6

Capitalism

On a mild spring morning full of the promise of new life, a man in his early thirties refuses to get out of bed. It is the same story as every day. He is not physically ill, although he is plagued by a range of minor ailments, such as sties, shortness of breath, and a persistent itch on the back of his head, to which he dedicates much attention. He is wrapped in a threadbare Oriental dressing gown. His soft, chocolate-colored eyes glide wearily over the dusty objects in his derelict bedchamber; his skin is pale, and his features appear curiously slack, as though even his facial muscles lack energy. Around him, filth and cobwebs reign—his room has not been cleaned for years, and the plaster ceiling is crumbling. His man-servant repeatedly beseeches him to get up, to dress, and to shave, but his efforts are in vain.

During the course of the day, the man in the dressing gown receives a string of visitors, all of whom try to lure him out of his bed and to convince him to accompany them to a May celebration that almost all of St. Petersburg will be attending. But the man in the dressing gown firmly resists their offers and remains in bed. His lethargy is disturbed only momentarily, when he remembers some pressing worries—he has recently been told that he has to vacate his lodgings, as his landlord intends to renovate the apartment. He has also just learned that his estate in the country is no longer yielding much profit, owing to neglect and poor management—his annual allowance is about to decrease dramatically. In spite of the urgency of these problems, he is unable to rouse himself into action. He resolves to write some letters to put his affairs in order but cannot muster the energy to do so. He procrastinates and despairs. Days, then weeks, and then the seasons pass. Sometimes he gets as far as putting a few lines to paper but then becomes caught up in the vexing grammatical question of when to use “which” and when to use “that.” The letters are never sent, and the man’s affairs deteriorate at an alarming pace.

The man in the dressing gown is Ivan Ilyitch Oblomov, the antihero of Ivan Goncharov’s (1812–1891) eponymous novel, published in 1859.¹ Although his name has become synonymous with a pathological form of laziness, Oblomov’s refusal to get out of bed and to live an active life is due to more complex causes. Laziness implies a moral judgment based on the idea that the lazy person voluntarily chooses to remain inactive and that his or her condition is the result of a lack of willpower or moral fiber. But Oblomov also suffers from a complex range of psychological ailments that challenge this assessment and include depression, anxiety, nervous weakness, and world-weariness.

Oblomov is the only son of a landowning and serf-holding family. He lives at a time when Russia is still essentially feudal but is also seeing the emergence of progressive thinkers, who are proposing radical reforms of the social order and the management of labor. Oblomov never has had to work—from the moment of his birth, he was assigned a man-servant, Zahar, who put on his socks and boots for him and who was supposed to do many other things besides. Zahar, however, is as work shy as his master and also stubborn, clumsy, inefficient, and ill-tempered. Unlike Oblomov, who is at heart a gentle, pure, and loving soul, Zahar has no redeeming qualities.

On one level, Goncharov’s novel may be read as social critique, a cautionary tale that reveals the unhealthy consequences of traditional master–servant relationships and the economically and psychologically corrosive effects of an unreformed feudal system. Oblomov and Zahar are mutually dependent, and their constant bickering and deep-seated resentment brings out the worst in both of them. Their relationship symbolizes the political paralysis of tsarist Russia, which was caused mainly by the torpid serf-holding nobility who stood in the way of progress but also by the (possibly deliberate) inefficiency of their serfs. Oblomov, in this reading, epitomizes an outdated feudalism, faced with a rapidly changing world that will soon bring about its bloody demise.

Yet on another level, Goncharov’s novel raises more profound questions about the meaning of life and the value of work and explores the philosophical origins of Oblomov’s chronic state of exhaustion and his refusal to partake in life’s ordinary trials and pleasures. At an early age, Oblomov gives up his (not particularly demanding) post as a collegiate secretary, justified by a doctor’s note listing a range of questionable illnesses. He withdraws from public life and spends most of his days in bed, clad in his famous loose dressing gown. He sometimes tries to read and resolves to work on a master plan for his future, which entails the reform of his rapidly decaying inherited estate. Yet he never manages to finish his books, and he never commits his plans to paper. He suffers from panic attacks when forced to go out and is prone to bouts of nervous fear. He is also depressed and languorous, and often bored, and grows fat later in life.

