ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that a civic politics of recognition must be grounded in a proper grasp of the Hegelian fourfold structure of the intra- inter-subjective doubling of self/other relations. Economics is a general science of human behaviour unless prohibited or violated by politics and morals. The abstractive power of capitalism lies in its power to absorb labour, race and gender subject to the maintenance of its own persistence as a system of class inequality invariant across all industrialized societies. In short, the polity, economy and sociocultural institutions of modern society have assumed particular constellations at given stages of mercantile, industrial and post-industrial capitalism. Yet global capitalism is still corporate capitalism whose global consistency generates ubiquitous contradictions, foreclosures, and marginalization. By rejecting the corporatist contract between business, government, and labour that has softened class differences in the last half century, global capitalism subjects everyone to the dominion of monetarism and the market, downsizing organizations and breaking unions.
