ABSTRACT
In the mid-1980s the French philosopher Jacques Derrida enigmatically suggested that 'the future belongs to ghosts'. The essence of Derrida's argument is that Fukuyama's global liberal, democratic, capitalist utopia is also the exhaustion of Weber's spirit of capitalism in its complete realisation. Since the economic space is organised around Herbert Spencer's principle of the survival of the fittest, there is no spirit about contemporary, hyper-rational capitalism. The Greek is the sacrificial lamb of neoliberal economics set on the refusal of the irreducibility of social relations, and this is why the sociologist must really oppose austerity in the name of an ethics of generosity, gifting, and the necessity of universal indebtedness. When neoliberal ideology rejects the connection, or responsibility, between self and other, the spectre returns in order to insist upon the irreducibility of the social relation.
