Abstract
Campbell summarizes the book’s thesis. He identifies the problem he tried to solve as accounting for the consumer revolution that accompanied industrialization. Solving this required developing a hedonistic theory of modern consumer behavior. However this led to a new problem, that of explaining how the section of the English middle-class who had inherited the Protestant Ethic could also enthusiastically embrace a hedonistic-inspired consumer ethic. The answer involved tracing developments in Calvinist thought beyond the point at which Weber stopped, whilst also focusing on a different teachings. This then led to the cult of sensibility and Romanticism, with the latter movement effectively legitimating the self-illusory hedonism that underpins modern consumerism. Campbell finishes by stressing how this effect was ironic, while also noting that irony can work both ways. He ends by suggesting that the cultural logic of modernity is one in which Puritanical and romantic elements exist in a symbiotic relationship.
The bourgeois were once the deadly enemies of the Romantics. Or rather, they only seemed to be. Now we know that the Romantics were bourgeois, and that the bourgeois were Romantics, to a considerable extent, far more than we (and of course, than they themselves) were accustomed to think.
John Lukács
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Notes
- 1.
See, for example, Richard le Gallienne, The Romantic Nineties (London: G. P. Putnam, 1926); Douglas Goldring, The Nineteenth Twenties: A General Survey and some Personal Memories (London: Nicholson and Watson, 1945), and James Lavers, Between the Wars (Boston, Mass.: Houghton Mifflin, 1961). Material for comparison with the 1960s can be found in Christopher Booker, The Neophiliacs (London: Fontana, 1970), Frank Musgrove, Ecstasy and Holiness: Counter Culture and the Open Society (London: Methuen, 1974), and Bernice Martin, A Sociology of Contemporary Cultural Change (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1981).
- 2.
For a discussion of the problems presented by Weber’s thesis and the criticisms commonly made of it, see Gordon Marshall, In Search of the Spirit of Capitalism: An Essay on Max Weber’s Protestant Ethic Thesis (London: Hutchinson University Library, 1982), chapters 5 and 6.
- 3.
Harold Bloom and Lionel Trilling (eds), Romantic Poetry and Prose (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973).
- 4.
Ibid., p. 607.
- 5.
The elitist romantic form of this critique has been best expressed in modern times by F. R. Leavis – see Nor shall my Sword: Discourses on Pluralism, Passion and Hope (London: Chatto and Windus, 1977) – and, in a more populist form, by Richard Hoggart, The Uses of Literacy (Harmondsworth, Middx.: Penguin Books, 1958). More explicitly socialist and neo-Marxist versions of this critique, which nevertheless still draw their inspiration from the Romantic tradition, have been developed by members of the Frankfurt School (see essays in B. Rosenberg and D. M. White (eds), Mass Culture: The Popular Arts in America (Glencoe, Ill.: Free Press, 1957), and A. Arato and E. Gebhardt (eds), The Essential Frankfurt School Reader (Oxford: Blackwell, 1978), Part 2).
- 6.
Bloom and Trilling (eds), Romantic Poetry, p. 595.
- 7.
John B. Halsted (ed.), Romanticism (New York: Walker, 1969), p. 92.
- 8.
There is also no particular reason for assuming that such reduction will necessarily be from ideals to interests; the ‘interests’ which individuals and groups come to have come equally be considered a product of their ‘ideals’. The relationship between these two concepts is taken up below (see pp. 212–16).
- 9.
Arthur Mitzman, The Iron Cage: An Historical Interpretation of Max Weber (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1970), p. 183.
- 10.
Louis Schneider, ‘Ironic Perspective and Sociological Thought’, in Lewis A. Coser (ed.), The Idea of Social Structure: Papers in Honour of Robert K. Merton (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1975), pp. 323–37, see esp. p. 336.
- 11.
See Werner Stark, ‘Max Weber and the Heterogony of Purposes’, Social Research, 34 (Summer 1967), 249–64, see esp. pp. 253–8 passim.
- 12.
