These days we’re constantly pushed to be more efficient – at work, of course, but also in our leisure pursuits and even while we sleep. How did we get here? And how can we get back to a state that’s governed by principles other than accumulation and profit? This week, a story of two key figures in the history of modern industrial capitalism: F.W. Taylor, the father of “scientific management” theory, and French thinker Georges Bataille, whose economic philosophy was predicated on the notion of spending rather than saving.

Efficiency, productivity and excess

The simplest questions often have the most complex answers. The Philosopher's Zone is your guide through the strange thickets of logic, metaphysics and ethics.

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When we think of 19th century German philosophy, we perhaps think first of Nietzsche, or Hegel, and then some other men - but Germany in the 1800s was also home to a number of women philosophers.

Women philosophers in 19th century Germany

For many on the political left, the end of capitalism is a cherished ideal - but what if capitalism ended and we found ourselves with something worse? This week we're exploring the possibility that Western liberal democracies could be sliding in the direction of "neofeudalism" and devolving into a much nastier set of economic and social structures than the ones we presently have.

Neofeudalism: techno-lords and peasants

Is obedience a virtue? History is littered with instances where obedience to bad rulers or unjust laws has resulted in catastrophe. But then it's hard to imagine raising or educating children without obedience being a fundamental requirement. This week we're exploring obedience in the moral domain - and in the domain of classical music, where disobedience to tradition can be the hallmark of genius.

Obedience

What should we think when an academic Humanities journal unsuspectingly publishes a paper that's been written as a hoax, full of fashionable jargon and deliberately specious arguments? Does this demonstrate that the Humanities set a higher value on shallow intellectual trends than on rigorous scholarship - or is there something more nuanced and complicated going on?

Style wars pt 2: Scandals and hoaxes

In the aftermath of the Second World War, France was in a state of creative ferment that affected politics, culture - and philosophy. A new mode of philosophical writing emerged in the form of the review, and it was being done in an idiom that we've since come to recognise as typical of modern French theory: dense, experimental, multivocal, open-ended, very much the opposite of traditional analytic philosophical style. It grabbed scholarly attention then, and is still controversial today.

Efficiency, productivity and excess

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