Eugene McCarraher is an associate professor of humanities at Villanova University and author of The Enchantments of Mammon: Capitalism as the Religion of Modernity.
Like the “radical orthodoxy” associated with John Milbank, Stanley Hauerwas, and an array of other British and American theologians, Hart’s project of rejuvenation has been no narrowly theological or academic exercise.
Although he was more iconoclast than apostle, Bourne can point us toward a politics of love.
“Critical theory” was the Frankfurt School’s elaborate alibi for the proletariat’s dereliction of its historical duty.
Capitalism has been a form of enchantment, a metamorphosis of the sacred in the raiment of secularity. With money as its ontological marrow, it represents a moral and metaphysical imagination as well as a sublimation of our desire for the presence of divinity in the everyday world.
Conceding the pathological potential of narcissism, the book affirms that it can also be a “wellspring of human ambition and creativity, values and ideals, empathy and fellow feeling.
Markets and property systems are related, but they are not the same: markets are about exchange and money; property about ownership and power.
For too long, Americans have followed Thoreau back to the safety of the hut, only to discover that the lives they lived were full of quiet desperation.