NOT GOD BUT AN OTHER
Capitalist modernity creates the possibility of conceiving human freedom. Unlike other socioeconomic systems, capitalism doesn’t demand widespread obedience of a transcendent entity in order to function. Though hierarchical relations remain, they are not rooted in a divine justification that would render free actions impossible. This marks a dramatic break from past systems. At the same time, modern science also entails a rejection of divine intervention as a factor in its calculations about the universe. Scientists can believe in God (though most do not), but they cannot explain human or natural actions with recourse to God and continue to have a serious standing among other scientists. This absence of God in capitalist modernity creates the space in which subjects can, for the first time in human history, believe in freedom without contradiction. Freedom is only thinkable without the presence of a divine force active in the world.
If God’s absence from the world becomes evident after the birth of capitalist modernity, capitalism simultaneously erects a new form of divinity, one even more tyrannical than the old form. The new god is the market, and unlike the omnipotent and omniscient God of the monotheistic traditions, the market doesn’t make its tyranny clear. It never proclaims itself to be a jealous god in the way that Yahweh does. It doesn’t appear to restrain freedom, as God does, but rather to foster it. The free market replaces God and acts as the Other, as a social authority, in capitalist modernity. Like God, it tells subjects what to desire and directs their actions, but it does so in a surreptitious fashion. The methods of God and those of the market are thus at odds, even though their function as the guarantee of social existence is the same. The traditional God and the market are bastions against the trauma of freedom. Capitalist modernity opens up the possibility of freedom only to close it off, but this opening is nonetheless the decisive event of the modern epoch.
God doesn’t disappear in modernity—one is still permitted to believe—but this epoch does away with God as a physical presence within the world. As long as God exists as a physical being governing the movements of the world, there is no possibility for human freedom because all human activity occurs in reference to an actually existing—rather than a spiritual—Other. The geocentric conception of the world enables humanity not just to see itself as the center of creation but to find assurance in the certain existence of a substantial Other (that is, in a substantial figure of authority). With this background, we can make sense of a historical mystery.
From a contemporary perspective, it is difficult to understand why the Copernican heliocentric system had such a radical effect on Catholic authorities. For the faithful, why would it matter if the Earth or the Sun were the center of the solar system? If one consulted believers today, probably not a single one would claim that the collapse of geocentrism troubles their sleep. Copernicus himself never had to worry about the wrath of the Church since he had the good fortune to die on the day that De revolutionibus orbium coelestium appeared in 1543. Others were not so lucky. A belief in heliocentrism played a major role in the Inquisition’s execution of Giordano Bruno in 1600 and led to Galileo Galilei denying his own publicly stated support for the Copernican thesis in order to avoid a similar fate. Bruno’s courage and Galileo’s capitulation were both the result of the intense pressure that the Church felt to maintain the geocentric system. The assault on geocentrism had the effect of an assault on the nature of God.
Though there are no biblical passages stating unequivocally that the Earth is the center of the universe, the heliocentric hypothesis nonetheless bothered Church authorities greatly. It did so because it uprooted God from the specific location that this being could have within the Ptolemaic or Aristotelian system. God could continue to exist and be ubiquitous or even simply spiritual, but God could never again have a definitive place. With the theoretical development of the heliocentric system, God ceases to be a substance.1 This is the perhaps modernity’s greatest disruption of tradition. The displacement of God can lead (and has led) to all sorts of fideism, but it also tears away the transcendent ground of social authority. It is just a small step from the displacement or spiritualization of God to the freedom that makes possible the execution of the monarch.2
As a being with a definite place in the structure of the world, God could function as the ultimate cause or prime mover of every action within the world. The spiritualization of God does not immediately eliminate the possibility of God’s causal relation to the world, but it renders this relation problematic. Just as Descartes requires the pineal gland to link causes in the mind with physical effects in the body, a sort of cosmic pineal gland would be necessary to connect the spiritual nature of God with the actions taking place in the physical universe. As with Descartes’s postulation, no amount of research is likely to turn up the existence of such a cosmic gland. Thus, a barrier between God qua cause and the physical universe qua effect emerges for the first time with heliocentric modernity. It becomes possible, even necessary, to separate religious belief from scientific research due to the intractability of the barrier. But this barrier is also the source of the freedom that modernity bequeaths to the subject. A spiritualized God, a God without a physical place, ceases to hold all the cards in advance for those playing in the physical universe.
Freedom is never simply the freedom to do what one wants.3 As thinkers from Plato onward have insisted, what one wants is always socially mediated and thus necessary before it is free. We don’t generate our own wants but inherit them from our milieu and its constraints. We are never more determined than when we are doing what we want, which is why freedom must not simply be equivalent to the ability to act in any way we please.
Freedom involves an absence of reliance on the Other as a substantial figure of authority. For the free subject, the Other does not have a substantial existence. There is no guarantee undergirding and taking responsibility for the decisions the subject makes. This means that the most significant barrier to freedom is not a member of the police forcing me to eat celery instead of a Twinkie, but a television advertisement telling me that George Clooney (or any representative of social authority) likes Twinkies. Freedom is freedom from the figure of the Other qua social authority providing an ontological support for my acts.
