Is the market society a good society?

Public Interest, Summer, 2003 by Daniel J. Mahoney

IT is tempting to identify the European intellectual tradition with uniform hostility toward capitalism. Certainly, many of its leading thinkers have tended to resent a social order in which money plays the dominant role in determining the character of social relations. They have heaped scorn on the philistinism of bourgeois society and denounced the injustice of an order where intellectuals are subordinate to the bourgeoisie in power and prestige. But as Jerry Z. Muller makes clear in his new book, The Mind and the Marker, capitalism has had its share of forceful advocates among the best European thinkers of the past three centuries. And its most serious critics have been aware of its virtues as well as of the paucity of humane alternatives to it. It is a mistake, then, simply to identify modern intellectuals with "bourgeois bashing."

Muller is an intellectual historian who does full justice to his craft. At the heart of his book are lucid, penetrating accounts of 16 European philosophers, economists, and social critics, from Voltaire and Smith to Marcuse and Hayek, who have wrestled with the problems of commercial society. Through these intellectual portraits Muller gives us a comprehensive account of capitalism's advantages and drawbacks, as well as of the sharp intellectual debates that have accompanied its spread. With the historian's eye for context, he brings to light the novelty of capitalism while also showing how it continues to draw upon our premodern moral inheritance. The book is at once an exploration of the deep tensions in capitalist societies and a measured defense of the achievements of this new political and economic order.

Muller begins with an introduction to the deep-seated reservations of classical and Christian thinkers toward commerce and money-making. This introduction enables the reader to appreciate the genuinely revolutionary character of modern capitalism. The premodern philosophical tradition was highly skeptical of the unrestricted acquisition of riches. Aristotle feared the pernicious consequences of a psychological disposition that he called pleonexia, the limitless drive for gain and acquisition. In his view, this impulse was destructive of both good morals and sturdy citizenship. The classical republics discouraged luxury and identified patriotism with frugality and an unflinching dedication to the common good. If the classics disparaged money and commerce in the name of civic and moral virtue, the Church fathers saw in the mercantile life a threat to the salvation of souls. A preoccupation with material goods was a mark of pride and of excessive concern with the things of this world. So the classics attacked co mmerce and luxury from the haughty perspective of pride, while Christians denounced it in the name of humility before the things of God.

It would take nothing less than a comprehensive "transvaluation of values" to open the European mind to the full moral and political case for commercial society. The opportunity arose after the unity of Christendom had been shattered by the Reformation and the wars of religion that ensued. Faced with the horrific consequences of sectarian strife and fearful of the authoritarian propensities of the Christian churches, such early modern thinkers as Grotius, Hobbes, Locke, and Spinoza sought a new socio-political order that placed well-being above all else. The old European dialectic of pride and humility that had defined Western reflection on civic and moral virtue for over a millennium was to give way to a new emphasis on "peaceable, sociable, and comfortable living," as Hobbes put it. This religious, intellectual, and cultural revolution made possible for the first time the full legitimation of commercial activity, but for centuries afterward debate over its fairness and decency continued to rage.

IT is this debate that most interests Muller and especially the arguments of a diverse group of thinkers-call them conservative liberals"-who defended economic liberty and premodern mores and restraints. Burke and Hegel in particular stand out in Muller's account as exemplars of the conservative liberal approach to questions of political economy. Both philosophers defended individuality as a great achievement of modern civilization but opposed the endless pursuit of human wants. Both strove to reconcile the achievements of modern liberal politics and economics with the rich moral inheritance of Western civilization.

Critics have been stumped by the difficulty of reconciling what Winston Churchill once called "the Burke of liberty" with "the Burke of authority." I-low does Burke's "liberal" defense of the American Revolution and his indictment of British conduct on the Indian subcontinent cohere with his "conservative" opposition to the French Revolution? To his credit, Muller shows that Burke's position was perfectly consistent. Throughout his public life, Burke was an eloquent advocate for British parliamentary liberties, a serious adherent of the principles of modern liberal political economy, and a critic of all efforts to erode the traditional moral constitution of Europe. His defense of prescriptive British liberties, his indictment of the cruel and corrupt conduct of the East India Company, and his assault on the tyrannical aspirations of the French revolutionaries can all be traced to his effort to preserve certain traditional manners and morals. Burke was above all a partisan of what he called, in his Reflections on the Revolution in France, a "manly, moral and regulated liberty." He understood more clearly than most the crucial dependence of capitalist democracy on traditional, noncommercial virtues.