Capitalism And The Equity Fetish

This book is a provocative, interdisciplinary, and critical appraisal of civil justice, property, and the laws that shape and command them within capitalism. Dr. Herian's book is both a complementary and countervailing narrative to many mainstream legal accounts, one that critiques core and influential areas of legal knowledge and practice. Central to the book's thesis is a rich collaboration of ideas and perspectives that consider what is at stake from institutions, concepts, and practices of equity and civil justice tied to the subjective psychic life and the unconscious desires of capitalist stakeholders. The book aims to address several questions, including how capitalism has imagined and shaped equity and civil justice since the nineteenth century; how capitalism acts as a well-spring of desire for forms of justice that wrap-around and sustain complex frameworks of private property power and ownership; and how equity supports agile neoliberal strategies of justice and reason in the twenty-first century. Dr. Robert Herian is Senior Lecturer at The Open University Law School (UK) and Co-Founder of the Equity and Trusts Research Network. Robert's research encompasses equity, trusts, and property law; psychoanalysis; legal history; critical theory and philosophy. He lives in Northwest England with his partner, Chloe, and their border terrier, Billy.

This book is a provocative, interdisciplinary, and critical appraisal of civil justice, property, and the laws that shape and command them within capitalism. Dr. Herian’s book is both a complementary and countervailing narrative to many mainstream legal accounts, one that critiques core and influential areas of legal knowledge and practice. Central to the book’s thesis is a rich collaboration of ideas and perspectives that consider what is at stake from institutions, concepts, and practices of equity and civil justice tied to the subjective psychic life and the unconscious desires of capitalist stakeholders. The book aims to address several questions, including how capitalism has imagined and shaped equity and civil justice since the nineteenth century; how capitalism acts as a well-spring of desire for forms of justice that wrap-around and sustain complex frameworks of private property power and ownership; and how equity supports agile neoliberal strategies of justice and reason in the twenty-first century.

Trusts & Equity continues to offer a comprehensive and user-friendly approach, providing a concise route through what can be a challenging area of the law. Drawing on years of experience, Gary Watt encourages students to actively engage with the subject and think critically about its central issues, outlining the key perspectives with clarity and rigour.Digital formats and resourcesThis edition is available for students and institutions to purchase in a variety of formats, and is supported by online resources.- The e-book offers a mobile experience and convenient access along with functionality tools, navigation features, and links that offer extra learning support: www.oxfordtextbooks.co.uk/ebooks- The online resources include:· Video lectures presented by Gary Watt, providing an introduction to key areas of debate within the subject· Essay questions and problem scenarios with accompanying answer guidance, along with general guidance on answering these kinds of questions to enable you to improve· Web links to further primary sources and commentary to aid your understanding· Flashcard glossary to help test your knowledge of key terms

Despite creating vast inequalities and propping up reactionary world regimes, capitalism has many passionate defenders—but not because of what it withholds from some and gives to others. Capitalism dominates, Todd McGowan argues, because it mimics the structure of our desire while hiding the trauma that the system inflicts upon it. People from all backgrounds enjoy what capitalism provides, but at the same time are told more and better is yet to come. Capitalism traps us through an incomplete satisfaction that compels us after the new, the better, and the more. Capitalism's parasitic relationship to our desires gives it the illusion of corresponding to our natural impulses, which is how capitalism's defenders characterize it. By understanding this psychic strategy, McGowan hopes to divest us of our addiction to capitalist enrichment and help us rediscover enjoyment as we actually experienced it. By locating it in the present, McGowan frees us from our attachment to a better future and the belief that capitalism is an essential outgrowth of human nature. From this perspective, our economic, social, and political worlds open up to real political change. Eloquent and enlivened by examples from film, television, consumer culture, and everyday life, Capitalism and Desire brings a new, psychoanalytically grounded approach to political and social theory.

Democracy is in shambles economically and politically. The recent economic meltdown in Europe and the U.S. has substituted democratic deliberation with technocratic decisions. In Athens, Madrid, Lisbon, New York, Pittsburgh or Istanbul, protesters have denounced the incapacity and unwillingness of elected officials to heed to their voices. While the diagnosis of our political-economic illness has been established, remedies are hard to come. What can we do to restore our broken democracy? Which modes of political participation are likely to have an impact? And what are the loci of political innovation in the wake of the crisis? It is with these questions that Reclaiming Democracy engages. We argue that the managerial approach to solving the crisis violates ‘a right to politics’, that is, a right that our collective life be guided by meaningful politics: by discussion of and decision among genuinely alternative principles and policies. The contributors to this volume are united in their commitment to explore how and where this right can be affirmed in a way that resuscitates democracy in the wake of the crisis. Mixing theoretical reflection and empirical analysis the book offers fresh insights into democracy’s current conundrum and makes concrete proposals about how ‘the right to politics’ can be protected.

How serious are the threats to our environment? Here is one measure of the problem: if we continue to do exactly what we are doing, with no growth in the human population or the world economy, the world in the latter part of this century will be unfit to live in. Of course human activities are not holding at current levels—they are accelerating, dramatically—and so, too, is the pace of climate disruption, biotic impoverishment, and toxification. In this book Gus Speth, author of Red Sky at Morning and a widely respected environmentalist, begins with the observation that the environmental community has grown in strength and sophistication, but the environment has continued to decline, to the point that we are now at the edge of catastrophe. Speth contends that this situation is a severe indictment of the economic and political system we call modern capitalism. Our vital task is now to change the operating instructions for today's destructive world economy before it is too late. The book is about how to do that.

Empiricist philosophy of science of the kind that promised truth through method and a unification of science now lies in disarray. Arguments over the indeterminancy of theoretical language, the inadequacy of induction, the empirical incommensurability of competing theories, the possibility or im possibility of scientific progress, and the applicability of natural science metatheory and methods to problems of human action have allIed to a loss in confidence. As it is commonly said, the philosophy of science is now in a "postempiricist" phase. It is a phase marked by heated disagreement over the possibility of empirically grounded scientific knowledge. Because the orienting assumptions of traditional psychology had been largely derived from the early logical empiricist program for science, the general deteriora tion in confidence at the philosophic level was inevitably to have repercus sions within psychology. The extensive ferment that has occurred within so cial psychology over the past decade, often termed "the crisis in social psychology," must properly be viewed within this context. And, in cases where criticisms of the traditional craft have been initiated on other than philosophical grounds, traditional logical empiricist answers have no longer been found sustaining. In effect, the science of psychology no longer rests on a firm metatheoretical base, and the future remains very much in the bal ance. Within this critical period of search and reappraisal, there are few voices that equal in significance that of Edward Sampson.

This volume of essays examines the ways in which magical practices are found in different aspects of contemporary capitalist societies. From contract law to science, by way of finance, business, marketing, advertising, cultural production, and the political economy in general, each chapter argues that the kind of magic studied by anthropologists in less developed societies – shamanism, sorcery, enchantment, the occult – is not only alive and well, but flourishing in the midst of so-called ‘modernity’. Modern day magicians range from fashion designers and architects to Donald Trump and George Soros. Magical rites take place in the form of political summits, the transformation of products into brands through advertising campaigns, and the biannual fashion collections shown in New York, London, Milan and Paris. Magical language, in the form of magical spells, is used by everyone, from media to marketers and all others devoted to the art of ‘spin’. While magic may appear to be opposed to systems of rational economic thought, Moeran and Malefyt highlight the ways it may in fact be an accomplice to it.