Market irrationality

William Connolly's The Fragility of Things (Duke University Press, 2013) wonders if rethinking the social roles of our jobs and lives might produce the changes we need. With Things, the professor of political science continues addressing life's vulnerabilities—such as crises in electoral politics, climate change, and social inequality—rendered by Western neoliberalism's evangelical devotion to market processes. It's a political theory book rooted in understanding social organization from neoliberal fountainhead Friedrich Hayek to communitarian philosopher Charles Taylor as a way to speculate that how we act now might change tomorrow. "Our lives are messages," Connolly writes, and varying from the conventional market norm, "can disrupt and redirect the flow of authority" and encourage others to do the same.