Markets Against Modernity

In Markets Against Modernity, economist Ryan Murphy documents a clear continuity between the systematic errors people make in their personal lives and the gaps between public opinion and informed opinion. These errors cluster around specific divergences between how the modern world’s institutions function—including global markets, pluralistic democracy, and even science itself—and how evolution trained our brains to understand the nature of economic relationships, social relationships, and humanity’s relationship to the physical world. Murphy calls these systematic divergences Ecological Irrationality. Exploring them leads him to even more prickly questions—and to conclusions that may challenge the beliefs of those who understand that, for instance, modern vaccines are safe and effective. Do we actually want a less cohesive society? Is doing a task yourself financially prudent? And if we recognize an expert consensus, is there even a way to implement it and achieve the desired effects?

In Habermas and Giddens on Praxis and Modernity Craig Browne investigates how two of the most important and influential contemporary social theorists have sought to develop the modernist visions of the constitution of society through the autonomous actions of subjects. Comparing Habermas’s and Giddens’s conceptions of the constitution of society, interpretations of the social-structural impediments to subjects’ autonomy and attempts to delineate potentials for progressive social change within contemporary society, Browne draws on his own work, which has extended aspects of the social theorists’ approach to modernity. Despite the criticisms developed over the course of the book, Habermas and Giddens are found to be two of the most important theorists of democratization and social democracy, the dynamics of capitalist modernity and their paradoxes, social practices and reflexivity, and the foundations of social theory in the problem of the relationship of social action and social structure.

May 5, 2018 marked the 200th anniversary of the birth of Karl Heinrich Marx, German scientist, philosopher, economist, and sociologist. His creative genius created a system-functional model of contemporary society, defined its socio-economic character, and formulated scientific and philosophical approaches for its cognition. Marx also developed methodological clues for identifying and substantiating the economic nature of phenomena, processes and the socio-economic relations that mediate them, which are of critical relevance today. Before Marx, political economy was an eclectic combination of separate theories and concepts espoused by various philosophers. Marx was able to transform the field into a coherent science with a single systemic approach. Today, the generally recognized economic mainstream has no way of explaining in detail the causes of the ongoing global economic crisis. However, it is generally accepted that modern Marxist legacy researchers have advantages in their analyses. They believe that at the start of the 21st century capitalism does not tend to self-destruct. However, its failings are more and more clearly manifested. They believe that the capitalist system has not outlived its weaknesses, and the old bourgeois financiers have not been replaced, as was necessary, by a generation of new leaders armed with new methods of management and capable of coming up with solutions to current problems. The philosophical underpinnings of the capitalist economic system have laid a time bomb under the whole ideology of capitalism. Capitalism as a development system ceases to exist. The truth, which was found in the past writings of Marx, cannot be completely rejected, nor should it be venerated as a museum exhibit. This book is aimed at reactivating fundamental political and economic studies on the rules and functioning of the global geo-economic system from the point of view of a modern interpretation of Karl Marx's concept of objective processes in the conditions of the current systemic crisis of capitalism.

Because of the deep unease over the direction modern society is following Christian Comeliau has written this critique of the global market economy. The author explores its alienating effects and social consequences.

Combining social, political, and cultural history, this book examines the contestation over space, history, and power in the late Qing and Republican-era reconstruction of the ancient capital of Suzhou as a modern city. Located fifty miles west of Shanghai, Suzhou has been celebrated throughout Asia as a cynosure of Chinese urbanity and economic plenty for a thousand years. With the city's 1895 opening as a treaty port, businessmen and state officials began to draw on Western urban planning in order to bolster Chinese political and economic power against Japanese encroachment. As a result, both Suzhou as a whole and individual components of the cityscape developed new significance according to a calculus of commerce and nationalism. Japanese monks and travelers, Chinese officials, local people, and others competed to claim Suzhou’s streets, state institutions, historic monuments, and temples, and thereby to define the course of Suzhou’s and greater China’s modernity.

A leading philosopher of technology calls for the democratic coordination of technical rationality with everyday experience. The technologies, markets, and administrations of today's knowledge society are in crisis. We face recurring disasters in every domain: climate change, energy shortages, economic meltdown. The system is broken, despite everything the technocrats claim to know about science, technology, and economics. These problems are exacerbated by the fact that today powerful technologies have unforeseen effects that disrupt everyday life; the new masters of technology are not restrained by the lessons of experience, and accelerate change to the point where society is in constant turmoil. In Between Reason and Experience, leading philosopher of technology Andrew Feenberg makes a case for the interdependence of reason—scientific knowledge, technical rationality—and experience. Feenberg examines different aspects of the tangled relationship between technology and society from the perspective of critical theory of technology, an approach he has pioneered over the past twenty years. Feenberg points to two examples of democratic interventions into technology: the Internet (in which user initiative has influenced design) and the environmental movement (in which science coordinates with protest and policy). He examines methodological applications of critical theory of technology to the case of the French Minitel computing network and to the relationship between national culture and technology in Japan. Finally, Feenberg considers the philosophies of technology of Heidegger, Habermas, Latour, and Marcuse. The gradual extension of democracy into the technical sphere, Feenberg argues, is one of the great political transformations of our time.

Market Society provides an original and accessible review of changing conceptions of the market in modern social thought. The book considers markets as social institutions rather than simply formal models, arguing that modern ideas of the market are based on critical notions of social order, social action and social relations. Examining a range of perspectives on the market from across different social science disciplines, Market Society surveys a complex field of ideas in a clear and comprehensive manner. In this way it seeks to extend economic sociology beyond a critique of mainstream economics, and to engage more broadly with social, political and cultural theory. The book explores historical approaches to the emergence of a modern market society, as well as major approaches to the market within modern economic theory and sociology. It addresses key arguments in economic sociology and anthropology, the relation between markets and states, and critical and cultural theories of market rationality. It concludes with a discussion of markets and culture in a late modern context. This wide-ranging text will be of interest to undergraduate and postgraduate students in sociology, economic theory and history, politics, social and political theory, anthropology and cultural studies.