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Confidence Games is certainly brisk and truthful enough to seduce the uninformed or the intellectually fashion-conscious. Religion, art, and economics form an "intricate interplay." (Stroke chin, furrow brow, don't insist on distinctions.) Since religion "never disappears" but assumes new forms, God has, in our time, been "reborn as the market." Once ploddingly industrial and material, that market has evolved "from a manufacturing to an information economy" driven by computerized networks of growing speed, complexity, and scope. These vertiginous webs of information comprise a "self-organizing system" whose incessant metamorphosis generates its own forms of chaos and order. Drawing on "complexity studies," recent financial theory, and investor-philosophers like George Soros, Taylor argues that markets are not arenas of individual agents but elastic, adaptable, and "self-reflexive" webs of interrelationship.
All attempts to impose order from outside, whether political or religious, will inhibit and pervert the creative energy that surges through life, and especially through contemporary capitalism. Indeed, the very instability and evanescence of the info-capitalist order can enrich our lives if we embrace rather than fear uncertainty and ephemerality. If we welcome unreservedly the volatility of financial and technological change, life can be "a confidence game in which the abiding challenge is not to find redemption but to learn to live without it." Postmodern jouissance and market calculation form a lucrative partnership, sponsored by Hayek and Nietzsche. As Zarathustra spoke, "joy is everlasting flow," and economics morphs into a gay and not a dismal science.
It's hard not to swoon to Taylor's often lissome and buoyant prose, and there's much to savor in this exuberant affirmation of contemporary capitalism. We get elegant and illuminating accounts of window design, Times Square architecture, the origins of NASDAQ, and the fall of the gold standard. We follow the intellectual history of markets from John Calvin and Adam Smith to Robert Shiller. We witness the conflation of aesthetics, providence, teleology, and economics in Hutcheson, Kant, Schiller, Hegel, Marx, and Simmel. We trace the cultural history of money, from its religious origins, to its psychoanalytical status as projected anality, to its accelerating dematerialization. What's more, Taylor is savvy enough to know his derivatives from his IPOs. Like the protagonist of William Gaddis' JR—who's cited at the outset of almost every chapter—Taylor has "picked up the lingo of investors, traders, and LBO experts." (That's leveraged buy-out, for you incognoscenti.)
But Taylor is most engrossing when he borrows, not from neo-disciplines like "complexity studies," but from vintage thinkers who've already explored the religious nature of economics. He covers the work of Georges Bataille, whose ruminations on gift exchange and unproductive expenditure still don't receive their due. He elucidates Marx's perception of money as the perpetually mobile "god among commodities," who bestows, mediates, and incarnates value. It was the historical materialist, Taylor reminds us, who discerned that money was fundamentally "a mental form," irrelevant and even hostile to materiality. And Taylor reprises Simmel's Philosophy of Money (1900), a ponderous masterpiece in which money becomes "a coincidentia oppositorum worthy of Nicholas of Cusa," reconciling all worldly oppositions and establishing "an inconceivable unity of being."
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