Economy as a Social Practice and the Critique of Capitalism
RAHEL JAEGGI
A NARROW CONCEPT OF ECONOMY
In a postscript to his programmatic text, “Traditional and Critical Theory,” Max Horkheimer makes the following remark: “Economism, to which the critical theory is often reduced, does not consist in giving too much importance to the economy, but in giving it too narrow a scope.”1 Starting out from this observation and this distinction between a “wide” and “narrow” understanding of economy, we can briefly sketch the history of critical theory and, more specifically, the history of its relation to the economy in the following way: The “old” critical theory gave itself the task of tracking the intrusion of the “commodity form” into all social relations, including individual self-relations. This was done to point out that the influence of the economy or the commodity form extends far beyond the sphere of economics into cultural preferences and worldviews.
Inspired by Lukács’s theory of reification,2 they thus understood the economy, in fact, very widely. According to this thesis, economic preferences in mature capitalism encompass and corrupt all spheres of life. The economic—understood as a specific mode of intercourse with things and people—is therefore made responsible for the characteristic pathologies of capitalist societies: exploitation, oppression, instrumentalization, reification, alienation, and, generally speaking, its irrationality. By tracing and criticizing the diffusion or even invasion of the commodity form into formerly or constitutively “noneconomic” spheres, Horkheimer and others have, without a doubt, contributed to freeing Marxist-inspired social critique from “economism.” However, despite this kind of “widening” of perspective in the early days of critical theory, surprisingly little attention was paid to the sphere of the economy proper—with some exceptions in the very early phase of the Institute for Social Research.3
Because of this, critical theory as a critique of capitalism finds itself in a slightly paradoxical situation. On the one hand, early critical theory, as a whole, is the critique of capitalism. It is thus, in a certain sense, nothing but the critique of capitalism, insofar as everything it deals with—including the most elaborate thoughts on aesthetic phenomena—is addressed in terms of the effects and character of capitalist socialization. On the other hand, however, the question arises as to what extent such a theory is actually a critique of capitalism at all, since, in fact, it deals very little with the analysis and critique of actual economic practices specific to capitalist societies.
There are complex reasons for this, some of them connected to the difficulties of actually implementing the original interdisciplinary program. The result of this development, however, is that no approach really emerged from this period of critical theory4 that would allow it to give a “wider” meaning, as Horkheimer demanded, to the field of economic practices and institutions themselves. In other words, this conception of the economic is “wide” only because it attests to the wide influence of the economic. Yet behind it still stands a narrow view of the economy, which in a certain way misses the above-cited claim from Horkheimer.
The enormous differences between early critical theory and what has been labeled the “second” generation of critical theory should, of course, not be underestimated. But, ironically enough, with respect to the point in question, little has actually changed in the follow-up to early critical theory. Jürgen Habermas’s theory of the colonization of the lifeworld,5 even if it could successfully overcome the totalizing grip of older critical theory and establish its normative foundations, has solidified a view according to which one must pay critical attention, above all, to the invasion of the economic into other areas of life, while the economic sphere itself is removed from the realm of criticism. In the widest sense, the conception of the economy in a differentiation-theoretical approach, which Habermas (among others) follows, grasps the economy as a sphere that is to some extent autonomous with respect to other social spheres. It is understood as a nonnormative sphere driven by its own logic.6 The economy, as a result, was treated as a “black box.” Wherever critical theory now deals with the economic formation of capitalist societies, it thinks in the metaphor of politically or democratically taming the tiger that is capitalism. (The economy, then, is based on the rational pursuit of self-interest; politics represents the public good and uses this to challenge such self-interest.) This makes it not only impossible but also unnecessary to rethink the economy itself, and, as it were, to grasp it widely.
CRITICAL THEORY IN CRITICAL TIMES: OPENING THE BLACK BOX
I don’t want to rehash the old debate about the alternative of reformist transformation versus the radical overcoming of capitalism. Whether a capitalism tamed into a house cat corresponds to its concept is an “academic” question, in the bad sense of the word. And one also should not underestimate how much of this discussion depends on the availability of an economic alternative to capitalism. However, we are today (both as critical theorists and citizens) confronted with what many of us, in one way or another, experience as “excesses” and threats posed by contemporary capitalism. For many, this raises the suspicion that the theory of “taming capitalism” is inadequate—not only because of our current, real powerlessness in the face of economic imperatives but also for already-existing systematic reasons. At issue, then, is what kind of animal is actually being “tamed,” whether it even can be tamed, and, finally, whether the domestication metaphor is itself adequate at all.