Oblomov’s apparent laziness, however, also has psychological and philosophical causes. He longs, above all, to re-create an earthly paradise, an idyllic Arcadian existence where all work is banned. There is an infantile, regressive dimension to this dream, as it closely resembles his early childhood experiences: in the country, cared for by his doting parents and their many servants, he was free from any responsibilities to manage his life; instead, he could roam the gardens and sleep, eat, and play at his leisure. Oblomov’s dream of a life free from work and responsibility chimes with a desire with which all of us are familiar: a secret longing to return to the realm of childhood, where our energies were ours to spend as we saw fit; where the days were structured by a diet of pleasure, play, and sleep; and where there was no obligation to bow to the laws of productivity and efficiency. Many experience the transition to the world of work as trauma, as an expulsion from paradise, and memories of that paradise lost continue to haunt us throughout our adult lives.

Oblomov’s best friend is a man called Andrey Stolz, who is in every respect his opposite: Stolz is inventive, productive, optimistic, taut, full of energy and vitality. Significantly, he was brought up by a German father, from whom he inherited his discipline, dedication, and apt hand at business, as well as all his other stereotypically Teutonic qualities. His dreamy Russian mother, however, a singer of songs and a teller of tales, nourished his imagination and thus equipped him with a passionate and spiritual dimension to his character. Stolz is the very embodiment of efficiency: he “went his way firmly and cheerfully; he lived on a fixed plan and tried to account for every day as for every rouble, keeping unremitting watch over his time, his labour, and the amount of mental and emotional energy he expended.”² Stolz represents progress and capitalist inventiveness. Yet there is also a philanthropic and a patriotic dimension to his industriousness: he builds bridges, streets, schools, and houses and works tirelessly for the advancement of Russian industry and the education of its people. Stolz, in other words, is a model capitalist—a capitalist with soul.

Stolz repeatedly rescues Oblomov from bankruptcy and frees him from the clutches of various scroungers and financial exploiters, tirelessly trying to draw his friend out of his inertia. It is in various conversations with Stolz that Oblomov shares his philosophical reservations about living an active life. When Stolz praises the merits of socializing, for example, Oblomov objects: “All these society people are dead men, men fast asleep, they are worse than I am! What is their aim in life? They do not lie in bed like me, they dash backwards and forwards every day like flies, but what is the good?” Stolz eventually accuses his friend of “Oblomovism,” a term he has invented to characterize Oblomov’s turpitude and lack of ambition. But Oblomov defends himself:

“What, then, is the ideal life, you think? What is not Oblomovism?” he asked timidly and without enthusiasm. “Doesn’t everyone strive for the very same things that I dream of? Why,” he added more confidently, “isn’t it the purpose of all your running about, your passions, wars, trade, politics—to secure rest, to attain this ideal of a lost paradise?”

On another occasion, the two friends discuss the merit of work:

“You will stop working some day,” Oblomov remarked.

“Never. Why should I?”

“When you have doubled your capital,” Oblomov said.

“I won’t stop when I have squared it.”

“Then why do you work so hard,” Oblomov began after a pause, “if it isn’t for the sake of providing for your future and then retiring to the country?”

“Oblomovism in the country!” Stolz said.

“Or to attain a high rank and social position and then enjoy in honourable inactivity a well-earned rest?…”

“Oblomovism in Petersburg!” Stolz said.

“When, then, are you going to live?” Oblomov asked, annoyed at his remarks. “Why slave all your life?”

“For the sake of work itself and nothing else. Work gives form, and completeness, and a purpose to life, at any rate for me. Here, now, you have banished work from your life, and what is the result?”³

The result of the permanent expulsion of work from Oblomov’s life is both comic and tragic. Having been duped into a ruinous rental arrangement on the poor side of St. Petersburg, he eventually marries his destitute landlady, the widow Agafya Matveyevna, having fallen in love with her rapidly moving white elbows when she pounds cinnamon. In her benevolent and undemanding care, Oblomov grows fat and happy. Agafya accepts him just as he is and dedicates her life to cooking his favorite dishes and shielding him from unwanted exertion and excitements.

While he thus manages to create an albeit significantly less glamorous version of the earthly paradise of which he has always dreamed, his choices are also driven by a darker, more sinister force. In another conversation with Stolz, we learn about Oblomov’s true thoughts on life: “It disturbs one, gives one no peace! I wish I could lie down and go to sleep…forever.” The narrator also informs us that “with years, agitation and remorse visited him less and less often, and he settled down slowly and gradually in the plain and wide coffin he had made of his existence, like ancient hermits who, turning away from life, dig their own graves.” And Oblomov’s thinly veiled death wish is ultimately fulfilled. He not only succeeds in practicing a kind of death in life but also dies young—of a stroke brought on by oversleeping, lack of exercise, and too much vodka, wine, red meat, and rich and spicy dishes. Yet at least he passes away quietly, “like a clock that stops because it hasn’t been wound up.”⁴ Oblomov’s time, Goncharov seems to suggest, has run its course, as is true of everything he represents: the age of feudalist paralysis and a spirit that is profoundly anticapitalist and antiprogressive in its refusal to subscribe to the values of work, self-improvement, and productivity. Yet what also dies with Oblomov is the possibility of inhabiting a childhood-like state in a work-free land of milk and honey in adulthood.

