Page 26 - Contemporary Cultural Theory

UTILITARIAN CULTURE AND CAPITALIST CIVILIZATION

which structure belief, than with the maximization of cultural utility,
however defined.
At one level, this antithesis between utilitarian capitalism on the
one hand, and the traditional intelligentsia on the other, arises as a
direct and unavoidable consequence of the nature of cultural work
itself. It is simply in the nature of culture, as also in that of the state,
that it remains extremely difficult to organize by means of any
thoroughgoing application of the market principles of the capitalist
economy. As Mrs Thatcher served to remind us, there is indeed a
sense in which a capitalist society, as distinct from a capitalist economy,
is a contradiction in terms. At another level, however, it might well be
argued that this antithesis is itself historically more specific, that it
follows a particular trajectory within the more general histories of
capitalism and patriarchy.
A relatively far-reaching and controversial debate over such matters
engaged much of the intellectual energy of both American and European
cultural sociology during the 1970s. Alvin Gouldner, for example,
argued that from the early 19th century until the then present day,
intellectual anti-utilitarianism had been overwhelmingly Romantic
in form: “the long history of Romanticism testifies to the fact that it
has not concerned itself with a problem transient or peripheral to the
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culture”. But where earlier Romanticisms had only rejected the
promise of industrial society, he continued, the Psychedelic Romanticism
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of the 1960s “rejects the actually ripened fruits”. For Daniel Bell, by
contrast, anti-bourgeois intellectualism remained identifiable with
modernism, and later post-modernism, and was as such a phenomenon
only of “the last 100 years”. Moreover, Bell insisted that such
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modernisms were not so much antithetical to, as a long-term
consequence of, utilitarianism itself. On this view, it was Puritanism
which had provided early capitalism with its central ideological
legitimation, Hobbesian utilitarianism which had powered its economy.
As the capitalist economic system developed, however, it rendered
Puritanism obsolete, thereby allowing the cultural dominance of this
modernism which, simultaneously a culture of self and a highly
marketable commodity, was thus the product both of Hobbesian
individualism and of corporate capitalism. 45
Yet a third position was that taken in Jürgen Habermas’s
Legitimation Crisis, which argued: first, that bourgeois ideologies
such as utilitarianism had never been able to provide adequate

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