08/30: Mind vs.Money-The War between Intellectuals and Capitalism

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Mind vs.Money

The War between Intellectuals and Capitalism

Alan S. Kahan

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ISBN: 978-1-4128-1063-0

Pages: 311

Binding: Hardcover

Publication Date: 01-24-2010

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For the past 150 years, Western intellectuals have trumpeted contempt for capitalism and capitalists. They have written novels, plays, and manifestos to demonstrate the evils of the economic system in which they live. Dislike and contempt for the bourgeoisie, the middle classes, industry, and commerce have been a prominent trait of leading Western writers and artists. Mind vs. Money is an analytical history of how and why so many intellectuals have opposed capitalism. It is also an argument for how this opposition can be tempered.

Historically, intellectuals have expressed their rejection of capitalism through many different movements, including nationalism, anti-Semitism, socialism, fascism, communism, and the 1960s counterculture. Hostility to capitalism takes new forms today. The anti-globalization, Green, communitarian, and New Age movements are all examples. Intellectuals give such movements the legitimacy and leadership they would otherwise lack. What unites radical intellectuals of the nineteenth century, communists and fascists of the twentieth, and anti-globalization protestors of the twenty-first, along with many other intellectuals not associated with these movements, is their rejection of capitalism. Kahan argues that intellectuals are a permanently alienated elite in capitalist societies.

In myriad forms, and on many fronts, the battle between Mind and Money continues today. Anti-Americanism is one of them. Americans like to see their country as a beacon of freedom and prosperity. But in the eyes of many European and American intellectuals, when America is identified with capitalism, it is transformed from moral beacon into the "Great Satan." This is just one of the issues Mind vs. Money explores. The conflict between Mind and Money is the great, unresolved conflict of modern society. To end it, we must first understand it.

Alan S. Kahan (Author)

 

Alan Kahan currently teaches at the Euro-American campus of Sciences Po in Reims, France.  Previously he was professor of history at Florida International University. He is the author of numerous articles and books including Alexis de Tocqueville, Liberalism in Nineteenth-Century Europe, and Aristocratic Liberalism.

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Editorial Reviews

"Alan Kahan has crafted the preeminent account of the ambiguous relationship between intellectuals and modern market societies. This is not merely a polemic, but a serious and balanced account of the role intellectuals have played in modern Western history. Integrating discussions of literature and politics, philosophical concepts and events, this is intellectual history at its best - and what is better, at its most relevant to today's world. Brilliant and insightful, splendidly written on many levels, accessible to the general reader and challenging and provocative for the scholar, wide-ranging, theoretically sophisticated without being bogged down in jargon, Kahan presents a stimulating and provocative account of how the clash between intellectuals and the market has helped produce a wealth of human tragedy. Even more important, he has given us new ways to think about how this can be avoided in future."

—Nicholas Capaldi, Loyola University New Orleans

“A useful primer to a giant, centuries-long debate. I would recommend it as a textbook for a course on the intellectual history of capitalism.”

—Jason Kuznicki, Cato Institute

“[Kahan] masterfully traces intellectual anticapitalism in the historical and philosophical tapestry of Western society. Clarity, which makes the work very readable…Readers will learn a great deal about lineages of all major anticapitalist arguments and their permutations in a global world.”

—Jekabs Bikis, Dallas Baptist University

“The eight chapters that follow [the first chapter] present a lively discussion of the ebb and flow of anti-capitalist movements and the symbiotic relationship between capitalism and liberal intellectuals…Recommended.”

—Choice

 “well researched and worth anybody’s money… he explained the world with tremendous force followed by an excellent analysis of money and its dehumanization, and the implications of anti-semitism by anti-capitalist intellectuals.”

—Richard Minns, Reinventing Socialism

Independent Review Articles

Mind vs. Money: The War Between Intellectuals and Capitalism

Mind vs.Money

The War between Intellectuals and Capitalism

David Gordon

Book Title:	Mind vs. Money: The War Between Intellectuals and Capitalism
	Author:		Alan S. Kahan
	Published:		New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction, 2010.
	Price:		$27.55 (Hardcover)
	Pages:		302
	Reviewer:		David Gordon
	Affiliation:		Ludwig von Mises Institute
	This book review appeared in the Summer 2012 issue of The Independent Review

Are intellectuals, as Alan Kahan suggests in this excellent book Mind vs. Money, at war with capitalism? Certainly he is right that for “the past 150 years, numerous Western intellectuals have trumpeted their contempt for capitalism and capitalists” (p. 3). Why have they done so? In answering, Kahan appeals principally to values and psychology: intellectuals hold different values from those that prevail under capitalism, and their method of thought is largely exclusive to themselves.