Though Descartes glimpses this conception of freedom when he adopts subjectivity rather than divinity as his philosophical starting point, his fully developed philosophy relies on an Other (in the form of God) as the guarantee of truth. The turn toward God in the Third Meditation represents Descartes’s tacit admission that the subject cannot stand on its own.4 Descartes, the first philosopher of capitalist modernity, retreats from freedom because he recognizes the horror that it manifests. Freedom implies the absence of any substantial Other, the lack of guarantees to guide the subject’s choices. The free subject exists alone with its decisions, and whatever morality it adopts stems from it alone, not from God or from any authorized figure. Many after Descartes have effected similar retreats from freedom and into the arms of various forms of the Other—Nation for the fascist, History for the communist, Jesus for the Christian fundamentalist, and so on.
The one thinker who refused to retreat into the arms of the Other on the question of freedom was Immanuel Kant. Kant’s moral philosophy represents a landmark in the history of philosophy because the moral subject must derive its guidelines from itself rather than from any external source. Even though the moral law is universal, the subject must define that universality itself, which is the crucial problem. Alenka Zupančič recognizes this in her analysis of the great leap forward that Kant accomplishes with his conception of morality. She argues, “That which can in no way be reduced without abolishing ethics as such is not the multicoloured variability of every situation, but the gesture by which every subject, by means of his action, posits the universal, performs a certain operation of universalization.”5 Even reason, which alerts the subject to the existence of the moral law, does not constitute the law or direct its implementation. Instead, the subject must decide for itself.
Kant identifies the bare existence of the moral law as the source and index of the subject’s freedom. No unfree entity, as Kant sees it, could have the capacity to give itself laws and disrupt its instinctual being. Though Kant ultimately believes that the moral law enables us to assume the existence of God, God provides no moral guidance in Kant’s philosophy. Morality leads to God rather than God leading to morality. This means that we are completely free, without any Other to guide our actions.
If God exists for Kant, God does not provide the key to moral action and thereby obviate our radical freedom. This is why Kant insists that the moral law—the subject’s own free decision—must serve as the final arbiter of good and evil. God does not have a say. In the Critique of Practical Reason, Kant claims, “the concept of good and evil must not be determined before the moral law (for which, as it would seem, this concept would have to be made the basis) but only (as was done here) after it and by means of it.”6 The subject is free because it has no external authority on which it might rely. Kant’s greatness as a philosopher lies primarily in his grasp of the implications for the subject’s freedom implicit in modernity.7
Though Georg Lukács tries to reduce Kant to being the philosopher of the antinomies of bourgeois thought, he is able to do so only by confining himself to the theoretical Kant of the Critique of Pure Reason. In the second Critique, Kant’s distance from capitalism becomes apparent through his insistence on a form of freedom that capitalism cannot stomach. The Critique of Practical Reason shows that freedom is not simply subject to the undecidability that the attempt to theorize it in the first Critique encounters. Instead, we know that we are free and that this freedom rests on no external guarantees (like God or the good). We know this through the experience of constraint that the moral law effectuates. But the moral law is not another substance that might replace God or even a new God. The moral law is not the Other but its absence. It is the site of authentic freedom because it is nothing but the subject’s own self-division. Thus, its existence is the index of the radical freedom of modernity’s break from God.8
If modernity inaugurates the possibility of freedom and Kant develops it philosophically, capitalism provides the perfect avenue for retreat from the trauma inherent within freedom. This is ironic given that every apologist for capitalism begins by foregrounding the role that freedom plays within the capitalist system. Even if capitalism produces injustice, even if capitalism leads to immorality, it nonetheless enables subjects to act freely. From Adam Smith to Ayn Rand to Donald Trump, freedom is the capitalist watchword always on the lips of its defenders. But capitalism’s conception of freedom has little to recommend it. It has more in common with the freedom of the communists who believe that they are acting on behalf of the objective forces of history than with the genuine freedom that Kant extols. Capitalist freedom is utterly false, which is why we cling to it so vehemently.
THE POVERTY OF FREEDOM
Capitalism’s impoverished conception of freedom manifests itself in the thought of almost every capitalist economist. These economists do not betray authentic capitalist freedom through their conception of it but make apparent the deleterious effect that capitalism has on actual freedom, that is, on freedom from the Other and its guarantees guiding our existence. Capitalism furnishes the freedom to accumulate but determines how that accumulation will take place. Despite the complete identification of capitalism with freedom, subjects in this system are not even free to choose their careers, their possessions, or what they will build. As almost every capitalist economist shows, the free market doesn’t allow for freedom.
Nowhere is this contradiction more apparent than in the work of Ludwig von Mises. Unlike most other exponents of the free market (like, for instance, Milton Friedman), von Mises doesn’t grant the existence of any form of freedom other than that produced by the market. He says, “There is no kind of freedom and liberty other than the kind which the market economy brings about.”9 Political freedom is entirely secondary and even inconsequential for von Mises. Economic freedom—the freedom to buy and sell one’s own commodities without restriction—is what renders social life endurable. When one can buy and sell freely, one can have the kind of satisfaction that would be impossible under any other economic system. This freedom is an end in itself for von Mises, a good that should exist throughout every social order and that we should promulgate at all costs.
