The Civilization Of Capitalism

2. The Sociology Of The Intellectual

Nevertheless, neither the opportunity of attack nor real or fancied grievances are in themselves sufficient to produce, however strongly they may favor, the emergence of active hostility against a social order.

For such an atmosphere to develop it is necessary that there be groups to whose interest it is to work up and organize resentment, to nurse it, to voice it and to lead it. As will be shown in Part IV, the mass of people never develops definite opinions on its own initiative. Still less is it able to articulate them and to turn them into consistent attitudes and actions. All it can do is to follow or refuse to follow such group leadership as may offer itself. Until we have discovered social groups that will qualify for that role our theory of the atmosphere of hostility to capitalism is incomplete.

Broadly speaking, conditions favorable to general hostility to a social system or specific attack upon it will in any case tend to call forth groups that will exploit them. But in the case of capitalist society there is a further fact to be noted: unlike any other type of society, capitalism inevitably and by virtue of the very logic of its civilization creates, educates and subsidizes a vested interest in social unrest.2

Explanation of this phenomenon, which is as curious as it is important, follows from our argument in Chapter XI, but may be made more telling by an excursion into the Sociology of the Intellectual. This type is not easy to define. The difficulty is in fact symptomatic of the character of the species.

Intellectuals are not a social class in the sense in which peasants or industrial laborers constitute social classes; they hail from all the corners of the social world, and a great part of their activities consist in fighting each other and in forming the spearheads of class interests not their own. Yet they develop group attitudes and group interests sufficiently strong to make large numbers of them behave in the way that is usually associated with the con cept of social classes. Again, they cannot be simply defined as the sum total of all the people who have had a higher education; that would obliterate the most important features of the type.

Yet anyone who had—and, save exceptional cases, nobody who had not—is a potential intellectual; and the fact that their minds are all similarly furnished facilitates understanding between them and constitutes a bond. Nor would it serve our purpose to make the concept coextensive with the membership of the liberal professions; physicians or lawyers for instance are not intellectuals in the relevant sense unless they talk or write about subjects outside of their professional competence which no doubt they often do— particularly the lawyers.

Yet there is a close connection between the intellectuals and the professions. For some professions—especially if we count in journalism—actually do belong almost wholly to the domain of the intellectual type; the members of all professions have the opportunity of becoming intellectuals; and many intellectuals take to some profession for a living. Finally, a definition by means of the contrast to manual labor would be much too wide. 3 Yet the Duke of Wellington’s “scribbling set” seems to be too narrow. 4 So is the meaning of hommes de lettres.

But we might do worse than take our lead from the Iron Duke. Intellectuals are in fact people who wield the power of the spoken and the written word, and one of the touches that distinguish them from other people who do the same is the absence of direct responsibility for practical affairs. This touch in general accounts for another—the absence of that first-hand knowledge of them which only actual experience can give. The critical attitude, arising no less from the intellectual’s situation as an onlooker—in most cases also as an outsider—than from the fact that his main chance of asserting himself lies in his actual or potential nuisance value, should add a third touch. The profession of the unprofessional? Professional dilettantism?

The people who talk about everything because they understand nothing? Bernard Shaw’s journalist in The Doctor’s Dilemma? No, no. I have not said that and I do not mean that. That sort of thing would be still more untrue than it would be offensive. Let us give up trying to define by words and instead define “epideiktically”: in the Greek museum we can see the object, nicely labeled. The sophists, philosophers and rhetors—however strongly they objected to being thrown together, they were all of the same genus—of the fifth and fourth centuries B.C. illustrate ideally what I mean. That practically all of them were teachers does not destroy the value of the illustration.

2. When analyzing the rationalist nature of capitalist civilization (Chapter XI) I pointed out that the development of rational thought of course precedes the rise of the capitalist order by thousands of years; all that capitalism did was to give a new impulse and a particular bend to the process. Similarly— leaving aside the Graeco-Roman world—we find intellectuals in thoroughly pre-capitalist conditions, for instance in the Kingdom of the Franks and in the countries into which it dissolved.

