Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction The modernist avant-garde and the culture of market society
- PART I THE POSTHUMAN SCENE
- 1 Approaching modernism
- 2 Ideology
- 3 Permanent revolution
- 4 Epistemology of the market
- PART II THE REGIME OF UNREST: FOUR PRECURSORS
- PART III THE MARGIN IS THE MAINSTREAM
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
4 - Epistemology of the market
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 September 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction The modernist avant-garde and the culture of market society
- PART I THE POSTHUMAN SCENE
- 1 Approaching modernism
- 2 Ideology
- 3 Permanent revolution
- 4 Epistemology of the market
- PART II THE REGIME OF UNREST: FOUR PRECURSORS
- PART III THE MARGIN IS THE MAINSTREAM
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
[M]en no longer consider what the coins weigh and are worth, but each one in turn accepts them according to the value that common approbation and their currency give them. Men do not argue about the alloy, but about the rate of exchange: thus all things are accepted equally.
(Montaigne, “An Apologie of Raymond Sebond”)Let me examine a little more closely the epistemological fallout, not of something the ideologists call a “free market” (which never exists in practice), but of a market largely freed from its entanglement in older, pre-capitalist moral and social restraints. In an older social order, ethico-religious traditions and institutions governed conduct, thought, and what constitutes knowledge, including the routines of commercial exchange. The Parthenon looks out over Athens from its position on the crown of the Acropolis hill. The dusty agora toils away at its base. Stand in the ancient agora today and look up and you will experience concretely the relation between the hierarchical sociopolitical order and the economy in ancient Athens. Greek society culminated in that great architectural icon of Greek spiritual and military power. The rude noises of the traders and the metoikos below are barely audible on that rocky summit from which the wind has blown everything away except the stones. The castes invested with political rights and power were dominated by kinship fealties, land, and religion.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Modernism and the Culture of Market Society , pp. 76 - 90Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2004