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Book Description

How are core social phenomena to be understood as modes of being? This book offers an alternative approach to social ontology. Recent interest in social ontology on the part of mainstream philosophy and the social sciences presupposes from the outset that the human being can be cast as a conscious subject whose intentionality can be collective. By contrast, the present study insistently poses the crucial question of who the human being is and how they sociate as whos. Such whoness is a clean-cut departure from the venerable tradition of questioning whatness (quidditas, essence) in philosophical thinking. Casting human being hermeneutically as whoness opens up new insights into how human beings sociate in interplays of mutual estimation that are simultaneously social power plays. Hitherto, the ontology of social power in all its various guises, has only ever been implicit. This book makes it explicit. The kind of social power prevalent in capitalist societies is that of the reified value embodied in commodities, money, capital, & co. Reified value itself is constituted through an interplay of mutual estimation among things that reflects back on the power interplay among whos. In this way a new critique of capitalism becomes possible.

Table of Contents

  1. Cover
  2. Title Page
  3. Copyright
  4. Dedication
  5. Content
  6. Foreword
  7. 1 By way of introduction: Precious little
  8. 2 Loosening the ground: Thinking about society, thinking society
    1. 2.1 Society, needs and wants, language
    2. 2.2 What is λόγος?
    3. 2.3 Opinion: Holding things and each other to be (whatness and whoness)
    4. 2.4 Showing oneself off as somewho
    5. 2.5 The openness of three-dimensional time as the enabling dimension within which society is situated
    6. 2.6 Living well and being somewho – The need to interrogate the tradition
  9. 3 Further outline of the phenomenon of whoness
    1. 3.1 Bearing a name and standing in estimation in the community through valuing interplay
    2. 3.2 Human social being as self-presentation and showing-off in the 3D-temporal clearing in an interplay of estimable reputability (politeness, pride, vulnerability, arrogance, conceit)
    3. 3.3 Further exemplary phenomena of standing and not standing as somewho (flattery, manliness) — The existential possibility of coming to one’s very own, genuine stand as self
      1. 3.3.1 Digression: Dialectic of self and other – Wrestling with Plato, Hegel, Heidegger
        1. 3.3.1.1 Preliminary considerations when approaching Plato’s and Hegel’s dialectical thinking
        2. 3.3.1.2 Approaching an existential dialectic of self and other through an interpretation of a passage from Plato’s Parmenides
        3. 3.3.1.3 The Hegelian dialectic of the concept, primal splitting and closing together
        4. 3.3.1.4 Heideggerian selfhood as a “shining-back” from being-in-the-world
        5. 3.3.1.5 Interpreting the dialectic of primal splitting and closing together with regard to selfhood
  10. 4 The satisfaction of wants and the striving to have more
    1. 4.1 Economics and chrematistics
    2. 4.2 Weber’s conception of economic activity
    3. 4.3 The Cartesian cast of economics
    4. 4.4 Schumpeter’s equilibrium theory
    5. 4.5 Aristotle on money and exchange — Money as a medium practically unifying social usages
    6. 4.6 Endless money-making?
  11. 5 Ontology of exchange
    1. 5.1 Commodity exchange and the necessity of rethinking Aristotelean δύναμις
    2. 5.2 Productive know-how, acquisitive know-how?
    3. 5.3 Commodity exchange not guided by the insight of know-how
    4. 5.4 Two complementary, reciprocal pairs of δυνάμεις: Reified value and desire
    5. 5.5 Recapitulation and the coming together of goods in commerce
      1. 5.5.1 A side-glance at Hegel’s treatment of actuality, possibility, contingency, necessity and freedom
    6. 5.6 Exchange as core phenomenon of social intercourse: Interchange and interplay
      1. 5.6.1 Reciprocally showing off who one is in the interplay of mutual estimation
      2. 5.6.2 The interplay of powers of self-presentation – engendering trust
      3. 5.6.3 Mutual estimation: Personhood, esteem and respect, the power play over who-standing and the possible intimacy between you-and-me
  12. 6 Justice
    1. 6.1 Justice as a fundamental social phenomenon of having one’s fair share (Aristotle) – Strauss’ misconception of ontological origins – The goods of living: valuable things and esteem – Ongoing compet
    2. 6.2 Distributive and commutative justice
    3. 6.3 Marxist critiques of capitalist social relations as unjust
      1. 6.3.1 The untenability of the labour theory of value as a theory of just exchange masking exploitation
      2. 6.3.2 Groundlessness of sociating interplay
      3. 6.3.3 The untenability of the theory of surplus value as a theory of capitalist exploitation
      4. 6.3.4 Injustice of capitalist wage-labour per se?
