Capitalism Without Tears
HERBERG, WILL
WRITERS and WRITING Capitalism Without Tears Capitalism and the Historians. Ed. by F A. Hayek. Chicago. 188 pp. $3.00. Reviewed by Will Herberg Author, "Judaism and Modern Man"; contributor to...
...it is indeed a problem that does not permit of a solution in principle...
...Insofar as he deals with the origins of modern industrialism, he will fall into the pattern against which the contributors to this volume so vehemently protest...
...whose incomes were almost wholly absorbed in paying for the bare necessaries of life...
...How did "baiting business," as Peter Viereck puts it, become the abiding preoccupation of the intellectual, whatever his politics...
...As a consequence, they all too easily tend to lapse into an ideologizing almost as deplorable as that against which the\ so properly protest...
...De Jouvenel does attempt a more searching analysis, but his paper, too, proves disappointing...
...The pro-capitalist intellectual who really thought of himself as an intellectual has, until recently, been a rare bird indeed...
...They are too indiscriminate and do not probe deeply enough...
...it is also and above all necessary, as Reinhold Niebuhr so persistently emphasizes, to be vigilant against the error in our own truth...
...Professor Hayek expresses the underlying thesis of the volume in the form of a "supreme myth" confronted by the "true fact...
...To add to the complexity, the human mind, though inescapably perspectival in its thinking, is always prone to claim an undue objectivity and universality for its insights and conclusions...
...and they raise a question that can no longer be ignored...
...The intellectual under capitalism, even when his work is well rewarded financially, feels himself unappreciated at his real worth, never taken seriously enough, relegated to the periphery of things...
...Preindustrial conditions have been idealized to the point of absurdity...
...They seem, with one or perhaps two exceptions, too self-assured, too self-righteous, too unqualified in their judgments and condemnations...
...During the period 1790-1830," the former sums up, "factory production [in England] increased rapidly...
...They tend too much to think in terms of political polemic and are too eager to denounce without making a real effort to understand...
...How did the "progressive" ideology, which was born as the ideology of the rising bourgeoisie, ??urn into an anti-capitalist creed...
...otherwise, the entire historiographical enterprise would be nothing more than irresponsible fantasy...
...Confrontation with Communist totalitarianism has well-nigh destroyed the ideological foundations of "progressivism" and has helped reconcile the intellectual with his society and culture, in which he has begun to discover hitherto unsuspected virtues...
...As long as "progressivism" remained the hallmark of modernity, history was seen in quasi-Marxist terms and early capitalism was pictured in darkest colors as an era of ruthless exploitation...
...Ashton in his two essays, and Hutt in his, carefully document this thesis, though their conclusions are formulated much more cautiously...
...The new anti-positivist emphasis on "values" in social philosophy, the new appreciation of the self-regulating mechanism of the market in economics, and the new appeal of a responsible Burkean conservatism in political thinking are marks of the spirit of our time...
...The existence of these two groups within the working class needs to be recognized...
...Hayek concedes, "but the working class as a whole benefited from the rise of modern industry...
...A new climate of opinion has come to prevail, very different from the orthodox "progressive" ideology of an earlier generation...
...were papers submitted at the Mont Pelerin Society conference at Beauvallon, France in September 1951, as part of a discussion of "problems of the preservation of a free society against the totalitarian threat...
...The emerging factory system, operated by greedy industrialists on the make, was described as having brought unspeakable suffering to the new class of industrial workers, whose forebears had allegedly lived a contented and comfortable life on England's "green and pleasant fields...
...A revision of the received "progressive" account of early modern capitalism is certainly in place, but how radical this revision is to be and to what limit> it should go is still far from clear...
...These papers are supplemented by two studies in economic history???The Standard of Life of the Workers in England, 1790-1830," also by Professor Ashton, and "The Factory System of the Early Nineteenth Century," by W. H. Hutt, professor of commerce at the University of Capetown...
...The first three essays???The Treatment of Capitalism by Historians," by T. S. Ashton, professor of economic history at the University of London...
...It is this latter tendency, rather than the inescapable perspectivism of thought, that is the source of arbitrariness and confusion...
...A greater proportion of people came to benefit from it both as producers and as consumers...
...On the other hand, every historical account is an account from a certain standpoint, from a certain perspective, and is relativized by this standpoint and perspective...
...Is all this not largely due to the fact that under capitalism, for the first time, due to the secular and "commercial" spirit that dominates it, the intellectual cannot find a place at the very center of the system commensurate with his sense of charismatic importance...
