Download Book review of The New Spirit of Capitalism by Boltanski

The New Spirit of Capitalism – Luc Boltanski & Eve Chiapello
London: Verso (2005)
Reviewed by William Davies
New Labour is defined partly by its respect for the achievements of the New Right over
the eighties and nineties. In various areas, such as market regulation and welfare policy,
it has simply taken the policies of the Right further in their logical direction, seeking to
produce and nurture markets that are as open and dynamic as possible. But in one
important respect, it has pursued these policies in a fashion that owes more to traditional
Leftist sensibilities than to the New Right. For in keeping with an intellectual and political
tradition that dates back to Marx, New Labour has abstained from debating the moral
qualities of markets, preferring instead to focus on their empirical mechanics. The rubric
of ‘evidence-based policy’ and the sociological frame of ‘globalisation’ have both been
instrumental in facilitating this.
Thatcherism was certainly shaped by the neo-liberal economics that displaced
Keynesianism from the seventies onwards, but economics rarely provides the emotional,
psychological or moral fuel for far-reaching political change. It was the moral qualities of
markets, and not simply their efficiency-maximising tendencies, that inspired the New
Right. Markets were associated with individual freedom, the traditional family, protection
from tyranny and hard work. With the exception of the last of these virtues, which has a
place close to Gordon Brown’s heart, New Labour has snubbed this normative legacy of
the New Right, viewing the market not so much as immoral, but amoral. This is in
keeping with scientific socialism. Marx may have had a deep-lying distaste for how
capitalism treated people, but it was its structural flaws that led him to predict its collapse
and not its moral ones. When New Labour came to accommodate the free market into its
political economy during the 1990s, it was primarily on account of a sociological
narrative about its inevitability provided by the likes of Anthony Giddens, and not due to
a sudden conversion to the moral worldview of Friedrich Hayek or Keith Joseph.
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”.
This sort of claim immediately raises the suspicion that the authors are talking about
ideology, in other words, a mode of thinking that is diffused on behalf of capital in order
to conceal the real nature of society. It was through bracketing liberal and neo-liberal
moral philosophy as mere ‘ideology’ that the Left managed to avoid engaging with it on
its own terms. Think tanks, universities and other bourgeois publishing channels were all
culpable in this respect of draping a layer of moral fiction over the truth of capitalist
relations. But The New Spirit of Capitalism is far from an ideology critique. Its chief
inspiration is not Marx at all but, as its title hints, Max Weber.
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The ‘spirit’ of capitalism in Weber’s sense is its psychological condition of existence – a
philosophy that must be present in society in order for capitalism to be not only tolerated,
but actively pursued. Weber’s most famous sociological work sought to demonstrate that
it was Protestantism that spawned the crucial psychological tendency to work more than
was necessary for the satisfaction of material needs; the result was the accumulation of
surplus wealth, or capital. The ‘spirit’ of capitalism is not a sham in the sense that
‘ideology’ is usually understood as, but a necessary ingredient in capitalism’s genesis
and historical prolongation.
The New Spirit of Capitalism adopts precisely this line of sociological enquiry. “Whereas
capitalism, by its very nature, is an insatiable process,” its authors argue, “people are
satiable, so that they require justifications for getting involved in an insatiable process. It
follows that capitalism cannot make do with offering nothing more specific than its
inherent insatiability”. Capitalism must therefore draw on something external to itself in
order to justify itself. Identifying this external resource is the empirical task of the book.
The answer given, and the distinctive claim of The New Spirit of Capitalism, is that
capitalism absorbs aspects of anti-capitalist critiques into itself, and thereby finds new
ways of legitimating itself in the eyes of society. Capitalism has “discovered routes to its
survival in critiques of it”.
