Abstract
This article reflects on the role of public sociology in the debate on the systemic crisis of western capitalism reinvigorated by the 2007–8 global financial crisis. The article argues that, in the current moment in history, sociologists have a professional duty to challenge the growing irrationality of the economically rational public discourse and to more vigorously uphold the formulation of alternative ‘real-utopian’ discourses. The article first introduces capitalism’s core ideology – economic rationality – arguing that it has hardened into the irrational dogma of the ostensibly rational West, with an unrelenting grip on the public discourse, especially in the ‘neoliberal’ Anglosphere. The ideology suppresses measures needed to address issues such as global warming and global financial disorder. Contemporary ‘Anglo’ sociology, including Australian sociology, is internally compartmentalized, self-referential and of marginal influence in the public sphere. Moreover, it espouses economic rationality in its practice within increasingly corporatized universities, while maintaining a progressive cloak over its intellectual products.
If I had been consulted whether to establish a Nobel Prize in economics I would have decidedly advised against it because the Nobel Prize confers on an individual an authority which in economics no man ought to possess. […] [T]he influence of the economist that mainly matters is an influence over laymen: politicians, journalists, civil servants and the public generally. There is no reason why a man who has made a distinctive contribution to economic science should be omnicompetent on all problems of society […]. But a progressive policy needs more than just a bigger break with the economic and moral assumptions of the past 30 years. It needs a return to the conviction that economic growth and the affluence it brings is a means and not an end. The end is what it does to the lives, life-chances and hopes of people.
The two citations above come from two scholars far removed from each other on a conventional ideological spectrum. One was an economist, considered the apostle of the free market and a key inspiration of Thatcherite neoliberalism, and the other was a professed Marxist historian. Nonetheless, the two citations convey, or at least imply, three common points: (1) that a ‘good society’ is more than an efficient economy; (2) that the former does not emerge unproblematically from the latter and (3) that economic rationality should not dominate public discourse and public policy. The three points frame the key argument of this article which discusses the role of academic sociology in a fast-changing society affected by multiple crises.
This is not to deny that many sociologists have seriously considered the above points in their academic work and/or professional practice. Many have also criticized the dominant economic logic and usually expressed it as opposition to ‘neoliberalism’. However, while being critical, we are compelled to uphold ‘scientific’ credibility and our reputation as ‘experts’, and this means not stepping outside of our disciplinary and more often sub- and sub-sub-disciplinary enclosures, from where it is often hard to see a bigger picture. In order to arrive at plausible findings – if not ‘valid knowledge’ – we need to adhere to manageable research questions, the data and a prescribed method. Furthermore, in order to attract the attention of policy makers and the general public, quantitative evidence seems to be a must. Yet, there is public hunger for a big picture, especially after the 2007–8 global financial crisis (GFC). The GFC prompted, or at least exacerbated, the feeling in a section of the thinking public that global neoliberal capitalism – what Hobsbawm (2009) termed ‘international bourgeois anarchism’ – did not align with the best interests of ‘society’.
In the time of crisis, the public craves a plausible elucidation by ‘experts’. The media space devoted to the GFC was filled by economists explaining ‘technical details’ of the near-miss global financial meltdown. A left-leaning critical minority of economists saw it as a sign of a systemic crisis and offered a ‘big picture’ analysis. The recent ascent to the bestseller lists of French ‘public economist’ Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-first Century testifies to the desire for a big picture as well as to the power of data and (numerical) evidence. In the wake of the GFC, sociologists were neither asked for nor came forward offering their narratives. Trying to see a ‘big picture’ or treat ‘society’ as a ‘core object’ of sociological inquiry the way economists treat the ‘economy’ (Wickham, 2012) is not just intellectually but also politically a difficult project. It is often seen as grand theorizing and/or getting on a moral high horse, while social visionaries are decidedly out of fashion in the Anglosphere. 1 An indication of this is a long-standing theoretical work on ‘real utopias’ by Eric Olin Wright, which did not manage to transcend the realm of academic sociology. 2 Nonetheless, I argue that the big picture is needed and that there is a public appetite for it which sociologists should respond to more directly.
We should dare to ask whether a civilization which has been uniquely successful in wealth accumulation guided by economic rationality has let this inexorable logic achieve a level of hegemony which pushes it into the terrain of irrationality. It is our professional duty to seek public engagement and advance the debate on institutional reform and cultural change. Gradual changes in the public discourse, once they achieve critical mass, could loosen the ideological iron grip of capitalist economic rationality and the unquestioned dominance of economic discourse. The question is, can sociological guerrilla warfare advance utopian thinking against heavily armed and entrenched economic rationality? An example of a recent success by critical sociologists in reaching the general reading public and making an impact is Wilkinson and Pickett’s 2010 book Spirit Level: Why Equality Is Good for Everyone, which combines engaging, succinct prose with presenting quantitative evidence. More such work is needed.
