Homo Strategicus. Liquid capitalism, creative destruction and habitable worlds
Alain Charles Martinet*
Collection "Les Grands Auteurs francophones
Editions EMS, 2022, 228 p.
Discover the book on the publisher's website.
*Faculty member of the Business Science Institute.
Rather than a predicted replica of the 2008 crisis, it is a pandemic that has suddenly caused shortages of basic products, which 40 years of "globalization" had convinced us would always be available.
Forty years of financialization and the digital revolution have imposed profitability and its maximization, devaluing all other evaluation criteria, and in particular precaution, compromise and social justice, inherent to the regulated industrial and managerial capitalism that had produced the Thirty Glorious Years.
Homo Å“conomicus became flesh and blood, and spread its simplistic mental schema by mimicry and alignment, liquefying companies, organizations and states, just as the Thatcher-Reagan tandem, an admirer of the Hayek-Friedman neo-liberal doctrine, had wanted. Forced to become self-employed, everyone had to adapt to blind technological innovation at a forced march, with Schumpeter's invocation of creative destruction supporting the strategic vacuum. Everywhere in the West, although to varying degrees, homo politicus, born under Aristotle, has had to bow to homo oeconomicus, now the only figure held to be legitimate.
By bringing to light these geneses and even more so their interdependencies, this book sees the exploitation of the planet, the rise of inequalities, the disintegration of the middle classes, the disintegration of liberal democracy and of societies, not as collateral damage, but as logical implications of this monopoly of an economy that has become speculative chrematism. Based on 50 years of research, it traces the rise of strategy, both in theory and in practice, and then its decline, submerged by a financialized management of the company, the State, the city and even social and solidarity organizations.
It shows the need to regenerate ethically oriented homo strategicus, and to liberate its imaginative forces, in order to confront ecological, social and political problems, and to make the economy come to its senses. It deploys the landmark concepts and the pragmatic epistemology adequate to a renewed strategy.
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