Zen Economics

Beginning in the mid-1970s a political program based in pre-Great Depression economics took hold in the U.S. and spread across the developed West. Its basis in reaction to the ‘managed capitalism’ that emerged from the Great Depression produced a hybrid—neoliberalism, which discarded the institutional framework of classical economics in favor of an opportunistic state-capitalist amalgam. The political maneuvers behind the rise explain the institutional re-emergence of this new-old capitalism but they don’t explain either why it was so readily adopted by so many people or why it has been so resilient in the face of the serial catastrophes it has created.

Capitalist theory informs a narrow, anti-historical concept of people, what motivates us and our relationship to one another and the world. More profoundly, the premises of the ‘self’ of capitalism form a deeply instantiated identity. The emergence of philosophical post-modernism informed by the work of Martin Heidegger, Friedrich Nietzsche and Karl Marx provided an explanation of the social basis of this Western self that unites capitalist theory with practice in paradox to create a ‘timeless and universal,’ yet wholly malleable, authoritarian subject. Western critics of philosophical post-modernism get its relationship to the re-emergence of new-old capitalism partially right without understanding the basis of the critique.

Zen Economics addresses the background philosophical issues around economics, science and technology to place them in context and then applies the results to work and labor, income and wealth distribution, environmental crisis and animal rights. Zen enters as absence, as radical humility toward what is knowable and what is known. This view derives from years spent with the base texts of existential philosophy, from correspondence between Martin Heidegger and D.T. Suzuki around the relationship between Heidegger’s ontology and Zen and from Buddhism as a practical, non-deistic, philosophy of life. The book ends with a political program that emerges from four decades of political activism.