Ethics Of Capitalism Research Articles

Entrepreneurs and the Social Sciences

Abstract The burden of occupying the first established chair of business history at the. London School of Economics (and indeed the first in Britain) is happily lightened by the knowledge that the field is by no means as bereft of research and scholarship as this priority implies. The first two professors of economic history appointed at LSE fifty years ago, Eileen Power and R.H. Tawney, made distinguished contributions, to the study of medieval traders and to the impact of puritanism on the capitalist ethic. Their successors have maintained this interest in business history. T.S. Ashton's study of the business of Peter Stubs of Warrington was one of the building blocks from which his picture of the Industrial Revolution was built. Charlotte Erickson's study of British industrialists remains the classic account of their social and educational origins and career patterns between 1850 and 1950. Donald Coleman and Theo Barker, well before they joined with other scholars to found the Business History Unit, wr...

Power and Protest in the Countryside: Studies of Rural Unrest in Asia, Europe, and Latin America.

List of Figures vii 1. Introduction: Moral Economy, Capitalism, and State Power in Rural Protest / Scott E. Guggenheim and Robert P. Weller 3 2. Routine Conflicts and Peasant Rebellions in Seventeenth-Century France / Charles Tilly 13 3. Indian Uprisings under Spanish Colonialism: Southern Mexico in 1712 / Robert Wasserstrom 42 4. Capitalist Penetration in the Nineteenth Century: Creating Conditions for New Patterns of Social Control / Joel S. Migdal 57 5. Bandits, Monks, and Pretender Kings: Patterns of Peasant Resistance and Protest in Colonial Burma, 1826-1941 / Michael Adas 75 6. Peasants, Proletarians, and Politics in Venezuela, 1875-1975 / William Roseberry 106 7. Mao Zedong, Red Miseables, and the Moral Economy of Peasant Rebellion in Modern China / Ralph Thaxton 132 8. What Makes Peasants Revolutionary? / Theda Skocpol 157 9. Afterword: Peasantries and the Rural Sector-Notes on a Discovery / Sidney W. Mintz 180 Notes 189 References 195 Index 207

A Triple Insurgence: Isaac Chocr�n's La revoluci�n

A Triple Insurgence: Isaac Chocrón's La revolución Kirsten F. Nigro University of Kansas Of all the Latin American nations Venezuela is perhaps the one which today is enjoying the greatest flurry of theatrical activity. Its numerous commercial and experimental theaters are vigorous, as well as successful, economic and artistic ventures. In the past decade this oil-rich country has become an energetic patron of the dramatic arts, sponsoring international theater festivals and establishing centers for research into and the dissemination of materials concerning Latin American drama. Venezuela also has produced a corps of first-rate actors and directors (most notably, José Ignacio Cabrujas) and playwrights, among whom Isaac Chocrón is surely one of the most prominent and respected. His play production has been a varied one, beginning with early realistic works, a style Chocrón has not totally abandoned but which has been complemented by hts-more strikingly experimental plays written during the 1970s.1 Yet despite their particular conventions, these plays share a thematic or substantive concern that make them distinctively Chocrón's; for with very few exceptions they are scathing condemnations of a world in which almost every human activity has been reduced to a monetary transaction. For example, in O.K. (1969) the tensions of a ménage-à-trois are released when one of its members is apparently bought off; in El quinto infierno (1961) the materialism of the United States mirrors that of Venezuela, whose populace is "controlado [sic] por un frenético afán de poseer, amasar y, sobre todo, de lucir."2 It is this same greed for the things a dollar can buy that makes an entire nation quite literally sell itself to the highest bidder in Asia y el Lejano Oriente (1966). Chocrón's most powerful statement about the capitalist ethic is contained in La revolución (1971), which is also the most electrify1 .Among Chocrón's most important plays are (in chronological order): El quinto infierno (1961), Animales feroces (1963), Asta y el Lejano Oriente (1966), published together in Teatro (Caracas: Monte Avila), 1974; Trie Trac (1967), in Teatro de Ia vanguardia: Contemporary Spanish American Theatre, ed. Myrna Casas (Lexington , Mass.: D. C. Heath and Company), 1975; O. K. (Caracas: MonteAvila), 1969; La máxima felicidad (Caracas: Monte Avila), 1974; El acompañante (Caracas: Monte Avila), 1978. 2.Teatro, p. 34. 48ROCKY MOUNTAIN REVIEW ing play he has written thus farin his career. Set in a sleazy cabaret, La revolución is a two-man show, played by the transvestite Gabriel, otherwise known as Miss Susy, and by Eloy the M.C., a finicky, puny-willed homosexual. Their public is never actually treated to the floor show promised them by Eloy; instead, the repartee between the two men, their reminiscences, quarrels, and reconciliations comprise the essential action of the play's two acts. Yet this prelude to the performance-as-advertised is in itself an explosive theatrical event, a kind of triple insurgence against the sexual, artistic and political codes of a society ruled by the mighty money market. Chocrón's principal antagonists to this less-than-holy trinity are his two sexual derelicts, who are offered as proof that "Uno nunca es nada. . . .Lo que nos rodea es Io que nos hace ser cosas."3 What surrounds them, as Gabriel is so quick to perceive, is "un mundo lleno de partes y de porcentajes" (p. 24), a stock market of sorts in which human worth is measured in dollars and cents. Thus while Gabriel and Eloy may be social outcasts, they are both the product and mirror of the very society that has banished them to its fringes. Theirs is not a sub- or a counterculture, but a culture in miniature and not a very pretty one at that. Gabriel knows this to be true and quite openly admits that almost everything in his life has been a buying and selling proposition. Sex, in his vocabulary, is a business deal, "un asunto de cuerpos y no de personas" (p. 23), wherein he usually trades some prize personal possession in exchange for the physical attention of young, virile men. Despite the years of...

