In an interview on Human Traits Essential to Capitalism

Your next book is The Passions and The Interests: Political Arguments for Capitalism Before its Triumph, by the great Albert O Hirschman.

This is a great book. It traces the history of an idea – an idea that is central to our whole civilisation today. The idea is that human nature is basically unruly and destructive, or has the potential to become so, but that we’ve designed a society that sets a space for this kind of impulse, where it’s acted out in a civilised manner – and that’s capitalism. So when we reflect on some of the horrors of capitalism, we have to consider that things could have been much worse if we didn’t have this system. Our fights would have been on real battlefields, rather than economic battlefields. That’s a theory, that’s an idea that really led to the adoption of capitalism, or the free enterprise system, around the world.

Capitalism had quite a tough path toward acceptability, I think. Traditionally, making money was viewed as unseemly, and avarice considered a deadly sin.

In medieval times, the dominant intellectual tradition was one of sin and the avoidance of sinful behaviour. Lust for power or wealth were unambiguously bad things. Even in a feudal society, such passions were acknowledged by society as, in some sense, legitimate, but the view didn’t have any authority. In the Renaissance, the authority of these self-denial concepts began to recede. Hirschman talks about Machiavelli representing a different ideal (of sorts) that was emerging. But it wasn’t until the early 1700s that we saw clear thinking about really having a system that becomes stable in a military sense, because you develop a business class that has an interest in the political stability of the system, as they fight it out for their economic interests. He emphasises the philosophy of the French writer Montesquieu and the Scottish writer James Steuart. They both wrote in the mid-1700s about the ideal of a merchant society that would be orderly and looking out for the material interests of people.

Was communism a big setback to this very positive view of capitalism?

Hirschman doesn’t emphasise communism, though he does emphasise that all along, during this course of history, there were critics of capitalism. Montesquieu and Steuart didn’t have the final answer. Marx was obviously among these critics, but the kind of criticism that Hirschman emphasises is a kind of criticism which may be in Marx but is not a major theme. The criticism is that capitalist society is so good at reducing our passions to passions about business, that we become a kind of vulgar, low-brow society – it doesn’t serve the spiritual interests of people.