In a situation in which Habermas’s “historical connection between democracy and capitalism,”7 a liaison dangereuse all along, has become untenable, a new take on economic issues begins to develop. And it is not only within critical theory that we witness a renewed interest in the critique of capitalism—and a renewed interest in conceptualizing the economy. Whether one takes issue with recent developments within the field of a critical economy8 or with the insights into the “normative character of the market” (as Axel Honneth addresses it),9 the very question of how to conceptualize the economy and how to understand economic practices and institutions in the context of our societies has become persistent. We might have to open up the black box in order to bring into view the internal state and constitution of economic practices and institutions that shape our lives as such. The object of critique might then (again) become the economy itself, instead of only looking at its effects in certain respects.
Such a project immediately raises difficult questions on the basic conceptual level, a level that one might call the “social ontology of the economic.” My attempt, in this essay, is not to give an outright or exhaustive answer to the questions involved. In this first attempt to come to grips with them, I will only try to understand what it might look like to understand the economy as “part of the social order,” as Jens Beckert puts it, and not as its “other.”10 I take it that this understanding is required to open up the conceptual space for thinking the economy in a wide sense.
A WIDE CONCEPT OF ECONOMY: ECONOMY AS SOCIAL PRACTICE
What does it now mean to conceive of the economy in a wide instead of a narrow sense? What does this wide scope entail, if it is not only meant to bring our attention to the effects of economic orientations on our lives?
A first, tentative, answer would be that a narrow conception can be limited in scope with respect to content, insofar as it conceives of the economic as the sphere of material reproduction in a narrow sense; it can also be narrow with respect to the attitude that is taken to be the economic approach—a certain kind of rationality that is focused on utility maximization and the rational pursuit of self-interest.
My thesis is as follows: In order to understand the economy in a wider sense, we should conceive of it as a set of social practices—of economic social practices, to be precise. To put it differently, I will suggest a practice-theoretical approach, a practice-oriented foundation for our thinking about economy and its institutions.11 Economic practices, then, are a subset of social practices in general and share the features of “practices” that I will go into below. As such, they are interrelated with other practices in a variety of ways and (together with them) form part of the sociocultural fabric of society.
Taking up such a perspective should enable a critique of the layout of economic contexts of practice, a critique immanent to their normative content, that is, to the normative conditions of fulfillment underlying these practices. To view them critically is to conceive of them as failed economic practices themselves. It would then no longer be the invasion of the economy into the social but defects in the shape and content of economic practices and institutions themselves that come into view (again).
To make my argument, several steps need to be taken. To begin with, I will briefly explain what I mean by “social practices” and will develop the idea of “forms of life” as “inert bundles of social practices.” Then I’ll describe in which sense the field of economics is a field of social practices and how to think of the connection of economic practices with other practices—as a form of life. Finally, I will draw some conclusions with respect to the “wide” concept of economy for which I am aiming and will tentatively point toward the prospects for a critique of capitalism that could be drawn from my approach.
SOCIAL PRACTICES AND FORMS OF LIFE
What then are social practices (according to the specific understanding that I suggest), what are forms of life, and in what way are economic practices social practices that aggregate with other social practices to constitute forms of life?
PRACTICES
The term “social practice” refers to practices concerning oneself, others, and the material world. To attend a dinner party or to play hide-and-seek are practices. So are taking an exam, shopping in a grocery store, or, more generally, exchanging commodities in a market. Practices are sequences of single actions (or deeds) that can be more or less complex and comprehensive and that have a (more or less) repetitive or habitual character. These practices are “social” not in the sense that they necessarily concern/relate to interpersonal relations or the coordination of social relationships. Rather, they are “social” because they can only exist and be understood against the background of a socially constituted realm of meaning.
Let me now highlight a couple of aspects regarding the very concept of a practice.
First, practices are not just intentional actions. Due to their repetitive and habitual character, they might be based on implicit rather than explicit knowledge, to a certain extent, as long as they are not interrupted or confronted with problems. They are patterns in which we act, patterns that allow us to act even if they are constituted by our actions. It is possible to describe them, therefore, as both results of our actions and as their precondition.
