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The Glory of Kings: A Festschrift for James B. Jordan
Fyodor Dostoevsky
(Christian Encounters Series)
Athanasius
(Foundations of Theological Exegesis and Christian Spirituality)
The Four: A Survey of the Gospels
Defending Constantine: The Twilight of an Empire and the Dawn of Christendom
From Behind the Veil: The Epistles of John
Deep Exegesis:The Mystery of Reading Scripture
1 & 2 Kings
Brazos Theological Commentary
The Promise Of His Appearing: An Exposition Of Second Peter
A Great Mystery: Fourteen Wedding Sermons
Deep Comedy: Trinity, Tragedy, And Hope In Western Literature
Miniatures & Morals: The Christian Novels of Jane Austen
The Priesthood of the Plebs: A Theology of Baptism
A Son To Me: An Exposition of 1 & 2 Samuel
From Silence to Song: The Davidic Liturgical Revolution
Ascent to Love: A Guide to Dante's Divine Comedy
Blessed Are the Hungry: Meditations on the Lord's Supper
A House For My Name: A Survey of the Old Testament
Heroes of the City of Man: A Christian Guide to Select Ancient Literature
Brightest Heaven of Invention: A Christian Guide To Six Shakespeare Plays
Wise Words: Family Stories That Bring the Proverbs to Life
The Kingdom and the Power: Rediscovering the Centrality of the Church
“The market may have its martyrdoms,” wrote John Ruskin. Guided by Ruskin, I offer some Lenten reflections on business at http://www.firstthings.com/
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Friday, March 9, 2012 at 6:33 am
The most controversial portion of the Graeber article mentioned in a previous post is his claim that there are structural similarities between slavery and modern capitalism. He enumerates several: ”Both rely on a separation of the place of social (re)production of the labor force, and the place where that labor-power is realized in production– in the case of slavery, this is effected by transporting laborers bought or stolen from one society into another one; in capitalism, by separating the domestic sphere (the sphere of social production) from the workplace.”
Both, he claims, involve a form of “social death”: In slave systems, “community ties, kinship relations and so forth that shaped the worker are, in principle, supposed to have no relevance in the workplace. This is true in capitalism too, at least in principle: a worker’s ethnic identity, social networks, kin ties and the rest should not have any effect on hiring or how one is treated in the office or shop floor, though of course in reality this isn’t true.”
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Wednesday, February 22, 2012 at 3:13 pm
Marx has many dimensions, but the humanist one is not typically noted. In his ethnographic notebooks, he writes this about ancient conceptions of wealth: “Among the ancients we discover no single inquiry as to which form of landed property etc. is the most productive, which creates maximum wealth. Wealth does not appear as the aim of production, although Cato may well investigate the most profitable cultivation of fields, or Brutus may even lend money at the most favorable rate of interest. The inquiry is always about what kind of property creates the best citizens. Wealth as an end in itself appears only among a few trading peoples – monopolists of the carrying trade – who live in the pores of the ancient world like the Jews in medieval society.” Wealth is not about accumulation but about formation of persons.
He adds, “Thus the ancient conception, in which man always appears (in however narrowly national, religious or political a definition) as the aim of production, seems very much more exalted than the modern world, in which production is the aim of man and wealth the aim of production. In fact, however, when the narrow bourgeois form has been peeled away, what is wealth, if not the universality of needs, capacities, enjoyments, productive powers, etc., of individuals, produced in universal exchange?”
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Wednesday, February 22, 2012 at 2:39 pm
Mary Douglas and Baron Isherwood wrote The World of Goods
Their first move is to recognize that consumption should be understood in the context of “social process, not merely looked upon as the result or objective of work.”
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Monday, February 20, 2012 at 3:43 pm
In an essay on Mauss’ The Gift: The Form and Reason for Exchange in Archaic Societies
Douglas thinks that this has significant implications for anthropological theory: “When anthropologists search around for a telling distinction between societies based on primitive and modern technologies, they try out various terms such as pre-literate, simple, traditional. Each has limitations that unfit it for general use. But increasingly we are finding that the idea of the gift economy comprises all the associations, symbolic and interpersonal and economic, that we need for comparing with market economy.”
