ABSTRACT
Drawing on Polanyi, Austin and Lacan, Marie Pellegrin-Rescia and Yair Levi offer a powerful critique of the language and categories of thought that dominate the contemporary intellectual and political landscape. The general tendency to dichotomize concepts such as left and right, social and economic, globalization and anti-globalization, is, they argue, a consequence of our subservience to the primacy of the rational economic agent. The authors offer a selection of case-studies of co-operatives, which are shown to be paradoxical entities in a worldview in which the social exists only as a metaphor for a space concerned with the damage caused by the economic. Through an analysis of experiences in achieving civil accord in South Africa and in establishing a new town in the mountains of Sicily, they offer a new political orientation in a world of uncertainty. In doing so they attempt an answer to one of the most intriguing questions of our time: should we accept as a fait-accompli the way our society is conceived and shaped, or can we have a say in the matter and assume the ethical responsibility involved?
TABLE OF CONTENTS
part I|83 pages
The ‘Social’ as Metaphor
part |6 pages
Introduction to Part I
section A|34 pages
The Theoretical Approach
section B|41 pages
A Historical Overview
chapter 6|10 pages
Anthropological Debt versus Imaginary Work Places
part II|92 pages
Cooperatives As Examples and Their Paradoxes
part |5 pages
Introduction to Part II
section Aa|13 pages
The Official Discourse
section Bb|67 pages
Critique of the Official Discourse
part |27 pages
Epilogue: Beyond the ‘Social’ as Metaphor
part |2 pages
Introduction to Epilogue