The Passions and the Interests: Political Arguments for Capitalism before Its Triumph (Princeton Classics)

by Albert O. Hirschman

He also believes it likely that these advances will not be accompanied by the very great inequalities of fortune that were characteristic of the prior age, but by “such a gradation of opulence, as leaving no chasm from top to bottom of the scale.”27

Didn't exactly pan out.

For example, among the reasons for which “the foundation on which freedom was built, may serve to support a tyranny” he lists the fear of losing wealth and situations in which “heirs of family find themselves straitened and poor, in the midst of affluence.” Relative deprivation and ressentiment resulting from actual or feared downward mobility are here seen as intimately bound up with the acquisitive society and its tumultuous ways, and these feelings are viewed as breeding ground for the ready acceptance of whatever “strong” government promises to stave off such real or imagined dangers.5 Moreover, commerce creates a desire for tranquility and efficiency, and this may be another source of despotism: When we suppose government to have bestowed a degree of tranquillity, which we sometimes hope to reap from it, as the best of its fruits, and public affairs to proceed, in the several departments of legislation and execution, with the least possible interruption to commerce and lucrative arts; such a state … is more akin to despotism than we are apt to imagine. … Liberty is never in greater danger than it is when we measure national felicity … by the mere tranquillity which may attend on equitable administration.6

If it is true that the economy must be deferred to, then there is a case not only for constraining the imprudent actions of the prince but for repressing those of the people, for limiting participation, in short, for crushing anything that could be interpreted by some economist-king as a threat to the proper functioning of the “delicate watch.”

… With man in society, things are very different: first the necessary must be taken care of, then the superfluous: then come the delights, then the accumulation of immense riches, then of subjects, then of slaves: never is there a moment of respite. What is most remarkable is that the less the needs are natural and pressing the more the passions increase and, what is worse, the power to satisfy them.12

My story takes it for granted that some men became so impelled and focuses instead on the reaction to the new phenomenon by what is called today the intellectual, managerial, and administrative elite. That reaction was favorable, not because the money-making activities were approved in themselves, but because they were thought to have a most beneficial side effect: they kept the men who were engaged in them “out of mischief,” as it were, and had, more specifically, the virtue of imposing restraints on princely caprice, arbitrary government, and adventurous foreign policies. Weber claims that capitalistic behavior and activities were the indirect (and originally unintended) result of a desperate search for individual salvation.

THE extent to which the ideas that have been discussed in this essay have been erased from the collective consciousness can be gauged by recalling some contemporary critiques of capitalism. In one of the most attractive and influential of these critiques, the stress is on the repressive and alienating feature of capitalism, on the way it inhibits the development of the “full human personality.” From the vantage point of the present essay, this accusation seems a bit unfair, for capitalism was precisely expected and supposed to repress certain human drives and proclivities and to fashion a less multifaceted, less unpredictable, and more “one-dimensional” human personality. This position, which seems so strange today, arose from extreme anguish over the clear and present dangers of a certain historical period, from concern over the destructive forces unleashed by the human passions with the only exception, so it seemed at the time, of “innocuous” avarice. In sum, capitalism was supposed to accomplish exactly what was soon to be denounced as its worst feature.

In all of these explicit or implicit critiques of capitalism there was little recognition that, to an earlier age, the world of the “full human personality,” replete with diverse passions, appeared as a menace that needed to be exorcized to the greatest possible extent.

Good point.

Here is the old idea of money-making as an “innocent” pastime and outlet for men’s energies, as an institution that diverts men from the antagonistic competition for power to the somewhat ridiculous and distasteful, but essentially harmless accumulation of wealth.

Errrrr, debatable.

Schumpeter argued that territorial ambition, the desire for colonial expansion, and the warlike spirit in general were not the inevitable consequence of the capitalist system, as the Marxists would have it. Rather, they resulted from residual, precapitalist mentalities that unfortunately were strongly embedded among the ruling groups of the major European powers. For Schumpeter, capitalism itself could not possibly make for conquest and war: its spirit was rational, calculating, and therefore averse to risk-taking on the scale implicit in warmaking and in other heroic antics.

Capitalism, which was once received as so liberating—from venal tyrants and greedy aristocrats—was now so disappointing, its features the purview of the dismal science. How did this happen? In the course of his arguments, Hirschman found himself trying to figure out how capitalism was initially understood before its triumph in order to present alternative perspectives after its triumph; if he could reveal its prospectus, he could thereby shed light on why it was seen to fall short. Deriving this kind of “theory,” what we might now call recovering a memory of capitalism, might thwart the temptations of throwing one’s hopes behind the salvations of the pure market or, at the other extreme, of the social revolution.

While Marxists and romantics alike criticized capitalism for its lack of moral compass, for having demeaned individual drives to narrow and base motives, in fact they denounced the system for realizing precisely what it was originally hoped would happen, turning the “wicked” into men who would have an “interest in not being so.” Hirschman discovered that a war was being waged over the very concept of human nature; for several centuries, “man was widely viewed as the stage on which fierce and unpredictable battles were fought between reason and passion or, later, among the various passions.”e