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Capitalism’s Existential Crisis: Producing Existential Freedom

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The Bad Faith in the Free Market

Abstract

This chapter will show that the 2008 financial crises more than challenged the faith in the free market; it represented a collective existential crisis where people questioned whether capitalist society and life had meaning. Inspired by Sartre’s later work “Search of a Method”, it will examine the evolution of freedoms from an empowering philosophy for remaking the world to a stifling discourse limiting such existential agency. It will then reveal the insights Marxism provides in terms of the socio-material production of freedom and the reframing of history as the revolutionary reproduction of progressive human freedoms. The near-global financial meltdown thus posed the possibility for not only reforming or even radical transforming the free market but also breaking free from the “fundamentalism” that posited capitalism as the only possible option.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Open University, Milton Keynes, UK

    Peter Bloom

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  1. Peter Bloom
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Bloom, P. (2018). Capitalism’s Existential Crisis: Producing Existential Freedom. In: The Bad Faith in the Free Market. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-76502-0_3

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-76502-0_3

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  • Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-76501-3

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-76502-0

  • eBook Packages: Economics and FinanceEconomics and Finance (R0)

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