Second, practices are not “brute facts.” They have to be interpreted and understood as something. They are constituted as practices only through interpretations. I should be able to understand your hiding behind the tree as part of a game of hide-and-seek (as opposed to hiding from the police). And, by understanding it as hide-and-seek, I implicitly understand its link to a set of other practices and interpretations, such as, for instance, to other games and to the interpretative concept of “game,” but, even more comprehensively, to the concept of childhood as opposed to adulthood, and so on. To someone who cannot correctly interpret the practice of shopping in a supermarket—and everything that goes with it—the piling of items in a shopping cart may seem like a kind of robbery.
Third, practices are regulated by norms. They are organized around an essential idea of what it means to “fulfill” this practice at all, that is, to act according to the normative expectations involved in a certain practice. (If you don’t at least try to hide, we are certainly not playing hide-and-seek.) But there also are norms that regulate what counts as a good way to fulfill a practice. (If you don’t examine your patients thoroughly, you are not a good doctor.)
Finally, practices have an inherent telos. They are directed at some aim that might be realized through engaging in them, even if we might find a multiplicity of aims coming together in a single practice. (I go shopping because I need to buy food for dinner, but also because I want to talk to the shopkeeper or because I’m bored at home.)
FORMS OF LIFE
Now, practices are typically connected to other practices. This is particularly tangible when practices are connected in a material sense. For example, the practice of standing in line at the cash register and paying clearly depends on a whole host of other practices that first make this one possible. But the interconnectivity of individual practices also occurs on another level: practices are connected with one another via a common horizon of interpretation, a horizon that alone makes these practices intelligible and functional. Our ability to pay at the register to acquire an item by purchase does not depend only on others producing the corresponding goods beforehand and carrying them to the shelf, or even on someone designing a cash register that others bought and placed in their shop. The functioning of this practical context also depends on the “institutional fact” that a certain piece of paper is understood and recognized as money, that the act of purchase and exchange is institutionalized and interpreted in a specific way.12 Without the social constitution of meanings like “this bill is valid in country A as money,” without the understanding and practice of using money as a general equivalent, and without the corresponding act of exchange as a specific variant of reciprocity, the exchange of printed bills for a loaf of bread appears as a very odd transaction.
What comes into view now are sets or ensembles of practices that are connected to and inform one another—and those are what I would like to call “forms of life.” (Forms of life in this sense can be more or less encompassing.) Stated the other way around, forms of life are to be understood as inert sets, ensembles, or bundles of social practices. They are ensembles of social practices because they encompass a diversity of practices that, while dependent on one another, do not exist as an impenetrable and closed totality. They are inert to a certain extent, because they maintain “sedimentary elements,” that is, praxis components that are not always open to change, explicit, or transparent. That is to say, the practices involved can have states of aggregation ranging from more fluid to inert ones. As a result, forms of life (as it holds for single practices) are not always engaged in deliberately or even reflected upon; we might participate in them without planning, intending, or even knowing exactly what we are doing.
We also have to take into account that social practices and forms of life are “materialized” in institutions and, even more “materially,” in architecture, tools, and material structures that (even if a result of our own actions) make us act. Therefore, they set limits to what we can do as well as enable us to do things in a certain way. Practices and forms of life, in short, are given as well as created. And they might develop a certain dynamic of their own. Nevertheless, they are something that human beings do and therefore could do otherwise. This becomes clear as soon as a certain set of practices and self-understandings hits its limit—when things no longer run smoothly. When a set of practices is interrupted, it doesn’t go unnoticed anymore. The moment of crisis forces reflection on and adjustments of practices—a re-creation of practices—that were previously taken for granted.
Now, if all of this is true, then practices individually and in their connection to each other constitute a shape that is not intentionally structured as a whole. They emerge (and maintain themselves), as opposed to being drafted at the drawing table from scratch, so to speak. In its concatenation with other practices, this shape brings about consequences that might not, or even could not, have been intended or imagined by the participants involved in those practices and forms of life. Adam Ferguson’s remark fits well here: “History is the result of human action, but not the execution of any human design.”13
ECONOMIC PRACTICES
To what extent, then, and in which respect, are economic practices social practices, practices that aggregate with other kinds of social practices into a form of life (and share the aforementioned characteristics)? What does it mean and what does it imply to conceive of the “economic realm” as a realm of practices?
Let’s consider the domain of the economic as that which, roughly speaking, is concerned with the satisfaction of the reproductive needs of society, the production and distribution of goods and services. It is easy to see, then, that each element that comes into play here—property, market exchange, and labor, to name only some—can be seen as a configuration of social practices and institutions (or practices that have become an institution). Seen from this perspective, practices addressing economic concerns (or, as it were, fulfilling “economic” aims in the narrower sense) are connected or even entangled with other, noneconomic practices and interpretations. They are part of what I have called an “ensemble” of social practices and their respective interpretations, which mutually inform and establish one other.
