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Capitalism, Citizenship and Community*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 January 2009

Stephen Macedo
Stephen Macedo
Affiliation:
Political Science, Harvard University
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Extract

The authors of Habits of the Heart (Robert N. Bellah, Richard Madsen, William M. Sullivan, Ann Swindler, and Steven M. Tipton; hereafter, simply Bellah) charge that America is losing the institutions that help “to create the kind of person who could sustain a connection to a wider political community and thus ultimately support the maintenance of free institutions.” Bellah fears that “individualism may have grown cancerous – that it may be destroying those social integuments that Tocqueville saw as moderating its more destructive potentials, that it may be threatening the survival of freedom itself.”

Proponents of the liberal free market order should, I will argue, take seriously the concerns that motivate Bellah and company: citizens of a liberal regime cannot live by exchanges alone. Liberal constitutionalism depends upon a certain level and quality of citizen virtue. But while the need for virtue is often neglected by liberal theorists, it is far from clear that the actual workings of liberal institutions have drastically undermined virtue in the way Bellah's dire account suggests. That analysis serves, moreover, as the springboard for a radically transformist argument that seeks, not so much to elevate and shape, but to transcend and deny, the self-interestedness that the free market exercises. Having argued against Bellah's analysis and prescriptions, I shall attempt to show how the phenomena he describes are open to an interpretation that is happier from the point of view of a concern with virtue. I shall end by using Tocqueville to suggest that combining liberal capitalism with intermediate associations like voluntary groups and state and local government helps elevate and shape self-interest, promoting a citizenry capable of and insistent upon liberal self-government.

Type
Research Article
Information
Social Philosophy and Policy , Volume 6 , Issue 1 , Autumn 1988 , pp. 113 - 139
Copyright
Copyright © Social Philosophy and Policy Foundation 1998

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References

1 Bellah, Robert N., Madsen, Richard, Sullivan, William M., Swindler, Ann, and Tipton, Steven M, Habits of the Heart (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), p. vii.Google Scholar

2 ibid.

3 See Maclntyre, Alasdair, After Virtue (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1981)Google Scholar; Sandel, Michael, Liberalism and the Limits of Justice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982)Google Scholar; Taylor, Charles, Hegel and Modern Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979)Google Scholar, and Taylor, two volumes of Philosophical Papers: Human Agency and Language and Philosophy and the Human Sciences (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985).Google Scholar

4 Bellah, , Habits, p. 277.Google Scholar

5 ibid., p. 275; and see Taylor, , “Atomism,” in Papers, vol. 2.Google Scholar

6 Maclntyre, , After Virtue, p. 6.Google Scholar

7 ibid., p. 5.

8 ibid., pp. 8–21.

9 Maclntyre's claim is doubly odd. Only philosophers argue about methaethics, yet philosophical communities appear to thrive on such debates. Few in broader political communities are even aware of the distinction between deontology and consequentialism. The practical consensus that sustains actual political communities probably draws on both “rightsbased” and “goods-based” considerations (as well as interests, apathy, and other attitudes that have nothing to do with morality). For an interesting discussion of the plurality of ultimate sources of moral value see Nagel, Thomas, “The Fragmentation of Value,” Mortal Questions (London: Cambridge University Press, 1981).Google Scholar

10 See McClosky, Herbert and Zaller, John, The American Ethos: Public Attitudes Toward Capitalism and Democracy (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, esp. chapter 1.

11 On the connection between a participatory civil culture and the health of liberal democracy see Almond, Gabriel A. and Verba, Sidney, The Civic Culture: Political Attitudes and Democracy in Five Nations (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1963)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, chapter 11; Verba, Sidney and Nie, Norman H., Participation in America: Political Democracy and Social Equality (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987)Google Scholar, passim.

12 Sandel, , Liberalism, p. 176.Google Scholar

13 MacIntyre, , After Virtue, p. 30Google Scholar, emphasis in original.

14 ibid., p. 31.

15 ibid., pp. 20–21.

16 Bellah, , Habits, p. 21.Google Scholar

17 ibid., p. 22.

18 ibid., pp. 5–6.

19 ibid., 6 and 8.

20 See Sandel, discussion of the “voluntarist notion of agency,” Liberalism, p. 59.Google Scholar

21 Bellah, , Habits, p. 4.Google Scholar

22 The point that liberalism does not depend upon an unencumbered conception of the self is developed at greater length in my Liberal Virtues: A Liberal Theory of Citizenship, Virtue, and Community (Oxford: Oxford University Press: forthcoming).

23 Murdoch, Iris, The Sovereignty of the Good (London: Ark, 1986), p. 42Google Scholar, and see Simon Weil: An Anthology, ed. Sian, Miles (New York: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1986).Google Scholar

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25 Especially Walzer, Michael, Spheres of Justice (New York: Basic Books, 1983)Google Scholar, and “Philosophy and Democracy,” Political Theory, vol. 9 (Aug. 1981), pp. 379–399.

26 Bellah, , Habits, p. 7.Google Scholar

27 ibid., p. 6.

28 ibid., p. 140.

