The market order as metaphysical loot: Theology and the contested legitimacy of consumer capitalism

The market order as secularized religious order

In her magisterial survey of the rise of capitalism in the West, the economic historian Deirdre McCloskey observed that by around 1800, people in North-Western Europe and North America had come to accept the increasing dominance of the market economy over social relationships with ‘more or less good grace’ (McCloskey, 2010: 23). Like McCloskey, most students of modern capitalism have started their historical investigations with the insight that from the late 18th century onwards, the emerging capitalist market order became slowly but steadily seen as a ‘normal’, obvious and legitimate form of social organization. The legitimacy of this order, although acknowledged by most authors as a fact, has of course not been left unchallenged. Marxist historians have argued that the capitalist market order suited the increasingly mobile middle classes and was thus imposed from above, often through violently removing opposition from the lower social ranks whose communities were threatened by the needs of the voracious machinery of global trade, finance and manufacturing.

Yet, when charting the intellectual history of the gradual embrace of market transactions, both Marxist and non-Marxist historians agree that the ideological upheavals of the late 18th-century Enlightenment forcefully undermined the boundaries that religious teachings had set for economic activities. For better or worse, economic behaviour became ‘liberated’ from the moral considerations thrust upon traders and consumers from the cloisters and the pulpits (Appleby, 2010; Hirschman, 1977; MacPherson, 1962; McCloskey, 2006; McCloskey, 2010; Rothschild, 2001). The historical narrative underlying this idea of capitalism as a form of secularization thus takes on the following shape: the Middle Ages and much of the early-modern period were dominated by theological concepts and religious norms that explained, governed and regulated market activities. During that age, markets, like all other parts of the social-political world, stood on the ‘wrong’ side of the dichotomy that divided heavenly kingdom and sinful world. Although market actors might have practically engaged in forms of economic behaviour that ignored religious dogma, for instance by forming monopolies and by withholding goods from the market in order to inflate prices, or by creating information asymmetries and exploiting whimsical fashions, the economy was imagined by contemporaries in metaphysical terms as a moral-social realm within which the salvation of the sinner could be won or lost. For that reason, as Pribram and Tawney argued, the church felt legitimized, and indeed obliged, to rule on all matters economic (Pribram, 1983: 6–7; Tawney, 1998/1926).

With the Enlightenment, at least according to this well-established narrative, the metaphysics of the market economy became radically changed by the process of secularization. The gradual dismantling of the supremacy that theology held over moral philosophy and science created a ‘possessive individualism’ (Macpherson) which saw man as possessor and proprietor of his own personal capacities, who owed society nothing for them: ‘society [became] a lot of free equal individuals, related to each other as proprietors of their own capacities’ (MacPherson, 1962: 3). Salvation seemed no longer the starting point and key focus of economic theory-building, which instead came to rely on a separation between religious, i.e. private, ideas and secular political-economic, i.e. public, thought. In line with this narrative of separation between theology and the secular realm, most historians today are keen to show that the Enlightenment did not alter the economic interests of past market actors per se, but that it transformed the metaphysical imagination which grounded their behaviour. In that very imagination, the market was removed from an overarching, transcendent moral universe and placed into the hands of a moral philosophy which started from the immanent, natural disposition to ‘truck, barter and exchange’ (Smith, 2003/1776: 25). The theological language that could still be found in Adam Smith’s work, for example, is then interpreted merely as highly persuasive ‘rhetoric’ (McCloskey, 1995: 95; Rothschild, 2001: 136–137).

Existing narratives of the intellectual history of modern market capitalism, thus, largely take for granted the legitimatory discourses that the proponents of the European and North-American Enlightenment constructed. There is perhaps no other scholar who better managed to wring together the different strands of these discourses into one coherent philosophy than Hans Blumenberg in his proclamation of the Legitimacy of the Modern Age (Blumenberg, 1999/1966). Blumenberg constructed an epochal shift from a pre-modern and religious to a modern and secular cosmology that was based on and legitimized by notions of progress, innovation, individual self-determination and human curiosity. This construction still stands as a silent saviour behind most accounts of the intellectual history of capitalism written today. Following Blumenberg, both modern science and capitalist market organization came to be understood as the outcome of the Enlightenment’s successful attempt at shedding off the yoke of Christian theology, and instead auto-create a cosmos of norms, concepts and beliefs that superseded a less sophisticated past.

Blumenberg’s tract was intended as a refutation of Carl Schmitt’s idea of a philosophy of history as political theology, which saw the Enlightenment and modern rationalism not as the outcome of the legitimate self-determination of an auto-created moral cosmos, but as an illegitimate metaphysical coup d’état (Bragagnolo, 2011; Ifergan, 2010) For Schmitt, the modern age was not much more than an unreflected, puerile aggression against medieval theology, which nevertheless pillaged and plundered the Christian cosmos for conceptual constructions in order to stabilize itself. Modernity came into existence metaphysically not via the separation from, but through the usurpation and re-appropriation of the theological devices and techniques that had been developed during the ‘dark ages’ (Blumenberg, 1999/1966: 106–109; Schmitt, 1922: 41–55; Schmitt, 1970: 88–89; Schmitz and Lepper, 2007: 105–113).