As shown in Mannheim’s (1997 [1936]) classical text referenced in the title of this article, utopian thinking has been part of Western thought for centuries. Early Christianity was itself a utopia inhabited by equal-worth individuals each possessing an immortal soul. Mannheim (1997 [1936]: 36) argued that both ideology and utopia, aligned with interest-bound groups, distort and disguise certain aspects of reality; a ‘state of mind is Utopian when it is incongruous with the state of reality within which it occurs’, and when ‘pass[ed] over into conduct, tend[s] to shatter [… and] break the bonds of the existing order’ (1997 [1936]: 173). Utopian mentality is ‘the collective unconscious, guided by wishful representation and the will to action’ (1997 [1936]: 36). Clearly, such thinking would be (and has been, as shown by the failure of the 20th-century communism) a poor blueprint for a successful political project of social transformation. In response, sociologist E.O. Wright suggests moving away from the ‘fantasy of a perfect world’ (2013: 3) towards ‘real utopias’ as a ‘normatively grounded sociology of the possible’ (2013: 1), focused on ‘transforming power relations within the economy in ways that deepen and broaden the possibility of meaningful democracy’ (2013: 2). He proposes three moral principles as standards for judging social institutions – equality, democracy and sustainability. He gives examples of real-existing ‘utopian’ phenomena that have formed outside the commercial imperatives of capitalist economic rationality, for example the popular and increasingly respected Wikipedia, a social collaborative effort which has survived ‘outside of markets and without state support’ (Wright, 2013: 18). Wikipedia also testifies to the new emancipatory potential of internet-based media. Public sociology could develop Wright’s real-utopian conceptual framework in many different directions.
Combining insights of classical and contemporary authors, this article discusses the much debated ‘systemic crisis’ of capitalism from the point of view of the (ir)rationality of its core ideology, which, having developed from scientific rationality, gradually assumed a dogmatic position. Such a position is increasingly ruinous for society and the environment, and eventually it is bound to become so for the economy itself. From this premise, the article argues for a greater role for public sociology and aspires to elucidate its position within the context of social sciences, primarily in relation to economics and history, which have been more successful in influencing public discourse and public policy (B.S. Turner, 2012). The article also reflects on the current practice of sociology within economically rational and increasingly corporatized public universities, and the significance of such practice on sociology’s public impact. 3
Modern (Western) rationality: a sketch
It has been widely accepted that the 18th-century European Enlightenment created a modern society free from religious dogma and vestiges of theocracy, and led to the development of the scientific method as the primary source of authority and legitimacy of knowledge (Popper, 1974 [1945]). The Enlightenment advocated secular and progressive meritocracy where all men (but not yet women) were ‘born equal’ and could enjoy ‘the unfettered exercise of individual talent in a world of reason’ free from traditional hierarchies (Hobsbawm, 1962: 38). The ‘enlightened’ 18th and 19th centuries were spectacularly successful in developing natural sciences as the basis of modern technology (Hobsbawm, 1962, 1975; Russell, 1972). The Industrial Revolution in England led to a revolution in economic productivity, material prosperity and the global domination of the West, primarily the Anglosphere (Hobsbawm, 1962; Wright, 2013). The ‘free market’, in the context of gradually developing nation-state-based democracies, represented the institutional framework of the epochal success of Western modernity.
Breaking the shell of feudal society enabled a fundamental shift from dogmatic (religious, authority-based) to rational (‘free’, argument-based) thinking. This shift can be conceptualized as a switch from judging to measuring. Judging is a process of truth-seeking reliant on the guidance of an external authority, while measuring introduces autonomous intellectual process channelled through the scientific method. The process of measuring observable natural phenomena (collecting data) on the basis of a hypothesis, analysing the data and consequently either verifying or discarding the hypothesis, became the core of the rational scientific method. Its claim to rationality and validity rests on the ‘objectivity’ of quantification and openness to critique, primarily by the ‘peer review’. The Enlightenment divested authority figures of their power to impart inherently subjective and fallible judgement. 4 Instead, the scientific method, with its strictly prescribed steps, became the way in which fallible humans can reach a form of recognized truth; truth that remains open to critique and correction.
