From: thant@void.esd.sgi.com (Thant Tessman)
Subject: Intellectual Treatment of Capitalism (Long)
Followup-To: talk.politics.theory
Organization: Silicon Graphics, Inc.  Mountain View, CA
Date: Mon, 5 Oct 92 21:05:49 GMT

This is a long (734 lines), but excellent essay from the book 
Capitalism_and_the_Historians, edited by F.A. Hayek.  Copyright 
1954, University of Chicago.  Reproduced without permission.  
(Buy the book.  It's really good.)


The Treatment of Capitalism by Continental Intellectuals
Bertrand de Jouvenel


We view with grave concern the attitude of the Western intelligentsia
to its society.  Man possesses mental images, representations of the
universe on progressive scales, of the things and agents therein, of
himself and his relation to them.  These images can be roughly likened
to ancient maps adorned with small figures.  Rational action, in a
sense, means to go by the maps available to the ego, however
inaccurate.  The breadth, richness and precision of these
representations or maps are due entirely to intercommunication.
Education consists in conveying a stock of such images and fostering
the natural faculty of producing them.  In any group, chosen at
random, it can be observed that members are unequally active in
communicating such representations; in all organized societies known
to us a fraction of the members is specialized in dealing with
representations.  Their importance to society is very great;
"rational" individual or collective action must be taken on the basis
of what is "known," of the images of reality which have been given
currency.  These images can be misleading.  "Rational" action based on
bad "maps" is absurd in the light of better knowledge and can be
harmful; the study of primitive societies yields a quantity of
illustrations.

It is rational, subjectively, to tilt at windmills if we firmly
believe them to be wicked, dangerous giants holding fair princesses in
bondage.  It is, however, a sounder view to regard them as a not very
efficient device to capture an irregular energy for the purpose of
grinding grain.  We may happen to dislike the miller, who may be a bad
man, but it is, at best, poetic fancy to regard him as blighting the
countryside by the spread of his evil wings.  The Western
intelligentsia is not exempt from such nightmares, resulting from a
grafting of strong feeling onto a weak stem of positive knowledge.

Positive knowledge is an understanding of our surroundings which
allows us to move toward our goal by the best route.  Indeed, some
understanding of the forces at work in these surroundings has made it
possible to put them to work for our purposes.  It is a fact of
experience that we can alter the arrangement of men (society) as well
as the arrangement of things (nature).  As in the former case, this
calls for knowledge.  To the ignorant, social devices will always
appear needlessly complicated; so does a machine.  Indeed, any organic
structure, as we know, is far more complex than an inorganic one.
Men, however, are less willing to admit ignorance in the realm of
society than in that of nature: 'de re mea agitur.'  In this social
realm, moreover, the criterion of judgement is a dual one.

Men pass judgements of value, some of which are ethical and relate to
'bonum honestum;' these latter are never applied to agents or agencies
known to be witless.  Taken to see a steel furnace, a small child or a
savage may be terrified by its roaring and call it "wicked."  This
view, however, will be dropped as soon as it is understood that the
furnace has no spirit.  No informed person will think of the furnace
as evil because it is fiercely red, lets out occasional streams of
burning lava, and feeds on gritty scrap iron and coal that is black.
It is merely a device, instrumentally good, since it leads to the
production of tools and machines, serving men's purposes.  Nor will
any reasonable person blame the furnace for the badness of some human
purposes served by the machines (such as aggressive war).  It is
understood that the device is a good servant and that men alone are
accountable for evil uses.  A schoolboy obdurate in the animist view
of the furnace would be shown by his schoolmaster that this is
superstition.  The same teacher, however, may regard "capitalism" in
the same light as the ignorant and superstitious schoolboy regards the
furnace.  He will see in it an evil monster, author of hurts and
wrongs, not a device as useful as the furnace in the production of
tools.

It is quite true that moral considerations have their place in the
assessing of social devices, while they do not seem germane to the
assessing of engineering devices.  For in social devices moral agents
are involved.  Therefore, social devices are subject to a double
criterion: efficiency and morality.  A discussion of the harmony of
these criteria in general involves metaphysics.  We shall attempt to
remain on a humbler plane.  As the notation of good and bad (morally)
applies only to consciences, a device can be bad only in directly.
There is a clear case against a device which makes men worse; such is
the criterion on which Plato relied to call the politics of Pericles
bad.  It has been held by some of the greatest minds of mandkind that
we grow worse through the development of our wants and better by
cutting them down.  The Stoics pointed out that we become slaves to
our desires, and the Cynics stressed that each desire given up is a
degree of freedom gained.  The early Church Fathers taught that by
attention to worldy goods we place ourselves under the sway of the
"Prince of this World."  More recently Rousseau took up this theme
with enthralling eloquence.  If this view is adopted, then devices
which tend ever to enlarge the scope of our wants by successively
satisfying them and by inducing hopes of meeting ever new wants are
bad indeed.  The social device of capitalism is bad, but so are, by
the same token, the engineering devices of industry.  This view,
however, is not avowed by contemporaries; on the contrary, they are
anxious that men's wants should ever increasingly be satisfied.
Therefore declamations against "money" do not seem to make sense.  If
men desire "goods," of course they desire money, which is the common
denominator of these "goods," the door opening to them; and the "power
of money" is nothing but the *reification* of the power of these goods
over men's desires.

