{"id":2032,"date":"2014-04-26T13:56:12","date_gmt":"2014-04-26T20:56:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/lexiconic.net\/wheatfromthechaff\/?p=2032"},"modified":"2014-04-26T19:50:30","modified_gmt":"2014-04-27T02:50:30","slug":"albert-o-hirschmans-the-passions-and-the-interests","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/lexiconic.net\/wheatfromthechaff\/archives\/2032","title":{"rendered":"Albert O. Hirschman&rsquo;s The Passions and the Interests"},"content":{"rendered":"<div id=\"wp_fb_like_button\" style=\"margin:5px 0;float:none;height:30px;\"><script src=\"http:\/\/connect.facebook.net\/en_US\/all.js#xfbml=1\"><\/script><fb:like href=\"http:\/\/lexiconic.net\/wheatfromthechaff\/archives\/2032\" send=\"false\" layout=\"standard\" width=\"450\" show_faces=\"false\" font=\"arial\" action=\"recommend\" colorscheme=\"light\"><\/fb:like><\/div><p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.amazon.ca\/The-Passions-Interests-Political-Capitalism\/dp\/0691160252\/ref=tmm_pap_title_0?ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1398565569&amp;sr=1-4\" target=\"_blank\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" title=\"k10110\" style=\"border-top: 0px; border-right: 0px; background-image: none; border-bottom: 0px; float: left; padding-top: 0px; padding-left: 0px; margin: 0px 10px 2px 0px; border-left: 0px; display: inline; padding-right: 0px\" border=\"0\" alt=\"k10110\" src=\"http:\/\/lexiconic.net\/wheatfromthechaff\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/04\/k101103.gif\" width=\"163\" align=\"left\" height=\"246\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>Albert O. Hirschman\u2019s <em>The Passions and the Interests: Political Arguments for Capitalism Before Its Triumph<\/em> is an essay as insightful and thought-provoking as it is elegant.&nbsp; Hirschman\u2019s <em>Passions <\/em>is a timeless classic that gracefully explores the intersection of economic, social and political thought, and provides a perceptive understanding of the Western world\u2019s intellectual accommodation and acceptance of capitalism. <\/p>\n<p>Hirschman\u2019s central thesis is that, at the dawn of the modern era, there was an emerging belief that the pursuit of economic interests would stimulate the \u201cbenign human proclivities at the expense of some malignant ones\u201d (66). Of course, before the dawn of capitalism, the pursuit of economic interests was considered one of the worst passions; avarice was always a foe of the Platonic conception of Reason and the Christian view of the Truth. Nevertheless, with the decline of feudalism and the rise of absolutist monarchies, the great concern of thinkers like Hobbes was the rising power of the state and the passions that led monarchs into ruinous external and civil wars. In this context, the pursuit of wealth was transformed in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries into the pursuit of material <i>interest<\/i>. And money-making \u2013 now defined as interest \u2013 became a sort of mid-way mode of thought and motivation that, since it was \u201cexempt from the destructiveness of passion and the ineffectuality of reason\u201d, provided \u201ca message of hope\u201d (43-44). Positioned half-way between passion and reason, in other words, interest had the politically salutary effect of restraining the more destructive vices of \u201cambition, lust for power\u201d: <\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p>[M]oney-making activities were approved in themselves [because] they kept the men engaged in them \u201cout of mischief,\u201d as it were, and had, more specifically, the virtue of imposing restraints on princely caprice, arbitrary government, and adventurous foreign policies\u201d (130).<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p>Two eighteen century thinkers at the center of this argument were Montesquieu and Sir James Steuart. The former proposed that a <i>laissez-faire<\/i> economy softened and refined the passionate and violent excesses of man: \u201cIt is almost a general rule that wherever the ways of man are gentle (<i>moeurs douces<\/i>) there is commerce; and whenever there is commerce, there the ways of men are gentle\u201d (60). The pursuit of wealth, Hirschman argues, was thus rehabilitated into a \u201ccalm desire\u201d that \u201cacts with calculation and rationality\u201d (65). Steuart built upon Montesquieu\u2019s insights and provided an argument that made the connection between a capitalist economy and a temperate state. \u201cMonied interests\u201d are mobile and less tied to land; as such, rulers who seek to arbitrarily seize the wealth of their lands or debase the currency will find such moves difficult to achieve and self-defeating if they do. As Hirschman summarizes, for \u201cSteuart, it is the overall complexity and vulnerability of the \u2018modern oeconomy\u2019 that makes arbitrary decisions and interferences unthinkable \u2013 that is, exorbitantly costly and disruptive\u201d (87). Overall, the pursuit of individual interest was therefore assigned the role of a mid-way countervailing force, a force that contained the passions of humanity, and particularly the passions of political leaders. <\/p>\n<p>However, by the end of the eighteenth century, the \u201cMontesquieu-Steuart vision\u201d disappeared, and new lines of thinking emerged. The \u201cidea that men pursuing their interests would be forever harmless\u201d increasingly appeared to have \u201can air of unreality about it\u201d (126). Adam Smith, at the dawn of industrial capitalism, was disturbed by the psychological