Cultural Contradictions Of Capitalism Research Articles

Daniel Bell's Dilemma: Financialization, Family Values, and their Discontents

Daniel Bell's Dilemma:Financialization, Family Values, and their Discontents Stefan Eich Daniel Bell, The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism (Basic Books, 1976). Melinda Cooper, Family Values. Between Neoliberalism and the New Social Conservatism (Zone Books, 2017). Amassing a mountain of etymological conjectures and anthropological reports that ranged from Iroquois family structures to the communal land ownership of archaic Russian villages, in the last years of his life Karl Marx concluded that Charles Fourier had been right. The modern family, Marx explained in his ethnological notebooks from the early 1880s, "contains in itself in miniature all the antagonisms that later develop widely in society and its state."1 Indeed, the patriarchal family itself had developed historically on the back of slavery. "In its primary meaning," Marx excerpted from the American anthropologist Lewis Henry Morgan's Ancient Society (1877), "family had no relation to the married pair or their children, but to the body of slaves and servants." Just as Fourier had argued, the status of civilization was mirrored by its family structures and the rise of capitalism had gone hand in hand with a patriarchal revolution against matriarchy and common ownership. This meant inversely, as Fourier concluded, that the surest and most rapid path to social progress was the march of women toward their liberty. In 1968, four years before excerpts from Marx's late ethnological notes were first published, Daniel Bell also turned to Fourier. Bell, like Marx, acknowledged Fourier's prophetic quality. Referring to the sexual revolution [End Page 241] sweeping through American campuses and bedrooms, Bell worried about what he dubbed the "psychological utopia of individual release."2 The prophet of such "orgiastic chiliasm," he declared in the American Scholar in the fall of 1968, had been Fourier. "Family life, the key social institution of the civilized state," Bell explained, "was Fourier's most compelling example of an unnatural institution, holding men in its iron grip, bringing misery to all its members."3 As the journal announced, Bell's next, long-awaited monograph would dissect Fourier's untimely anticipation of the utopia of sexual liberation. Bell was far from alone in his concern about the state of American sexual mores and family structures at the time. Already in 1965, Daniel Patrick Moynihan's report on "The Negro Family" had caused a stir by reframing black urban poverty around "the deterioration of the Negro family."4 Moynihan, a sociologist then serving in the Johnson administration as Assistant Undersecretary of Labor, argued in the report that "the Negro community has been forced into a matriarchal structure which, because it is to out of line with the rest of the American society, seriously retards the progress of the group as a whole, and imposes a crushing burden on the Negro male and, in consequence, on a great many Negro women as well."5 By the early 1970s anxieties about the counter-cultural sexual liberation directly echoed Moynihan's account of black family breakdown. It was during these years that the economist Gary Becker began to extend his account of human capital from education into reproduction to develop an "economic theory of marriage."6 Throughout the 1960s Becker had been Bell's colleague at Columbia, but in the wake of the student protests on Morningside Heights in the spring of 1968 both turned their backs to Columbia. Bell moved on to the sociology department at Harvard. Becker returned to the University of Chicago. In his theoretical papers Becker had largely refrained from spelling out the political implications of his theory of family economics, but as the introduction to his unifying Treatise on the Family (1981) made clear, his account self-consciously tapped into anxieties about divorce [End Page 242] rates and single mothers that had been building up in the course of the 1970s. As Becker declared in the book's opening sentence, "the family in the Western world has been radically altered, some claim almost destroyed, by the events of the last three decades."7 ________ Becker's hyperbolic assessment forms the opening epigraph of Melinda Cooper's brilliant Family Values.8 As Cooper shows in her important revisionist account, financialization and neoliberal depoliticization were never opposed to family values...

Cultural tourism as pilgrimage

AbstractIn this recent address to a UNESCO doctoral summer school in northern Italy, the author argues that all cultural tourism has underlying and implicit philosophical-religious dimensions that are particularly important in the era of “late capitalism,” in which “the idiosyncratic has triumphed over the normative” and there is a deeply nihilistic drive and trajectory to the ascendant culture. After drawing on the sociologist Daniel Bell’s analysis of “the cultural contradictions of capitalism,” the author argues that there is an irreducible sacred dimension to the human person (res sacra homo) and his or her life always has the character of a pilgrimage, cognitively comprised of a quest for significance beyond the separate meanings of the normal occupational and utilitarian life. Master-works of urbanism, architecture, sculpture, painting, music, and literature offset the nihilistic dynamic of “late modernity,” and the author draws particular attention to literary works of cross-cultural understanding such as the trilogy of historical novels about India by L. H. Myers, The Root and the Flower and the novels of the great modern Japanese writer Shusaku Endo. As works of fundamental importance for orienting his analysis he adduces C. S. Lewis’s The Abolition of Man and Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning.

