The Ethics of Capitalism - Social Europe Journal

to flourish in southern hemisphere
societies. While this
might have been detrimental to
older social solidarities, created
new divisions between rich and
poor, and operated working
practices that were solely driven
by profit maximisation, the end
product – economic growth –
justified the means by which
this was achieved.
The neoliberal world view,
welcoming of capitalism as beneficial
socio-economic process,
has forced out a previous, social
democratic agenda that saw
capitalism as inherently conflictual
and as something that
needed to be harnessed for
other moral and political ends.
Consider the fate of the ‘old’
Labour Party in Great Britain.
One of its leading intellectuals
from 1910 to 1970 was R.H.
Tawney. As an economic historian
his research into the origins
of modern English capitalism
itemised the dismantling of late
medieval society and community,
allowing commercial interests
amounts of freedom that
previously would never have
been tolerated. Tawney showed
that medieval economic life was
based on notions of a moral
economy. One manifestation of
this was the canon laws that
prohibited usury. It was morally
abhorrent for one Christian to
lend aid to another Christian
and to benefit from that transaction
by charging a sum of
money in excess of the original
loan. The force of this moral
injunction lay in agricultural
community where it was considered
unjust for one farmer or
peasant to profit from the misfortune
of another.
The dynamics of modern capitalism
uprooted a moral economy
based on traditionalism and sta-
bility. The Puritan revolution of
the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries eventually established
religious toleration and with this
political rights. The Anglican
Church lost its old authority in
holding the needs of community
as sacrosanct over the desires of
individuals. Despite its ascetic
origins, the new Protestant religious
liberty came to befriend
commercial interests and the
institutional restraints on the
pursuit of wealth were loosened.
Henceforward the moral economy
was a contradiction in terms,
especially after the upheavals of
the industrial revolution and the
licence given to the entrepreneur.
But if economy was no longer
moral, politics and the labour
movement became a moral crusade
for Tawney. The Christian
ethic became a political
Gesinnungsethik. What had been
rooted in community instead
became a profession of conscience
articulated in politics,
education and social reform.
Tawney wrote: ‘Poverty is an
Industrial problem, the Industrial
problem is a moral problem’; ‘the
social problem is a problem not
of quantities, but of proportions,
not of the amount of wealth, but
of the moral justice of your social
system’; ‘we need to choose (after
the bosses are off the back of the
workers) between less and more
wealth and less and more civilisation’.
This is a politics inspired
by Christian moral imperatives
that had to be vigorously
deployed against a soulless
industrialism. There is an explicit
Christian morality here that
Tawney realised in the educational
community of the Toynbee
Hall where he worked with
William Beveridge and Clement
Atlee. The religiously sectarian
roots of the Labour Party are
quite diverse – to recall, for
example Welsh non-conformism
and widespread Methodism. But
Tawney exemplified the assertion
of a public good and of public
duty as the antidotes to the selfishness
of interests and mere
pecuniary wealth.
Other more politically
detached sociologists, like
Durkheim and Max Weber,
made considerable efforts to
chart the effects of a modern
dynamic capitalism on the
social division of labour. From a
moral point of view both
Durkheim and Weber offer
intriguing but different
approaches. Weber deployed an
extremely sharp cultural critique
of modern capitalism. Like
Tawney, he saw the origins of
modern capitalism as being
forged by a Puritan sensibility
that raised hard systematic
work into a Lebensführung that
came to define modernity. For
reasons of salvation, the
Puritans adopted a rational and
systematic approach to life, not
for economic purposes but as a
way of immunising themselves
from sinful temptation.
Puritanism, said Weber, created
a monastic regime in the profane
everyday world. This
caused a step change in the
already developing world of
capitalist enterprise in the late
medieval period. Modern industrial
capitalism replicated the
rationality structures laid down
by the Puritans. Entering the
twentieth century, Weber saw
modern capitalism as an
unstoppable global force.
Modern capitalism triumphed
because its practitioners still
exercised a set of virtues inherited
from their Puritan forebears.
This is probably best
described as an accountant’s
28 Social Europe Journal Summer 2009