29 Taylor, , Hegel and Modern Society, p. 126.Google Scholar But for a more positive view of Romanticism, see Rosenblum, Nancy excellent study, Another Liberalism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1987).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

30 Bellah, p. 127–128.

31 ibid., p. 15.

32 ibid.

33 Sotirios A. Barber develops the notion that reasoned criticism is central to the task of distilling a tradition from mere history; see his On What the Constitution Means (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984), pp. 84–5. I develop the argument that liberalism does not depend upon an instrumental notion of rationality in Liberal Virtues.

34 Bellah, , Habits, pp. 6–7.Google Scholar

35 ibid., p. 24.

36 See Sandel, Michael, “The Procedural Republic and the Unencumbered Self,” Political Theory, vol. 12 (1984), p. 93.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

37 Bellah, , Habits, p. 4.Google Scholar

38 ibid., p. 290.

39 The Gallup Report, #259, April 1987, p. 10.

40 ibid., p. 35.

41 ibid., p. 13. “Yuppies,” young, upwardly mobile professionals, are usually regarded as the vanguard of materialism and self-centeredness.

42 The Gallup Report, #248, May 1986, p. 14.

43 See the discussion of Taylor, Mary at Habits, pp. 192–5.Google Scholar

44 See Verba and Nie, Participation, chapter 11, Tables 1 and 9.

45 ibid., p. 20 and chapter 13 generally.

46 ibid., p. 264.

47 Bellah, , Habits, p. 251.Google Scholar

48 ibid, p. 197.

49 ibid.

50 ibid., p. 196.

51 ibid., p. 25.

52 ibid., p. 43.

53 ibid., p. 175.

54 ibid., p. 176. For an excellent argument about the prohibitive costs involved in trying to compensate people for a variety of forms of bad luck, see Richard A. Epstein's contribution to this volume.

55 ibid., p. 204.

56 ibid.

57 ibid., p. 205.

58 ibid., p. 206. See Hartz, Louis discussion, The Liberal Tradition in America (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1955)Google Scholar, esp. ch. 8.

59 ibid.

60 ibid., p. 207.

61 ibid.

62 ibid.

63 ibid. The “moral” egalitarianism of Bellah and his cohorts turns out, after all, to be a rather thin patina glossing a thoroughly intellectual elitism (economists and sociologists understand the complexity “invisible” to most Americans). Bellah is, finally, derisive about middle-class American values (the work ethic, suspicion of politcs, and insistence on independence). Middle-class attitudes are systematically reduced to a failure “to come to terms” with reality.

64 Weber, Max, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, trans. Talcott, Parsons (New York: Scribner's 1930).Google Scholar

65 See especially Book 1.

66 Bellah, , Habits, pp. 185–189.Google Scholar

67 ibid., p. 285.

68 ibid.

69 ibid., p. 287.

70 ibid., p. 286.

71 ibid.

72 ibid., p. 288. Bellah's critique of market relations seems more than a little indebted to Marx, especially the discussions of money as the universal “pimp” of mankind, and of commodity fetishism, in the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, and Capital, vol. 1, respectively; The Marx-Engels Reader, 2nd ed., ed. Tucker, Robert C., (New York: Norton, 1978), pp. 101–105, 319–329.Google Scholar Besides tax increases, Bellah proposes that government promote this moral transformation via economic democracy, measures establishing the “social responsibility” of corporations, and a “revitalized party system”; see Habits, p. 287. He offers few details. Would revitalizing the party system, for example, require reversing the “democratic” reforms of the early 1970s?

73 ibid., p. 288.

74 See Tocqueville, famous discussion in Democracy in America, trans. G., Lawrence, ed. J.P., Mayer (Garden City: Anchor, 1986), pp. 690–695.Google Scholar

75 Bellah, , Habits, p. 256, 289.Google Scholar Sandel, I might add, also suggests moving against capitalism to shore up community by allowing states to enact plant closing laws “to protect their communities from the disruptive effects of capital mobility and sudden industrial change.” See Sandel, Michael, “Morality and the Liberal Ideal,” The New Republic, May 7, 1984, pp. 15–17.Google Scholar

76 Bellah, , Habits, p. 218.Google Scholar

77 As in the bumper-sticker: “Think Globally – Act Locally.”

78 Bellah, , Habits, p. 296.Google Scholar

79 ibid., p. 197.

80 ibid., p. 198, emphasis in original.

81 ibid.

82 ibid., p. 199.

83 ibid.

84 ibid., p. 263.

85 ibid., p. 265. And so, between Neocapitalists and Welfare Liberals, the debate “is over procedures to achieve fairness for each, not about the substantive meaning of justice for all.” In Hegelian terms, Neocapitalists and Welfare Liberals stand for different versions of moralitat, or civil society, while Bellah pursues a vision of sittlichkeit, a substantive ethical community; see Hegel's Philosophy of Right, trans. T.M., Knox (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1967)Google Scholar, third part.

86 Bellah, , Habits, p. 199.Google Scholar

87 ibid., p. 250.

