The Bad Faith in the Free Market, Softcover reprint of the original 1st ed. 2018 The Radical Promise of Existential Freedom

Innovatively combining existentialist philosophy with cutting edge post-structuralist and psychoanalytic perspectives, this book boldly reconsiders market freedom. Bloom argues that present day capitalism has robbed us of our individual and collective ability to imagine and implement alternative and more progressive economic and social systems; it has deprived us of our radical freedom to choose how we live and what we can become.

Since the Great Recession, capitalism has been increasingly blamed for rising inequality and feelings of mass social and political alienation. In place of a deeper liberty, the free market offers subjects the opportunity to continually reinvest their personal and shared hopes within its dogmatic ideology and policies. This embrace helps to temporarily alleviate growing feelings of anxiety and insecurity at the expense of our fundamental human agency. What has become abundantly clear is that the free market is anything but free.

Chapter 2: Breaking Free from the Free Market: The Existential Gap of Freedom

Chapter 3: Capitalism’s Existential Crisis: Producing Existential Freedom

Chapter 4: The Facticities of Neoliberalism: Demanding Existential Freedom

Chapter 6: Subjected to the Free Market: The Subject of Existential Freedom

Chapter 7: Deconstructing the Free Market: The Spectre of Existential Freedom

Chapter 8: Reinvesting in Good Faith: The Radical Promise of Existential Freedom

Peter Bloom is Senior Lecturer and Head of the Department of People and Organisations at the Open University, UK. His primary research interests include ideology, subjectivity and power, specifically as they relate to broader discourses and everyday practices of capitalism and democracy. 

Argues that market freedom holds back the potential for the achievement of radical existential freedom

Reveals the continued philosophical relevance of existentialism for analyzing and concretely challenging the current neoliberal status quo as well as capitalism generally

Constructs a new critical 'method' for creating the structural, cultural and psychological conditions of possibility for realizing this radical existential freedom

Innovatively draws upon the traditions of existentialism, Marxism, post-structuralism and psychoanalysis by, respectively, combining the insights of Sartre, Marx, Foucault and Lacan