Intellectuals, he tells us, try to provide reasons for their views and values. “Intellectuals,whether they speak English, French, or German, use a special kind of language: careful critical discourse (CCD). In CCD, if you say something, you must be prepared to prove it by giving reasons, not by appeals to higher authority. . . . If you don’t talk right, intellectuals will look down on you because you are not using CCD to justify your actions or beliefs” (pp. 7–8).

But why should thinking critically lead to hostility to capitalism? Kahan responds that thinkers naturally value their own activity more than the occupations of their less cerebral brethren. In particular, from the time of the ancient Greeks, thinkers have looked down on money making. Kahan distinguishes three ways of holding money in disdain, “the Three Don’ts,” with a fourth supplementary one thrown in for good measure.

The first Don’t recognizes that sufficient money is needed to live a good life but nonetheless disdains commerce: “Don’t Make Money (Just Have It)” (p. 31). If this mandate brings to mind Plato and Aristotle, the next has an altogether different origin. “Don’t Have Money (Give It to the Poor)” (p. 42) inevitably recalls the teachings of Jesus in the Gospels. Though few have been able to adhere in full to the rigors of this precept, its influence has been vast. Kahan’s final Don’t has a more modern ring. “Don’t Have or Make More Money Than Others Do (It’s Not Fair)” (p. 54) encapsulates a view that anyone interested in contemporary political philosophy will recognize. Even if no one had ever been poor, we would not have escaped this mandate’s requirements.

Kahan also calls attention to another view, less influential than his three Don’ts, that also led intellectuals to oppose capitalism. “Don’t Make Money, Take It and Spend It” (p. 53). He calls this Don’t the “Duke’s Don’t” because it often guided the behavior of aristocrats. But if it did so, one might ask, why is this precept relevant to explaining the intellectuals’ attitude? Kahan stands ready with a response. Intellectuals, owing to their high regard for their own pursuits, often consider themselves an aristocracy and ape nobles’ manners.

Even if Kahan is right that intellectuals have often been shaped by these Don’ts, must this influence lead to hostility to capitalism? Can one not hold that, however problematic getting and spending money may be, we nevertheless need a free market? Does not society function better with capitalism, whatever its moral failings, than with any alternative system?

That is indeed a possible response to the Don’ts, and in the early years of capitalism it was more than a bare possibility. It was precisely the line that Adam Smith, David Hume, Baron Montesquieu, and Benjamin Constant, among others, adopted. “Along with freedom, another political benefit [that] intellectuals [in the period 1730 –1830] expected from capitalism was peace. Capitalism led to peace because peace was more profitable than war, and trade had taught men to control their other passions in the name of gain” (p. 73).

However strong the classical liberals’ arguments may have been, they eventually lost favor among the intellectual elite. One of the strongest features of Kahan’s book is his detailed account of the views of a number of capitalism’s opponents who unfortunately supplanted their more capitalistically inclined predecessors.

If one thinks of critics of capitalism, Oscar Wilde is probably not the first one that comes to mind, but the bohemian Wilde perfectly exemplifies an influential way of attacking the market on the grounds that it subordinates art and the cultivation of personality to commercial concerns. “Wilde’s ideal is the cultivation of the individual personality. The problem with private property is that it makes this doubly impossible, first by an unequal distribution of wealth, and worse, by a misguided system of values. Poor rich folk, says Wilde, their property prevents them from cultivating their intellect” (p. 123).

Kahan rightly draws attention to Ferdinand Toennies, hardly as well known as Karl Marx, but nevertheless of major significance. Toennies’s contrast between community and society, with its hearkening back to a lost order of society that the ruthless market displaced, won him wide acclaim and influence. “What is the difference between community and society? Community is based on the family, the village, and the town. It is idyllic. . . . If commerce is incompatible with community, this means it is incompatible with happiness. Again and again Toennies comes back to the point that society transforms us all into isolated individuals at war with one another” (pp. 147– 48).

