Skip to main content
Palgrave Macmillan
Book cover

The Bad Faith in the Free Market

The Radical Promise of Existential Freedom

  • Book
  • © 2018

Overview

  • Argues that market freedom holds back the potential for the achievement of radical existential freedom
  • Reveals the continued philosophical relevance of existentialism for analyzing and concretely challenging the current neoliberal status quo as well as capitalism generally
  • Constructs a new critical 'method' for creating the structural, cultural and psychological conditions of possibility for realizing this radical existential freedom
  • Innovatively draws upon the traditions of existentialism, Marxism, post-structuralism and psychoanalysis by, respectively, combining the insights of Sartre, Marx, Foucault and Lacan

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this book

eBook USD 79.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as EPUB and PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
Softcover Book USD 99.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Compact, lightweight edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info
Hardcover Book USD 109.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Durable hardcover edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info

Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout

Other ways to access

Licence this eBook for your library

Institutional subscriptions

Table of contents (8 chapters)

Keywords

About this book

Innovatively combining existentialist philosophy with cutting edge post-structuralist and psychoanalytic perspectives, this book boldly reconsiders market freedom. Bloom argues that present day capitalism has robbed us of our individual and collective ability to imagine and implement alternative and more progressive economic and social systems; it has deprived us of our radical freedom to choose how we live and what we can become.

Since the Great Recession, capitalism has been increasingly blamed for rising inequality and feelings of mass social and political alienation. In place of a deeper liberty, the free market offers subjects the opportunity to continually reinvest their personal and shared hopes within its dogmatic ideology and policies. This embrace helps to temporarily alleviate growing feelings of anxiety and insecurity at the expense of our fundamental human agency. What has become abundantly clear is that the free market is anything but free.

Here, Bloom exposes our present day bad faith in the free market and how we can break free from it.

Authors and Affiliations

  • Open University, Milton Keynes, United Kingdom

    Peter Bloom

About the author

Peter Bloom is Senior Lecturer and Head of the Department of People and Organisations at the Open University, UK. His primary research interests include ideology, subjectivity and power, specifically as they relate to broader discourses and everyday practices of capitalism and democracy. 

Bibliographic Information

Publish with us