It is the proper function of the spiritual and moral teacher to show
men the worthlessness of some of the things they do desire.  Impeding
the acquisition of these things by temporal authority tends to cause
lawbreaking and to create a complex of criminal interests.  These are
among the clearest examples of the deteriorating effect of social
devices on human character.  The civilized world has marveled at the
existence of a powerfully organized criminal society beneath the
surface of American life; this mushroom growth was occasioned by the
driving-underground of gambling.  These phenomena warn us that a
result contrary to the intention may be obtained when social devices
are used to raise the moral level of human behavior.  It is, moreover,
well known that any attempt to change man's actions by means other
than a change in his spirit is usually futile and anyhow not a moral
improvement.

To the intellectual the social device of capitalism offers a
displeasing picture.  Why?  In his own terms, here are self-seeking
men in quest of personal aggrandizement.  How?  By providing consumers
with things they want or can be induced to want.  The same
intellectual, puzzlingly, is not shocked by the workings of hedonist
democracy; here also self-seeking men accomplish their aggrandizement
by promising to other men things they want or are induced to demand.
The difference seems to lie mainly in that the capitalist delivers the
goods.  And all through the West the fulfilling of political promises
seems to be a function of capitalist achievement.  Another aspect of
the capitalist device which makes it unpleasant to the intellectual is
the "degradation of workers to the condition of mere instruments."  In
Kant's words, it is always immoral to treat other men as means and not
as ends.  Experience teaches us that this is not an uncommon behavior,
nor is it peculiar to capitalism.  It is Rousseau's view that such
treatment is inherent in civilized society, which multiplies random
contacts based on utility rather than on affection, and that it
becomes more and more widespread as contacts increase and interests
overlap.  Marx's view is less philosophical, more dependent on
history.  The nascent capitalist, he says, found already at hand a
population which had been treated as tools by previous exploiters
before being seized by the enterprising bourgeois, and the existence
of a proletariat which could be treated in such a way originated in
the expropriation of the farmers.  This is what obliged the workers,
berift of their own means of production to work for others who
disposed of such means.  If this theory (obviously inspired by the
enclosures) were true, capitalism would have found it most difficult
to obtain "wage slaves" in the countries where land was most readily
available (i.e. in the United States).

It is not impossible that the mental picture of capitalism has
suffered from a dichotomy which classical economists found necessary
for logical purposes--the dichotomy of the consumer and the worker.
The entrepreneur was represented as serving the consumer and using the
worker.  Such a dichotomy can be introduced even in the case of
Robinson Crusoe, whose physical resources (considered as "the worker")
can be represented as exploited in the service of his needs
(considered as "the consumer").  This reification of two aspects of
the public was intellectually tenable at the outset of what is known
as the capitalist era.  Heretofore, indeed, the buying public of
manufacturers had been sharply distinguished from the working public
of artisans, engaged chiefly in producing luxuries consumed by the
rich, who lived on unearned takings from the produce of the land.  But
precisely in the capitalist era the wage-earning producer of
industrial consumer goods and the market buyer of such goods have
become increasingly identified.  It would be a striking illustration
of social evolution to find out what fraction of manufactured consumer
goods has gone to the wage-earners employed in manufacturing.  This
fraction has constantly increased under capitalism, so that the
dichotomy has become ever a more theoretical concept.  It is almost
unnecessary to point out that the dichotomy is intellectually useful
in any economy where division of labor obtains; in the same manner the
Soviet worker is used in the service of the Soviet consumer.  The
difference lies in the fact that he is used more mercilessly as a
worker and gets less as a consumer.

