Economy and the Future: A Crisis of Faith

by Jean-Pierre Dupuy, Malcolm B. DeBevoise (Translator)

Overview

A monster stalks the earth—a sluggish, craven, dumb beast that takes fright at the slightest noise and starts at the sight of its own shadow. This monster is the market. The shadow it fears is cast by a light that comes from the future: the Keynesian crisis of expectations. It is this same light that causes the world’s leaders to tremble before the beast. They tremble, Jean-Pierre Dupuy says, because they have lost faith in the future. What Dupuy calls Economy has degenerated today into a mad spectacle of unrestrained consumption and speculation. But in its positive form—a truly political economy in which politics, not economics, is predominant—Economy creates not only a sense of trust and confidence but also a belief in the open-endedness of the future without which capitalism cannot function. In this devastating and counterintuitive indictment of the hegemonic pretensions of neoclassical economic theory, Dupuy argues that the immutable and eternal decision of God has been replaced with the unpredictable and capricious judgment of the crowd. The future of mankind will therefore depend on whether it can see through the blindness of orthodox economic thinking.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781611861464
Publisher:	Michigan State University Press
Publication date:	10/01/2014
Series:	Studies in Violence, Mimesis & Culture
Edition description:	1
Pages:	194
Product dimensions:	5.90(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.70(d)

About the Author

MALCOLM DEBEVOISE is a three-time winner of the French-American Foundation Prize for nonfiction and has translated more than forty works from French and Italian in all branches of scholarship.

Table of Contents

Introduction. The Bewilderment of Politics ix

Chapter 1 Economy and the Problem of Evil 1

Chapter 2 Self-Transcendence 21

Chapter 3 The Economics of the End and the End of Economics 65

Chapter 4 Critique of Economic Reason 89

Conclusion. The Way Out from Fatalism 127

Appendix. Time, Paradox 131

Notes 147

Index 163

Editorial Reviews

From a few simple questions Jean-Pierre Dupuy draws a number of profound insights, not always easy to grasp, that run contrary to the usual interpretation of the recent economic crisis. The trouble is well worth it.
—Julie Clarini, Le Monde

From the Publisher