    4. 6.4 The just distribution of the goods of living
    5. 6.5 Redistributive social justice, the welfare state and the alleviation of poverty
    6. 6.6 Esteem, honour and fame in social life with a focus on Aristotle and Schopenhauer
    7. 6.7 A just distribution of honour and fame in society? – The (non-)fame of creative recasters of an historical world
    8. 6.8 The gainful game among competitive players
    9. 6.9 Recent debates on justice in Anglophone moral philosophy and the disappearance of commutative justice
      1. 6.9.1 Walzer’s plurality of distribution systems
      2. 6.9.2 Conceptions of distributive justice and the welfare state
    10. 6.10 Critical appraisal of Nozickian libertarianism
      1. 6.10.1 The legitimate founding of a state
      2. 6.10.2 The original appropriation of (landed) property
      3. 6.10.3 An attack on libertarian freedom conceived as individual caprice
    11. 6.11 A closer look at Rawls
      1. 6.11.1 The “original position”
      2. 6.11.2 Property-owning democracy
    12. 6.12 Anomalies in the gainful game and the political power play
  13. 7 Interlude and recapitulation with some intermediate conclusions: Everyday living of finite human beings – Security and insecurity
    1. 7.1 Securing the polity of civil society – An initial determination of government (Schmitt, Locke, Kant) – The rule of law
    2. 7.2 Exchange as the starting-point of social living (Plato, Hegel)
    3. 7.3 The reliability of things (Heidegger)
    4. 7.4 Exchange essentially unreliable
    5. 7.5 Free market exchange as both an unreliable and reliable form of sociation
    6. 7.6 Money-mediated exchange abstract and reified (Marx)
    7. 7.7 Risky enterprise and secure jobs
  14. 8 The short reach of Cartesian certainty and Leibniz’ principle of reason into the social science of economics
    1. 8.1 Leibniz’ principle of reason as a general “grand principle”
      1. 8.1.1 Digression: The principle of reason further considered
        1. 8.1.1.1 Leibniz
        2. 8.1.1.2 Hegel
        3. 8.1.1.3 Nietzsche
        4. 8.1.1.4 Heidegger
        5. 8.1.1.5 Anaximander and the fairness of interplay
        6. 8.1.1.6 Deepening the interpretation of Anaximander
    2. 8.2 “The economic law of motion of modern society” (Marx)
    3. 8.3 Adam Smith’s notion of labour-value
    4. 8.4 Economics as a quantitative empirical science (Aristotle, Hayek)
    5. 8.5 The disclosive truth of markets
    6. 8.6 Stock market estimations of the future
    7. 8.7 Market irrationality, sentiment and psychology as phenomena of mood
  15. 9 Sociation via reified interplay, the invisible and the visible hand
    1. 9.1 Social democracy, reified sociating interplay and caring-for in a capitalist economy – Caring for one’s own world and indifference to others (Heidegger’s Being and Time)
    2. 9.2 Self-interest and mutual caring-for in exchange interplay
    3. 9.3 Reified sociating interplay and purportedly ‘inhuman’ alienation of human being
    4. 9.4 The wage-labour relation and caring-for – Co-operation and conflict – Hierarchy and reified discipline – Economic democracy and total economic control
    5. 9.5 The invisible hand and the ontological possibility of a caring capitalism – Unlimited economic growth through caring for each other
    6. 9.6 The set-up and the endless cycle of self-augmentation of reified value (Marx, Heidegger) – The historical possibility of the side-step into endless mutual caring-for
      1. 9.6.1 The gainful game
      2. 9.6.2 The set-up
    7. 9.7 State intervention in the economic interplay of civil society
    8. 9.8 Uncertainty of income-earning – The ‘law’ of social inertia and the tendency toward conservation of a way of life – Openness to the future vs. risk-aversion – The ensconcing of particular interest
    9. 9.9 The manifestation of the visible hand in the shape of bureaucracy
    10. 9.10 State intervention as a visible helping hand for the invisible hand – An asserted unconditional right to be cared for – Caring-for that “leaps in” vs. caring-for that “leaps ahead” (Heidegger)
    11. 9.11 The paternalistic ‘all-caring’ state – Taxation and its tendentially asphyxiating hold on civil society
  16. 10 Social power and government
    1. 10.1 Ontology of social power
      1. 10.1.1 Recapitulation: Various kinds of social power
      2. 10.1.2 Aristotle on social and political power
    2. 10.2 Two related social powers: Rhetoric and the political power of government – Legitimacy, punishment, terror
    3. 10.3 Legitimacy of government further considered – Acceptance and affirmation of government
    4. 10.4 The “restlesse desire of Power after power” and the necessity of the Leviathan – Straussian “vanity” and the inevitable ongoing mutual estimating of who-status and individual powers – The modern
    5. 10.5 Legitimacy of the Leviathan – An arbiter in the “Competition of Riches, Honour, Command, or other power” – The predicament that “nothing is more easily broken than a mans word”
    6. 10.6 The individualization of the truth of being (Protagoras, Heidegger) – The ultimate socio-ontological source of strife – The finite process of resolving differences among individual perspectival v
