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[...] The first public for public sociology, I suggest, is the academy, with its unprecedented numbers of students in economics and business administration, who are being taught, in essence, that society exists only as a grandiose opportunity for utility maximization by those capable of making the …

Is the state, then, the executive committee of the capitalist class? The answer that does justice to the dialectical, i.e., inherently contradictory nature of capitalism as a social formation is that it is, but only to the extent that it is not. If government was entirely captured by capitalist…

[...] More money than ever is today being spent by firms on advertisement and on building and sustaining the popular images and auras on which the success of a product seems to depend in saturated markets. In particular, the new channels of communication made available by the interactive internet s…

[...] dreams, promises and imagined satisfaction are not at all marginal but, on the contrary, central. While standard economics and, in its trail, standard political economy, recognize the importance of confidence and consumer spending for economic growth, they do not do justice to the dynamically…

[...] needs are dynamic, and especially in capitalism; that what is ‘necessary’ for life is to a large extent socially defined, i.e., necessary only for social life in a given society; and that outside of the limiting case of complete deprivation, scarcity is neither absolute nor open-ended but soc…