Abstract
This paper seeks to place the explosion of popular interest in empathy within a specific historic context: the financial crisis of 2008. The financial crisis, and the years of economic recession that followed, led to a general discontent with the neoliberal system. The paper argues that key texts of the post-crisis discourse of empathy tapped into this malaise by advancing a radical critique of the neoliberal worldview on the basis of care theory. However, the embrace of global empathy ironically became entangled with the ethos of neoliberal globalism that it sought to supersede. The post-crisis vision of an empathetic world thus ended up reinforcing the very paradigm it critiqued. The paper posits that the awkward alliance between the ethos of empathy and the neoliberal imaginary may explain the recent backlash of popular aversion to the discourse of empathy and its rejection in present-day politics.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 269-285 |
| Number of pages | 17 |
| Journal | Journal for Cultural Research |
| Volume | 24 |
| Issue number | 4 |
| DOIs | |
| State | Published - 2020 |
Bibliographical note
Funding Information:With the development of E-Commence, People can buy merchandise in home and he can pay electronic coins to the shop by the Internet. How to protect the customer’s anonymity and the coin’s validity is an important problem. D. Chaum proposed blind signatures for untraceable payments [1]. However, Von Solms and Naccache [2] have shown that unconditional anonymity may be misused for untraceable blackmailing of customers. Also, unconditional anonymity may ease money laundering, illegal purchases, and bank robberies. Several papers [3] proposed the revocable anonymity methods, where one or more trusted third parties are needed. Kugler and Vogt et al proposed a new kind of tracing mechanism [4,7], which guarantees stronger privacy than other approaches. Their coin tracing can be carried out without the help of any trusted third parties. Their payment system allows tracing, but a traced customer will afterwards detect the fact of being legally or illegally traced. If the tracing turns out to be illegal, the customer can prove this violation of his privacy and the bank can be prosecuted. Paper [4] also gives some useful definitions for coin tracing, owner tracing, legal tracing and illegal tracing. According to these definitions in [4], we introduce a new kind of tracing mechanism, which supports the conditional anonymity, both a customer and a bank can reveal the identity of the customer, none of them can 1This paper is supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China under Grant No.60173033.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2020 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.
Keywords
- 2008 financial crisis
- Empathy
- care theory
- globalisation
- neoliberalism