Beyond Self-Interest: Why the Market Rewards Those Who Reject It

Pelc, Krzysztof

ISBN 10: 152664813X / ISBN 13: 9781526648136

Published by Bloomsbury Publishing

About this Item

Most items will be dispatched the same or the next working day. A copy that has been read, but is in excellent condition. Pages are intact and not marred by notes or highlighting. The spine remains undamaged.

Seller Inventory # wbs1730311273

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Beyond Self-Interest: Why the Market Rewards Those Who Reject It
• Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 152664813X
• ISBN 13: 9781526648136
• Binding: Hardcover
• Condition: Very Good
• Weight: 560 grams

About this title

Synopsis

A provocative retelling of the workings of self-interest in contemporary market society, which claims the world increasingly belongs to passionates, obsessives, and those who do things for their own sake, rather than as means to other ends.In our capitalist market society, we have come to accept that the way to get ahead is through strong will, grit, and naked ambition. This belief has served us it has contributed to making our affluent societies affluent. But does the premise still hold?As Krzysztof Pelc argues in Beyond Self-Interest , this default assumption no longer captures reality. There is a limit to the returns of calculation, planning, and resolve, and in a growing number of settings, this limit has been reached. The true idols of market society, he contends, are those who disavow their self-interest, or at least appear to do eco-conscious entrepreneurs, media moguls with a mission, and modern-day artisans catering to a well-educated and ever more socially conscious population of consumers. Increasingly, those who prosper do so by spurning prosperity, or by convincing others that they are instead pursuing purpose, passion, love of craft-anything but their own self-advancement. This is the paradox of intention, and it is increasingly defining our lives.Pelc tells the story of this paradox from its unlikely emergence among a group of British thinkers in the early 19th century to its development over the next two centuries, as it was successively picked up by philosophers, novelists, social scientists, and, ultimately, capitalists themselves. All of whom arrived at a common the appearance of disinterest pays, but only if it is believable-which presents the self-interested among us with a tricky problem.Drawing on three centuries of thought about commercial society and the people living in it, this richly researched account of the cycles of capitalism does not naively suggest that we should reject the market. Rather, it calls on us to treat economic growth once more as its earliest theorists as a formidable tool of human development, instead of an end in itself.