Peter Bloom
Biographic Data
| ID | 175296 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Peter Bloom |
| GIVEN NAMES | Peter |
| FAMILY NAME | Bloom |
| SIGNATURE | BLOOM P |
| AFFILIATIONS | The Open University |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-2225-6149 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 42 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 44 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 41 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1977 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 4 |
Nativism and Capitalism: From Colonial Hauntings to Radical Indigenous Futures
Nativism and Capitalism: From Colonial Hauntings to Radical Indigenous Futures offers a sweeping reappraisal of nativism as a central force within global capitalism rather than a simple reaction against it. Peter Bloom shows how the figure of the “native”, inherited from colonial rule, continues to shape how capitalist modernity organizes scarcity, hierarchy, and belonging. From 19th-century empire to today’s far-right populisms, the book traces …
Beyond Nativism
Consent, coercion, colonialism: A manifesto for digital rights from the left
Digital transitions, involving the widespread adoption of biometric, algorithmic, and AI systems across public and private sectors, are often framed as inevitable and necessary for progress. However, these transitions are not neutral. They are shaped by coercive data extraction practices of digitalization, which consolidate corporate power, and reproduce colonial social relations. At the center of this process is the erosion of meaningful consent…
Capitalism Reloaded: The Rise of the Authoritarian–Financial Complex
Available Open Access digitally under CC-BY-NC-ND license. In Capitalism Reloaded, Peter Bloom charts a pivotal shift from the well-known military-industrial complex to a new 'Authoritarian-Financial Complex'. Unlike its predecessor, which centred on armaments and defence, this emerging power structure fuses financial interests with advanced surveillance and digital control, turning social repression into a lucrative industry. Bloom introduces a …
Capitalism Reloaded: The Rise of the Authoritarian-Financial Complex
Available Open Access digitally under CC-BY-NC-ND license. In Capitalism Reloaded, Peter Bloom charts a pivotal shift from the well-known military-industrial complex to a new ‘Authoritarian-Financial Complex’. Unlike its predecessor, which centred on armaments and defence, this emerging power structure fuses financial interests with advanced surveillance and digital control, turning social repression into a lucrative industry. Bloom introduces a …
Authoritarian Capitalism in the Age of Globalization
Authoritarian capitalism is rapidly evolving, intensifying and spreading across the globe. This updated second edition book demonstrates that the recent resurgence of fascism and repressive democracies are connected to and symptomatic of the fundamental authoritarianism of capitalism.
Extreme wellness at work: Whose body counts in the rise of exceptionalist organisational fitness cultures
Management has long concerned itself with controlling workers’ bodies, with organisational wellness discourses being its latest fixation. This article’s purpose is to introduce and understand ‘whose body counts’ – a discourse of bodily exceptionalism in performative organisational cultures. Using ethnographic methods, this article presents an analysis of a CrossFit workplace health promotion at an underperforming US corporation, to identify a com…
The development of a smart political moral economy in Africa: Discourse, legitimisation, disciplining, and hegemony
This paper uses and expands the concept of a ‘political moral economy’ to better understand elite attempts to justify and promote capitalist development strategies linked to the proliferation of ‘smart technologies’ such as big data, mobile communications, and the construction of hi-tech cities. Drawing on an Ideology and Discourse analysis perspective on hegemony introduced by Ernesto Laclau and Chantel Mouffe, it aims to show how market-based ‘…
Hacking work: Critically examining the implications of the new discourse and practices of hacking for work intensification and organisational control
This article discusses the importance of ‘hacking work’ in organisations, specifically in relation to control over workers in organisations operating within the neoliberal ideological project. Noting the shift in the discourse of hacking beyond references to computer-mediated, anti-establishment oriented activities, we draw on the current meaning of the term ‘hacking’ that encompasses any ‘shortcuts’ that can be applied to more efficiently comple…
The French Connection: Wagner and the Opéra
This article considers the nature of the first draft of the synopsis-in French, as Le Hollandais volant-of what became Der fliegende Holländer; the sale of that synopsis to the new director of the Opéra, Léon Pillet (identifying the journalist and administrator who arranged the sale); the use made of the synopsis-very little-by the eventual authors of the French opera, Le Vaisseau fantôme; and the genesis of the revised ending of the Holländer (t…
Guerrilla Democracy: Mobile Power and Revolution in the 21st Century
Infectious Domination, Contagious Revolutions
