Abstract
The following paper seeks to understand Donald Trump as a “dialectical image” for the contradictions of neoliberal capitalism. Trump’s management style, as described in his Art of the Deal, combines a fetishizing of entrepreneurial risk as a “lifestyle” with the insistence that it is not the entrepreneur but his targets who are ultimately exposed to risk. This suggests that we might understand the elevation of “deal-making” to a lifestyle as a characteristic of modernity that, with neoliberalism, is increasingly coming to the fore. Such a critique of modernity, I further argue, is anticipated by Fichte’s Closed Commercial State with its intriguing dialectic of risk. I conclude by arguing that Trump’s politics marks the rise of a new, specifically American style of Fascism—one that demands identification not with the state as supra-individual collective, but with an impersonal system governing over individual lives and rendering them precarious.
Original language | English |
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Pages (from-to) | 395-412 |
Number of pages | 18 |
Journal | Fudan Journal of the Humanities and Social Sciences |
Volume | 13 |
Issue number | 3 |
DOIs | |
Publication status | Published - 2020 Sep 1 |
Bibliographical note
Publisher Copyright:© 2020, Fudan University.
All Science Journal Classification (ASJC) codes
- Arts and Humanities (miscellaneous)
- Social Sciences(all)