Ethics and Political Philosophy Commons^™

Competition And Community In Marx’S Alienation Theory: Addressing 21st Century Social Isolation Through A Laclauian Lens, Brett J. Zimmerman

Theses

Capitalism reorients human priorities by necessitating socio-economic competition and tying the preeminent priority of survival to the rate at which one accumulates material resources. The orientation of wage as the only means to survival has replaced the need for the working class to form tribes, build inter-group solidarity, and engage in their communities, resulting in a less fulfilling society. Marx is traditionally conceptualized as a political or economic thinker, and while much of his political and economic thought will be useful supplementary material, in Section I, I will be viewing Marx through a more interpersonal lens. The section will take …

Discussion Of Living Through Capitalism, By James A. Chamberlain, James Chamberlain

Emancipations: A Journal of Critical Social Analysis

A discussion of Chamberlain's recent book, Living Through Capitalism: Resisting Devastation Through Communities of Life .

Are We Witness To The Disintegration Of Capital’S Laws Of Motion? A Review Of Jodi Dean’S Capital’S Grave: Neofeudalism And The New Class Struggle (Verso Books, 2025), Kai Heron

Emancipations: A Journal of Critical Social Analysis

No abstract provided.

Cash Or Credit: A Collection Of Short Essays About Economic Philosophy And The Trajectory Of Political Economy, Jackson C. Dusart

Student Publications

From John Locke to Herbert Marcuse, discussions about economics and societies have dominated the philosophical battleground. While Adam Smith waged a war against mercantilism, men like Karl Marx and John Stuart Mill, two ideological enemies, were both writing to address the same problems they saw in society. Each one of these men has contributed to a different part of the discussion. In understanding their differences, and their common ground, these essays examine a hypothetical four-hundred-dollar jacket, stolen from the author at Gettysburg College. Each one of these philosophers, each writing at different times and in different circumstances, will attempt to …

The Bus Stop At The Heart Of Capitalism, Jamie Van Der Klaauw, Ryan Kopaitich

Emancipations: A Journal of Critical Social Analysis

Where is the heart of capitalism today? To fight it, we must construct it. But in doing so, we can also construct a public capable of overthrowing it.

Crisis, Class, Hegemony: Three Remarks On The Contemporary Critique Of Capitalism, Brian Milstein

Emancipations: A Journal of Critical Social Analysis

Azmanova rightly notes that the present conjuncture has been marked by a vexing exhaustion of utopian energies—which she sees underwritten by a condition of “meta-crisis” and a “paradox of emancipation.” I am sympathetic to her insights, but I wonder how these figure into a broader critique of the politics of present-day capitalism. In a brief addendum to this symposium, I remark on three theoretical problem areas pertinent to the contemporary critique of capitalism: (a) the theory of crisis as it pertains to emancipatory politics, (b) the idea of an emancipatory class, and (c) the concept of hegemony in the context …

The Dependent Nature Of Enlightenment And Capitalism: Discourse On How Civilization Needs Capitalism To Curb The Effects Of Enlightenment, Katriel Lee

Departmental Honors & Graduate Capstone Projects

This paper examines the interplay between the intellectual movements of enlightenment, the economic system of capitalism, and the manifestation of violent racist ideologies like antisemitism and anti-black racism. The core argument is that while the enlightenment ideals of reason, universality, and human dominance over nature inherently set the stage for categorizing and objectifying groups seen as deviating from the desired uniformity, the emergence of extreme racist violence like the Holocaust requires the additional factors of a failing capitalist economy and the rise of totalitarian governments. In the modern American context, racist thought persists in the more covert form of color-blindness. …

The Contradiction Between Use-Value And Exchange-Value: Ecology, Imperialism, And The Telos Of Production, Larry Alan Busk, Elizabeth Portella

Emancipations: A Journal of Critical Social Analysis

This article elaborates and defends a critique of capitalism which, despite its appearance in various bodies of work, has not been named or systematically differentiated. The critique locates a contradiction between production for use-value and production for exchange-value, or a contradiction in what we call “the telos of production.” While maintaining that it has some basis in Marx’s work, we defend this model as preferable to the critique of capitalism based strictly on the exploitation of labor (which we call the “exploitation-exclusive critique”). We attempt to show this by applying the two approaches to the empirical realities of the ecological …