With Schmitt, I argue that the emergence of the capitalist market order and its underpinnings in moral philosophy and economic theory was not, as described by most economic historians, the outcome of a separation of entrepreneurial curiosity and desire for economic innovation from inhibiting religious dogma. In contrast, I argue that the metaphysical foundations of market capitalism were the outcome of an expropriation and appropriation of theological concepts, devices and techniques. As such, this process resembled the illegitimacy of the original ‘secularization’, the forceful expropriation of church property and its re-appropriation by the modern state. The religious idiom found in 18th-, 19th-, and 20th-century economic and marketing theory does not constitute merely the remnants of contemporary ‘Christian rhetoric’, but offers a glimpse on theological riches, expropriated and appropriated metaphysical assets that had originally been designed to enable individual salvation.

The focal point of a Schmittian unraveling of the intricacies of the capitalist market order is Adam Smith’s attempt at identifying the unnatural and socially disruptive mechanisms of market capitalism as the pillars of a somehow ‘obvious and simple system of natural liberty’ (Smith, 2003/1776: 873). Curiously, Smith’s natural disposition to ‘truck, barter and exchange’ existed among all people throughout all ages, and yet nowhere did this disposition lead to the emergence of modern, capitalist market societies other than in those cultural-geographical areas where a specific constellation of theological concepts, devices and techniques infused market interactions with salvatory qualities. Within this constellation, which expressed itself in the Netherlands, in Britain, France, and North America from the 17th century onwards, the mobilization of the calculating, opportunity-oriented individual and the political system of a democracy of valuation, argumentation and persuasion became connected for the first time in a coherent form. This constellation was not based on some kind of ‘natural propensity’ to earn money and seek profits, which, as already Max Weber reminded his readers, existed in all ages and ‘among all sorts and conditions of men’ (Weber, 1930/1905: 17). Instead, this constellation of ideas consisted of a peculiar mix of three elements: firstly, the late-Scholastic theology of the accounting and the accountable Self, especially as adopted and developed by Lutheranism and Calvinism; secondly, Protestant ecclesiology with its emphasis on the priesthood of the common man and on the importance of individual witness and testimony of God’s existence and grace; and thirdly, the post-Reformation, Deist theology that presented God’s creation as a benign, self-ordering kosmos. In the course of my argument, I therefore largely follow authors like Colin Campbell, Alexander Rüstow, Jacob Viner and Max Weber, who have located the ‘spiritual’ origins of the social-economic logic of modern consumer capitalism in a peculiar mix of Protestant theology and Enlightenment Deism (Campbell, 2005: 136–37; Rüstow, 1950: 15–24; Viner, 1972: 28–47; Weber, 1930/1905). The conclusions reached by these sociologists and economists as regards the metaphysical, ‘spiritual’ foundations of modern capitalism, however, deserve to be pushed much further as they ultimately point in the direction of the disputed legitimacy of the modern age in general and of market capitalism in particular.

The ‘extreme necessity’ for the self-determination of reason against the dogmatism of theology, which Blumenberg invoked (Blumenberg, 1999/1966: 108), never existed. Against Blumenberg, I argue that those trader-philosophers who created the metaphysics of the market order merely felt inconvenienced by the moral norms of the medieval cosmos and therefore knowingly and unscrupulously delved into the toolbox of religious thought and theological devices not only in order make recurrent, organized profitability (Weber, 1930/1905) and the sensuous enjoyment of material goods (Campbell, 2005) seem permissible and even advisable. More importantly, they elevated the idée fixe that life was essentially a series of choices from which there was no escape to the essence of human existence as such. Theology’s capacity for empowering social structures that offered both salvation and justice was therefore not separated from a newly emerging alternative, ‘modern’ cosmos, but the former was looted to avouch for the construction of the latter. From the early 17th century onwards, economists, marketers, traders, and later the marketing profession itself, expropriated and then re-appropriated theological and ecclesiological concepts that accommodated their metaphysical and political aims.

Traders, consumers and god as shopkeeper

One of the key moments in the intellectual history of capitalism occurred in March 1656, when the testament of the notorious Boston trader, shopkeeper, and marketer Robert Keayne was opened. It revealed a 53-page document that justified Keayne’s life-long devotion to the perfection and exploitation of life’s choice architecture. What became known as the Apologia of Robert Keayne was in fact one of the first coherent outlines of reasons for why profit-seeking through the creation of information asymmetries between market actors, calculated price escalation for imported goods, and the dexterous management of profit-margins across a portfolio of market offerings was not a ‘sin’ but a legitimate and justified form of social behaviour. Keayne had overcharged customers for the linen and needles they bought from him and he was duly hauled in front of local Presbyterian Church committees several times to explain his actions. Embittered, he penned his apologia to write off the debt he had incurred on his soul and on society. Keayne’s testament seems to confirm the narrative that market capitalism was brought about by modern mavericks, who attacked the firm hold that religious elites, like Boston’s Presbyterian church-elders, had on all matters pertaining to the social-moral fabric of the community (Bailyn, 1950; Tawney 1998/1926: 128–131). A closer inspection of the public trials and private justification of Robert Keayne however shows him as extremely well-versed in the interpretation of the Bible and the history of religious thought. His employment of the genre of the apologia as a theological device for the defense of his actions was in itself a citation of the Apostles Peter’s and Paul’s, and St Augustine’s use of this genre to explain the hope they had that the sinful world they saw around them was indeed saved and justified (1 Peter, 3: 15; Romans, 1–3; St Augustine, 1998).

