Religion in market society

2021 ◽  
pp. 157-212
Author(s):  
Marcus Moberg
Keyword(s):  
Author(s):  
Rebecca Colesworthy

Chapter 1 takes a cue from recent anthropologists who have stressed the influence of Mauss’s socialism on his sociological work. Returning to Mauss’s The Gift, the chapter argues that what links his essay to the experimental writing of his literary contemporaries is not their shared fascination with the primitive, as other critics have suggested, but rather their shared investment in reimagining social possibilities within market society. Mauss was, as his biographer notes, an “Anglophile.” Shedding light on his admiration of British socialism and especially the work of Beatrice and Sidney Webb—friends of Virginia and Leonard Woolf—as well as competing usages of the language of “gifts” in the social sciences and the arts, the chapter ultimately provides a new material and conceptual framework for understanding the intersection of largely French gift theory and Anglo-American modernist writing.


Human Affairs ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 31 (1) ◽  
pp. 40-45
Author(s):  
Leandro Gaitán

Abstract In a future highly technological society it will be possible to modify the personality using different kinds of technological tools. Consequently, we could become buyers and consumers of personality. As such, personality, which is a core aspect of the self, could turn into a commodity. This article intends to address the following questions: 1) How can new technologies modify personality? 2) Why might personality become a commodity? 3) What is wrong with turning personality into commodity?


1974 ◽  
Vol 68 (2) ◽  
pp. 561-571 ◽  
Author(s):  
Timothy A. Tilton

Implicit in Dahrendorf's Society and Democracy in Germany and explicit in Moore's Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy are respectively a liberal and a radical model of democratic development. Neither of these models adequately accounts for the experience of Sweden, a remarkably successful “late developer.” Although Swedish industrialization proceeded with little public ownership of the means of production, with limited welfare programs until the 1930s, and above all with restricted military expenditure—all factors Dahrendorf implies are crucial for democratic development—it did not produce the traditional liberal infrastructure of bourgeois entrepreneurs nor a vigorous open market society. Similarly only three of Moore's five preconditions for democracy obtained in Sweden: a balance between monarchy and aristocracy, the weakening of the landed aristocracy, and the prevention of an aristocratic-bourgeois coalition against the workers and peasants. There was no thorough shift toward commercial agriculture and, most important, there was no revolutionary break with the past. Consequently, one has to evolve a radical liberal model of development which states the conditions for the emergence of democracy in Sweden without revolution. This model contains implications for the further modernization of American politics.


1994 ◽  
Vol 24 (97) ◽  
pp. 549-561
Author(s):  
Norbert Lechner

The article investigates the effects of extensive enforcement of the market society on the pattems of politics in the example of the Latin American countries. The institutionalized politics as well as the »political« (the symbolic representations of the collective order) undergo a transformation, during which the context and the meaning of democracy is changed. Instead of politics being trapped within the mere market logic and only reacting to challenges, a policy which tries toregulate social processes with the aim of a collective order for the collectivity is necessary.


Author(s):  
Volodymyr Tarasyuk

and Scholarly Comprehension The unbalanced state apparatus in the conditions of the law enforcement system inaction and the chaotic actions of the authorities aimed at overcoming the crisis caused by the resistance of oligarchic capital eloquently testify to the need to implement systematic programs to restore and develop strategic directions of the state. Strengthening and separating regional elites from the center weakens the role and discredits central governments; the loss of control over the strategic sectors of the economy monopolized by the oligarchs requires the government to constantly seek a compromise between the interests of the state and meet the needs of corrupt capital; lack of own (national) programs for the development of education and science, national security and defense, information policy – led to the introduction of foreign ideas and concepts, sometimes outdated and sometimes irrelevant to modern Ukrainian conditions (for example, the introduction of restrictive economic instruments contribute to the destruction of countries, unable to provide their needs with their own resources at least 90%). The constant reduction of financial, natural, and human resources has led to growing public discontent with the oligarchs who «colonized Ukraine» in the late 1990s and early 2000s and, depending on Russian markets, pursue their own mercantile interests contrary to state interests. Elite change is one of the most pressing and painful issues related to the restoration of subjectivity and statehood in the Ukrainian state. None of the previous mass protests, the Orange Revolution and the Revolution of Dignity, led to a change of elites as the primary, basic cause of mass discontent. Policy inclusiveness and economic monopolization do not help restore public confidence in government actions and decisions. Domestic elites are in one way or another closely connected (dependent) with oligarchic capital – whether financial, political or media. Thus, Ukrainian elites can be confidently called pro-oligarchic, and oligarchs – representatives of domestic elites. The public demand for the de-elitization of the oligarchs has every reason to grow into another Maidan. In Ukraine, during the thirty years of independence, no conditions have been created for the professional realization of educators, scientists, doctors, journalists, engineers, etc. All so-called non-profit professions are in deep decline. Market relations have gradually transformed into market thinking – a liberal economy turns us into a market society. When measuring education, medicine, politics, friendship or family relations according to the standards of market thinking – the market suffers, and public relations, and education, medicine, science, politics, etc. – none of these categories can be market by definition.


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