The panegyric to the free market that animates the thought of von Mises is representative of that found in every defender of the capitalist economy. But the ideal of freedom to buy and sell what one wants to buy and sell is not just capitalist ideology. One really has this freedom in the capitalist system, and it separates capitalism from other economic forms in which the state or some other organization restricts what one can buy or sell. Though every market has some restrictions—the local department store cannot sell nuclear bombs or snuff films—the market in a capitalist economy has only minimal restrictions justified in the name of public safety. Though certain companies may work to limit the production of certain commodities (as oil companies did with the electric car), these instances represent violations of the inherent ideal of capitalism, and they do not eliminate the real effects of this ideal. Nonetheless, the free market, even in its ideal unrestricted form, is not a bastion of freedom, as von Mises himself surprisingly reveals.
Von Mises presents himself as an apostle of freedom, as someone so committed to freedom that he will countenance extreme inequality to sustain it.10 But then, when he extols the virtues of the market, he praises its ability to rescue us from our freedom. This is one of those shocking moments when a thinker inadvertently exposes the unconscious desire at stake in her or his conscious project. According to von Mises, “The market process is the adjustment of the individual actions of the various members of the market society to the requirements of mutual cooperation. The market prices tell the producers what to produce, how to produce, and in what quantity.”11 Rather than confronting the burden of freedom when we decide on our life’s work, von Mises believes that the market decides for us. This is the crucial move in the thought of von Mises and many other champions of capitalism. They give the market the status of the Other for subjects within the capitalist economy. These defenders are even more perspicacious than Marx himself in displaying capitalism’s retreat from freedom at the precise point—the market—where it posits an absolute freedom.
The market replaces God insofar as it tells us what we should desire. But it is an improved version of God because it permits us to retain the idea of ourselves as free beings. Whereas Christian theologians must constantly wrestle with the problem of human freedom in the face of an omnipotent God, the apologist for capitalism never confronts a similar problem because the free market incessantly assures us, even with its moniker, of our freedom. That is, the capitalist Other, unlike God, doesn’t force us to question how we could reconcile freedom and the Other’s omnipotence, and yet the market relieves us from our freedom much more effectively than God. God leaves room for doubt, whereas the market rarely does.12
When we think about the difference between God and the market, it seems easy to judge which is the more oppressive form of the Other. The partisans of the Christian God in the Middle Ages burned at the stake the heretics who refused to accept God’s abridgement of their freedom. Capitalism, in contrast, leaves heretics alone. Those who reject the market can forge an existence outside its exigencies without any legal ramifications. Capitalism does not condemn nonbelievers to hell. But this explicit tolerance hides an ideological severity much more extreme than that of the Inquisition. The association of the market with freedom is so widespread in the capitalist universe that it is almost impossible to think outside these terms. Even those who opt out of the system most often seek the form of freedom that the capitalist system itself promulgates—the freedom to control their economic destiny. Heresy might not have been commonplace in the medieval world, but it becomes rarer once the market replaces God because the market is an improved form of God, a deity that insulates us from freedom, insisting all the while that we are free.13
In The Road to Serfdom, F. A. Hayek repeats the same contradiction that entraps von Mises, though he discusses it in terms of the worker rather than the businessperson. Hayek argues that society should not provide any security of employment but instead allow workers to lose their jobs when these jobs cease to be socially necessary. Rather than seeing this position as coldhearted, Hayek views it as enlightened. One of the virtues of capitalism is that it eliminates socially unnecessary labor by rendering that labor unprofitable. Utility rules the capitalist universe and quickly eliminates positions that no longer contribute to the collective good.
When I examine the field of possibilities for my life’s work, the choice seems impossible. I could devote myself to medical research, stock trading, exploration of the cosmos, garbage collection, the study of history, or an almost infinite amount of other options. But when I look at the absence of career opportunities for history professors and the bevy for stock traders, the choice becomes clear. Even those who lack the privilege of choosing a career and must simply decide where to apply for a job receive guidance from the market, which tells them to apply at Walmart rather than at the local bookstore. The free market rescues me from the horrible freedom of having no grounds for deciding what I desire to take up as an occupation.
The way that parents and teachers talk to us about this decision reveals the profound link between the guidance offered by the market and that which comes from God. They explain that we will know we’ve found our calling when we find it. We will find ourselves struck like Paul on the road to Damascus. But the voice indicating our career path is not the voice of God. It is the voice, as Hayek makes clear, of the free market.
What Hayek likes about this economic verdict is the extreme clarity that it provides for the worker faced with a free decision about employment. He notes, “Even with the best will in the world it would be impossible for anyone intelligently to choose between various alternatives if the advantages they offered to him stood in no relation to their usefulness to society. To know whether as the result of a change a man ought to leave a trade and an environment which he has come to like, and exchange it for another, it is necessary that the changed relative value of these occupations in society should find expression in the remunerations they offer.”14 We don’t have to flounder around searching for what to do within the capitalist system. The magic of the market will direct us to the proper, socially necessary line of work. Despite Hayek’s insistence that only capitalism ensures our absolute liberty, here he describes its brake on that liberty as a virtue.
