Certainly. Or does it?
It is clear that the ferocious competition of interests and passions, the mad rule of money, and materialism as the measure of all things — in short, the free market, released from all rules and governed only by the greed of the most powerful — fatally corrodes our souls. This is what the great Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn thought at the end of his life.
This view was shared by the family of French thinkers of the 1930s called the “non-conformists,” which included Charles Péguy and a few others. They saw commodity exchange as a source of depersonalization. It was also the thesis of an entire group of Christian (or simply spiritualist) thinkers who saw in the idea of the “free market” the death of moral values and the end of man’s faith and aspiration to the absolute.
It was also — and this should put us on alert — one of the main themes of fascism and one of the reasons the masses were seduced by it...
CONTINUED ONLINE.
Bernard-Henri Lévy, the French philosopher, has written more than thirty books, including the New York Times bestseller American Vertigo (2006) and, most recently, Left in Dark Times: A Stand Against the New Barbarism (2008), both published by Random House.
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