Edited by Andrew Buchwalter
Pages: 232
Pages: 232
Hegel and Capitalism examines Hegel’s unique understanding and assessment of capitalism as an economic, social, and cultural phenomenon.
Bringing together scholars from varying perspectives, this book examines the value of Hegel’s thought for understanding and assessing capitalism, both as encountered by Hegel himself and in forms it takes today. The contributors consider Hegel’s complex and multifaceted appraisal of modern market societies, which he understands variously as a condition for a proper account of individual freedom, the framework for a productive account of social interdependency, and the breeding ground for a host of social pathologies concerning individual consumption, labor conditions, and disparities in wealth between the rich and poor.
Hegel’s ideas about the topic are situated in the context of work by other important thinkers, including Adam Smith, Immanuel Kant, J. G. Fichte, Karl Marx, Max Weber, and Theodor Adorno, along with contemporary social and economic theorists.
Demonstrating the value of Hegel’s philosophy for addressing issues pertaining to capitalism today, the essays bring insight to contemporary concerns such as resurgent neoliberalism, economic globalization, the subordination of ever more spheres of human life to the logic of economic imperatives, and the adequacy of models of utility maximization for comprehending contemporary market societies.
"even if his treatment of civil society does not cut as deeply as Marx’s critique of capitalism, conferring upon Hegel the title of official ‘philosopher of the bourgeois and capitalist organization of labor’ is a caricature (ibid., 37). Before we bury the ‘dead dog’ Marx himself tried to resuscitate, Marxists should pause to consult the more measured criticisms and nuanced appraisals of Hegel’s economics in the Buchwalter-edited Hegel and Capitalism. [...] Hegel’s relationship to capitalism is contested throughout the text. [...]Taken as a whole, Hegel and Capitalism paints the picture of a Hegel concerned with what Ross calls the determinate negation of [....] laissez-faire capitalism."
Table of Contents of Hegel and Capitalism
- Introduction: Hegel and Capitalism (Andrew Buchwalter)
- Hegel Discovers Capitalism: Critique of Individualism, Social Labor, and Reification during the Jena Period (1801–1807) (Michalis Skomvoulis)
- Beyond Recognition in Capitalism: From Violence and Caprice to Recognition and Solidarity (Kohei Saito)
- Anonymity, Responsibility, and the Many Faces of Capitalism: Hegel and the Crisis of the Modern Self (Ardis B. Collins)
- The Purest Inequality: Hegel’s Critique of the Labor Contract and Capitalism (Nicholas Mowad)
- Hegel’s Notion of Abstract Labor in the Elements of the Philosophy of Right (Giorgio Cesarale)
- Hegel’s Torment: Poverty and the Rationality of the Modern State (C.J. Pereira Di Salvo)
- Capitalism as Deficient Modernity: Hegel against the Modern Economy (Michael J. Thompson)
- Economy and Ethical Community (Richard Dien Winfield)
- Two Ways of “Taming” the Market: Why Hegel Needs the Police and the Corporations (Lisa Herzog)
- Hegel’s Logical Critique of Capitalism: The Paradox of Dependence and the Model of Reciprocal Mediation (Nathan Ross)
- Hegel and Capitalism: Marxian Perspectives (Tony Smith)
- Hegel’s Ethic of Beruf and the Spirit of Capitalism (Louis Carré)