It is difficult to express enough shock at the presence of this passage, given Hayek’s zealous commitment to freedom. Toward the beginning of The Constitution of Liberty, an extended homily to freedom, he provides his definition of the concept. He contends that freedom is nothing but the absence of coercion, the ability to act without being compelled in one way or another.15 This is a sentiment that Hayek echoes throughout The Road to Serfdom as well: freedom is the foundational value for Hayek, and yet he celebrates capitalism for freeing us from its burden by directing our desire. Capitalism places an Other in the place of the modernity’s displaced God. By resurrecting this God, Hayek betrays the freedom he celebrates. This resurrection is not simply his theological misinterpretation of capitalism. He correctly sees that capitalism does provide subjects with a new form of social authority, a new Other to guide their actions, even if that authority is invisible.
In an ontological sense, my freedom has its basis in the nonexistence of the Other, in the fact that there is no Other to tell me how to desire. I must interpret the desire of the Other that does not exist in order to constitute my own subjectivity as desiring. We are condemned to freedom not, as Jean-Paul Sartre would have it, because we could also decide to act differently but because there is no authoritative and substantial Other to tell us how to desire. Any such figure that we call on is the product of an act of belief, and this is what occurs with capitalism, as Hayek rightfully describes. In the form of the market, capitalism provides us with the image a substantial Other that we can believe in.
Given the thoroughgoing hostility to any abridgement of freedom to choose expressed during the entirety of Human Action and The Road to Serfdom, the passages cited above are startling. Von Mises and Hayek extol the virtue of capitalism for providing respite from our freedom to choose what we want to devote our lives to. Under capitalism we don’t have to decide wholly on our own; instead, the system, through its formulation of demand and its allocation of salaries, lets us know what business we should start and what work would be socially useful, and what is socially useful is what, according to von Mises and Hayek, we should choose.
Capitalism, in other words, tells us how to belong to our social order, how to fit in with the demands of society. There is no possibility here of the freedom to do something that does not fulfill the social demand. We can only act according to this demand, and capitalism excels by making this demand completely clear. Though we can believe that we freely chose our job—and Hayek argues that we always do—capitalism takes the weight of this burden off our shoulders by showing where we should direct our energies. The system of salaries and the announcement of positions available offer a schema for understanding the Other’s desire. This schema is the fantasy structure through which capitalism permits us to escape the nonexistence of the Other and thus the horror of recognizing that there is no one and nothing to tell us how to desire.
But capitalism’s installation of this new Other or new form of God comes on the heels of the destruction of the earlier form. In short, capitalism killed God.16 It is only after the onset of capitalist modernity that it became possible for Spinoza to imagine a horizontal rather than a vertical conception of substance in which God would be wholly immanent to creation. Spinoza’s God no longer “acts with an end in view” because he no longer has a status outside or above the world.17 This dethroning of God is the direct result of the introduction of capitalist relations of production. Capitalism dismantles hierarchies, levels social relations, and eliminates privileges. Even God cannot survive this process.
Of course, people in modernity still believe in God—and not just in Spinoza’s immanent version. But God no longer functions as the master signifier for the social order in the capitalist universe. God no longer tells subjects what they should desire. But it is difficult to endure this absence of God qua social authority, which is why we find refuge in other forms of social activity once the God hypothesis is no longer tenable as the ground for the social order. Belief in God is so appealing because God provides respite from the confrontation with the nonexistence of the Other. If God provides this type of guidance, it requires a leap of faith to gain access to it. God’s directives on desire are not publicly disseminated within the capitalist social order. Belief remains widespread, but the capitalist universe is incompatible with the traditional figure of God.
The true horror of God’s spiritualization or the Other’s nonexistence is not that the subject can’t interpret what God or the Other wants. It is that the Other itself ceases to know and begins to bombard the subject with questions about desire. One turns to suicide bombing or begins watching reality television shows—they are similar responses to the same problem—in order to discover what the Other wants, but one continues to confront the Other’s nonexistence even in the midst of these activities. The contemporary Other doesn’t offer the commandments of the traditional God.
Though capitalist modernity eliminates the transcendent God of tradition religion, it introduces an immanent God. This is not Spinoza’s God, which is correlative to the created world, but rather a God who tells us what to desire. This figure is the market itself. Instead of leaving us on our own with just our freedom and no idea of what we should desire, the market frees us of the burden of freedom, but we are able to keep the word. In the capitalist universe “freedom” saves us from freedom.
NOT GOD BUT AN ADVERTISEMENT
For all capitalism’s success in directing the desire of subjects when it comes to production and work, the most conspicuous destruction of freedom in the capitalist system occurs in the act of consumption. The capitalist universe today centers around consumption rather than production or work, and it is here that the new form of God becomes fully evident. Advertising exists not simply—or even primarily—to sell products but to save subjects from their freedom. Advertisements provide an image of the Other that enables us to believe that we are not simply on our own when it comes to how we should consume.
