book review of The New Spirit of Capitalism

Renewal has had a revamp, and placed under the excellent stewardship of Martin McIvor. I'm now on the editorial board, and have contributed a review to the latest edition. Having already become a little boring on the topic, it's a review of Boltanski and Chiapello's The New Spirit of Capitalism. Here's a word version of the review.

Given it's Renewal, I'm trying to think about what their argument means for social democracy or the Labour party. And it strikes me that the gap which currently exists in the contemporary political imagination, which Boltanski and Thevenot invite us to fill, is the question of the moral qualities of markets. New Labour has been duped by the Right into thinking that markets are simply technocratic devices to increase efficiency, but the Right itself never believed this or promoted them for this reason alone. Instead, there are distinctly moral issues at stake in how and why we embrace markets (this isn't about 'are markets moral or not?' but about different markets as different varieties of moral edifice). Or as I put it in the piece:

The varying moral dimensions of capitalism have therefore been a curiously absent topic from mainstream political discourse since Thatcherism imploded fifteen years ago. This is a significant gap, because as Boltanski and Chiapello’s wonderful book demonstrates, the moral promises made by capitalism are a critical feature of how it defends and sustains itself. The simple reason for this is that people must be provided with good reasons for engaging with it in the first place. As the authors put it “capitalism will face increasing difficulties, if it does not restore some grounds for hope to those whose engagement is required for the functioning of the system as a whole”.

One of the critiques of neoliberalism that I am increasingly frustrated by rests on a failure to understand what Boltanski refers to repeatedly as 'justification'. The famous Gordon Gecko defence of the financial world, 'greed is good', may actually be one of the least helpful representations of capitalism of recent years. It fails to ask the question Boltanski asks - what does this system offer you beyond more wealth? That answer has to be a moral one of some sort, and can't simply be greater self-satisfaction. For the Left to portray neoliberalism as the celebration of greed and selfishness is rather like the Right portraying socialism as resting on a hatred of freedom. If you insist on viewing your opponents in such terms, you will never understand them.

David Harvey's book on neoliberalism avoids this mistake up to a point, in that he digs around a little in the work of Hayek and others to find out what they believed they were doing. Surprise surprise, they didn't announce their plans in terms of unleashing greed and suffering, like crazed Monty Burns figures. Instead there is an intention of liberation, albeit via the market. Being a good Marxist, Harvey looks beneath this and discovers something less benign. But as I'm ploughing through literature on Law & Economics at the moment as part of my PhD, and interviewing some of the Chicago school protagonists along the way, I'm wondering if there may be a more Boltanskian way through this, in which the neoliberal promises of freedom are viewed as authentic, yet fiercely compromised. If I come out the other side having lost the latter half of this statement, perhaps my friends at the Adam Smith Institute will give me a job.

Comments

[stet]

Great book, very useful. But perhaps a bit out-of-date. This thing that we call "capitalism" changes fast. The French edition is 1999. And most of its insights are based on the evolution of key vocabulary in management literature from the 70s, then the 80s and 90s. Does the light-connected, liberal-autonomous, networking-artistic, post-Maoist capitalistic manager portrayed in the book still exist? Some people think that firms rather said in the past ten years or so: "Err... great stuff... but let's better focus on squeezing employees and making big money instead. New is cool but old spirit is all right too. Nope?" People that has read the book and that actually work inside big firms often think so.

[stet]

By the way, I'm eager to advertise this other one:
http://testsociety.wordpress.com/2007/09/16/economics-as-foucauldian/

[Will]

Yes I agree. But the methodological approach remains original and valid. I still reckon that the 'lets make some money' spirit would require some accompanying justification of some kind.