Tag: Michel Foucault
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The Great Paradox of the French Revolution
One of Bastos’s central arguments is that the French Revolution destroyed forms of authority and social organization that had evolved over centuries, replacing them with an abstract, homogeneous, and centralized political model. According to this interpretation, the old provinces, charters, jurisdictions, and local communities were replaced by artificial administrative divisions conceived by the central power…
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From Being to Society: How Philosophy Gave Birth to Sociology
The history of sociology is often presented as the story of a new science born in nineteenth-century Europe to study industrialization, urbanization and capitalism. While this account is not wrong, it misses a deeper intellectual transformation. Sociology did not emerge from nowhere. It emerged from a long philosophical struggle over the nature of reality itself.…
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Capitalism as a “Mental Technology”: From Bastos to Hartmut Rosa and the social capital theories
One of the most intensive defenses of capitalism I have recently heard comes from Miguel Anxo Bastos. In several conferences and interviews, he presents capitalism not merely as an economic system, but as a kind of “mental technology”: a way of seeing the world rationally, systematically, and productively. In his account, capitalism emerges from habits…