From the time of the Reformation, trader-philosophers like Keayne had at their disposal a unique combination of theological devices and techniques that allowed them to present the ordering of economies around profit-motive and free consumer choice not as sinful and destructive but as benign, just and conforming to God’s will. As mentioned earlier, we can identify the ingredients of this mix, which provided the metaphysical leaven for the emerging capitalist market order as, firstly, Scholastic teachings about the nature of the soul, which gave rise to the confessional habit, resulting in turn in a specifically Western culture of accounting, auto-consultation and diary-writing. The painstaking soul-searching which became a unique feature of late-medieval Western culture directly influenced the Augustinian monk Martin Luther, whose interpretation of St Paul led him to develop the second ingredient, an ecclesiology which understood transcendent belief as a form of personal conviction and testimony, and the individual believer as a priest in their own right. The third ingredient was added by the Deists of the early Enlightenment, who revived interest in Platonist cosmology and neo-Platonist theology. The theology of Deism directly provided metaphysical ammunition to economists who argued that one should desist from trying to micro-manage the behaviour of traders and consumers for the common good, because market-based economies had a habit of bringing about that common good by themselves if only left to their own devices.

The intellectual journey of the modern market order thus begins with scholastic thinkers like Avicenna and Thomas Aquinas, who laid heavy emphasis on the individuization enabled by the existence of the soul, which allowed self-awareness and self-consciousness in human beings. According to Chloe Taylor (2009), these teachings became increasingly central to practical religious life during the Middle Ages, especially when in 1215 the Fourth Lateran Council decreed that all believers should at least once a year give an account of their behaviour through the Sacrament of Penance. Now commonly known as confession, this sacrament allowed the individual conscience to express itself and it therefore fulfilled an important spiritual role (Hahn and Schorch, 2007; Taylor, 2009: 51–55). Both the individually expressed belief in its normative content (Apostolic Creed), and the verbal account of one’s actual behaviour became key institutions that enabled people’s access to the re-enactment of the Lord’s Supper. This re-enactment not only (re)created the body of Christ but also that of the church and confirmed the real presence of Christ among the living. The existence of this collective body of believers and the real presence of Christ in the Supper saved the world that had fallen from paradise. Thus, a good and justified social order rested on a verbal expression of one’s belief, on making the right choices, and a full verbal account of these choices. By enumerating, describing and declaring their sinful behaviours, entire populations in Europe were introduced to the idea that both an immaterial soul and an individual Self existed and that this Self was made up of the attitudes one developed and the choices one made in life (Foucault, 1993; Le Goff, 1986; Taylor, 2009).

The ‘truth’ and legitimacy of these choices and attitudes resided in the ‘sacred heart’, a visual representation of the heart of Jesus which symbolized the justification of mankind in the eyes of Christ (Hoepfl, 2008). While the Catholic version of the ‘sacred heart’ often showed it enclosed in small glass-boxes or burning within the body of the resurrected Christ, the Reformation ‘revealed’ the closed nature of attitudes and choices and threw open the sacred heart for the sake of deeper, and more public, investigation. Protestant religious thought with its emphasis on choice and individual belief as a form of becoming witness to God’s grace instituted a movement of constant self-examination and deep anxieties over salvation. Eventually, an entire body of confessional literature emerged which advised people on how to search their souls for hidden attitudes and how to give an honest account of one’s behaviour before confessing one’s sins. ¹ But the Catholic Church had already connected this mental preparation for confession to the idea of making decisions, of choosing and of voting (lat. votum = prayer, wish, desire, promise). Long before voting became part of the struggle for democracy and universal suffrage, the Catholic Church developed the institution of the ‘suffrage of the faithful’, also known as ‘prayers for the dead’, which allowed the living to pray for, and thus to ‘vote’ (lat. suffragari = to vote) for the poor souls in purgatory. Catholic chapels still provide spaces for prayer, donations and the lighting of candles in order to enable the living ‘to vote’ for the dead and promote their ascension to heaven.

The more radical reformed churches then merely transported this voting mechanism from the transcendental world of souls, heaven and hell into the immanent sphere of the living. The overbearing importance of the word, the truth and the testimony in Calvinism, and its literal-legalistic interpretation of the Bible consequentially expressed itself in public spectacles. A person arriving in the Puritan communities of New England during the 17th century, for example, had to go through a vetting process which was based on a jury of community members and church-elders scrutinizing the testimony given by this person. Acceptance into the group, and thus the salvation that came with being part of the ‘community of saints’ as the Puritans saw themselves, was dependent on being ‘voted in’ (Brauer, 1958; Champion, 1998; Hardman Moore, 2007).

