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Labyrinths of Prosperity: Economic Follies, Democratic Remedies by Reuven Brenner explores the cyclical shifts in economic thought, specifically focusing on the myths of macroeconomics and their impact on policy-making and prosperity. Brenner questions the scientific legitimacy of macroeconomic theories, highlighting their contradictions and the misleading confidence with which they are presented. He critiques the use of national statistics and macroeconomic aggregates—such as the GDP and unemployment rates—as unreliable bases for policy-making due to their frequent revisions and inherent inaccuracies. The book argues that true prosperity emanates from trade and financial practices that allow individuals to take risks and leverage opportunities, rather than from macroeconomic policies that claim to fine-tune economies around aggregated statistics. Brenner suggests that public policy should shift towards fostering environments where entrepreneurial endeavors can thrive, through mechanisms such as referenda and direct political engagement, to prevent policy errors from persisting unchallenged. By advocating for decentralization, Brenner assigns the responsibility of curbing government excess and sustaining prosperity to the ingenuity and innovation of individuals, thus promoting a political climate that encourages adaptation and economic freedom over rigid statutory prescriptions.

This book offers a series of probing reflections on issues at the heart of recent debates in philosophy, literary theory, and intellectual history. In ten powerfully articulated essays, Richard Wolin calls into question the implied radicalism of the so-called postmodern turn, exposes the unstated agenda of neoconservative cultural theory, and provides a major reinterpretation of Walter Benjamin’s place in contemporary cultural studies. 

At the center of the book lie the peculiar and troubling affinities between two groups of cultural critics usually seen as antithetical: the radical conservative thinkers of Germany’s Weimar Republic and the French poststructuralists who came to the prominence in the aftermath of the May 1968 uprising. 

Wolin concludes the volume with a cogent reappraisal of “antihumanism” as a leitmotif of postwar French intellectual culture, along with a reassessment of the “de Man affair” and its implications for the poststructuralist interpretation of fascism.