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Monday, February 20, 2012 at 3:29 pm
Gill again, stating the obvious: “Neither those who dominate and lead our industrialism – that is our bankers and financiers – nor those thousands and millions of men and women who are its more or less irresponsible instruments – neither, that is to say, the masters nor the men, are moved, inspired, by the notion that the object of working is sanctification, and that the work done, the things made have for their primary reason of being a collaboration with God in creating, and that is to say a collaboration with God in His praise of Himself. Nor have either masters or men any idea that the most important product of their factories is the men and women who work in them – that all things made are made to minister to persons and therefore partake of the nature and end of personality.”
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Monday, January 23, 2012 at 8:12 pm
In his 1939 lecture on Sacred and Secular in Art and Industry, Eric Gill compared the artist and the modern industrial laborer. They have much in common: “Both are normally engaged in making things. Both are normally workers with their hands. Both are normally paid for what they do and not paid if they don’t do it. (In this respect unlike either the man of business or the politician.) Both are commonly instructed as to what is required of them before they begin working.” Gill argued that the key difference is one of responsibility: “The artist is responsible for the form and quality of what his deeds effect; he is the responsible workman; he has responsibility and would be insulted if he were denied it; but the workman, the labourer, the hireling, the factory hand has been, as the theologian puts it, reduced to a sub-human condition of intellectual irresponsibility; he neither has responsibility nor does he now desire it. He is too deeply corrupted by his serfdom. The hireling flieth, because he is a hireling.”
Gill argues further that the detachment of labor from artistic responsibility for the products of labor distorts modern understanding of the “fine arts.” Fine arts are “very important and even enthralling,” he says, but “only as important and enthralling as they now are by reason of the fact that the common arts in our sort of mechanized society do not give any scope for the satisfaction of those specially fine feelings which our fine artists are now the special purveyors of.”
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Monday, January 23, 2012 at 3:34 pm
Joyce Appleby’s Economic Thought and Ideology in Seventeenth-Century England
To read the mercantilists as advocates of state intervention is to read back from a nineteenth century perspective, from the perspective of Smith’s triumph. They didn’t need to advocate for state intervention because prior to the seventeenth century it was a matter of course that magistrates and kings would oversee economic activities in order to ensure public order and the maintenance of certain social goods. Aristotle started it when he analyzed “economics” not as a discourse on markets or “the market,” but as a discourse on types of household – oikos nomos.
That production and exchange were intertwined with other social realities was a truism that took legal form:
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Friday, December 30, 2011 at 3:35 pm
Gellner provides a stimulating description of the interconnection of economic, political, cultural, and intellectual components of “industrial society,” which for him is a virtual equivalent of “modern society.” He begins with the Weberian description of modern society as a society organized by principles of “rationality,” by which he means,first, “coherence or consistency, the like treatment of like cases, regularity,” which is manifested both in bureaucratic government and in laboratory sciences, and, second, “efficiency, the cool rational selection of the best available means to given, clearly formulated and isolated ends.” If the bureaucrat is the ideal type of consistency, the entrepreneur is the ideal modern type of efficiency.
Behind these forms of rationality, though, is a deeper impulse, an “ecumenical” outlook that views the world as a single world. While “the most striking fact of pre-modern, pre-rational visions” is “the co-existence within them of multiple, not properly united, but hierarchically arranged sub-worlds,” the striking feature of the modern outlook is its singular unity: “all facts are located within a single continuous logical space” and “statements reporting them can be conjoined and generally related to each other.” In principle, there is “one single language [that] describes the world and is internally unitary.” For moderns, there is a single ruling Logos; and the dividing walls have been broken down.
At the same time, however, modern industrial society insists on “the separation of all separables, the esprit d’analyse.” Though this seems to contradict the unifying spirit of modernity, in fact the two work together.
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Monday, December 26, 2011 at 9:41 am
Specialization and division of labor is often seen as one of the marks of modern society. Ernest Gellner (Nations and Nationalism (New Perspectives on the Past)
The reason, Gellner suggests, lies in our highly unspecialized educational system: “the major part of training in industrial society is generic training, not specifically connected with the highly specialized professional activity of the person in question, and preceding it. Industrial society may be most criteria be the most highly specialized society ever; but its educational system is unquestionably the least specialized, the most universally standardized, that has ever existed. The same kind of training or education is given to all or most children and adolescents up to an astonishingly late age. Specialized schools have prestige only at the end of the educational process. . . . specialized schools intended for a younger, earlier intake have negative prestige.”