The advertisement doesn’t tell us directly what to desire—no successful advertisement would say, “Drink a beer right now,” for instance—but instead works to create a belief in the existence of a particular Other. The beer commercial shows the Other rewarding us for the act of drinking beer. We see the male drinker surrounded by a group of young women attired only in bathing suits, an image that shows the social support one receives for choosing this beer. One fits in the social order and attains the maximum recognition. In this way, one knows how to desire and thereby avoids the trauma of one’s freedom.
The advertisement enables the capitalist subject to believe that in every consumer choice it makes it is being seen. That is to say, the Other rewards the consumer for its choices through the recognition that stems from the proper purchase. When I am drinking a certain kind of beer, I don’t necessarily imagine myself surrounded by adoring women, but I do imagine the Other seeing my choice and approving it. The advertisement tells me that my choice has the Other’s stamp of approval, and the best advertisements enable the subject to disavow this reliance on the Other’s approval at the same time that they offer it most thoroughly.
The beer commercial is often the most straightforward in its evocation of the Other. The Other exists in the form of a group of potential love objects, friends watching a football game together, or Clydesdale horses nostalgically reminding the viewer of a former era when choices were clearer. In each case the advertisement offers a point of identification from which the subject can see itself being seen. This point is the Other who exists and who authorizes the subject’s choices. The proper viewer of these advertisements gains from them a sense of belonging that has the effect of saving the subject from its freedom.
More successful—and more dangerous—advertisements proffer the image of belonging through freedom or detachment from the Other. In such advertisements the Other forms through the image of its nonexistence and thus becomes even more firmly entrenched. One of the great instances of this phenomenon was the Monster.com commercial from the 1990s. Here a group of young children ironically express their desire to fit in the capitalist system. One says, “I want to be forced into early retirement,” while another proclaims, “I want to work my way up to middle management.” This series of damning indictments of the hopelessness of the capitalist system serves to support an investment in Monster.com as respite from this hopelessness and as a form of the Other that will create a region within the capitalist economy where one can fit without sacrificing one’s freedom. In this way, Monster.com, like Google or Apple, presents itself as a vehicle for the subject’s liberation from the conformity that the market demands while sustaining an image of the Other that is the basis for the market’s success. The appeal of the Monster.com advertisement is inextricable from its nefariousness. It is an even more potent obfuscation of freedom than the Budweiser Clydesdales. We can believe ourselves to be rejecting the market while nonetheless finding recognition in this new form of God.
The link between the advertisement and God stands out in one of the key scenes from F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. The novel recounts the story of Jay Gatsby’s pursuit of his lost love Daisy Buchanan, whom he is trying to lure away from her husband Tom. After a confrontation between Tom, Daisy, and Gatsby, they flee New York City back to their homes on Long Island. Daisy drives with Gatsby, and Tom goes in another car. While traversing the Valley of Ashes that separates the city from its wealthy suburbs, Daisy hits and kills Myrtle Wilson, who is having an affair with her husband Tom. Though Daisy doesn’t intend to hit Myrtle, she drives carelessly and then doesn’t even stop after the accident. Though Daisy’s behavior reveals the insularity of the ruling class, the importance of the scene lies primarily in what happens in the aftermath of Myrtle’s death and in the reaction of her husband George.
George responds to Myrtle’s death with recourse to an advertisement. Fitzgerald’s description of the Valley of Ashes highlights a prominent billboard that hangs over the industrial wasteland. This billboard presents what the narrator, Nick Caraway, describes as “the eyes of Dr. T. J. Eckleberg.” The fading billboard advertises an optometrist by showing a massive pair of eyes with glasses that look out over the Valley of Ashes. Throughout the novel, the eyes of Dr. T. J. Eckleberg function as the Other, the modern form of God that guarantees and directs our actions. When Myrtle dies, George identifies the role of the billboard and of all advertisements in capitalist modernity.
When discussing what he plans to do with his neighbor Michaelus, George looks up at the eyes of Dr. T. J. Eckleberg for assurance. He tells Michaelus, “God sees everything,” and then his neighbor replies, “That’s just an advertisement.”18 With this exchange, Fitzgerald perfectly captures the relationship between advertising and God, as well as the change in the status of God in modernity. Though advertising now plays the role of God—the eyes of Dr. T. J. Eckleberg tell us how to desire and how to evade our freedom—this new form of God is absent rather than present. Thus, we can proclaim, with Michaelus, that the Other does not exist, even though this requires abandoning the security that the all-seeing Other provides.
When we conceive of God in the modern world, we should abandon the idea of a transcendent being and instead take Fitzgerald’s image as our point of departure. The eyes of Dr. T. J. Eckleberg soothe George because they permit him to imagine that our actions occur with an ontological support. These eyes authorize his misplaced vengeance when he kills Gatsby for Daisy’s crime. In the same way, advertisements provide a salve for all consumers by offering an image of what we should want.