Schools, Work and Consumption: Education and the Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism

This paper examines several contemporary social theorists and commentators who have focused on conflicts in contemporary social values and beliefs and have pointed to what has been called the 'cultural contradiction of capitalism.' These contradictions, it is argued, tum on the conflict between traditional notions of bourgeois morality and attitudes, and those that have been spawned by a consumption-oriented capitalism. The paper suggests that it is within this context that many of the problems and predicaments presently faced by schools become comprehensible. School may now constitute the final bulwark for the socialization of the young into the work-oriented, instrumentally-motivated values of traditional bourgeois society. In so doing it has become the public battleground for the struggle to resolve the contradictory nature of culture in contemporary society.

Releer a Daniel Bell. A 40 años de la publicación de Las contradicciones culturales del capitalismo

The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism, published by Daniel Bell in 1976, exercised a visible influence on the intellectual debates of those years and it has maintained a relatively constant presence in sociological literature. Bell argued mainly that culture had radically changed in a direction that made it incompatible with the reproduction of the capitalist economy. Forty years after the appearance of the book, in this article we seek to assess the consistency of this thesis. The perspective is critic. We want to show its weaknesses revealing the misuse of Weber’s idea concerning the relationship between protestant ethic and development of capitalism, the shortcomings of the theory of society built by Bell in order to settle the existence of contradictions and the adoption of concepts of culture and religion restrictives.

Revulsion and awe: charting the development of the moral economy of capitalism and its hero in the American imagination, from the protestant ethic to ecstasy of the entrepreneur

ABSTRACTThe spirit of capitalism shifted throughout the twentieth century, Boltanski and Chiapello place it sometime in the period between the 1960s and 1990s [2005, The New Spirit of Capitalism, Verso, London], for Bell it had happened by the mid-1970s and its contradictions were already apparent [1998, The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism, Basic Books, New York]. David Harvey is more specific and cites 1979 as the dawn of the new era [2005, The New Spirit of Capitalism, Verso, London]. This paper seeks to build on this scholarship of the changing spirit of capitalism and read it through the development of the heroic figure of the American imagination, through the representation of the capitalist hero. Its aim is to situate the figure of the capitalist hero in the post-crash era and ultimately to understand the seductive power of the new capitalism that enables it to thrive. My thesis is that the seductive power of the new capitalism can be understood as an oscillation between revulsion and awe, we are both morally repulsed by the venality of capitalism yet also captivated by it. Revulsion and awe are at the core of the libidinality of the new capitalism and can be seen through the representation of the heroic object of the capitalist imagination.

Living Authentic: "Being True to Yourself" as a Contemporary Moral Ideal

From reality television and self-help literature to exhortations to be "true to yourself," authenticity pervades contemporary culture. Despite their prevalence, cultures of self-improvement and authenticity are routinely linked to arguments about increasing narcissism and declining care for others. Self-improvement involves self-based practices geared to help realise the "improved" and "better you" while authenticity is focused on developing the unique, inner and "real" you. Critiques of both self-improvement and authenticity culture are particularly evident in a sociological tradition of "cultural pessimism" (Hookway, Moral). This group of thinkers argue that the dominance of a "therapeutic" culture where the "self improved is the ultimate concern of modern culture" has catastrophic social and moral consequences (Reiff; Bell; Lasch; Bellah; Bauman and Donskis). Drawing upon Charles Taylor, I take critical aim at such assessments, arguing that ideals and practices of authenticity can be morally productive. I then turn to an empirical investigation of how everyday Australians understand and practice morality based on a qualitative analysis of 44 Australian blogs combined with 25 follow-up online in-depth interviews. I suggest that while the data shows the prevalence and significance of "being true to yourself" as an orientating principle, the bloggers produce a version of authenticity that misses the relational and socially-shaped character of self and morality (Taylor; Vannini and Williams).

