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

by Eugene McCarraher

In the countryside, a similar moral and theological economy prevailed: “the commons,” as it was called in England. “Commons” meant not only the common fields and forests of a manor but also the assignment to the whole community of power to determine property rights, the provision of subsistence, and the organization of labor.

Before the Norman invasions of the eleventh century, village land in Saxon England belonged, not to individual people or families, but to all residents of the village; individuals enjoyed rights of use, not ownership. Even after the Norman conquest, when village lands belonged to a lord, common rights remained, conditional on fealty and tribute to the manorial noble. Thus the commons was no utopian ideal; it reflected the historical and everyday experience of cooperation and mutual aid.

In England, the two documents that enshrined the commons in law and morality—the Magna Carta and the Charter of the Forest, both forced on King John in 1215—possessed, in Peter Linebaugh’s words, “the aura of power, the glamour of color, and the solemnity of religion.” Because the world was a sacramental place, a viol...

The commons also pointed to a barely repressed desire for communism that lurked as the political unconscious of medieval Christendom. “The ideal—if only man’s nature could rise to it—was communism,” as R. H. Tawney long ago recognized. Private property was considered a rueful concession to the circumstances of a fallen world; property was either a necessary evil, a right of use, or a social trust.

One’s land, workshop, or manor was a means of subsistence and a contribution to the common good, not a means of increasing one’s wealth or of fostering accumulation as an end in itself. Under the medieval cope of heaven, property had to be directed toward the common good, not employed or aggregated for private gain; distributed as widely as possible, not concentrated in ever fewer hands; and dispensed to the poor after the requirements of one’s “station in life” had been met.

A century later, William Langland asserted in Piers the Plowman, his mid-fourteenth century moral allegory, that “Christians should hold their riches in common, and none covet anything for himself.” Where devotion to Mammon wrought misery and death, “Love,” Langland wrote, “is the physician of life … the direct way to Heaven.”7 Medieval millenarianism suggests that a beatific, communist promise resides at the heart of Christianity—a promise whose vindication was rooted in a metaphysics and theology of sacramental love.

Puritan ministers revered and publicized the work of pamphleteers, such as Edward Misselden, Thomas Mun, Nicholas Barbon, and William Petty, advocates for greater freedom in monetary policy, international trade, and enclosure. Through enclosure—the termination of rights to the commons, the transformation of customary land tenures into rents, the fencing of common land, and the dispossession of tenants—Puritan nobles and gentry hastened the capitalist transformation of English agriculture.

Puritans were also the shock troops in what Peter Burke has called “the triumph of Lent”: the reduction of holy days, the curtailment of feasts, the grim cancellation of Carnival.

Puritans condemned lust and gluttony but never inveighed “against the lucrative vices of men of trade or handicraft.” What Christopher Hill rightly identified as the Puritans’ “cultural revolution” was rooted in their indomitable and lucrative faith in the divine imperative of profit. “When duty was so profitable,” as Tawney asked sardonically, “might not profit-making be a duty?”

The Puritan God was the Celestial Improver with unrelenting demands for more. As Baxter ominously declared in his Christian Directory, “if God shew you a way in which you may lawfully get more than in another way”—without, of course, “wrong to your soul or to any other”—then “if you refuse this, and choose the less gainful way, you cross one of the ends of your Calling, and you refuse to be God’s Steward.” Of course, Baxter cautioned, we may not pile up “riches for our fleshly ends”; but “in subordination to higher things,” the pursuit of wealth was justified, even mandatory.

“for he was the true householder.” Since

Echoing Baxter and other Puritans, Herbert reasoned that since riches are “a blessing from God,” then “all are to procure them, honestly and seasonably, when they are not better employed.”

Bensalem also sports an entertainment industry, with devices for “feats of juggling, false apparitions, impostures, and illusions” as well as for imitation of motion, “by images,” in what resembles film or holograms.

The island’s intelligentsia relies on “Merchants of Light,” businessmen who, concealing their identities, procure knowledge and inventions from all over the globe.22 The New Atlantis spawned five centuries of technological beatific visions.

Calling for the abolition of feudal land tenures and their replacement with contractual wage relations, Platte contended that new property relations would leave both landlord and tenant free to “trie experiments” and “improve to the utmost.”

