Equality and Morality

He's very deeply invested in seeing "market society" as the telos of the originary scene. It was there from the beginning, as you can see from the concluding chapter of The Origin of Language. So, he doesn't see it as an ancillary hypothesis that could be falsified without affecting the originary hypothesis itself. All the arguments he makes in this Chronicle are arguments he's made many times before. And power, sovereignty, and the state have always been terribly undeveloped concepts in GA. When Gans talks about politics he's really talking about an intersection of ethics, aesthetics and economics. The economic losers need to be bought off and given ways to express themselves, to put it crudely. But I don't know if this is the religious core--a genuine "faith" in the originary scene could, by definition, survive such a diversion from the historical road map. There's also another, more "positive" side to his refusal to take these questions seriously. He really only believes in social arrangements that exist beyond a doubt, in a way that everyone recognizes. The US actually exists. The USSR actually existed. So did Nazi Germany and so does "Islamism." When "absolutism" is running a post office, maybe he'll consider it--until then, it's just utopian (or dystopian). And there's something to respect in that stance.

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It's interesting--he defines the "market" in terms of the "career," something, which, as far as I know, he has never returned to. But the whole notion of "markets" needs to be thoroughly rethought.