part0014

Can disembedded markets and the capital form of money as their medium take on the function of a symbolic self-representation of capitalist society? In the case that the answer is ‘yes’, their status would become similar to what Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann have called a ‘symbolic universe’ (Berger and Luckmann 1967), thus entering into a kind of successorship to institutionally specialised religion. As I am going to argue in this chapter, the answer is not simply ‘yes’, but ‘yes and no’: on the one hand, disembedded markets appear as the utmost universal social system, transcending and bridging even the realms of religion-based civilisations and hence performing the function of self-representation in some sense more adequately than religions. Capitalism has achieved something that none of the so-called ‘world religions’ had ever been able to come close to doing, namely, creating a social nexus that truly includes all of mankind. All that happens in society, including even the militant ‘revival’ of religions or national identities being observed today, is now occurring within that nexus. Capitalism has created its own global civilisation, whose impact on society does not extend only to the sphere of material reproduction, but also to the inner worlds of culture, morality and subjectivity. On the other hand, disembedded markets represent only a rudimentary, relational form of sociality, and thus fall far behind the substantial solidarity provided by religious, ethnic or kinship identities. They continue to depend on their symbiosis with the latter, as markets can work only in an environment offering a minimum of local accountability and reliability. As I am going to argue, this symbiosis is a contradictory and precarious one; it tends to produce self-reinforcing antagonisms, which are highlighted in the present-day debate on globalisation.

Defining the collective identity of the world-society means – to recall the point discussed in Chapter 5 – drawing a distinction; a distinction, however, always has an internal and an external side. Beyond the internal side of social integration, we have to consider the eternal side of managing the unknowable and non-disposable. As we have seen, the counterpart of the social universality of capitalism is its claim on the unknowable via the private appropriation of the creative capacities of labour. Creativity confines itself no longer to religious, philosophical or artistic contemplation, such as in the ancient high cultures, but takes an encompassing and practically transforming character. Thus, with regard to the ‘external’ side of contingency management, there is indeed some analogy between capitalism and the religions; again, however, this analogy turns out to be a bounded and ambivalent one. On the one hand, disembedded markets constitute a system of ‘discovery’, to use Friedrich von Hayek’s term. Due to its built-in expansionary dynamics, capitalism is determined to gain new lands and to explore and develop hitherto-unknown human potentials – a dynamic that indeed has parallels with the biblical claim that God guided people into the Promised Land. On the other hand, there are two differences between capitalism and religious faith. First, religious faith is related to a wide range of mundane and cosmic contingencies, including issues such as the finite character of human life, the creation of the world, and the end of history. The capitalist discovery process, by contrast, concentrates on a much narrower realm of mundane contingencies and earthly well-being, a realm which, however, had always been vital for religious believers too (Max Weber had emphasised this point). Second, the ‘management’ of contingency typically has a different meaning in both systems: while the religious believer finds his fulfilment in the faithful acquiescence to God’s will, capitalism finds its mission in the active transformation and mastery of the outer world, though active and transformative elements are not absent in many religious denominations too. The boundary between transcendence and immanence becomes liquid, giving capitalism its ‘demonic’ character, to use Paul Tillich’s (1988) term. Different from religious faith, the spirit of capitalism can never reach a state of tranquillity, and cannot promise final redemption. The only possible ‘redemption’ that capitalism can offer lies in the process of creative destruction itself. Never being able to content itself with its successes, capitalism is bound to open ever-new horizons of contingence. Again, the mechanisms of the capitalist discovery process need closer consideration, which will be the subject of Chapter 9 . As I am going to show, it is just the success of capitalist innovation that is undermining its own socio-structural underpinnings and that thus tends to paralyse itself. Again, we can see here how the capitalist dream of absolute wealth is destroying itself, just as it is becoming a religion for all mankind.

Here, I will concentrate on elaborating the two general aspects of societal boundary management, and thereby examine the functional equivalence thesis between capitalism and religion. I will then discuss these two aspects in turn.