A large part of the Western intelligentsia of today forms and conveys
a warped picture of our economic institutions.  This is dangerous,
since it tends to divert a salutary urge to reform from feasible
constructive tasks to the unfeasible and the destructive.  The
historian's contribution to the distortion of the picture has been
under discussion, especially his interpretation of the "Industrial
Revolution."  I have little to add.  Historians have done their
obvious duty in describing the miserable social conditions of which
they found ample evidence.  They have, however, proved exceptionally
incautious in their interpretation of the facts.  First, they seem to
have taken for granted that a sharp increase in the extent of social
awareness of and indignation about misery is a true index of increased
misery; they seem to have given little thought to the possibility that
such an increase might also be a function of new facilities of
expression (due partly to a concentration of workers, partly to
greater freedom of speech), of a growing philanthopic sensitivity (as
evidenced by the fight for penal reforms), and of a new sense of the
human power to change things, mooted by the Industrial Revolution
itself.  Second, they do not seem to have distinguished sufficiently
between the sufferings attendant upon any great migration (and there
was a migration to the towns) and those inflicted by the factory
system.  Third, they do not seem to have attached enough importance to
the Demographic Revolution.  Had they used the comparative method,
they might have found that a massive influx into the towns, with the
resultant squalor and pauperism, occurred as well in countries
untouched by the Industrial Revolution, where they produced waves of
beggars instead of underpaid workers.  Given population pressure,
would conditions have been better without capitalist development?  The
condition of underdeveloped and overcrowded countries may provide an
answer.*  Methodological oversights of this type, however, dwindle
into insignificance in comparison with conceptual errors.

[*  Do we not see such countries in dire need of capital for the
employment of surplus labor crowded off the land?  Be it noted that
such labor can be employed on terms which seem to us humane only on
condition that its produce serves foreign and richer markets.  But, in
so far as it destines its wares for the home market, hours have to be
long and pay short to make the merchandise salable to a poor
population.  Indeed, the initial factories seeking to serve an ample
fraction of the local population cannot fail to employ their workers
on terms much lower than those which were previously commanded by
artisans serving only a narrow market of wealthy landowners.
Therefore the Industrial Revolution is logically accompanied at the
outset by a fall in real wages, if one compares, somewhat unduly, the
previous reward of the artisan with the present reward of the factory
worker.]

The vast improvement achieved in workers' conditions over the last
hundred years is widely attributed to union pressure and good laws
correcting an evil system.  One may ask, on the other hand, whether
this improvement would have occurred but for the achievements of this
evil system, and whether political action has not merely shaken from
the tree the fruit it had borne.  The search for the true cause is not
an irrelevant pursuit, since an erroneous attribution of merit may
lead to the belief that fruit is produced by shaking trees.  Lastly,
one may ask whether the "hard times" so bitterly evoked, and for which
capitalism is arraigned, were a specific feature of capitalist
development or are an aspect of a rapid industrial development
(without outside help) to be found as well under another social
system.  Does the Magnitogorsk of the 1930's compare so favorably with
the Manchester of the 1830's?

It is remarkable that the historian should fail to "forgive" the
horrors of a process which has played an obvious part in what he calls
"progress," precisely in an age addicted to "historicism," where
excuses are currently found for horrors going on today on the plea
that they will lead to some good, an assertion as yet incapable of
proof.  Surely indignation is best expended on what is happening
today, events which we may hope to influence, rather than on what is
beyond recall.  Nonetheless, instances readily come to mind of authors
who have stressed the hardships of the British working classes in the
nineteenth century while finding nothing to say about the violent
impressing of Russian peasants into kilkhozes.  Here bias is blatant.

Can we find specific reasons for the historian's bias?  I think not.
the attitude of the historian would present a special problem only if
it could be shown that it was he who originally brought to light the
evils of capitalism previously unnoticed by the remainder of the
intelligentsia, thereby altering the point of view of his fellow
intellectuals.  But this is not in accordance with the facts.
Unfavorable views of capitalism, whole systems of thought directed
against it, were prevalent in large sectors of the intelligentsia
before historians exposed the past wrongs of capitalism or indeed
before they paid any attention at all to social history.  It is
probably the main achievement of Marx to have fathered this pursuit,
which originated and developed in an anticapitalist climate.  The
historian is no aimless fact-finder.  His attention is drawn to
certain problems under the influence of his own or other current
preoccupations related to the present day.  These induce him to seek
certain data, which may have been rejected as negligible by former
generations of historians; these he reads, using patterns of thought
and value judgments which he shares with at least some contemporary
thinkers.  The study of the past thus always bears the imprint of
present views.  History, the science, moves with the times and is
subject to the historical process.  Furthermore, there is no
philosophy of history.  To sum up, the historian's attitude reflects
an attitude obtaining in the intelligentsia.  If he manifests a bias,
it is one pertaining to the intelligentsia in general.  Therefore it
is the intellectual's attitude which must claim our attention.

