Chapter 7
Modernism and Capitalism
Daniel Bell
I
That fabulous polymath Samuel Johnson maintained that no
man in his right mind ever read a book through Erom beginning to
end. His own method was to glance rapidly through the pages, read
only the parts that interested him, and skip all the rest. This is one way
of knowing a book, and for a clever reader it may suffice. But these j
days, many persons do not read a book but read of it, and usually from
reviewers. Given the constraints of the media and the nature of the
culture, this knowledge at one remove contains a peril. For one thing,
even w hen a book has a complex argument, most reviewers, busy
people they, sprint through a book seeking to catch a few lines to
encapsulate the argument and to find a tag which can locate the author
into the comfortable niches of the marketable vocabularies of
conversation. Since the dominant bias in American culture is a liberal
one, an argument that cuts across that liberalism makes some reviewers
uncomfortable. And those whose work decries those aspects of
contemporary culture which make cheap claims to "liberation," often
find themselves labeled as "neo-conservative."
In its own terms, such a designation is meaningless, for it
assumes that social views can be aligned along a single dimension.
(What is ironic, in tact, is that those who decry the "one-
dimensional" society, often hold such a one-dimensional view of
politics. ) In the larger historical context, the phrase makes no sense
because the kind of cultural criticism I makeÑand I think of similar
criticisms by Peter Berger and Philip RieffÑtranscends the received
categories of liberalism, and seeks to treat the dilemmas of
contemporary society within a very different framework.
Since an author's point of view is relevant to the understanding
of his intentions, I think it not amiss to say that I am a socialist in
economics, a liberal in politics, and a conservative in culture. Many
people might find this statement puzzling, assuming that if a person
is
a radical in one realm, he is a radical in all others; and, conversely, if
he is a conservative in one realm, then he must be conservative in the
Others as well. Such an assumption misreads, both sociologically
and morally, the nature of these different realms. I will begin with
the values I hold, and deal w ith the sociological distinctions in the
following section.
About economics: The economic realm today is usually thought
to be simply instrumental. One of my arguments is that capitalist
society, in its emphasis on accumulation, has made that activity an
end in itself. But no moral philosopher, from Aristotle and Aquinas,
to John Locke and Adam Smith, divorced economics from a set of
moral ends or held the production of wealth to be an end in itself;
rather it was seen as a means to the realization of virtue, a means of
leading a civilized life.
The turning point in modern thought comes with Bentham.
Bentham assumed that all men desired happiness, which he described
simply as the maximizing of pleasure and the minimizing of pain. In
practice this meant that whatever individuals defined as their own
good was to be accepted as an "end" to be pursued. Adam Smith
had written, besides The Wealth of Nations, a book entitled The
Theory of Moral Sentiments, in which an "impartial spectator"
represented the judgment of the community, which all right-
thinking men would have to take into account. But for Bentham, in
the Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation, "the
Community is a fictitious body" and the interest of the community is
"the sum of the interests of the several members who compose it."
Modern capitalist thought has accepted that argument to its
own detriment, for a justification only or largely on the basis of
individual interest is a weak moral argument. As my colleague
Irving Kristol points out, economics is necessarily bound with
normative considerationsÑthe judgments whether the consequences
of aggregated individual decisions are j ust and fair. No society can
escape the necessity of making a reasoned judgment about what is
proper and desirable, and of assessing the consequences of
economic decisions in the light of those standards.
Modern economics has become a positive science in which the
ends to be pursued are assumed to be individual and varied, and
economics is only a science of "means," or of rational choice in the
allocation of resources among competing individual ends. The price
system, however, is only a mechanism for the relative allocation of
goods and services within the framework of the kinds of demands
generated. Yet these demands derive from the existing distribution
of income. And, what ultimately provides direction for the economy
is the value system of the culture in which the economy is
embedded Economic policy can be efficacious as a means; but it
can only be as just as the cultural value system that shapes it.
It is for that reason that I am a socialist in economics. For me
socialism is not statism, or the collective ownership of the means of
production. It is (as Aneurin Bevan once said), a judgment on the
priorities of economic policy. It is for that reason that I believe that
in this realm, the community takes precedence over the individual in
the values that legitimate economic policy. The first lien on the
resources of a society therefore should be to establish that "social
minimum" which would allow individuals to lead a life of self-
respect, to be members of the community. This means a set of
priorities that ensures work for those who seek it, a degree of
adequate security against the hazards of the market, and adequate
access to medical care and protection against the ravages of disease
and illness.