The classical liberals, from Adam Smith, Jeremy Bentham and Herbert Spencer to Ludwig von Mises, Friedrich von Hayek and Karl Popper, considered markets to be the core of an ‘open’ society, which was free to everybody irrespective of ethnicity, race, gender, class or religion, and to be able to institute the principle of individual freedom and self-determination. Markets are a social system enabling individual interests to coincide with the interests of all others in a spontaneous way free from political domination; so far, this economic version of liberalism shares the legacy of enlightened secularism, as noted above (Chapter 3 ). Indeed, the tendency of markets to transcend the boundaries between nation-states, cultures and civilisations and to create a global division of labour seems beyond controversy. With the trade liberalisations of the nineteenth century and again after the Second World War, the global character of capitalism intensified further. The evolution of markets went parallel with the invention of new global communication media such as the telegraph, the telephone and the internet. At the same time, however, the emerging market-based world-society gave rise to unprecedented social polarisations and transnational economic inequalities. Therefore, it would be misleading to conceptualise the nexus of disembedded markets as an emergent form of global ‘solidarity’ in a Durkheimian sense, as Richard Münch (2011: 107) has suggested. This would mean watering down Emile Durkheim’s strong assumptions about the institutional preconditions of contract, which certainly do not apply to present-day global capitalism, despite the existence of global organisations like the United Nations, the World Trade Organization and non-governmental organisations, whose power over national states continues to be weak. On the other hand, it would be similarly misleading to consider the global market with Polanyi and other critical theorists as a ‘technocratic’ system governed by nothing but the ‘artificial’ motive of material gain. An individual profit motive – on this point Marx had been much clearer than Polanyi – can arise only on the basis of money as an institutionalised social medium coordinating individual transactions. Via money, society is always present as a third partner in apparently utilitarian transactions – a point that is lacking in Polanyi’s analysis (Hart 2009).

As a socially integrating device, money works in a way different from Durkheimian institutions, as had been pointed out in various ways by Max Weber and Georg Simmel. The difference can be summarised in two points. First, markets and money as their medium constitute the utmost ‘impersonal’ social relation, cross-cutting locally bounded norms of solidarity and brotherhood, and removing traditional privileges of insiders vis-à-vis outsiders (Weber 1972: 382; 1978: 544), while Durkheimian institutions are clearly bound to particular communities of a religious or national kind. Second, money does not integrate individual interests, like religions do, by subordinating them to an overarching collective identity and moral obligation. Though moral obligations are by no means absent in market transactions and though a minimum amount of collective trust in currencies appears to be indispensable to the success of transactions (Ganssmann 2011), money works in a relational, network-like way. Unlike a religious ethic, money is not at odds with individual vanities, but shows an almost infinite capacity to integrate heterogeneous wants, thus laying the groundwork for ‘individual freedom’ in society. Every transaction does not only involve the immediate partners, but an open number of mostly anonymous indirect participants appearing only in the mirror of prices and costs. By virtue of its relational character, the nexus of money and markets bypasses the logic of social inclusion and exclusion inherent in traditional ethnic, national and religious identities; 1 emotional neutrality and cool opportunism supersede the pattern of friend and foe. Free markets are open to anybody, irrespective of race, gender, nation, religion and other ascribed social characteristics. Due to the social construction of labour power as private ‘property’, even those who in fact own nothing are included. Thus, money and markets can overcome the class dichotomy between poor and rich, as the failure of Marxism to construct a separate ‘class identity’ for workers has demonstrated. Even the outsiders of society, such as criminals and terrorists, cannot do without money. Thus, if there is a medium representing the encompassing unity of modern society, the most convincing candidate to fill this function is clearly money, not states, religions or civilisations.

Another classic author who emphasised the universal nature of markets is George Herbert Mead. Mead’s considerations are of particular interest from my point of view, since they concentrate on comparing religion and the economy as two basic kinds of human universality. Mead stressed that ‘each of them becomes universal in its working character, not universal because of any philosophical abstraction involved in them’ (Mead 1934: 289). Upon closer inspection, however, the universality of markets and the universality of religion differ in important points. The economic process is more ‘superficial’ and apparently ‘materialistic’ in its character, whereas religious cults require the individual to take the ‘inner attitude’ of the other believers, understanding their existential needs and helping them to save their souls. However, the economic attitude is much easier to communicate between strangers than the religious one: ‘It is quite possible to understand anybody who comes to you with something of value which you want to get; if he can express himself in commercial terms, you can understand him. If he comes to you, however, with this particular religious cult, the chances are very great that you cannot comprehend him’ (Mead 1934: 296). Moreover, the economic process, as it is going on, tends to overcome its superficiality, because it requires the participants to communicate with each other, to identify with potential customers and suppliers, and to anticipate their needs. Mead’s conclusion is that the potential of markets to create a universal social nexus is higher than that of religion. Whereas religions often had been sources of warfare between groups and nations, the economic process can bring ‘a closer and closer relationship between communities which may be definitively opposed to each other politically’ (Mead 1934: 282). And he argued: ‘It has been the most universal socializing factor in our whole modern society, more universally recognizable than religion’ (Mead 1934: 295–296). Markets and money transcend the boundaries of religious communities, representing a form of universality that is working in practice and that is beyond abstract theological or philosophical reasoning.

