The Nature and Logic of Capitalism by Robert L. Heilbroner

Author:Robert L. Heilbroner
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 2013-03-13T16:00:00+00:00

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1. See Goran Therborn, What Does the Ruling Class Do When It Rules? (London: Verso, 1978), pp. 171–73; also Joyce Oldham Appleby, Economic Thought and Ideology in Seventeenth-Century England (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1978 pp. 5–6.

2. Amin, Class and Nation, p. 52. There was no world religion as such for the social formation of feudalism. Rather, the tenets of Christianity and those of secular vassalage combined to form a framework of divided authority—the “two swords”—within a system of shared values. See Georges Duby, The Three Orders (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982).

3. Albert Hirschman, The Passions and the Interests (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1977), p. 41.

4. Adam Smith, Theory of Moral Sentiments, p. 183; Wealth of Nations, p. 342.

5. Hirschman, Passions and Interests, p. 41; Smith, Lectures on Jurisprudence, p. 538. (“Doux commerce” is to be translated as “gentle,” not “sweet,” commerce.)

6. Smith, Lectures, p. 540.

7. Sec Alisdair Maclntyre, After Virtue (Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 1981).

8. See Michael Schudson, Advertising: The Uneasy Persuasion (New York: Basic Books, 1984), Ch. 7.

9. John Locke, The Second Treatise of Government, p. 71. Locke’s concept of property extends beyond chattels into a view of personhood, but it is nonetheless unimaginable without chattels or personal wealth.

10. Mill, Principles of Political Economy, pp. 944–45, 970.

11. Milton Friedman, Capitalism and Freedom (Chicago: University oC Chicago Press, 1962), p. 10.

12. Giddens, Historical Materialism. For a bold attempt to describe a socialist structure that would provide such bulwarks to liberty see Branko Horvat, The Political Economy of Socialism (Armonk, N.Y.: M. E. Sharpe, Inc., 1982).

13. Immanuel Wallerstein, The Modem World-System, Vol. I, pp. 351–52.

14. Horvat, Political Economy of Socialism, p. 68.

15. Sec, for example, Fustel de Coulanges, The Ancient City (New York: Doubleday, n.d.), Book I.

16. Lynn White, Machina Ex Deo: Essays in the Dynamics of Western Civilization (Cambridge, Mass.: M.I.T. Press, 1968), p. 86.

17. Max Weber, Economy and Society (New York: Oxford University Press, 1947), p. 158f.

18. Marshall Berman, All That Is Solid Melts into Air (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1982), p. 100.

19. I refer, nevertheless, to a few commentaries of unusual value. Anthony Giddens discusses the commodification of time (following Mumford) as a penetration by capital of crucial and neglected importance (Historical Materialism, Ch. 6). Erich Kahler (citing copiously from Fromm) gives a stinging analysis of the commodification of perceptions in The Tower and the Abyss (New York: Braziller, 1976), p. 93f. Finally, I mention again Michael Schudson’s Advertising: The Uneasy Persuasion for a penetrating analysis of a consumer society.

20. Sec my Marxism: For and Against, pp. 167–69. For a description of the manner in which a unified ideology is formed in a religious society that bears many resemblances to a communitarian form of socialism, see Gertrude Enders Huntington, “Children of the Hutterites,” Natural History, February 1981.

* I cannot resist adding an example of the modern use of economics as a system of clarificatory belief. Thomas Schelling writes: “. . . [T]he free market may not do much,

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