ISSN 1076-9005
Volume 30, 2023
Capitalism—its Nature and its Replacement: Buddhist and Marxist Insights. By Graham Priest. London: Routledge, 2021, xviii + 252 pages, ISBN 978-1-032-04911-3 (hardback), $170.00, 978-1-032-04910-6 (paperback), $48.95, 978-1-003-19514-6 (e-book), $44.05.
Reviewed by David Cummiskey
The author of this review seems to believe that contemporary capitalism with its obvious deleterious effects is an accident (in the history of capitalism), hence his proposition of an “enlightened capitalism,” a confounding oxymoron. In any case, this belief is unwarranted.
More generally, and this concerns the book reviewed as well, the superposition of different regimes of virtues as if they were independent of their historical and cultural context is also unwarranted. Capitalism preconditions any idea one could conceive about ethics as a form of life or how we may try to live a “good life,” down to unconscious drives.
The same could be said about Dhamma-Vinaya that originated 2500 years ago in Magadha. The very idea of comparing different ethics as if one could pick one as a personal preference or combine bits of each here and there, as one would with personal tastes, is a sign of the times we live in, the sign of a determined ideology. The reason is simply that moral questions such as “how should I live?” or “what should I do?” cannot be detached from a social critique.
It is not simply that norms are historically and culturally conditioned. The point rather is that the very idea that “the good life” could serve as a criteria to determine what a right and just world should be is obscure if not obfuscated.