The attitude of rivalry and mistrust that markets and money have generated at almost all times from the side of churches (Weber 1972: 352–353; Simmel 1989b [1900]: 306) can be explained largely by their universal characteristics. Money and market based individualism have a subversive influence on religious communities, as they challenge their internal coherence, as well as their external boundaries. Markets create a sphere of personal freedom which undermines the social control exerted by religious authorities; they open channels for individual mobility and social rise, including the chance to escape oppressive religious and political regimes via transnational migration. The dynamics of money-based individualisation in turn puts religious communities under pressure to adapt and to make themselves compatible with the regime of disembedded markets.

The reverse side of the universality of markets is what I have called above ( Chapter 3 ) their ‘moral minimalism’. Markets do not know solidarity, nor do show any collective accountability for personal risks (except for insurance systems, which are based on commercial principles). At the same time, markets confront actors with a vast amount of uncertainty, making individual chances of success incalculable in many cases. This applies to all dimensions of disembedding, the territorial and the social as well as the material and the temporal. Transnational commodity and service markets are subject to fluctuations largely beyond the control of national economic policies and nationally based corporate strategies, let alone individual actors. Nevertheless, collective and individual control policies are widespread: states are trying to protect national markets by imposing trade barriers or capital controls. Corporations strive to gain control over their markets by forming monopolies, cartels, or network relationships with suppliers and customers; and workers organise in unions – practices which have been analysed extensively in economic sociology following Mark Granovetter’s (1985) seminal article. In most cases, markets are not ‘pure’ ones governed by atomistic competition, but rather they are more or less ‘organised’ ones subject to the control of states, corporations and networks. Moreover, market exchange gives rise to at least three basic coordination problems – the problem of the valuation of goods; the regulation of competition; and the regulation of cooperation (Beckert and Aspers 2011) – which can be solved only by the setting of rules by political institutions or sectoral business organisations. However, though such practices may provide a certain amount of local calculability, they cannot eliminate the uncertainty of markets, so far is it from their transnational or global reach. Under conditions of globally declining demand, cartels often collapse or end up in downward spirals of mutual retaliation, as it could be observed in numerous cases (e.g. oil, ship-building, steel). The volatility of commodity and service markets is reinforced by that of global financial markets with their problems of auto-reference of investment decisions and of extreme fluctuations generated by speculative moves. The incalculability of individual market chances does not come only from the sheer size of markets, but also from the volatility and the dynamic character of the market process itself. Given that amount of complexity, the knowledge of actors can never be sufficient to anticipate the conditions of their own success. As a consequence, the social norm of personal accountability, which is constitutive for a liberal society, becomes fictitious to a large degree.

The impact of social and material disembedding on the calculability of individual market chances is different, but it is even graver. Due to the separation of the material and personal factors of production from each other, economic actors find themselves divided into two classes of proprietors, one of them owning capital assets and the other one being positioned on the debt side of capital and faced with the need to sell their labour power. For the non-propertied, this means that they are confronted with an additional dimension of uncertainty beyond the general contingency of markets. Different from the owners of capital, they do not command the material means to be successful in markets. They are subject to the market in an immediate, personal sense, as the only ‘asset’ which they can offer is their labour power – so far there is not much to add to Marx’s early theory of alienation. The commodification of labour confronts individuals with a double-bind dilemma, which Robert Merton (1968) has highlighted in his well-known analysis of anomie: while capitalism institutes financial success as a paramount social norm, it withholds the legal means to conform to this norm to the non-propertied, that is, most members of society. A widespread option for individual actors to cope with this dilemma is what Merton called ‘innovation’, which is the attempt to conform to the ideal of financial wealth through illegal means, the other possible options being ‘ritualism’ (strict conformity with legal rules while sacrificing the rewards of wealth), ‘retreat’, or ‘rebellion’. A capitalist society of disembedded markets thus can be described largely as an anomic system, as it affords one the chance to lead a life in conformity with institutionalised aims and rules only to a privileged minority. The term ‘anomie’ (going back to Durkheim) circumscribes the impossibility for individual actors to identify with the perspectives of all others, which would be the precondition for moral integration.