Animism and the Origins of Alienation: The Anthropological Perspective of Thorstein Veblen

To Marxists familiar with his work Thorstein Veblen poses great question mark. His trenchant analysis of economic orthodoxy matched by his equally trenchant analysis of dialectical materialism; and if he sardonically critical of the capitalist ethic of individualism, he no less skeptical of the Marxist doctrine of class struggle.' Veblen remains an ideological enigma, man of the Left who easier to celebrate than to classify. Ever since he made his appearance as social theorist at the turn of the century, radical scholars have claimed him as valuable intellectual resource and potential ally in the struggle against bourgeois society and classical market theory a grand man! exclaims the economist Joan Robinson.2 In 19059 during the midst of the golden of American socialism, William English Walling informed readers of The International Socialist Review that Veblen's analysis of business enterprise is not only more evolutionary, but also more revolutionary than that of [sic].3 Three decades later another generation of radicals could read the sophisticated Marxist Quarterly and find reassurance in Lewis Corey's exhortation: All that vital in Thorstein Veblen may fulfill itself in Marxism and socialism.4 During this Old Left era only the German emigres in America, philosophers and sociologists like Herbert Marcuse, Theodor Adorno, and Max Horkheimer, seemed to be aware of the difficulties of assimilating Veblen into the Hegelian tradition of thought which had shaped Marx's outlook.' After World War II, American Marxist economists slUch as D o uglass Dowd and Paul Sweezy continued the effort to incorporate Veb-

God, America and the Remnant

The American assault on the human spirit and upon the salvational work of God began at home as a degeneration of the American character. The European capitalist ethic had always threatened a perversion of the spirit, because it exalted individualism and because it measured religious justification by ownership or wealth or power. And so the American character from its infancy bore the potential of moral disaster: the individualism could become egotism, the productive energy could become technicism and a commodity ethic, the optimism and pride of achievement could become racism and imperialism. Thoreau saw the danger in the 1840s, De Tocqueville even earlier. The American contribution to the decay was a separation of the capitalist ethic from a religious base, a vulgarization of cultural criteria, and an immensely extended dominion over nature. The American people, having perfected a new morality of power, egotism, technicism, and the commodity ethic, became with each generation less culpable and less capable of moral choice, like inebriates or addicts who cannot be judged as the men they once were.American individualism reduces the judicability and therefore the salvability of men because it isolates them not only from their human neighbours but from the divine community of law, love, and responsibility. The moral shrinking can be seen in some of the manifestations of individualism. One is sentimentalism within a dominant savagery. Human ferocity, unlike the natural kind in animals, is often tinged by an apparent and trivial tenderness.