Even if we don’t buy the products that the advertisements try to sell us, we take solace in the idea of the Other that they sustain. George’s conclusion about the billboard was wrong—God doesn’t see everything—but his error is nonetheless completely understandable. Dr. T. J. Eckleberg is the new god. Just like the old God, this one exists in order that we don’t have to be free, but unlike the old version, this one exists in an epoch where its existence has been thoroughly questioned.19
DAS ADAM SMITH PROBLEM
Understanding capitalism’s new version of God enables us to grasp the solution to the oft-debated question concerning the relationship between Adam Smith’s two great works, The Theory of Moral Sentiments and The Wealth of Nations. This debate has aroused such furor that it has even acquired its own name: Das Adam Smith Problem. The basic problem is that Smith’s two major works don’t appear to jibe philosophically. He argues in his moral philosophy for a sentimental attachment to others and in his economic work for an emphasis on private interest in lieu of public concerns. This problem gains renewed interest in light of understanding the free market as the new form of the Other. The solution to Das Adam Smith Problem lies in the free market replacing God and saving capitalist subjects from freedom.
The solution requires that we think about Das Adam Smith Problem in different terms than those often used to approach it. The commonsensical answer to this problem was for a long time a historicist one: Smith’s position simply evolved over time from the writing of his moral philosophy in 1759 and his economic treatise in 1776. Today this answer no longer has many adherents, and the task has become one of identifying the sources of continuity rather than emphasizing the differences.
Though the problem of the difference between the moral Smith and the capitalist Smith has largely disappeared, the question of the shared concerns of his two books remains up in the air. As David Wilson and William Dixon note, “an Adam Smith problem of sorts endures: there is still no widely agreed version of what it is that links these two texts, aside from their common author; no widely agreed version of how, if at all, Smith’s postulation of self-interest as the organising principle of economic activity fits in with his wider moral-ethical concerns.”20 Das Adam Smith Problem comes about because Smith’s two books appear almost completely at odds with each other. The first argues for the existence of human morality on the basis of a sentimental attachment to others, while the second contends that self-interest drives the human being.
In the opening of The Theory of Moral Sentiments, Smith argues for a fundamental limitation on human selfishness that seems utterly incompatible with his later economic proclamations. He says, “How selfish so-ever man may be supposed, there are evidently some principles in his nature, which interest him in the fortune of others, and render their happiness necessary to him, though he derives nothing from it except the pleasure of seeing it. Of this kind is pity or compassion, the emotion which we feel for the misery of others, when we either see it, or are made to conceive it in a very lively manner.”21 Emotion connects us to others even when we fail to see the connection. Compassion might not be conscious, but it nonetheless functions and governs our interactions with others. Smith’s entire moral philosophy has its basis in the emotional or sentimental identification that people experience with each other, and this type of identification plays no role in his conception of the activity of the economic world. It is thus no wonder that the attempt to reconcile Smith’s two famous texts became enough of a theoretical problem to earn its own name.
It takes only a brief glance at the juxtaposition of Smith’s moral philosophy with his treatise on economy to recognize that his concerns in the two texts are disparate. In The Wealth of Nations, Smith famously argues that self-interest provides the basis for human interaction. We benefit from others because they act according to their self-interest, and when we appeal to them for commodities that we require, we do so on the basis of fulfilling this self-interest. In Smith’s later work, self-interest is the guiding thread and emotional connection seems entirely absent. The emphasis on an unbreakable sense of compassion that dominates the earlier book has no place in this economic outlook. There is a connection between subjects, but this connection derives from the unconscious manifestations of self-love, not from unconscious compassion for the distress or misery of others.
Most solutions to Das Adam Smith Problem focus on the ethical status of Smith’s conception of capitalism. Samuel Fleischacker is one exponent of this position. His defense doesn’t claim that capitalism necessarily leads to the kind of virtue that Smith espouses in The Theory of Moral Sentiments but rather that it lays the groundwork for this virtue. That is to say, capitalism isn’t inherently moral; it facilitates morality. It provides the structural basis for the development of morality.
Capitalism does so though its production of prosperity. According to Fleischacker, “Commerce tends to bring freedom in its train, and to improve the lodging, clothing, and sustenance of the worst off. These basic goods are all that one needs to lead a decent life—and therefore enough to make commercial society worth striving for and preserving.”22 Fleischacker flirts with the idea that capitalism provides training in the virtues and ultimately leads to the end of violence, but he abandons this thesis as too strong and reconciles himself to a weaker vision of the connection between the two texts. He sees that a profound gap does exist with only certain points of overlap, despite his own efforts at reconciliation.
It is the case that the two texts are disparate works and that Smith’s concerns in his treatise on economy run far afield from his concerns in the discussion of morality. On the whole, it seems that we cannot reconcile them except through the statement that the same author wrote each. But there is nonetheless a nodal point that unites the two works—Smith’s vision of God. This is the fundamental overlap between The Theory of Moral Sentiments and The Wealth of Nations, and it is all the more revelatory given God’s relative absence from Smith’s thought.
Nowhere in either work does Smith make explicit mention of a traditional deity. Nonetheless, the modern notion of God—the capitalist reformulation of God—makes an appearance in both books as the Other who would direct our desire and lead it out of the abyss. Though Smith writes both works (in 1759 and 1776) before Kant’s Critique of Practical Reason (in 1788), they represent a retreat from modern Kantian freedom before the fact. It is as if Smith read Kant and then constructed a moral and an economic theory that would enable us to escape the traumatic ramifications of Kantian freedom.23 In fact, the defining trait of Smith’s thought, like that of so many defenders of capitalism, is the flight from freedom. Smith conceives of subjects as free, but this freedom has a support in an Other, as both The Theory of Moral Sentiments and The Wealth of Nations make evident.