The memory of the Vietnam struggle for liberation continues to loom large even into the new millennium. For many, it was the war that gave birth to the US counterculture, the catalyst for a radical energy spurred on by their conviction that their own freedom should not be won by the blood of a repressed people halfway across the world. For others, it remains a testament to the possibility of a heavily outgunned and out-resourced force defeating a…
Infectious Domination, Contagious Revolutions
Denaturalizing the Environment: Dissensus and the Possibility of Radically Democratizing Discourses of Environmental Sustainability
Disruptive Democracy: The Clash Between Techno-Populism and Techno-Democracy
Do new "smart" technologies such as AI, robotics, social media, and automation threaten to disrupt our society? Or does technological innovation hold the potential to transform our democracies and civic societies, creating ones that are more egalitarian and accountable? Disruptive Democracy explores these questions and examines how technology has the power to reshape our civic participation, our economic and political governance, and our entire e…
The Bad Faith in the Free Market
The Ethics of Neoliberalism: The Business of Making Capitalism Moral
The 21st century is the age of "neo-liberalism" – a time when the free market is spreading to all areas of economic, political and social life. Yet how is this changing our individual and collective ethics? Is capitalism also becoming our new morality? From the growing popular demand for corporate social responsibility to personal desire for "work-life balance" it would appear that non-market ideals are not only surviving but also thriving. Why t…
The Ethics of Neoliberalism: The Business of Making Capitalism Moral
The 21st century is the age of "neo-liberalism" – a time when the free market is spreading to all areas of economic, political and social life. Yet how is this changing our individual and collective ethics? Is capitalism also becoming our new morality? From the growing popular demand for corporate social responsibility to personal desire for "work-life balance" it would appear that non-market ideals are not only surviving but also thriving. Why t…
Cutting off the King's Head: The Self Disciplining Fantasy of Neoliberal Sovereignty
This paper aims to reconsider the relationship and importance of sovereign power for neoliberalism. At the broader theoretical level, this analysis hopes to illuminate the dynamic and mutually reinforcing relation of subjection and subjectivation, as proposed by Foucault, through a psychoanalytic,particularly Lacanian, perspective. It proposes that the identification with a powerful sovereign provides individuals with ontological security in the …
Beyond Power and Resistance: Politics at the Radical Limits
Has political resistance has lost its ability to confront political and economic power and achieve social change? Despite its best intentions, resistance has often become incorporated and neutered before it achieves its aims, as new forms of power absorb it and turn it towards their own ends. Since the Enlightenment, the opposing forces of power and resistance have framed our view of society and politics. Exploring that development, this book sho…
Authoritarian Capitalism in the Age of Globalization
Exploring the rise of authoritarian capitalism, this book offers a fresh perspective on politics and economics in the present age of globalization. It asks the crucial question of whether individuals and nations can break free from the ‘grip’ of authoritarian capitalism in the twenty-first century. \n \nPeter Bloom includes a detailed and in-depth analysis of how marketization is promoting political authoritarianism across the world. He tells a s…
The moral work of subversion
This article critically reconsiders dominant understandings of morality and subversion within organizations. Existing organizational literature does not adequately address the important productive role of morality for producing and justifying everyday subversive practices as well as the use of subversion to legitimate power relations and dominant values. Drawing upon interactionist insights, we develop a practice-based account of morality, highli…
Authoritarian Capitalism in the Age of Globalization
Work as the contemporary limit of life: Capitalism, the death drive, and the lethal fantasy of 'work-life balance
This article introduces contemporary discourses of 'work-life balance' as a cultural fantasy revolving self-hood around employment and organizations. To do so, it draws on the Lacanian interpretation of the Freudian 'death drive' to highlight the importance of 'disequilibrium' for the construction of the subject and individual identification therein. More precisely, it reflects on the ways this structuring of self-hood associated with the impossi…
Modernization as Spectacle in Africa
Read an excerpt
Work as the contemporary limit of life: Capitalism, the death drive, and the lethal fantasy of 'work-life balance
This article introduces contemporary discourses of 'work-life balance' as a cultural fantasy revolving self-hood around employment and organizations. To do so, it draws on the Lacanian interpretation of the Freudian 'death drive' to highlight the importance of 'disequilibrium' for the construction of the subject and individual identification therein. More precisely, it reflects on the ways this structuring of self-hood associated with the impossi…
The moral work of subversion