For a general discussion of these issues in sociology see: R. K. Merton, ‘The Unanticipated Consequences of Purposive Social Action’, American Sociological Review, 1 (1936), 894–904; R. K. Merton, Social Theory and Social Structure (New York: Free Press, 1949), Part 1; Colin Campbell, ‘A Dubious Distinction: An Inquiry into the Value and Use of Merton’s Concepts of Manifest and Latent Function’, American Sociological Review, 47 (February 1982), no. 1, 29–43; and Albert O. Hirschman, The Passions and the Interests: Political Arguments for Capitalism before its Triumph (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1977), pp. 130–6.
- 13.
In fact, Werner Stark claims that it was Weber’s tendency to espouse a general cultural pessimism that caused him to invert that more ‘progressive’ notion of the heterogony of purpose associated with such writers as Adam Smith and Bernard de Mandeville (Stark, ‘Max Weber and the Heterogony of Purposes’, p. 253).
There are clear differences between consequential and transformational irony; that is, between observing that actions have unintentional and opposed consequences, and noting that conduct itself may change its character over time. Weber refers to both types in his work. The fact that an anti-materialistic Protestantism helped to bring modern capitalism into being is an example of consequentialist irony. On the other hand, the fact that the actual behaviour of Puritan entrepreneurs also becomes transformed from meaningful moral action into ‘meaningless’ moral profit-seeking with the loss of a genuine Calvinist faith can be seen as an example of transformational irony.
- 14.
The process through which idealistic commitments are created is clearly related to Weber’s discussion of charisma.
- 15.
Max Weber, The Theory of Social and Economic Organization, trans. A. M. Henderson and Talcott Parsons, edited and with an introduction by Talcott Parsons (New York: Free Press, 1964), pp. 98–9.
- 16.
Quentin Skinner, The Foundations of Modern Political Thought, vol. 1: The Renaissance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978), pp. xii–xiii.
- 17.
Hans Gerth and C. Wright Mills, Character and Social Structure: The Psychology of Social Institutions (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1954), pp. 112–30.
- 18.
Marshall, In Search of the Spirit of Capitalism, p. 258.
- 19.
See C. Wright Mills, ‘Situated Action and the Vocabulary of Motives’, American Sociological Review, 6 (December 1940), 904–13; M. Scott and S. Lyman, ‘Accounts’, American Sociological Review, 33 (February 1968), no. 1. 46–62; Alan F. Blum and Peter McHugh, ‘The Social Ascription of Motives’, American Sociological Review, 36 (February 1971), 98–109; and Anthony Wootton, Dilemmas of Discourse: Controversies about the Sociological Significance of Language (London: Allen and Unwin, 1975), pp. 86–92.
- 20.
The principal influence here has been the work of Kenneth Burke; see his A Grammar of Motives and A Rhetoric of Motives (Cleveland, Ohio: World Publishing, 1962).
- 21.
Interestingly, Scott and Lyman state that their concept of an account includes ‘those non-vocalized but lingual explanations that arise in an actor’s “mind” when he questions his own behaviour’, but they go on to restrict their concern to vocalized accounts, and especially those given in face-to-face relations (see Scott and Lyman, ‘Accounts’, p. 47).
- 22.
Joyce Tompkins, The Popular Novel in England 1770–1800 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1961), p. 101.
- 23.
See pp. 121f.
- 24.
It is not being argued that idealistic conduct is, at root, self-interested merely that it can decay into such a form. This fact should not be taken as indicative that all moral action is basically little more than selfishness. This is no more reasonable than the assumption that selfish behaviour is merely a disguise, adopted for reasons of modesty, for conduct that is truly altruistic.
- 25.
Idealistic is not, of course, the opposite of self-interested conduct; ‘other-interested’ or ‘altruistic’ conduct is the opposite of self-interested, whilst ‘realistic’ is the opposite of idealistic. Ideals are, however, generally presented as transcending self by their very nature as ‘non-actual’ entities and although it is possible to concentrate upon realizing the ideal in oneself whilst making no effort to realize it in any other form, systems of ideals are interlinked and it may prove more difficult than imagined to limit one’s efforts to realize them in oneself without being forced to pay attention to their more generalized forms. It is in this way that idealistic concerns can function to exert a ‘pull’ away from pure self-interest.