One could object, along with Joseph Schumpeter and Friedrich Hayek, that the incompatibility of social norms with the factual distribution of legal means does not give rise to ‘innovation’ in the sense of unlawful behaviour, as Merton argued. Individual actors can cope with the double-bind dilemma of social ends and means also in a legal and socially productive way, such as in the case of economic entrepreneurship. Though entrepreneurs sometimes tend to operate at the edge of the law too, they do not formally break the law: they disrupt economic, technical and social routines when searching for unconventional ways towards market success. The dynamic and innovative nature of capitalism goes back largely to this type of economic entrepreneurship – not only of self-employed entrepreneurs, but also of employees striving for performance-based internal advance in firms. 2 Thus, one could argue that it is just the inconsistency between social norms and the lack of personal means that generates creative modes of individual adaptation and thus promotes innovation and social dynamics.

There is an element of truth in this argument because it is indeed the relative openness of capitalist society and the prospect of social advancement that is driving capitalist dynamics (I will come back to this point below in Chapter 9 ). The liberal argument, however, misses the point that it is not only the existence of the market itself that allows entrepreneurs to rise, but the parallel existence of non-market institutions and support systems, which provide necessary resources and protect actors against the risks of unlimited market exposure. The institutional guarantee of property rights by the state (North 1990) is not enough. The availability of network support by families, neighbourhood and ethnic communities, as well as risk capital providers and business ‘angels’ are key preconditions for successful entrepreneurship, as many empirical studies have shown (Portes and Zhou 1992; Aldrich 2005; Corsino and Soto 2005; Granovetter 2005a; Mizrachi 2005; Stamm 2013). For employees, internal labour markets, collective bargaining systems, a non-discriminating educational system, and the welfare state are vital factors that help to generate entrepreneurial ambition. Without the support of such systems, individuals with lower-class backgrounds would have little motive to invest in their qualifications and to work hard for social ascension.

To put it in a different way, the capitalist system can develop its dynamic and innovative capacities only under the condition of being more than a ‘pure’ market society. It is not the market alone, but the factual symbiosis of markets with functionally differentiated non-market institutions and networks that lays the groundwork for capitalist entrepreneurship. Wolfgang Streeck (2009, 2011) has described this as a kind of coexistence between ‘Williamsonian’ and ‘Durkheimian’ institutions, which is anything but a stable and harmonious one. Rather, due to the parasitic aspects of the relationship of markets with non-market institutions, it is prone to self-destructive feedback circles. On the one hand, only ‘Durkheimian’ institutions like states, associations or families can provide that minimum level of local trustworthiness, stability and solidarity in market relations that are vital for entrepreneurs. Setting and safeguarding the market as a historical institution is not something that can be left over to the market itself, but rather depends on the political and social solidarity of citizens. Moreover, even capitalist enterprises as forms of organised cooperation need interpersonal trust and cannot function solely according to the logic of market competition, as a vast literature on organisations and organisational cultures has shown (see Schein 2017). Last, but not least, markets, as a real institution, would be unthinkable without families, schools and local networks socialising children and qualifying individuals to participate in the complex social world that they create.

On the other hand, the individualising forces of globalised competition are undermining these very non-economic institutions that frame and safeguard private property. The owner of capital, being globally mobile, is in a position superior to those depending on locally bound non-market solidarities, as he or she always has the option to pack up and leave. Public infrastructure, therefore, crumbles, as tax revenues decline due to the tax evasion of the wealthy. Ever-present pressures for ‘economisation’ in the world’s education, science and health systems as well as in popular culture and the media are undermining the functional differentiation of society (Schimank and Volkmann 2017). Aggressive innovators gain an edge not by observing market regulations, but by circumventing or breaking them. Well-established firms and industries decline just because of having settled too comfortably with their own organisational culture. Families of entrepreneurs fall apart due to rivalries between their members (Stamm 2013); networks disintegrate, as participants defect due to opportunist motives. The revolutionising impact of entrepreneurial innovation finally does not spare the social foundations of entrepreneurship themselves. With the self-destructive consequences of entrepreneurial competition, the anomic and socially polarising implications of disembedded markets are now coming to the surface (see also Michéa 2014).