Capitalism, Democracy, And Adam Smith, John Thrasher

Philosophy Faculty Articles and Research

How can we better understand the relationship between capitalism and democracy today? This article challenges the prevailing “independence thesis” that views capitalism and democracy as separate and often antagonistic systems. By revisiting Adam Smith’s integrationist approach to political economy, I argue for a more nuanced understanding of the symbiotic relationship between political and economic orders. The article critically examines common responses to the independence thesis – insulation and implementation strategies – and proposes an alternative framework based on Smith’s integrated political economy. This Smithian perspective not only offers a more accurate description of the interdependence between capitalism and democracy but …

Tom Wetzel, Overcoming Capitalism: Strategy For The Working Class In The 21st Century, Nathan Jun

2024 Faculty Bibliography

No abstract provided.

Llms And Crisis Epistemology: The Business Of Making Old Crises Seem New, Mich Ciurria

Critical Humanities

Large Language Models (LLMs) like ChatGPT have set in motion a series of crises. These include disruptions to the labor force, education, and democracy. Some people believe that rich technocratic ‘saviors’ should solve these crises. Naomi Klein, however, argues that this is a neoliberal fantasy. Tech CEOs will not solve AI-related crises because they have a vested interest in perpetuating disaster capitalism and the social inequalities that keep wages low. Who, then, can solve the AI crisis? I submit that the answer is: oppressed groups with experiential and intergenerational knowledge of crises. To oppressed folks, technological crises are not new, …

The Constraints Within Capitalism: An Evaluation Of Ann E. Cudd's "Enlightened Capitalism" In 'Capitalism, For And Against', Phoebe E. Shown

The Cardinal Edge

There is extreme partisanship in the United States regarding whether or not capitalism should continue to be implemented. This partisanship is apparent in Capitalism, For and Against: A Feminist Debate, by Ann E. Cudd and Nancy Holmstrom. The published debate between Cudd and Holmstrom ultimately discusses whether systemic changes can be placed upon capitalism for an ideal "enlightened capitalism", presented by Cudd, or if the United States should adopt a new economic system altogether, suggested by Holmstrom. I address Ann E. Cudd's argument for an "enlightened capitalism" by summarizing her main ideas, and proceed to refute it on the grounds …

Critical Theory And Poverty, David Ingram

Philosophy: Faculty Publications and Other Works

This chapter explores the contributions that the Frankfurt School of critical theory has made to philosophical discussions about the meaning and injustice of poverty. Critical theorists interpret poverty to mean more than material deprivation, and they see its injustice as 2 extending beyond wrongful suffering and the threat to a human right to life to encompass psychological impoverishment and dehumanization. The chapter begins by examining critical theory’s historical roots in the Marxist critique of capitalism. The next section discusses early efforts by critical theorists to extend this critique to state-administered economies (capitalist and socialist) that have succeeded in sharply reducing …

Worker Ownership And The Public-Private Dichotomy: Disparity In Cudd’S Capitalism: For And Against, Zane R. Phelps

The Cardinal Edge

Ideological traditions, movements, and their associated developments are riddled with interpretation and disparity: human affairs are too complex and too riddled with contradiction to be narrowed down, to be sure. To maximize clarity, as well as its benefits in dialectics and discourse, critical analysis of these disparities in authored research can be a step towards maximizing the utility of debate, wherein both sides reach a conclusion or synthesis, ending up better off than before. This is the formula to be applied in the case of Cudd and Holmstrom. I take Cudd’s reading and interpretation of concepts such as worker ownership …

Marx, Race, Black Radicalism, And Racial Justice, Gregory Slack

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In this dissertation I defend the claim that not only was Marx not an anti-black racist, he was an anti-anti-black racist, despite sometimes employing racist language and epithets. I prove this claim by adducing massive amounts of textual evidence from Marx and Engels’ writings, spanning their entire careers as writers and revolutionaries, where time and again they condemn black slavery and the slave-trade, look forward to and call for their abolition, and aim at a future of racial justice and equality for black people, as a component part of communist justice for all working people, under a communist mode …

A Lesson In Mourning: The Evolution Of The English Anti-Elegy, K. Matthew Bennett

