Moral Markets by Nico Stehr

Author:Nico Stehr [Stehr, Nico]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781594514579
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Published: 2008-07-30T00:00:00+00:00

THE POVERTY OF AFFLUENCE

To consider wealth as immoral is not less deadly an error than to see in wealth the good par excellence. Emile Durkheim ([1883] 1964:239)

Emile Durkheim’s clear views about the status of wealth in society are clearly a minority opinion; for as I have already indicated, at least since the 18th century there is an extended heritage and unrelenting critique of the moral, cultural, and political ill consequences of growing material wealth in Western societies. It is the poverty of wealth or, even more generally, the extravagance of production and consumption in modern society that comes in for sustained criticism. Today, concern with excessive production and consumption centers on their impact on the environment and sustainability criteria (cf. Arrow et al., 2004). In addition, there is a long-standing history of worry about excessive consumption and consumption patterns — for example, in the sense of a satisfaction of “unnatural wants.”17 Surprisingly, therefore, the strongly naturalistic conception of the universal origin and the fixed volume of wants is favored by social scientists who otherwise prefer to put considerable distance between naturalistic and social conceptions of social affairs.

Even policies aimed at reducing the social ambitions of the wage-earning class were advocated in order to preserve the existing social order and its moral underpinnings. A frugal life was a morally superior life, and best supervised by the state (Firth, 2002:48).

But at times, although much less often, admiration is also expressed for the civic and other virtues that follow from prosperity. Praise for the virtues of wider prosperity, rather than the wealth of the rich, occur in the context of practical, political, and policy debates about the societal role of affluence. In the social sciences, especially outside the boundaries of economics, such tribute is clearly in a minority position. A critique of the “excessive dimensions of the scientific-technological-industrial civilization” (Jonas, [1979] 1984:14) continues to be much more common.

In this section, I will introduce in greater detail various classic social theories and social theorists that over the centuries have played a role in the critique of (material) affluence, as it affects the convictions and conduct not merely of a small elite, but also of larger segments of society.18 Later in this section, I will turn to more recent strong doubts expressed about the moral, political, and cultural consequences of prosperity in contemporary societies. The very persistence of these misgivings about the consequences of affluence indicates that such qualms persevere, despite the fact that such a critique now extends directly to the greater part of society, as a result of the unprecedented increase in the average well-being of households in developed societies.

The initial widespread and persistent critique of wealth is one defined largely in terms of the material resources that are consumed by a small class of prosperous households and individuals. Whether such a definition of wealth, confined to but a small stratum of society, is still adequate, or whether it should perhaps be replaced by another definition of wealth due to the growing level

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