A Vexing Gadfly: The Late Kierkegaard on Economic Matters (Princeton Theological Monograph) Paperback – May 1, 2009

This book by Eliseo Perez-Alvarez, which was originally a doctoral dissertation, is a very interesting and relevant book for Kierkegaard scholarship, and this for many reasons.

First, it presents (in it's first chapter) in a brief but compelling fashion the social and economic inequalities which were a part of the time and place Kierkegaard lived in, "Golden Age Denmark". Second, it makes a strong case (in the second chapter) for interpreting Kierkegaard as a person who was deeply concerned throughout his whole writing career with the fate of the poor and the outcast. Third, it shows (again in the second chapter) in a convincing way that Kierkegaard adressed the issues of economical and social inequalities from a theological point of view and in an increasingly revolutionary fashion during what is commonly called his "second authorship", ie. his writing carreer posterior to the "Concluding unscientific postscript". This tendency Perez-Alvarez depicts (in the third and last chapter of the book) as finally crystallizing in Kierkegaard's late journal entries and his "The Moment" (or The Instant") pamphlets, in which Kierkegaard resolutely attacks the structures of his time which perpetuated these inequalities.

Now, such an approach to Kierkegaard's writings is very suggestive, since we get the feeling from reading this book that for Kierkegaard Christian love was inseperable from active engagement with his fellow men, especially the most unfortunate. It goes against a reading commonly made of Kierkegaard as advocating a purely spiritual message separated from actuality or as refusing to concretely love his neighbor while writing beautiful books about neighbourly love. We get to see that his conception of the equality of all human beings before God implied for him a deep respect and care for the lower classes of society. It is also very thought-provoking because it doesn't follow the usual tendency Kierkegaard scholars have to interpret Kierkegaard's last phase of authorship as the result of a gradual descent into insanity. Instead, Perez-Alvarez shows very well that Kierkegaard's increasingly radical positions are a result of a more and more complete rejection of Golden Age culture and politics in favor of an increasingly strong siding and appealing to the lower classes of society.

Nevertheless, this book is not perfect: it's main failing may be that in it's demonstration of it's main thesis (namely, that Kierkegaard adressed economic matters from a theological point of view in his authorship), he sometimes presents Kierkegaard's economical discourse in a way that makes it hard to articulate into a structured whole. He presents various aspects of it and thus rectifies the vision we may have commonly had of Kierkegaard, but we are in the end more or less left alone to make a synthesis in our mind of this "devastating" critique Perez-Alvarez speaks of.

Also, sometimes Perez-Alvarez passes judgements on other thinkers in passing which I think are not justified. As an example, at some point he conflates the positions of Hegel and that of Thomas Aquinas, whose thoughts were in reality quite different. He also depicts at some point Max Stirner as a representative of bourgeois individualism, which is slightly funny since he is at the same time trying to prove that another thinker (namely Kierkegaard) is NOT a bourgeois indivualist, which is what other specialists have made him out to be.

Finally, one last criticism: by putting so much the emphasis on Kierkegaard as someone caring for the material and physical well-being of the poor, one may lose sight of the importance Kierkegaard put on their *spiritual* well-being. Now, unless I interpret Kierkegaard wrongly, it is not only because one's relation to God conditions one's praxis that he was interested in spirituality. Another aspect was also essential for him: the matter of personal salvation. It was also because the pastors of his time were an obstacle to salvation that he finally recommended the "ordinary folk" to shun them, not only because they didn't attend to their material needs. This point Perez-Alvarez barely ever considers in his work, while I think it is essential for understanding Kierkegaard's authorship correctly.

Nevertheless, this book is to my mind similar to what Kierkegaard considered himself to be: "a necessary corrective". It is well-researched, well-writted, and may be of great use in the future to those who want a more complete picture of this multi-faceted being who was Sören Kierkegaard.