States of exhaustion, as we have seen in the previous chapters, have been theorized both as primarily physical and as primarily mental phenomena. In ancient humoral theory and current biomedical thinking, exhaustion’s causes are explained in terms of imbalances in bodily economies: it may be triggered by a disequilibrium between the humoral fluids in the body, on the one hand, and a deficiency in serotonin levels in the brain, on the other. Psychoanalytic approaches, in contrast, shifted the focus onto formative childhood experiences revolving around loss and mourning, as well as onto repression and our drive to return to a state of death-like repose, where all toil and suffering ceases. In Oblomov’s case, we can clearly observe the workings of the death drive—his vision of earthly paradise closely corresponds to the inorganic, Nirvana-like condition that Sigmund Freud describes in Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920).⁵

Although these theories take into consideration the ways in which external factors may affect our inner lives, they are primarily concerned with processes that take place inside us—be that in our bodies or our psyches. A radically different explanatory model emerged in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that centers on the idea that the causes for what was perceived as an epidemic rise in cases of exhaustion are to be found predominantly on the outside. In the works of George M. Beard, Richard von Krafft-Ebing, and other physicians writing on neurasthenia, the focus shifted toward cultural and environmental factors as the key triggers of exhaustion. Chief among these are the pressures of the liberal market economy, urbanization, a different attitude toward time and work, and a faster, technologically enhanced pace of life.

Exhaustion is intricately bound up not just with our private inner lives and our physical health but also with wider social developments, in particular with more general cultural attitudes toward work and rest. In the Enlightenment, attitudes toward work began to undergo radical transformation, triggered by various factors. These include above all secularization, which was one of the key engines driving scientific progress. In the wake of scientific progress there followed rationalization, the division of labor, industrialization, and bureaucratization. The seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries also saw the rise of a new and increasingly more influential middle class. Most important, however, the modern period saw the advent of free-market capitalism, and the rapid spread of the capitalist system had serious consequences for the psyche of the individual, owing primarily to changing cultural conceptions of the value of work and an increasing commodification of time.

With the onset of industrialization and factory production, the rhythms of work changed. They were now no longer dominated by nature, the seasons, and the weather, as in agrarian societies, but were regulated by abstract rational principles, such as clock time and measurable productivity. Workers had to adapt their rhythms to those of the machines they were servicing; they had to perform the same repetitive movements over and over again, all day long. Karl Marx, too, had much to say about the exhausting nature of factory work. During the course of his lifetime, Marx radically changed his attitude toward labor: in his younger years, he considered work as identity generating, as the primary human activity that defines us as social beings. In his late works, however, he increasingly came to see labor as a burden, as a constraint on freedom and self-realization. As the historian Anson Rabinbach points out, while originally advocating emancipation through work, Marx eventually came to dream of emancipation from work.⁶

One of the most important texts on changing attitudes toward work in the modern period is The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1904–1905), by the German founding father of sociology, Max Weber.⁷ It is significant that Weber was himself diagnosed with neurasthenia and suffered from bouts of prolonged mental and physical exhaustion and an inability to work. Weber was born into a wealthy family in 1864 and was adversely affected by tensions between his parents as a child: his father, a politically engaged lawyer, was a lover of earthly and sensual pleasures, while his mother adhered to a religious-ascetic lifestyle. Weber felt torn between these two poles. He studied law, history, philosophy, and economics and was made professor in Heidelberg in 1896. In 1897, he fell out with his father after a severe quarrel, and when his father died a few months later, Weber suffered a nervous breakdown and sank into depression. His breakdown is usually attributed to overwork, but the historian Joachim Radkau has recently suggested a more complex link between Weber’s nervous exhaustion, his intellectual life, and his childhood experiences.⁸ Radkau argues that Weber’s life was marked by a struggle between his ascetic aspirations, on the one hand, and his erotic inclinations, on the other. Not just the age of modernity, then, but Weber himself is the hero of his famous study, his intellectual interest in the topic having been shaped both by the zeitgeist and by personal experience.