...On the one hand, there is in some sense objective historical factuality, controlling the historian...
...not merely in the long run but from the very beginning...
...If this is true, it would seem to follow that our best reliance in achieving a measure of objectivity in our thinking is to try to preserve a certain degree of detachment and self-criticism and to refuse to push the "logic" of our position to extremes...
...The essays are by no means equal in scholarship, insight or cogency, but they all have something to say...
...It is this version that the contributors to this volume are concerned with challenging...
...This gloomy contrast between the "merrie England" of the days before the steam engine and the dreadful conditions brought about by the early Industrial Revolution is already found in Fried-rich Engels's The Condition of the Working Classes in England in 1844, and by the second half of the nineteenth century it had achieved the status of a "fact" which everybody "knows...
...Why did the intellectual, who for centuries has been the brains and the spokesman of Church, prince and bourgeois, suddenly, between 1830 and 1848, turn against the new capitalist social order...
...I am not sure that this is fully grasped by all the contributors to this volume...
...but, in either case, he will be anti-capitalist in sentiment...
...The five essays plus introduction that constitute the book are united by the insistence that the conventional picture of the rise and consequences of the factory system is false to the point of travesty...
...There is] evidence of the existence of a large class [of factory workers] raised well above the level of mere subsistence...
...In recent years, however, as a result of historical lessons that even the intellectual cannot escape, a marked change of attitude has taken place...
...The "supreme myth" is the "legend of the deterioration of the position of the working classes in consequence of the rise of 'capitalism.'" The "true fact" is the "slow and irregular progress of the working class which we now know to have taken place" during this period...
...In this atmosphere, the revision of the history of early modern capitalism for which Hayek and his collaborators are pleading will find a much readier hearing than would have been conceivable a few decades ago...
...He becomes a spiritually displaced person, alienated from his culture, despising the values and standards that his society takes for granted...
...and "The Treatment of Capitalism by Continental Intellectuals," by Bertrand de Jouvenel, the French publicist...
...This insight of the celebrated American historian is fully borne out by the successive rewritings of such axial events as the "fall" of the Roman Empire, the Reformation, and the French and Russian Revolutions...
...It is not enough to fight "their" error with "our" truth...
...The problem of objectivity in history is by no means a simple one...
...Two questions, however, immediately arise: (1) How did this distorted picture come about and what enables us now to see more "truly...
...The intellectual may be "progressive," that is, quasi-socialistic, in his thinking, or he may be "reactionary," prone to glorify the "good old days" before capitalism...
...I think it will have to be recognized that there is a good deal to the Hayek-Ashton-Hutt thesis...
...there is considerable evidence to sustain the "revisionist" case at other points as well...
...But this raises the other question: Is the revision any more "objective" than the "myth" it aims to replace...
...Almost automatically, though perhaps unwittingly, he will take his cue from the professional crusaders against capitalism and become the partisan of the classes he takes to be the victims of the social order he dislikes...
...seasonally employed agricultural workers and hand-loom weavers in particular...
...With very few exceptions, it became the version that passed into the standard treatment of early capitalism in England and America...
...How far can the revision go without itself becoming little more than a pro-capitalist "myth...
...There were, however, masses of unskilled or poorly skilled workers...
...contributor to "Commentary," "Partisan Review" "Each age," Frederick Jackson Turner once noted, "writes the history of the past anew with reference to conditions uppermost in its own time...
...The five are prefaced by an introductory essay on "History and Politics" in which Professor Hayek attempts to trace the far-reaching and often insidious effects of political bias on historiography and historical interpretation...
...His ideology will be an ideology of self-validation, and therefore an ideology devaluating the established order...
...Today, it is the accepted account of the rise of capitalism in modern Europe that is beginning to undergo revision...
...the famous Blue Books, upon which the anti-capitalist case has been based from Marx onward, have turned out to be astonishingly unreliable...
...1 am afraid that, on the whole, this volume does not help render it any clearer...
...2) How far is the revision now under way to go...
...The Anti-Capitalist Bias of American Historians," by Louis M. Hacker of Columbia...
...Some individuals or groups in this as well as other classes may for a time have suffered from [the factory system's] results," Mr...
...Hayek, Hacker and de Jouvenel undertake to deal with the first question, but not very satisfactorily...
...Hutt puts it this way: "The two main conclusions suggested by this discussion are, first, that there has been a general tendency to exaggerate the 'evils' which characterized the factory system before the abandonment of laissez-faire, and, second, that factory legislation was not essential to the ultimate disappearance of those evils...
Vol. 37 • June 1954 • No. 26
