#1292 Nima Bassiri: Capitalism, Psychiatry, and the Emergence of Pathological Value

Madness and Enterprise: Psychiatry, Economic Reason, and the Emergence of Pathological Value

Uncovers a powerful relationship between pathology and money: beginning in the nineteenth century, the severity of mental illness was measured against a patient’s economic productivity.  Madness and Enterprise reveals the economic norms embedded within psychiatric thinking about mental illness in the North Atlantic world. Over the course of the nineteenth century, various forms of madness were subjected to a style of psychiatric reasoning that was preoccupied with money. Psychiatrists across Western Europe and the United States attributed financial and even moral value to an array of pathological conditions, such that some mental disorders were seen as financial assets and others as economic liabilities. By turning to economic conduct and asking whether potential patients appeared capable of managing their financial affairs or even generating wealth, psychiatrists could often bypass diagnostic uncertainties about a person’s mental state. Through an exploration of the intertwined histories of psychiatry and economic thought, Nima Bassiri shows how this relationship transformed the very idea of value in the modern North Atlantic, as the most common forms of social valuation—moral value, medical value, and economic value—were rendered equivalent and interchangeable. If what was good and what was healthy were increasingly conflated with what was remunerative (and vice versa), then a conceptual space opened through which madness itself could be converted into an economic form and subsequently redeemed—and even revered.

The Breakdown of Capitalist Realism | Mediations | Journal of the Marxist Literary Group

Benjamin Noys examines the “substance” of Mark Fisher’s Capitalist Realism in order to argue that the text serves more than a diagnostic function in our…

Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism

A New York Times BestsellerA Wall Street Journal BestsellerA New York Times Notable Book of 2020A New York Times Book Review Editors' ChoiceShortlisted for the Financial Times and McKinsey Business Book of the YearA New Statesman Book to ReadFrom economist Anne Case and Nobel Prize winner Angus Deaton, a groundbreaking account of how the flaws in capitalism are fatal for America's working class

A Thousand Plateaus

A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia is a 1980 book by the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze and the French psychoanalyst Félix Guattari. It is the second and final volume of their collaborative work Capitalism and Schizophrenia. While the first volume, Anti-Oedipus (1972), was a critique of contemporary uses of psychoanalysis and Marxism, A Thousand Plateaus was developed as an experimental work of philosophy covering a far wider range of topics, serving as a "positive exercise" in what Deleuze and Guattari refer to as rhizomatic thought.

Capitalism and Its Critics: A History

A Financial Times Most Anticipated Book of 2025A sweeping, dramatic history of capitalism as seen through the eyes of its fiercest critics. At a time when artificial intelligence, climate change, and inequality are raising fundamental questions about the economic system, Capitalism and Its Critics provides a kaleidoscopic history of global capitalism, from the East India Company and Industrial Revolution to the di...

Mental Wealth

TL;DR • When it comes to mental health, our society approaches it like we did with physical health 50 years ago. We only think about it when something goes wrong. • To the wider public, mental heal…

Capitalism | The Paper Pilot

The Paper Pilot's digital garden of thoughts on philosophy, politics, and sociology

Cognitive Capitalism - Public Seminar

There are broadly three ways of thinking historically about capitalism. One draws on Marx’s value theory and pretty much treats...Read More

Capitalism, Slavery, and the Industrial Revolution

The Williams Thesis, Part I

Feeling (un)freedom

Escaping capitalist amnesia through the voice of the soul

Capitalist Realism and the Eviction of Culture: Notes from Ljubljana

I’d like to thank everyone who came out to Nova pošta last Thursday evening to my lecture on Mark Fisher’s Capitalist Realism, recently translated into Slovenian by Pika Golob and Nina …

Who Deserves to Exist? Gender Fear and False Promises of Identity-Driven Neocolonial Aid - শুদ্ধস্বর

Non-profit industrial complex and neocolonial philanthropic entities are working toward their own self-preservation rather than fundamentally restructuring power and society.

Cannibal Capitalism

Shortlisted for the Deutscher Memorial Prize 2023 Capital is currently cannibalizing every sphere of life-guzzling wealth from nature and racialized populations, sucking up our ability to care for each other, and gutting the practice of politics. In this tightly argued and urgent volume, leading Marxist feminist theorist Nancy Fraser charts the voracious appetite of capital, tracking it from crisis point to crisis point, from ecological devastation to the collapse of democracy, from racial violence to the devaluing of care work. These crisis points all come to a head in Covid-19, which Fraser argues can help us envision the resistance we need to end the feeding frenzy. What we need, she argues, is a wide-ranging socialist movement that can recognize the rapaciousness of capital - and starve it to death.

Who Gets to Define Human Suffering?

As psychiatry concedes long-standing criticisms of diagnosis, a deeper question emerges: What now justifies its authority over human suffering?