Although, as in the Catholic Church, salvation was the key focus of all these concerns, Calvinism activated believers so that they would worry about every aspect of their lives in a constant search for evidence of damnation or salvation. Calvin’s predestination theory encouraged people to tirelessly look for signs of God in their lives. This total preoccupation with Self and salvation in turn gave rise to the confessional diary which first emerged among reformed Protestants. English Puritans wrote diaries to examine themselves and see whether their lives showed signs of having been chosen among ‘the Elect’ (Maculloch, 2004: 379, 457). With the diary, a cultural system of recording for the aim of self-improvement, self-motivation and self-activation emerged, which ended up being used by the market research industry from the early 1930s in form of the purchase diary. ²

Seeing God as the world’s ‘other’ (Schmitt, 1922: 53), and teaching unquestioned acceptance of man’s status as guilty and saved, both Luther and Calvin opened up a total focus on the Self as the object and the vehicle of salvation. In addition, individual choice and judgment became elevated to a quasi-sacred status. Although the Bible became the sole authority in spiritual matters, individuals were bestowed with the freedom of conscience to interpret it according to the stages of their individual life-journey (Chillingworth, 1638). To understand life as an auto-directed journey of the Self, whose course and progress could be charted through the type of written and tabulated accounts that Benjamin Franklin perfected in his diaries, enabled 17th-century trader-philosophers like Robert Keayne and John Bunyan to transfer knowledge-practices of hope and salvation on ‘hopeless’, but lucrative pursuits (Sloterdijk, 2006: 89–95). The English Baptist preacher Bunyan, whose life-journey turned him from an itinerant trader haunted by inner voices that told him to ‘sell Christ’ into the author of the Pilgrim’s Progress (1678/1684), embodied this connection between the Self-enabling account-book and the market-oriented mindset. According to Weber, Bunyan’s vision of the relationship of the sinner to God was that of the customer to the shopkeeper: ‘one who has once got into debt may well, by the product of all his virtuous acts, succeed in paying off the accumulated interest but never the principal. … The process of sanctifying life could thus almost take on the character of a business enterprise’ (Weber, 1930/1905: 124).

Accounting historians and historical sociologists have debated whether the institutionalization of the confession and of the religious diary had an influence on the development of early-modern capitalism through the emergence of accounting and double-entry book-keeping (Derks, 2008; Schumpeter, 1994: 121–130; Sombart, 1902; Yamey, 1949). What these debates have ignored so far is that constant soul-searching, the ‘accounting’ of one’s choices (Romans, 14: 12) and voting behaviour (Acts, 1: 23–26) were at the heart of Christian theology from the 13th century at least, and remained so until well into the 19th century. In the social context of the United States, these traits of Christian theology were even strengthened as church institutions became increasingly ‘democratized’, for example through the influence of widely-read religious magazines (Hatch, 1989).

In medieval theology, the church had occupied an important mediating role in the justification of the individual because of the sacraments, like the confession, which it was able to administer or deny. These sacraments and their observance in ritual helped the believer to be justified and ‘saved’ in the eyes of God. Luther rejected this position and argued that man could never be justified by his own actions but instead remained always both a sinner and justified (simul iustus et peccator). For Luther, people needed to gain subjective confirmation about their spiritual place in life, and this perpetual status-update only came through one’s individual belief in Christ, whose grace needed no church hierarchy as mediating authority. According to Luther’s interpretation of St Paul, it was only the Bible, now understood as God’s verbum externum, and the conscious faith and the belief (i.e. the interpretations) of the individual which ensured salvation.

Luther’s and Calvin’s emphasis on conscience and choice motivated and activated trader-philosophers, who from the mid-16th century began to promote the theological program of the Reformation and its teachings about man’s essential claim to ‘freedom’. This claim was supported by the juridification of the economy of salvation and grace which above all Martin Luther’s interpretation of St Paul introduced into Western theology and religious life. While St Paul had associated faith in Christ with being ‘made righteous’ and ‘set free’, Luther, who had studied law both briefly and unwillingly, re-contextualized these terms by interpreting ‘justification’ as a declaration of innocence in a judicial sense (Sanders, 2001: 53–58; Westerholm, 2004: 22–23). Protestant ecclesiology followed this re-contextualization with some stark consequences. Lutheran churches ‘democratized’ their structures of decision-making, and Presbyterian (Calvinist) churches turned from a collective body of all Baptised, as envisaged by Paul (1 Corinthian: 12–27), into what was essentially a series of courts, from the smallest gathering up to the General Assembly (Dörfler-Dierken, 2001: 13–32). Luther’s and Calvin’s teachings ‘activated’ believers by reinterpreting life as a series of choices and judgements that needed constant accounting and justification. Experienced and lived faith became a form of ‘witness’ and ‘testimony’ in the great courtroom of life.

In its account of the possibility of salvation, Lutheran and Reformed Protestantism assigned priority to individual choice and conscience. In the two centuries that lay between the Reformation and the Enlightenment, God was slowly replaced by an ‘Inner Light’ that burned in all members of the human race (Moore, 2000). In that process, God’s grace also ceased being a public good, administrated by the Catholic Church as monopoly supplier. The privatization of salvation naturally affected those who tried to square religious teachings and the economic practices of the multitude of priests that Lutheran ecclesiology declared all baptised Christians to be. The theory of capitalist markets that gradually became formulated during the 18th century continued to promote the idea that individually expressed choices, through some hidden mechanism like an ‘invisible hand’, led to a just and legitimate, that means righteous, social order. This particular nexus was perhaps best expressed by the German author Johann Andreas Wiegleb, who around 1715 penned a poem that boldly presented God as ‘a capitalist who betrays nobody’ and as a debtor who sought merciful individuals to be trustees of the Kingdom of Heaven (Stenzel, 1969: 85).