If they no longer held that Catholic sacramental ritual was efficacious for salvation, they believed that they encountered God in the midst of material creation—and wealth.

If Protestants had rejected Catholicism as a “gospel of works”—a scheme of salvation through enchanting external rituals rather than inward faith—the Protestant ethic was a gospel of work, with riches as the new eucharistic tokens of communion with divinity. To Puritans and other “improving” Protestants, the golden rules of capitalism codified a post-medieval theological economy.

“possessive individualism,”

Locke observed that God has given the earth to men and women “to make use of it to the best advantage of life and convenience”; indeed, we are “sent into the world by His order and about His business.” Left without attention to “His business,” land that “hath no improvement … is called, as indeed it is, waste.”

An acre of land in America may be as fertile as an acre in England, he observes, but it is not worth 1 / 1,000 of the English acre, for “all the Profit an Indian received from it were it valued and sold here.”

The value of the acre to the Indian as subsistence means little or nothing to Locke; what matters is the creation of exchange value, assessed in monetary terms and underwritten by the covert metaphysics of capital.

A key historical observation.

Locke remained well aware of the purely conventional nature of monetary value; he expressed astonishment that “a little piece of yellow metal” could “be worth a great piece of flesh or a whole heap of corn.”

Thus in Locke’s view, “improvement,” not labor, confers a right to property—improvement understood as God’s appointed “business” of increasing profitable production.

“His business” is capitalist business: the systematic entrepreneurial development of land through enclosure from the commons. For Locke, the whole point of the commons is to be steadily diminished by gainful improvement; the land and labor themselves are evaluated in the terms of pecuniary reason and ontology.

So despite—or rather, precisely because of—his concern for the small agricultural proprietor, Locke remains, along with Hobbes, one of the premiere ideological architects of possessive individualism.

Far from offering an apologetic for labor, Locke vindicated the divine right of capital, supplementing Hobbes’s fabrication of enchantment in Leviathan (1651)—where the “commonwealth” ...

At the same time, in sanctioning the dispossession of indigenous peoples for their lack of prowess in “His business,” the Second Treatise contained a theological w...

The religious allure of the new capitalist order obsessed numerous Elizabethan and Jacobean writers, from poets and playwrights to political economists and commercial pamphleteers. Mammon, Philip Spenser wrote in The Faerie Queene (1590), is “God of the world and worldlings … greatest god below the skye.”

Ben Jonson satirized the commercial culture of Jacobean London in Volpone (1606), whose eponymous protagonist—a greedy and salacious Venetian nobleman—greets the dawn with a gilded prayer:

Good morning to the day; and next, my gold, Open the shrine that I may see my saint: Hail the world’s soul, and mine … … let me kiss With adoration, thee, and every relic Of sacred treasure, in this blessed room.

“Our summum bonum is commodity,” Robert Burton lamented in The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621), “and the goddess we adore, Dea moneta, Queen Money, to whom we daily offer sacrifice.” Queen Money poisoned souls; divided friends; parted lovers;

She made a mockery of piety and revealed the face of perverse, sublunary desire: “Take your heaven, let them have money.”

with new delights, / As may compare with Heaven.” Eden is innocent of property, enclosure, and hierarchy. With

Before the Fall, they performed “no more toil than sufficed / To recommend cool Zephr, and made ease / More easy.”

Once Satan slithers into the Garden, this earthly beatitude ends, and the sinful regime of toil and accumulation commences.

Milton suggests that the ethic of improvement is the spawn of Mammon. Milton’s Mammon is the perfect example of perversion: a being who reveres and desires creation even more than he loves its Creator:

Milton portrays Mammon as the demon of possessive individualism.

As the prototype of industrious improvement, Mammon leads the excavation crew for Pandemonium, the capital city of Hell, and they erect “a Temple … with Golden Architrave.” As Milton makes clear, the construction of Pandemonium is the paradigm for later human despoliation of the earth. Just as Mammon fractures the soil and mountains of hell for building materials, so men, “by his suggestion taught,” seek to plunder and desecrate creation: They have “ransacked the center, and with impious hands / Rifled the bowels of their mother Earth / For treasures better hid.”35

The most profound challenge to the new regime of enclosure and commerce came from the Diggers, whose spokesman Winstanley addressed the question of property with remarkable theological bravado. In April 1649, Winstanley and several others occupied a piece of common land on St. George’s Hill, in Surrey, just outside London. After tearing down fences and other enclosures, they planted vegetables and invited “all to come in and help them.” Reviving the ethos of the medieval countryside, they declared that England would never be free until all enjoyed a “free allowance to dig and labor the commons.”

