Utopias of humanization of capitalism: the crisis of critical intellectuality

Abstract

This article seeks to question some recent criticisms of the contemporary and senile form of capitalism, which do not reach the radicality of the questioning of the form-capital. The idea is to show that a range of critical intellectuals of various currents presents proposals for the transformation of the world that are, at a time, utopian in the negative sense of incoherent and unenforceable ideal constructs, and lacking in utopia in the positive sense of the imagination of a social life radically distinct from the present. We examine the criticisms of authors from different philosophical schools: the liberal Thomas Piketty, the Foucaultians Pierre Dardot and Christian Laval and, from Marxism, André Gorz and David Harvey. The aim is to argue that the crisis in which critical intellectuality is found is linked to its lack of radicality. Secondly, this article also points out that, in some of the theories we examine, the lack of radicality of their theses may be based on attachment to the privileges of the “intellectual class”.