I accept and reinterpret, the classical distinction between needs
and wants. Needs are what all individuals have as members of the
"species." Wants are the varied desires of individuals in accordance
with their own tastes and idiosyncrasies. I believe that the first
obligation of a society is to meet those essential needs; otherwise,
individuals cannot be full "citizens" of the society. Admittedly, the
word "needs" is ambiguous. Keynes once wrote: ". . . it is true that
the needs of human beings may seem to be insatiable. But they fall
into two classesÑthose needs which are absolute in the sense that we
feel them whatever the situation of our fellow human beings may be,
and those which are relative in the sense that we feel them only if
their satisfaction lifts us above, makes us feel superior to, our
fellows. Needs of the second class, those which satisfy the desire for
superiority, may indeed be insatiable . . . but this is not true of
absolute needs.
Unwittingly, modern economics has established its own
distinction between needs and wants: the concept of discretionary
income. One part of a person's expenditure is relatively fixedÑthe
amount necessary to meet one's self-defined basic (or, in Keynes's
sense absolute) needs. The other portion is variable: it can be
postponed used to satisfy different wants, and is spent quite often in
those pursuits that express the signs of status and the desires for
superiority.
The social minimum I support is the amount of family income
required to meet basic needs. And, since this is also a cultural
definition, it will, understandably, change over time. And I am a
socialist also, in that I do not believe wealth should be convertible
into undue
privilege in realms where it is not relevant. Thus it is unjust, I argue,
for wealth to command undue advantage in medical facilities, when
these are social rights that should be available to all. In the realms
of wealth, status and power, there are principles of just allocation
that are distinctive to each realm.
Yet I am a liberal in politicsÑdefining both terms in the
Kantian sense. I am a-liberal in that, within the polity, I believe the
individual should be the primary actor, not the group (be it family
or corporation or church, or ethnic or minority group). And the
polity, I believe, has to maintain the distinction between the public
and the private, so that not all behavior is politicized, as in
communist states, or left without restraintR as in the justification of
laissez-faire in traditional capitalist societies .
The public realm operates under the rule of law which applies
equally to all, and is therefore procedural: it does not specify
outcomeE between individuals; it treats people equally rather than
seeking tc "make them" equal. The private realmÑin morals and
economicsÑiq one where consenting parties make their own
decisions, so long as tht spillover effects (pornography in one
instance, pollution in the other' do not upset the public realm.
I believe in the principle of individual achievement, rather than
the inherited, or prescribed allocation of social positions. But I am
nol an egalitarian in the current, fashionable sense that the law
shoulc make persons equalÑa situation which is not, in fact,
equality bu representation by numerical quota. One of the reasons
that I distinguish between needs and wants is that I do not see how,
in the economic realm, one can make incomes equal. The insistence
on wage differentialsÑwhich is strongest among workersÑreflects
the moral intuition that differences in skill and effort should be
rewardec differently. Once a social minimum is created, then what
people dc with the remainder of their money (subject to the
principle of illegiti mate convertibility), is their own business, just as
what people do ir the realm of morals is equally their own business,
so long as it is dont privately. And, if universalism prevails in social
competition, then the criterion of merit, I believe, is a just principle
to reward individua achievement in the society.
I am a conservative in culture because I respect tradition; I
believe in reasoned judgments of good and bad about the qualities
of a work o art; and I regard as necessary the prillciple of authority
in the judgine of thc value ol experience and arl and education. I
use the term culture to mean less than the anthropological catchall
which defines am "patterned way of life" as a culture, and more than
the aristocratic
tradition which restricts culture to refinement and to the high arts.
Culture, for me, is the effort to provide a coherent set of answers to
the existential predicaments that confront all human beings in the
passage of their lives. For this reason, tradition becomes essential to
the vitality of a culture, for it provides the continuity of memory
that teaches how one's forebears met the same existential
predicaments....
The emphasis on judgment is necessary to fend off that lack of
discrimination which regards all "meaningful" experience as good,
and which insists that each group's "culture" is as valid as any other.
