The New Spirit of Capitalism

"This book was a huge inspiration for me when writing my PhD and my first book The Limits of Neoliberalism. This is partly because it showed how capitalism is sustained, reproduced through what Boltanski and Chiapello call different orders of worth — the idea in keeping with Weber’s stance that what capitalism has to offer us is not just money or pleasure but ways of living worthwhile lives. A lot of people have argued that The New Spirit of Capitalism is very far from a critique of capitalism. Some Marxists hate it. Indeed, some people have used the book as a manual to think about how to moralise capitalism or make it more innovative! But what the authors do is to show that capitalism goes through phases — ways of validating people, of allowing them to achieve moral esteem. What’s very original about the book is that they show how capitalism develops these moral paradigms out of specific traditions of anti -capitalism. They argue that socialists from the mid nineteenth to mid twentieth century saw capitalism as unfair, but that the reconstruction of capitalism in the 1920s and 1930s — Fordism, The New Deal and so on — accommodated aspects of that critique, learned from it, and met workers’ needs. Capitalism has found ways of reinventing itself by listening to aspects of that critique. This is partly what makes capitalism so hard to overturn. It is a system that learns from its critics. Critique becomes an animating force. Yes. Clearly you’d rather been working in a Fordist factory in the 1930s than you would in a Manchester cotton mill in the 1820s. Lives were palpably improved. The second move the authors make, which I find extremely provocative and interesting, is that there was a crisis of the Fordist variety of closely regulated capitalism in the 1960s and 70s, and, once again, capitalism was reformed through internalising the demands and appeals of anti-capitalist critics. The reinvention of capitalism in the 1980s — what’s sometimes called ‘post-Fordism’ — involved accommodating what Boltanski and Chiapello call ‘the artistic critique’ of capitalism, which had grown louder over the of the 1950s and ‘60s, coming to a head in 1968. Critics and artists such as Guy Debord or Herbert Marcuse attacked the conformity of capitalism, its predictability, the model of ‘organisation man.’ And so when capitalism hit a crisis in the 1970s, the resources for its moral reinvention were already available, and the ‘new spirit of capitalism’ involved satisfying some of those demands, though inevitably then neglecting what the authors term the ‘social critique’ of the traditional Left. Exactly. Steve Jobs and large parts of Silicon Valley more generally are an example of this. But the social critique has been forgotten, and as a result we see the rise of precarity and inequality. From 1960s onwards we dispensed with the moral force of egalitarianism because we wanted to be free and individual. And we’ve gone to opposite extreme: you can live a creative life, turn up to work wearing whatever you like, but no one’s going to provide you with any security and your boss is going to be making three hundred times more than you. Capitalism is shaped by questions of what is a worthwhile life. How do I fulfil myself, achieve social validation? We shouldn’t discount the fact that this internalisation critique has achieved progress, although I think one of the reasons why Boltanski and Chiapello wrote this book in the 1990s was to ask, why have critiques become so powerless? Long before the financial crisis they asked where has all the critique gone? Their answer was that it has been brought into the fold: anti-capitalism is now part of capitalist rhetoric. And, indeed, if you look at business schools you see a celebration of chaos, of entrepreneurship that wants to overturn things. Innovation, it is said, doesn’t come about by being a capitalist but by being your ‘own self’, by drawing on the artistic critique."