The great convergence of Smith’s two books occurs when he mentions—it occurs only once in each text—the invisible hand. This is Smith’s metaphor for the modern God, the social authority who gives a direction for the subject’s desire. In The Theory of Moral Sentiments, Smith presents the invisible hand in a less ideological form than he does in the later work. In a shocking section of the book, Smith admits that wealth, contrary to what we and the wealthy themselves believe, doesn’t bring happiness. For a champion of capitalism, this is a potentially damning admission, and it would be difficult to imagine it in the mouths of today’s capitalist believers. We pursue wealth, as Smith sees it, from a completely misguided premise, but this pursuit brings with it great benefit for society. The pursuit of wealth functions like Hegel’s cunning of reason: the universal benefits from the sacrifices made by particulars.24 The pursuit of wealth enables the social order to develop and advances the interest of society, even though it doesn’t bring the promised happiness to the one who pursues it.
When Smith turns to a discussion of the distribution of resources that derive from the pursuit of wealth, he has recourse to the metaphor of the invisible hand. Commenting on the wealthy, he notes, “They are led by an invisible hand to make nearly the same distribution of the necessaries of life, which would have been made, had the earth been divided into equal portions among all its inhabitants, and thus without intending it, without knowing it, advance the interest of the society, and afford means to the multiplication of the species.”25 The invisible hand functions like God, directing the rich to invest and spend their money in the proper avenues. Without the invisible hand, we would be morally adrift, and nothing would guarantee that our actions correlated with each other for the good. The concept of the invisible hand, in other words, enables Smith to sustain an idea of a social safety net that holds subjects together and coordinates their desires. It also frees them from their own freedom in the face of the Other’s absence.
The far more famous mention of the metaphor of the invisible hand occurs in The Wealth of Nations, where Smith argues for the socially beneficial effect of the pursuit of self-interest. Here the invisible hand coordinates otherwise competing sites of self-interest into a coherent whole. Smith says, “by directing that industry in such a manner as its produce may be of the greatest value, he intends only his own gain; and he is in this, as in many other cases, led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention. Nor is it always the worse for the society that it was no part of it. By pursuing his own interest, he frequently promotes that of the society more effectually than when he really intends to promote it.”26 Though later champions of capitalism pick up on Smith’s insistence on the pursuit of one’s own gain, what stands out even more in this passage is the direction that the invisible hand provides to all self-interested activity. There is no risk of the system destroying itself, as Smith sees it, because an invisible hand watches over it, just as it watches over the moral “distribution of the necessities of life.” This is the modern version of God: a force that provides assurances that all our activities will work out for the good despite our intentions. This is the point at which The Theory of Moral Sentiments and The Wealth of Nations perfectly align.27
The solution to Das Adam Smith Problem is also the solution to capitalism’s hold on us as subjects. Capitalist modernity does away with God as a present force in social relations, but it installs him as a determining absence. The Other as an absent field that directs the desire of subjects arises with capitalism just as modernity destroys the figure of God as the guide for our desire. That is to say, God ceases to be a visible hand and becomes an invisible hand. The invisible hand traverses Smith’s disparate books as the unifying force between them. It also represents Smith’s most important contribution to the understanding of capitalism’s success.
The conception of God as an invisible hand is not just an idiosyncrasy of Smith’s two books. The fact that the term appears a single time in each work permits it to stand out, but the concept undergirds the entirety of both works and the capitalist economy as such. The invisible hand is not just capitalist ideology, a conception generated to smooth out the antagonisms of the capitalist system. It is rather an inextricable part of that system, its necessary product.
The lovers of capitalism—and who doesn’t belong to this group, even if unconsciously?—love it precisely for its invisible hand. Through this figure, it resurrects in a much more palatable form the God that it killed. The invisible hand doesn’t demand that we abandon enjoyable activities like bearing false witness and coveting our neighbor’s wife. Far from prohibiting them, it integrates these activities into the alignment of competing desires within the capitalist universe. This universe is one in which we all have a place and from which none need be cast out as long as we abandon our freedom and accept the verdict of the new god. The invisible hand not only solves Das Adam Smith Problem but also the problem of a horrible freedom.
THE OTHER DOES EXIST
The fundamental project of psychoanalysis is its combat against the belief in the invisible hand. In psychoanalytic terms, the precise name for a believer in the invisible hand is neurotic. The neurotic seeks refuge from her or his own freedom in the idea of an Other who provides a hidden guidance for what the neurotic should desire. As long as God exists as a physical presence within the world directing desire, neurosis cannot develop.28 The guide for the subject’s desire is clearly stated in the dictates of God. But when modernity eliminates God or consigns God to a spiritual realm, the subject turns toward a new Other that exists only in its absence. This Other—Smith’s invisible hand of the market—tells the subject how to desire, and the subject who accepts this Other becomes neurotic. The struggle against neurosis is thus the struggle against the underlying belief that sustains the capitalist economy. If we are all neurotic to some extent or another, this means that we all have some degree of investment in the capitalist system.
