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Responses to Rothman: Capitalism Itself Corrupts
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19575 |
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Section : |
MODERN THOUGHT
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| Issue
Date : |
11 / 1991 |
647 Words |
| Author
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Christopher Lasch
Christopher Lasch is Alonzo Watson Professor of History at the
University of Rochester. |
Edith Wharton, hardly an uncritical admirer of the commercial classes of nineteenth-century New York, grudgingly praised them in her memoirs (written in the 1930s) for their "social amenity and financial incorruptibility." The world, she added, had "traveled far enough" from those virtues "to begin to estimate their value."
These words could serve as an epigraph for Professor Rothman's interesting essay. His contrast between nineteenth-century capitalism and the irresponsible, unproductive capitalism of our own day will be dismissed, in some quarters, as an exercise in nostalgia--the predictable reproach that now greets appreciative retrospection of any kind. But our ancestors' virtues stand out more clearly now that we have lost them, and it ought to be possible to appreciate those virtues, as Wharton did, without forgetting our ancestors' faults.
Nineteenth-century capitalism was ruthlessly acquisitive, but it was tempered by a sense of social responsibility inherited from earlier religious traditions. Now that conscientious scruples constraining the hunger for money and power have pretty much disappeared, the logic of the market plays itself out without effective opposition.
My own account of these matters would differ from Rothman's in several particulars. For one thing, it would emphasize the inherently destructive force of the market, which has no use for tradition, for what are commonly referred to as family values, or for any values at all if they stand in the way of quick profits.
Max Weber was dead wrong, in my opinion, in linking the Protestant ethic to the spirit of capitalism. Reformation theology, Calvinism in particular, was the product of a world in which capitalist enterprise remained peripheral--a world of farmers, artisans, and tradesmen. To be sure, Protestantism rejected monastic withdrawal as the ideal of the religious life; but it urged people to content themselves with a modest standard of living and to resist the temptations of worldly success. There was nothing in early Protestantism, least of all in Calvinism, to support the idea, advanced by Adam Smith and other eighteenth-century economists, that a taste for luxury might actually serve the interest of economic development. Economic development was simply not part of the Calvinist program.
It is not surprising, therefore, that Calvinism decline, in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century New England, precisely in those areas most thoroughly penetrated by
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