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