This article critically reconsiders dominant understandings of morality and subversion within organizations. Existing organizational literature does not adequately address the important productive role of morality for producing and justifying everyday subversive practices as well as the use of subversion to legitimate power relations and dominant values. Drawing upon interactionist insights, we develop a practice-based account of morality, highli…
The power of safe resistance
This paper seeks to critically reimagine the relationship between power and resistance. The aim is to better understand how resistance aids in the construction, exercise and often reproduction of power. These efforts open the space for a new perspective of power linked to the production of the resistance subject. Specifically, it is argued that hegemonic power relations create in their wake dominant forms of resistance, which ironically provide i…
The paradox of order: Reimagining Ideological Domination
In contemporary political theory, the analysis of politics and social relations rests predominantly on a problematic opposition between openness and closure, reflected concretely around the normative poles of pluralism and stability. The principal aim of this paper is to show how openness and pluralism work actually to strengthen a given social order. Where as past models stress the 'closed' character of ideology, we contend instead, drawing on t…
Back to the capitalist future: Fantasy and the paradox of crisis
This paper draws on a Lacanian perspective to better understand how crisis can paradoxically produce fantasies of ideological renewal. Using the 2008 economic meltdown as an example, it argues that these events are articulated as a part of a crisis narrative that links past ideals with future stability and progress. At the level of subjectivity, these fantasies reflect the psychological trauma individuals feel in the face of encountering the inco…
The development of a smart political moral economy in Africa: Discourse, legitimisation, disciplining, and hegemony
This paper uses and expands the concept of a ‘political moral economy’ to better understand elite attempts to justify and promote capitalist development strategies linked to the proliferation of ‘smart technologies’ such as big data, mobile communications, and the construction of hi-tech cities. Drawing on an Ideology and Discourse analysis perspective on hegemony introduced by Ernesto Laclau and Chantel Mouffe, it aims to show how market-based ‘…
Hacking work: Critically examining the implications of the new discourse and practices of hacking for work intensification and organisational control
This article discusses the importance of ‘hacking work’ in organisations, specifically in relation to control over workers in organisations operating within the neoliberal ideological project. Noting the shift in the discourse of hacking beyond references to computer-mediated, anti-establishment oriented activities, we draw on the current meaning of the term ‘hacking’ that encompasses any ‘shortcuts’ that can be applied to more efficiently comple…
Beur Cinema and the Politics of Location: French Immigration Politics and the Naming of a Film Movement
(1999). Beur Cinema and the Politics of Location: French Immigration Politics and the Naming of a Film Movement. Social Identities: Vol. 5, No. 4, pp. 469-487
Une lecture de Lélio ou Le Retour à la vie
La mission de Berlioz en Allemagne: Un Document Inédit
Berlioz à l'Institut Revisited
Music, Musicians, and the Saint-Simonians
Fespaco In Paris: A Battle of Position
Berlioz Studies
Berlioz a Ricordi: Dix Lettres Inédites
Beur Cinema and the Politics of Location: French Immigration Politics and the Naming of a Film Movement
(1999). Beur Cinema and the Politics of Location: French Immigration Politics and the Naming of a Film Movement. Social Identities: Vol. 5, No. 4, pp. 469-487
The Cambridge companion to Berlioz
Introduction: Berlioz on the eve of the bicentenary
In a recent novel by the popular French journalist Patrick Poivre d'Arvor, Un Héros de passage , a prototypically inexperienced and ambitious young man arrives from the provinces in the capital – the year is 1845 – there to seek fame and fortune. In Paris he makes the acquaintance of a darkly beautiful woman called “Queen Pomaré.” This is not the historical Tahitian Queen whose fifty-year reign over the Polynesian island, from 1827 to 1877, encom…
The Cambridge Companion to Berlioz
Journal Article The Cambridge Companion to Berlioz Get access Mark Everist, Mark Everist Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Peter Bloom Peter Bloom Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Music and Letters, Volume 83, Issue 1, February 2002, Pages 123–128, https://doi.org/10.1093/ml/83.1.123 Published: 01 February 2002
The paradox of order: Reimagining Ideological Domination
In contemporary political theory, the analysis of politics and social relations rests predominantly on a problematic opposition between openness and closure, reflected concretely around the normative poles of pluralism and stability. The principal aim of this paper is to show how openness and pluralism work actually to strengthen a given social order. Where as past models stress the 'closed' character of ideology, we contend instead, drawing on t…
The power of safe resistance
This paper seeks to critically reimagine the relationship between power and resistance. The aim is to better understand how resistance aids in the construction, exercise and often reproduction of power. These efforts open the space for a new perspective of power linked to the production of the resistance subject. Specifically, it is argued that hegemonic power relations create in their wake dominant forms of resistance, which ironically provide i…