Importantly, science is based on quantification: the authority of numbers is the core principle of its method. Scientific positivism of the heroic early era of western science (first natural and then social) rests on the indispensability of quantification and ‘value-neutrality’. Of course, scientific positivism has been challenged on the grounds that it is impossible to fully dispense with (subjective) judgement within the scientific method: what one chooses to observe, measure and calculate is dependent on creative ideas, hypotheses and judgements that are inherently biased and too complex to be precisely accounted for (cf. Steele, 2004). Moreover, as Popper (1974 [1945]) argued, the scientific method abstracts from any a priori value judgement, but the decision to act or argue rationally is itself pre-rational or non-rational: it involves a ‘leap of faith’, an ‘irrational faith in reason’ (Popper, 1974 [1945]: 231, emphasis in original). In other words, it involves a value judgement that being rational is better than being irrational. 5 This leap of faith is a key achievement of the Enlightenment.
In consequence, the contemporary West takes itself for granted as a rational civilization whose foundations are embedded in free inquiry and democratic debate. According to Popper (1974 [1945]: 226), authoritarianism and rationalism cannot be reconciled because science, based on reasoning, only advances through criticism and argument. Dogma is therefore inherently irrational; it eliminates ‘readiness to listen to critical arguments and to learn from experience’. Popper defined rationality as ‘fundamentally an attitude of admitting that “I may be wrong and you may be right, and by an effort, we may get nearer to the truth”’ (Popper, 1974 [1945]: 225, emphasis in original). He also emphasized the social character of rationality: a particular type of rationality that a society or an era adheres to is continuously tested through critical debate. Political revolutions that ushered in modern capitalism secured the institutional framework for such a debate (Hobsbawm, 1962). Yet, as argued below, economic rationality developed into the dominant ethos of the West which, due to the material success of its application, was able to obliterate its ideological challengers and transform into a dogma. Consequently, it jeopardizes not only its rational status but also the civilization it has so significantly shaped over the past two centuries.
From scientific to economic rationality
The power of economic rationality stems from the fact that it is a derivative of scientific rationality–its capitalist adaptation. Their common core is quantification and their common source of authority is the authority of numbers over words and of calculus over discourse. Just like scientific rationality, economic rationality rests on a carefully prescribed process of measuring and calculation. The ‘capitalistic’ rationality, expressed ‘purely numerically’ is, according to Weber (1978 [1921]: 165), uniquely Western. As rationality – the scientific, properly methodical way of thinking and acting – it is part of moral justification of a particular economic system.
In practice, economic rationality is a money calculus of the utility maximizer seeking profit through optimizing the cost–benefit ratio. The maximizing logic of economic rationality can be postulated as more = better. What is ‘good’ or ‘better’ in the ethical sense is a matter of an ongoing debate (see Wright, 2013), but the economic rationality is unambiguous; profit is good and more profit is better. If a benefit (or detriment) of an economic enterprise, or an asset, is non-quantifiable, it is invisible to economics.
According to Weber (1978 [1921]: 108), the abstract formal rationality of capital accounting is completely indifferent towards, and free from, postulates of ‘substantive rationality’. 6 The only substantive precondition of capitalist formal rationality is a ‘thorough market freedom, that is, the absence of monopolies’, and the absence of regulations that limit the freedom of contract in the process of economic action (Weber, 1978 [1921]: 108, 161–2). ‘Rational’ capitalist production is complemented by a ‘rational spirit’ (Weber, 2002 [1905]); the rationalization of the conduct of life in general and a rationalistic ethic of the homo economicus.
However, even the impersonal and a-moral rules of financial accounting are devised in reference to something before them. In the discursive regime of Western capitalism, the substantive goal of economic rationality is social progress, defined more narrowly as wealth accumulation and overcoming material scarcity (Simon, 1978). Social progress can be defined in a classical utilitarian fashion, following Bentham and Mill, as movement towards the ‘greater happiness of the greatest number’, or a not too dissimilar contemporary definition by Wright (2013: 2) as increasing ‘the potential to substantially reduce human suffering and expand the possibilities for human flourishing’. The early classical economists Adam Smith, John Stuart Mill and others were protagonists of the liberal rationalist tradition developing out of the European Enlightenment. 7 The modern secular West upholds a faith in the progress of human civilization 8 measured primarily by economic parameters; also a faith in the equal right of rational agents – individuals – to engage in economic action and profit from it. Mill (1970 [1848]) argued that the political economy should only inform one aspect of life and be concerned with man solely as a being who desires to possess wealth, and who is capable of judging the comparative efficacy of means for obtaining that end. Capitalist economic rationality entrusted the ‘invisible hand’ of the market to connect private profit with general social prosperity and progress (Smith, 2008 [1776]). However, early classical economists never overlooked the social and moral context of what they called ‘political economy’. Their defence of free enterprise with minimal interference of the state was progressive in their time and had different political implications than the same insistence over recent decades. It is only since the ‘marginalist revolution’ of the 1870s that the capitalist ‘market’ has been invested