I want to illustrate this by brief reference to a few examples (without claiming any completeness).
PROPERTY
Let’s consider an institution like property as part of a complex, always socially interpreted and normatively infused set of practices—that is, let’s consider it as part of a form of life. Understandings of property, along with the corresponding practices of handling it, are parts of and fundamental to very different economic formations; economic regimes are always also property regimes. In this case, different understandings of the legal title to property are accompanied by different practices of acquisition, preservation, and disposal of that which is understood as property within a social order. One can alienate it more or less without limit, or not; one appropriates it in different ways, and certain ways of appropriation count as property creating, or not. Property is therefore not only a “bundle of rights” but also a bundle of social practices recognized and interpreted as something, which are guided by and (the other way around) expressed in legal norms.14 These norms are deeply bound up with underlying interpretations and partially “faded” cosmologies in which the world (among other things) divides itself not only into animate and inanimate but also into possessable and unpossessable things, qualities, or goods.15
Different social orders can thus be characterized, among other ways, by means of the following criteria: which objects in general can be owned (or not), and what kinds of disposal go along with the possession of objects. For example, in every social formation there are things that cannot be considered property: taboos, sacred objects, persons, or personal things. There also are limits to disposing of what one possesses—even in our society, in which property appears largely unrestricted. One may not sell a gun to a minor; some things—certain artworks for instance—may not be destroyed or even exported, although they may belong to someone. For other entities—such as body organs or patent rights—it is debatable to what extent the right to sell is tied to having property in them.16 But there also are classifications in regards to the question, What may be owned by whom? It is a relatively new achievement of some modern political systems that (with some exceptions) whatever can be property at all can be owned by all in the same manner. And, as with the other characteristics mentioned, this achievement is deeply embedded in comprehensive interpretations of what it means to be a person and is entrenched with normative understandings of our being in the world and our relations with one another.
MARKET AND EXCHANGE
When we turn to the act of exchange, we will confront a similar situation: it can be carried out by independent private property owners confronting each other in the marketplace, or not; it can be based on the idea of reciprocity or based on ideas of gift exchange, without an explicit agreement for immediate or future rewards. Practices of exchange are based on norms and rules characteristic of those particular forms of exchange, and thus these forms must be understood altogether within a context of practices and interpretations. To be a “commodity” and to be able to be exchanged is an ascribed status (like a “goal” in a soccer game). For the process of exchanging money for goods to work, the principle of exchange must be established, that is, the principle that qualitatively unlike objects can be exchanged with each other through the medium of money under the assumption of their quantitative equivalence.
None of this can be taken for granted. As the extensive anthropological discussions about gift exchange and potlatch practices show, the very ideas of symmetry and reciprocity (not to mention basic conceptions of alienability and indifference connected with the exchange of commodities) are bound up with a whole bunch of broader social meanings and understandings.17 Market exchange itself is a quite complex and little understood social operation based on other social practices and interpretations—which it also affects. Contrary to mainstream approaches to thinking about the market, much more than “maximizing preferences” is necessary for the institution of the market to function, and some quite basic understandings/social paradigms are at stake before the ideas and practices implied can even be thought of.
LABOR AND PRODUCTION
Another social practice crucial for fulfilling the economic needs of society is labor or work. Labor is not simply a preinterpretively given, “raw” activity but rather is a practice that exists within a social and normative structure of recognition. It is not the activity, as such, that constitutes “work” but the social recognition of the activity as work and the role that the respective activity has in the social process of cooperation. Cooking or playing piano can be seen as work, or not, depending on whether it is practiced by the chef or the homemaker, by the pianist or the layperson. Work confronts us not only as an “eternal natural necessity,” as Karl Marx has it, in service of the human “metabolism with nature,”18 but always and already as a socially and culturally determined factor in the context of social cooperation and the division of labor. In this sense, work is guided by norms and interpretations and is formed within specific social institutions.
