Bouvard on Market Society and Originary Equality
Is it just me, or is the religious core in Gans' GA further revealing itself? (He has said he likes to think of GA as a substitute faith but doesn't believe it can really work as such. ) I see an inability, a bit surprising in such a subtle thinker, to go beyond his too-easy dismissal of the "Nietzchean" alt-right. I am reminded of an earlier Chronicle where he says that if he's wrong about liberal democracy, there's nothing for an old professor to do but disappear before the onslaught of the survivalists. An apocalyptic side is showing, beyond his usual remarks about the possibilities of nuclear conflagration, or Girard's vision, and he does not really engage with Adam's hopeful blogging. It's somehow so impossible to imagine a "nice", "modern" world where sovereignty is not divided and insecure, with the ideological marketeering that implies, that the exercise of imagining a world where people work in the other direction has no appeal.
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.
Bouvard on Market Society and Originary Equality — https://center.study/post/reddit-equality-and-morality