with a life and agency of its own and seen as not only central but ‘foundational’ to society (Smith, 2005: 4). Economic essentialism naturalizes the market beyond capitalism, as ‘spontaneous order’; there is a presumption that it works in a way not open to questioning, negotiation or reform (Hayek, 1973a). In the words of Edmund Burke (cited in Popper, 1974 [1945]: 136): ‘the laws of commerce are the laws of nature, and therefore the laws of God’. Hayek invested many years of his life to give the spontaneous market order a philosophical justification via a rather arcane notion of ‘catallaxy’ (Hayek, 1973b: 107–21). In a Popperian sense of rationality being necessarily social and dialogical, a spontaneous, natural or divine order cannot be rational. In the same vein, Marxist historic determinism pointing to ‘inexorable laws’ of social development implies that ‘reason can have no part in bringing about a more reasonable world’ (Popper, 1974 [1945]: 202, emphasis in the original). According to Popper, rational social order is a work in progress in the democratic ‘open society’; both total ideology and utopian prophecy are its enemies (1974 [1945]: 202)
Economics and sociology in the Anglosphere
Aspects of economic rationality existed in pre-modern societies, but it experienced its full and detailed articulation only though the development of economics as science. Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations (2008 [1776]) is considered foundational in this sense. The social sciences, including economics, developed after the natural sciences and, in order to establish their scientific legitimacy as a path to credible knowledge – an aspiration never fully realized – they had to adopt the rationality and method of natural sciences based on measuring and calculation. Partly, the public invisibility of sociology is caused by a drifting away from this rule into ‘qualitative’ research and theory, where scientific credentials of methodical ‘objectivity’ and ‘value freedom’ are more difficult to uphold, making it easier to dismiss, or simply ignore, its findings.
From its early foundations as a ‘moral science’, economics took a different path. According to Hobsbawm (1975: 289), during the third quarter of the 19th century economics developed a close and direct link with mathematics, in this way strengthening its scientific credentials. The marginal utility school of economics, more narrowly focused than the ‘political economy’ practised by J.S. Mill in the preceding decades, developed simultaneously in Britain, Austria and France around 1870. The English-speaking countries have been the leaders in economic science from its inception, although significant schools existed in Italy, Austria and France (Hobsbawm, 1975: 299). 9 Williams and Findlay (1981) argued that the concept of an economically rational calculative human seemed especially irresistible to the Anglo-Saxon philosophy, social science and common sense. They saw this as a consequence of the historic propensity of Anglo-American philosophy towards positivism and ‘scientism’. According to Williams and Findlay (1981), Anglo-Americans, due to cultural biases, tend to belittle the ‘right hemisphere thinking’ responsible for creativity and imagination, while prioritizing the ‘left hemisphere’ rational, methodical, logical, step-by-step thinking. Hobsbawm (1975: 290–1) argued that spectacular economic progress during the second half of the 19th century was ‘unlikely to concentrate the minds of economists on the more profound aspects of their science’ and that the tendency to ‘separate economic analysis from its historic social context grew constantly more powerful’.
Smith (2005: 5) argued that some ‘core ideas of classical economics expanded across the social sciences’, at least in the Anglosphere. Liberalism as a dominant political tradition of the Anglosphere upholds economic rationality by giving priority to individual rights and interests before collective ones; resistance to it is a marginal political pursuit left to minor ‘green’ and other ‘left’ parties. Steele (2004: 1033) argued that most people (rationally) resisted the subordination of their personal freedom to ‘some nebulous concept of public good’.
The neoliberal turn of the late 1970s, inspired by the work of F. Hayek (in the UK), and M. Friedman (in the US) reinvigorated neoclassical economic theory as a basis for public policy (Reich, 2008; Stilwell, 2010). This theory reaffirmed economic growth as the central public policy aim at the time the growth rate of developed countries started to flounder following the 1973 ‘oil shock’. According to Reich (2008), at that time the US entered the stage of ‘supercapitalism’, focused on economic growth, deregulation, ‘small government’ and the primacy of the ‘free market’.
The failure of Eastern European communism – the anti-capitalist utopia turned dystopian – provided a significant boost to capitalist economic rationality: it allowed it to acquire an aura of historic authority. A view that capitalism is the order of things that demonstrated endurance and superiority to all alternatives, real or imagined, and emerged as the eschatological winner, became a position beyond serious dispute. The declaration that history had ended (Fukuyama, 1992) was a prominent moment in the ideological retrenchment and triumphalism of economic rationality that followed the fall of communism. 10
Yet, amid the public debate on environmental destruction and increasingly frequent economic and financial shocks leading to claims about a systemic crisis of western capitalism, economic science is called on to reconnect with its historic social context and look at a bigger picture. Shiller (2005), Reich (2008), Stiglitz (2010), Piketty (2014) and other left-leaning economists responded to this call. Stiglitz (2010: 238) argued that economics, instead of being a scientific discipline, had become ‘free market capitalism’s biggest cheerleader’ and that, in order to reform the economy, economics must be reformed first. Piketty’s (2014) monumental work partly responded to this call. Sociology could and should be a key collaborator in this critical pursuit. Economists, however, enjoy a legitimacy bonus sociologists cannot count on. Can this be changed?