First, work activities assume definite sociocultural forms insofar as they are made possible by and shaped from the available skills, techniques, and resources of a given society in a specific historical time. And the other way around: those skills are brought into being by techniques and tools that have been historically achieved. (Producing a clay brick by hand requires and makes possible abilities and modes of behavior different from those necessary for electronically supervising a manufacturing plant; communication via the Internet requires and creates different abilities and behaviors than direct interaction.) It is not just the individual activities and modes of behavior that change here but a whole context of practice in which something means something, where standard procedures and habits take shape, right down to their sedimentation in the physical abilities and sensory skills of the workers or their relation to time. Work is, secondly, a social activity that gains a determinate form through the modes of cooperation in which it is brought about—from the simplest division of labor to the more complex social and internal division of labor in modern societies. Third, there are legal sets of norms that constitute labor relations by means of the relevant institutions (such as the modern civil employment contract or, alternatively, the system of feudal rights for protection and obedience), which provide, for example, the legal framework for free or, alternatively, dependent labor.
While these sets of norms constitute labor in a specifically legal and institutional way, there also are less comprehensive and rigid customary social norms that must be understood as central to giving labor its structure. Labor thus can be brought about only if certain social preconditions are given, and can be identified as such only in the framework of a particular interpretation and in its connection with other practices and interpretations. As a result, if it would be a reductive take on the economic institution of the market to understand market activities as merely “maximizing preferences” of purely rational agents, it also would be a mistake to reduce labor to “instrumental action.” Labor is a far richer activity, composed of a variety of attitudes and symbolic and communicative skills, and marked by habits, customs, and embodiments, and is to be understood only within a broader social context.19
THE PRACTICE CHARACTER OF PROPERTY, EXCHANGE, AND LABOR
These are just some preliminary hints and first bits of evidence; it certainly would be vital to elaborate and specify these examples. The crucial result for my argument, though, is the following: in each of the cases discussed, we find indications of what I have called the practice character of the relevant economic activities.
First, they are socially constituted, established in a distinctive social and historical framework, “under an interpretation” that is always also normatively infused. This holds even if many of the practices, interpretations, and (legal) norms that express such a view of property, exchange, and labor are so self-evident to us—so seamlessly embedded in the interpretative framework of our form of life—that we barely notice their existence or effects at all. The process of exchanging goods for money at the grocery store or paying rent for an apartment is such an ordinary practice that we rarely take note of the peculiarity of it. Looked at the other way around, the fact that we cannot buy children in the same way that we buy an apartment or grocery item is so taken for granted that we don’t perceive it as a prohibition. But then, when we buy food at the grocery store, electronic devices at the shopping mall, or cars at the auto dealer, these transactions all are based on implicit understandings of the meaning of ownership and the status of commodities and exchange that are related to far-reaching and comprehensive normative assumptions and encompassing practices.
That these conceptions and accompanying practices are not self-evident only becomes clear once we realize, for example, how historically recent is the ban on human trafficking (and also how incompletely enforced it is), or that some indigenous peoples consider the land on which they live, including its flora and fauna, as in some sense unsalable, as we consider our children unsalable. Accordingly, there are crises and conflicts that mark the borders between what can and can’t be a commodity or what should and should not be considered labor—and it is in the context of those debates that the normative character and the fact that these entities are socially constituted becomes visible. If this social and constituted character seems likely to disappear or to fade away, and processes of naturalization or reification of practical social contexts are widespread—thus blurring or rendering unrecognizable the social origins of the institutions and understandings in question—then this seems to be an important characteristic of practices. Although they are human-made, instances of second nature, the aspect of nature—of the given—seems to overtake them.
Second, economic practices have proved to rely on and be connected with a whole set of “neighboring” practices, a nexus of practices of a broader (noneconomic) concern. These practices inform one another, rely on one another, and are in some cases mutually dependent on one another. As a result, a distinct and determinate form of life and its respective (normative) understanding is involved, once we single out a certain economic practice.
SOME PRELIMINARY RESULTS
Let’s briefly summarize what results from conceiving of the economy as a social practice, before addressing the criticizability of it so conceived. In my further reflections, a “practice-account” of the economy, which sees it as a part of a broader form of life, has the following consequences.
The first consequence can be drawn in relation to the question of the normativity of economic practices. The thesis that the market and even economic institutions, as such, are a “norm-free sphere” has in recent times been intensely countered with the argument that economic actors are not free from moral considerations, and even more so, are not free from ethical considerations, habits, and dispositions, that is, from their “ethical life” (Sittlichkeit).20 My account of the economy as a social practice agrees with these diagnoses but goes even further. Normativity or the ethical background/embeddedness of the economy don’t come into the picture from the outside, let’s say, because the economic agents are in fact not free from moral considerations or ethical orientations. If practices are (internally) constituted by norms, then economic practices also have inherent normative conditions of success, or ethical-functional norms that are indispensable for their proper functioning.