Weber spent five years unable to work and to sleep, moving into and out of sanatoriums and suffering numerous relapses. Eventually, having accepted the chronic nature of his ailment, he decided to give up his academic post for good. In November 1900, while recovering in a sanatorium in the Swabian Alps, Weber felt so weak and depleted that even the thought of writing to his wife, Marianne, seemed “dreadful.” Always eager to assist her ailing husband and to remain informed about his physical and mental state, Marianne composed little ready-made cards for him that he simply had to complete. One of these cards read “sleep: ‘reasonable’; Legs: ‘weary’; Head: ‘swimming.’”⁹

Weber was constantly haunted by fears of overstimulating his fragile nervous system. As a result, he was very much opposed to any cures that involved stimulation as a therapeutic strategy, including hydrotherapy and electrotherapy, which were popular measures for treating exhaustion at that time. Yet he fully embraced the dominant medical metaphors that doctors used to describe the phenomenon. He believed that all “overspending” of nervous energy would be “punished” with exhaustion. Nerve force, in his view, behaved just like capital and was governed by strict laws regulating the conservation and expenditure of energy. Exhaustion was nature’s revenge for any forms of exertion that were out of the ordinary, including long walks, intense conversations, and even concentrated reading. In a letter to his friend Robert Michels in 1908, Weber wrote: “Exhausted nerve ‘capital’ (and you don’t have a lot of that) behaves like exhausted capital in civil society: when it’s gone, it’s gone.”¹⁰

In a letter in 1909 to the same friend, who also suffered from exhaustion and whose condition deteriorated, Weber wrote (overindulging in his characteristic fondness for italicized emphasis):

I wish I did not know with such eerie certainty the fate that your style of life and work is storing up for you…. You have “cut down on” your night work, and that is supposed to help you? You are going to Paris “for relaxation,” and that—a cure for over-tiredness through new stimuli—has (surprise, surprise!) done nothing to help?…Give up for a year all lecture trips abroad and all hurried work, go to bed every (every) day at 9.30, spend two weeks at a time in the summer relaxing without books (without any books) in the isolated German forest…, and you will know after a year how much work capacity/capital you have left; you will again have the security of feeling healthy and, in particular, know precisely how much you are able to work. But only then…Please forgive me if you hear in this the know-all attitude of a “nerve specialist” more than the sympathetic interest of a friend, but there are times when one has to get the truth off one’s chest.¹¹

The ways in which Weber imagines bodily economies of energy and depletion are based on financial and theological models very similar to the ones he describes in his most famous work, the essays that were published in 1904 and 1905 and that constitute The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. In this study, Weber establishes a parallel between the Protestant religious ethos and what he calls the “spirit” (Geist) of capitalism. Weber’s argument is a radical one: he explores the cultural and historical origins of a basic attitude toward work that most of us have come to accept as natural: the importance of being efficient and successful in one’s chosen profession.

Today our profession has come to define who we are perhaps even more than do our racial and class origins and our gender. “What do you do?” is one of the first questions asked when we meet someone. The aspiration to do well at work, and to rise through the ranks of our chosen profession, is an aim that most of us accept automatically and uncritically. Very few people today choose not to partake in that process. Yet this has not always been the case. Moreover, in the past century, and in particular as a result of the shift from manufacturing to service industries in the majority of Western countries, the nature of many jobs has also radically changed, in that sociopsychologically exhausting tasks have replaced physically draining ones.

Weber analyzes the cultural-historical origins of the German concept of Berufspflicht, loosely translatable as “duty toward one’s profession.” Beruf means “profession,” but it is also related to Berufung, which translates as “calling.” One’s Beruf can thus be seen not just as a mere occupation but also as a vocation that has “called” or claimed us. Weber’s study begins with the observation that people from a Protestant background occupy leading economic positions much more frequently than do those from other religious denominations, and that they tend to dominate in market-driven economies. He wonders why this should be the case and argues that there is something at the very heart of the Protestant worldview that drives people to do well in capitalist society.

The primary enemy of the capitalist spirit, Weber argues, is traditionalism. Economic traditionalists are not interested in multiplying their assets but only in covering their basic needs. Their concern is with the present rather than the future, and consequently they are more interested in working less than in earning more.¹² Creaturely pleasures are valued more highly than achievement. A parable about a Southeast Asian fisherman and an investment banker neatly illustrates the difference between the traditionalist worldview and the entrepreneurial spirit. It also raises some interesting questions about the very foundations of the capitalist frame of mind:

An American investment banker went on a much-needed holiday to Thailand. Having worked hard all year trading in derivatives, he was exhausted and dying for a proper break. He booked himself into a luxury hotel, drank cocktails at the bar in the evenings, and spent his days fishing in the calm emerald-green waters that caressed the edges of the resort’s sandy beach and that gently rocked the colorful small boats moored at the ramshackle pier of a nearby fishing village. On his first afternoon, the banker struck a deal with one of the local fishermen, who sat idly on the pier in the sunshine, and who agreed to take the banker to a good fishing spot in his little boat for a few hours each day. On the third day, as he sat in the boat fishing, the banker began to question the fisherman about his life.

