这是对当代市场社会自我利益运作的挑衅式复述，声称世界越来越属于狂热者、痴迷者和狂热者：那些为了自己而做事情的人，而不是作为达到其他目的的手段。
我们要勇敢地接受这个资本主义社会，我们要勇敢地走在前面。这种信念对我们很有帮助：它有助于使我们的富裕社会富裕起来。但前提仍然成立吗？
正如Krzysztof Pelc在《超越自我利益》（Beyond Self-Interest）一书中所指出的那样，这种默认假设不再抓住现实。计算、计划和解决的回报是有限的，在越来越多的设置中，这一限制已经达到。他认为，市场社会的真正偶像是那些否认自身利益的人，或者至少看起来是这样的人：有生态意识的企业家、有使命感的媒体大亨，以及迎合受过良好教育、社会意识越来越强的消费者群体的现代工匠。越来越多的人通过拒绝繁荣，或通过说服他人他们追求的是目标、激情、对手艺的热爱，而不是自我提升来实现繁荣。这是意图的悖论，它正日益定义我们的生活。
Pelc讲述了这个悖论的故事，从19世纪初在一群英国思想家中不太可能出现到它在接下来的两个世纪里的发展，哲学家、小说家、社会科学家以及最终的资本家自己都接二连三地接受了这个悖论。所有这些人都达成了一个共同的认识：不感兴趣的外表是值得的，但前提是它是可信的，这给我们中间的自利者带来了一个棘手的问题。
基于对商业社会和生活在其中的人们的三个世纪的思考，这篇对资本主义周期进行了大量研究的文章并没有天真地建议我们应该拒绝市场。相反，它呼吁我们再次像最早的理论家那样对待经济增长：将其视为人类发展的强大工具，而不是其本身的目的。
Beyond Self-Interest: Why the Market Rewards Those Who Reject It
A provocative retelling of the workings of self-interest in contemporary market society, which claims the world increasingly belongs to passionates, obsessives, and fanatics: those who do things for their own sake, rather than as means to other ends.
In our capitalist market society, we have come to accept that the way to get ahead is through strong will, grit, and naked ambition. This belief has served us well: it has contributed to making our affluent societies affluent. But does the premise still hold?
As Krzysztof Pelc argues in Beyond Self-Interest, this default assumption no longer captures reality. There is a limit to the returns of calculation, planning, and resolve, and in a growing number of settings, this limit has been reached. The true idols of market society, he contends, are those who disavow their self-interest, or at least appear to do so: eco-conscious entrepreneurs, media moguls with a mission, and modern-day artisans catering to a well-educated and ever more socially conscious population of consumers. Increasingly, those who prosper do so by spurning prosperity, or by convincing others that they are instead pursuing purpose, passion, love of craft-anything but their own self-advancement. This is the paradox of intention, and it is increasingly defining our lives.
Pelc tells the story of this paradox from its unlikely emergence among a group of British thinkers in the early 19th century to its development over the next two centuries, as it was successively picked up by philosophers, novelists, social scientists, and, ultimately, capitalists themselves. All of whom arrived at a common realization: the appearance of disinterest pays, but only if it is believable-which presents the self-interested among us with a tricky problem.
Drawing on three centuries of thought about commercial society and the people living in it, this richly researched account of the cycles of capitalism does not naively suggest that we should reject the market. Rather, it calls on us to treat economic growth once more as its earliest theorists did: as a formidable tool of human development, instead of an end in itself.
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