- 26.
Simone de Beauvoir, Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter, quoted by Jerome Bruner, Alison Joly and Kathy Sylva (eds), Play – Its Role in Development and Evolution (Harmondsworth, Middx.: Penguin Books, 1976), p. 587.
- 27.
Ibid.
- 28.
Such behaviour must be ‘genuine’ if it is to fulfil the function of providing the individual with reassurance concerning his goodness; that is, it must be an intrinsically self-justifying act in which the desire to do good predominates over the desire for confirmation of one’s goodness.
- 29.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, The Sufferings of Young Werther, trans. Bayard Quincy Morgan (London: John Calder, 1976), pp. 80–1.
- 30.
For an example of how commercial institutions can provide the necessary framework for the generation of a romantic idealism, see the authors’ introductory essay, ‘From Romance to Romanticism’, in Colin Campbell and Allan Murphy, Things We Said Today: The Complete Lyrics and a Concordance to The Beatles’ Songs 1962–1970 (Ann Arbor, Mich.: Pierian Press, 1980), pp. xxi–xxxi.
- 31.
Gordon Rattray Taylor, The Angel-Makers: A Study in the Psychological Origins of Historical Change 1750–1850 (London: Heinemann, 1958).
- 32.
Ibid.
- 33.
See Daniel Bell, The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism (London: Heinemann, 1976) and Martin, A Sociology of Contemporary Cultural Change.
- 34.
There has been much debate in sociology over the exact nature of this distinction and how far it is reasonable to accuse Weber of defining the one in terms of the other (see Marshall, In Search of the Spirit of Capitalism, pp. 119–22). The validity of these criticisms is not at issue here, given that, however the two are defined, the ‘spirit’ which animates economic productive activity cannot encompass all a religious ethic is intended to cover.
- 35.
Brian M. Barbour, ‘Franklin and Emerson’, in Brian M. Barbour (ed.), Benjamin Franklin: A Collection of Critical Essays (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1979), pp. 25–9, see esp. p. 28.
- 36.
Irvin G. Wyllie, The Self-Made Man in America: The Myth of Rags to Riches (New York: Free Press, 1954), p. 140, and Barbour, ‘Benjamin Franklin’, in Barbour (ed.), Benjamin Franklin, pp. 63–74.
- 37.
Unfortunately, Freud’s ideas, as they became modified in the course of their assimilation into popular thought during the 1920s, further worked to reinforce the tendency to blur the Protestant ethic with the spirit of capitalism. As a consequence, the Bohemians of Greenwich Village regarded themselves as deliberately opposing what they defined as ‘a business-Christian ethic’ (see Malcolm Cowley, Exile’s Return: A Literary Odyssey of the 1920s (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1962), p. 62).
- 38.
It is important to remember that Romanticism, like Puritanism, was also a movement of deep moral concern.
- 39.
The phrase is Oden’s (see Thomas C. Oden, ‘The New Pietism’, in Eileen Barker (ed.), New Religious Movements: A Perspective for Understanding Society (New York: Edwin Mellen Press, 1982), pp. 86–106, see esp. p. 86). In fact, Oden shows rather well how that aspect of the 1960s cultural revolution which went under the label ‘encounter movement’, whilst ostensibly rebelling against Calvinistic Puritanism, was actually ‘reappropriating’ the pietistic wing of the puritan Protestant tradition (Ibid., pp. 93–4).
- 40.
