Capitalism and Religion: The Price of Piety [Paperback]

Philip Goodchild (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: August 4, 2002 | ISBN-10: 0415282241 | ISBN-13: 978-0415282246 | Edition: 1

Our global ecological crisis demands that we question the rationality of the culture that has caused it: western modernity's free market capitalism. Philip Goodchild develops arguments from Nietzsche, Adorno, Horkheimer, and Marx, to suggest that our love of Western modernity is an expression of a piety in which capitalism becomes a global religion, in practice, if not always in belief. This book presents a philosophical alternative that demands attention from philosophers, critical theorists, philosophers of religion, theologians, and those in ecological politics.

Editorial Reviews

Review

[Goodchild's] strongest book to date...this is a book which many people should read and engage with, it has the potential to be a 'defining' book of this first decade of the new century.
–Professor Keith Ansell Pearson, University of Warwick

Philip Goodchild's important new volume examines the cost of the pieties of the west -- the devastating pieties of religion, philosophy, science, and the free market economy that cost the earth and are paid for in blood. It is a learned and provocative work, giving a jolt to current complacencies and developing the imaginative resources for a piety worth the price. Read it!.
–Professor Grace Jantzen, Research Professor of Religion, Culture and Gender, University of Manchester

There are times when our thinking is in need of a shock to awaken it from its un-critical slumbers. Philip Goodchild's text provides such a shock. Centred around the tasks of a critical piety he takes the reader on a search for a new reason and a new ethics. It is a brave, compelling and potent work, executed with a tremendous philosophical intelligence and a rare ethical sensibility. It contains fresh insights into time and money, God and faith, reason and experience and, most impressive of all, it carries out a fundamental reevaluation of the philosophical tradition from Spinoza and Kant to Marx and Nietzsche and to Deleuze and Derrida. This is a supremely important work that demands to be read by anyone with a commitment to critical thinking. My book of the year and, I suspect, of several years to Some.
–Keith Ansell Pearson, Professor of Philosophy, University of Warwick

About the Author

Philip Goodchild lectures in Religious Studies at the University of Nottingham. He is the author of Gilles Deleuze and the Question of Philosophy (Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1996) and of Deleuze and Guattari (Sage, 1996) and is presently editing two other forthcoming volumes on philosophy and religion.

Product Details

• Paperback: 288 pages
• Publisher: Routledge; 1 edition (August 4, 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0415282241
• ISBN-13: 978-0415282246
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.7 x 0.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,062,086 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars you can't diss my boy goodchild and get away with it...., April 9, 2007

By 

barredsubject "barredsubject" (Oakland, Ca) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Capitalism and Religion: The Price of Piety (Paperback)

disregard the other reviewer's curt dismissal of goddchild's highly insightful, original, and timely book. Goodchild is one of the few people out there capable of thinking through the aporias of capitalism and does so from a highly materialist reading, which apart from zizek's critique, seems to be one of the few out there willing to do so; goodchild's analysis of time and price are a part of his larger critique of the system of credit that couldn't, with the recent sub-prime lending bust and the current rise in predatory lending, be more pertinent or necessary. Capitalism has once again morphed its ugly head and goodchild is one of the few player's out there, really putting the "radical" back in orthodoxy.

[...].

1 of 29 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Don't waste your money or your mind..., November 20, 2006

By 

M. Wark - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Capitalism and Religion: The Price of Piety (Paperback)

A book written by a slave for slaves...Reverse your intelligentsia induced lobotomy and get an actual education based on fact rather than on an old and discredited ideology in a new dress.

For starters read Murray N . Rothbard (Man, Economy and State; For A New Liberty), Hans Hermann-Hoppe (A Theory Of Socialism and Capitalism; Economics and Ethics of Private Property) and George Reisman (Capitalism: A Treatise On Economics) instead.

Sec Semper Mendaciis!