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Chris Long

Hegel on Wall Street - NYTimes.com - 1 views

opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/...hegel-on-wall-street

Hegel Individual

shared by Chris Long on 04 Oct 10 - No Cached
  • Hegel’s emphatic but paradoxical way of stating this is to say that if the free market individualist acts “in [his] own self-interest, [he] simply does not know what [he] is doing, and if [he] affirms that all men act in their own self-interest, [he] merely asserts that all men are not really aware of what acting really amounts to.”
  • Hegel narrates how each formation of self and world collapses because of a mismatch between self-conception and how that self conceives of the larger world.  Hegel thinks we can see how history has been driven by misshapen forms of life in which the self-understanding of agents and the worldly practices they participate in fail to correspond.  With great drama, he claims that his narrative is a “highway of despair.”
  • holier-than-thou virtue and the self-interested Wall Street banker are making the same error from opposing points of view.
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • Both are wrong because, finally, it is not motives but actions that matter, and how those actions hang together to make a practical world. 
  • what makes self-interested individuality effective is not its self-interested motives, but that there is an elaborate system of practices that supports, empowers, and gives enduring significance to the banker’s actions.
  • What bankers do, Hegel is urging, is satisfy a function within a complex system that gives their actions functional significance.
  • Time matters here because what must be promoted is the practice’s capacity to reproduce itself.
  • the profit-driven actions of the financial sector became increasingly detached from their function of supporting and advancing the growth of capital.
  • What market regulations should prohibit are practices in which profit-taking can routinely occur without wealth creation; wealth creation is the world-interest that makes bankers’ self-interest possible
  • regulation is the force of reason needed to undo the concoctions of fantasy
  • Chris Long on 04 Oct 10
     
    Very interesting discussion in light of Adorno's work in Minima Moralia
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