Economic Metaphors
Lewis, J. Patrick
BOOKS Economic Metaphors DEMOCRACY AND CAPITALISM by Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis Basic Books. 256 pp. $16.95. by J. Patrick Lewis Werner Sombart once said that socialism in America came to...
...Keynes's fix proved short-lived as the 1970s eroded the faith that both capital and labor could be served equally by a growing state sector...
...Their deep and long-held commitment to equality is, of course, never in doubt, but why de-emphasize it now...
...It "is silent on how people might get to be what they want to be...
...Bowles and Gintis's "visionary-historical approach" begins with what Marxists ignore and liberals misconstrue: the great clash between personal and property rights...
...It's the Great U-turn...
...the latter are generally thought to be less than fully rational—children, prisoners, the elderly, women, nonwhites...
...Indeed...
...In an interesting chapter on the structure of discourse, the authors claim that "such terms as liberty, freedom, right, man, and citizen...
...Even more ironic and disconcerting is that perhaps the two most prominent radical economists at work in the United States should let liberty take primacy over justice...
...Because the market and the voting booth are ostensibly open to choosers and learners alike, liberalism claims to "allow people to get what they want...
...But if their visionary-historical approach is to be an effective course of social action, it must face up to two major shortcomings: the murkiness of popular sovereignty and the necessity of confronting bedrock economic issues...
...Leftists, in other words, could not improve on a system that allowed the average family to fatten so lavishly at the trough of high mass consumption...
...The authors stop short of Ronald Reagan, whose charm temporarily persuaded many of the dispossessed that their dinghies would be made to rise by lavishly accommodating the wealthy...
...On the subject of domination, it is heartening to see Marx extended and in some cases rejected...
...In Beyond the Waste Land (1983), Samuel Bowles, David Gordon, and Thomas Weisskopf performed a masterful autopsy on contemporary capitalism, charting the patient's history with copiously grim statistics...
...The authors seem to have forgotten the jingoistic uses to which "liberty" has been put by neo- and paleo-conservatives, because they make liberty one of the two hallmarks of their postliberal democracy...
...Whatever merit Sombart's view may hold, it is clearly reductionist, and one of the central aims of Democracy and Capitalism is to "illustrate the unfortunate consequences of the dominance of economic metaphor in our political and moral thinking...
...New progressive movements must know that much of both liberalism and Marxism is simply irrelevant to their major concern, "the politics of becoming" There is a kind of 1960s dreaminess to the phrase that the authors never manage to shed...
...These two great traditions are found wanting not least because they are based on the politics of getting—who gets what, when, and how...
...Under Reagan the distribution of income skews even further...
...Neither tradition therefore holds promise for progressive social change...
...Bowles and Gintis reconstruct flawlessly the life and times of liberal democracy...
...Site, state, discourse, action, structure, and a dozen other terms gum up the text but not the argument...
...But semantics counts...
...might have been explosive collisions of these rights...
...Otherwise, Democracy and Capitalism is merely about the politics of becoming Utopian...
...The Lockean, Jeffersonian, Madisonian, and Keynesian "accommodations" successfully rationalized and defused what J. Patrick Lewis, an economist, teaches at Otterbein College in Ohio...
...Absent a coherent theory of the individual, Marxism for its part squeezes all forms of domination—racism, rape, imperialism, intolerance of homosexuals, religious bigotry, state despotism—"either into obscurity or into the mold of class analysis...
...So "the politics of becoming" becomes a luxury, hence a foreign language to the thirty-five million poor Americans unless it refers to the desire to be unhungry, adequately clothed and housed, and marginally educated...
...by J. Patrick Lewis Werner Sombart once said that socialism in America came to grief on roast beef and apple pie...
...There is nothing inevitable about post-liberal democracy, except the fact that it must contend with other, less palatable alternatives for a hold on the future...
...The authors ably show that this one-dimensional view misses the richly textured nuances of all social and economic exchanges...
...The irony of liberalism is that it can and has created individual liberties while simultaneously protecting the bastions of power from being called to account...
...Rather they are tools with uses...
...In place of socialism, now apparently too barnacled to be of use, Bowles and Gintis prefer "postliberal democracy...
...At the heart of the argument against liberalism and for democracy is the dichotomy of choosers and learners...
...In liberal theory, personal preferences are taken as given, and representation is assumed to be equal to participation...
...In fact, the entire case here is as much about language—some of it trendy, some tedious—as it is about politics...
...do not stand for ideas, meanings, or concepts...
...This time around, Bowles and Herb Gintis, professors of economics at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, offer a political philosophy that might well have been called "The Poverty of Liberalism and Marxism...
...The former consist of society's favored—educated and propertied white male adults...
...If voting offers the option of quitting a product or a political party—"exit," in Albert Hirschman's phrase—it does not exactly make for a loud "voice," either in one's personal development or in the public domain...
...Democracy is thus made "safe for elites...
...The task of reconciling these inherently contradictory rights has fallen to the gentry who, as proprietors of both kinds, have fallen over each other to reconcile them...
...Bowles and Gintis deftly draw from feminist theory, which is almost solely responsible for our understanding of the family, patriarchy, and the mode of reproduction, all glimpsed until recently only through the* fog of Marx...
...The other, "popular sovereignty," smells of populism, picnics, and townhall meetings...
Vol. 50 • August 1986 • No. 8