Second, and to very briefly come back to my first comments about Habermas and the differentiation between “system” and “lifeworld,” where the capitalist economy belongs to the system, I believe that, with a practice-theoretic approach, the alternative between an action- and a system-theoretic approach to the economy can be overcome in a meaningful way. One of the advantages of a systemic view of the economy seems to be that it can grasp “mechanisms of social integration” that “do not necessarily coordinate actions via the intentions of participants, but objectively, ‘behind the backs’ of participants.” The “invisible hand” of the market, then, is the paradigm case of this type of regulation.21
But to conceive of the economy as and in a context of social practices doesn’t mean that it arises from actions and intentions, or from the results of such. Practices are, as I have said, only partially intentional, only partially explicit, and only partially due to the will and actions of people. They are not planned for in advance but emerge. And when practices “congeal” into institutions (which I think of as states of aggregate practices), they can achieve their own dynamic and take on a life of their own, a phenomenon that is difficult for the parties involved to see. It might then be fruitful to readdress the “systemic” phenomena in a practice and institutional theoretical framework, thereby avoiding the unwanted side effects of an understanding of economics as a nonnormative sphere.
Third, if it follows from the described character of economic activities that, as social practices, they are interrelated with other social practices and aggregate or bundle with them into a form of life, this context must be understood as an open one. The question of which practices are essential for what and which practices are dependent on one another cannot be clearly or conclusively answered a priori. We might think of a variety of different relations among these practices—functional dependencies of some sort, but also cases in which the relation is looser, mutual, or reciprocal. Even if, in some cases, one practice is more authoritative or “steers” more than another, it shouldn’t be taken for granted a priori that, for instance, cultural practices would be premised upon economic practices or vice versa. We might, therefore, get rid of a simplistic “base/superstructure” model without losing sight of the mutual dependencies among different practices and norms.
Fourth, in each of the cases I’ve outlined (even if only sketched), I would argue that the extraeconomic aspects are not just preconditions for the economic activities and institutions in the narrower or “proper” sense—that is, for maximizing utilities in the market, for bringing about results in an instrumental fashion through labor, for being able to divide the world along property relations.22 These far-reaching preconditions cannot easily be taken for granted. In addition, to conceive of economic attitudes as practices that are related to other (economic and noneconomic) practices, and thus as an ensemble within an ensemble, implies that the very distinction between economics and its preconditions, and the inside/outside dichotomy itself, turns out to be less informative and less helpful than we have thought. According to the practice-oriented description of the economic, then, it makes little sense to speak of rescuing a particular class of practices from the context of a form of life.
Among the basic orientations that we might have to reexamine, then, is the widespread concentration of critical efforts—within critical theory as well as within other discourses critical of capitalism—to protect certain spheres (cultural, social, personal) from “contamination” by the supposedly separate economic sphere. Economic practices, according to this view, are not merely reliant on or “embedded” in a surrounding or enabling ethical form of life; they are, rather, part of the form of life itself and its respective dynamic.
We are now in a position to readdress Horkheimer’s remark. With a concept of the economic as a nexus of practices, we should be able to overcome the narrow concept of the economy criticized by him in two interrelated regards. First, the economy itself is understood in a wider sense, because it is no longer reduced to the (as it is, narrow) attitudes of purpose-oriented, utility-maximizing behavior that seeks to fulfill narrowly defined interests. Second, and further, the relation between economic and other social practices is understood in a wider sense than an economistic determinism allows for.
CAPITALISM AS A FORM OF LIFE?
But then, does this situatedness of economic practices still hold for capitalist societies? Isn’t it a defining feature of a capitalist society that “the economy” (and economic rationality) has disentangled itself from the web of social practices in which it was involved—or, as Karl Polanyi has it, isn’t the process of “disembedding” the economy from its social context the peculiar (and threatening) characteristic of capitalist societies?23 Capitalism would then not be a “form of life”; it would, so to speak, not actually “live” but would threaten all forms of life with its dominance (and the domination of abstract and “dead” labor).