The culture crunch

Daniel Bell’s The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism lies at the intersection of the three main theoretical currents of sociological thought, those of Karl Marx, Émile Durkheim and Max Weber. His ‘three realms’ methodology moves away from deterministic accounts that subordinate the political and cultural to the economic realm. By granting each realm an autonomy and principles of their own, Bell locates the contradictions of capitalism in the friction between them. With constant innovation, individual expressiveness and libertarian social values becoming forces in-and-of-themselves, prevailing social structures and the roles within them are left looking increasingly incoherent, illegitimate and meaningless. Likewise, the shift from Protestant asceticism to modernist hedonism creates a sharp tension between the demand for a disciplined and responsible workforce and the demand for economic growth through unrestrained and instantly gratifying consumerism. The result is a complex of crisis scenarios which were manifest with the end of the post-war boom. However, as other commentators have pointed out, Bell’s prophetic theses often seem to fail under the light of subsequent history.

From the cultural contradictions of capitalism to the creative economy

The geography of contemporary bohemia is integral to Richard Florida’s thesis of the rise of a new creative class in the USA. The strong correlation between the presence of bohemians and innovative high-tech industries in a number of American cities stands in sharp contrast to the historical image of a bohemian subculture of artists and intellectuals, defined by their antagonistic relationship to bourgeois society. Rather than a sign of social marginality, bohemian life-styles have now become a marker of the ‘new economy’, variously labeled the creative, the cultural or the aesthetic economy. In my paper I want to compare and contrast these two opposed images of bohemia – the 19th-century idea of bohemia as the libertarian other of liberal-bourgeois society and the new, highly topical economic geography of bohemia – with the following questions in mind: How and why does the 19th-century artistic critique of capitalism mutate into an expression of the new spirit of capitalism? Does this change from an antagonistic to an affirmative relationship signal the emergence of a new spirit of art that can be related to the new spirit of capitalism?

Mode of production: new media technology and the Napster file

This essay explores the economic and cultural contradictions of capitalism which new media technology illuminates through its own distinctive prism of material practices. It critiques the technological determinism that accompanied the dot.com boom and shows why the hopes of a new economic paradigm underpinned by new digital technology were unfounded. The essay argues that the category mode of production, which diagnoses the fundamental contradiction between the forces and social relations of production, remains central to any account of capitalism and new media technology. The essay supplements the mode of development category with Manuel Castells’ notion of a mode of development (informationalism). It also discusses Marx’s analysis of fixed capital to explore the contradictions which technological advances intensify. In particular the essay argues that new technology in general and new media technology specifically generate economic and cultural contradictions for capitalism (as well as opportunities). These contradictions are illustrated via a case study of Napster, the music file swapping Internet service which the large media corporations crushed. However, music file swapping services continue to operate, demonstrating that new media technology has potentialities that cut against the priorities of accumulation and private property.

Virtue and Markets

This essay proposes an interdisciplinary framework for teaching markets and morals by exploring the linkages between political economy, civil society, and culture. Free markets in capitalist mixed economies shape, and are shaped by, political institutions of representative democracy, the vibrancy of civil society, and the values, norms, and beliefs embedded in culture. The major challenge for liberal society and free markets is to reconcile individual and group interests with the common good. The cultural contradictions of capitalism reflect the inadequacy of commercial virtues to sustain a liberal society. External constraints of law and institutional checks and balances in all spheres need to be conjoined with internalized moral constraints of a well-ordered individual conscience. This, in turn, requires a normative order which transcends radically the selfishness of individual and group interests, thus preserving liberty and democracy while enhancing economic efficiency and the social beneficence of free markets. The essay thus confirms Alexis de Tocqueville's notion of the interdependence of liberty, morality, and faith.

The Cultural Contradictions of Daniel Bell

In 'The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism," Daniel Bell has done an excellent job of defining and summarizing the attributes of the new sensibility, the postmodernist and antirationalist "psychedelic" culture that is actionist, anti-establishment, experimental, and obsessed with continuous change. Even better, he has elucidated the cultural and intellectual trends and movements which over the past two hundred years have led to the apparent dominance of the new culture. In fact he has done such an excellent job of proving the cumulative power of the trend that we fail to see, on the basis of his evidence, why the new culture did not predominate in the 1950s instead of in the late sixties, and why its impact was so sudden, shocking, and discontinuous. On the basis of the overwhelming evidence Bell cites, the growth in salience of the new culture ought to have been continuous and should have appeared in a slowly evolving way. Moreover, if all these factors have been operating for so long, the new culture should not have come as such a surprise to so many people. To come directly to the point, we suspect that Bell is guilty of providing an overdetermination of causation, of providing enough causes to explain half a dozen cultural revolutions but no specific causes for the one that did occur. Moreover, we will argue that his central theme, the freeing of culture from its socioeconomic base, is not a cause for the current cultural revolu tion, which in fact did not occur as Bell describes it. To state it differently, Bell's central argument that culture is now free from its socioeconomic base is, at best, only partially true. Indeed the major ways that culture still

Consuming the Romantic Utopia: Love and the Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism.