Sociology and social history are disciplines much favored nowdays.  We
would turn to them for help.  Unfortunately, their scholars have given
little or no attention to the problems centering on the intellectual.
What is and what has been his place in society?  To what tensions does
it give rise?  What are the specific traits of the intellectual's
activity, and what complexes does it tend to create?  How have the
attitudes of the intellectual to society evolved, and what are the
factors in this evolution?  All these problems, and many more, should
be tempting to social scientists.  Their importance has been indicated
by major thinkers (such as Pareto, Sorel, Michels, Schumpeter, and,
first and foremost, Jean Jacques Rousseau).  The infantry of science,
so to speak, has not followed; it has left this vast and rewarding
field of study uncharted.  We must therefore make shift with the
scanty data in our possession, and we may perhaps be excused for the
clumsiness and blundering of an ill-equipped attempt.

The history of the Western intelligentsia during the last ten
centuries falls easily into three parts.  During the first period the
intelligentsia is levitic; there are no intellectuals but those called
and ordained to the service of God.  They are the custodians and
interpreters of the Word of God.  In the second period we witness the
rise of a secular intelligentsia, kings' lawyers being the first to
appear; the development of the legal profession is for a long time
the main source of secular intellectuals; amusers of noblemen,
progressively raising their sights, provide another, very minor,
source.  This secular intelligentsia grows slowly in numbers but
rapidly in influence and conducts a great fight against the clerical
intelligentsia, which it gradually supersedes in the main functions of
the intelligentsia.  Then, in a third period coinciding with the
Industrial Revolution, we find a fantastic proliferation of the
secular intellectual, favored by the generalization of secular
education and the rise of publishing (and eventually broadcasting) to
the status of a major industry (an effect of the Industrial
Revolution).  This secular intelligentsia is by now far and away the
most influential, and it is the subject of our study.

An enormous majority of Western intellectuals display and affirm
hostility to the economic and social institutions of their society,
institutions to which they give the blanket name of capitalism.
Questioned as to the grounds of their hostility, they will give
*affective* reasons: concern for "the worker" and antipathy for "the
capitalist"; and *ethical* reasons: "the ruthlessness and injustice of
the system."  This attitude offers a remarkable superficial
resemblance to that of the clerical intelligentsia of the Middle Ages
(and a striking contrast, as we shall see, to that of the secular
intelligentsia up to the eighteenth century).  The medieval church
centered its attention and its work on the unfortunate.  It was the
protector of the poor, and it performed all the functions which have
now devolved on the welfare state: feeding the destitute, healing the
sick, educating the people.  All these services were free, provided
out of the wealth shunted to them by church taxes and huge gifts,
vigorously pressed for.  While the church was forever thrusting the
condition of the poor before the eyes of the rich, it was forever
scolding the latter.  Nor is its attitude to be viewed merely in the
light of a mellowing of the heart of the wealthy for their own moral
improvement and the material advantage of the poor.  The rich were not
only urged to give but also urged to desist from their search after
wealth.  This followed most logically from the ideal of the Imitation
of Christ.  The seeking of worldy goods beyond bare necessity was
positively bad:  "Having food and raiment, let us therewith be
content.  But they that will be rich fall into temptation and a snare
and into many foolish and hurtful lusts which drown men in destruction
and perdition.  For the love of money is the root of all evil" (I Tim.
6:7-10).  Obviously of a faith which warned men against worldy goods
("Love not the world, nor the things that are in the world" [I John
2:15]) could not but regard the most eager and successful seekers
after such goods as a vanguard leading the followers to spiritual
destruction.  The moderns, on the other hand, take a far more
favorable view of worldly goods.  The increase of wealth seems to them
a most excellent thing, and the same logic should therefore lead them
to regard the same men as a vanguard leading the followers to material
increase.

This latter view would have been most unrealistic in the material
conditions of the Middle Ages.  In so far as wealth was drawn from
land which received no improvements, and in so far as the well endowed
did not make productive investments, there was nothing but
disadvantage to the many in the existence of the wealthy (though this
existence did give rise to the artisan industries from which there
long after evolved the industries serving the people; further, it was
instrumental in the development of culture).  It is perhaps a fact
worthy of notice that the modern use of profit, expansion from
retained earnings, arose and was systematized in the monasteries; the
saintly men who ran them saw nothing wrong in extending their holdings
and putting new lands under cultivation, in erecting better buildings,
and in employing an ever increasing number of people.  They are the
true original of the nonconsuming, ascetic type of capitalist.  And
Berdyaev has truly observed that Christian asceticism played a capital
part in the development of capitalism; it is a condition of
reinvestment.  It is tempting to mention that modern intellectuals
look favorably on the accumulation of wealth by bodies of bearing a
public seal (nationalized enterprises), which are not without some
similarity to monasterial businesses.  They do not, however, recognize
the same phenomenon when the seal is missing.

