THE GUILD SYLLABUS
The 27 Foundational Texts of Restorative Inquiry
To dismantle the system, you must first understand its internal logic. This curriculum is designed to move the reader from Diagnosis to Restoration.
PHASE I: THE DIAGNOSIS (How the Machine Works)
Objective: To understand the system’s internal logic and its deceptions.
1. The New Industrial State
John Kenneth Galbraith
The Concept: The Technostructure. The economy is not controlled by “market forces” but by corporate planning systems that manufacture consumer demand.
2. The Theory of the Leisure Class
Thorstein Veblen
The Concept: Conspicuous Consumption. The system is driven not by utility, but by status signaling. Efficiency is sabotaged by “Business” to maximize profit.
3. Zombie Economics
John Quiggin
The Concept: The Zombie Idea. Theories like “Trickle-Down” were killed by the 2008 crisis but keep rising from the dead because they serve the powerful.
4. Technofeudalism
Yanis Varoufakis
The Concept: Cloud Capital. Capitalism is replaced by a feudal system where Tech Giants are lords and we are serfs producing data-rent for free.
5. Private Government
Elizabeth Anderson
The Concept: The Communist Dictatorship of the Workplace. Modern firms are private governments where employers exercise sweeping, arbitrary, and unaccountable authority.
6. Financial Instability Hypothesis
Hyman Minsky
The Concept: Stability Breeds Instability. In prosperous times, profit-seeking firms move toward “Ponzi” financing, ensuring a fragile state and systemic collapse.
PHASE II: THE GENEALOGY (How We Got Here)
Objective: To see that the current order was not inevitable; it was constructed by specific choices.
7. The Great Transformation
Karl Polanyi
The Concept: Fictitious Commodities. The dangerous lie that Land, Labor, and Money are just items for sale. When treated this way, society rebels.
8. The Heart of Christianity
Marcus Borg
The Concept: Faith as Assent. Faith shifted from “Loyalty” to “Believing Impossible Things,” creating a mind rigid enough to accept Market Fundamentalism.
9. Democracy in Chains
Nancy MacLean
The Concept: The Constitution of Lock-in. How institutions were deliberately designed to shackle democracy so the poor could never tax the rich.
10. The Reactionary Mind
Corey Robin
The Concept: The Counter-Revolutionary Impulse. Conservatism is an activist doctrine born in reaction to challenges from below to win back privilege.
11. Prison Notebooks
Antonio Gramsci
The Concept: Cultural Hegemony. Power is maintained through “Civil Society”—the web of schools and media that manufacture spontaneous consent.
PHASE III: THE CRISIS (The Cracks in the Wall)
Objective: To analyze the collision with physical and social reality.
12. Crashed / Chartbook
Adam Tooze
The Concept: The Poly-Crisis. We are facing a tangle of feedback loops where solving one problem worsens another.
13. Less is More
Jason Hickel
The Concept: Degrowth. Infinite growth on a finite planet is madness. We must plan a democratic downscaling of production.
14. Thinking in Systems
Donella Meadows
The Concept: Overshoot and Feedback Delays. Systems are driven by internal structure. Exponential growth on a finite planet leads to inevitable overshoot.
PHASE IV: THE MORAL ARCHITECTURE (The Soul)
Objective: To rebuild the definition of Justice and the Good Life.
15. What Money Can’t Buy
Michael Sandel
The Concept: Market Society. Pricing civic goods (health, education) corrupts their value and crowds out moral norms.
16. A Theory of Justice
John Rawls
The Concept: The Veil of Ignorance. A just economy is one you would be happy to be born into blindly—maximizing for the least advantaged.
17. Development as Freedom
Amartya Sen
The Concept: The Capability Approach. Poverty is a deprivation of freedom. The goal is to expand what humans can actually do and be.
PHASE V: THE NEW PARADIGM (The Hope)
Objective: To design an economy embedded in the Earth and the Spirit.
18. Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander
Thomas Merton
The Concept: The True Self. Resistance begins by rejecting the “Consumer” and reclaiming the “True Self” in communion with others.
19. Small is Beautiful
E.F. Schumacher
The Concept: Buddhist Economics. Work is spiritual nourishment. The economy should maximize well-being with minimum consumption.
20. For the Common Good
Herman Daly & John Cobb
The Concept: The Person-in-Community. Replacing Homo Economicus with a view of humans interconnected with each other and the Earth.
21. Tools for the Transition
Meadows et al.
The Concept: Redesigning Information. Shifting feedback structure to motivate sustainability, moving from “Growth” to “Development.”
APPENDIX: THE STRUCTURAL FOUNDATIONS
22. Globalists
Quinn Slobodian
The Concept: Encasement. Designing international law to “encase” the market, protecting property rights from democratic voters.
23. Debt: The First 5,000 Years
David Graeber
The Concept: The Myth of Barter. Markets were created by states to fund wars. Debt is a moral relationship recently weaponized for domination.
24. The Age of Extremes
Eric Hobsbawm
The Concept: The Great Compromise. The “Golden Age” of high wages was a concession made by elites terrified of the Soviet alternative.
25. Debtor Nation
Louis Hyman
The Concept: Financialization. Corporations realized they could profit more by lending money for consumption than producing goods.
26. The Half Has Never Been Told
Edward Baptist
The Concept: The Whipping Machine. American industrial dominance was built on the torture-based securitization of enslaved people.
27. Civilization and Capitalism
Fernand Braudel
The Concept: The Longue Durée. History moves in deep currents that dwarf political events. We must look at 500-year cycles.
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