Economic rationality as total ideology
The classical economic science of Smith and Mill emphasized that homo economicus is but one aspect of ‘man’, while contemporary neoclassical economists, more specialized than their 18th- and 19th-century predecessors, tend to neglect this caveat. In its contemporary rendition, homo economicus has become a capitalist reduction of homo sapiens; this economically rational creature may have become irrational in a substantive sense. Partly due to the global dominance of the Anglosphere, economic rationality has nowadays attained the ultimate symbolic power, the power which, in Bourdieu’s words, ‘establishes a gnoseological order’: the immediate meaning of the world, and in particular of the social world (Bourdieu, 1991: 166, emphasis in original). Economic rationality is ‘consensus on the meaning of the social order’, ensuring its reproduction. It is impossible to step outside this apparent consensus without a serious status penalty (1991: 165–6). According to Bauman (2000: 4), we now live in a ‘new order, defined primarily in economic terms’, which has ‘colonized, re-educated and converted to its ways the rest of social life […]’; ‘this is a kind of society which no longer recognizes any alternative to itself and thereby feels absolved from the duty to examine, demonstrate, justify (let alone prove) the validity of its outspoken and tacit assumptions’ (2000: 22–3). Therefore, economic rationality has become a ‘doxa’; ‘the unexamined frame for all further cognition’ (Bauman, 2000: 30).
Paradoxically, a dogma crept up on a society that became historically uniquely successful through discarding dogmas, and this happened precisely because it has been so successful. In the 21st century, ideology seems to be lagging behind reality. Mannheim (1997 [1936]: 87) argued that ‘knowledge is distorted and ideological when it fails to take account of the new realities applying to a situation, and when it attempts to conceal them by thinking of them in categories which are inappropriate […]’. The economic rationality of profit maximization and economic growth has encountered its environmental limits, and therefore it has become irrational – if we start from a minimal but necessary assumption that survival of humanity is a rational goal.
The dominant economic rationality is a product of conditions that have ceased to exist: the conditions of scarcity. Apparently, there is no clear line between ‘scarcity’ and ‘post-scarcity’ or ‘affluence’. As economic productive forces grow, new needs and wants can be created virtually ad infinitum. The existence of a vast advertising industry is an indirect but solid proof that we have surpassed the realm of needs. Another way of establishing the ‘end of scarcity’ is to look for a point where the increase in consumption ceases to be correlated with an increase in quality of life and life satisfaction, which is also complex. In any case, the West is considered synonymous with the ‘affluent society’ and the ‘age of high mass consumption’, which secures a generous level of satisfaction of material needs, and where, as Galbraith (1977: 102) put it, ‘more people die of too much food than of too little’.
It follows that contemporary capitalism has historically transcended its core economic tenet ‘more = better’ in at least two ways. First, arguing from within the hegemonic discourse, in the affluent society any further increase in economic output has diminishing marginal utility, for producers seeking profit (there is no real demand – the ‘need’ first has to be created through marketing, which is costly) as well as for consumers seeking satisfaction. Second, arguing from without the dominant rationality, technology and ever-higher productive output have power, for the first time in history, to damage the natural environment to an irreparable level, exemplified by climate change (Galbraith, 1992: 6; Hamilton, 2010; Hamilton and Denniss, 2005). The problem and the warning are not new: 150 years ago Marx highlighted a ‘metabolic rift’ between the city and the country, human beings and the Earth (Foster, 1999). The rift has widened in the meantime; the dangers of anthropogenic climate change have been established among scientists since the early 1980s and were revealed to the global public at the 1992 Rio Earth Summit. Since then, the global warming debate has heated up but policy outcomes are modest at best.
Clearly, maximizing economic utility cannot be defended as rational if, at the same time, it threatens long-term economic prospects and ecological survival. The solution of this paradox within the hegemonic discourse involves emphasizing the difference in time frames: we maximize economic utility now whereas environmental repercussions are cast into the (inherently uncertain) future. Those who argue that the practical problems caused by climate change are already here and growing are only heard if they propose ‘market-based solutions’. Securing the conditions for economic growth remains sacrosanct.
