I would also call attention to Max Weber's The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism and R. H. Tawney's Religion and the Rise of Capitalism. These studies show the development of the bourgeois mindset and the rise of the acquisitive class that underlie capitalism arising out of the transition from the Catholicism of the Middle Ages to the Protestantism of the Reformation that emphasized freedom and individualism. Calvinism and Puritanism contributed the "Protestant work ethic" as a moral basis.
The Middle Ages were theocratic and feudal. Did liberalism replace theocracy along with capitalism displacing feudalism as dominant. Is liberalism the new religion, and where economic liberalism dominates are economists, managers and acquisitors the new priesthood.
The question is not only the rise of capitalism but the reasons for a break with the ancient and medieval culture that precluded it. One obvious reason is the rise of science and the development of technology that gave birth to industry and therefore private ownership of the means of production. However, a cultural shift also took place in the direction of liberalism — social, political, and economic.
But that is not sufficient. There was also a cultural and institutional shift taking place that favored the development of liberalism and capitalism as economic liberalism and democracy as political liberalism. Markets catered to social liberalism as free agents exercised choice.
Capitalism presumes the precedence of economic liberalism (the sanctity of private property and contracts) over social and political liberalism. Social and political liberalism are required to provide agents' free choice that underlies market exchange.
If this is the case, then the assumption that liberalism is somehow natural is mistaken. It is a cultural phenomenon that Continental European and British, including American colonial. This brings up the question of the degree to which these cultural developments are exportable to vastly different cultures. Is liberalism a natural basis for globalization as liberals assume, and is it even sufficient?
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Capitalism and religionDavid F. Ruccio | Professor of Economics University of Notre Dame Notre Dame
2 comments:
From Bruenig at the link:
"Capitalism is a system braced by stories. Consider the rise of the liberal individual, a kind of atomistic personhood, distinct from all other persons. It seems the whole Enlightenment had a hand in creating this particular view of man—yet the concept was unknown to the people of the medieval and ancient worlds. The idea was not intentionally developed as a thread in capitalism’s web of self-justification, but it has been recruited for such purposes, where it underwrites much free-market discourse about the primacy of the individual over the collective. This is only one of the many accounts which have been absorbed into the vast narrative support structure of capitalism"
Tom this is the point I was trying to make the other day with you... 'capitalism' is not foundational .... it is libertarianism which is foundational....
She makes the point here that 'capitalism' can be seen as a byproduct or result of libertarianism...
libertarianism is the REAL problem....
rsp,
I would not say "libertarianism" but rather liberalism.
The term "libertarianism" generally denote some type of anarchism, either of the right, like anarcho-capitalism, or of the left, like anarcho-syndicalism.
Wikipedia
he anarcho-communist Joseph Déjacque was the first person to describe himself as "libertarian".[73] Unlike Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, he argued that, "it is not the product of his or her labour that the worker has a right to, but to the satisfaction of his or her needs, whatever may be their nature."[74] In 1844 in Germany the post-hegelian philosopher Max Stirner published the book, The Ego and Its Own, which would later be considered an influential early text of individualist anarchism.[75]
Capitalism is not foundationally anarchistic. Capitalism self-identified with classical liberalism through Locke, Smith, Ricardo, Bastiat, Say, Malthus, Bentham, and J. S. Mill, for example, rather than the anarchists of the time, like Wm. Godwin or Proudhon.
But capitalism also assumes liberal democracy as the government type, in particular the repesentative type of democracy characteristic of a republic that the ownership class can control institutionally.
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