Foucault, Lenin, and Western Marxism

Taking Max Weber's conception of the modern capitalist world system as a classical precedent, and with reference to a series of analytical schemas on capital formation, this essay takes three recent books as a starting point for examining the revival of critical theoretical attention to 'the new capitalism'. The Social Structures of the Economy by Pierre Bourdieu focuses on the erosion of the separation between business and household economies by providing a case study of the construction boom in single-family dwellings which replaced the public housing movement in 1980s France. Also concentrating on recent French history, Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello, in their monumental book The New Spirit of Capitalism, argue that the post-industrial restructuring of 'formally free' labour was provoked by countercultural protest in the 1960s and further justified by managerial discourses advocating postmodern 'flexibilization' in the 1990s. Finally, Nigel Thrift's Knowing Capitalism enumerates recent examples demonstrating how the 'rational' accounting of economic capital is increasingly expanded and intensified by commodified cultural circuits which facilitate flows of information between business schools, management consultants and entrepreneurial gurus and in a variety of everyday spaces and ordinary practices. While each of these works convincingly projects the resurrection of 'the spirit of capitalism' on local and global scales, they have less to say about the underlying political dynamics or emerging alternatives to this process.

Purpose: To analyze the relationship between the rise of the retirement preparation programs (RPP) and the transformations in the ideological environment of organizations associated with the advent of the spirit of neoliberal capitalism. Originality/value: Few studies of Brazilian literature have addressed the dissemination of RPP from critical perspectives and, especially, in the business environment. Most of the research has addressed public institutions. Concerning international literature, the article innovates by associating the rise of the idea of active aging with the thesis of the new spirit of capitalism, developed by Luc Boltanski and Ève Chiapello. Unlike existing international studies, the analysis focuses on RPP as instruments for disseminating the dominant order in the organizational sphere. Design/methodology/approach: To meet the proposed objectives, qualitative research was carried out. Data were collected from nine informants from five consultancies that work in the structuring of corporate RPP and two companies that have recently structured their programs. A thematic content analysis was performed. Findings: The results reveal that the developed RPP promote conceptions of active aging in line with the new spirit of capitalism and changes in the forms of work organization driven by neoliberalism, which made it possible to conceptualize RPP as an object that incorporates and facilitates the diffusion of active aging and constructing an active retirement. The study advances in the understanding of the implications of new discourses on old age for organizations and stimulates a more critical comprehensionof RPP in public and private organizations.

Weber's thesis that the spirit of capitalism was preexistent to the rise of capitalism itself inspired many sociologist to search for the cultural background of contemporary forms of capitalism. In this paper, the author focuses on and makes comparisons of three approaches of such kind. The one approach draws from Luc Boltanski and ?ve Chiapello who examine the development of 'new spirit of capitalism' by focusing on the interrelation of two macroactors - capitalism and critique; the other one is of Nigel Thrift who relates the rise of 'soft capitalism' to the strengthening of 'cultural circuit of capital'; and finally, Richard Sennett's approach analyzes the culture of 'new capitalism' and work ethic of the 'mp3 organizations'.

The importance of being earnest - In this highly personal and largely non-technical discussion article, based on a public comment at the Zonder Maskers symposium, I engage in a radical exercise of the dialogue to which sociologists of the TOR-team have invited moral philosophers. I consider the results of the survey as very disquieting, contrary to what the authors seem to think. I start by raising questions about the moral competency of the surveyed youth, and try to find out in what way more adequate survey scales could have avoided some problems. After dismantling the notion of Self, which prominently figures in the beliefs, attitudes and values of the surveyed youth, I try to connect the form of "false consciousness' reflected in what the authors call 'self-ideology' to the 'new spirit of capitalism', by means of some insights crudely drawn from the outstanding and complex work by Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello.

This article situates Responsible Innovation (RI) as part of a larger shift in science and technology governance demanding a ‘social fix’ for innovation, which we argue amounts to a new spirit of technoscience. Inspired by Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello's analysis of the development of a ‘new spirit of capitalism’ from late twentieth century, we observe the rise of a new governance rationality in technoscientific innovation which places society, its needs, and desires at the center of scientific and technological development. This shift has significant implications for the field of science and technology studies, and the modes of critique that STS scholars mobilize in understanding and intervening in the politics of sociotechnical change. The new spirit of technoscience calls for a reassessment of familiar formulas of STS critique, with a renewed symmetrical approach to the prescription and production of democracy for science and technology governance.

The following paper suggests a connection between recent developments in the justification of the capitalist system and contemporary European Liberal Arts programs. By looking at Luc Boltanski’s and Eve Chiapello’s study on The New Spirit Of Capitalism and Gilles Deleuze’s term of societies of control we highlight a pivot within Western societies towards flexibility, creativity and self-fulfillment as essential requirements on the job market. We then link this observation to European Liberal Arts programs and ask to what extent the Liberal Arts’ self-understanding, as it appears at European universities, conforms to this new capitalist imperative. Furthermore, we examine how we experienced these claims during our time as Liberal Arts students.