The contradictions revealing themselves here have little to do with the Habermasian ‘colonialisation’ of the life-world. The self-destructive tendencies of entrepreneurship should not be equated with an invasion of a supposedly asocial systemic logic of markets into the communication-based life-world from the outside, as Habermas (1981: Vol. II: 447–448) does. Rather, they are related to conflicting dimensions of sociality and unanticipated consequences of action evolving just as a consequence of the global success of the liberal freedom narrative itself. Far away from reflecting only ‘systemic’ imperatives, disembedded markets constitute a moral claim of an utmost universal and pervasive character, as recent authors (Neckel 2008; Michéa 2014; Bröckling 2016) have emphasised. Today, ‘entrepreneurship’, ‘empowerment’, ‘creativity’ and ‘self-fulfilment’ have become the keywords of an ever-present media and coaching industry aiming to give advice to freelancers and employees on their way to economic success and reinforcing the disciplining effects of the market environment itself. Here, creativity is no longer framed as a free activity, but takes on the paradoxical form of an ultimate social obligation. The universalism of markets culminates in a moral imperative for the single actor to perfect their social self-enactment, competencies and performances. The entrepreneurial person has to prove himself or herself in a world which is no less opaque than the hidden God ( deus absconditus ) of Calvinism. Similar to the Calvinist believer, who can never be certain about his or her personal state of salvation, they can never content themselves with their past achievements. Salvation, if possible at all, can come only from the process of never ending self-improvement. In the regime of disembedded markets, perfect personal autonomy coincides with perfect social adaptation and governance. Under such conditions, the Kantian idea of individual freedom, being compatible with the freedom of everybody, ends up in a nightmare scenario; here, Michel Foucault’s critique of neoliberalism and modern subjectivity as a form of total ‘governance’ finds its justification (Bröckling 2016). 3 The market narrative ignores the parallel involvement of individuals in non-market spheres, which they have to balance with each other (Honneth 2002). 4 With its encompassing, irrefutable as well as irredeemable claims, the market narrative tends to dominate the entire conduct of life; it is incompatible not only with functional differentiation, but also with what Michael Walzer has called the pluralism of the ‘spheres of justice’, which he deems vital for the flourishing of a free society (Walzer 1983).

Full conformity with the imperatives of the market is possible only for those who possess sufficient financial, social and cultural capital, and – hence – who are in a position to devote themselves to symbolic celebrations of entrepreneurship while avoiding its real hazards. This has begun to apply to an increasingly influential ‘transnational class’ that is composed of corporate, state, technical and consumerist factions (Sklair 2001; Caroll 2010) and that is capable of leading a cosmopolitan lifestyle. Living on the sunny side of globalisation, the members of this class feel comfortable with market ideologies, be it in their conservative or in their green-multiculturalist versions, which seem to fit perfectly with their social experiences. Though cosmopolitan values implicitly presuppose an appropriate personal endowment of capital in its diverse forms, 5 their cultural impact reaches far beyond the circles of the wealthy. The less wealthy are caught in a conflict between their idols and their dependence on the very non-market resources and networks at the local level that are threatened by the creative destructive forces of globalised capital. If they do not venture the hazards of an entrepreneurial existence, they may arrange themselves with market ideologies in a ceremonious way by observing the rituals of self-perfection on a formal level while factually following conventional lifestyles. Others may choose the option of ‘retreat’, in Merton’s (1968) sense, in both cases sometimes at the price of serious personal disadvantages. Workers in traditional industrial settings may still opt for the collective organisation and defence of their interests, though deindustrialisation in many advanced industrial countries has led to a lasting decline in the power unions, and has thus largely removed this option from the table.

At the other extreme, the losers of globalisation may opt for rebellion in its various forms, ranging from the extreme left to the extreme right. While the leftist versions have lost ground in the present, right-wing forms of rebellion in the sense of a militant resuscitation of local collective identities and cultural traditions appear to be on the rise again – a development which in some sense looks similar to that which occurred in the first half of the twentieth century. As mentioned above ( Chapter 4 ), Benjamin Barber has highlighted recent developments in the globalisation process. And he frames the push-and-pull of this process in as that between ‘Jihad’ and ‘McWorld’: ‘After all, Jihad and McWorld operate with equal strength in opposite directions, the one driven by parochial hatreds, the other by universalizing markets, the one re-creating ancient subnational and ethnic borders from within, the other making national borders porous from the outside’ (Barber 1996: 6). In such a constellation, the religious furor of market universalism is countered by an equally fervent invocation of local, ethnic and religious particularisms, giving the lie to the liberal dream of a mankind unified by ‘ doux commerce’. As Barber argued, the relationship between McWorld and Jihad is a ‘dialectical’ one, with both forces not constraining but rather reinvigorating each other. In a similar vein, Michael Geyer and Charles Bright have argued that globalisation – though not destroying states – has a tendency

