The Specter of Capital

The Specter of Capital Joseph Vogl (translators Joachim Redner and Robert Savage) Stanford University Press, 2015Various conceptions of innate order have been central to the evolving worldviews that have provided a coherent mental architecture during the successive epochs in the history of the West. In The Specter of Capital, Joseph Vogl traces the development, and continuing evolution, of one of these conceptions in particular - the idea that a market economy is an orderly and just system. He takes the reader back through a number of facets of modern thought, such as the influence of the Newtonian system of natural order on the view developed by Bernard Mandeville, Adam Smith and others that individuals' pursuit of their self-interest would produce, instead of dog-eat-dog chaos, a self-regulating, productive and morally justified social and economic order.The Specter of Capital examines the idea of an orderly market system in intelligent, although not exhaustive, detail, and then proceeds to "deconstruct" it, arguing that the coherence isn't really there. "The world has become unreadable... Things in general are running out of control." Vogl has written a postmodernist critique, with deconstruction as his main theme.Accordingly, a reader will find the book to have varied dimensions. Depending upon the reader, these will seem valuable, instructive and intriguing; or, on the contrary, nihilistic and pretentious. Let's look at them one at a time:With regard to the intellectual history, Vogl's book provides an excellent summary, but to say this is not to say that his account supplies (or perhaps is intended to supply) anything original. A good history of economic thought will give the same review of the thinking behind classical and neo-classical economics, and will supply considerably more detail than Vogl has aspired to. It would have to be a history that is quite up to date, however, since Vogl is especially good in his description of the most recent economic thinking and market behavior that led to the world's recent financial crisis. A number of recent books about the crisis are also very good on those subjects.There will be several things to say about his deconstructionist theme that the market is not really a finely jeweled mechanism producing order and justice. It will be helpful, however, to hold our discussion of those until we have noted the book's stylistic dimension. The esoterica that marks Vogl's postmodernism will turn away a good many readers, and not without justification. It will appeal, though, to the type of mind that revels in the abstruse. There should hopefully be readers, too, who will read The Specter of Capital out of curiosity, hoping to sample the experience of diving into the sort of writing done in recent decades by the super-sophisticates of the intellectual world. Such folks are numerous, and it's good to be aware of them.The entry for "postmodernism" in UrbanDictionary.com gives an audaciously irreverent and sarcastic capsule summary - which, for all that, captures the essence of the movement quite well. It says that "...under thinkers like Derrida, Baudrillard, Foucault and Irigaray [it has] spread like cancer into at least the 'soft' sciences, if not further afield. [It] works insidiously by establishing in the minds of the faithful that there are no ultimate truths in either the moral or a scientific sense, and dressing up b***s*** in flowery language... Unfortunately these matters are brought up in the midst of reams and reams of tendentious twaddle."In this vein, we find Vogl talking a language known only to the initiates: "...the chrematistics of old acquires a new and privileged discursive space." And: a critique of political economy would "have to do away with the aporias admitted into the classical theories of economics" and will need to unmask "the estrangement processes encrypted in the value form, or [be known] for confronting the specter of exchange value and the metamorphosis of commodities with a critical ontology. …