Abstract
In the context of the origin of money, we encountered the calculation of utility. However, it is necessary to widen this concept. We are not dealing with something that could be simply interpreted as egoism in any moral sense: we are not making a simple accusation in the sense of Friedrich Nietzsche’s disparaging of moral self-righteousness. Of course, giving a gift also involves a calculation of utility.
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Notes
This part contains texts already published in German by Franz Hinkelammert, Das Subjekt und das Gesetz: Die Wiederkehr des verdrängten Subjekts (Münster: Edition ITP-Kompass, 2007). Chapter 7 is unpublished. Both were translated by Patricia Davie.
Cf. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire: The New World Order (Boston: Harvard University Press, 2000).
This reaches its extreme in the twentieth century in the ideas of Gary Becker, Human Capital (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993). Becker even calculates the utility afforded him by his mother and children. For this pinnacle of rationality he was even awarded the Nobel Prize. Indeed, anyone seeking to understand our era must grasp the fact that this is the pinnacle of our rationality.
Cf. Franz Hinkelammert, La maldición que pesa sobre la ley: Las raíces del pensamiento crítico en Pablo de Tarso (San José, Costa Rica: Editorial Arlekín, 2010). In German: Der Fluch, der auf dem Gesetz lastet: Paulus von Tarsus und das kritische Denken (Luzern: Exodus, 2011). See chap. 3, “Sobre los marcos categoriales de la interpretación del mundo en Pablo y Agustín.”
Ludwig Wittgenstein, Vortrag über Ethik und andere kleine Schriften, ed. Joachim Schulte (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1989), 12.
In a novel by Umberto Eco, the consequences of such a worldview are described in a shocking way. Cf. Umberto Eco, The Prague Cemetery (London: Random House, 2011).
Translation of quotation from W. Schirmacher, Technik und Gelassenheit (Freiburg: Karl Alber, 1985, 25).
Franz Hinkelammert, Democracia y totalitarismo (San José, Costa Rica: DEI, 1990). See part 2, chap. 1: “La metodología de Max Weber y la derivación de estructuras de valores en nombre de la ciencia.”
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© 2012 Ulrich Duchrow and Franz J. Hinkelammert
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Duchrow, U., Hinkelammert, F.J. (2012). The Basic Characteristics of Modernity: Functional Mechanisms, Efficiency, and the Trivialization of the World. In: Transcending Greedy Money. New Approaches to Religion and Power. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137290021_8
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