As a matter of fact, economic practices and institutions in capitalism take on a certain determinate and determining shape, such as private property in the means of production, the existence of a “free” labor market, and an accumulation of capital oriented toward “gain” instead of “need”—that is, toward the cultivation of capital instead of the consumption of it or subsistence on it. Economic relations seem not only to overtake other aspects of life but also to develop dynamics of their own that “exceed the subjective ends and the control of its participants and that, moreover, cannot be affirmed by them collectively.” Here the social is transformed into “social forces.”24
This is what one might want to refer to as the “systemic” character of a capitalist economy. But then, my (yet to be developed) hypothesis is that the activities involved are still practices, based on norms, aggregated into institutions, and involved in the larger practical context of a form of life—even if they might turn out to be “failed” practices in a certain respect.25 The capitalist organization of the economy only presents itself as “disembedding” or “denormativizing,” insofar as its dynamic consists in dissolving traditional ethical limits as they expressed themselves institutionally—for example, in premodern guild-like regulations and limitations on economic activity. But, I argue, it also constitutes its own, new normativity. What is being designated here is only the absence of a specific ethos and the replacement of a norm and its institutional framework with another one—one that presents itself as ethically “neutral” and based on rational preferences and utility maximization.
Here, one should not be fooled by capitalism’s tendency to make the normative and the dense ethical character of economic institutions invisible, something that underlies neoclassical economics, for instance. Even the idea of universal exchangeability, as I have indicated, presupposes as well as constitutes a form of life. Even the practice that conceals its “practice character” is still a practice. And even dissolving the bonds to other practices is still characterized by entanglements, even if those are based upon “false abstraction” (from the entanglement with other practices) and are working behind our backs, without being (as one might have it with Hegel) self-consciously embraced. To put it in a way congenial to Marx’s characterization of civil society: the “context of contextlessness” (Zusammenhang der Zusammenhanglosigkeit) is still a context. And the ethos of abolishing substantial ethical relations and restrictions, like the ones that were broken in the course of “modern” or capitalist economic institutions (which are both a presupposition and effect of such relations), is still itself an ethos—the ethos of capitalism. But then the capitalist form of life itself and its economic practices come into view—and thereby the prospect of a debate about and a critique of capitalism as a form of life.
Here, I would like to get one possible misunderstanding out of the way. When I speak of a “critique of capitalism as a form of life,” given what has been said, this should not be equated with the so-called “ethical critique” of capitalism, such as the thematization of the ethically detrimental effects of what Max Weber calls the “economic mentality” of capitalism or the “culture of capitalism” on our ways of life.26 At stake here is not critically judging capitalism against a standard of critique based on a theory of the good life. Rather, if economic practices are conceptualized as practices within a wider context of practices, as part of the sociocultural fabric of society, and if even the seemingly inaccessible and self-moving dynamics of economic processes should—in principle—be able to be thought of as results, in any case, of a complex chain of practices, what comes into view, rather, is the prospect of renewing a critique of capitalism as an irrational social order in a certain sense.
What, then, is wrong with capitalism (as a form of life)? It is both easy and, arguably, complicated to spell out what exactly is intrinsically wrong with capitalism.27
In my discussion, at least one meta-criterion for criticism evolves that might set the stage for further inquiry, building on the topic of “failed” practices and the supposed ethical neutrality of a capitalist economics. There seems to be something wrong with a social order that relies on an ethics that it, at the same time, conceals and universalizes as “neutral.” And there seems to be something wrong with practices that we don’t see as practices and that are constituted in such a way that the fact of their artificiality (of their “being made”) is concealed, as is the case with the economic forces that drive our lives in capitalism.
NOTES
Thanks to Bastian Ronge, Lea Prix, and Benjamin Streim for comments on an earlier draft of this chapter. Most of all, thanks to Anna Katsman for her invaluable comments and revisions, without which I would not have been able to finish this chapter for publication.
1. Max Horkheimer, Critical Theory: Selected Essays (New York: Continuum, 1972), 249. Italics added.
2. Georg Lukàcs, “Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat,” in History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics, trans. Rodney Livingstone (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1971), 83–222.
3. Bastian Ronge, “How to Think Critically About the Economy? Friedrich Pollock and Jürgen Habermas,” conference presentation at Theorizing Crisis: The Economic Thought of the Frankfurt School, Minneapolis, March 28, 2014.
4. I am talking here about critical theory in the narrower or specific sense of the so-called Frankfurt School.
5. Jürgen Habermas, Theory of Communicative Action, vol. 2, trans. Thomas McCarthy (Cambridge: Polity, 1987).
6. Habermas, Theory of Communicative Action. For a thoughtful discussion of this, see Timo Jütten, “Habermas and Markets,” Constellations 20, no. 4 (2013): 587–603.