implications of the division of labor, in which, according to Smith, \u201cthe heroic spirit is almost utterly extinguished\u201d (107). [Thereafter, the Romantics and Marxists of the following century, albeit in different directions, would expand upon the view that the pursuit of material interest was now the primary scourge of human existence.] Adam Smith, as we all know, is still considered a proponent of capitalism, but he turned the \u201cMontesquieu-Steuart vision\u201d on its head. The pursuit of wealth lost its moderating role; it was once again considered a passion \u2013 indeed, all passions were collapsed into the \u201caugmentation of fortune\u201d &#8211; but now this passion worked like an \u201cinvisible hand\u201d to meet the needs of society (108). Put another way, making money was no longer considered a <i>purposeful <\/i>bulwark against excess, but an <i>ironic <\/i>and unseen force of social stability and peacefulness.  <\/p>\n<p>In the end, Hirschman provides a salutary lesson for the history of ideas: it\u2019s not enough to recognize the unintended consequences of intended outcomes. If we are to better understand our past, and escape Santayana\u2019s warning about repeating history, we must also remember that sometimes the intended consequences succeed, but in ways we don\u2019t appreciate. Thus, Hirschman contends that \u201ccapitalism was supposed to accomplish exactly what was soon to be denounced as its worst feature\u201d (132). Let us finish with Hirschman\u2019s own elegant conclusion: <\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p>For as soon as capitalism was triumphant and \u201cpassion\u201d seemed indeed to be restrained and perhaps even extinguished in the comparatively peaceful, tranquil, and business-minded Europe of the period after the Congress of Vienna, the world suddenly appeared empty, petty, and boring, and the stage was set for the Romantic critique of the bourgeois order as incredibly impoverished in relation to earlier ages &#8211; the new world seemed to lack nobility, grandeur, mystery, and, above all, passion. Considerable traces of this nostalgic critique can be found in subsequent social thought from Fourier\u2019s advocacy of passionate attraction to Marx\u2019s theory of alienation as the price of progress to Weber\u2019s concept of Entzauberung (progressive disintegration of the magical vision of the world). In all of these explicit or implicit critiques of capitalism there was little recognition that, to an earlier age, the world of the \u201cfull human personality,\u201d replete with diverse passions, appeared as a menace that needed to be exorcized to the greatest possible extent (132-133).<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p>Hirschman, in other words, is a voice for moderation and mindfulness. Instead of simply oscillating between one extreme and the other, we should recognize that our current discontent may in fact be the result of attempts to resolve older problems, and that by abandoning current policies we may unwittingly return to an older but <i>nevertheless still unsatisfactory <\/i>paradigm. [One wonders, for example, if critics of \u201cNew Deal\u201d reform capitalism really understand what existed before.] Hirschman, in the end, reminds us that the continuities from the past still have implications for the future.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Albert O. Hirschman\u2019s The Passions and the Interests: Political Arguments for Capitalism Before Its Triumph is an essay as insightful and thought-provoking as it is elegant.&nbsp; Hirschman\u2019s Passions is a timeless classic that gracefully explores the intersection of economic, social and political thought, and provides a perceptive understanding of the Western world\u2019s intellectual accommodation and [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,109,8,13,14],"tags":[169,35,170,171,168,167,124,165,166,151],"class_list":["post-2032","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books","category-critical-theory","category-economic-issues","category-in-a-philosophical-mood","category-language","tag-albert","tag-economics","tag-hirschman","tag-history","tag-interest","tag-passions","tag-philosophy","tag-politics","tag-reason","tag-theory"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/lexiconic.net\/wheatfromthechaff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2032","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/lexiconic.net\/wheatfromthechaff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/lexiconic.net\/wheatfromthechaff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/lexiconic.net\/wheatfromthechaff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/lexiconic.net\/wheatfromthechaff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2032"}],"version-history":[{"count":11,"href":"http:\/\/lexiconic.net\/wheatfromthechaff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2032\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2046,"href":"http:\/\/lexiconic.net\/wheatfromthechaff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2032\/revisions\/2046"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/lexiconic.net\/wheatfromthechaff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2032"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/lexiconic.net\/wheatfromthechaff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2032"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/lexiconic.net\/wheatfromthechaff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2032"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}