Despite the actual historical research not being so hot or voluminous, I find Bataille's theory of General Economy a much more robust and more tangible way of d

Despite the actual historical research not being so hot or voluminous, I find Bataille's theory of General Economy a much more robust and more tangible way of describing the conditions of modernity while also indicating a specific response/solution, namely, that we have to re-learn to sacrifice, not accumulate, excess, like our ancestors did for most of human existence. We don't build ridiculously grand and inefficient structures like Pyramids and Cathedrals or practice ritual sacrifice because we no longer entertain the notion that human economy necessarily involves realms that require the destruction of excess production (and no, the destruction of excess dairy or agricultural production in the name of market controls on prices is not that). All the way up to early modernity humans unanimously understood economy like this to some extent, even if Abrahamic religions changed the flow around so that economy of surplus came to revolve around the excess of desire-production in humans specifically rather involving the entire realm of goods (Judaism still understood the older arrangement to a certain extent: we know that Cain and Abel burned produce to God, or that Jacob was on the cusp of sacrificing his only son to God; in Christianity, as Nietzsche noted, the debtor, God, pays himself back with his own flesh, and Christian practice proper is this immolation of the 'excess of the flesh', human desire, to our own more godly selves, our souls).