At the time of the publication of Wiegleb’s poem, the excesses of Calvinist teachings about predestination and condemnation of souls had become superseded by the more optimistic theologies of the Pietists and the early representatives of the Enlightenment. The combination of post-Calvinist reformed Protestantism and enlightened scepticism about miracles and revelation became particularly productive during the eighteenth century. After God had first become neatly separated from ‘the world’ and then internalized and privatized as ‘Inner Light’, early-modern thinkers like Adam Smith were now able to re-introduce God into the workings of the socio-economic machinery. Smith’s famous dictum about the ‘obvious and simple system of natural liberty’ that established itself of its own accord as if guided by an ‘invisible hand’ was in truth a Deist theological concept based on Platonist cosmology (Rüstow, 1950: 23–27; Viner, 1972: 47). The idea of the market as a beautiful and rational kosmos that should be protected from political meddling was later used in the same form by Friedrich August Hayek to legitimize the market as a principle of social-economic organization. For both the Deist moral philosopher Smith and the Kantian economist Hayek, the market had all the qualities of a kosmos, a ‘spontaneous order’ which regulated and balanced itself and needed protection from people trying to manipulate it in the pursuit of social justice, a term Hayek once derided as ‘an empty phrase with no determinable content’ (Harcourt, 2011: 128–130; Hayek, 1976: 133; Smith, 2006: 151–58). The ‘immense machine of the universe’ and the ‘universal happiness’ of those who inhabited this universe was ‘the business of God and not of man’, according to Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments (1976/1759: 236).

Smith, little busts of whom were put by Glaswegian traders into their shop-windows as a political statement in favour of free trade and low taxes, showed himself a child of his times when he described the free production and distribution of goods in the same language that contemporary Deist theology used in order to describe all creation as a great machine that followed natural laws by itself (Alvey, 2007; Denis, 2005; Hill, 2001). Any form of interference with this machine, whether practiced by men or imagined in their ideas, constituted a disruption of its natural, law-based and regular organization and was thus as superstitious as other supra-natural inclinations like magic or the belief in miracles and revelation (Thomas, 1991: 786). It was Deist theology which allowed Smith to see order and grace in the disorderly and often disgraceful reality of economic exchanges.

Smith’s vision of markets and society was ultimately based on an idea that Platonist theologians had propagated for centuries, namely that there existed a kind of universal purpose that acted to produce good even amidst the most unlikely of circumstances (Psalm 19: 1–6; Philippians 2 :13; Romans 8: 28). Smith’s socio-economic theorizing stood in the philosophical traditions of this kind of ontology. In The Theory of Moral Sentiments, Smith argued that all human beings had been created with the innate capacity to sympathize with others. Because of the divinely designed law of original sympathy, human beings felt a constant desire to being held in high regard by their fellow creatures. By stepping into the role of another person, and thus feeling and seeing as they felt and saw, people naturally succumbed to take part in a perennial ‘race for wealth, and honours, and preferments’, in order to ‘outstrip all [their] competitors’ (1976/1759: 82–83). This race, or competition, which emerged from people’s desire to seek the approval and positive disposedness of others around them, then produced the circumstances in which people tried harder to better their own situation as well as that of others (Denis, 1999; Forman-Barzilai, 2010: 196–210; Otteson, 2002: 205–228).

The notion of the divinely created sense of universal ‘sympathy’ later returned in Smith’s writings on economics, this time in form of the general principle of exchange by barter and trade. In Smith’s Wealth of Nations, individual subjects enacted God’s providence because their choices and urges ultimately created a good and stable order of affairs regarding resource allocation and the mutual adjustment of prices and demand. For Smith, it was the seeming egotism and unruliness of individuals that created a benign order, a kosmos, out of chaos (Smith 2003/1776: 568–72). The theological nature of Smith’s economics, its Deist-Platonist underpinnings, made his theory of markets an important predecessor of the political Romanticism of the nineteenth century (Schmitt, 1919). Rather than accept that markets are situations of resource conflict in which political decisions have to be made and are continuously being made, economic Romanticists like Smith were unwilling to recognize the essentially political, conflictual nature of such situations. Smith eschewed politics and fled into the fantasy-world of self-regulating market mechanisms. His economic theory thus merged Protestant sensibilities about the solitary nature of individual choice with political Liberalism, ‘where the emancipated private individual of the bourgeois social order is the only metaphysical authority’ left (Critchley, 2004: 109).

Like Robert Keayne a century before him, Smith provided a justification and legitimization (apologia) for the social order which traders and marketers aimed to establish. But each apologia has its transcendental sources, even if unacknowledged. Smith’s Deist economic theory did not expunge God at all: the world’s happiness was still God’s ‘business’, and divine providence ensured that individuals as the new metaphysical core of the market order brought about this happiness through their actions. This world was, thus, still constructed in terms of theological concepts, this time the divine design of universal happiness brought about by the ‘invisible hand’ of providence, and was arguably not the result of a shift from faith to reason (Nelson, 2001: 55–59, 101, 278–280; Oslington, 2011; Petsoulas, 2001: 147–48; Viner, 1960).

