The dawn of consumer society is a recent affair, preceded by two millennia of social models hostile toward it. And yet, its success has been so resounding that only a few decades were necessary not only to wipe out many institutions, but even the memory of alternative practices and moral systems. We have forgotten, for example, that the founder of Christianity started and ended his life expelling the merchants, and that even from the mid-XIX century all the way through to the end of the XX, communism represented a preeminent moral and political posture. Does this mean we’ve definitively turned the page?
Antonio Escohotado asks the question without dogmatism, turning a magnifying glass on the situations and arguments opposed to the type of world we have settled into. After pinpointing the complex that gave rise to the idea of commerce, which he describes as a kind of infection, he traces its ups and downs from Greco-Roman times down to today. The analysis presents the reader with a tumultuous epic which helps us understand our origins with the unmistakable aura of the real.
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