[lbo-talk] Nietzsche again

Rakesh Bhandari bhandari at berkeley.edu
Mon Jul 16 10:40:54 PDT 2007


I have been arguing that the subject who is unjustly treated or appropriated in violation of our codes, rooted in fair exchange, is not recognized, given our atomistic social ontology, as a subject, a potential bearer of ethical claims. For this reason capitalism is indeed just because it cannot recognize and de-constitutes the aggrieved Subject in the name of humanism and the individual, in the name of abstract universality and singularity. The aggrieved subject is also practically deconstituted juridically and politically. Individualism is not simply an ideology. Humanism would seem to be the enemy, the oxymoron of class humanism the answer; it's this disturbing, perhaps irrationalist nihilism towards conventional morality or good common moral sense that sometimes misleads people into conflating Marx and Nietzsche, though I think Justin and others are correct that Marx's normative standpoint of human flourishing can be productively compared to Nietzsche's. Yet with Nietzsche we have to remember that morality can be critiqued from the left and the right.

Andrew Sayer has been developing another argument to take seriously normative concerns, in particular what he calls lay normativity, everyday and everyman's moral concerns. He focuses on human flourishing but his hero is the one and for him only Adam Smith, not the Adam Smith of Theory of Moral Sentiments vs The Adam Smith of Wealth of Nations.

http://www.lancs.ac.uk/fss/sociology/papers/sayer-class-moral-worth-rec.pdf



More information about the lbo-talk mailing list