One of the chief complaints of psychoanalytic Marxists in the twentieth century concerned capitalism’s tendency to render its subjects neurotic. For most of these thinkers, the problem lies in the repression that capitalism demands. Even a non-Marxist like Karen Horney identifies the capitalist economic system as the source of what she calls “the neurotic personality of our time.” In Horney’s book of this title, she states, “From its economic center competition radiates into all other activities and permeates love, social relations and play. Therefore competition is a problem for everyone in our culture, and it is not at all surprising to find it an unfailing center of neurotic conflicts.”29 Capitalist competition does not lead to free subjects but to neurotic ones. It requires repression in order to fit subjects into the limited positions that the market economy requires.
The association of capitalism with neurosis represents an accurate diagnosis with a mistaken cause. Michel Foucault is undoubtedly correct to call into question the attack on capitalism as a purely repressive system, but Foucault’s critique misses another possible link between capitalism and neurosis. Capitalism doesn’t feed the neurotic subject through its repressiveness but through its capacity for fostering the illusion that the Other exists. The basis of neurosis is not just the repression of sexual desire and its replacement with a symptom but the belief in the substantial existence of the Other, the belief that a self-identical social authority can issue clear demands that solve the problems of subjectivity and freedom. Neurosis is dependence on an external authority that enables the subject to avoid taking responsibility for its own acts. This redefinition of neurosis is crucial both for understanding the neurotic structure of capitalism and for avoiding Foucault’s critique of this diagnosis.
The problem with neurosis is that the social authority the neurotic obeys doesn’t exist. Though social authorities do make constant demands on subjects, they do not know their own desire and thus cannot direct the desire of subjects who look to them. That is to say, the authority cannot say what it really wants.30 Like the subject, social authority has an unconscious that prevents its unambiguous articulation of demands. Like the subject, social authority suffers from the divide between what it says and the point from which it articulates this demand. The demand is always articulated with signifiers, and signifiers always create a divided subject out of the pretension of authority.
The divide in social authority becomes evident if we examine how authority figures respond to those who comply with their demands to the letter. For instance, the student who always comes to class prepared, always turns in assignments early, and always has her hand up to provide the correct answer to the question annoys the teacher rather than winning the teacher’s love. The student who knows when to disobey and when to challenge the teacher’s authority stands a much better chance of becoming the beloved student. The perfectly obedient student equates the teacher’s demand with the teacher’s desire, while the student who sometimes challenges authority reads the teacher’s desire as distinct from the demand. The student who challenges authority recognizes that social authority does not exist, even if the flesh-and-blood teacher does. The obedient student, in contrast, neurotically clings to the idea of a substantial authority embodied in the teacher, an authority that knows and can say what it wants.
In his Seminar XII, entitled Problèmes cruciaux pour la psychanalyse, Jacques Lacan identifies neurosis with desire of the Other’s demand, which is another way of saying that the neurotic subject believes in the substantial existence of the Other. Lacan says, “In the neurosis…it is in relation to the demand of the Other that the subject’s desire is constituted.”31 The neurotic thinks that strict obedience of the Other’s demand—not exceeding the speed limit by even a little bit, for instance—works to capture the Other’s desire. But this alignment of the Other’s demand with the Other’s desire never occurs. The driver who never speeds earns not the respect of social authority but its suspicion, just like the student who fails to see that the teacher doesn’t desire the perfect obedience she or he demands. The Other doesn’t really want what it demands because it has an unconscious just like the subject itself.
The mistake of the neurotic is the belief that the Other exists, that the Other has no unconscious, which leads the neurotic to cling to the Other’s demand rather than confront the abyss of its own subjectivity. This attempt to cling to the Other’s demand always leads the subject astray—and represents the weak link in the capitalist chain—because the Other never wants the subject to do what it demands. The result is a neurotic failure on the part of the subject to find its satisfaction satisfying. Capitalism necessarily produces neurosis. It is not, as the contemporary world constantly reminds us, a repressive system, but it is, all the same, a neurotic one insofar as it allows us to find refuge in the market qua social authority.
Capitalism requires a belief in the existence of the Other. This is what Adam Smith makes clear in his discussion of the invisible hand, and it is the reason for the lasting popularity of this image among capitalism’s defenders. The idea of an invisible hand or an Other guiding our desire enables us to believe in our freedom—there is no clearly delineated God or authority telling us what to do—and to find respite from this freedom at the same time. It is thus the perfect system for the destruction of the freedom that modernity offers to its subjects.
The fundamental catastrophe of modernity is the disappearance of God as a substantial Other. Subjects like Donald Trump attempt to compensate for this catastrophe by buying their way into popularity, which is simply a situation where the Other offers clear and distinct demands. But popularity, like capitalism, always leads to disappointment. One is never popular enough, just as one never has quite enough capital. The invisible hand ultimately betrays us. As subjects of modernity, we must exist without a visible or an invisible hand. We must dissociate modernity from capitalism—a dissociation that is the only path to authentic freedom.