Harassed in court and bullied by local landowners, the Diggers were forced to abandon St. George’s in August. The summer of love ended, and the sinful reign of law and order was restored. Other Digger colonies cropped up throughout England, but they, too, were quickly and ferociously suppressed.38 Never trained in philosophy or divinity, Winstanley forged his Christianity out of his own experiences of misery, doubt, and epiphany. Born in 1609, he had been a cloth merchant in London, but when his business failed in 1643, he was forced to move to Cobham, where he labored as a cowherd. In the tracts and pamphlets that he began writing at this time, Winstanley denounced the dubious ethics of commerce, recalling unscrupulous traders—including, perhaps, himself—who demanded “sometimes too much” for their goods. Having fallen into rural wage labor, Winstanley now knew from bitter experience the hardships and indignities of poverty: “sickness, frowns of friends, hatred of men, losses of his estate by fire … being cheated by false-spirited men.” Official religion had offered no help; though he had been an eager “hearer of sermons” and “a blind professor and strict goer to church,” no denomination offered the poor anything beyond chastisement or the afterlife.39 From this maelstrom of personal ruin and despair,

Winstanley fashioned a daring and compelling theology of communism. In an extraordinary four-year burst of writing (1648 to 1652), Winstanley published pamphlets and treatises that fused theology, metaphysics, history, and politics. Convinced, as he proclaimed in The True Levellers Standard Advanced (1649), that “the great Creator Reason made the Earth to be a Common Treasury,” Winstanley narr...

But Winstanley did not need dialectics of class analysis to respond to injustice; he denounced private property and the theft of the commons because they violated God’s original communist mandate for creation—and that was enough to impel him to action.

This perverse “delight,” led inexorably to private property, class conflict, and tyrannical government—“Civil Propriety,” as he called the system of dominion that held the vast majority in mesmerized servitude. “Civil Propriety” blighted all of creation; “the Ayre and Earth is all poysoned, and the curse dwels in both, through mans unrighteousness.”43 The form of idolatry and bondage that Winstanley’s rural contemporaries knew was the “disturbing devil” of capitalist property. The earth was “hedged in to In-closures,” he observed in A Declaration from the poor oppressed people of England (1649),

while men were subjected to the demon of money,

Enclosure was the mark of perverted desire for the sacramental goods of the earth. A year later, delivering A New-Yeers Gift for the Parliament and Armie (1650), Winstanley extended his prophetic range to include the entire political system, sounding the inaugural notes in what would become the tradition of modern anarchism. There are two kinds of kingly power, he explained: one, that of “Almightie God, ruling the whole creation in peace … the power of universall love,” and the other “the p...

Citing the book of Acts, he described the descent of the Spirit on the brethren: “the Rich men sold their Possessions, and gave part to the Poor; and no man said, That ought that he possessed was his own, for they had all things Common.”

In The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759) Smith mused on the beneficent ruses of avarice. “Enchanted with the distant idea of felicity,” a poor boy “charmed with the beauty” of the luxuries abounding in the blueblood world of pleasure will work and cultivate his talents to fulfill his desire for riches—only to discover that “wealth and greatness are mere trinkets of frivolous utility.” Yet “it is well that nature imposes upon us in this manner,” Smith observed, for “it is this deception which rouses and keeps in continual motion the industry of mankind.”

celebrated the experience of delight in righteous conduct. While Christian

Thomas Chalmers maintained that economic laws were beautiful as well as utilitarian. Celebrating the “thriving interchange of commodities” in The Application of Christianity to the Commercial and Ordinary Affairs of Life (1820), Chalmers marveled at the “beauteous order” of the market, wrought by the “presiding Divinity” who “compasses all his goings.” God’s grace could enrapture and fructify the apparently sordid dealings of business, “impregnating our minutest transactions with the spirit of the gospel.” Chalmers envisioned the plenitude of grace available to all who asked, a “great stream of supply, which comes direct from Heaven to earth.” This grace-filled abundance ensured success in the market, the sign and seal of “a beauteous character.”

In the evangelical gospel of scarcity, privation was excellent news: