THE PASSIONS AND THE INTERESTS

Political Arguments for Capitalism before Its Triumph

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

Contents

CHAPTER 1

The Idea of Glory and Its Downfall

At the beginning of the principal section of his famousessay, Max Weber asked: "Now, how could anactivity, which was at best ethically tolerated, turn intoa calling in the sense of Benjamin Franklin?" Inother words: How did commercial, banking, and similarmoney-making pursuits become honorable at some pointin the modern age after having stood condemned ordespised as greed, love of lucre, and avarice for centuriespast?

The enormous critical literature on The ProtestantEthic has found fault even with this point of departureof Weber's inquiry. The "spirit of capitalism," it hasbeen alleged, was extant among merchants as far backas the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, and a positiveattitude toward certain categories of business pursuitscould be discovered in the writings of the Scholastics.

Weber's question is nevertheless justified if it isasked in a comparative vein. No matter how muchapproval was bestowed on commerce and other formsof money-making, they certainly stood lower in thescale of medieval values than a number of other activities,in particular the striving for glory. It is indeedthrough a brief sketch of the idea of glory in the MiddleAges and the Renaissance that I shall now attempt torenew the sense of wonder about the genesis of the"spirit of capitalism."

At the beginning of the Christian era St. Augustine!lad supplied basic guidelines to medieval thinking bydenouncing lust for money and possessions as one of thethree principal sins of fallen man, lust for power (libidodominandi) and sexual lust being the other two. Onthe whole Augustine is perfectly even-handed in hiscondemnation of these three human drives or passions.If he does admit of attenuating circumstances for anyof them, it is for libido dominandi when combined witha strong desire for praise and glory. Thus Augustinespeaks of the "civil virtue" characterizing the earlyRomans "who have shown a Babylonian love for theirearthly fatherland," and who were "suppressing the desireof wealth and many other vices for their one vice,namely, the love of praise."

For the later argument of this essay it is of considerableinterest that St. Augustine conceives here of thepossibility that one vice may check another. In anyevent, his limited endorsement of glory-seeking left anopening that was broadened far beyond his teachingsby the spokesmen for the chivalric, aristocratic idealwho made the striving for honor and glory into thetouchstone of a man's virtue and greatness. WhatAugustine had expressed most cautiously and reluctantlywas later triumphantly proclaimed: love of glory,in contrast with the purely private pursuit of riches,can have "redeeming social value." In fact, the idea ofan "Invisible Hand"—of a force that makes men pursuingtheir private passions conspire unknowingly to·ward the public good-was formulated in connectionwith the search for glory, rather than with the desire formoney, by Montesquieu. The pursuit of honor in amonarchy, so he says, "brings life to all the parts of thebody politic"; as a result, "it turns out that everyonecontributes to the general welfare while thinking thathe works for his own interests."

With or without such sophisticated justification, strivingfor honor and glory was exalted by the medievalchivalric ethos even though it stood at odds with thecentral teachings, not only of St. Augustine, but of along line of religious writers, from St. Thomas Aquinasto Dante, who attacked glory-seeking as both vain(inanis) and sinful. Then, during the Renaissance, thestriving for honor achieved the status of a dominantideology as the influence of the Church receded and theadvocates of the aristocratic ideal were able to draw onthe plentiful Greek and Roman texts celebrating thepursuit of glory. This powerful intellectual currentcarried over into the seventeenth century: perhaps thepurest conception of glory-seeking as the only justificationof life is to be found in the tragedies of Corneille.At the same time, Corneille's formulations were so extremethat they may have contributed to the spectaculardownfall of the aristocratic ideal that was to be stagedby some of his contemporaries.

Writers from a number of Western European countriescooperated in this "demolition of the hero," withthose from France—the country that had perhaps gonefarthest in the cult of the heroic ideal-playing themajor part. All the heroic virtues were shown to beforms of mere self-preservation by Hobbes, of self-loveby La Rochefoucauld, of vanity and of frantic escapefrom real self-knowledge by Pascal. The heroic passionswere portrayed as demeaning by Racine after havingbeen denounced as foolish, if not demented, by Cervantes.

