Sovereign Individuals of Capitalism

Bryan S. Turner, Nicholas Abercrombie, Stephen Hill

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2014
• eBook ISBN: 9781317650720
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

In this sequel to their acclaimed The Dominant Ideology Thesis, the authors develop their analysis of the social and cultural underpinnings of modern capitalism. They confront a central assumption of western culture: namely, that the individual is sovereign, and that capitalism above all other economic forms depends on individualism. These ideas have an unbroken history from Alexis de Tocqueville to Milton Friedman. The paradox of the modern world is that the moral emphasis on the individual is contradicted by the actual organization of economy and society.

The authors suggest that individualism and capitalism have no enduring or necessary relationship. Their linkage is entirely accidental and was confined to one particular historical period in the West. Against the background of what they term the Discovery of the Individual, the authors show how individualism gave capitalism a particular shape, and capitalism in turn highlighted the possessive features of the individual. Oriental capitalism and late capitalism in the West bear no particular relationship to individualism; indeed, they flourish best in the absence of individualistic culture. Collectivism increasingly dominates both economic and social life.

These issues once informed the sociological enterprise, but have not been systematically addressed in recent times. This book revives the classical tradition of the historical and comparative analysis of culture and economy in capitalist society, in the context of the late twentieth-century world.

CHAPTER 1 The Sociological Tradition

DOI: 10.4324/9781315763255-2

The sociological use of the term individualism derives from Alexis de Tocqueville’s writings on American democracy. De Tocqueville saw American individualism as verging on egoism, which elevated private self-interest and selfishness above all other values, in the long run sapping all forms of public life and communal relationships. The classical sociological tradition had an ambiguous attitude towards this increasingly dominant system of beliefs and behaviour, as it did toward the new social order of capitalism which accompanied individualism. Classical sociology recognized the emancipation of individuals from the incubus of traditionalism, but was critical of many of the implications of individualism and capitalism.

Classical Sociological Views

The nineteenth-century view of the relationship between individuals and society was often summed up in the term individualism. However, as K. W. Swart argues, this term was used to designate three quite different clusters of ideas: ‘first, the idealistic doctrine with equalitarian implications of the rights of man, or what may be called political liberalism; secondly, the anti-statist, largely utilitarian doctrine of laissez-faire, or economic liberalism; thirdly, the aristocratic cult of individuality, or Romantic individualism’ (Swart, 1962, p. 77). To add further to the complexity, there have been clear national variations in doctrines of individualism. In nineteenth-century Germany, the stress on the individual meant the importance of the development of individual talents and personalities. In France, individualism was frequently construed as a menace to social order, while in Britain the protection of individual rights was an important political good. A final source of confusion is the very widespread use of individualistic doctrines in quite different cultural spheres. It is this feature that makes this such an intriguing problem in sociology. Thus individualism is said to characterize political theories, religious beliefs, literature, painting and economic theory, all apparently different fields with different cognitive requirements.

Besides these diverse views surrounding the term individualism and the discussion of the relationship between individuals and societies in the nineteenth century, a number of analytical issues were jumbled together. The term individualism is a nineteenth-century invention. Most nineteenth-century social theorists discussed the actual relationship of individuals and society, the pictures of that relationship adopted in their societies, the desirable relationships, and the methodological issues of whether to explain social phenomena in individualistic or social structural terms. The discussion was largely organized in terms of the desirability of individualism, the vices or virtues of individualistic doctrines or ways of behaving. Accounts of the vices were prominent, particularly in France. Reactions to the Revolution from Catholic conservatives like de Maistre and de Bonald conceived of individualism as the destroyer of religion, law and social order generally; individualism was anarchy. The views of Saint-Simon were also influential, though rather different. He combined a progressive, rather than reactionary, view of history with a concern for social order and a dislike of the Enlightenment’s respect for the individual. It is, however, probably Alexis de Tocqueville’s views that are best known to sociologists. For him, individualism, which was produced by democracy, involved a withdrawal of individuals from public life into a private sphere, a development which severed social ties and left people at the mercy of a strong state. As an antidote, he gave a special emphasis to localism, regionalism and the social importance of voluntary associations. Intrinsic to most of these accounts was a moral reaction to the appearance of capitalism.

Social theorists were not all anti-individualists, of course. Most notably, Herbert Spencer argued that individuals should be set free from the tyranny of the state and other repressive social institutions – a view that led him to propose extreme laissez-faire doctrines. It is true that, in Spencer’s case, there is at least a potential discord between his individualism and his organicism (Peel, 1971). This is not the case with those German writers who cultivated individuality as ‘a cult of individual genius and originality, especially as applied to the artist, stressing the conflict between individual and society and the supreme value of subjectivity, solitude and introspection’ (Lukes, 1973, p. 19). It received its highest expression in the work of Stirner ‘whose individualism amounted to an amoral and anti-intellectualistic vision of freely cooperating and self-assertive egoists’ (Lukes, 1973, p. 19).

We turn now to the four major figures in the classical sociological tradition. They all formulated views about the relationship of individuals and society, and were impressed by the specific ways in which capitalist society constructed the individual. These formulations integrated methodological and substantive levels of analysis.

