Responsibility and Capitalism. A Phenomenological Way to Approach the Economic Crisis

Abstract

The Western world is presently afflicted by a huge economic crisis, started in 2007 in the United States, with the collapse of the subprime mortgage market, and exploded in 2008 with the breakdown of Lehman Brothers[1]. Even if its most critical stage seems to be finished, capitalist countries find it difficult to recover. Globalization exported the effects of the crisis everywhere, but those that suffered the greatest damages are Europe and North America. The collapse of some financial companies is only the top of a huge iceberg. The crisis has roots in something deeper, in the principles and mechanisms of capitalism itself. The Western part of the world is still paying not for the mistakes of a few executives, but for a general lack of ethics in the whole system.

Keywords

• capitalism
• crisis
• economics
• ethics
• Levinas
• Marx
• phenomenology
• Ricoeur