“How many fish do you catch on a good day?” he asked.

“I never catch more than five.”

“Why?” the banker asked, astounded. He had been able to catch seven on his second day and was hoping to break his record that day.

“Why not?” the fisherman replied. “We only need five. My family and I, we couldn’t eat more than that, and fish don’t keep.”

“Why don’t you sell the additional ones at the market, or to the hotel?”

“Why should I?” the fisherman shrugged.

“To make a profit, of course! In just a few weeks, you could earn enough to buy a second boat, and an employee, and together you could catch even more fish, and earn even more money. You could soon afford an entire flotilla of boats, build warehouses for storage and sell your fish at markets that are further away.”

“But why would I want to do this?” The fisherman was genuinely puzzled.

“You would grow rich!”

“And then? What would I do with my money?”

The banker laughed. He thought the fisherman was pulling his leg. But when the latter remained silent, the banker tried to explain further: “You could buy Porsches, live in a big house with air-conditioning and a pool, wear fancy clothes, buy the latest technological equipment. You could drink champagne instead of water. You could eat oysters every day. You could buy your wife designer handbags and Manolo Blahniks. You could send your children to Harvard!”

The fisherman was not impressed. These things did not mean anything to him.

The banker started to become exasperated. But then he had an idea: “You could go on holidays to great places like this one, and spend all day enjoying the sun and fishing!”

“But I’m already doing that,” the fisherman said, smiling, and then he rowed the banker back to the shore.¹³

Investing more energy in work in order to multiply one’s money with the purpose of rendering life more enjoyable and comfortable, or of buying earlier retirement, would be a different version of the traditionalist attitude—a more systematic, future-orientated pursuit of pleasure. In communities driven by the Protestant work ethic, however, there is no such hedonistic, life- and fun-loving motivation behind the dedication to work—surplus capital gained is simply reinvested to earn more money. Earning money is merely a by-product of doing well in one’s vocation, rather than the original aim, and the fruits of hard labor are not spent on creaturely comforts, which were considered sinful and base. Weber argues that Protestants save rather than spend and are therefore able to accumulate capital. But what is the driving force behind the desire to do well in one’s profession, if pleasure and material wealth as values in their own right do not matter?

Weber explains this puzzling phenomenon with recourse to the essentially ascetic nature of the Protestant work ethic. Protestant reformers such as Martin Luther, John Calvin, and John Knox attempted to limit the role of intermediaries between believers and God, including priests and the church as an institution, and attacked established customs such as confession and indulgences. The reformists wished to get rid of what they considered “magical” sacramental practices that promised grace and salvation. Weber describes this process as the “disenchantment” of the modern world: the spiritual consequences of sinful behavior could no longer simply be forgiven if one expressed remorse in the confessionary or purchased one’s salvation in the form of a letter of indulgence. Therefore, one’s entire life had to be systematically managed so that believers could derive from it continual reassurance about their state of grace, on the one hand, and avoid even the occasional slipping into sin, on the other. As a result, asceticism (formerly practiced only by monks) took on a renewed importance. In Protestant cultures, Weber argues, asceticism was gradually transformed from a monastic spiritual practice into a worldly one, as it had become the principal way of controlling one’s state of grace or, at least, the external signs that were thought to signal a state of grace. And one’s complete dedication to the profession to which one has been called by God, as well as the rationalization of one’s lifestyle, were the primary means of achieving this asceticism in a worldly setting.¹⁴

These, in a nutshell, are the processes that, according to Weber, explain how industriousness, frugality, efficiency, discipline, and a strong sense of personal responsibility became the very fabric of the Protestant moral code. The emphasis on the value of asceticism and industriousness also explains the condemnation of everything that stood in their way—above all, comfort, indulgence, sensual pleasure, waste, and rest. As a consequence, attitudes not just toward work but also toward rest and time changed dramatically. Weber argues that relaxation and the enjoyment of worldly possessions was seen as a dangerous distraction from a holy life. The saints’ everlasting rest, he writes, is in the next world. Yet on Earth, humans above all have to fulfill God’s calling:

Not leisure and enjoyment, but only activity serves to increase the glory of God, according to the definite manifestations of His will.

