ABSTRACT
The human body that suffers may very well become the new utopian figure of the 21st century which will enable the construction of a new ethics to oppose the post-human, cybernetic, utopia of capitalism. The development and expansion of European capitalism, especially in the case of Germany, which became the new European superpower in the wake of unification in 1871, eventually led to World War I and the first moment in the story of the collapse of the laissez-faire model in the fires of 1914–1918. It is possible to see that later perspectives, including Becker's theory of human capital, which translate life itself into a potential source of value, also operate under the spell of a kind of martial rationality. In the wake of the war, the Americans led the attempt to create an interstate system to prevent further global conflict, the League of Nations, and also sought to prop up Germany.