Religious concepts and their consequences: the formatting of the market

In contrast to the more radical strands of the European Enlightenment, American social and political philosophy continued to invest in the idea of social order as a manifest covenant with God (Moots, 2010). As shown by Nelson (2001) and Viner (1960, 1972) for the case of economics as an academic discipline, 19th- and 20th-century American trader-philosophers also continued to selectively appropriate elements of medieval and early-modern theology in order to construct an overarching metaphysics of the capitalist market order. These mechanisms through which markets became ‘moralized’ (Stehr, 2007) and infused with salvatory capacity can also be studied in the case of advertising and marketing as a field of commercial practices. These industries provide a fitting example for how a particular set of theological concepts came to be mobilized in the formatting of industrial market societies. American advertising agencies in particular promoted the Protestant conviction that individual choice was a form of ‘testimony’ and thus part of the pathway to salvation and justification.

The two foremost American advertising agencies, J. Walter Thompson (JWT), founded in 1864 in New York, and N. W. Ayer & Sons, founded in 1869 in Philadelphia, both enjoyed very close connections to the Christian publishing industry on the eastern seaboard and in the mid-West. The rapid growth of JWT, Ayer’s and many other American advertising agencies was propelled by a thriving market for religious weekly magazines, monthlies and annuals (Goldstein and Haveman, 2010; Lears, 1994: 46–53, 138–147; Moore, 1989). The strong relationship between religious organizations and the printing press had its roots in the belief that the Kingdom of God needed the convictions and actions of human beings in order to be brought about. Accordingly, an editorial in the Christian Herald in 1823 taught its readers: ‘The kingdom of God is a kingdom of means. … Preaching of the gospel is a Divine institution—“printing” no less so. They are kindred offices. The pulpit and the press are inseparably connected. The Press, then, is to be regarded with a sacred veneration and supported with religious care. The press must be supported or the pulpit falls’ (quoted in Hatch 1989: 142).

This veneration of the press as the mouthpiece of a chosen people in search of God’s own country rubbed off on the nascent American advertising industry because the periodical press needed advertisements in order to sustain its business model in a competitive media environment. Unlike the Catholic Church, which saw heavenly grace accessible through the institutional settings of the sacraments, the reformed churches became obsessed with the printed word of the Bible as the only divine institution permissible. American advertising professionals, who mostly hailed from a middle-class, white Anglo-Saxon Protestant background, shared this logo-centrism and viewed advertising as a way of forming consumer convictions mainly through the printed word (Hopkins, 1923; Lears, 1994: 110–111; Marchand, 1985: 32–38).

The American outlook on advertising as a commercial activity was thus underpinned by a theological position with regards to the powers of the printed word, which could form convictions in people and could lead them on the path of right choices. Advertising agents used the nexus between ‘verbum externum’ and human behaviour in order to justify their profession. In 1875, the Baptist Francis Wayland Ayer, founder of what was then America’s—and perhaps the world’s—largest advertising agency, N.W. Ayer & Son, wrote to a business friend who had expressed doubts over the moral worth of the advertising profession: ‘I have put my hand to this plough and by the help of the Lord I am going to finish the furrow. Before I have finished, you will come to me some day and say that you respect me for my business as well as myself’ (quoted in Lears, 1994: 93). Before settling in the advertising industry, Ayer had worked for periodicals like National Baptist and he built his agency around servicing religious weeklies. While building America’s number one advertising agency, he was a Sunday school superintendent and served for 25 years as president of the North Baptist State Convention of New Jersey (Hawkins, 1999). About him it was said that he was ‘such a man as Oliver Cromwell would have been had Oliver been allowed to become an advertising agent’ (Rowell, 1906: 258).

The Protestant faith in the market as the realm of a religious ‘calling’ was perhaps best represented by Bruce Fairchild Barton, co-founder of the then fourth largest advertising agency in America, Batten, Barton, Durstine and Osborne (today BBDO), one-time Republican Congressman and Public Relations advisor to US-President Calvin Coolidge (Buckley, 2003). Barton was born into a family of itinerant preachers, who in the 1880s settled in Oak Park, Illinois, where they formed the First Congregationalist Church. Barton attended Berea College, a Protestant liberal arts college in Kentucky and began work as editor for various religious and consumer magazines during the 1910s and 1920s. His magazine and newspaper essays quickly gained a large following among American readers because of their optimistic and positive outlook on life. Infused by the Protestant principle of pro-actively shaping one’s own fate, Barton used newspaper and journal columns to promise ‘More Power to You’ (Barton, 1917) and ‘Better Days’ (Barton, 1924). In 1925, Barton published a book entitled The Man Nobody Knows, in which he depicted Jesus as the ‘world’s greatest salesman’, an advertising executive whose power of speech attracted and motivated men and who instilled optimism and a sense of personality in all people he met (Barton, 1925; Fried, 2005: 4–20). In 1926, Barton followed this success story with The Book Nobody Knows, an interpretation of the Bible from the view-point of Madison Avenue, and a year later he summarized his secular sermons in the tract What Can a Man Believe? (Barton, 1926; Barton, 1927).

