The revenge of the market on the rentiers why neo-liberal reports of the end of history turned out to be premature

Starting from the perspective of heterodox Keynesian-Minskyian-Kindlebergian financial economics, this paper begins by highlighting a number of mechanisms that contributed to the current financial crisis. These include excess liquidity, income polarisation, conflicts between financial and productive capital, lack of intelligent regulation, asymmetric information, principal-agent dilemmas and bounded rationalities. However, the paper then proceeds to argue that perhaps more than ever the ‘macroeconomics’ that led to this crisis only makes analytical sense if examined within the framework of the political settlements and distributional outcomes in which it had operated. Taking the perspective of critical social theories the paper concludes that, ultimately, the current financial crisis is the outcome of something much more systemic, namely an attempt to use neo-liberalism (or, in US terms, neo-conservatism) as a new technology of power to help transform capitalism into a rentiers’ delight. And in particular, into a system without much ‘compulsion’ on big business; i.e., one that imposes only minimal pressures on big agents to engage in competitive struggles in the real economy (while inflicting exactly the opposite fate on workers and small firms). A key component in the effectiveness of this new technology of power was its ability to transform the state into a major facilitator of the ever-increasing rent-seeking practices of oligopolistic capital. The architects of this experiment include some capitalist groups (in particular rentiers from the financial sector as well as capitalists from the ‘mature’ and most polluting industries of the preceding techno-economic paradigm), some political groups, as well as intellectual networks with their allies – including most economists and the ‘new’ left. Although rentiers did succeed in their attempt to get rid of practically all fetters on their greed, in the end the crisis materialised when ‘markets’ took their inevitable revenge on the rentiers by calling their (blatant) bluff.

Humanization of health care: a reflexive theoretical essay based on the philosophy of Emmanuel Lévinas

Fundação de Amparo à Pesquisa do Estado de São Paulo (FAPESP)

The De-Totalization of History in Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried

This paper aims at discussing how Tim O’Brien, a veteran of the Vietnam War, reviews the American involvement in the conflict in his novel The Things They Carried (1990). The author shows the perspective of the soldiers in the stories and, therefore, presents other possibilities to analyze that historical fact. The interplay of fiction and truth is essential for O’Brien to reach the objective of reevaluating official history in order to make the readers rethink the past.

Foucault's heraclitism and the concept of history

Deleuze states that Foucault would have created a new relationship between men and history, a relationship other than that established by the philosophers of history. In order to specify the steps Foucault took to accomplish this invention, I shall support, according to Deleuze, Foucault s Heraclitism as the basis for a genuine Foucaultian concept of history. After outlining the risks taken by Foucault s concept of history, I observe this concept at work through the three periods that perform his thought: Archeology, Genealogy and Aesthetics of Existence. The main characters that embody his concept of history through these periods are: a) the discontinuous profile of history; b) the denaturalization of would-be unhistorical objects; c) the historical dimension of body; d) the eddies of subjectivation in history. We shall focus our inspection on the turn made along Foucault s work when he takes into a new account the theme of subjectivity, mostly in the last two volumes of the History of Sexuality. Thus, our attention turns to the subjectivity defined as a process, in order to investigate individual identity as the result of history.