Profit-Sharing and Labour Relations in England in the Nineteenth Century

An examination of the history of profit-sharing and co-partnership in England in the nineteenth century serves two purposes. One is to add to the growing body of evidence which contradicts the generalization that in the third quarter of the nineteenth century trade unionists were beginning to espouse the capitalist ethic; the other aim of this paper is to draw attention to one of three innovations in the history of labour relations in this period. Of these, both arbitration and conciliation, and cooperation have received considerable attention from historians, but profit-sharing and labour co-partnership schemes, which were forcefully canvassed by such prominent contemporary figures as G. J. Holyoake, respected veteran chartist, and George Potter, the influential labour leader, have not attracted the attention they deserve. The Royal Commission on Trade Unions in 1868 was chiefly concerned with the legal status of trade unions, yet in addition to their discussion of arbitration and conciliation the commissioners took evidence on the progress and achievements of profit-sharing and co-partnership. This reflected the existence of considerable interest in this subject at that time, which in turn provides evidence of the search by contemporaries for a solution to the growing problem of conflict between capital and labour, a matter which generated an extensive literature in the 1860s. The historical failure of profit-sharing, in terms of its limited growth and its lack of success as a method of improving labour relations, even compared with the progress of arbitration and conciliation, does not excuse the historian from neglecting a subject about which a number of influential contemporaries evidently felt strongly – though as it subsequently proved with excessive optimism. This article sets out to describe briefly the origins of the profit-sharing movement of the nineteenth century, proceeds to analyse the course of development, and finally examines its significance within the context of labour relations in England in the period 1850 to 1914.

Capitalist Ethics--Tough or Soft?

FEw world outlooks have been responsible for greater social mischief than the ideology or social philosophy which might be called socialism-the cluster of ideas centering upon a contrast between the evil capitalist ethic and its supposedly superior socialist counterpart. Sentimental socialists maintain, for one thing, that, since the system of private enterprise for profit rewards pursuit of self-interest, it cannot serve the general interest. Consequently, a system banning selfish private enterprise for profit is bound to encourage economic activity in the public interest in the place of the proscribed private interest. What is sentimental here is the belief that a change in social organization is all that is required to abolish human selfishness. As Mr. Dooley said, A man that'd expect to train lobsters to fly in a year is called a lunatic; but a man that thinks men can be turned into angels by an election is called a reformer and remains at large. Among sentimental socialists are such disparate modern thinkers as Albert Einstein, Jawaharlal Nehru, and R. H. Tawney. Sentimental or socialism has an extraordinary appeal to gentle physicists, non-materialistic statesmen, Unitarian ministers, and social workers-to mention just a few vulnerable categories. The appalling experience of this century with an actual socialist system in Russia has shaken this set of beliefs, to the limited extent by which mere evidence can sway opinion, but even so the world-wide influence of the ideology of soft socialism is an incalculable asset to the system of organized terror now ruling most of the Eurasian continent.

Christian Morals and the Competitive System

Previous articleNext article FreeChristian Morals and the Competitive SystemThorstein VeblenThorstein Veblen Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Volume 20, Number 2Jan., 1910 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/intejethi.20.2.2376857 Views: 215Total views on this site Citations: 8Citations are reported from Crossref Journal History This article was published in The International Journal of Ethics (1890-1938), which is continued by Ethics (1938-present). PDF download Crossref reports the following articles citing this article:James Gilligan The Role of Shame and Guilt in Political Violence: From Wars and Revolutions to Genocide and Terrorism, (Aug 2022): 19–38.https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-05570-6_2Mary V. Wrenn Veblen, Veblenian Social Practices, and Prosperity Theology, Journal of Economic Issues 54, no.11 (Mar 2020): 1–18.https://doi.org/10.1080/00213624.2020.1720560Guglielmo Forges Davanzati Structural change driven by institutions: Thorstein veblen revised, Structural Change and Economic Dynamics 45 (Jun 2018): 105–110.https://doi.org/10.1016/j.strueco.2018.03.002Guglielmo Forges Davanzati Credit, Production, and Wages in Thorstein Veblen's Economic Thought, International Journal of Political Economy 43, no.11 (Sep 2014): 92–109.https://doi.org/10.2753/IJP0891-1916430108Charles G. Leathers, J. Patrick Raines Veblen's evolutionary economics of religion and the evolutionary psychology of religion, International Journal of Social Economics 41, no.22 (Jan 2014): 146–161.https://doi.org/10.1108/IJSE-02-2013-0045Charles G. Leathers, J. Patrick Raines Natural religion and “moral capitalism”, International Journal of Social Economics 38, no.44 (Mar 2011): 330–340.https://doi.org/10.1108/03068291111112031Jan Willem Lindemans Hayek's Post-Positivist Empiricism: Experience Beyond Sensation, (Mar 2015): 143–170.https://doi.org/10.1108/S1529-2134(2011)0000015012Stephen K. Figler Veblen Revisited: Excerpts from and Contemporary Comment on Thorstein Veblen's The Higher Learning in America, Quest 35, no.11 (Jan 1983): 21–28.https://doi.org/10.1080/00336297.1983.10483779