Waste of time is thus the first and in principle the deadliest of sins. The span of human life is infinitely short and precious in order to reassure oneself of one’s calling. Loss of time through sociability, “idle talk,” luxury, even more sleep than is necessary for health—six to at most eight hours—is worthy of absolute moral condemnation.¹⁵

Here, we can see that once again, wasteful (that is, nonproductive) activities and rest have been classified as sins—just as acedia had been defined as one of the Seven Deadly Sins in the Middle Ages. The sudden renewed increase in cultural anxieties about exhaustion and its effects occurred precisely at the historical moment when the values that exhaustion threatened (above all, activity, productivity, and progress) rose in importance and became an ineradicable part of our social fabric. In other words, exhaustion is the flip side of the dominant cultural values of the modern era. The more important these values became, the more their opposites were feared and vilified: wasting time and lack of energy and ambition became the primary secular sins of the capitalist age. The squandering of time and energy was considered as scandalous an act as the squandering of money itself.

And yet there is a further twist to be added to this argument: as Rabinbach has suggested, technological progress is also essentially driven by the hopes of redemption from labor, by the desire to avoid hard, crude, and unnecessary physical work and the bodily fatigue that comes in its wake.¹⁶ Many innovations are the result of visions of less or easier work: think of such simple devices as washing machines, excavators, and suitcases on wheels; or imagine robots able to perform human tasks so that we no longer have to do them ourselves. Modernity, then, in a paradoxical move, causes exhaustion but is also driven forward by the desire to avoid exhaustion.

The German novelist Thomas Mann, just like Weber, describes himself explicitly as neurasthenic in his diaries and letters. Illness, particularly nervous ailments, and the connection between illness and genius more generally, is a topic that was to preoccupy him all his life. In his first novel, Buddenbrooks (1901), Mann reflects explicitly on the effects of work and capitalist competition on the body, mind, and spirit of the individual. The novel is set in the nineteenth century and chronicles the social, physical, and psychological decline of a German bourgeois merchant family, the descendants of which become increasingly unable to perform well in a new market-driven economic setting. The fall of the Buddenbrooks is contrasted with the rise of the nouveau-riche and economically much more adventurous Hagenströms, who signal a new era in which coarse and ruthless capitalists are victorious. The Hagenströms are blessed with a healthy appetite (both literally and metaphorically), and their children are vigorous and socially successful. The members of the Buddenbrook family, in contrast, battle with exhaustion, nervous weakness, hypochondria, melancholia, tuberculosis, bad teeth, and world-weariness.

The brothers Thomas and Christian Buddenbrook represent the generation in which the family’s fortunes begin visibly to deteriorate. Christian, the younger of the two, is a clownish hypochondriac, obsessed with an increasing number of trivial nervous and bodily ailments. He squanders his wealth, time, and talents and ends up in an asylum. His reproachful brother Thomas describes him in medical terms as “a growth, an unhealthy pustule on the body of our family.”¹⁷ For Thomas, who takes over the family business, bourgeois existence turns into an increasingly difficult charade. His commercial dealings do not go well—he lacks the entrepreneurial ruthlessness and acumen of his competitors. The pressures of the changed economic landscape oppress him, as do the many misfortunes of his siblings. He grows weary of, and alienated from, his family and his profession and finds it ever more difficult to keep up the social masquerade. He becomes anxiously obsessed with his clothes, his appearance, and external symbols of status and wealth, precisely because he knows that beneath the surface everything is falling apart. When he reads Schopenhauer’s The World as Will and Representation, the book has a devastating effect on him.

Mann’s description of Thomas’s state of psychological, physical, and spiritual exhaustion, which is brought on not just by the corrupting influence of Schopenhauer but also by too much hard work and the hopelessness of the task of trying to rescue the family’s business in a radically transformed socioeconomic landscape, centers on the waning of engagement and commitment, a feeling of existential emptiness, and the excessive and increasingly impossible investment of energy that is necessary in performing simple tasks and upholding a socially acceptable façade:

And, in truth, Thomas Buddenbrook’s existence was no different from that of an actor—an actor whose life has become one long production, which, but for a few brief hours for relaxation, draws on and consumes unceasingly all his energy [beständig alle Kräfte in Anspruch nimmt und verzehrt]. In the absence of any passionate, authentic interest, which would have engaged him, his inward impoverishment and desolation oppressed him almost without any relief, with a constant, dull chagrin, while he stubbornly clung to an inner duty and the tenacious determination to be worthily representative, to conceal his inward decline, and to preserve “the dehors” whatever it cost him. All this made of his life, his every word, his every motion, his every interaction with people, an artificial, self-conscious, forced, exhausting and nerve-wrecking act of histrionics.¹⁸

Thomas soon dies an ignoble death as a result of an infected tooth. His son Hanno, the last of the Buddenbrooks, is of a pale and weakly constitution, hypersensitive, effeminate, nervous, and completely incapable of performing ordinary worldly tasks. He fears pressure, work, and competition. The only areas of joy in his life are a homoerotic friendship with an aspiring young writer and improvising on the piano. Hanno dies young as a consequence of overexertion—after an emotionally draining session playing Wagner on the piano, he succumbs to tuberculosis.