The intellectual thinks of himself as the natural ally of the worker.
the partnership is conceived, in Europe at least, as a fighting one.
The image is imprinted in the intellectual's mind of the long-haired
and the blue-bloused standing side by side on the barricades.  It
appears that this image originated in the French Revolution of 1830
and became generally popular during the Revolution of 1848.  The
picture was then projected backward into history.  A permanent
alliance between the thinking few and the toiling many was assumed, a
view to which romantic poetry gave expression and currency.  Th
historian, however, can find no evidence of such an alliance in the
case of the secular intelligentsia.  No doubt the clergy was committed
to the solace and care of the poor and unfortunate, and indeed its
ranks were continuously replenished from the lowest orders of the
people; the clerical intelligentsia was thus the channel whereby the
talented poor rose to command princes and kings.  But the lay
intelligentsia, growing away from its clerical root, seemed to turn
its back on the preoccupations of the church.  Evidence of its
interest in what came in the nineteenth century to be called the
"social question" is up to that time remarkably scant.  There is,
however, abundant evidence of a sustained fight by the lay
intellectuals against the welfare institutions of their day,
administered by the church.  During the Middle Ages the church had
amassed immense wealth from pious gifts and foundations for charitable
purposes.  From the Renaissance to the eighteenth century these
accumulations were returned to private possession through far-reaching
confiscation.  In this process the intellectuals played a major role.
Servants of the temporal power, they started from the simple fact that
the wealth of the church was least amenable to tax; they moved by
degrees to the idea that property was more productive in private hands
and hence that private enterprise was the best servant of the prince's
treasure.  Finally, it became a truism that the prince lost his due
and the subject his chance by the piling-up of wealth in undying hands
(cf. D'Aguesseau's report on perpetual foundations).*  The lay
intellectuals took little account of the social needs fulfilled by the
institutions which they sought to destroy.  Beggars should be rounded
up and led to forced labor; this was the great remedy, in sharp
contrast to the medieval attitude.  It is not an undue comparison to
liken the attitude of the secular intelligentsia to that of the most
rabid opponents of the social services in our day, except that they
went so much further, taking an attitude which we may find recurring
in our times a few generations hence, if the social services should
happen to claim a large part of the national wealth in a poor economy.

[*  This report, which prefaced the French Royal Edict of August,
1749, lays down the principle that the accumulation of land in
collective hands which never release their holdings impedes the
availability of capital to the individual, who should find it possible
to obtain and control a "fund of wealth" to which he may apply his
energy.  Readers of this and other state papers will perhaps subscribe
to the equation:  "The ideas of the French Revolution, I mean those
which inspired the ministers of Louis XV."]

In direct contradiction to the friars who were to love in poverty with
the poor, the secular intellectuals started out as companions and
servants of the mighty.  They can be called friends of the common man
in the sense that they fought against distinctions between the high-
and the lowborn and that they favored the rising plebeian--in point of
fact, the merchant.  [The merchant, of course, was also an industrial
promoter, since he ordered from artisans the goods which he offered
for sale.]  There was a natural bond of sympathy between the merchant
and the civil servant, both waxing important but both still treated as
social inferiors.  There was a natural resemblance in that both were
calculators, weighers, "rational" beings.  There was, finally a
natural alliance between the interests of the princes and those of the
merchants.  The strength of the prince bound up with the wealth of the
nation and the wealth of the nation bound up with individual
enterprise; these relationships were perceived and expressed as early
as the beginning of the fourteenth century by the secular councillors
of Philip the Fair of France.  The legal servants of the princes
tended to free property from its medieval shackles in order to
encourage an expansive economy benefiting the public treasury.  (All
the terms here are anachronistic, but they do not misrepresent the
policies of those times.)

Hostility to the money-maker--l'homme d'argent--is a recent attitude
of the secular intelligentsia.  Any history of European literature
must cite the names of the numerous money-makers who patronized
intellectuals and apparently earned the affection and respect of their
proteges; thus the courage shown by the men of letters who defended
Fouquet (after the imprisonment of this financier and finance minister
by Louis XIV) testifies to the depth of the feelings which he had
inspired.  The homes of Helvetius and D'Holbach must of necessity
figure in any history of the ideas before the French Revolution.
These two 'hommes d'argent' were much admired by their circle, while
the person most popular with French intellectuals at the time of the
Revolution was the banker Necker.  Again, in the Revolution of 1830, a
banker--Lafitte--occupies the front of the stage.  But this is the
parting of the ways.  Later, intellectuals cease to admit the
friendship of capitalists, who, in turn, cease to be possible
figureheads, as Necker had been.  [One of the latter instances being,
of course, that of Engles.]