Boltanski and Chiapello identify three different spirits of capitalism that have operated
over the past century, each one being initiated by a moral crisis that its predecessor was
unable to fend off. From the late nineteenth century until the 1930s, capitalism was
imbued with an ‘entrepreneurial spirit’, which appealed to people through the virtues of
free enterprise and creativity. The Depression destroyed the moral and political validity
of capitalism on these terms, and resulted in widespread attacks on the social injustices
of the system. Absorbing these critiques into itself, a spirit of capitalism emerged that
guaranteed people economic security and equality. This was the Keynesian-Fordist
settlement that persisted right up until the crisis that hit capitalism in the years between
1968 and 1973.
The ‘new spirit of capitalism’ is formed out of the critique that was levelled at its
predecessor. Where the Depression was met with a ‘social critique’ of its unfairness, the
late sixties and early seventies witnessed the return of an ‘artistic critique’, in which
capitalism is attacked for its bureaucracy, inflexibility and uniformity. The new spirit of
capitalism appeals to values of self-actualisation, freedom and authentic community.
This is nothing other than the values of the 1968 generation, absorbed into capitalism as
a basis for its justification.
Justifications are not simply popular moral codes, but function through tangible tools and
texts. As far as The New Spirit of Capitalism is concerned, it is management texts that
do the most decisive work in the economy, and they provide the authors with their
central object of study. The bulk of the book contains a careful exposition and moral
interpretation of management theory. In an age in which capitalism has absorbed the
‘artistic critique’ of sixty-eight, businesses now engage with employees through their
‘connexionist values’, that is, the moral commitment to networks, social capital, diversity
and information-sharing. The anti-hierarchical ethos that is so striking in contemporary
management literature is a means of aligning working practices with the psychology of
those it needs to motivate. Botlanski and Chiapello stress that capitalism must to a
significant extent deliver on the promises that it makes, or else risk losing support and
sowing the seeds of its next moral crisis. However, they also alert us to the promises
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that it cannot make good on. Most profoundly, the promise of authenticity and freedom is
always compromised by the need for managerial control and a diffuse feeling of
inauthenticity. Consequently we live in “a new era of suspicion”.
More significantly for the Left are the promises that capitalism no longer makes at all,
namely those once spawned by the ‘social critique’ of capitalism. Drunk on the dreams
of independence and networks, we no longer challenge capitalism on grounds of
equality or security. Efforts to defend those excluded from this new connexionist world
look conservative and inflexible. Policies that might support greater equality are
presented as barriers to the fulfilment of authentic selves. Under the new spirit of
capitalism, the most exploited individuals do not even show up on our moral radar at all.
Occasionally one cannot help feeling that Boltanski and Chiapello are demonstrating
guilt by association. The causal chain connecting a Tom Peters management text and
how employees actually feel about their work is itself a matter for sociological
investigation, and perhaps not something that can be assumed. Who’s to say that
management theory isn’t simply a self-reinforcing sham, which nobody outside of it takes
seriously? Similar suspicions have been raised in the past when Leftist sociologists have
attempted to trace the origins of neo-liberalism to right-wing think tanks.
This complaint does little to tarnish a magnificent work of social theory, of quite aweinspiring scope. What marks it out best from Marxist approaches is the way in which it
dignifies employees with real agency. It is not inevitable that people will turn up to work
from one week to the next, indeed the book demonstrates that capitalism nearly came to
a complete halt in France in the early seventies due to its failure to strike an adequate
moral bargain. If capitalism were as mendacious as the Left has sometimes assumed,
Boltanski and Chiapello ask us, do we really believe that it would have survived to
exploit us for quite so long? This is not to say that it is entirely honest either.
One of the uncomfortable lessons of this book for policy-makers is that they are not
currently the decisive influence over the moral character of capitalism. But with the
exception of commentators such as Will Hutton, there has been a marked reluctance
within the British left to discuss different types of capitalism in moral terms anyway. The
implication of Boltanski and Chiapello’s book is that the next time capitalism hits a crisis,
it will be fuelled once more by a ‘social critique’ of its injustices, and less by an ‘artistic
critique’ of its inauthenticity. Now would be the time to develop the new theories of
political economy and corporate governance to succeed under the next spirit of
capitalism, but these are currently few and far between.
William Davies is a sociologist and policy analyst
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