Ihe debasement of modernity is the emphasis on "selt-expression,"
and the erasure of the distinction between art and life, so that the
acting out of impulse, rather than the reflective discipline of the
imagination becomes the touchstone of satisfaction. To have
significance, a culture must transcend the present, because it is the
recurrent confrontation with those root questions whose answers,
through a set of symbols, provide a viable coherence to the meaning
of existence. And since the appreciation of tradition in culture, and
judgment in art (and a coherent curriculum in education) has to be
learned, authority--in the form of scholarship, teaching, and skilled
exegesisÑis a necessary guide for the perplexed. And such
authority can be earned only by studv, not by speaking in tongues.
rhe triune positions I hold do have a consistency in that they
unite a belief in the inclusion of all people into citizenship through
that economic minimum which allows for self-respect, the principles
of individual achievement of social position on the basis of merit,
and the continuity of the past and present, in order to shape the
future, as the necessary conditions of a civilized order.
II
In the broader sense, my theme is not just the cultural
contradictions of capitalisrm as such, but of bourgeois society: that
new world created by the mercarltile and fabricating guilds, the
middle or bourgeois c lass that revohltionized modern society after
the sixteenth century by making economi( activity, rather than
military or religious concerns, the (entral feature of society.
C,apitalism is a socioeconomic system geared to the production of
commodities by a rational calculus of (ost and price, and to the
collsistent a(cumulation of capital for the
purposes of reinvestment. But this singular new mode of operation
was fused with a distinctive culture and character structure. In
culture, this was the idea of self-realization, the release of the
individual from traditional restraints and ascriptive ties (family and
birth) so that he could "make" of himself what he willed. In
character structure, this was the norm of self-control and delayed
gratification, of purposeful behavior in the pursuit of well-defined
goals. It is the interrelationship of this economic system, culture, and
character structure which comprised bourgeois civilization. It is the
unravelling of this unity and its consequence, which are the threads
of my argument.
I read the contradictions through two prisms: the first, a
svnthetic construct, is an "ideal type." It is "ahistorical" and treats the
phenomena as a closed system. Thus it can be "hypothetical
deductive" and specify the limits of the phenomena. Its virtue as an
ideal type is the possibility of identifying the essential lineamentsÑ
what I call the axial principles and axial structuresÑof the
circumscribed social realms vvhich the flux of historical change
sometimes obscures. Being static, however, the ideal type does not
account for origins or future directions. For that, one needs the
second prism of history and the detailed empirical complexity whi(h
is its content.
Using the ideal type, I see the contradictions of capitalism in
the antagonistic principles that underlie the technical-economic
political and cultural structues of the society. The technical-
economic realm, which became central in the beginning of
capitalism, is, like all industrial society today, based on the axial pl-
illciplt of e(onolllizing: the effort to a~~-llie ve efficiency through
the breakdowll ot all activities into the smallest components of unit
cost, as defined bv the systems of financial accounting. Tllt axial
structure, based on spe~~-ializatiorl and hierarclly, is Ollt' of
bureaucratic coordinatioll Necessarily, individuals are treated not as
persons but as 'things" (in the sociological jargon their be}lavior
regulated by the role requirements), as instrumellts to maxhlli7.e
profit. In short, indiniduals are dissolved into theil function.
The political realm, which regulates conflict, is governed by the
axial principle of equality: equality before the law, equal (ivil rights,
and, most recently, the (laims of equal so(ial and economic rights.
Because these claims become translated into entitlements, the political
ordel incrt asingly intervelles in the ecollomic and social realms (in the
affairs of corpol-ations, universitits, and hospitals), in order to
redress the positions and rewards generated in the societv bv the economic
system. The axial structure of the polity is representation, and, more
recelltlw, participation. And the demands for participatioll, as a
principle, llOW are carried over into all other realms of the society. The
legitimations, which provide the defenses against its despisers. But the
legitimation of the culture, as I have argued, is the quest for
selfgratification and the expression of "personality." It attacks
established orthodoxy in the ftame of personal autonomy and heterodoxy.
Yet what modern culture has failed to understand is that orthodoxy is not
the guardian of an existent order, but is itself a judgment on the
adequacy and moral character of beliefs, from the standpoint of "right
reason." The paradox is that "heterodoxy" itself has become conformist in
liberal circles and exercises that conformity under the banner of an
antinomian flag. It is a prescription, in its confusions, for the
dissolution of a shared moral order.
