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Responses to Rothman: A Pivotal Question Unanswered
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# : |
19573 |
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Section : |
MODERN THOUGHT
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| Issue
Date : |
11 / 1991 |
776 Words |
| Author
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Robert Heilbroner
Robert Heilbroner is Norman Thomas Professor of Economics
emeritus at the New School for Social Research in New York.
His books include The Worldly Philosophers, Business
Civilization in Decline, and The Nature and Logic of
Capitalism. |
I find much to sympathize with in Professor Rothman's view of American entrepreneurship.
Like him, I am made profoundly uneasy by the cultural pressures developed within a capitalist society. Again like him I am convinced of the need to search for the deep roots of surface behavior. And, not least, I agree with his cautiously pessimistic prognosis with respect to American business entrepreneurship.
That said, there remains a core question within Rothman's piece that robs it, for myself at least, of the cutting edge of convincing argument.
The missing problem is the failure to address the question of why American capitalist culture and its social embodiments have decayed as they have, but not the cultures and entrepreneurship of other nations.
Here, of necessity, I must argue by anecdote and generalization, never the best way to address these matters. But in the absence of comparative international TATs and similar protocols, let me put the matter this way: Who has not reflected on the question of why the Japanese are so different from ourselves? Or the Swedes or the Italians, the French or the Germans? The answer that we give to this question is that their "cultures" are different, which indeed they are. But different in what ways? Here the matter becomes exceedingly complex. They seem to be different in a thousand surface particulars, but probably in only a few central elements having to do with nurturing practices, the sources of that superego orientation that Professor Rothman--with my concurrence--believes to be so strategic in elucidating behavior.
But that is not the end of the matter. For have we not also reflected that despite the differences in cultures, one can "do business" with Japan, Sweden, Italy, France, and Germany? To be sure, occasionally culture gets in the way and negotiations come to nothing because one side misreads the conversation or breaches the etiquette of the other. But after all, that can happen between a Texan and a New Englander. What is crucial is that there is a commonality of understanding with respect to the rules of the game of capitalism that overrides huge differences in culture.
What we face then is a demonstration of both the extraordinary power of a capitalist "culture"--better, perhaps, of "business" culture--that insinuates itself within the historical and social traditions of many highly
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