Today, such interpretations appear prophetic, given the spectacular successes of nationalist political movements in many European countries and in the United States, mounting popular opposition against the European Union and the Euro (Kuhn et al. 2016), and the rise of authoritarian regimes in countries like Russia and Turkey. The former optimism surrounding globalisation has given way to an increasing rift between cosmopolitan and communitarian ideologies and preferences of the electorate, which is deeply divided on issues such as the openness of national borders, the importance of supranational vs. national governance, and the relevance of universal human rights vs. local collective identities. This poses a considerable challenge to the social cohesion of Western democracies (Zürn and de Wilde 2016). 6 Moreover, the disillusionment with economic globalisation is likely lying behind much of which in the above-discussed studies has been referred to as a ‘return’ of religions, in particular the return of Islamic fundamentalism. The recourse to ‘authentic’ traditions and values to be observed here can largely be interpreted as a defensive response to the factual globalisation of economic and social relations. It is the background of mounting interdependence, which involuntarily shifts hitherto unnoticed or irrelevant cultural differences to the focus of attention: ‘The recent globe-wide assertion of particularistic ideas is heavily contextualized by the phenomenon of increasing globality’ (Robertson and Chirico 1985: 233). The gods re-emerging here are no longer the original gods but are re-invented ones, responding to the larger religion of capitalist globalisation. The demons of capitalism are replaced only by other demons of an even more dubious kind, which cannot undo capitalist globalisation and which cannot the basis of true identity and social stability. As Pankaj Mishra (2017) has shown, this is a dilemma that has not only evolved in the most recent past. The capitalist promise of absolute wealth always tended to evoke more desires and ambitions than it could satisfy. As a result, it nourished ressentiment on the side of the late-comers, the excluded, and the underprivileged, which took militant forms even from the very beginnings of modern capitalism in the late eighteenth century.

In the social sciences, the central issues that have been arising out of the globalisation debate since the end of the 1980s still appear to be unsettled. Above all, there is the controversy between the globalisation optimists, who point to globalisation as a social reality based on transnational markets, corporations, networks, and cultures, and the pessimists, who insist that genuine social cohesion cannot be based on markets but only on inherited collective identities. By their very nature, such identities – be they kinship ties, local communities, or nations, religions, or civilisations – are not global but particular (this includes even supranational political associations like the EU, which is still a regional phenomenon). While an optimistic tone seemed to prevail in globalisation studies until the turn of the millennium (for an overview, see Held and McGrew 2000; Lechner and Boli 2000), the trend has begun to swing in the other direction since then in scholarship as well as in politics. Today, the mainstream view in political science and sociology seems to have become sceptical of globalisation. National ‘container’ theories of society are now widespread, as Barrie Axford (2013) has noted in his overview. 7

The conclusion so far is that neither the vision of market-based social universalism nor the restoration of local, national or religious identities alone can offer satisfying answers to the social tensions created by capitalist globalisation. As a model for real life – beyond the great philosophical utopias – the ideal of cosmopolitan individuality presupposes an appropriate endowment with capital in its diverse forms, which the vast majority of the population, even in the advanced industrial countries, does not command. The idea of cosmopolitan individualism, thus, cannot but vastly overtax most people, though it clearly would be premature to abandon the liberal idea altogether. Without being framed by functionally different non-market institutions at the national and local levels, markets are likely to produce irrational and destructive outcomes. It is only due to the factual plurality of institutions that markets can become manageable in practice. The very same non-market institutions, however, appear as obstacles against the freedom of competition, which is why they come under pressure to change, to adapt, or to be dismantled altogether. In this way, capitalism indeed tends to undermine its own social foundations. With non-market institutions declining, militant counter-movements at the local or national levels are likely to emerge. Thus, the universal claim of markets ends up in vicious feedback circles between global and local identities, and apparently there is no political recipe to stop their acceleration.

