Abstract
Alan S Kahan, Mind vs. Money: The War between Intellectuals and Capitalism, Transaction: New Brunswick, NJ, 2010; 302 pp.; 9781412810630, £29.95 (hbk)
Reviewed by: Willie Thompson, South Shields, UK
The initial impression on beginning this volume is that it is some form of academic joke – its opening sentence reads ‘For over 150 years, western intellectuals have been at war with capitalism’. However, as is soon apparent, it is intended to be taken altogether seriously. The book’s subtitle clearly identifies its theme, begging the question of whether any such ‘war’ has ever actually occurred. It goes on to disregard virtually every methodological rule applicable to the human sciences or indeed sciences of any sort. Factual error, of which there is no great shortage, is probably the least of its faults. Argument is not constructed out of critically examined evidence; instead evidence is selectively mobilized and tailored to support a pre-given conviction. Consequently Kahan’s survey is characterized by major historical lacunae.
Categorizations are arbitrarily made and as arbitrarily discarded. Bizarre definitions are advanced. Statements are sometimes contradicted a few paragraphs or even sentences later, and along with other gems of dialectical dexterity Kahan frequently indulges in ‘the indefinite multiplication of subordinate hypotheses’, attempting to rescue dubious generalizations by explaining away qualifications and anomalies, as when he comes to discuss the neoconservatives. Even though the argument takes the form of a historical survey, there is a manifest lack of historical sensitivity – Kahan’s historical figures, despite reference to ‘several important differences’, are twenty-first-century consciousnesses in togas, doublets or breeches as the case may be.
His thesis is that intellectuals have been almost always (not merely in the past 150 years) irredeemably hostile to capitalism and have regrettably from time to time seduced mass movements into similar attitudes. Exceptionally, for a few decades covering the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, leading intellectuals viewed commerce as a force for liberation, peace and equality (there is no mention of eighteenth-century commercial wars or the slave trade; plantation slavery is adjudged to be anti-capitalist). Soon, however, all that changed and thereafter it was downhill all the way. Anti-capitalist ideas and intellectuals have been the source of the twentieth century’s miseries. In this scenario not only professed socialists and communists were guilty. The reader is informed that both Mussolini and Hitler were intellectuals (and of course a species of socialist) hostile to capitalism. Anti-Semitism too is a form of anti-capitalism.
Kahan begins in ancient Greece and continues into the present. One category of intellectual however is entirely absent from the discussion, namely the mainstream economists after Adam Smith. None are even mentioned, apart from a passing allusion to Hayek. Neither Ricardo, Marshall, Schumpeter nor Jevons, appear in these pages. The most astounding omission must be J.M. Keynes, surely the intellectual’s intellectual, whose purpose in life was to save capitalism from itself. A later twentieth-century parallel, J.K. Galbraith, is likewise ignored. As to what allegedly motivates such a low opinion of capitalism on the part of intellectuals, divided arbitrarily into the categories of academics and bohemians, the answer is simple – and simplistic. Kahan’s amateur psychoanalysis diagnoses it as personal gripe, feelings of inadequacy or guilt, lust for power and, inevitably, ‘self-hatred’ (15).
If the definition and account of intellectuals here is vague and shoddy, that of capitalism is non-existent – no definition is attempted. It appears in this volume to mean any sort of commercial society, in the eighteenth century as much as in the present. Capital is never examined and, though the author has a lot to say about Marx, accused of obsessive anti-Semitism (139–40), neither is Capital. Mind vs. Money is not any sort of analysis, but rather a morality fable in a historically illiterate framework. Whatever capitalism in this version may be, it is exempt from systemic failings, and the USA is alleged to be the most democratic society on the planet. If not yet in a state of total perfection, capitalism is certainly the best of all possible economic worlds and immune to rational challenge.
Not that Kahan wants to get rid of intellectuals. Rather, he would like to transform them so that they can serve as licensed jesters in the court of King Capital by drawing attention to marginal imperfections. He expresses this hope in his closing sentence: ‘This is how we make the world safe for intellectuals, and safe from them’.