This astounding transformation of the moral andideological scene erupts quite suddenly, and the historicaland psychological reasons for it are still not whollyunderstood. The principal point to be made here is thatthose responsible for the demolition did not downgradethe traditional values in order to propound a new moralcode that might have corresponded to the interests orneeds of a new class. Denunciation of the heroic idealwas nowhere associated with the advocacy of a new bourgeoisethos. Obvious as this statement is with respect toPascal and La Rochefoucauld, it also holds for Hobbes,some interpretations to the contrary notwithstanding.For a long time it was thought that Molière's plays hadas their message the praise of bourgeois virtues, but onceagain this interpretation has been shown to be untenable.

By itself, therefore, the demolition of the heroic idealcould have only restored the equality in ignominy thatAugustine had meant to bestow on love of money andlust for power and glory (not to mention lust proper).The fact is of course that, less than a century later, theacquisitive drive and the activities connected with it,such as commerce, banking, and eventually industry,came to be widely hailed, for a variety of reasons. Butthis enormous change did not result from any simplevictory of one fully armed ideology over another. Thereal story is far more complex and roundabout.

Man "as he really is"

The beginning of that story does come with the Renaissance,but not through the development of a newethic, that is, of new rules of conduct for the individual.Rather, it will be traced here to a new turn in the theoryof the state, to the attempt at improving statecraftwithin the existing order. To insist on this point ofdeparture proceeds of course from the endogenous biasof the tale I propose to tell.

In attempting to teach the prince how to achieve,maintain, and expand power, Machiavelli made his fundamentaland celebrated distinction between "the effectivetruth of things" and the "imaginary republicsand monarchies that have never been seen nor have beenknown to exist." The implication was that moral andpolitical philosophers had hitherto talked exclusivelyabout the latter and had failed to provide guidance tothe real world in which the prince must operate. Thisdemand for a scientific, positive approach was extendedonly later from the prince to the individual, from thenature of the state to human nature. Machiavelli probablysensed that a realistic theory of the state required aknowledge of human nature, but his remarks on thatsubject, while invariably acute, are scattered and unsystematic.By the next century a considerable changehad occurred. The advances of mathematics and celestialmechanics held out the hope that laws of motionmight be discovered for men's actions, just as for fallingbodies and planets. Thus Hobbes, who based his theoryof human nature on Galileo, devotes the first ten chaptersof Leviathan to the nature of man before proceedingto that of the commonwealth. But it was Spinoza whoreiterated, with particular sharpness and vehemence,"Machiavelli's charges against the utopian thinkers ofthe past, this time in relation to individual humanbehavior. In the opening paragraph of the Tractatuspoliticus he attacks the philosophers who "conceivemen not as they are but as they would like them to be."And this distinction between positive and normativethinking appears again in the Ethics, where Spinozaopposes to those who "prefer to detest and scoff at humanaffects and actions" his own famous project to "considerhuman actions and appetites just as if I wereconsidering lines, planes, or bodies."

That man "as he really is" is the proper subject ofwhat is today called political science continued to beasserted-sometimes almost routinely—in the eighteenthcentury. Vico, who had read Spinoza, followedhim faithfully in this respect, if not in others. He writesin the Scienza nuova:

Philosophy considers man as he ought to be and istherefore useful only to the very few who want tolive in Plato's Republic and do not throw themselvesinto the dregs of Romulus. Legislation considersman as he is and attempts to put him to gooduses in human society.

Even Rousseau, whose view of human nature was farremoved from those of Machiavelli and Hobbes, paystribute to the idea by opening the Contrat social withthe sentence: "Taking men as they are and the laws asthey might be, I wish to investigate whether a legitimateand certain principle of government can be encountered."

Repressing and Harnessing the Passions

The overwhelming insistence on looking at man "ashe really is" has a simple explanation. A feelingarose in the Renaissance and became firm convictionduring the seventeenth century that moralizing philosophyand religious precept could no longer be trustedwith restraining the destructive passions of men. Newways had to be found and the search for them beganquite logically with a detailed and candid dissection ofhuman nature. There were those like La Rochefoucauldwho delved into its recesses and proclaimed their "savagediscoveries" with so much gusto that the dissection looksvery much like an end in itself. But in general it wasundertaken to discover more effective ways of shapingthe pattern of human actions than through moralisticexhortation or the threat of damnation. And, naturallyenough, the search was successful; in fact, one can distinguishbetween at least three lines of argument thatwere proposed as alternatives to the reliance on religiouscommand.

The most obvious alternative, which actually antedatesthe movement of ideas here surveyed, is the appealto coercion and repression. The task of holding back,by force if necessary, the worst manifestations and themost dangerous consequences of the passions is entrustedto the state. This was the thought of St. Augustine,which was to be closely echoed in the sixteenth centuryby Calvin. Any established social and political orderis justified by its very existence. Its possible injusticesare just retributions for the sins of Fallen Man.