Kristin Ross, May '68 and its Afterlives, Chicago, University of Chicago, 2002, 238pp. Julian Bourg, From Revolution to Ethics: May 1968 and Contemporary French Thought, Montreal, McGill-Queen's University Press, 2007, 468pp. Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello, The New Spirit of Capitalism, London, Verso, 2007, 601pp. Serge Audier, La pensee anti-68, Paris, La Decouverte, 2008, 380pp. Francois Cusset, Contre-discours de Mai. Ce qu'embaumers et fossoyeurs de 68 ne disent pas a ses heritiers, Arles, Actes, 174pp. Gregory Elliott, Ends in Sight: Marx/Fukuyama/Hobsbawm/Anderson, London, Pluto, 2008, 148pp. As a political date, 1968 arguably rivals far more momentous years (1789, 1848, 1871, 1917, 1956 ...) for sheer magnitude of bibliography. Especially in its Parisian guise, it continues to call forth innumerable chronicles, confessions and genealogies, of widely varying quality and scope. This fortieth anniversary has not been short of publications. However, as the primacy of the personal narrative wanes and younger generations of scholars and intellectuals who 'weren't there' take the stage, there are signs of greater perspicacity and insight, especially as concerns the location of '68 within various strands of cultural, social and political history. (1) In this review essay, I'd like to consider a number of recent attempts, both Anglophone and Francophone, to tease out certain intellectual lineages from the tangled web of positions and arguments that stem, in one way or another, from the events of that year (and of its metonymic month, May). In books such as Audier's La pensee anti-68 and Bourg's From Revolution to Ethics this explicitly takes the guise of intellectual history; in Cusset's Contre-discours de Mai and Ross's earlier May '68 and its Afterlives we are dealing with an overtly partisan and critical history, wanting to counter the 'embalming' and 'burial' of the political potentialities of '68 by memoirists and sociologists, for the sake of the present (and the future); in Boltanski and Chiapello's The New Spirit of Capitalism (only considered here to the extent that it focuses on '68) we are instructed instead about how '68 may be understood as a crucial fulcrum for the contested recomposition of capitalism and its normative codes; finally, I have included a discussion of Elliott's Ends in Sight, a book which is not expressly preoccupied with '68, in order to draw into relief the contrast between the sense of a beginning commonly associated with '68 and the sense of an ending that has pervaded a certain strain of Left thinking faced with the predominance of an imperial neoliberalism. These books are also the occasion to home in on certain themes which belong to the vital legacy of '68: the tension between political and social thought; the role of modality in our understanding of systemic change; the politics of time; the irreducibility of experience to explanation; the relationship between socio-political upheavals and the reproduction of capitalism. In order to sketch out what I think is at stake in a number of these debates, I have also made reference to some crucial contributions that were made in the heat of the moment (Tom Nairn's 'Why it Happened') or in the dispassionate hindsight of earlier anniversaries (Regis Debray's 'Modest Contribution'). THE IMPOSSIBLE EVENT 'Is it still possible?' This question, adorning a poster for one of the innumerable recent commemorations of 'May '68', seems to succinctly capture the drive behind the compulsive attentions that this often under-specified and yet over-determined moment continues to garner. As many have noted, the general tendency of an epoch to project its hopes and anxieties into past events is exacerbated when it comes to the phenomena rather gnomically encapsulated in the signifier 'May '68'. In an interview with Peter Hallward, Alain Badiou has noted that the strange formality or hollowness of its name is a sign of the obscurity of the occurrence it strives to indicate: I'm very struck by the fact that today everyone says 'the events of May 1968', but if we say that the event has 'event' as its name, it means that we haven't yet found its name. …

More than a decade ago, critical ecopedagogue Richard Kahn expressed his fears and hopes regarding Education for sustainable development (ESD). He feared that ESD would be short lived and marginalized and would develop an instrumental pedagogy of one-sided transmission of knowledge, yet hoped for ESD to encompass three types of “ecoliteracies”: technical/functional, cultural and critical. After an assessment of current ESD, as reported by UNESCO, this paper concludes that his two first fears were unfounded, while his hopes regarding ESD’s pedagogical content were largely not met. To better understand the result, Luc Boltanski’s and Éve Chiapello’s analysis of “the new spirit of capitalism” is mobilized. According to it, current capitalism integrates “artistic critique” on e.g., lack of autonomy and creativity with greater ease than “social critique” with respect to e.g., poverty and inequality. This might explain what ecoliteracies that are integrated into ESD.