Strangely enough, the fall from favor of the money-maker coincides
with an increase in his social usefulness.  The moneyed men whom the
French intellectual of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries had
liked so well had been chiefly tax farmers (publicans).  The economics
of tax farming are simple.  The farming companies rented the privilege
of collecting a given tax by paying a certain sum to the exchequer.
They saw to it that much more than the official levy flowed in to
their coffers; the margin constituted their gross income.  When the
costs of collection had been subtracted, the remainder was clear
profit.  This procedure is certainly more deserving of the name
"exploitation" than any modern form of profit-making.  Moreover, these
profits were only rarely used for investments enriching the country.
The tax farmers were renowned for their ostentatious consumption.  As
their privilege was valuable, they conciliated influential people at
court by "helping them out" very freely.  Thus the tax farmer combined
all the features commonly attributed to the "bad capitalist" without
any of the latter's redeeming features.  He produced nothing, he
profited in proportion to the harshness of his agents, and he retained
his privilege by corruption.  What a paradox it is that this type of
money-maker should have been popular with the intellectual of his day
and that unpopularity should have become the lot of the money-maker at
the time when his chief form of money-making became the manufacture of
goods for popular use!

Until the late eighteenth century the secular intelligentsia was not
numerous; its average intellectual level was therefore high.
Moreover, its members were educated in ecclesiastical schools, where
they received a strong training in logic, which the "scientific
education" of our day seems unable to replace.  Therefore these minds
were prone to consistency; it is remarkable how common a quality
consistent reasoning was in their works, as compared to those of our
contemporaries.  For minds thus equipped, as soon and in so far as
they insulated earthly concerns from spiritual truths, the criterion
of earthly good was bound to be what we call efficiency.  If, with
Descartes, we insulate what occurs in space and comes directly to our
notice, we can validly state that one movement is greater or less than
another and validly call the "force" which causes it greater or less.
If social events are regarded as movements, some of which are
considered desirable, the it is "good" that these should be produced,
the forces which tend to produce them are "good," and devices tending
to call them forth and apply them to the object are better or worse in
proportion to their efficiency.  It is a naive belief of many European
intellectuals that "efficiency" is an American idol, recently
installed.  But it is not so.  In anything which is regarded
'instrumentaliter.' as an agent for the production of another thing,
the greater or lesser capacity of the agent is to be taken into
account, and Descartes repeatedly spoke in this sense of the greater
or lesser *virtues* of the agent.  It seems clear that, the more one
tends to a monist conception of the universe which sets up the wealth
of society as the result to be attained, the more one must be inclined
to equate efficiency in the service of wants and desires with social
good.  Strangely enough, however, such an evolution of intellectual
judgment did not occur in the last hundred and fifty years
coincidentally with the evolution toward materialist monism.  Ethical
judgments disastrously detached from their metaphysical basis sprang
up in disorderly growth to plague temporal action.

It seems at least plausible to seek some relation between this change
of attitude and the wave of romanticism which swept over the Western
intelligentsia.  Factory builders trampled over the beauties of nature
precisely when these were being discovered; the exodus from the
country coincided with a new-found admiration for country life.  A
sharp change of surroundings divorced men from ancient ways precisely
when folkways were coming into fashion.  Finally, town life became
life with strangers priecisely at the moment when civil society was
proclaimed insufficient for man's comfort, and the necessity of
communal feeling and affection was stressed.  All these themes are to
be found in Rousseau.  This major philosopher was well aware that the
values which he cherished were in opposition to the progress of
Western society; therefore, he wanted none of this progress: no
successive quickening of new wants, no monstrous bellying of towns, no
vulgarization of knowledge, etc.  He was consistent.  Western
intellectuals, however, were not to be diverted from their enthusiasm
for progress.  Therefore, at one and the same time, they thought of
industrial development as a great spreading of man's wings and of all
its features which were in sharp contrast with the "shepherd" values
as deplorable blemishes.  Avidity was responsible for these blemishes,
no doubt--and also for the whole process!  There is a natural
homogeneity of the attitudes relative to a certain general process.

The intellectual is really of two minds about the general economic
process.  On the one side, he takes pride in the achievement of
technique and rejoices that men get more of the things which they
want.  On the other hand, he feels that the discipline reigning there
is a harsh one.  These two views are conveniently reconciled by
attributing to the "force" of "progress" everything one likes about
the process and to the "force" of "capitalism" everything one
dislikes.

It is perhaps worthy of note that precisely the same errors are made
in respect to economic creation as are made on the metaphysical level
in respect to Creation, since the human mind has but limited
capacities and lacks variety even in its mistakes.  The attribution to
essentially different forces of what is considered good and what is
considered bad in the tightly knit process of economic growth of
course recalls Manichaeism.  Error of this type is not dispelled but
tends to be aggravated by retorts taking Pope's line that all is well
and that every unpleasant feature is the condition of some good.