For examples of the dispute over the uniqueness of the counterculture see Kenneth Westhues, Society’s Shadow: Studies in the Sociology of Countercultures (Toronto: McGraw-Hill Ryerson, 1972), and Kenneth Keniston, Youth and Dissent: The Rise of a New Opposition (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1971), whilst for an overview see Colin Campbell, ‘Accounting for the Counter Culture’, The Scottish Journal of Sociology, 4 (January 1980), no. 1, 37–51. A plea to accept the ‘romantics’ own definition of reality and not resort to sociological ‘imputation’ is to be found in Brian Salter, ‘Explanations of Student Unrest: An Exercise in Devaluation’, British Journal of Sociology, 24 (September 1973), no. 3, 329–40. Roszak’s apologia for the counter-culture also reveals the extent to which history has become distorted by the prevalence of romantic myth. He indicts Christianity, for example, in the form of a ‘Protestant ethic’ for bringing about a materialistic, ratiocinative culture in which feeling and sensibility are suppressed and nature disparaged (sec Theodore Roszak, The Making of a Counter-Culture (Garden City: Doubleday Anchor Books, 1969), pp. 250–1). He appears to see no contradiction, however, between this view and his approval of writers like Blake who drew their inspiration from the self-same Protestantism (Ibid., pp. 127–201).
- 41.
The tendency to view seventeenth-century Puritanism through the distorting screen of Victorian evangelicalism may be partly to blame for the failure to recognize its profoundly pietistic character, although the very emotionalism and sentimental humanitarianism characteristic of this later movement ultimately derives from the former.
- 42.
John William Ward, ‘Benjamin Franklin: The Making of an American Character’, in Barbour (ed.), Benjamin Franklin, pp. 50–62, see esp. p. 61.
- 43.
This observation was made by Hoxie Neale Fairchild, Religious Trends in English Poetry (New York: Columbia University Press, 1939–49), vol. 3, p. 12.
- 44.
Roszak, The Making of a Counter-Culture, p. 62.
- 45.
Oden, ‘The New Pietism’, pp. 95–7.
The general failure to perceive that the ‘opposite’ of the Protestant ethic is every bit as inner-directed as that which it rejects, stems, at least in part, from the mistake of regarding individualism as the key feature of that ethic. This is an error contained in the arguments of both William H. Whyte (The Organisation Man, New York: Doubleday Anchor Books, 1957) and Riesman (David Riesman, Nathan Glazer and Reuel Denny, The Lonely Crowd, New York: Doubleday Anchor Books, 1966) and naturally leads to the assumption that whatever ethos has replaced it must be ‘social’, or ‘other-directed’ in form.
- 46.
The terms are from Bell, The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism; Martin, A Sociology of Contemporary Cultural Change; John Carroll, Puritan, Paranoid, Remissive: A Sociology of Modern Culture (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul); and Martha Wolfenstein, ‘The Emergence of Fun Morality’, in Eric Larrabee and Rolf Meyersohn, (eds), Mass Leisure (Glencoe, Ill.: Free Press, 1958), pp. 86–95.
- 47.
Thus although one can impute a ‘natural uninhibitedness’ to a person’s conduct (as, for example, the Romantics did with the ‘noble savage’), no one can choose to behave in that fashion. To be ‘uninhibited’ is to reject an inhibited pattern of behaviour; it is therefore deliberate and not ‘unthinking’ conduct.
- 48.
Jerome L. Singer, The Child’s World of Make-Believe: Experimental Studies of Imaginative Play (New York: Academic Press, 1973), pp. 73 and 198.
- 49.
Part of the failure to perceive how fundamentally interdependent are the nature of the personality traits necessary for the construction of ‘puritan’ and ‘romantic’ character types stems from the persuasive force of the romantic myth. This specifies that a romantic is someone who is ‘naturally’ impulsive, uninhibited, passionate and creative, when, in reality romantics are merely those people who deliberately choose to behave in this way.
- 50.
Fairchild, Religious Trends in English Poetry, vol. 2, p. 9.
- 51.
Walter E. Houghton, The Victorian Frame of Mind 1830–1870 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1957), p. 277.
- 52.
Henry Murger, The Latin Quarter (Scènes de la Vie Bohème), trans. Ellen Marriage and John Selwyn (London: Greening, 1908), p. 329.
- 53.
