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Contemporary Cultural Theory

of religious, political, ethical and aesthetic value as by any
kind of cognitive knowledge, scientific or otherwise. Hence
the importance for Parsons of ‘a common system of ultimate
values as a vital element in concrete social life’ (p. 469). It is
precisely such systems of ultimate value, he argued, that
organise, integrate and de-randomise the ends of individual
social actors. Whatever the strengths or weaknesses of Parsons’
general sociology, he was surely right to identify in utilitarian-
ism this fundamental incapacity to understand the significance
for action of human values, whether religious, political, ethical
or aesthetic. For economists such sins are merely venial, but for
the cultural theorist they become irreparably mortal.
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 to whatever inherent intel-
lectual power it might possess. This was obviously so during the
1980s, when Thatcherism and Reaganism were simultaneously
at their most hegemonic and most radical. But the immense
institutional and intellectual prestige that still attaches to univer-
sity economics departments also seems to owe far less to the
discipline’s supposed ‘scientificity’ than to its effectiveness as
political and social propaganda. As the German sociologist
Max Horkheimer observed, the consonance between ‘theory’ and
‘fact’, in intellectual thought as much as in commonsense, is
‘conditioned by the fact that the world of objects to be judged
is in large measure produced by an activity that is itself deter-
mined by the very ideas which help the individual to recognise
that world and to grasp it conceptually’ (Horkheimer, 1972,
p. 202). In our view, utilitarianism functions in precisely such
a fashion in contemporary western societies. It will figure in what
follows, then, not as an alternative solution to the cultural
problems of capitalism, but rather as importantly constitutive of
those very problems, as part of the socio-cultural context against
which other cultural theories have been obliged to define them-
selves.
In chapters 2 to 6, we chart the development of five versions
of non-utilitarian cultural theory, which we term, very loosely:
culturalism, critical theory, semiology, difference theory and post-

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