The Enchantments of Mammon: How Capitalism Became the Religion of Modernity

by Eugene McCarraher

The Romantic antipathy to capitalism, mechanization, and disenchantment stemmed not from a facile and nostalgic desire to return to the past, but from a view that much of what passed for “progress” was in fact inimical to human flourishing: a specious productivity that required the acceptance of venality, injustice, and despoliation; a technological and organizational efficiency that entailed the industrialization of human beings; and the primacy of the production of goods over the cultivation and nurturance of men and women. This train of iniquities followed inevitably from the chauvinism of what William Blake called “single vision,” a blindness to the enormity of reality that led to a “Babylon builded in the waste.”