Changing the World: Sean Graham
Sean Graham was born Hans Friedrich Eisler in 1920 in Germany. His parents were from well-established Jewish families. His mother died soon after he was born and he was brought up by his maternal aunt and uncle in Hamburg. The family left Germany with the rise of anti-Semitism, bringing Sean and his sister to England. He was educated at Aldenham and Bryanston public schools and studied law at Cambridge, although he aspired to be a poet and prefer…
Modernization as Spectacle in Africa
Read an excerpt
Discourse theory and critical media politics
The twenty-first century has supposedly ushered in a new form of political struggle driven by advances in social media. Protestors are now not only fighting for their cause on the streets but beami
Back to the capitalist future: Fantasy and the paradox of crisis
This paper draws on a Lacanian perspective to better understand how crisis can paradoxically produce fantasies of ideological renewal. Using the 2008 economic meltdown as an example, it argues that these events are articulated as a part of a crisis narrative that links past ideals with future stability and progress. At the level of subjectivity, these fantasies reflect the psychological trauma individuals feel in the face of encountering the inco…
We are all monsters now: A Marxist critique of liberal organization and the need for a revolutionary monstrous humanism
Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to investigate how Marxist accounts of capitalism and capitalists as “vampiric” and “cannibalistic” can challenge the exploitation underlying “monstrosity” of the diverse “liberal organization”. Design/methodology/approach – To bear out this argument, it will critically turn to Marx's original description of capitalism as “vampire” like. It will do so by examining a range of theoretical and existing empirica…
Work as the contemporary limit of life: Capitalism, the death drive, and the lethal fantasy of 'work-life balance
This article introduces contemporary discourses of 'work-life balance' as a cultural fantasy revolving self-hood around employment and organizations. To do so, it draws on the Lacanian interpretation of the Freudian 'death drive' to highlight the importance of 'disequilibrium' for the construction of the subject and individual identification therein. More precisely, it reflects on the ways this structuring of self-hood associated with the impossi…
Cutting off the King's Head: The Self Disciplining Fantasy of Neoliberal Sovereignty
This paper aims to reconsider the relationship and importance of sovereign power for neoliberalism. At the broader theoretical level, this analysis hopes to illuminate the dynamic and mutually reinforcing relation of subjection and subjectivation, as proposed by Foucault, through a psychoanalytic,particularly Lacanian, perspective. It proposes that the identification with a powerful sovereign provides individuals with ontological security in the …
Beyond Power and Resistance: Politics at the Radical Limits
Has political resistance has lost its ability to confront political and economic power and achieve social change? Despite its best intentions, resistance has often become incorporated and neutered before it achieves its aims, as new forms of power absorb it and turn it towards their own ends. Since the Enlightenment, the opposing forces of power and resistance have framed our view of society and politics. Exploring that development, this book sho…
Authoritarian Capitalism in the Age of Globalization
Exploring the rise of authoritarian capitalism, this book offers a fresh perspective on politics and economics in the present age of globalization. It asks the crucial question of whether individuals and nations can break free from the ‘grip’ of authoritarian capitalism in the twenty-first century. \n \nPeter Bloom includes a detailed and in-depth analysis of how marketization is promoting political authoritarianism across the world. He tells a s…
The moral work of subversion
This article critically reconsiders dominant understandings of morality and subversion within organizations. Existing organizational literature does not adequately address the important productive role of morality for producing and justifying everyday subversive practices as well as the use of subversion to legitimate power relations and dominant values. Drawing upon interactionist insights, we develop a practice-based account of morality, highli…
Authoritarian Capitalism in the Age of Globalization
The Ethics of Neoliberalism: The Business of Making Capitalism Moral
The 21st century is the age of "neo-liberalism" – a time when the free market is spreading to all areas of economic, political and social life. Yet how is this changing our individual and collective ethics? Is capitalism also becoming our new morality? From the growing popular demand for corporate social responsibility to personal desire for "work-life balance" it would appear that non-market ideals are not only surviving but also thriving. Why t…
Political science (25 works) · Law (23 works) · Politics (21 works) · Sociology (20 works) · Art (14 works) · Capitalism (10 works) · History (10 works) · Political Economy and Marxism (10 works) · Political economy (9 works) · Epistemology (8 works)