But they were few in number; they were clergy-men, mostly monks; and their written performance was accessible to only an infinitesimal part of the population. No doubt strong individuals were occasionally able to develop unorthodox views and even to convey them to popular audiences. This however in general implied antagonizing a very strictly organized environment—from which at the same time it was difficult to get away—and risking the lot of the heretic. Even so it was hardly possible without the support or connivance of some great lord or chieftain, as the tactics of missionaries suffice to show. On the whole, therefore, intellectuals were well in hand, and kicking over the traces was no joke, even in times of exceptional disorganization and license, such as during the Black Death (in and after 1348).

But if the monastery gave birth to the intellectual of the medieval world, it was capitalism that let him loose and presented him with the printing press. The slow; evolution of the lay intellectual was merely an aspect of this process; the coincidence of the emergence of humanism with the emergence of capitalism is very striking. The humanists were primarily philologists but—excellently illustrating a point made above—they quickly expanded into the fields of manners, politics, religion and philosophy.

This was not alone due to the contents of the classic works which they interpreted along with their grammar—from the criticism of a text to the criticism of a society, the way is shorter than it seems. Nevertheless, the typical intellectual did not relish the idea of the stake which still awaited the heretic. As a rule, honors and comfort suited him a great deal better. And these were after all to be had only from princes, temporal or spiritual, though the humanists were the first intellectuals to have a public in the modern sense. The critical attitude grew stronger every day. But social criticism—beyond what was implied in certain attacks on the Catholic Church and in particular its head—did not flourish under such conditions.

Honors and emoluments can however be had in more than one way. Flattery and subservience are often less remunerative than are their opposites. This discovery was not made by the Aretino 5 but no mortal ever surpassed him in exploiting it. Charles V was a devoted husband but, during his campaigns which kept him from home for many months at a time, he lived the life of a gentleman of his time and class. Very well, the public—and what particularly mattered to Charles, his empress—need never know, provided arguments of the right kind and weight were duly handed to the great critic of politics and morals. Charles paid up. But the point is that this was not simple blackmail which in general benefits one party only and inflicts uncompensated loss on the other. Charles knew why he paid though doubtless it would have been possible to secure silence by cheaper if more drastic methods. He did not display resentment. On the contrary he even went out of his way to honor the man. Obviously he wanted more than silence and, as a matter of fact, he received full value for his gifts.

product but partly an independent phenomenon due to the access of wealth and weight which came to the industrial bourgeoisie and to the incident increase in the political importance of an anonymous public opinion—all these boons, as well as increasing freedom from restraint, are by-products of the capitalist engine.

In the first three-quarters of the eighteenth century the individual patron was slow to lose the paramount importance in the intellectual’s career that he had held at the beginning. But in the peak successes at least, we clearly discern the growing importance of the new element— the support of the collective patron, the bourgeois public. In this as in every other respect, Voltaire affords an invaluable instance. His very superficiality that made it possible for him to cover everything from religion to Newtonian optics, allied to indomitable vitality and an insatiable curiosity, a perfect absence of inhibitions, an unerring instinct for and a wholesale acceptance of the humors of his time, enabled that uncritical critic and mediocre poet and historian to fascinate—and to sell. He also speculated, cheated, accepted gifts and appointments, but there was always the independence founded on the solid base of his success with the public. Rousseau’s case and type, though entirely different, would be still more instructive to discuss.

