Thursday, September 3, 2015

What are the main points of the arguments in ''The Black Swan'' and ''Idyll of Market I'' by Joseph Vogl?

''The Black Swan'' and ''Idyll of Market I'' are respectively the first and second chapters of The Specter of Capital—a book published in English in 2014—by Joseph Vogl (born 1957), who was a German philosopher. Holder of a Chair of Modern German Literature at the Humboldt University of Berlin, Vogl responds to the global financial crisis using the tools of philosophy, cultural studies, and literary criticism to create an analysis of the historical development of the ideology of economics and its effects on the world.
In the first two chapters, Vogl argues that the tools of economics are insufficient for analyzing its failures as a system of thought. Instead, he argues that economics should be criticized from the outside using other tools of cultural critique to recognize its structural blindness and biases.
Vogl grounds his analysis historically, seeing economics as replicating many of the ideological characteristics of religion, including (especially) Adam Smith's "invisible hand" as a fundamentally mysterious assumption that has evolved into a poorly-grounded faith in market economies.
Capitalism and economics for Vogl are structured as (and what Foucault analyzed as) discourses, or totalizing hermeneutics: comprehensive enclosed systems that are ultimately self-referential and grounded in faith which shapes the way all events and knowledge are interpreted within that system.

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