The political systems of St. Augustine and Calvin arein some respects closely related to that advocated inLeviathan. But the crucial invention of Hobbes is hispeculiar transactional concept of the Covenant, which isquite alien in spirit to those earlier authoritarian systems.Notoriously difficult to pigeonhole, the thought ofHobbes will be discussed under a different category.

The repressive solution to the problem posed by therecognition of man's unruly passions has great difficulties.For what if the sovereign fails to do his job properly,because of excessive leniency, cruelty, or some otherfailing? Once this question is asked, the prospect of theestablishment of an appropriately repressive sovereignor authority appears to be of the same order of probabilityas the prospect that men will restrain their passionsbecause of the exhortations of moralizing philosophersor churchmen. As the latter prospect is held to be nil,the repressive solution turns out to be in contradictionwith its own premises. To imagine an authority exmachina that would somehow suppress the misery andhavoc men inflict on each other as a result of their passionsmeans in effect to wish away, rather than to solve,the very difficulties that have been discovered. It is perhapsfor this reason that the repressive solution did notlong survive the detailed analysis of the passions in theseventeenth century.

A solution that is more in harmony with these psychologicaldiscoveries and preoccupations consists in theidea of harnessing the passions, instead of simply repressingthem. Once again the state, or "society," iscalled upon to perform this feat, yet this time not merelyas a repressive bulwark, but as a transformer, a civilizingmedium. Speculations about such a transformation ofthe disruptive passions into something constructive canbe encountered already in the seventeenth century. AnticipatingAdam Smith's Invisible Hand, Pascal arguesfor man's grandeur on the ground that he "has managedto tease out of concupiscence an admirable arrangement"and "so beautiful an order."

In the early eighteenth century Giambattista Vicoarticulated the idea more fully while characteristicallyendowing it with the flavor of an exciting discovery:

Out of ferocity, avarice, and ambition, the threevices which lead all mankind astray, [society] makesnational defense, commerce, and politics, and therebycauses the strength, the wealth, and the wisdomof the republics; out of these three great vices whichwould certainly destroy man on earth, society thuscauses the civil happiness to emerge. This principleproves the existence of divine providence:through its intelligent laws the passions of men whoare entirely occupied by the pursuit of their privateutility are transformed into a civil order whichpermits men to live in human society.

This is clearly one of those statements to which Vicoowes his fame as an extraordinarily seminal mind. Hegel'sCunning of Reason, the Freudian concept of sublimationand, once again, Adam Smith's Invisible Handcan all be read into these two pregnant sentences. Butthere is no elaboration and we are left in the dark aboutthe conditions under which that marvelous metamorphosisof destructive "passions" into "virtues" actuallytakes place.

The idea of harnessing the passions of men, of makingthem work toward the general welfare, was put forwardat considerably greater length by Vico's English contemporary, Bernard Mandeville. Often regarded as aprecursor of laissez-faire, Mandeville actually invokedthroughout The Fable of the Bees the "Skilful Managementof the Dextrous Politician" as a necessary conditionand agent for the turning of "private vices" into"publick benefits." Since the modus operandi of thePolitician was not revealed, however, there remainedconsiderable mystery about the alleged beneficial andparadoxical transformations. Only for one specific "privatevice" did Mandeville supply a detailed demonstrationof how such transformations are in fact accomplished.I am referring, of course, to his celebratedtreatment of the passion for material goods in general,and for luxury in particular.

It may therefore be said that Mandeville restrictedthe area in which he effectively claimed validity for hisparadox to one particular "vice" or passion. In thisretreat from generality he was to be followed, with thewell-known resounding success, by the Adam Smith ofThe Wealth of Nations, a work that was wholly focusedon the passion traditionally known as cupidity or avarice.Moreover, because of the intervening evolution oflanguage, to be considered at some length later in thisessay, Smith was able to take a further giant step in thedirection of making the proposition palatable and persuasive:he blunted the edge of Mandeville's shockingparadox by substituting for "passion" and "vice" suchbland terms as "advantage" or "interest."
(Continues...)Excerpted from THE PASSIONS AND THE INTERESTS by Albert O. Hirschman. Copyright © 2013 Princeton University Press. Excerpted by permission of PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS.
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