Name: The Enchantments of Mammon
ISBN: 9780674984615

Eugene McCarraher

Eugene McCarraher challenges the conventional view of capitalism as a force for disenchantment. From Puritan and evangelical valorizations of profit to the heavenly Fordist city, the mystically animated corporation, and the deification of the market, capitalism has hijacked our intrinsic longing for divinity, laying hold to our souls.

How Capitalism Became the Religion of Modernity

The Enchantments of Mammon

weber contends that capitalism is disenchanting. into the iron cage we are thrown; no, mccarraher sees capitalism as “regime of enchantment, repression, displacement, and renaming of our intrinsic and inveterate longing for divinity” — a “misenchantment, parody, or perversion for sacramentalism”. its animating spirit is that of money, driven by the theology of economics. the premise of the thesis rests on the idea that the earth is sacramental, imbibed with the "goodness of god". henry miller: we don’t have to make the earth a paradise, it is one.  

a part of the book i found fascinating is when mccarraher lodges a critique of the left as having to share far too much with the opposition: an ideology of progress. the prometheanism of marx and engels to lenin and stalin and extrapolated to even modern day china is put to the fire as a model that leads to the evisceration of the natural world in the service of sisyphean hedonism. echoes of the ecomarxism of kohei saito, perhaps just steeped in christian theology.

this book is a history of christian thought and its intermingling with capitalism in its nascent stages, from the 1400s. mccarraher presents a scathing indictment of manifest destiny and the ideology inherent in some sects of christianity. 

the philosophical argument to turn to a kingdom of being, of the goodness of god, is something i cannot identify with, but regardless it is still an immensely interesting work. 

Ghee

weber contends that capitalism is disenchanting. into the iron cage we are thrown; no, mccarraher sees capitalism as “regime of enchantment, repression, displacement, and renaming of our intrinsic and inveterate longing for divinity” — a “misenchantment, parody, or perversion for sacramentalism”. its animating spirit is that of money, driven by the theology of economics. the premise of the thesis rests on the idea that the earth is sacramental, imbibed with the "goodness of god". henry miller: we don’t have to make the earth a paradise, it is one.  

a part of the book i found fascinating is when mccarraher lodges a critique of the left as having to share far too much with the opposition: an ideology of progress. the prometheanism of marx and engels to lenin and stalin and extrapolated to even modern day china is put to the fire as a model that leads to the evisceration of the natural world in the service of sisyphean hedonism. echoes of the ecomarxism of kohei saito, perhaps just steeped in christian theology.

this book is a history of christian thought and its intermingling with capitalism in its nascent stages, from the 1400s. mccarraher presents a scathing indictment of manifest destiny and the ideology inherent in some sects of christianity. 

the philosophical argument to turn to a kingdom of being, of the goodness of god, is something i cannot identify with, but regardless it is still an immensely interesting work. 

The Enchantments of Mammon How Capitalism Became the Religion of Modernity