Kenneth Keniston, Youth and Dissent: The Rise of a New Opposition (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1971), p. 160; Jeanne H. Block, Norma Haan and M. Brewster Smith, ‘Activism and Apathy in Contemporary Adolescents’, in James F. Adams (ed.), Understanding Adolescence: Current Developments in Adolescent Psychology (Boston, Mass.: Allyn and Bacon, 1968), pp. 198–231, see esp. p. 215. Interestingly, Keniston’s evidence, as well as that of Block, Haan and Smith, suggests that Bohemian youths are the offspring of parents who were themselves ‘Bohemian’ in their youth, thus somewhat qualifying Parry’s remark about there being ‘less of an hereditary character’ in this group than any other in society.
- 54.
See, in addition to Booker, Musgrove, and Westhues, Nathan Adler, The Antinomian Stream: New Life Styles and the Antinomian Personality (New York: Harper and Row, 1972).
- 55.
Peter L. Berger and Richard J. Neuhaus, Movement and Revolution (New York: Doubleday Anchor Books, 1970), p. 35.
- 56.
It is important to recognize that not all students, let alone all youths, accept ‘romantic’ values. On the contrary, there is evidence that the majority espouse conventional ‘bourgeois’ success values. See, for example, the evidence provided by R. Mills, Young Outsiders: A Study of Alternative Communities (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1973), p. 22.
This is a perspective that stresses the ‘strange unevenness between developmental and humanist themes in American educational and child-rearing philosophies’ on the one hand, and ‘the weakness of these same themes in commerce and politics’ on the other (see Charles Hampden-Turner, Radical Man (London: Duckworth, 1971), p. 419). For an argument which has clear links with the popular idea that permissive child-rearing was the cause of the student rebelliousness which occurred in the 1960s, see Richard Flacks, ‘The Liberated Generation: An Exploration of the Roots of Student Protest’, Journal of Social Issues, 23 (July 1967), no. 3, 52–75; reprinted in Kenneth Westhues, Society’s Shadow: Studies in the Sociology of Countercultures (Toronto: McGraw-Hill Ryerson, 1972).
- 57.
Rousseau is the great seminal influence here (although again Freud is the one who is most commonly cited), his ideas having been taken up and incorporated into educational practice by Pestalozzi and Froebel. The Freudian revolution imparted a new impetus to the introduction of progressive (or largely ‘romantic-inspired’) ideas and practices into child-rearing, and especially infant care, something which Wolfenstein has documented for the period 1914–45 in the United States (see Wolfenstein, ‘The Emergence of Fun Morality’, 1958). To suggest that the widespread adoption of ‘permissive’ child-rearing practices has been a major factor in the creation of a new generation of ‘romantics’ is to overlook the obvious fact that only romantically inclined parents would be likely to adopt such practices in the first place. It is therefore simpler to regard the child’s values as directly inherited from the parents.
- 58.
This is most clearly revealed in those ‘refined’ activities long considered most suitable for upper-middle class woman to pursue; activities such as playing the piano, singing, drawing, arranging flowers and, of course, engaging in philanthropic work.
- 59.
Kenneth Keniston, The Uncommitted: Alienated Youth in American Society (New York: Dell Publishing, 1960), pp. 116–17.
- 60.
See, Taylor, The Angel-Makers, Part Five.
- 61.
Liam Hudson, Frames of Mind: Ability, Perception and Self-Perception in the Arts and Sciences (London: Methuen, 1968).
- 62.
The prevalence among the middle classes of moral crusades and movements of reform, such as anti-slavery, pacifism and, more recently, nuclear disarmament, testify to the strength of this tradition. See Parkin on the middle-class preference for ‘expressive politics’ – Frank Parkin, Middle Class Radicalism: The Social Basis of the British Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1968).
- 63.
Hudson, Frames of Mind, pp. 36 and 45.
- 64.
It would be wrong to give the impression, however, that all artists have espoused a ‘romantic’ aesthetic in the narrow sense. Some have asserted a classical or neo-classical aesthetic against what they regarded as the excessive emotionalist or expressive tendencies of Romanticism. Their perception of the role of the artist in society, however, did not necessarily depart very much from a romantic position.
- 65.
