Page 147 - Culture Society and Economy

Robotham-07.qxd 1/31/2005 6:24 PM Page 140

CULTURE, SOCIETY AND ECONOMY

not as happily regulated by the invisible hand as Smith imagined. With
characteristic far-sightedness Hegel wrote the following, concerning the
claims of harmony put forward by Adam Smith for the bourgeois social
order:

Particularity by itself, given free reign in every direction to satisfy needs,
accidental caprices, and subjective desires, destroys itself and its sub-
stantive concept in the process of gratification. At the same time, the satis-
faction of need, necessary and accidental alike, is accidental because it
breeds new desires without end, is in thoroughgoing dependence on
caprice and external accident, and is held in check by the power of uni-
versality. In these contrasts and their complexity, civil society affords a
spectacle of extravagance and want as well as the physical and ethical
degeneration common to them both. 23

Because of the growth of the division of labor and therefore of
‘long-distance trade’, great hardships followed unjustly for workers in one
part of the world because of recession in another part. Civil society was,
according to him the ‘animal kingdom of mankind’. The state had to step
in (the Beamte – the universal class!), regulate the economy and protect
the vulnerable. Special steps had to be taken to draw citizens into public
life if the natural inclination of bourgeois society to propagate a narrowly
self-centered private existence was to be countered. In Hegel’s schema,
‘Corporations’ were allocated the task of achieving this feat – of restoring
the public civility of classical Greece to modern bourgeois civil society.
But nothing could be done about competition, the inescapable swings of
the market and the inevitable rise of large enterprises. Attempts to elimi-
nate inequality, as in the French Terror, were fundamentally misconceived
and doomed to fail. This was the source of his simultaneous admiration
for and alienation from the French Revolution.
Durkheim, as is well known, transformed these notions into an argu-
ment for something that he called Solidarité (‘organic’, he claimed), with
this same division of labor that both Adam Smith and Hegel had deplored,
now serving as the source of a beneficial national integration. Again with
a little help from the state. Weber, with characteristic Germanic pes-
simism, rejecting reactionary anti-capitalist Romanticism (although obvi-
ously drawn to Nietzsche) also taught that ‘disenchantment’ and
rationalization were inexorable realities of the modern world and had to
be borne stoically. One would have to do one’s best to preserve the rule
of law but Lockean illusions of a natural law foundation for modern
jurisprudence were simply too laughable for words. An attitude of resigned
twentieth-century bourgeois subjectivity – the so-called ‘Schopenhauerian

140