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis analyzes the evolution of the anti-elegy originating with Thomas Hardy’s elegiac sequence in memory of his wife Emma; Poems of 1912-1913. Using French post-structuralist Georges Bataille’s The Accursed Share as a theoretical lens, Hardy’s anti-elegies are analyzed and rhetorically connected to English war poet Siegfried Sassoon’s anti-elegies. Hardy’s anti-sentimentality, fatalistic outlook on death, and rejection of the Christian afterlife seeps into the language of Sassoon’s war poems which serve as a protest to the dehumanizing effects of late capitalism witnessed during the First World War. Hardy and Sassoon’s anti-elegies, with their hyper-focus on the elegized body, are …

Unlovable Labour: Rejecting The "Do What You Love" Ideology, Trey Dykeman

Richard T. Schellhase Essay Prize in Ethics

Miya Tokumitsu’s article ‘In the Name of Love’ is polemic against what she refers to as the DWYL (Do What You Love) movement that has been most recognisably popularised and transformed by Steve Jobs. She denounces this movement as an insidious ideology cleverly disguised as an uplifting lifestyle which has as its tenets labour, profit, and individualism; through her analysis of these tenets, she unveils them as alienation, erasure, and precarity, respectively. Her insights aid her in her aim to demonstrate that these ideological pillars do not support the wellbeing of the proletariat but rather reinforce the rugged structure of …

Scarcity Or Economic Insecurity? Two Yardsticks For Measuring Capitalism’S Performance, Costas Panayotakis

Publications and Research

This article argues that capitalism’s relationship to economic insecurity is as important for the evaluation of that system as its relationship to scarcity. Critically analyzing the neoclassical and Marxist focus on capitalism’s relationship to scarcity, the article describes how capitalism’s relationship to economic insecurity offers a more cogent elaboration of these traditions’ shared belief that the economic system should serve people. In particular, while critical of the neoclassical portrayal of capitalism as a system using scarce resources efficiently, this paper also argues, against Marxism, that an alternative to capitalism might be preferable even if scarcity is not abolished.

The Ghost University: Academe From The Ruins, Peter Fleming

Emancipations: A Journal of Critical Social Analysis

No abstract provided.

Progressive Neoliberalism Isn't The Solution. We Need A Radical, Counter-Hegemonic And Anti-Capitalist Alliance. A Conversation With Nancy Fraser, Nancy Fraser, Lara Monticelli

Emancipations: A Journal of Critical Social Analysis

During the annual meeting of the research network “Alternatives to Capitalism” held at the New School for Social Research in New York City in 2019, Professor Nancy Fraser engaged in a vibrant discussion about one of her latest books, “Capitalism. A Conversation in Critical Theory”, co-authored with Rahel Jaeggi (Polity Press, 2018). Here is a shortened and edited extract of the conversation.

Influencing Capitalist Attitudes To Drive More Capital Towards Social Good, Leah Michelle Burton

Antioch University Dissertations & Theses

The purpose of this study is to better understand how to influence capitalist attitudes and drive more capital towards social good. This is why we must explore the prospect of emancipating the capitalists from capitalism. This study identifies capitalism as a form of oppression that is contributing to a newly developed ethics of capital, a term introduced in this study. Emancipatory action research and general systems theory were employed as the primary approaches to engaging a group of venture capitalists and finance professionals in activities and dialogues. Value2 is the theory of action I use to influence the attitudes of …

Capitalism And Biblical Ethics, Sarah D. Stewart

Liberty University Journal of Statesmanship & Public Policy

There has been a growing trend in some expressions of Christianity to view Capitalism as fundamentally incompatible with the Christian faith. This article looked to a variety of sources to argue that Christianity and Capitalism are not fundamentally incompatible. Rather, Capitalism developed alongside developments in Christian theology during the Middle Ages. This traditional form of Capitalism is defined and argued for in this article. The article attempts to demonstrate that the elements that allow Capitalism to thrive are compatible with Christian ethics. The case is made by first examining the historical development of Capitalism and its relationship to Christianity. From …

The Moral Agency Of The State: What Does A Virtuous State Look Like And Is Allowing Capitalism Virtuous?, Austin Cable

Undergraduate Honors Theses

It has become quite noticeable that modern world politics across the globe has lacked a guiding morality in which we can hold states morally accountable in both the international and domestic spheres. This can be seen in the never-ending wars and occupations across the Middle East, South-East Asia, and many other places around the world. Now, attempting to implement such guiding moral principles seems to be an impossible task mainly because of the massive difficulties that one would face in trying to get the 195 countries around the world to agree on such principles. Because of this, most will probably …

