Guest post by Rob Faure Walker
In Love and the Market: How to Recover from the Enlightenment and Survive the Current Crisis, I have tried to demystify Roy Bhaskar’s MetaReality (2012). As with much of Bhaskar’s writing, the content of MetaReality is somewhat impenetrable and his writing doesn’t help either. As Mervyn Hartwig observed, Bhaskar had been accused by others of being ‘an abominable writer who cared not a jot for his readers’ (Bhaskar 2016, xii). That said, I happen to think that MetaReality is quite well written! Setting aside discussion of Bhaskar’s writing style, the ideas in MetaReality could not be more important, especially as we face the concatenated and accelerating economic, environmental, ethical, and existential crises of the modern era.
When I first attended and then co-hosted Bhaskar’s old reading group at UCL with Priscilla Alderson, discussion of MetaReality was always vibrant and relevant. But metaReality seldom made it from these conversations and into the academic writing that they inspired. This has always struck me as a tragedy for critical realism, and for the world more generally. We are after all meant to be pursuing a serious philosophy. Unlike the unserious proclamations of David Hume that Bhaskar liked to critique (Bhaskar 2016, 163), serious philosophy must be in and of this world. In Love and the Market, I have tried to address this by offering an accessible exploration of the philosophy of metaReality. This does not mean that I have dumbed anything down, rather I have tried to contextualise this otherwise esoteric philosophy with grounded examples of metaReality in the world. Like Bhaskar’s MetaReality, this makes for quite a strange book. Though, I hope that by holding the reader’s hand a little more than Bhaskar did, Love and the Market presents metaReality as a little less esoteric.
While promoting a more loving world is a compelling reason to write a book, it is not why Love and the Market emerged. It emerged from the data. Having previously developed an approach to analyse changes to political discourse over time (Faure Walker 2021, 2019), I was fortunate enough to gain funding to apply this approach again. This time, I assembled a corpus of British Parliamentary texts going back nearly 1,000 years[i] and ran software analysis to find patterns in the location (collocation) and frequency of words. Perhaps as a critical academic with a Marxist disposition, the emergence of the ‘market’ from my data was inevitable, though I had not set out to explore this. What emerged was a significant change to the meaning of ‘market’ in the 1640s.
This was first indicated by ‘market’ tending to be collocated with the word ‘place’ – ‘marketplace’ or ‘market place’ before 1642 and ‘place’ being dropped from most instances of ‘market’ in the record since. Exploring what might have caused this change led me to a piece of legislation from the same time. The Triennial Act of Parliament (1641) was passed in response to the King’s marginalising of Parliament. It is well known to historians of the English Civil War as it placed Parliament on a legal footing, setting Parliament against the Monarch’s power. The Triennial Act granted powers to Parliament by placing the Kings Clerks under the power of Parliament. Notably, this included the Clerks of the Peace and Clerks of the Assizes, placing justice in the hands of Parliament. However, largely overlooked in the historical record are the Clerks of the Market. Having taken charge of this position, Parliament failed to direct the Clerks of the Market in their duties.
According to a history of the Clerk of the Market written in 1737 – there has been little written on the position since – the Clerks of the Market were to be found throughout the land and would proclaim that anyone buying or selling outside of market days, places or at prices not set by them would be liable to be hanged. The impact of the Clerk of the Market is corroborated by the Parliamentary record documenting people trying to avoid the Clerks’ ruling before 1642, while after 1642 there is no record of such efforts. Thus, the market was contained as a defined phenomenon in space and time (the marketplace on market days) before 1642, subsequently taking on the modern conception of the market that is both abstract and total in the way that it governs all aspects of our lives.
The timing of this shift is important as it corresponds with the emergence of modernity through the Enlightenment. Thus, I argue that the emergence of the market economy should be seen in the context of the emergence of the ‘rational age’ and positivism that we live under today. By other accounts of the emergence of the modern era, such as by ecofeminist philosopher and historian of science Carolyn Merchant, the emergence of our rational age is closely tied to the emergence of patriarchy (Merchant 1980, 2006; Federici 2004). This leads me to explore the witchtrials and other violent ruptures that emerged in our culture at this time. This reveals countercultures to modernity from the 1600s to the present that offered the possibility of transcending the market’s alienation of people from each other and from nature itself.
Exploring a metaReal conception of Love in countercultures to the Enlightenment leads me to the sects that emerged during the English Civil War and on to the hippies of the 1960s and 70s and more recent traveller and anti-work movements. While they offer imperfect critiques of modernity, they each offer us a way to understand metaReal love better. Bhaskar uses the Tao to explore metaReality and the foundational text of the Tao, the Tao De Jing, opens with ‘The Tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao’. Much like other conceptions of God, the Tao can be theorised but is recognised as being beyond our experience and description – a scenario familiar to critical realists’ exploration of the real. And so it is for the metaReal conception of love that I explore in Love and the Market. Though, while love is beyond our comprehension, I hope that the book helps to define some of the boundaries of love and in doing so might make a contribution to our potential flourishing amidst the crises of modernity.
Love and the Market: How to Recover from the Enlightenment and Survive the Current Crisis was published by Bristol University Press in September 2024 https://bristoluniversitypress.co.uk/love-and-the-market (50% Discount Code: CNF24 active until 15th October)
Rob discussing why “All We Need is Love?” on The Measure of Everyday Life public radio program/podcast
Bhaskar, Roy. 2012. The Philosophy of MetaReality: Creativity, Love and Freedom. Text. London: Routledge.
—. 2016. Enlightened Common Sense: The Philosophy of Critical Realism (Ontological Explorations). Edited by Mervyn Hartwig. Abingdon: Routledge.
Faure Walker, Rob. 2019. “The UK’s PREVENT Counter-Terrorism Strategy appears to promote rather than prevent violence.” Journal of Critical Realism 18 (5): 487-512. https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1080/14767430.2019.1646095. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14767430.2019.1646095.
—. 2021. The Emergence of ‘Extremism’: Exposing the Violent Discourse and Language of ‘Radicalisation’. London: Bloomsbury.
Federici, Silvia. 2004. Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation. London: Penguin.
Merchant, Carolyn. 1980. The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology, and the Scientific Revolution. 1st ed. San Francisco: Harper & Row.
—. 2006. “The Scientific Revolution and The Death of Nature.” Isis 97: 513-533.
[i] The British Parliamentary record goes back to 1066. While the verbatim record starts much later, there is enough detail and context to identify trends and changes over this time.