At a GDP (gross domestic product) per capita of US$36,977, the current OECD average 11 (OECD, 2014), economic growth is pursued for the sake of preserving current power relations rather than for the ostensible purpose of ‘increasing living standards’. Attempts at articulation of a ‘static equilibrium’ 12 have been resisted because the economic growth eliminates a need for internal and global redistribution, which would imply not only substantive internal reforms but also a gradual end of Western global dominance (Galbraith, 1977: chs 7–9).
Economic vs. moral order
As argued above, the discursive power of economic rationality is based on the fact that it has developed from the quantitative logic of science – measuring and calculation – which is universally seen as rigorous and objective. There is inherent clarity in a numerical order: values and ranks are obvious and beyond dispute. It is evident why it is tempting to consider such an order foundational and ultimate. If complex and debatable qualities are turned into orderly quantities, it seems rational that the latter should take epistemic priority. The capitalist economic order enjoys legitimacy not only because of its core principle of quantification; its central moral claim is that, for the first time in history, it has made ‘all men born equal’, free to compete and ‘get ahead’. The fact that those ‘men’ remain vastly unequal is understood to be a consequence of their merit. The merit is quantified and expressed primarily in economic terms, and therefore there tends to be a significant overlap between the economic and moral value of an individual, determining his or her social status.
The epistemic primacy of economic rationality means that, alongside the problems discussed above, it serves as proxy for the moral order in public policy debates. This is not to argue that normative debates about ‘social purpose’ and a ‘good society’ are entirely reduced to economic discourse. The debates linger on, but only as a side-show of capitalism. Wright (2013: 3, 2014) argues that one of the key tasks of an ‘emancipatory social science’ is ‘specifying the moral principles for judging social institutions’. As mentioned above, he nominated democracy as one of three such principles, alongside equality and sustainability. However, democratic deliberations rarely lead to policy consensus and political power is often applied against resistance. The moral authority of communicative reason is usually trumped: in order to proceed from debate to public policy and action, complex moral questions – what constitutes ‘fairness’ for example – normally fall back on economic rationality (cf. Habermas, 1984). The economic ‘bottom line’ provides what is usually seen as a sensible, pragmatic solution.
Yet, the economic and moral domains remain distinct. The idea of social progress includes intellectual and aesthetic aspects that emerge from intrinsic rather than utilitarian economic motivation (Russell, 1972: 30–40; Mill, 1973 [1859]). In spite of coming perilously close to it, the individual inhabiting capitalism remains irreducible to homo economicus. The moral person espousing non-quantifiable values and having a need to conceptualize quality – to judge and not just to measure and calculate – keeps reappearing in public discourse (most frequently in obituaries). Humans continue to strive for improvement and think about the future; according to classical ethics, the awareness of the difference and moral tension between what is (Sein) and what ought to be (Sollen) may be an essential characteristic of the rational human person (see Kant, 1967 [1785]; Kolakowski, 1977). For example, there is empirical evidence that only a minority of people in the highly utilitarian American context conceive ‘improvement’ purely through the economic gain (Wilkinson and Pickett, 2010). Aside from, and sometimes in contravention to economic gain, people seek justice, love, autonomy, community, truth, beauty, salvation, meaning and communion with nature. In these domains it is impossible to establish a reliably calculable relationship between cost and benefit and they are therefore out of reach of economic rationality. However, all these substantive pursuits are under ongoing pressure to be submitted to the ultimate quantifying judgement of the market. For example, aesthetic enjoyment in art becomes a side benefit of art investment, while communion with nature is regulated, mediated and commodified through the tourism industry.
Economic rationality clashes with the central postulate of classical ethics as formulated by Kant (1967 [1785]); rational agents (human persons) have an absolute value and are therefore ‘ends in themselves’. They are endowed with a ‘perfect duty’ not to use themselves and others ‘merely as a means to the satisfaction of their inclination’, and an ‘imperfect duty’ to further the ‘ends of nature in [them]selves’, that is, to seek their own perfection. Clearly, the capitalist economy is in breach of this moral postulate; it treats people instrumentally, as disposable labour employed for the purpose of profit creation. Much critical theory has been devoted to demonstrating that economic rationality implies pervasive commodification of human beings (Small, 1912; Wright, 2013) and their reduction to aspects of homo economicus: producers (‘labour force’; ‘human capital’) on the one hand, and consumers on the other.
In the wake of early classical political economists such as Smith and Mill, the 20th-century critics of economic rationality argued that the capitalist economic order must be subordinate to the moral purposes of humanity. The founder and long-term editor of the oldest sociology journal (American Journal of Sociology, founded in 1895) Albion Small (1912: 818) quoted ‘influential German economists’ as claiming that ‘economic life can have no license except as a subordinate section of the moral life of men’ and that ‘all economic and social problems are ethical problems, and must be treated as such’. Small (1912: 818) emphasized the difference between this view and the ‘fundamental capitalistic conception on which English and American policy still implicitly rests’. 13 Polanyi’s (2001 [1944]) argument against the separateness of the economic sphere and against the faith in the self-regulating market points in the same direction.
