Systemic Unreason: A Psychic History of States and Corporations

ABSTRACT The history of capitalism has long been told as a story of structural laws and behavioural axioms. In this essay, we sketch a general theory of order and change that instead foregrounds the path-shaping power of the fictive and the irrational. Our key claim is that any collective body is underwritten by psychological investment in a foundational delusion and that this cuts two ways. Visions of wholeness and narratives of closure are what bind individuals to institutions, reproducing patterns of behaviour and thereby lending stability to the interactions that structure world affairs. Yet these same fictions sometimes set disruptive processes into motion. Order and change can therefore be understood in terms of a grand historical psychodrama, wherein the mythical origins and shared hallucinations associated with modernity’s key institutions—such as those of state and corporation—continually return to haunt and reshape the logics of the so-called world system.