    7. 10.7 Ontological powerlessness of the metaphysical, productive conception of power – The ultimate impotence of both political power and rhetoric – Ineluctably sharing an hermeneutic cast of the truth
  17. 11 The socio-ontological constitution of ‘we ourselves’
    1. 11.1 Dialectical movement from the sensuous givenness of world to the identity of ego and world – The dialectic of recognition – “Ego that is we and we that is ego” (Hegel’s Phenomenology)
    2. 11.2 Universal self-consciousness and irrepressible, questioning, singular individuality – The ever-broken mediation between singularity and universality concretely realized in ethical life
    3. 11.3 The question of who: Selfhood, my self, you-and-I (Heidegger’s 1934 lectures and Being and Time)
    4. 11.4 How do we ourselves come about? – Belonging together in a situation
    5. 11.5 Constitution of an historical people – Heidegger’s authoritarian, anti-liberal casting of “we the people” – The historical decision to open up to the future – “We are the coming about of time its
    6. 11.6 We the people and singular, rare individuals – The ethos of open-mindedness – Abstract personhood, interplay through a reified medium and the historical possibility of the free individual – The i
    7. 11.7 The socio-ontological critique of liberalism – Contract as the abstractly universal shell-form for the metabolism of civil society – The possibility and ethos of a liberal We in free and fair int
  18. 12 Government and the state
    1. 12.1 Recapitulation via Locke: The liberal conception of government, its critique and socio-ontological grounding in the power interplay of civil society
    2. 12.2 The totalitarian state as a counter-casting to liberalism – The yearning for a totally controlled “organic construction” at the pinnacle of productionist metaphysics (Ernst Jünger)
      1. 12.2.1 Heidegger’s anti-liberal interpretation of the German tradition in 1933 (W. v. Humboldt, Kant, Hegel)
    3. 12.3 The forever contradictory, moving realization of freedom in civil society and state as power play (Hegel’s Rechtsphilosophie)
      1. 12.3.1 Diremption of particularity from the universal in civil society and their mediation
      2. 12.3.2 The police and civic corporation as supplements to the interplay of civil society
      3. 12.3.3 A problematic transition from civil society to the state – ‘Infinite’, singular affirmation of the concept of freedom through an ethos of free and fair interplay – The chimæra of a final resolu
      4. 12.3.4 The inner constitution of the state and the singularity that remains plural – The endlessly contentious issue of taxation – Never-ending controversy over concrete conceptions of the universal g
      5. 12.3.5 Division of powers within the state in accord with the concept of freedom – Hereditary monarchy “outside human freedom” true to the hermeneutic cast of productionist metaphysics – The concept o
      6. 12.3.6 The transition from civil society to state reconsidered: The power play over sociating estimation and identity in belonging to a political whole — Constitutional rules of play for the ongoing p
      7. 12.3.7 The reality of freedom as the shared, ethical social living of a people and its fracturing, through which free societies remain in flux
      8. 12.3.8 Hegel’s critique of the liberal conception of state – Kant’s “idea of the original contract”
      9. 12.3.9 Pre-ontological ethical ‘second nature’ and ontological insight into the political realm
      10. 12.3.10 The dispensability of the philosopher king and the precipitation of socio-ontological structures in historically lived, ethical usages
  19. 13 Democracy
    1. 13.1 Democracy, competitive electoral struggle and majority will vs. individual freedom
      1. 13.1.1 The political power struggle for estimation as a worthy politician – The government’s power to enact concrete policy and its mirroring in democratic public debate – The infection of the univers
      2. 13.1.2 The tendential danger of the dissolution of freedom in merely democratically mediated, state-posited will – The erosion of the freedom of interplay through the sham universal of redistributive
      3. 13.1.3 Schumpeter’s competition theory of democracy – The democratic We not merely a summation of individual wills – The legitimacy of democratically elected government – The vacillating vagaries of d
      4. 13.1.4 The socio-ontological isomorphism between the competitive gainful game and the competitive democratic struggle for political power more closely considered – The democratic constitution of a peo
      5. 13.1.5 Carl Schmitt’s critique of the “parliamentary law-making state”– The contradiction between formal law-making procedures and substantial rights – Direct plebiscitary democracy
    2. 13.2 Democracy, freedom and justice: A recapitulation
  20. 14 Global whoness and global power plays
    1. 14.1 Whoness of a people
    2. 14.2 The state as the universal that remains particular in the interplay among foreign powers
    3. 14.3 Brute international power interplays
    4. 14.4 Nationalism, protectionism and free, estimative power interplay among peoples
  21. 15 Bibliography
  22. 16 Index
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