It is not surprising that the discussion of the problem of evil in
society should tend to follow the pattern of the more ancient and
far-reaching discussion of the problem of evil in the universe, a
matter upon which far more intellectual concentration has been brought
to bear than upon the more limited modern version.  We find the
secular intelligentsia passing judgment on temporal organization, not
from the point of view of adequacy to the end pursued, but from the
point of view of ethics (though the ethical principles invoked are
never clearly stated or perhaps even considered).  One hears Western
students stating that the welfare of the workers must be the aim of
economic leaders; that, although this aim is achieved in the United
States and not achieved in the U.S.S.R., it does inspire the Soviet
leaders and not the Western leaders (or so the students say); and that
therefore the former are to be admired and the latter condemned.  Here
one finds one's self very clearly in a case of jurisdiction 'in
temporalia, rationae peccati.'  The secular intellectual in this
instance does not judge social devices as devices (and the device
which achieves the workers' good out of the leaders' indifference 'ex
hypothesi' is surely an excellent device as compared to that which
produces no workers' good out of the leaders' solicitude!), but he
steps into the shoes of a spiritual guide, with perhaps insufficient
preparation.

Taking a sweeping view of the attitudes successively adopted by the
lay intelligentsia of the West, we shall say that it started out in
reaction to the spiritual juristiction of the clerical intelligentsia,
in the services of the temporal powers, and concerned itself with
bringing rationality into the organization of earthly pursuits, taken
as given.  Over the centuries it battered down the power of the church
and the authority of revelation; thereby it gave free rein to the
temporal powers.  Temporal power takes the two basic forms of the
sword and the purse.  After liquidating the social power of the
church, it turned upon the sword-bearing classes, especially upon the
greatest sword-bearer, the political sovereign.  The weakening of the
ecclesiastical power and of the military power obviously gave full
freedom to the moneyed power.  But then the intelligentsia turns
again, proclaiming a spiritual crusade against the economic leaders of
modern society.  Is this because the intelligentsia must be at odds
with any ruling group?  Or are there special causes of antagonism
toward business executives?

The intellectual wields authority of a kind, called persuasion.  And
this seems to him the only good form of authority.  It is the only one
admitted by intellectuals in their utopias, where the incentives and
deterrents of material reward and of punishment are dispensed with.
In real societies, however, persuasion alone is inadequate to bring
about the orderly co-operation of many agents.  It is too much to hope
that every participant in an extensive process will play his part
because he shares exactly the vision of the promoter or organizer.
This is the hypothesis of the "General Will" applied to every part and
parcel of the economic body; it goes to the extremes of unlikeliness.
It is necessary that some power less fluctuating than that gained from
persuasion should lie in the hands of social leaders; the
intellectual, however, dislikes these cruder forms of authority and
those who wield them.  He sniffs at the mild form of authority given
by the massing of capital in the hands of "business czars" and recoils
from the rough sort of authority given by the massing of police powers
in the hands of totalitarian rulers.  Those in command of such means
seem to him coarsened by their use, and he suspects them of regarding
men as wholly amenable to their use.  The intellectual's effort to
whittle down the use of alternatives to persuasion is obviously a
factor of progress, while it may also, carried too far, lead society
into the alternatives of anarchy and tyranny.  Indeed, the
intellectual has been known to call upon tyranny for the propping-up
of his schemes.

The intellectual's hostility to the businessman presents no mystery,
as the two have, by function, whilly different standards, so that the
businessman's normal conduct appears blameworthy if judged by the
criteria valid for the intellectual's conduct.  Such judgment might be
avoided in a partitioned society, avowedly divided in classes playing
different parts and bound to different forms of honor.  This, however,
is not the case of our society, of which current ideas and the law
postulate that it forms a single homogeneous field.  Upon this field
the businessman and the intellectual move side by side.  The
businessman offers to the public "goods" defined as anything the
public will buy; the intellectual seeks to teach what is "good," and to
him some of the goods offered are things of no value which the public
should be discouraged from wanting.  The world of business is to the
intellectual one in which the values are wrong, the motivations low,
the rewards misaddressed.  A convenient gateway into the
intellectual's inner courtyard where his judgments are rendered is
afforded by his deficit preference.  It has been observed that his
sympathy goes to institutions which run at a loss, nationalized
industries supported by the treasury, colleges dependent on grants and
subsidies, newspapers which never get out of the red.  Why is this?
Because he knows from personal experience that, whenever he acts as he
feels he should, there is unbalance between his effort and its
reception: to put it in economic jargon, the market value of the
intellectual's output is far below factor input.  that is because a
really good thing in the intellectual realm is a thing which can be
recognized as good by only a few.  As the intellectual's role is to
make people know for true and good what they did not previously
recognize as such, he encounters a formidable sales resistance, and he
works at a loss.  When his success is easy and instantaneous, he knows
it for an almost certain criterion that he has not truly performed his
function.  Reasoning from his experience, the intellectual suspects
whatever yields a margin of profit of having been done, not from
belief in and devotion to the thing, but because enough people could
be found to desire it to make the venture profitable.  You may plead
with the intellectual and convince him that most things must be done
this way.  Still he will feel that those ways are not his.  His
profit-and-loss philosophy can be summed up in these terms: to him a
loss is the natural outcome of devotion to a-thing-to-be-done, while a
profit, on the other hand, is the natural outcome of deferring to the
public.