Just as the nascent advertising industry was strongly rooted in the religious fervour of the 19th century, the Anglo-American market and consumer research sector also seems to have been the precinct of distinct religious communities characterized by anxieties over salvation. Virtually the entire first generation of English and American market and consumer researchers was born into a religious constellation which ensured that notions of the individual conscience as the centre of salvation became the founding stone of the metaphysics of the market (Bercovic, 2010; Buckley, 1981; Macloughlin, 1971; Tomlins, 2010; Valeri, 2010). Early market researchers and consumer psychologists like George Gallup, Elmo Roper, Charles Coolidge Parlin, Walter Dill Scott, James McKeen Cattell, Edward Kellog Strong, Robert J. Silvey, and Henry Charles Link, marketing theorists like Wroe Alderson, and firms that committed themselves to the techniques of market and consumer research early on, like Rowntree’s in Britain and Quaker Oats in the United States, all belonged to a trans-Atlantic commercial culture dominated by Baptists, Quakers, Congregationalists, and Evangelical Christians (Alderson, 1956; Jeremy, 1998; Link, 1936; Schwarzkopf, 2011; Tamilia, 2007; Ward, 2010: 183; Wooliscroft, 2000).

Out of this large group of people, I will focus here on one market and consumer researcher whose publications highlight the direct line that can be drawn from Protestant theology to ‘modern’ consumer capitalism. This protagonist, the staunch Southern Baptist Henry Grady Weaver, was General Motors’ first director of consumer research and a great popularizer of the market and consumer research agenda in the United States. Although perhaps best known for publicizing the benefits of consumer research for both the general public and corporate management, for example by appearing on Times magazine’s front-page in November 1938, he also authored widely read texts on the political-theological underpinnings of the American market economy (Marchand, 1998).

In 1947, Weaver published a book entitled Mainspring, a bestselling Libertarian-Protestant apologia for free-market capitalism and its inherent Christian-Judeo ‘virtues of self-reliance, self-improvement, self-faith, self-respect, [and] self-discipline’ (Weaver, 1947: 26). In the book, Weaver rejected all government control of private enterprise by reminding his readers that ‘Christ spoke of the God of Abraham. The God of Truth. The God of Rightness. The God that does not control any man but who judges the acts of every man’. Weaver also used the book to advocate a political structure that ‘unleashed the creative energies’ of individuals, leaving them free to work and consume as they pleased (Weaver, 1947: 66, 5). In the book, Weaver brought together two strands of intellectual developments which together made up the metaphysical basis of 20th-century consumer capitalism: the Protestant emphasis on life as individual effort and hard work, and the Deist belief in universal harmony. For Weaver, competition was the ‘practical manifestation of human beings in free control of their individual affairs, arriving at a balance in their relationship with one another’ (Weaver, 1947: 16). Attempts to regulate this ‘balance’ through the meddling authority of political decisions merely destabilized the ‘natural order’ that emerged between individuals in society (Weaver, 1947: 16–19). To Weaver, this principle was ‘as inexorable as any law of physics’ (Weaver, 1947: 203), but it relied on human beings re-organizing and mobilizing themselves as fully independent individuals: ‘There are no substitutes for self-faith, self-reliance, self-development, individual effort and personal responsibility. Life on earth is no bed of roses. The end of man is not self-indulgence—but achievement. There are no short-cuts, and no substitutes for work’ (Weaver, 1947: 225).

The remarkable role that Quakers and Baptists played in the emerging market and consumer research industry becomes perhaps more understandable if one considers the overall influence that the Protestant-Congregationalist ecclesiology had on the making of social science research methods particularly in the United States. The insistence of Calvinist, Baptist and Quaker communities on local self-governance and the independence of their congregations was based on an anti-Catholic theological teaching which held that the church was brought about by the voluntary co-operation of free and equal members with direct access to a Holy Spirit that acted as a deposit for one’s inheritance in heaven (Ephesians, 1: 13–14). The Baptist denomination, in particular, is characterized by a strong emphasis on individual choice and behaviour, and it considers the adult choice to be baptised as the main pillar of its theology and ecclesiology. The emphasis on small, independent congregations as ecclesiological organizing units predestined American social scientists and consumer researchers to privilege small survey groups, like consumer juries and focus groups, as a key approach to understand the complexities of society (Didier, 2002; Silver, 1990).

With the arrival of liberal European emigrants in the United States during the interwar years, two strands of metaphysical reflections about market economies that had become separated during the 18th century finally came together again. Although the likes of Ludwig Mises, Friedrich Hayek and Ayn Rand were deeply suspicious of organized religion, their visions of the free market order became infused with the religious idiom of those American trader-philosophers who had eagerly worked towards turning that vision into reality. As Bethany Moreton, Michael Novak, Stephen Long, and many other authors have shown, from the 1920s onwards the culture of ‘free enterprise and consumer choice’ retained the character of a theological project that it had first adopted during the early 17th century (Long, 2000, 104–106, 203–207; Moreton, 2009; Nelson, 2001: 35–48; Novak, 1982: 333–360).