Karl Marx

In the Paris Manuscripts Marx put emphasis on the active, sensuous and practical aspect of human nature under the general notion of praxis. Against idealism, Marx modified Feuerbachian anthropology to give prominence to the sensuous character of human embodiment. Human beings are defined by their active appropriation and transformation of nature through their labour. At the ontological level, therefore, Marx saw human individuals as agents who, in transforming their environment, necessarily transform themselves. But this individual development as conscious and practical agents is set in the context of the social character of human reality. Marx argued, therefore, that before the development of private property, the division of labour and alienation, the utilitarian/liberal opposition between ‘individual’ and ‘society’ did not exist, at least as a meaningful opposition. The bare individual of bourgeois culture is a historical and social product of a particular type of society.

Marx’s emphasis on the social/historical constitution of the separate individual became the basis for his opposition to utilitarian philosophers such as Jeremy Bentham and J. S. Mill. Bentham’s account of human beings as dominated by anti-social instincts (such as greed and envy) was rejected by Marx on the grounds that ‘economic man’ in capitalism was not a universal statement of the human essence, but on the contrary a specific, time-bound commentary on free-market capitalism. Marx’s philosophical anthropology involved the notion that to satisfy our individual needs we have to be social beings. It was this anthropology of the social individual that provided Marx with what he took to be a factual and moral critique of contemporary society. In particular, it is the division of labour under capitalist conditions of production that transforms complete or ‘full’ individuals into specialized bare individuals, whose ‘personality’ is distorted by the narrow, constrained circumstances of their labour and life-world.

These themes were important in Marx’s early work (especially in the critique of Feuerbach and the The German Ideology), but they assumed a prominent place in the Grundrisse:

A presupposition of wage labour, and one of the historic preconditions for capital, is free labour and the exchange of this free labour for money, in order to reproduce and to realize money, to consume the use value of labour not for individual consumption, but as use value for money. Another presupposition is the separation of free labour from the objective conditions of its realization – from the means of labour and the material for labour. The individual relates to himself as proprietor, as master of the conditions of his reality.

(Marx, 1973, p. 471)

For Marx, the capitalist mode of production is an economic system in which commodities are produced for exchange rather than use. One of its most important preconditions is the existence of free labour, that is, of labourers who are able to sell their labour power in free markets to whomsoever offers the highest price. For capitalism to work effectively, labourers cannot be involved in feudal relations, being tied to particular landowners or to their parcels of land. Individuals have to be defined as barely as possible so that all their characteristics, skills or capacities are potentially saleable. In pre-capitalist societies people might be defined by their land, place or residence or particular skills. In classical Athens, for example, a person, together with his land, constituted the individual. In capitalism, however, these characteristics have to be separated from persons so that they can be sold. The relation between an individual and his or her characteristics is therefore one of possession not identity. What is required is for the individual to be isolated, bare and separable from social ties.

The requirement for the isolated or bare individual (adjectives that Marx often uses) is reflected in law and property relations. In pre-capitalist society, Marx believed that the basic unit of ownership was not the individual but the household. In capitalist society, however, the individual became the legal subject with the guaranteed freedom to dispose of property or skills as appropriate. The restrictive medieval guilds were abolished, as were customary and traditional restrictions on property, leaving the individual as the absolute proprietor of property.

At one further remove, the creation of the isolated individual was also reflected in the realm of ideas. As Marx says of notions of bourgeois freedom in the Communist Manifesto: ‘Your very ideas are but the outgrowth of the conditions of your bourgeois production and bourgeois property, just as your jurisprudence is but the will of your class made into a law for all, a will, whose essential character and direction are determined by the economical conditions of existence of your class’ (Marx and Engels, 1970, p. 49). More precisely, in the Grundrisse, he discusses the relationship of the doctrines of individual freedom and equality that were popular in the eighteenth century to the requirements of the capitalist mode of production. Exchange of commodities is the crucial feature of capitalism and such exchanges require equality and freedom; individuals must not only be able freely to exchange, the exchange is treated as one between people equal for the purpose of the exchange. The real basis of the ideas of freedom and equality is the economic system of commodity exchange, and at the same time the exchanges demonstrate the ideas. Doctrines of liberty and equality are enshrined in legal, social and political practices that make the exchanges possible. Marx expresses the idea in the following manner: ‘Equality and freeom are thus not only respected in exchange based on exchange values but also, the exchange of exchange values is the productive real basis of all equality and freedom. As pure ideas they are merely the idealized expressions of this basis; as developed in juridical, political, social relations, they are merely this basis to a higher power’ (Marx, 1973, p. 245).

If the bourgeois social theory and capitalist economic and legal practice contain a definition of the individual in the barest possible terms, as a proprietor of capacities from which he or she can easily be parted, the problem remains: what features are essential to the individual in capitalist society, characteristics from which a person cannot be parted? Some writers have suggested that the isolated individual has will and choice, that is, the will to act and the capacity to choose courses of action. This makes the individual a creature who intervenes in the world and has to take responsibility for his or her choices (Parekh, 1982).