In Buddenbrooks, Mann connects nervous weakness and world-weariness with modern culture and its discontents. These include the need for an ever more complex repression of sexual desires, a loosening of family bonds, and the shift from traditional values and an old-fashioned Protestant work ethic to a new, more cold-blooded type of competitive capitalism. The representatives of the old world suffer bankruptcy, marry badly, and fall from grace. Mann’s novel suggests that there is something about artistic and sensitive people that is incompatible with the new world order. The decline of the family’s social status and mental and bodily health is accompanied, or perhaps even caused, by an increase in sensitivity and artistic inclinations. Thomas’s father, for example, is extremely religious; Christian spends most of his time in the theater and most of his money on entertaining actresses; Thomas marries an eccentric violinist and develops a fatal interest in metaphysics. It is no coincidence that Hanno, a sickly and hypersensitive artist figure, is deemed to have no chance of survival from the moment he is born.

Mann’s alignment of nervous weakness and mental instability with the arts draws, as we have seen, on a much older topos: as far back as the fourth century B.C.E., Aristotle associated the melancholic temperament with scholarship, creativity, and genius, a link that Marsilio Ficino strengthened further in the fifteenth century. What Mann adds to this idea is that the competition-driven modern world has become so hostile to those who are born sensitive that their very survival is at risk.

In our own times, the imperative to be productive and the desire to earn money have been stripped entirely of the spiritual dimension that Weber argues they possessed in the past. It is ironic that in many Western countries today (unlike in Japan, for example), hard work is no longer held a value in itself. Gone are the days when a long-term strategy for professional success—based on drudgery, long apprenticeships, and life-long learning—was considered admirable. Subjects that require a sustained cognitive effort, such as modern languages, are in danger of all but disappearing from higher education. “Get-rich-quick” schemes, the appeal of the promise of lotteries to create millionaires in two seconds, climbing the property ladder, risky investments, and reckless stock market trades are the new “magical” ladders leading to salvation. The figure of the investment banker, in particular, has attracted so much attention recently because it embodies the hope that we can all get obscenely rich without any long-term physical or intellectual effort. In many ways, the antifutural, impatient “maximum-results-with-minimum-effort” mentality that characterizes our age is the very opposite of the Protestant work ethic and more akin to the mind-set of the gambler and the drug addict: both desire instant bliss without exertion and pursue it without any regard for the long-term consequences.

It is no wonder, then, that our age has seen the advent of another phenomenon: capitalism fatigue. The idea that a drive to maximize profit, growth, and progress at all costs is a “natural” human desire, and that unregulated free-market capitalism is the only system that allows it to thrive, is one that still dominates economic policies in the West. However, the mantra of growth for growth’s sake, the celebration of unfettered consumption on credit, and the basic premises of neoliberal market theories are increasingly being questioned, and not just by economists on the left. A discontent with the globalized version of capitalism is becoming ever more tangible, and it is taking many different forms.

In The Price of Inequality: How Today’s Divided Society Endangers Our Future, the Nobel Prize–winning economist Joseph Stiglitz challenges the dogma of neoliberal and laissez-faire economic policies. He argues that a very small, very wealthy, and very powerful elite with vested interests determines economic policies in the West, all of which are designed to render them even richer. He challenges the “trickle-down myth”: the economic activities of the super-rich elite are not productive and do not result in more jobs or investment in infrastructure, since they are mainly of a distributive, “rent-extracting” nature. Stiglitz provides compelling evidence for the fact that, as a result of deregulating the markets, the incomes of a small elite have exploded out of proportion while average incomes have fallen and inequality has increased. While Stiglitz does not argue against free-market capitalism as such, he recommends systematic government regulation as a cure for the rapidly growing chasm between rich and poor. Without such constraints, this chasm, and especially the gap between the 1 percent of super-earners and the rest of the population, will not just result in social problems but indeed threaten the stability of the market itself: excessive inequality of the kind we are currently witnessing, Stiglitz warns, creates volatility, undermines productivity, and hinders growth.¹⁹