Consumer capitalism and the political economy of salvation

To identify the capitalist market order as a theological project moves the debate about the relationship between capitalism and religion somewhat beyond its current limitations of the question whether capitalism ‘is’ a religion (Benjamin, 1991/1921), and whether there ever was a ‘Protestant Ethics’ (Weber, 1930/1905). In the light of the discussion above, the market order is revealed as a project which to its very core is imprinted by the theological concepts, techniques and devices it freely borrowed from a metaphysical warehouse that offered everything from Platonist cosmology and medieval theories of the soul to Protestant ecclesiology and Lutheran theories of justification. This hotchpotch of theological ideas in fact formed the nucleus of the ‘modern’ market order, which has its sources firmly rooted in pre-modern, religious notions of the mobilized and resourceful Self.

Naturally, the rise of this market order and its unique moral philosophy of individual rights contains and accommodates many narratives. Some of these narratives privilege the role played by the early-modern secular state in the making of the Enlightenment and later the moral philosophy of classical liberalism. Other narratives might point at the undeniable influence that the human sciences and the experimental natural sciences had on the creation of a modern sense of subjectivity. Yet, what has become clear from the above discussion of the intellectual history of market capitalism is that the ‘modern’ metaphysics of markets as socio-political designs is not based on immanent sources of legitimization, like capitalism’s capability to produce growth, jobs, wealth, and innovative products. Instead, capitalism is also able to draw on transcendent sources of legitimacy that originated in pre- and early modern theology. Theological concepts and devices, not empirical data or ‘reason’, helped first promote consumers’ choices as testimonies that enable salvation. Similarly, it was first theological concepts which helped justify and legitimize the idea that markets could act as ordering mechanism if only they were liberated from the supremacy of politics. The argument that the world would be set right by handing it over to the mechanism of individual self-guidance was first made as an ecclesiological point, not as one of economics or secular political theory. To interpret the rise of modern consumer capitalism in terms of a legitimate break with a pre-modern past, as a historical disruption based on an essentially new vision of individual and society, therefore presents a warped version of capitalism’s intellectual history. The market order, although visibly constituting a break with pre-modern forms of social ordering and organization, does not dispose of a metaphysical model upon which it could construct a legitimate foundation. This order, as we have come to accept it either jubilantly or grudgingly, is an illegitimate reconfiguration of selected elements of pre-secular, Christian metaphysics—illegitimate because the main reason for its existence comes disguised in form of the conditio moderna which is in denial of its essentially theological roots.

The strong influence that Protestant sects exerted on the making of consumer- and choice-centred market capitalism during the late 19th and early 20th century can be interpreted as an outcome of the perennial oscillation in religious thought between liberation and sin (Metz, 1998). From the late 19th-century Social Gospel Movement to 20th-century Liberation Theology, and Pope Benedict XVI’s encyclical Caritas in Veritate at the beginning of 21st century, Christianity’s socially progressive potential has brought together Catholic, Lutheran, and non-Conformist denominations in the ideal of developing alternatives to capitalist market organization, including social welfare work, mutualism, and solidarity. The second major streak of Christianity, its emphasis on the individual conscience, on choice and the ever-present danger of sinning, fed into the capitalist entrepreneurial spirit which ignored the image of the suffering Christ and instead reconstructed social relations around the idea of the perfectibility of the Self.

Critics have often noted that the rampant consumerism experienced in our time is the long-term consequence of this choice-oriented ideal of working to consume. Precisely this self-centeredness was already inherent in the Judeo-Christian moral universe, only that its religious institutions, like the confession, had been constructed to prevent people from descending into mere ‘self-fulfillment’. Modern notions of the creative and consuming Self and of the market order organized around these Selves therefore need to be understood as secularized theological concepts that were stripped off the safety devices which had once ensured that the development of the Self remained connected to the well-being of the community.

This observation brings us back to Bruno Latour’s question whether we have ever been ‘modern’, and to the confrontation between Carl Schmitt and Hans Blumenberg (Latour, 1993; Schmitz and Lepper, 2007). Blumenberg took Schmitt directly to task and argued that the modern world was born out of a necessary struggle against a religious-dogmatic interpretation of the world, and with the specific aim in mind to trade transcendent ontological security for curiosity and the embrace of the essential insecurity that came with individual freedom. For Blumenberg, modernity constituted a radical break with humanity’s past and it derived its legitimacy from the necessity of that break: the self-created disruption of the metaphysics of Christianity declared the human being transcendentally homeless and its life an open project. Modernity was thus anything else but ‘merely the Middle Ages, just by other means’ (Blumenberg, 1999/1966: 107). With Blumenberg, most social theorists have identified modern market capitalism as part of an essentially, that is ontologically, new and self-created age of reason, innovation, and curiosity, which consciously understood itself as a permanently provisional, non-metaphysical, arrangement. With Schmitt, one might argue that the insecurities which underlie this modern utopia are tenable only because the early proponents of the capitalist market order spun a web of very metaphysical obligations, while outwardly cloaking themselves as agents of immanence to conspire against the transcendental. The outcome of this conspiracy plot was that societies and communities became restructured around the needs of those who profited most from markets as a form of ordering social relations.