This paper analyses the phenomenon of free and open source software (FOSS) in the light of Luc Boltanski and Ève Chiapello's The new spirit of capitalism. It argues that collaborative FOSS production by volunteer software developers is a species of critical social practice in Boltanski and Chiapello's sense: rooted in resistance to capitalist social relations, and yet also a source of values that justify the new routes to profitability associated with contemporary network capitalism. Advanced via collective projects that are sustained by hacker norms and privately legislated ‘copyleft’ law, the FOSS ethos is apparently antithetical to private property-based accumulation. Yet it can be shown to embody the ‘new spirit of capitalism’ in its most distilled form; moreover FOSS developers have instituted new forms of property and new modes of profit creation around software that are in the process of being adapted for use in other economic sectors. Meanwhile, the private law constraints on profit-seeking that have emerged from the FOSS movement are counteracting some of the social pathologies that accompany network capitalism only to consolidate others. The paper concludes by identifying likely bases for a renewal of critique given these realities.

zfwu Zeitschrift für Wirtschafts- und Unternehmensethik , Seite 57 - 71

This article compares two conceptualizations of “ghosts” emerging from the counterculture of the late 1960s and early 1970s: one found in Luc Boltanski and Ève Chiapello’s The New Spirit of Capitalism, and the other in Mark Fisher’s Acid Communism, situated within the broader context of his work. Particular attention is devoted to how both interpretations are positioned in relation to the assumptions and discursive rules derived from Max Weber’s The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. Following in Weber’s footsteps, Boltanski and Chiapello trace the roots of contemporary work culture. Fisher, by contrast, searches for potential sources of a postcapitalist order grounded in the principle of freedom from work. These concepts attribute significant agency to the historical counterculture – not only in the symbolic realm, but also within political and economic spheres. However, authors take opposing stances on whether the transformation initiated by the counterculture has already taken place, or is still yet to come.

É conhecida a interpretação de Luc Boltanski e Ève Chiapello de que os acontecimentos de 1968 teriam desencadeado uma renovação do “espírito do capitalismo”. Assim, se o primeiro espírito, descrito por Max Weber, era do puritano ascético inspirado na ética do trabalho, a “busca por autenticidade” dos jovens de 68 teria desencadeado o novo espírito conexionista e flexível. Porém, ao mesmo tempo em que se criava o primeiro espírito do capitalismo, igualmente um espírito do anticapitalismo se gestava nos sindicatos, intelectuais socialistas e movimentos comunistas e anarquistas. Esse espírito foi igualmente renovado pelos jovens de 68 a partir da crítica à “sociedade industrial”, comum ao projeto unidimensional tanto no mundo capitalista quanto na experiência do “socialismo real” vigente. Assim, se é verdade que 68 desaguou numa renovação do espírito do capitalismo, podemos dizer que igualmente renova o espírito do anticapitalismo, cujos experimentos vivem na radicalidade das críticas feminista, antirracista, decolonial e ecológica do capitalismo hoje em dia.

Du Gay and Morgan’s edited collection offers a thorough volume focusing on The New Spirit of Capitalism (NSC), a book published in France in 1999 and translated into English in 2005. There is no doubt that New Spirits of Capitalism? Crises, Justifications and Dynamics is a timely landmark work among the growing body of organization studies inspired by approaches developed in the field of French pragmatist sociology (Jagd, 2011; Patriotta, Gond & Schultz, 2011; Cloutier & Langley, 2013; see also the M@n@gement special issue with Dansou & Langley, 2012; Taupin, 2012). This is particularly due to the fact that, as noted by the editors, Boltanski and Chiapello’s seminal work is a weighty tome that presents several complex contributions to domains as diverse as sociology, political economy, social history, social critique etc. Whilst elucidating one theoretical approach stemming from that articulated in Boltanski and Thevenot’s On Justification (published in France in 1991, eight years before NSC but translated into English in 2006), Du Gay and Morgan also take the opportunity to clarify the approach of the French pragmatist sociology (also termed sociology of critical practices or sociology of critique), which is often misunderstood. With New Spirits of Capitalism?

This chapter examines the normative changes that have taken place in attitudes to work since the events of May ’68 in France. The chapter explores the ‘crisis of work’ that shook France in the 1970s as the ‘artistic critique’, examined in previous chapters, finally found a large following among workers and young people who resisted or outright rejected the post-war social framework of labour and consumption. At the same time, it considers how, towards the end of the 1970s, a ‘new spirit of capitalism’ (Boltanski and Chiapello) began to gradually emerge that incorporated many aspects of the ‘artistic critique’ back into capitalism. The chapter concludes with a consideration of contemporary critiques of ‘abstract labour’ such as that of Jean-Marie Vincent.

The article develops a theoretical framework for the critical examination of cinematic tourist design. Considering ‘film-induced tourism’ as part of a bigger system involving the design of mobilities, it interrogates the connection between the aesthetic and ethical principles that end up informing the engineering of national hospitality in media platforms. The design, which is managed by a ‘worldmaking authority’ or network encompassing the host nation state and international tourist and media markets, conforms to the rationalised rules of what Boltanski and Chiapello termed the ‘new spirit of capitalism’, which mobilises romantic ideals of individual freedom to sell landscapes and exotic cultural characters. The phased development of such mobilities conforms to contingency and is indifferent to the welfare of particular social groups. The model is exemplified through the phased design of mobilities out of two films with virulent sexist and antisemitic content centred on the journeys of the fictional Kazakh journalist Borat to the United States.