Wednesday in the Age of Reason-Munchausen (1988)

The Unreal World of Business

With the intrusion of the logic of market exchange into almost every aspect of social life it has become a commonplace today to speak of business activity as the ‘real world’. [61] Furthermore, those who do not take part in this universal process of capital accumulation are eyed with suspicion—they do not, as the saying goes, ‘live in the real world’. For Chesterton, however, the society dominated by capitalist economics had a fictitious and unreal quality; whatever it was, it was certainly not the ‘real world’—‘The Thing’.

As we saw in Chapter Two, Chesterton believed that accepting a framework of limits was a key to perceiving the objectivity of reality. Now, a commercial society which had turned away from limited production for use and had instead instituted unlimited accumulation through exchange was not going to be one which was marked by a firm sense of reality. Chesterton believed that the modern mind had a tendency for “inhabiting an imaginary world almost without knowing it; of moving in a sort of dream amid the assumptions of a land of unreason.” [62]

Source:
http://www.angelfire.com/folk/richardjgill/

The Wonder of the World: Hannah Arendt, G. K. Chesterton and Ecological Populism by Richard Gill

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