Love, The Other And The City: Critical Analysis Of The Ethics Of Alterity In A Capitalist Society, Juan Luis Cabrera

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

Loving for Levinas is a desubjectivation. The one who loves is the one who does not resist the call of the Other. He who loves, according to Levinas, recognizes in the face of the migrant, the orphan, the widow, and the poor, as an inescapable responsibility. However, is this desubjectivation a possibility in capitalist cities? Capitalism is the consequence of a philosophical heritage founded in the totality of the same. Philosophy understood as “love of wisdom” places man in a position of control towards everything that surrounds him, the Other included. Everything belongs to the subject that knows the reality …

Caring Without Sharing: Philanthropy's Creation And Destruction Of The Common World, Amy B. Schiller

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation explores multiple ways philanthropy builds and undermines the common world. Political science treatments of philanthropy have focused mainly on its role in the development of civil society, with a recent turn towards critiques of philanthropy as an instrument of elite power and tension between private wealth and democratic governance. In this dissertation, I examine how philanthropy can foster enduring spaces of human flourishing, or reduce beneficiaries to objects of pity, surveillance and domination. I trace philanthropy's evolution from ancient to contemporary contexts and propose a framework for philanthropy to, under certain conditions, build and care for the common …

Libertarianism, Bas Van Der Vossen

Philosophy Faculty Books and Book Chapters

Libertarianism is a theory in political philosophy that strongly values individual freedom and is skeptical about the justified scope of government in our lives. Libertarians see individuals as sovereign, as people who have a right to control their bodies and work, who are free to decide how to interact with willing others, and who cannot be forced to do things against their will without very strong justification.

For some, the argument in support of this view hinges on the principle of self-ownership. To them, individual rights are morally foundational, the basic building blocks of their theory. Many others, however, take …

Democratic Rights And The Choice Of Economic Systems, Jeppe Von Platz

Philosophy Faculty Publications

Holt argues that Rawls’s first principle of justice requires democratic control of the economy and that property owning democracy fails to satisfy this requirement; only liberal socialism is fully democratic. However, the notion of democratic control is ambiguous,and Holt has to choose between the weaker notion of democratic control that Rawls is committed to and the stronger notion that property owning democracy fails to satisfy. It may be that there is a tension between capitalism and democracy, so that only liberal socialism can be fully democratic, but if so, we should reject, rather than argue from, the theory of democracy …

An Ethical Evaluation Of The Modern Pharmaceutical Industry, Kaitlyn Drennan

Dialogue & Nexus

Lack of transparency, wrongdoings, and unlawful promotion characterize the healthcare industry; these are especially prevalent within the pharmaceutical industry. Consequently, an investigation into the evidence of the corruption and the ethical infringement is needed. In this paper, I will evaluate the pharmaceutical industry’s adherence to the three major branches of ethics. The ever-increasing prices of pharmaceutical products, especially medications used for the combating of anaphylaxis and cancer, coupled with the compensatory-based medication promotion and research points to a major crisis in the realm of social justice. These examples, among many other current issues, lead to difficulties in individuals receiving the …

An Ecological Critique Of Capitalism, Macauley Berg

Undergraduate Honors Theses

I will be addressing the broad set of impacts generally referred to as "the environmental crisis.” I argue that this environmental crisis is truly an ecological one, insofar as humans are its primary drivers as well as its primary victims. I then investigate the structural cause (or structural causes) which produce this multitude of effects. In turn, this leads me to seek out and address the social underpinnings of this problem. I identify capitalism (specifically, its current form of global neoliberal economics) as a major driver of the ecological crisis and explore the relationship between capitalism and environmental practice. As …

The Structural Injustice Of Forced Migration And The Failings Of Normative Theory, David Ingram

Philosophy: Faculty Publications and Other Works

I propose to criticize two strands of argument - contractarian and utilitarian – that liberals have put forth in defense of economic coercion, based on the notion of justifiable paternalism. To illustrate my argument, I appeal to the example of forced labor migration, driven by the exigencies of market forces. In particular, I argue that the forced migration of a special subset of unemployed workers lacking other means of subsistence (economic refugees) cannot be redeemed paternalistically as freedom or welfare enhancing in the long run. I further argue that contractarian and utilitarian approaches are normatively incapable of appreciating this fact …