We Didn't Start the Fire: Capitalism and Its Critics, Then and Now

Thanks to globalization, it is often said, the world is at the dawn of a new era. The spread of markets across the globe and the deepening and quickening of economic interconnections have narrowed the choices open to leaders and publics. You can either opt out of the system and languish or put on what Thomas Friedman calls neoliberalism's "golden straitjacket" -- after which "your economy grows and your politics shrinks." The new order's boosters tout its productivity and efficiency, but critics bemoan its hollowing out of democracy and communal solidarity. From blue-collar autoworkers and turtle-suited environmentalists in the United States to angry farmers in France and frustrated strongmen in Malaysia, calls ring out to reclaim some areas of life from the ever-tightening grip of the market.

The controversy has emerged so quickly that it seems new and strange -- although in fact it is anything but, as Jerry Z. Muller demonstrates in his wonderful new book The Mind and the Market. A historian at Catholic University, Muller has written a lively and accessible survey of what dozens of major European thinkers have thought about capitalism. The value of the book lies less in its contribution to the literature on any particular individual than in its gathering together in one place of a wealth of information on figures from Burke, Smith, and Voltaire to Schumpeter, Keynes, and Hayek. Muller's masterful sketches of intellectuals from across the political spectrum help put today's battles over globalization in proper historical perspective. He reminds us just how venerable many of the current antiglobalization movement's concerns actually are, and thus how they need to be understood and addressed not as the consequences of recent policies or conditions but rather as inherent in the dynamics of capitalism itself. What becomes painfully clear in the process is how far the level of debate has fallen in recent decades and how impoverished and narrow contemporary thought about the market has become.

GREED AND GOODNESS

Because Americans take capitalism for granted, they often fail to appreciate what a historically recent and revolutionary phenomenon it is. Trade and commerce have been features of human society from the beginning, but it was really only in the eighteenth century that economies began to emerge in which markets were the primary force in the production and distribution of goods. And as soon as such economies did emerge, they began transforming not only economic relationships but social and political ones as well. These transformations were so radical and so destabilizing, in fact, that they prompted an almost immediate backlash.

Some of the critics' concerns related to the harmful effects that the glorification of moneymaking had on individual character. Throughout Western history, Muller notes, the pursuit of material gain had generally been frowned upon, if not actively discouraged, since it was seen as incompatible with a virtuous life. Thus Plato had Socrates say in The Republic that "the more men value money the less they value virtue," while the Apostle Paul argued that "the love of money is the root of all evils." Critics of capitalism could draw on this tradition, and did. In the mid-nineteenth century, for example, Marx's collaborator Friedrich Engels stressed the new system's "morally scandalous" foundations. Self-interest was really nothing more than greed, he claimed, and greed stood in direct conflict with morality and the larger needs of humanity. He and Marx were convinced that the market's exaltation of self-interest would ultimately erode all restraints on behavior and thus increase social conflict and disorder -- a development they were ready to welcome, since it would pave the way for the rise of socialism.

The critics argued, moreover, that in addition to encouraging avarice, market-based societies distracted people from the common purposes and higher ends to which life should be devoted. Advocates might claim that capitalism's greatest accomplishment was freeing individuals to pursue their own self-interest, but the critics replied that in practice this often translated into an obsession with trivial choices about consumption rather than anything deeper and more noble.

Such concerns were voiced with increasing vehemence and regularity during the surge of globalization that began toward the end of the nineteenth century and led a surprisingly large number of intellectuals to reject the liberal, capitalist system completely. Muller illustrates this dynamic by contrasting the careers of the Hungarian revolutionary and literary critic Georg Lukács and the German sociologist and political ideologist Hans Freyer. Born in 1885, Lukács gradually became obsessed by the "spiritual emptiness and moral inadequacy of capitalism" and became convinced that the system was not worth saving. Longing to replace it with an entirely new type of civilization, one that promised a fresh start and an opportunity to lead a meaningful and purposeful life, he eventually turned to communism. For Lukács, Muller notes, it seemed to provide precisely "what capitalism could not: a cause to which one could devote one's whole life, rather than just part of oneself; a source of discipline worth accepting; and an all-encompassing community."