Consuming the Romantic Utopia: Love and the Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism. Eva I1louz. Berkeley: University of California Press. 1997. 371 pp. ISBN 0-520-20275-9. $45.00 cloth. Time was in Western culture when marriage was unabashedly an economic transaction between families as much as a social bond between husband and wife. Love was seen, at best, as something that would grow within the marriage over time and, at worst, as a chaotic force disrupting the social order. Sure, some people still marry for money, but a lot has changed. The marriage contract has become largely a formal public marking of a couple's private love, and it holds only while love remains, quaint vows of unto death do us part notwithstanding. This widely known narrative in which love expels market considerations from courtship contains elements of truth. But as Eva Illouz shows in her important new book, aspects of the marketplace-from shopping and advertising to social class-still permeate contemporary romance. Illouz's work is a wide-ranging exploration of the relationship among the market, love, romance, courtship, and marriage. Given the rise of a world consumer culture, this is a crucial topic. Her book includes both a historical account as well as an extensive empirical, qualitative study of contemporary American culture. Illouz was trained in the French sociological tradition and frames much of her discussion around debates over postmodernism, as well as Bourdieu's ideas about social class. Because she avoids oversimplifications and tends to interrogate an issue rather than present a linear argument, her work cannot be readily summarized. This can cause frustration. I sometimes found myself enjoying a chapter only to come up empty handed when I searched for take-aways after completing it. This problem is particularly acute in the early chapters. I encourage readers to plug through, for the book gets consistently better as it goes along. The title, Consuming the Romantic Utopia, reflects Illouz's claim that romance is a secular ritual that brings two sacred into our everyday lives. By utopias, Illouz means experiences that temporarily reconcile our economic and social conflicts. The first of these utopias is represented by images of opulence and nonutilitarian luxury (e.g., the candle-lit dinner) that remove the couple from profane concerns of daily life and unite them in a reverie of consumption. The second utopia also removes the couple from everyday life, but this time it places them in wild and exotic nature, strolling hand in hand down an isolated tropical beach. Thus, leisure consumption and images of romance are densely intertwined. Romance is constructed in our culture as not just a good time, but a ritual rejuvenation of a couple's romantic spirit. Illouz pays particular attention to issues of social class. In one interesting finding, she reveals that respondents with high cultural capital tend to reject stories of spontaneous and passionate romantic love as phony and often unhealthy constructions of mass media. Yet, when asked to talk about romantic events in their own lives, these same educated respondents were the most likely to tell stories that closely conformed to romantic cultural scripts. …

Consuming the Romantic Utopia: Love and the Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism. By Eva Illouz. University of California Press, 1997. 386 pp. Cloth, $45.00; paper, $17.95

Consuming the Romantic Utopia: Love and the Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism. By Eva Illouz. University of California Press, 1997. 386 pp. Cloth, $45.00; paper, $17.95

Consuming the Romantic Utopia: Love and the Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism by Eva Illouz

Consuming the Romantic Utopia: Love and the Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism by Eva Illouz

Book ReviewsConsuming the Romantic Utopia: Love and the Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism. By Eva Illouz. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1997. Pp xv+371. $45.00 (cloth); $17.95 (paper).

Book Reviews<i>Consuming the Romantic Utopia: Love and the Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism</i>. By Eva Illouz. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1997. Pp xv+371. $45.00 (cloth); $17.95 (paper).

