The Emotions of the Market

Abstract

Recently, Martha C. Nussbaum wrote that we need to look deeply into the psychology of the individual in order to understand how we can be more empathetic with our fellow humans. From its origins in the late nineteenth century through to the ‘industrial psychology’ of the 1920s and 1930s in the United States, where it was twinned with the objective of making for a more efficient workplace and workforce, to a supposedly democratic technique available to all, now dedicated to searching for and providing ‘balance’ in our lives, psychology has now turned to notions of ‘empathy’ as a key to gaining personal equilibrium. Empathy must be one of the most successful political and social novelties to assail us in the current period, racked as it is by any number of just causes and needs from the very basic – hunger, lack of shelter and personal security – through to emotional and material poverty.