The governments of Western ‘market democracies’ are nowadays primarily guarantors of capitalist economic competition and, in the context of secular morality with its inevitable relativism, not guarantors of any type of moral order. In fact, the latter is considered to be an odious feature of theocratic regimes, that does not befit secular democracies, where the relationship between legality and morality remains unresolved. In the culture of capitalism, wealth creation is conceived, if not as the ultimate social good in itself, then at least as the precondition for any other good, and for social progress.
However, secular democracies cannot achieve a rational agreement on a superior moral order as the basis for the idea of progress. In terms of equality as a social value for example, Piketty (2014: 348–9) emphasizes the change in the US from being more egalitarian than Europe and proud of it a century ago, to being less egalitarian and proud of it nowadays, as the dominant American discourse came to equate ‘inegalitarianism’ with meritocracy. Ley and Johnson (1990) see debates on rationality bogged down in one crucial difficulty: how to analyse and establish the rationality of social goals and values? They propose merging economics and ethics through a normative-intuitionist ‘ontological rationality’ that acknowledges that goals and values are meta-rational (Ley and Johnson, 1990). Yet Western democracies do have established methods of imposing the ‘common will’, including moral choices. Therefore, imposing a moral order on economic rationality through deliberative (rather than just representative) democracy would not have to be a ‘road to serfdom’, as Hayek feared. 14 The problem is how to reinvigorate democracy against the power of private wealth and ‘workplace dictatorships’ (Wright, 2013: 7), and the tendency of the capitalist consumer to take priority over the citizen (Ginsborg, 2008).
Concluding thoughts
Countering the totalitarian tendency of the economic rationality is difficult in the context of the crisis of Western democracy. Many have argued that the democracy ‘peaked’ in the late 1960s and since then, simultaneously with and partly due to globalization, ‘market fundamentalism’ and the increase in inequality, has experienced decline (Ginsborg, 2008; Hobsbawm, 1999; Piketty, 2014; Reich, 2008). Can this be reversed and substantive elements of deliberative democracy strengthened? At this point in history it seems hard to envisage a social force or movement that would be able to seriously challenge economic rationality from within the system. Sociologists, as experts on society, have a duty to contribute to the process of rational democratic deliberation by making their critical input public, accessible, engaging and based on data. It is the ‘calling’ of sociologists to formulate elements of ‘real utopias’ (cf. Wright, 2013, 2014). Sociologists of the Anglosphere bear even more responsibility because they inhabit the global lingua franca and therefore have access to global audiences.
The central question to be confronted post-GFC, and amid the global warming debate is: if capitalism is in crisis, how can we help resolve it by rational democratic debate while escaping the ideological black hole of economic rationality? Can public intellectuals contribute to transforming public discourse and imagining the competitive market as a servant of a ‘good society’ and a healthy economy (not to be equated with economic growth) as a prerequisite rather than a replacement for a ‘healthy society’? These questions are not new but they are becoming increasingly urgent. The rationality of people’s relationship to nature (not treating it as an inexhaustible resource), the social and environmental rationality of the economic process (e.g. reducing overwork and over-consumption) and the rationality of political dialogue (e.g. not reducing democracy to voting and freedom to consumer choice) can no longer be embedded in economic rationality as we know it. ‘Utility maximization’ and rationality have to be imagined in a more holistic way; perhaps as an ‘ontological rationality’ that unites economic and moral orders, as proposed by Ley and Johnson (1990).
A movement away from the sanctity of individual choice towards the idea of the ‘common good’ has been suggested in various guises for centuries. Reforms leading to an increased level of financial regulation and redistribution through taxation have been tested in continental European countries, and especially Scandinavia. In the Anglosphere this model of ‘socialism’ has been criticized for stunting economic growth and considered a failure. The opportunity for reform offered by the GFC – a strong indictment of the lack of financial regulation – has been largely missed. 15 Just like the moral order, the political process remains a by-product and derivative of the economic rationality of the market and its fetishistic quantification.
A grassroots movement against the economic dogma of growth (more = better) is still marginal but visibly present in the Anglosphere and elsewhere. Social forces that advocate a ‘green enlightenment’ and a more egalitarian society are up against a formidable opposition of vested interests: of governments prioritizing the short term in order to be re-elected; of corporations disregarding environmental issues in order to ‘survive global competition’ and maximize profits; of nations wanting to maintain their place or advance up the global hierarchy; of competitive individuals seeking status through pecuniary success. Challenging economic rationality is an epochal task.
