This conventional conception acts as an arm of power. Postmodern society has grounded itself in an economic normativity that corrupts ethics through the process of economization. As sociality is reduced to markets, neoliberalism colonizes ethics itself.

For many of us, conventional approaches to both economics and to ethics have become consummately dangerous. As many of the authors in this book point out, the rigid boundaries imposed by modern economists in answer to the question of what, exactly, is meant by economics are breaking down in our late modern, or postmodern, world. And it is so with ethics as well. Ethics—the question of how we ought to live— is in its modern economic context reduced to questions of property rights, of individual identity understood as autonomous action in markets, and of the good society as that which protects those rights and those markets. At least in the West, the actualization of economics has become synonymous with the machinations of capitalism, leaving those of us with normative claims to make about political economy at best at the margin of economics and at worst irrelevant to economics.

The crisis of the Left is a very real one indeed, and much of that crisis has to do with the struggle to find a critical wedge that might disrupt neoliberal capitalism enough to yield a space for economic voices other than conventional ones. Modern economics has not only conflated the term economics with the term capitalism (resulting in the politics of neoliberalism) but has for quite a while now reduced the human to a homogenous identity as what Dierdre McCloskey terms “that great stick of a character,” homo economicus. Additionally, the question of distributive justice has been effaced within the web of positive law and private property rights, the social has been reduced to the market, and the meaning of human freedom has been narrowed to the scope of economistic individualism.

But the good news in all of this is that we are beginning to experience a renascent regard for and reinterpretation of deeply rooted values about distributive justice, interpretations which see redistribution as necessary to overcome the asymmetries of wealth and the historical pathologies of economic power. Many now hold to an unflinching resolve to affirm plurivocal modes of respectful recognition of identities (see Fraser 1996, 1997).1 Particularly in areas like poststructural feminist literature, critical social theory is alive and well in embracing what Zambrana (2013: 93) terms “the struggles of the present with the aim of contributing to dismantling systematic forms of domination”. Those systemic forms are heavily brushed with modern economics as, indeed, politics and social policy are writ large in the language of capital. Unlike earlier efforts, the postmodern emancipatory energy of a renascent Left now works without the illusory comfort of a grounding in some putative, foundational normativity (e.g., a “universal pragmatics”). To paraphrase Michel Foucault, everything is now viewed as potentially dangerous, including foundational norms. It is the dangers of economic life, moreso than the violations of norms, which demand our attention. As Foucault (1984: 343) suggests, modern ethics has been peddling normative “solutions” as if the hard work of cultural history and emancipation might be glossed over: I am not looking for an alternative: you can’t find the solution of a problem in the solution of another problem raised at another moment by other people. You see, what I want to do is not the history of solutions, and that’s the reason why I don’t accept the word alternative. I would like to do the genealogy of problems, of problematiques. My point is not that everything is bad, but that everything is dangerous, which is not exactly the same as bad. If everything is dangerous, then we always have something to do. Despite the constrictions, contradictions, and refusals to recognize its own weaknesses and vulnerabilities, neoliberalism has colonized the political with the economic, or, better yet, with the capitalistic. Following Aristotle, if politics is colonized, so is ethics. Within that colonization, it has become precisely the role of the right-centrist politician to remind the public that this particular, neoliberal economization of their lives as citizens is not a threat to traditional values like fairness, equity, the good, and the just but is itself the medium through which these moral ends may be realized. [Never mind the facts; see Piketty 2014]. Seen in this light we see an illusion in which “unrestrained power of capital [thus] represents a progressive change” (Zambrana 2013: 109), legitimated through “ideological manipulation of normative language” (Zambrana 2013: 114), and thus critical theory is stood on its head. “Bureaucratic management replaces solidarity;” and, with that, moral comportments are translated into neoliberal evaluations of “goals” and “performance” in achieving them. Human value—alone and in community with others—is administered in the name of capital’s ends. Ethics must find its assigned seat in this horror movie.