88 ibid., p. 199. And see Lane, Robert, “Market Justice and Political Justice,” American Political Science Review, vol. 80, no. 2 (June 1986), pp. 383–402.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

89 Bellah, , Habits, p. 201.Google Scholar

90 ibid., p. 200. Robert Lane also reports that Americans view the market as more “fair and wise” than political processes; see Lane, , “Market Justice,” p. 385.Google Scholar

91 Bellah, , Habits, pp. 201–202.Google Scholar

92 ibid., p. 202.

93 Bellah notes, at page 252 of Habits, that the civil rights movement drew on “strength and vitality still latent in the sense of the public good Americans have inherited.” Well it did, until it turned into claims for affirmative action and special privileges which a majority of Americans oppose.

94 “But social movements quickly lose their moral edge if they are conceived as falling into special pleading, as when the Civil Rights movement was transformed into ‘Black Power.’ Then we are back in the only semilegitimate realm of the politics of interest.” See Bellah, , Habits, pp. 202–203.Google Scholar

95 ibid., p. 263.

96 In the relative prosperity of the last several years, people's satisfaction with their own lives and the state of the union has, according to some measures at least, been quite high. The Gallup Report #246, March 1986, informs us that, when asked whether they are satisfied or dissatisfied “with the wav things are going in the United States at this time,” the ratio of responses was 66–30% in March of 1986, as compared with 12–84% in August of 1979. These figures vary considerably from one month to another, and the latter figure is a real low point, but the change has been substantial and is closely related to people's financial outlook.

97 Bellah, , Habits, p. 263.Google Scholar

98 ibid., p. 263.

99 I deal with these issues at somewhat greater length in The New Right v. The Constitution, 2nd ed. (Washington, DC: Cato Institute, 1987); much more needs to be said.

100 Once liberals recognize that the preservation of our constitutional arrangements depends on a certain active quality of citizenship, they should take more seriously the principle of, “subsidiarity,” discussed in Finnis, John, Natural Law and Natural Rights, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980), p. 146Google Scholar and passim.

101 These themes are discussed at much greater length in my Liberal Virtues.

102 As Harvey C. Mansfield, Jr.'s, recent excellent discussion of American conservatism suggests, Bellah is not alone in failing to take adequate account of the interplay of interests and pride that helps sustain liberal constitutionalism; see “Pride versus Interest in American Conservatism Today,” Government and Opposition, vol. 22, no. 2 (Spring 1987), pp. 194–205.

103 Tocqueville, , Democracy, p. 52.Google Scholar

104 ibid., p. 255.

105 The contrasts between Mill and Tocqueville (on religion, for example) are striking. The confidence, so striking in Mill, in an inner core of individuality needing only to be liberated and stimulated by diversity in order to flourish is lacking in Tocqueville. Compare Tocqueville's discussion in Democracy, pp. 429–436 with Mill, John Stuart, On Liberty (New York: Norton, 1975), pp. 27–38 and 46–50.Google Scholar And for an interesting similarity with Tocqueville, see Adam Smith's discussion of religious sects in An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, ed. R.H., Campbell, A.S., Skinner, and W.B., Todd (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979), vol. 2, pp. 794–796.Google Scholar

106 Tocqueville, , Democracy, p. 526.Google Scholar

107 ibid., p. 525.

108 ibid., p. 622.

109 ibid., p. 92.

110 ibid., p. 95.

111 ibid., p. 632.

112 ibid., p. 629.

113 ibid., p. 57.

114 ibid., p. 629.

115 ibid., p. 514–517.

116 ibid. p. 515; and see pp. 681–683.

117 ibid., p. 645.

118 ibid., p. 692.

119 ibid., p. 692.

120 ibid., p. 239.

121 ibid., p. 556. And see Smith, Adam discussion in Wealth of Nations, pp. 782, 787–788.Google Scholar

122 On the other hand, Tocqueville defended the Bank of the United States, and argued that opposition to its power was motivated by the levelling equality he feared; Democracy, pp. 178, 388–389.

123 ibid., p. 642.

124 ibid., p. 667.

125 ibid., p. 697.

126 I am all too conscious that much more needs to be said about the variety of ways one might attempt to support the popular capacity for self-government. Joshua Cohen, for example, provides some very powerful arguments for a bevy of measures I would want to resist; see his “The Economic Basis of Deliberative Democracy,” Social Philosophy and Policy, vol. 6, no. 2 (Spring 1988).

127 Precursors of certain variants of today's liberal thought, such as Hobbes and Bentham, heaped scorn and cynicism on the idea that qualitative discriminations could be made about the value of different ways of life. The hegemony of these ideas is also transmitted through the influence of economics: homo economicus has interests only, and his motto is de gustibus non est disputandum. Bentham's famous maxims are illustrative: “pushpin is as good as poetry,” and “better a pig satisfied than Socrates dissatisfied.” See his The Principles of Morals and Legislation (New York: Hafner, 1948); and Hobbes, Thomas, Leviathan (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1981).Google Scholar

128 See Lane, , “Market Justice,” p. 385Google Scholar , and “Government and Self-Esteem,” Political Theory, vol. 10 (1982), pp. 5–31.