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Monday, December 26, 2011 at 9:10 am
A recent issue of the New Yorker had an intriguing profile of Paypal founder Peter Thiel. Thiel’s current obsession is education”
“Thiel believes that education is the next bubble in the U.S. economy. He has compared university administrators to subprime-mortgage brokers, and called debt-saddled graduates the last indentured workers in the developed world, unable to free themselves even through bankruptcy. Nowhere is the blind complacency of the establishment more evident than in its bovine attitude toward academic degrees: as long as my child goes to the right schools, upward mobility will continue. A university education has become a very expensive insurance policy—proof, Thiel argues, that true innovation has stalled. In the midst of economic stagnation, education has become a status game, ‘purely positional and extremely decoupled’ from the question of its benefit to the individual and society.”
He “thinks that young people—especially the most talented ones—should establish a plan for their lives early, and he favors one plan in particular: starting a technology company,” and so he is ”giving fellowships to brilliant young people who would leave college and launch their own startups.”
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Wednesday, December 14, 2011 at 9:50 am
Figgis claims that the French Revolutionaries drew inspiration from Juan de Mariana’s endorsement of overthrowing tyrants, but the revolutionaries would have been wise to heed de Mariana’s arguments against fiat money. At the beginning of his treatise on the alteration of money, he writes:
“At the time that there was a great shortage of money in Spain and the treasury was completely exhausted by long and drawn-out wars in many places and by many other problems, many ways to make up for this shortage were thought out and tried. Among others, consideration was given to the debasing of money, and that in two ways:
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Monday, December 5, 2011 at 1:45 pm
Tracing the separation of “economics” from the rest of life, Dumont notes that one key moment was the blurring of traditional distinctions between fixed property in land and movables. This was based on the priority of the I-Thou over the I-It relation (not his terminology): in “traditional societies,” “relations between men are more important, more highly valued, than the relations between men and things.” Given this view, for traditional societies, “immovable wealth remained, as associated with power over men, the only recognized form of wealth.” Again, “rights in land are enmeshed in the social organization in such a manner that superior rights accompany power over men. Such rights or ‘wealth,’ appearing essentially as a matter of relations between men, are intrinsically superior to movable wealth, which is disparaged.”
In modernity, the human-thing relation takes on primacy, and in conjunction with this change movable wealth becomes more important than immovable. The “revolution” of modernity is that “the link between immovable wealth and power over men was broken, and movable wealth became more fully autonomous in itself, as the superior aspect of wealth in general.” With this, in turn, emerged “an autonomous and relatively unified category of wealth.” Wealth that carried social and political responsibility was no longer seen as different in kind from objects.
Milbank makes the same point in his essay in The Crisis of Global Capitalism
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Friday, December 2, 2011 at 5:18 pm
Like many scholars, Louis Dumont (Essays on Individualism
Law in particular is conceived not as “an expression of the order descried in nature by the human mind” but becomes instead “in its entirety the expression of the ‘power’ or ‘will’ of the legislator.” Once, “right had been conceived as a just relationship between social beings” but in Ockham right is “the social recognition of the power (potestas) of the individual.” Ockham thus becomes “the founding father of the ‘subjective theory’ of right” that is the basis of “the modern theory of law.”
Dumont adds in a footnote that the setting for the development of this theory of law: The debate between Pope and the Franciscans over the Franciscan vows of poverty.
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Thursday, December 1, 2011 at 1:38 pm
“For centuries England has relied on protection, has carried it to extremes and has obtained satisfactory results from it. There is no doubt that it is to this system that it owes its present strength. After two centuries, England has found it convenient to adopt free trade because it thinks that protection can no longer offer it anything. Very well then, Gentlemen, my knowledge of our country leads me to believe that within 200 years, when America has gotten out of protection all that it can offer, it too will adopt free trade.”
U.S. Grant, stating a policy as American as his initials.