Another important figure to whom Kahan draws attention is the French personalist Emmanuel Mounier. Mounier’s antipathy to the alleged ills of capitalism led him to look with considerable longing at both fascism and communism. “The most influential Catholic anti-capitalist movement among intellectuals [after World War I] was ‘personalism,’ founded by the Frenchman Emmanuel Mounier. Many of personalism’s ideas . . . were also often similar to those of fascists or communists. As Mounier wrote, ‘there is almost no one today from the extreme right to the extreme left, who does not profess anti-capitalism’” (p. 190).

The anticapitalist themes that Kahan emphasizes also figured prominently among the New Deal’s advocates. Rexford Tugwell, a prominent adviser to Franklin D. Roosevelt, “wanted to create a ‘fourth power’ of government, alongside the executive, legislative, and judicial powers, for the purpose of expert planning . . . . Along with many New Dealers, Tugwell believed in a ‘planned capitalism,’ which was perhaps another way of saying a capitalism in which intellectual bureaucrats and professors, not entrepreneurs, were the aristocrats” (pp. 198–99). These examples constitute only a small sample of the many figures Kahan covers. His account of Tocqueville is especially well done. Though rightly classed as a classical liberal, Tocqueville by no means viewed capitalism with complete favor. To the contrary, he criticized the new industrial aristocracy for its harshness and bemoaned the deadening effect of the division of labor on personality. But unlike many critics of capitalism, he did not aim to replace it with some imagined utopia to be brought about through revolution. Rather, he saw the cure for capitalism’s ills in greater freedom and peaceful reforms. Kahan concurs. In the language of Max Weber, intellectuals should turn from an ethics of absolute ends to an ethics of responsibility that takes account of consequences. Like Adam Smith, intellectuals should recognize both the good and the bad features of capitalism, a system they have been all too often overly quick to condemn.

Kahan’s analysis of particular figures is often insightful, but his book’s thesis begs an important question. In claiming that intellectuals are at war with capitalism, he says next to nothing about intellectuals who hold other opinions. What about intellectuals who are only mildly critical of capitalism or—what a thought—those who defend capitalism as morally good? Aside from eighteenth- and nineteenthcentury figures, the only pro-capitalist intellectuals discussed at any length are the neoconservatives, whose support for capitalism, as Kahan shows, is tepid. Hayek is mentioned once, but his ideas are not discussed. Mises, Rothbard, Rand, and Nozick are not cited at all. It would have been better had Kahan first tried to determine the extent to which modern intellectuals are opposed to capitalism. Instead, he takes for granted that almost all of them are and tries to figure out why.

Another problem stems from Kahan’s neglect of intellectuals who fail to fit his thesis of war between mind and money. A number of pro-capitalist intellectuals have themselves attempted to account for many intellectuals’ antimarket views. Despite the considerable learning displayed in his book, Kahan makes no use of such works as Ludwig von Mises’s The Anti-Capitalistic Mentality (Princeton, N.J.: Van Nostrand, 1956); Robert Nozick’s “Why Do Intellectuals Oppose Capitalism” (in Socratic Puzzles, 280–95 [Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1997]); and Friedrich Hayek’s “The Intellectuals and Socialism” (University of Chicago Law Review [Spring 1949]). Kahan quotes from an essay by Bertrand de Jouvenel that appeared in a book that Hayek edited (p. 292, n. 18), but if he has read anything by Hayek himself, it is not on evidence in the book. He would have benefited had he done so. For example, he refers to many Depression-era intellectuals’ attraction to “a science of economic planning” (p. 180); Hayek wrote a long book, The Counter-Revolution of Science (New York: Free Press, 1964), about the influence of this idea in nineteenth-century France. Despite these problems, however, Kahan has given us a stimulating, insightful, and informative book.

http://www.independent.org/aboutus/person_detail.asp?id=1497

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Money: The War between Intellectuals and Capitalism. Alan S. Kahan. New Brunswick, N. J.: Transaction Press, 2010, 302 pp. Alan Kahan's Mind vs. Money is ...

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