The French economist Thomas Pikkety’s best-selling Capital in the Twenty-First Century (2013) provides a painstakingly researched empirical-historical account of the evolution of inequality, showing that an ever smaller number of people control an ever larger concentration of capital, and that this tendency, if unchecked, will lead to the inevitable demise of the system in its current form.²⁰ The British economist Adair Turner goes even further. He argues that there is something fundamentally wrong with the ways in which “growth” is uncritically accepted as a value and pursued by Western governments as the ultimate aim of all economic policies.²¹ Various so-called happiness economists, such as Kate Pickett, Richard Wilkinson, Richard Layard, Bruno Frey, and Alois Stutzer, have provided compelling statistic evidence that economic growth does not automatically translate into increased happiness.²² On the contrary, growth, particularly in the Anglo-American version of capitalism, is generally accompanied by increased inequality, which diminishes human happiness and brings with it its own specific forms of exhaustion, on both a broader cultural and an individual-psychological level. Earning enough money to allow for all primary human needs (such as food, accommodation, education, and health care) to be covered comfortably does matter, of course. There is no doubt that poverty renders people unhappy. But there is no statistically measurable correlation between happiness and an income that exceeds this minimum level: beyond a basic living wage, there is a flattening of the relationship between income and well-being. One winter coat, for example, keeps you warm, but two do not keep you warmer. The added benefits of luxury, style, and status are marginal factors that cannot bring about or sustain an increase in contentment. The adverse and socially corrosive effects of inequality, in contrast, such as rising crime levels, falling education and literacy standards, health and addiction problems, obesity, and teenage pregnancy rates, are likely to be so severe that they outweigh the benefits of allowing a tiny proportion of the population to grow wealthier.

The numerous studies conducted by the happiness economists confirm a very simple and old idea: money cannot buy happiness. Stiglitz’s, Pikkety’s, Turner’s, and many other studies attest to a growing disenchantment in the West with capitalism in its current neoliberal form. There is a steep rise in books and media reports dedicated to capitalism’s night sides, ranging from the appalling conditions in Southeast Asian sweatshops and the grave environmental disasters such as oil spills and leaking nuclear power stations, to the mindboggling bonuses paid out to precisely the bankers who have gambled away the foundations of their own companies, and much else besides.

Capitalism fatigue finds its perhaps most visible expression in the Occupy movement, which emerged in Spain in March 2011 under the label Indignados and in the United States in the autumn of 2011 as the Occupy Wall Street movement and then spread to many other countries. The Occupy movement uses the slogan “We are the 99%” and protests against the mounting power of multinational global corporations over politics, growing social and economic inequality, and the failure legally to prosecute those responsible for causing the financial crisis. Yet the movement has been criticized for a lack of alternative goals—its advocates are, above all, negators, militating against the current system, rather than proposing concrete and realizable action plans. In addition, what renders this and other antiglobalization movements potentially less impactful than, say, left-wing protests in the 1960s and 1970s, is the fact that there simply appear to be no viable alternatives to capitalism. Following the demise of the last serious Communist regimes in the 1990s, we are left with only one, albeit deeply flawed, system. The situation is reminiscent of self-loathing, depressed people feeling strongly that they can simply no longer continue being themselves, yet there is nothing else they can be.

It is worth remembering, however, that there may at least be better, more humane versions of capitalism out there that acknowledge the importance of individual well-being and the quality of life of the many, insist on legislation to bring about a less exhausting work–life balance for its workforce, and place more emphasis on maintaining a reasonable equilibrium between the avoidance of obscene levels of inequality and the pursuit of growth. The Scandinavian model, for instance, demonstrates more concern for the general welfare of its citizens by prioritizing areas such as education, childcare, affordable housing, and a functioning benefit and health-care system, which contrasts starkly with the main aims of the exclusively growth-focused Anglo-American brand of capitalism. The pursuit of growth for growth’s sake demands a high price—not just socially but also psychologically and physically, as the steep rise of neurasthenia, depression, and burnout in our century and the previous two shows.

Goncharov, Weber, Mann, and numerous other writers and thinkers have raised serious questions about the psychological, ethical, and experiential consequences of modern attitudes toward work and growth that many of us tend to accept uncritically. Turner and Stieglitz, too, argue that what is needed is, above all, a shift in priorities and a reintroduction of moral principles into economic policy making. They propose therapy rather than a radical revolution. Yet whether a gentle readjustment will be able to restore trust in what in many respects appears an exhausted model of organizing economic activities remains to be seen.