Students in art colleges would seem to be among those most aware of this choice. Tom Nairn and Jim Singh-Sandhu comment, for example, on how they see themselves as confronted with the choice between ‘being a Great Artist’ or a ‘Success’, and that ‘while some students dream of being Rembrandts, more assume they are going to be Mary Quants, David Baileys, or David Hockneys’ (‘Chaos in the Art Colleges’, in Alexander Cockburn and Robin Blackburn (eds), Student Power: Problems, Diagnosis, Action (Harmondsworth, Middx.: Penguin Books, 1969), pp. 103–185, see esp. p. 107).
- 66.
Evidence of the conflict between these two ethics can be found in the intellectual history of modern societies. In Britain conflict between the ‘romantic’ and ‘rational-utilitarian’ perspectives has largely taken the form of what Raymond Williams has called ‘the culture and society debate’. He traces this from its origins in the dispute between Romantics and Benthamites down to the twentieth century, placing on the one side such writers as Blake, Coleridge, Arnold, Carlyle, Ruskin, Henry James, D. H. Lawrence and F. R. Leavis, whilst on the other he identifies Bentham, J. S. Mill, T. H. Huxley, H. G. Wells, Bertrand Russell and C. P. Snow (Raymond Williams, Culture and Society 1780–1950, Harmondsworth, Middx.: Penguin Books, 1961). Indeed, the so-called ‘Two Cultures Debate’, initiated by Snow in the early 1960s, and in which Leavis took such strong exception to Snow’s account of the cultural topography of the modern world, starkly revealed the extent to which this intellectual conflict still characterizes modern society. The most significant feature of that debate was not the pronouncement that the intellectual life of the West was increasingly split into the two groups of scientists and literary intellectuals, but the way in which the ensuing controversy revealed that the mutual hostility stemmed from a fundamental contrast in ethical outlooks – for details see David K. Connelius and Edwin St Vincent (eds), Cultures in Conflict: Perspectives on the Snow-Leavis Controversy (Chicago, Ill.: Scott, Foresman, 1964). It was not merely a question of mutual antipathy and misunderstanding born of intellectual specialization, rather it was a moral conflict, born of contrasting (indeed inverted) definitions of the good, the true and the beautiful; definitions which, at base, involved the differential ranking of ‘utility’ and ‘pleasure’. Life is not an intellectual system, however, and this intellectual conflict should not be mistaken for a cultural ‘contradiction’. On the contrary, intellectuals help to ensure the dynamic evolution of the cultural system of modernity by advancing these rival claims.
- 67.
As Weber emphasized, the source of rationalization within an individual’s status-set is the consistent application of one set of values derived from a single ideal of character. It is this ethically prompted source of ‘integration’ that can come to challenge the situationally differentiated application of values to conduct.
- 68.
This latter claim concerns a disjunction of norms, that is behaviour required ‘in the economic realm’ and that ‘central in the culture’ (see Bell, The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism, p. 15). It is hard to make sense of such claims, but it would seem that ‘economic realm’ excludes the activity of consumption and that ‘culture’ excludes the area of science and technology, as it is only by interpreting Bell’s terms in this way that it is possible to arrive at the strange conclusion that the ‘two realms which had historically been joined to produce a single character structure – that of the Puritan and his calling – have now become unjoined’ (ibid.). Clearly the economy and the culture of modern society can only be considered ‘unjoined’ if one assumes the complete victory of romanticism and the complete absence of any consumption activity; if, on the other hand, one recognizes that the economic realm necessarily comprises consumption and production, whilst the culture contains both puritan-utilitarian and romantic traditions, then ‘contradiction’ is no more a fair description than comparability.
- 69.
As Denis de Rougemont has pointed out, passion is the distinctive feature of the European psyche, and a prime source of that restlessness and strenuousness so characteristic of the West (Passion and Society, trans. Montgomery Belgion, rev. edn (London: Faber and Faber, 1956), p. 316).
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Campbell, C. (2018). Conclusion. In: The Romantic Ethic and the Spirit of Modern Consumerism. Cultural Sociology. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-79066-4_10
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