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Law, Change and Revolution: A Theological Note on the Finality of Capitalist Resurgence.

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 February 2024

Extract

If it is the case that ‘every age adopts an image of itself—a certain horizon, however blurred and imprecise, which somehow unifies its whole experience’, then we may enquire: in what does such a contemporary image consist? Perry Anderson suggests, with characteristic elan, the following: ‘The radical internationalization of the forces of production—not to speak of circulation—that defines the spearhead forms of capital in the final years of the 20th century promises to render all national correctors. . . increasingly tenuous in the future. In that sense no society ...will be immune to the unpredictable tides and tempests of an uneven development whose elements are acquiring a well-nigh meteorological velocity around the world.’ The intimation of apocalyptic in this image of tides and tempests hints at the possibility of epochal change; and indeed, it is a feeling that has grown into a conviction on the part of many theorists, as the world economy lurches towards the 21st century. ‘Post-industrial’, ‘informational’ or ‘hyperreal’: however the revolutionary force of capitalism is to be described at the close of this century, it is becoming increasingly clear that the sheer magnitude of these changes are installing, not only new patterns of economic production and exchange, but also, and more profoundly, new realms of human experience. The world is changing, a feeling uncannily and often disturbingly present to many, as they search to establish the lineaments of the human in this Promethean age.

Type
Original Article
Copyright
Copyright © 1992 Provincial Council of the English Province of the Order of Preachers

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Footnotes

1

An earlier draft of this paper was presented to the conference: ‘Religion and the Resurgence of Capitalism’, Lancaster, July 1991.

References

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3 There are of course a variety of types of exchanges other than that of the market. Karl Polanyi, in his pioneering work The Great Transformation (Beacon, 1944)Google Scholar, argues for a threefold typology: market, reciprocity and redistribution.

4 'Societies Collapse, Faiths Linger on', Encounter, March 1990, p. 3.

5 On ‘finality’ as ‘a relation to the end’, see Bernard Lonergan's helpful remarks in A Third Collection (London: Geoffrey Chapman, 1985), p.24. The fabric metaphor comes, of course, from Hegel's Lectures on the Philosophy of World History: Introduction (Cambridge: CUP, 1980), p.71Google Scholar, and so provides the context for my suggestion of ‘unravelling’.

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