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

Born in 1887, meanwhile, Freyer took a similar journey but ended up at a different destination. He too grew increasingly disillusioned with the spiritual emptiness and personal alienation that characterized modern society and searched for a radical alternative to the "moral dead-end of capitalism." But whereas Lukács found his salvation in communism, Freyer found his in National Socialism. Neither a racist nor an antisemite, Freyer, like many intellectuals, was attracted to the Nazis because they seemed to offer what capitalism lacked: an opportunity to sacrifice for the larger good and participate in a world historical project.

THE GREAT TRANSFORMATION

Another set of criticisms focused on capitalism's effects not on individuals but on society. Well into the nineteenth century, Muller points out, it was widely believed that societies could be held together only by "a shared vision of the public good," and so many intellectuals worried that the growth and spread of markets would lead to the decay of social and political institutions. An early expression of such concerns came from one Justus Möser, a fascinating figure Muller rescues from obscurity. Born in 1720 in the small west German town of Osnabrück, Möser watched with fear as the market began to destabilize the society in which he lived. He decried the fact that in the emerging capitalist world,

money and paid service decide all, and both have shamefully extinguished the economy of public honor which were the nonmonetary means by which patriots were rewarded. The economy of public honor led in a certain and orderly fashion to the commonweal; it functioned on the basis of duties rather than punishments, it created patriots willing to sacrifice for the sake of their fellow citizens and become involved in all undertakings for the sake of the state and renown. Now the rich in their gilded coaches trample the common citizen into the dust; and the paid servant laughs at the man who once sought as his reward for voluntary and grand service nothing but the honor of wearing the black coat of public office.

For Möser, in short, basing social relationships on material exchange and reward was not a historical necessity but rather a choice that the communities of his time were making, and a bad one.

Möser also bemoaned the way the emerging capitalist system led to a stifling homogenization. By insisting on the universality and primacy of a set of "simple principles" and by allowing the direction and nature of social relationships to be determined by economic needs, the spread of markets threatened to rob communities of their distinctive cultures and institutions. Capitalism thus departed, he declared, "from the true plan of nature, which reveals its wealth through its multiplicity, and would clear the path to despotism, which seeks to coerce all according to a few rules and so loses the richness that comes with variety."

Concerns similar to Möser's continued to be raised by European intellectuals as time passed, and became increasingly widespread and impassioned. In 1887, the German sociologist Ferdinand Tönnies published his path-breaking Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft (Community and society), setting the terms of the debate for generations to come. Tönnies asserted that there were two basic forms of social life, that which existed before the spread of markets and that which existed after. In the precapitalist world, community reigned supreme. Commitment to the public good was the highest value, and citizens were bound together by common views and an instinctual, unquestioned sense of social solidarity. The dominance of markets, in contrast, created a type of social organization where self-interests rather than communal interests were paramount and the only bonds between citizens were temporary and shifting relationships of contract and exchange. Although Tönnies intended his analysis to be objective, he was clearly haunted by the sense that modern man had paid a terrible price for the advance of the market -- the loss of communities united by shared ideals and the emergence in their place of meaningless and transitory societal groupings. As he famously noted, "In community people remain essentially united in spite of all separating factors, whereas in society they are essentially separated in spite of all uniting factors."

A recurrent subtheme of Muller's book, interestingly, is how such ideas about capitalism intersected with antisemitism. He thus describes, for example, how Tönnies' categories were taken a step further by the German social scientist Werner Sombart, who placed the ultimate responsibility for the shift on the shoulders of the Jews. Jews, Sombart argued, embodied all the traits valued most highly by the market -- egoism, self-interest, and abstract thinking -- and therefore had the most to gain from its spread. With Sombart, the triumph of capitalism was thus portrayed as "the replacement of a concrete, particularist, Christian Gemeinschaft by an abstract, universalized, Judaized Gesellschaft," an ominous turn that gave the alienated and displaced someone handy to blame.

WHAT WOULD BURKE DO?