September 5th - Hirschman
Over the past few days I read Albert O. Hirschman's The Passions and the Interests: Political Arguments for Capitalism Before its Triumph. I think my thinking, my writing about this book might start with the small note appended after the short final part, in which he puts forward a pocket-sized - or even business-card sized - argument for intellectual history.
He points out that where the repetition of historical events is very rarely exact, the repetition of thought - of reaction to recurrent or similar problems by means of a process that abstracts away their particularities and contingencies in search of their truly characteristic core - often repeats verbatim. He presents it as "almost painful" that Keynes would present as an example of his "characteristically low-key defense of capitalism" the by then two hundred year old idea that commercial enterprise is a much less damaging, a much softer, pursuit than the pursuit of power over others. (Though, is the pursuit of money, even if not for that aim, the pursuit of a form of potential power over others?) He ends by saying
I conclude that both critics and defenders of capitalism could improve upon their arguments through knowledge of the episode in intellectual history that has been recounted here. This is probably all one can ask of history, and of the history of ideas in particular: not to resolve issues, but to raise the level of debate.
That is really what this book is about - an episode in intellectual history. It does not claim any particular causative relation of the thoughts and writings presented to the material development of society - and here I will insert a large digression.
Hirschman seems to have a kind of Marxist leaning, but not doctrinally, rather just as a sympathy. On page 81 he ascribes to Adam Smith, Adam Ferguson, and John Millar the "common conviction that economic changes are the basic determinants of social and political transformation" and cites Ronald Meek "in particular his 1954 essay 'The Scottish Contribution to Marxist Sociology'" - without particular comment on the Marxist implications and leanings of what might be called a materialist perspective. Perhaps paranoically, I view this uneditorialized citation of Marxist scholarship as a sign of sympathy to Marxism.
Additionally, Hirschman seems pessimistic or at least ambivalent of the capacity of ideas to effectively shape history. Late in the book he contrasts the unintended consequences of human action with its "structural obverse" - "actions and decisions are often taken becasue they are earnestly and fully expected to have certain effects that then wholly fail to materialize." More insightfully, he points out that "once these desired effects fail to happen and refuse to come into the world, the fact that they were originally counted on is likely not only forgotten but actively repressed." The final part of the book - as described also in my introductory paragraph above - seems very concerned with the effects of forgetting, intentional and unintentional. That is why he bypasses the more "modest" and familiar (perhaps) argument that reliance on the state for subsistence restrains our capacity for dissidence - he feels the unfamiliar, the stranger argument is more provocative of examining our own thinking about capitalism. (To end the digression with an aside, Hirschman gets points with me for his single allusion to Michael Polanyi's The Tacit Dimension - there is also a fun irony in choosing the younger Polanyi in a book of economic history)
So what is the unfamiliar, the stranger argument? It is also a particular episode and a particular line of thought. Hirschman alludes in passing to the argument that private property is necessary because it provides an alternative source of subsistence to the state and thus allows for the possibility of dissent, but he mentions it only so as not to discuss it. So which argument is he discussing?
I won't reconstruct the entire lineage in detail. You should read the book for that, it's not really what this post is for. In extremely brief terms - at the tail end of the middle ages, the passions, conceptually emergent from Greek thought as inherited by the Scholastics, take a particular place in nascent political thought, particularly in Machiavelli, where they are seen as something requiring restriction. Eventually the passions cease to be seen as a block, and one passion, avarice, becomes isolated from the others and seen as a passion that can hold the others in check. From this idea of an isolated passion of avarice comes the idea of a more rational notion of "interest" which itself becomes more specifically economic. This notion of interest counterpoised to passion is used to argue that the dominance of commerce places certain restrictions on the arbitrary power of the sovereign. We jump forward, over a very interesting discussion of the use of the French doux, to Adam Smith, who in one fell swoop renders the entire discussion incoherent to modern eyes in a kind of stunning dialectical move - economic interest is resultant from a wide variety of the passions, but, in their total contribution to this interest, the entire collection of other passions and motivations becomes effectively subsumed within economic interest, and human society can then be investigated on the basis of the latter alone. The range of ground social inquiry can cover suddenly becomes tightened, restricted, readying the ground for intellectual specialization. And the whole prior discussion vanishes from view.
Of course, as the earlier discussion of failed goals may intimate, the world regulated into order by the imperatives of commerce failed to materialize, and where it did materialize, it materialized in the form of law-and-order despotism. The actualization of the image was perverse.
Hirschman says
In sum, capitalism was supposed to accomplish exactly what was soon to be denounced as its worst feature.
That is what I find most interesting about this book. I very very rarely hear arguments for capitalism that actively advocate for its restrictive-compulsive features. Those are the features I as a communist am most likely to discuss, and, if I must play devil's advocate for capitalism or if I feel a particular critique is missing the point, it is often in this direction that I'll gesture. I do feel we can get bogged down in these intellectual critiques. A particularly powerful historical-empirical critique of capitalism, say, would be to demonstrate that the conditions of the English industrial textile industry were totally impossible without the underpinnings of triangle trade slavery, without colonial land seizure etc. and tearing the false image of 'freedom' out of the real throat and guts of capitalism feels much more important and much less flippant than tearing it out of its ideological mouth. But I think, as above, there is an important place for intellectual history.
