What explains the "triumph of capitalism"? Why do people so often
respond positively to discussions favoring it while shutting down
arguments against it? Overwhelmingly theories regarding capitalism's
resilience have focused on individual choice bolstered by careful
rhetorical argumentation. In this penetrating study, however, Catherine
Chaput shows that something more than choice is at work in capitalism's
ability to thrive in public practice and imagination--more even than
material resources (power) and cultural imperialism (ideology). That
"something," she contends, is market affect.
Affect, says Chaput, signifies a semi-autonomous entity circulating
through individuals and groups. Physiological in nature but moving
across cultural, material, and environmental boundaries, affect has
three functions: it opens or closes individual receptivity; it pulls or
pushes individual identification; and it raises or lowers individual
energies. This novel approach begins by connecting affect to rhetorical
theory and offers a method for tracking its three modalities in relation
to economic markets. Each of the following chapters compares a major
theorist of capitalism with one of his important critics, beginning with
the juxtaposition of Adam Smith and Karl Marx, who set the agenda not
only for arguments endorsing and critiquing capitalism but also for the
affective energies associated with these positions. Subsequent chapters
restage this initial debate through pairs of economic theorists--John
Maynard Keynes and Thorstein Veblen, Friedrich Hayek and Theodor Adorno,
and Milton Friedman and John Kenneth Galbraith--who represent key
historical moments. In each case, Chaput demonstrates, capitalism's
critics have fallen short in their rhetorical effectiveness.
Chaput concludes by exploring possibilities for escaping the
straitjacket imposed by these debates. In particular she points to the
biopolitical lectures of Michel Foucault as offering a framework for
more persuasive anticapitalist critiques by reconstituting people's
conscious understandings as well as their natural instincts.
