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Stuart Hall: Selected Political Writings (Paperback, 2017, Duke University Press) 5 stars

Selected Political Writings gathers Stuart Hall's best-known and most important essays that directly engage with …

'Market forces' represents more than a rational preference for markets over centralised planning as the more effective form of modern economic organisation. It makes 'the market' into an organising principle of social life -- a law as general, for born-again Thatcherites, as 'the class struggle' ever was to marxists. It is the only language of moral and social calculation, because it obeys an objective logic, driven by the 'hidden hand' of impersonal forces, and is not interest-laden, context-bound or morally constrained. The 'social good' can only be calculated by reducing it to individual needs, aggregated on the basis of a formal (and empty) 'equality': it means imposing the collective will of a mythical majority on the unruly but sovereign interests of individuals and is therefore, by definition, the beginning of tyranny. Thus, 'There is no such thing as "society", there is only individuals and their families'.

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