Does power still lie in the economic realm, and largely in the
hands of the giant corporations? To a considerable extent this is still so
in Western society, yet such an argument misreads the nature of societal
change today. A capitalist order had historical strength when it fused
property with power through a set of ruling families to maintain the
continuity of the system. The lirst deep, internal structural change in
capitalism was the divorce of family and property from managerial power
and the loss of continuity through the chain of elites. Economic power
today lies in institutions whose chiefs cannot pass along their power to
their heirs and who, increasinglyÑsince property is not private (but
corporate), and technical skill, not property is the basis of managerial
positionsÑno longer have the traditional natural rights, justifications,
and legitimacy in the exercise of that power, and feel it keenly. The
larger fact is that a modern society multiplies the number of
constituencies and given the increasing interdependence of economic and
social effects, the political order becomes the place where power is
wielded in order to manage the systemic problems arising out of that
interdependence and the increasing competition of other, statedirected
economies. The major consequence is the expansion of State power, and the
fact that the State budget, not the division of profits within the
enterprise, becomes the major arbiter of economic decisions (including the
formation ot capital ), and that competition not between capitalist and
workers, but between the multiple constituencies (where corporations still
exercise a large degree of influence) is the mode of allocating power in
the society.
III
A final word on religion, which for me is the fulcrum of my book. I do
not (pace Durkheim) see religion as a "functional necessity" for
society, or that without religion a society will dissolve. I do not
believe in religion as a patch lor the unravelled seams of society. Nor do
societies "dissolve," though in periods of extreme crises (like times of
war) the loss of legitimation may sap the will to resist. Religions cannot
be manulactured. Worse, if they were, the results would be spurious and
soon vanish in the next whirl of fashion.
As Max Weber bitingly observed more than a half century ago:
the need of literary, academic, or cafe-sotiety intelle( tuals to include
religious feelings in the inventory of their sources of impressions and
sensations, and among the topics for discussion, has never yet given
rise to a new religion. Nor can a religious renascence be generated by the
need of authors to compose books, or by the far more effective need of
clever publishers to sell such books. No matter how much the
appearance of a widespread religious interest may be stimulated, no
religion has ever resulted from the needs of intellectuals or from their
chatter. The whirlgig of fashion will presently remove this subject of
conversation and journalism, which fashion has made popular.
Religions grow out of the deepest needs of individuals sharing a common
awakening, and are not created by "engineers of the soul."
My concern with religion goes back to what I assume is the
constitutive character of culture: the wheel of questions that brings one
back to the existential predicaments, the awarelless in men of theil
finiteness and the inexorable limits to their power (the traIlsglessioll
of which is hamartia), and the consequent effort to find a coherent answer
to reconcile them to the human condition. Sin(e that awarentss touches
the deepest springs of consciousness, I believe that a culture which has
become aware of the limits in exploring the mundant will turn, at some
point, to the effort to recover the sacred.
We stand, I believe, with a clearing ahead of US. 'I'he
exhaustiotl ot Modernism, the aridity of C.ommunist life, the tediulll ot
the lililUstrained self, and the meanitlgless of the monolithic pOliti(al
(tlalltS, all indicate that a long era is (-oming to a slow clo.se. 'I'he
impulse of Modernism was to leap beyond: beyond nature, beyoll(l ( ultult,
bex ontt tragedyÑto explore the apelron, the boulldless, driven bv the
selfinfinitizing spirit of the radital self. Bourgeois soc ietv sulltttl
economicS from moral norms to allow the individual to pursue his own
self-defined wants, yet at the same timt sought to belld the ( ultul-t to
its restricted moral norrlls. Modernism zvas tht major etfol-t to brtak
away from those restrictions in the name of experiell~~-e, the aestllt
ti(and the experimental and, in the end, brol;t all boulldali(s. Ytt it wt
now seek to return economics to moral norms, is there not a similar warranty
for culture?
We are groping for a new vocabulary whose keyword seems to be limits:
a limit'to growth, a limit to the spoliation of the environment, a limit to
arms, a limit to the tampering with biological nature. Yet if we seek to
establish a set of limits in the economy and technology, will we also set a
limit to the exploration of those cultural experiences which go beyond moral
norms and embrace the demonic in the delusion that all experience is
"creative"? Can we set a limit to hubris? The answer to that question could
resolve the cultural contradiction of capitalism and its deceptive double,
semblable et frere, the culture of modernity. It would leave only the economic
and political mundane to be tamed.
50s HOME | READING LIST | NEWS | FILREIS HOME
Document URL:
http://www.writing.upenn.edu/~afilreis/50s/bell-on-modernism.html
Last
modified: Thursday, 31-May-2007 09:42:46 EDT