The promise of wealth, affluence and happiness is a central source of legitimation for capitalism, and a key driver of its dynamic. A manifestation of the capitalist dream machine is the often-cited global ‘consumption culture’ inventing ever new goods, artefacts and designs which become the objects of consumers’ desire just because they are different from the old ones, and hence can serve as social status markers (Baudrillard 1998; Skidelsky and Skidelsky 2012). However, this is not all. As a long-term view on the industrial revolutions of capitalism shows, the transformative impact of capitalism on everyday life goes far beyond the idols of consumption. With basic inventions, such as the steam engine, the railway, the airplane, the automobile, electricity, the telegraph, the telephone, the computer and the internet, capitalism has managed to overcome the practical limitations of space and time. It has created a vast range of new lifestyle opportunities not only for small elites but for large masses of people. Journeys that took months still in the early nineteenth century, for example, take only a few hours today; worldwide communication, which had been cumbersome in pre-capitalist times, now works almost instantaneously. Individual mobility and individual connectivity have risen spectacularly; information horizons have expanded. The productivity of manual and intellectual work has been enhanced spectacularly due to industrial innovations, making work as well as life much more comfortable. The inventions in chemistry and pharmaceuticals have helped to prolong human life and to fight many diseases deemed incurable in former ages. They have also contributed to vast productivity increases in agriculture, thus averting the apparent capacity bottlenecks that would have prevented our being able to nourish a growing population – the bottlenecks which Thomas Malthus had warned of. As noted above (Chapter 4 ), the rise of new technologies was often accompanied by sweeping utopias, visions, and imaginations of a positive and a negative variety (Sturken et al. 2004). For those who lived at the time of these inventions, it was not always easy to believe in their natural origin, such as in the case of early users of the telegraph, who thought it was connected with supra-natural spirits through the electric wires (Sconce 2004). The industrial revolutions of capitalism have transformed human life in ways that were unprecedented and never could have been predicted by any observer. To earlier generations, the new technologies could not have appeared as anything but miracles falling from heaven. At the same time, the industrial revolutions meant a historically unprecedented amount of human intervention into the natural environment, the dangerous and destructive consequences of which have only become an issue of urgent discussion in the recent past.

There is no doubt that miracles are vital for religions too, including the monotheistic ones. Even the cursory reader of the Bible is familiar with the miracles performed not only by Jesus himself, but even by the apostles (e.g. Luke 4:31–40; 5:1–26; Acts 14:8–11; 19:11–12), and their importance as a means of enhancing the credibility of the related message. Miracles appear to play a much smaller role in the life of the Prophet Mohammed; 8 instead, the Koran offers colourful descriptions of wealth and opulence prevailing in paradise. Capitalism does not promise such heavenly pleasures: it neither offers an answer to the questions related to the finite character of human life, 9 nor provides a solution to the meaning and end of history. Instead of heavenly rewards, capitalism offers all the more reliable ways to attain earthly ones, such as health, material welfare, social status, and individual freedom, which – of course – always have been relevant for religious believers too. At the same time, the social mechanisms by which innovations are realised in capitalism are by no means entirely different from those used in religion. In both cases, charismatic leaders preaching myths and visions, and leading believers are vital. 10 Entrepreneurs and business leaders, such as Henry Ford, Bill Gates and Steve Jobs, see it as their mission to communicate their projects beyond narrow expert networks into the broader public. Comparable to religious prophets, they spark hopes, rouse confidence and point the way to progress. Mobilising the public is a decisive factor in bringing about successful innovation. Innovative visions and paradigms work like self-fulfilling prophecies: projects that appear utterly phantasmal in their initial phase (consider only the idea of the airplane around 1900), may become a realistic undertaking if the protagonists are successful in winning a critical mass of relevant actors to ‘believe’ and to invest in the project (Lampel 2001). Innovation myths develop in all arenas of the economy, including not only production, technology and organisation but also consumption, where the rise and fall of fashions and trends is a widely discussed phenomenon (Deutschmann 2001, 2008, 2012a; Hirschle 2012; Beckert 2016). Capitalist myths, like religious ones, can mobilise collective forces and literally ‘move mountains’ if they are successful.