The concepts of will and choice were important for the eighteenth-century social theorists whom Marx saw as a reflection of capitalist economic practice. These theorists argued that capitalist society did in fact allow individuals to be truly unfettered, independent and free. Marx poured scorn on these arguments. ‘In this society of free competition, the individual appears detached from the natural bonds, etc., which in earlier historical periods make him the accessory of a definite and limited human conglomerate … But the epoch which produces this standpoint, that of the isolated individual, is also precisely that of the hitherto most developed social relations’ (Marx, 1973, pp. 83–4, our emphasis). Capitalism, ironically, therefore made individuals more interdependent because of its social method of production and, above all, because of its reliance on continued economic exchange between individuals.

Marx’s more abstract views about methods of analysing social phenomena are related to his arguments against Adam Smith and David Ricardo, whom he saw as standing ‘with both feet on the shoulders of the eighteenth century prophets’. One of the vices of bourgeois social theory was that it produced a methodological individualism in which social analysis was based on individual characteristics. Marx, on the contrary, takes the view that individuals do not have any essential characteristics abstracted from the society in which they find themselves. ‘Society does not consist of individuals; it expresses the sum of connections and relationships in which individuals find themselves’ (McLellan, 1971, p. 77). There is no natural individual; individuality and what constitutes an individual vary from society to society. Each society constructs the individual in its own particular way.

Marx’s notion that each society constructs individuals in different ways is clearly connected to his ethical theory. The construction of individuals may also be their constraint. Marx’s aim was the creation of social arrangements – socialism – which encouraged the full development and exercise of human capacities. Capitalism was, to some extent, a stage on the road to the liberation of these capacities, because its greater productive abilities encouraged a greater diversity of needs. However, since it depended so crucially on market relations, it was still constraining: it represented having rather than being. Consequently, the capitalist bare individual promoted only a partial human individuality, which could only be fully developed in socialism.

Emile Durkheim

In The Division of Labor in Society (1893), Durkheim powerfully rejected the utilitarian individualism of Herbert Spencer. The thrust of his rejection was the impossibility of explaining economic relations by reference simply to economic self-interest. For Durkheim, the problem was how one should explain the binding nature of economic contracts, that is, the ‘non-contractual element in contract’. The economic system would not work, Durkheim argued, if economic relations were not enforced and enforceable by appeals to general legal norms; these legal institutions must exist prior to economic contracts and cannot be explained in terms of self-interest. In general, this element of social solidarity in society is to be explained by social facts and not by inappropriate explanations of a psychologistic character. It was in this theoretical context that Durkheim produced the famous distinction between mechanical and organic solidarity. In pre-modern societies, the main root of social solidarity is to be found in the conscience collective, the absence of individualism and the low level of the division of labour. With the development of social specialization and the division of labour, the conscience collective becomes vaguer, weaker and less intense. Organic solidarity thus comes to rest primarily on the reciprocal obligations and relations that emerge as an effect of the division of labour.

Durkheim’s position has often been taken to be a form of radical sociologism which treats the ‘individual’ as simply an effect of social relations. However, Durkheim’s analysis of the individual is both more complex and more interesting than this conventional view would suggest. Individualism, and especially moral individualism rather than economic individualism, remained the abiding focus of Durkheim’s sociology and of his political philosophy.

The problem of individualism does not emerge significantly in The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life (Durkheim, 1912), because there Durkheim was primarily concerned with societies based on mechanical solidarity, that is, with societies where the ‘individual’ was yet to be developed. He acknowledged, however, that with the growing division of labour there would be a specialization of the individual, which would in turn give rise to a greater sense of religious individualism. In a similar fashion, Durkheim argued that the differentiation of society and the individuation of the person in Western societies had an effect on the educational system which, with the Renaissance and the Reformation, gave rise to an emphasis on the individual in educational theory and practice. In his study of the development of educational practice in France, Durkheim is perfectly aware of this growing emphasis on the subjectivity of the individual and the need to direct educational interests towards the developing person:

With the Renaissance, by contrast, the individual began to acquire self-consciousness. He was no longer, at least in enlightenment circles, merely an undifferentiated fraction of the whole; he was himself already, in a sense a whole, he was a person with his own physiognomy who had and who experienced at least the need to fashion for himself his own way of thinking and feeling. We know that at this period there occurred, as it were, a sudden blossoming of great personalities.

(Durkheim, 1977, p. 263)

Although Durkheim is often regarded as the sociologist of the social sui generis, he was also the sociologist of the moral individual as the product of long-term structural changes in the nature of Western societies, which gave rise to individualism and the individual.

The crucial element in Durkheim’s commentary on individualism is the essay ‘Individualism and the intellectuals’ which was published in La Revue Bleue in 1898 (Durkheim, 1969). It is this short essay which perhaps best expresses the relationship between moral individualism and sociologism in Du...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Title Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Prologue
• Chapter 1 The Sociological Tradition
• Chapter 2 The Discovery of the Individual
• Chapter 3 Discourses of the Individual
• Chapter 4 The Bare Individual of Pioneer Capitalism
• Chapter 5 Cultural Contradictions of Modernity
• Chapter 6 The Dominance ofDiscourse?
• Conclusion
• References
• Index