7. Jürgen Habermas, “Demokratie oder Kapitalismus? Vom Elend der nationalstaatlichen Fragmentierung in einer kapitalistisch integrierten Weltgesellschaft,” review of Die gekaufte Zeit, by Wolfgang Streeck, Blätter für deutsche und internationale Politik 5 (May 2013): 59–70. Translated by Ciaran Cronin as “Democracy or Capitalism,” http://www.india-seminar.com/2013/649/649_jurgen_habermas.htm.
8. See, for example, J. K. Gibson-Graham, The End of Capitalism (As We Knew It): A Feminist Critique of Political Economy (Cambridge: Blackwell, 1996).
9. Axel Honneth, Freedom’s Right: The Social Foundations of Democratic Life (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014).
10. See Jens Beckert, “Die sittliche Einbettung der Wirtschaft: Von der Effizienz und Differenzierungstheorie zu einer Theorie wirtschaftlicher Felder,” Berliner Journal für Soziologie 22, no. 2 (2012): 247–66.
11. For a very informative overview of practice theory in its various forms, see Andreas Reckwitz, “Toward a Theory of Social Practices: A Development in Culturalist Theorizing,” European Journal of Social Theory 5, no. 2 (2001): 243–63. For an extended version of my own understanding, see Rahel Jaeggi, Kritik von Lebensformen (Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2014). An English translation is forthcoming from Harvard University Press.
12. See John Searle’s famous account of “social” or “institutional” facts of this kind in Searle, The Construction of Social Reality (New York: Free Press, 1995).
13. Adam Ferguson, An Essay on the History of Civil Society (1767), ed. Fania Oz-Salzberger (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995).
14. The understanding of property as a “bundle of rights” is a widely used metaphor that has informed much of the theorizing about property. For an early usage of the metaphor, see John R. Commons, The Distribution of Wealth (New York: A. M. Kelley, 1963). For a comprehensive discussion of property, see Jeremy Waldron, The Right to Private Property (Oxford: Clarendon, 1988).
15. I talk about “faded cosmologies” in analogy to what has been termed “faded metaphors,” that is, words whose metaphorical origins have been forgotten.
16. For an extensive discussion of the ethical limits of property and market relations, see, among others, Elisabeth Anderson, Value in Ethics and Economics (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993); Margaret Jane Radin, Contested Commodities (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996); Debra Satz, Why Some Things Should Not Be for Sale: The Limits of Markets (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010); and Michael Sandel, What Money Can’t Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012).
17. See, most famously, Marcel Mauss, Essai sur le don: Forme et raison de l’échange dans les sociétés archaïques (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 2007). See also Bronisław Malinowski, The Argonauts of the Western Pacific: An Account of Native Enterprise and Adventure in the Archipelagoes of Melanesian New Guinea (New York: Routledge, 2014).
18. Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 1, trans. Ben Fowkes (New York: Vintage, 1976), 283.
19. Jürgen Habermas, “Labour and Interaction: Remarks on Hegel’s Jena Philosophy of Mind,” in Theory and Practice, trans. John Viertel (Boston: Beacon, 2011), 142–69.
20. See, among others, Jens Beckert, Beyond the Market: The Social Foundations of Economic Efficiency (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002). For a philosophical approach, see Honneth, Freedom’s Right, chapter 6.
21. Jürgen Habermas, Between Facts and Norms: Contributions to a Discourse Theory of Law and Democracy, trans. William Rehg (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998), 39–40. Italics added.
22. Thanks to Anna Katsman for pressing me on this issue.
23. Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of our Time (Boston: Beacon, 1957).
24. Frederick Neuhouser, “Marx: Alienated Social Forces” (unpublished manuscript). Neuhouser discusses an interpretation of capital as an “alienated social force” that is along the lines of the one sketched here.
25. Thanks, again, to Anna Katsman, who insisted on this point.
26. See, for example, Max Weber, Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretive Sociology, 2 vols., ed. Guenther Roth and Claus Wittich (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987).
27. See Philip Van Parijs, “What Is Intrinsically Wrong with Capitalism” Philosophica 34, no. 2 (1984): 85–102; and Rahel Jaeggi, “Alienation, Exploitation, Dysfunction: Three Paths of the Critique of Capitalism,” Southern Journal of Philosophy (forthcoming).