Consuming the Romantic Utopia: Love and the Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism

Consuming the Romantic Utopia: Love and the Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism

Consuming the Romantic Utopia: Love and the Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism

Consuming the Romantic Utopia: Love and the Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism

On the sustainability of the capitalist order: Schumpeter's capitalism, socialism and democracyrevisited

The present study provides a contemporary reading of Schumpeter's instability-of-capitalism thesis as formulated in Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy (1942). The study of the sustainability of the Western position in capitalism focuses on: (1) the dissociation between private and social objectives in welfare capitalism, (2) the deconstruction of the moral-ethical principles on which the capitalist order was founded, (3) the threat of egalitarianism, (4) the role of the intellectual class, and (5) the cultural contradictions of capitalism. Contrary to claims that the disolution of the state socialist order signals a victory for capitalism it is observed that capitalism remains exposed to powerful challenges. “[B]etween now and the year 2000, the order of money will become universal. From Santiago to Beijing, from Johannesburg to Moscow, all economic systems will worship at the altar of the market” “But capitalism's very success creates the conditions for failure” (Attali, 1991, Millenium, pp. 120, 118).

A Postmortem on Daniel Bell's Postindustrialism

THE CONCEPT OF POSTINDUSTRIALISM, AS A DISTINCT STAGE IN THE EVOlution of modem societies, has long attracted fairly wide attention, especially as it has been put forth in two books by the sociologist Daniel Bell: The Coming of Post-Industrial Society (1973) and The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism (1976).1 For the historian, the question is whether and in what ways this concept can illuminate recent social history. Does the idea of postindustrialism offer important help in making sense of changing life-patterns and values in America over the last half-century? Or does its emphasis on the role of the individual as a consumer deflect too much attention from group conflicts, slurring over the evidences of inner turmoil in a society by focusing only upon the blander aspects of existence? Postindustrialism refers to the period in the evolution of an already economically developed society that follows the largest leap of industrial growth and is marked by a relative decline in the importance of the manufacturing sector, by widespread affluence and leisure, by a high degree of dependence upon technology, and by a relative emphasis on one's role as a consumer, rather than a worker, as compared with all previous historical eras. The notion of an important historical turning point of this kind was actually put forth back in the 1950s, long before Daniel Bell's writings on the subject, by such figures as David Riesman, John Kenneth Galbraith, and Walt W. Rostow.2 Indeed, in a way it was present in the selfcongratulatory writings of a semipopular sort in the 1920s, proclaiming the existence of a New Era in contrast to the grimmer poverty of the decades just preceding.3 It is noteworthy that conceptions along the lines of postindustrialism seem to gain vitality in seasons of prosperity-the 1920s, the 1950s, and 1960s. Indeed, as we shall see, Daniel Bell's writings on the

A Commentary on Daniel Bell's Book "The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism"

The relationship between capitalism and the arts has received too little serious study, and much that has been written on the subject suffers from ideological bias. Cultural historians have noted that in capitalist countries an art market system emerged in the past two centuries replacing an earlier reliance of artists on the patronage of aristocracy and church; whereas in socialist countries a greater portion of artist support has been assumed by the state. Marxist writers have asserted that art in capitalist countries inevitably becomes a tool of the bourgeoisie in maintaining its social privilege. On the other hand, apologists for capitalism have claimed artistic freedom depends on a 'free market' and is absent in a statecontrolled economy. Whatever the validity of such observations, they are of limited value in advancing one's operative knowledge of how the arts have influenced capitalist institutions-and vice versa-in specific historical situations. Assertions that can be argued effectively only in ideological terms are especially useless in this regard. Happily, Daniel Bell's new book, The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism (Basic Books, New York, 1976. 301 pp. $12.95) helps to fill this void. He attempts to show that modernist and post-modernist (19th century and later) art have been strong forces in undermining the capitalistic ethos and that a crisis of morale may be imminent within capitalist institutions. Though his case is not entirely convincing, he does throw new light on a long overlooked area of cultural interplay. Bell's references to what he sees as the insidious role of modernist and post-modernist art in the U.S.A. are contained in a larger analysis of the present state of culture affecting capitalist institutions in that country. According to him, these institutions have undergone significant changes in recent decades that have affected their fundamental integrity. Time was (in the 19th century and earlier) when the capitalistic ethos was all of a piece. Economic producers and consumers alike subscribed to the protestant work ethic and the puritan code of behavior. Producers worked tirelessly to improve the efficiency of the manufacturing apparatus. Consumers practiced thrift, saved their money for a time of need. People, generally, felt constrained by the puritan code of modesty, sobriety and inhibition. But today capitalist culture appears to have become schizoid. The producer's component still adheres to the ideals of efficiency and productivity. Wasteful activity is censured. The consumers component, however, has become profligate. Consumers are continually enticed to spend beyond their means, and the by-products of this promotion contribute