Globalization, postcommunism, and the modern project: The political economy of nihilism, its ciphers, and the Platonic cave

This work is a critical study of the modern project with an emphasis on globalization and postcommunism. Its point of departure is a consideration of modernity as a progressive unfolding of Western nihilism. Some of the key questions examined by the author are: What are the ideas that have formed the project of globalization? What is the essence of money, capital, political economy, and technology, and how these are interrelated? What is the relation between globalization and the Platonic cave and its corresponding dystopian 'regime in speech' described by Plato in Book V of the Republic? How does nihilism 'work'? What lies behind the idea of efficiency? What does postcommunism tell us about globalization and capitalism? Together, these and other inquiries present an examination of the question of the power of nihilism and its efficiency that form the 'political economy' (commonwealth) of modern nihilism. The work includes theoretical analyses of Heraclitus, Plato, Aristotle, Machiavelli Hobbes, Smith, Rousseau, Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, Simmel, Schumpeter, Heidegger, Strauss, Kojeve, Hayek, Friedman, Foucault, Darby, and Fukuyama, as well as a more empirically oriented examination of the communist and postcommunist transformation. The main thesis is twofold: (1) globalization may be seen as 'the Platonic cave' writ large; and (2) central to its realization is technology and ciphers (arbitrary abstractions) that transform man 'beyond good and evil.' In this connection, the author argues for a return to the study of political philosophy grounded in Socratic and Platonic thought and teaching in order to revive an essential source of self-knowledge and ethics.