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Thursday, December 1, 2011 at 10:49 am
A recent New Yorkerpiece argues that big business remains the driver of economic growth: “the truth is that, from the perspective of the economy as a whole, small companies are not the real drivers of growth. One can see this by looking at the track record of the world’s economies. The developed countries with the highest percentage of workers employed by small businesses include Greece, Portugal, Spain, and Italy—that is, the four countries whose economic woes are wreaking such havoc on financial markets. Meanwhile, the countries with the lowest percentage of workers employed by small businesses are Germany, Sweden, Denmark, and the U.S.—some of the strongest economies in the world.”
In sum, “small businesses are, on the whole, less productive than big businesses, and though they do create most jobs, they also destroy most jobs, since, while starting a business is easy, keeping it going is hard.”
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Friday, November 18, 2011 at 5:04 pm
Paul Kahn (Putting Liberalism in Its Place
Interest-as-desire becomes institutionalized as the market, which Kahn describes as a method of “objectifying interests in the form of property, which then allows a process of valuation and exchange” in place of “brutish competition of each against all.” (I wonder here if Kahn proves himself to be still in the grip of social contract theory, which posits a pre-social, pre-exchange state.)
When desire/interest and the market come to dominate society, as they have in the modern world, reason and will tend to take a particular shape, a particular political shape.
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Thursday, October 27, 2011 at 5:02 am
Americans, Hauerwas says, “presume that they have exercised their freedom when the get to choose between a Sony or Pansonic television.”
That’s a cleverly subversive thing to say, but things are not quite as easy as Hauerwas makes them. Consumers may, for all I know, often be this superficial: “I get to choose Sony or Panasonic! What a country!” Though the consumer choosing his Sony may never think of it, the fact that there is both a Sony and a Panasonic to choose – the fact that there are televisions to purchase at all – require an unimaginably complex set of circumstances and institutions.
Someone had to invent the TV in the first place. Then someone had to organize the materials and the production facilities that would produce these objects on a large scale. Then someone else had to organize very similar materials and productive facilities to produce the competitor’s brand. Then someone had to organize the transport to get them to the store where you can make your choice between Sony and Panasonic. And of course, if the TVs are going to be on the shelf for the consumer to buy, the store has to be built, shelves stocked, people and resources managed for retail sales. It’s Leonard Read’s “I, Pencil” on a grand scale.
No doubt, this is not an ideal government-free set of activities. Contracts have to be signed; titles and patents are involved; government regulates at every step of the process. Yet, overall, it is an chain of actions, most of which fully deserve the label “free.”
In short, the freedom required for the superficial choice between Sony and Panasonic is far thicker than Hauerwas’s quip suggests.
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Wednesday, October 12, 2011 at 3:20 pm
In her 1999 book, The War Against Population: The Economics and Ideology of World Population Control
Kasun explains, “Dr. Ravenholt was reported to believe that only such extreme measures could counteract the ‘population explosion’ that would otherwise so reduce living standards that foreign rebellions would spring up ‘against the strong U.S. commercial presence.”
Ravenholt was a cut-up. Kasun cites a scholar who “described Dr. Ravenholt’s behavior at a dinner for population researchers: for the amusement and edification of the guests, Dr. Ravenholt strolled around the room gesturing as if he were operating a hand vacuum abortion pump.”
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Wednesday, October 12, 2011 at 11:12 am
Deepak Lal (In Praise of Empires: Globalization and Order
“Rather than follow the correct British policy of adopting unilateral free trade and then allowing its hegemony to spread the norm, the United States chose the extremely acrimonious route of multilateral and more recently bilateral negotiations to reduce trade barriers. This is due to the fact that, unlike the British who have correctly seen free trade not as a zero-sum game and . . . the Americans have never accepted the classical liberal case for free trade. They have always looked upon trade as a zero-sum game. They have been protectionist,” apart from “a brief period between 1846 and 1861.” In 1901, TR stated the guiding principle: “Reciprocity must be treated as the handmaiden of Protection. Our first duty is to see that the protection granted by the tariff in every case where it is needed is maintained, and reciprocity be sought so far as it can be safely done without injury to our home industries.”
This is counterproductive, Lal argues: “by perpetuating the myth that trade is a zero-sum game and that removing tariffs can only be done on the basis of reciprocity, the United States has endured that issues of domestic policy will inevitably spill over into trade policy.” He notes the ironic fact that “one of the largest unilateral movements to free trade has occurred in China since Deng Xiaoping adopted the Open Door policy.”
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Monday, September 26, 2011 at 5:11 pm
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