As a means to control the creativity of human work, capital represents a powerful rival to religion, since it embodies perhaps the strongest of all utopian powers: private command over what mankind can do . In its approach to control mundane contingencies, capitalism even appears superior to the religions, because it is based on man’s active mastery of the outer world, not only, as in the religions, on faithful acquiescence to God’s will. Capitalism does not only raise promises, it can also keep them. However, the activism of the capitalist spirit also has its dark side, since it never can reach a stable state of tranquillity. While religious myths are indifferent against the historical flow of time, capitalist innovation myths tend to exhaust themselves with their implementation and therefore have to be continuously generated anew. As mentioned above ( Chapter 4 ), human creativity is a resource that can never be defined comprehensively and can materialise itself only in a never-ending process of ‘growth’. No particular paradigm of innovation can ever articulate the totality of human potentials; therefore, the career of innovations typically is made up of a sequence of phases, stretching from invention, demonstration and growth, to slowdown and maturity (Freeman and Louca 2001: 146). The mobilising impact of innovative paradigms on the economy and on society as a whole is confined to the initial phases, when the potentials of the new paradigm are still unexplored, when they can open new horizons and when they can motivate new investments. As soon as a new technology becomes established and institutionalised, slowdown sets in and profits tend to decline. To avoid the imminent danger of stagnation and recession, new inventions and myths, to be financed by new debts, need to be generated. Capitalism thus can never promise definitive redemption, but can opt only between growth and decline. It cannot escape the state of permanent self-indebtedness and settle down into a stationary state of reproduction. Capitalism is a machine to generate and to fulfil new desires; what it cannot overcome is the habit of desiring.

From this perspective, capitalist uncertainty management clearly has its limits, and profound differences with religious ideas of salvation come into view. Above all, the religious dichotomy between transcendence and immanence becomes liquid in capitalism. This brings society into a condition of permanent self-insufficiency and unrest, which Paul Tillich has circumscribed with his concept of ‘the demonic’. The demonic is the destruction of form by ‘the desire for infinity’ (Tillich 1989: 68), and it includes not only destructive (i.e. satanic) forces but creative forces as well. A demonic being is an ‘intermediate’ being that is located within and, at the same time, torn apart by two different categories of life, such as between animal and human, or between human and god. Due to this ‘intermediate’ existence, the demon is never able to content itself with its given condition, and it is doomed to permanent unrest. In a similar sense, capitalist society can never reach a stable state of tranquillity, as Tillich argues. As opposed to the conventional religions, the capitalist spirit does not aim at the reconciliation of the believer with God. It does not face the absolute on the level of communication, prayer and sacrifice, but in an attitude of never-ending conquest and appropriation. Contingency management, therefore, takes on the character of a Sisyphean task, with contingency emerging continuously anew, as soon it is put under control.

The obvious question is this: can the Sisyphean work really go on indefinitely? Many doubts have been raised concerning this question. Above all, there are the environmentalists, who point to the devastating impact of energy-intensive economic growth on the natural environment and insist that it is urgent that the growth stop along with the consumption of energy, natural resources and CO 2 emissions, lest we lose the planet. While the necessity for such planet-friendly policies is largely uncontroversial today, there is much more disagreement about whether successful environmental policies are possible under capitalism or only under a ‘de-growth’ regime with reduced levels of consumption and production, which would presuppose an overthrow of capitalism. While there is no doubt that capitalist growth has followed an energy-intensive path in the past, there are no a priori reasons, why this should be the case also in the future. Advocates of so-called ‘green capitalism’ have argued that there is no iron law for capitalism to continue energy-intensive growth (Global Commission on the Economy and the Climate 2014). Given the foreseeable continuity of worldwide population growth, the only promising option to establish a sustainable economic regime would be to make use of the innovative potential of capitalism. In any case, an effective turn towards a sustainable economy would require vast amounts of capital investment, and, hence, of growth as well.

I will not go deeper into this still largely open debate here. Neither will I enter into a detailed discussion of recent theories of secular stagnation, which have been suggested by prominent economists, such as Larry Summers and Richard Gordon (e.g. Gordon 2014). These approaches emphasise the impact of scientific progress on growth, and they point to a slowdown of scientific inventions as a likely cause of the decline of growth rates. The counter-argument is that it is not scientific progress as such (whose course is largely unpredictable) that drives capitalist growth, but the entrepreneurial transformation of scientific inventions into marketable innovations (as had been Schumpeter’s well-known point). The key question is not whether capitalism is able to produce enough scientific inventions (which is an unanswerable question), but whether it will be able to generate entrepreneurs as a particular category of social actors, who can transform scientific discoveries into marketable innovations. It is not scientific progress but entrepreneurship that could become the real bottleneck for growth. This is an empirical hypothesis open to sociological enquiry, to which I will now turn.