Diane Coyle — The capitalism we deserve

  Émile Durkheim held that collective consciousness is a key factor in sociology. Societies not only differ owing to culture and institutional arrangements, but also culture and institutional arrangements are both the product of the group mindset and also influence its transformation through influence on the mindsets of individuals. Sociology is a science to the degree that it can identify regularities in social behavior. 

Culture and institutions are analogous to mathematical functions with respect to outcomes of individual behavior in groups, so it is not surprising that patterns of social behavior can be identified and expressed rigorously. 

Societies are not merely aggregations of individuals making individual decisions independently based on individual preferences, as some have supposed. Not only is cross-influence operative, but also sets of rules, some implicit, like tradition, and some explicit, like law. Behavior is internally correlated by shared mindsets but and externally correlated by culture and institutions.

Capitalism is a socio-economic phenomenon exhibited by many societies. Being an expression of a shard mindset and established through custom and law, it is subject to these influences and follows rules. 

Capitalism's expression and transformations in particular societies is based on the level of collective consciousness of that society. The type of collective consciousness and their level in the sense of exhibiting inclusivity and universality that sociologists call "solidarity" fluctuates.

In this sense the culture and institutions that a society "deserves" is based on the level of collective consciousness. Because collective consciousness is not constant, it can be "improved" in the sense of increasing the sense of solidarity. This implies different varieties of capitalism based on different levels of solidarity, from the extreme individualism of laissez-faire to the managed capitalism of social democracy.

Historian Jürgen Kocka has written Capitalism: A Short History at 169 pages. What’s more, it spans the centuries from China during the Han Dynasty through the Arab empire and the European Middle Ages to global financial capitalism today.

The Enlightened Economist
The capitalism we deserve
Diane Coyle | freelance economist and a former advisor to the UK Treasury. She is a member of the UK Competition Commission and is acting Chairman of the BBC Trust, the governing body of the British Broadcasting Corporation