Extravagance and Misery: The Emotional Regime of Market Societies

In Extravagance and Misery: The Emotional Regime of Market Societies, Alan Thomas, Alfred Archer, and Bart Engelen investigate the extensive and growing economic inequalities that characterize the affluent market societies of the West. Drawing on insights from political philosophy and the new science of happiness, they show the damaging impact that existing inequalities have on our well-being, and offer an explanation for what went wrong in our highly unequal and frequently unhappy societies.

Combining the approaches of philosophy and political economy, the authors expose the economic, social and political mechanisms that create and perpetuate economic inequalities. They employ research from the new science of happiness to assess the impact of those mechanisms on the well-being of the poor, the middle class and the rich. They scrutinize the role of key emotions, such as shame (amongst the poor), envy and admiration (towards and for the rich) as well as discussing which emotional narratives serve to justify and entrench excessive inequalities in income and wealth.

The result is an explanation of the emotional regime that characterizes our capitalist societies and that perpetuates the unfair gap between the extravagance of the rich and the misery of the poor. Extravagance and Misery concludes with a proposal of how to re-shape this emotional regime in the interests of justice and solidarity.

Alan Thomas is a Professor of Philosophy at the University of York. Educated at Cambridge, Harvard and Oxford he has held visiting positions at the Australian National University, St. Louis University, Tulane University, and the University of British Columbia. His previous publications include Value and Context and Republic of Equals, both published by Oxford University Press.

Alfred Archer is an Associate Professor at Tilburg University. He was educated at the University of Glasgow and the University of Edinburgh. He has worked at the University of Bristol and Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich and held a visiting position at Freie Universität Berlin. His previous publications include Honouring and Admiring the Immoral: An Ethical Guide and Why It’s OK to be a Sports Fan, both published by Routledge.

Bart Engelen is an Associate Professor at Tilburg. After his PhD and postdoctoral research at KU Leuven, he moved to Tilburg University. His research focuses on the borders between ethics, political philosophy and economics. He has published extensively on the ethics of nudging and issues surrounding rationality, autonomy, paternalism, moral education, voting and markets. He is currently the head of research of Tilburg University’s Department of Philosophy.