In the last decades of the eighteenth century a striking episode displayed the nature of the power of a free-lance intellectual who has nothing to work with but the socio-psychological mechanism called Public Opinion. This happened in England, the country that was then farthest advanced on the road of capitalist evolution. John Wilkes’ attacks on the political system of England, it is true, were launched under uniquely favorable circumstances; moreover, it cannot be said that he actually upset the Earl of Bute’s government which never had any chance and was bound to fall for a dozen other reasons; but Wilkes’ North Briton was nevertheless the last straw that broke…Lord Bute’s political back. No. 45 of the North Briton was the first discharge in a campaign that secured the abolition of general warrants and made a great stride toward the freedom of the press and of elections. This does not amount to making history or to creating the conditions for a change in social institutions, but it does amount to playing, say, the role of a midwife’s assistant. 7

The inability of Wilkes’ enemies to thwart him is the most significant fact about it all. They evidently had all the power of organized government at their command. Yet something drove them back. In France, the years preceding the revolution and the revolution itself brought the rabble-raising tabloid (Marat, Desmoulins), which however did not, like ours, completely jettison style and grammar. But we must hurry on. The Terror and, more systematically, the First Empire put an end to this. Then followed a period, interrupted by the rule of the roi bourgeois, of more or less resolute repression that lasted until the Second Empire felt compelled to loosen the reins—about the middle sixties.

In central and southern Europe this period also lasted about as long, and in England analogous conditions prevailed from the beginning of the revolutionary wars to Canning’s accession to power.

4. How impossible it is to stem the tide within the framework of capitalist society is shown by the failure of the attempts—some of them prolonged and determined—made during that period by practically all European governments to bring the intellectuals to heel Their histories were nothing but so many different versions of Wilkes exploits.

In capitalist society—or in a society that contains a capitalist element of decisive importance—any attack on the intellectuals must run up against the private fortresses of bourgeois business which, or some of which, will shelter the quarry. Moreover such an attack must proceed according to bourgeois principles of legislative and administrative practice which no doubt may be stretched and bent but will checkmate prosecution beyond a certain point. Lawless violence the bourgeois stratum may accept or even applaud when thoroughly roused or frightened, but only temporarily. In a purely bourgeois regime like that of Louis Philippe, troops may fire on strikers, but the police cannot round up intellectuals or must release them forthwith; otherwise the bourgeois stratum, however strongly disapproving some of their. doings, will rally behind them because the freedom it disapproves cannot be crushed without also crushing the freedom it approves.

Observe that I am not crediting the bourgeoisie with an unrealistic dose of generosity or idealism. Nor am I unduly stressing what people think and feel and want—on the importance of which I almost, though not quite, agree with Marx. In defending the intellectuals as a group—not of course every individual—the bourgeoisie defends itself and its scheme of life. Only a government of non-bourgeois nature and non-bourgeois creed—under modern circumstances only a socialist or fascist one—is strong enough to discipline them. In order to do that it would have to change typically bourgeois institutions and drastically reduce the individual freedom of all strata of the nation. And such a government is not likely—it would not even be able—to stop short of private enterprise.

From this follows both the unwillingness and the inability of the capitalist order to control its intellectual sector effectively. The unwillingness in question is unwillingness to use methods consistently that are uncongenial to the mentality shaped by the capitalist process; the inability is the inability to do so within the frame of institutions shaped by the capitalist process and without submitting to non-bourgeois rule. Thus, on the one hand, freedom of public discussion involving freedom to nibble at the foundations of capitalist society is inevitable in the long run. On the other hand, the intellectual group cannot help nibbling, because it lives on criticism and its whole position depends on criticism that stings; and criticism of persons and of current events will, in a situation in which nothing is sacrosanct, fatally issue in criticism of classes and institutions.

5. A few strokes will complete the modern picture. There are the increasing means. There is the increase in the standard of life and in the leisure of the masses that changed and is still changing the composition of the collective patron for the tastes of whom the intellectuals have to provide. There was and is the further cheapening of the book and newspaper and the large-scale newspaper concern. 8 There is now the radio. And there was and is the tendency toward complete removal of restraints, steadily breaking down those short-run attempts at resistance by which bourgeois society proves itself so incompetent and occasionally so childish a disciplinarian.