Nonetheless, history most certainly has not ended and economic rationality is probably not its last word. After two centuries of dynamic development, advanced capitalism is today very different from the society of appalling misery of the working classes described by Adam Smith, Malthus, Ricardo, Marx and Engels. It is also considerably different from the society that existed in the 1960s and 1970s that Popper (1974 [1945]: 140) refused to call ‘capitalism’ and instead termed ‘interventionism’. Popper suggested ‘piecemeal [social] engineering’ because ‘only by planning, step-by-step, for institutions to safeguard freedom, especially freedom from exploitation, can we hope to achieve a better world’ (1974 [1945]: 143). This was written to refute Marx’s ‘prophecy’ of the inexorable advent of socialism, but it also refuted Hayek’s (1973a) distaste for ‘constructivism’; the idea that people have consciously created their society, and that they are able to engineer a better one. Popper’s idea of dialogical rationality indeed gives the power to change and improve society back to the people as it is the civic duty of rational persons. If the rational citizen happens to also be a professional student of society, then this duty is emphasized.
Therefore, the energies of social scientists, primarily (political) economists and sociologists, should be channelled towards careful but persistent reform, which, as Wright (2013, 2014) argued, diverges from the usual meaning of ‘utopia’. The communicative and deliberative potential of new internet-based media increases the ability of public sociology to cultivate alternative and emancipatory discourses and reach non-academic audiences. However, challenging the dominance of economic rationality in the public discourse has to start from sociology’s very own milieu; an increasingly corporatized academia which is becoming unsupportive of, and unsympathetic towards, sustained and serious intellectual engagement within itself and without, in the public sphere. The public engagement of academics has been largely reduced to public exposure in the form of short media bites, sought primarily as a marketing tool for nominally public universities that compete on the national and international ‘education market’, seeking to grow their business and improve their ranking. In this author’s nearly two decades at Australian universities, it has often appeared that sociologists adjust their academic praxis to the neoliberal encroachment of academia all too willingly. Amid ever-growing forms of managerialism and competition between individuals, academic units and universities, we enjoy the relatively privileged ‘obscurity of the professoriate’ (S.P. Turner, 2012: 348), while keeping a progressive cloak over our intellectual products. In addition, narrow subdisciplinary specializations and responding to the requirements of various ‘research metrics’ at economically rational universities favour quantity over quality of academic work and make serious intellectual and public engagement virtually impossible.
By default, the sweeping view taken by this article, which is necessary for the discussion of the origin of the undisputed rule of economic rationality, meant venturing into a risky territory of ‘grand theory’, where one is exceptionally exposed to criticism of a conceptual and methodological nature. Inevitably, much remained uncovered or under-theorized in a short journal article. In addition, it is hard to maintain a guise of ideological neutrality while critiquing the ‘dominant ideology’ and advocating ‘real utopias’. The article may irritate some practitioners of Anglo sociology by criticizing the profession and its rather (un)comfortable embeddedness in the increasingly shallow and businesslike academia.
In spite of its limitations, this article hopes to contribute to ‘engaged theory’ (rather than ‘grand theory’), which sees the duty of the profession of sociology to maintain critical vigilance in the most public forms possible, aided by new media. Unlike account of the decline of public sociology over the past half-century (see Burawoy, 2005; B.S. Turner, 2012; S.P. Turner, 2007, 2012) this call to arms denounced the dominant type of rationality as historically outdated but pervasive, and postulated a pressing need to continue (public) work on ‘real-utopian’ discourse. My second line of defence is that in crafting my argument I engaged in depth with some social science classic texts and applies them to the 21st-century context, looking at the position and potential for re-positioning of sociology in the broad context of the social sciences, especially in relation to economics (Wickham, 2012), as a possible way of continuing and strengthening public engagement diminished by decades of neoliberalism.
In terms of the profession of academic sociology, the article aspired to be an exercise in self-reflection, especially in terms of a public role of an ‘expert’, an exercise which I believe has an inherent value and should be ongoing. 16 I also argued that there was a public appetite for a debate about ‘society’ and not just ‘economy’, in spite of the incessant declarations of our political leaders on the absolute primacy of the latter, and that there has never been a better moment for sociologists to respond to it.
Finally, the rather broad conceptual sweep and cross-disciplinary scope made the writing of this article a rewarding but also challenging and exceedingly time-consuming endeavour, which certainly slowed down the accumulation of my own ‘research output’. In this way, however, the article includes not only theoretical criticism but also some practical resistance to the increasing tyranny of quantity and ‘performance indicators’ in the life of an Australian academic.