In this interview, Gary Hall argues that if we are to move to a post-capitalist society, we need to experiment with new ways of being and doing that are based less on ideas of self-centred individualism, competition and celebrity, and more on openness, collaboration and the gift. The university, he suggests, is somewhere we can actualise such alternative modes of thinking and working, as it is one of the few spaces in post-industrial society where the forces of contemporary neoliberalism are still being overtly opposed, to a certain extent at least. A persona he proposes we adopt in order to do so is that of the pirate, this being for him someone who tries, teases and troubles as well as attacks our existing economic, legal and political models.
Pirate Philosophy: https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/pirate-philosophy
Uberfication of the University: https://www.upress.umn.edu/book-division/books/the-uberfication-of-the-university
Categories: Archive
If you ever get a chance to read Phillipe Steiner’s book (2010) “Durkheim and the Birth of Economic Sociology” (translated into English from French by Keith Tribe) I highly recommend it. He points out that before Durkheim wrote Division of Labor, he was writing about political economy at the Historical School with folks from the Marginal Revolution. Durkheim developed a bad taste in his mouth for political economy, telling his François Simiand in a letter that (paraphrasing) “I’m glad that you can do political economy, because I can’t stand the subject.”
Durkheim did something fascinating however in his correspondence with Simiand. He suggested the development of a “Social Utility” theory to contrast Bentham, as well as a “social theory of value” to contrast Ricardo, and the Marginalists of the time. This reminds me of that.
It also reminds me of the accolades that von Mises had for Max Weber in developing the idea of Rational Action based on Methodological Individualism. Neoliberal economics has been running with that idea ever since. I often wondered if Max realized just what the consequences of that theory would be.
I recently listened to a cohort tell me how Durkheim isn’t relevant to anything anymore, and asked why do we still talk about him? Maybe Sociology threw out the Durkheimian baby with the Parsonian bath water. I personally think that Durkheim’s work is worth another look. Gary Hall is on to something, and we owe it to ourselves as Sociologists, and to society to go see if there was a baby in that bathwater that got tossed out.