Page 22 - Contemporary Cultural Theory

UTILITARIAN CULTURE AND CAPITALIST CIVILIZATION

recognition, or so Parsons argued, of the significance for social science
of “the conception of a common system of ultimate values as a vital
element in concrete social life”. 36
It is precisely such systems of ultimate value, according to Parsons,
which organize, integrate and de-randomize the ends of particular
individual actors, and which also shape the normative orientations
through which the analytically separate elements in the unit act are
structurally related to each other. This stress on “ultimate values” is
characteristically “cultural”, though it is not, in fact, as characteristically
sociological as Parsons himself supposed. Parsons’s own sense of the
importance of truly common values is almost certainly open to at
37
least as much criticism as the initial utilitarian conception itself. But
Parsons is nonetheless quite right to identify a fundamental incapacity
on the part of utilitarian thinkers to understand the significance for
action of human values, whether religious, political, ethical or aesthetic.
Neither Benthamite indifference nor the Humean subterfuge by which
evaluative judgements are misrepresented as acts of cognition are at
all adequate. For the economists, perhaps even the political scientists,
such sins are merely venial. But for the cultural theorist, they become
irreparably mortal.

Utilitarian culture and capitalist civilization

The enduring appeal of utilitarianism owes a great deal more, however,
to a happy coincidence between its thematics and those of powerful
business interests than it does to whatever inherent intellectual power
it may possess. And this has indeed always been so. As Alvin Gouldner
observes: “in the eighteenth century, utility emerged as a dominant
social standard. What is relevant here is utilitarianism not as a technical
philosophy but as a part of the popular, everyday culture of the middle
class”. Already actually dominant in Britain and in its North American
38
colonies during the 18th century, utilitarian values underlay much of
the rhetoric of the French Revolution, and were rapidly transmitted
throughout Europe, and thereafter by means of imperialism throughout
the world, in the 19th and early 20th centuries. And there can be little
doubt that utilitarianism has indeed provided a powerful rationale
for the developmental logics of industrial capitalist (and even Soviet
state capitalist) civilization. But the immense institutional and

13