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

by Eugene McCarraher

Like earlier tyrants, “the great employer” rules not only by force but also “mostly by fairy tales.” Though “the sight of a millionaire is seldom a enchanting sight,” Chesterton observed, “nevertheless he is in his way an enchanter.” The modern industrialist was “much more than a swindler,” he mused; he was “a mesmerist and a mystagogue,” a “sorcerer” like the one Marx and Engels had accused in The Communist Manifesto. If maladroit in the arts of enchantment, he hires a coven of magicians—otherwise known as advertisers—and pays extravagant fees for the fetishes they conjure. “Even if there is only the devil to pay,” the industrialist-warlock foots the bill for the shamans of capitalist culture, whose charms of corporate sorcery studded the popular press. Coming upon a description of “the Happy Factory” in an American magazine, Chesterton noted how its vision of mechanization turned quickly and daftly seraphic. “From height to height of ideality” it soared “until it ended with a sort of hush, as of the ultimate opening of the heavens.”