The fundamental difference of attitude between the businessman and the
intellectual can be pinned down by resort to a hackneyed formula.  The
businessman must resort to a hackneyed formula.  The businessman must
say:  "The customer is always right."  The intellectual cannot
entertain this notion.  A bad writer is made by the very maxim which
makes him a good businessman:  "Give the public what it wants."  The
businessman operates within a framework of tastes, of value judgments,
which the intellectual must ever seek to alter.  The supreme activity
of the intellectual is that of the missionary offering the Gospel to
heathen nations.  Selling spirits to them is a less dangerous and more
profitable activity.  Here the contrast is stark between offering
"consumers" what they should have but do not want and offering them
what they avidly accept but should not have.  The trader who fails to
turn to the more salable product is adjuded a fool, but the missionary
who would so turn would be adjudged a knave.

Because we intellectuals are functionally teachers of truth, we are
prone to take toward the businessman the very same attitude of moral
superiority which was that of the Pharisee toward the Publican, and
which Jesus condemned.  It should be a lesson to us that the poor man
lying by the wayside was raised by a merchant (the Samaritan) and not
by the intellectual (the Levite).  Dare we deny that the immense
improvement which has occurred in the condition of the toiling many is
chiefly the work of the businessman?

We may rejoice that we minister to the highest wants of mankind; but
let us be honestly fearful of this responsibility.  Of the "goods"
offered for profit, how many can we call positively harmful?  Is it
not the case of many more of the ideas we expound?  Are there not
ideas nefarious to the workings of mechanisms and institutions which
insure the progress and happiness of commonwealths?  It is telling
that all intellectuals agree to there being such ideas, though not all
agree as to which are obnoxious.  Far worse, are there not ideas which
raise anger in the bosoms of men?  Our responsibility is heightened by
the fact that the diffusion of possibly mischievous ideas cannot and
should not be stopped by the exertion of the temporal authority, while
the merchandizing of harmful goods can be so stopped.

It is something of a mystery--and a promising field of investigation
for historians and sociologists--that the intellectual community has
waxed harsher in its judgments of the business community precisely
while the business community was strikingly bettering the condition of
the masses, improving its own working ethics, and growing in civic
consciousness.  Judged by its social fruits, by its mores, by its
spirit, capitalism of today is immeasurably more praiseworthy than in
previous days when it was far less bitterly denounced.  If the change
in the attitude of the intelligentsia is not to be explained by a turn
for the worse in what they assess, is it not then to be explained by a
change which has occurred in the intelligentsia itself?

This question opens a great realm of inquiry.  It has for long been
assumed that the great problem of the twentieth century is that of the
industrial wage-earner's place in society; insufficient notice has
been taken of the rise of a vast intellectual class, whose place in
society may prove the greater problem.  The intellectuals have been
the major agents in the destruction of the ancient structure of
Western society, which provides three distinct sets of institutions
for the intellectuals, the wariors, and the producers.  They have
striven to render the social field homogeneous and uniform; the winds
of subjective desires blow over it more freely;  subjective
appreciations are the criterion of all efforts.  Quite naturally, this
constitution of society puts a premium upon the "goods" which are most
desired and brings to the forefront of society those who lead in the
production of "goods."  The intelligentsia has then lost to
this"executive" class the primacy which it enjoyed when it stood as
"the First Estate."  Its present attitude may be to some degree
explained by the inferiority complex it has acquired.  Not only has
the intelligentsia as a whole fallen to a less exalted status, but,
moreover, individual recognition tends to be determined by criteria of
subjective appreciation by the public, which the intelligentsia
rejects on principle; hence the countervailing tendency to exalt those
intellectuals who are for intellectuals only.

We do not presume to explain, and the foregoing remarks are the merest
suggestions.  Our ambition is merely to stress that there is something
to be explained and that it seems timely to undertake a study of the
tensions arising between the intelligentsia and society.

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