Money and the Moral Order in Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth-Century American Capitalism

Abstract

The moral use of money in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century is considered by examining a sample of thirteen American entrepreneurs. Bourdieu's concepts of economic and symbolic capital, as well as Appadurai's ideas about linking desire and sacrifice through exchange are used to show how some entrepreneurs redistributed their wealth through philanthropy. Other men of wealth remained committed to personal accumulation. The concept of habitus is shown to be limited in explaining the differences in the moral distribution of wealth. [philanthropy, wealth distribution, money and morality, historic capitalism, economic altruism] In this article I examine motivations for the philanthropic use of money, as opposed to the purely market oriented accumulation of wealth. I ask questions about the social forces and cultural processes that surrounded nineteenth and twentieth-century American entrepreneurs who gave away accumulated wealth, while other entrepreneurs ignored giving. Both groups were concerned with capital accumulation, but the philanthropic conceived of money as having moral potential, while the non-philanthropic entrepreneurs thought of money only in terms of rational gain and loss. Though considered irrational in terms of market forces, giving money away in the late nineteenth and early twentieth-century America could also be conceived, as I show, as supportive of the moral order.