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Interview on the Thought of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon – Françoise – July 27th 2017

17 Thursday Aug 2017

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Françoise: Hello Thibault Isabel, last June you released a book about Pierre-Joseph Proudhon. Could you present and explain the reasons for this book?

 
Thibault Isabel: Since the collapse of communism, the modern world lives with the idea that there no longer exists a viable alternative to liberalism. “There is no alternative,” as Margaret Thatcher already said. But, we quite simply forget that alternatives have always existed, provided that they return to pre-Marxist socialism, which has nothing to do with Stalinist collectivism. Proudhon offers a contesting vision with a human face, incompatible with the Gulag and the dictatorship of the proletariat. It allows us to rethink the present in the light of the forgotten ideas of the past. That’s why he’s useful.

Françoise: Proudhon came from a modest background and, throughout his life, he had to work in order to survive: he became a worker, and then became an independent worker managing his own publishing house… How did that influence his thoughts?

 
Thibault Isabel: Proudhon was horrified by wage labor. He found having to work for a boss, not having the power to conduct his own professional activity, humiliating. In his eyes, the cardinal virtue was responsibility, autonomy. Every man should become master of his own acts and destiny. That’s why the philosopher from Besançon nourished a boundless love for independent labor. His entire political and economic doctrine aimed to make labor freer, in order to liberate individuals from the domination of the powerful.

Françoise: Proudhon – the thinker of balance – is a reference for intellectuals coming from very diverse perspectives. Could one say he crosses political currents, a non conformist? What were his influences? And his heirs?

Thibault Isabel: Proudhon was neither capitalist nor communist. But, all the political thought of the 20th century was structured around this opposition. Henceforth, Proudhonian thought seems unclassifiable today, because it isn’t reducible to a clear and well defined camp on the left-right axis as we conceive it. The majority of Proudhon’s heirs themselves escape this divide, the non-conformists of the 1930s show very well, notably the young personalist intellectuals gathered around Alexandre Marc at the time. As for the authors that influenced Proudhon, we must in fact cite all the pioneers of socialism: Cabet, Owen, Leroux, Fourier, etc. We have the tendency to forget that he existed in a vast nebula of very talented intellectuals.

Françoise: Long after his death, the Catholic writer Georges Bernanos could say of modern civilization that it was before “a universal conspiracy against any form of spiritual life”. What was Proudhon’s point of view on Modernity and the philosophy of Progress?
Thibault Isabel: Proudhon defended social progress, but he didn’t believe in the linear progress of civilization. He was even convinced that progressivism took on a Utopian and chimeric character. That’s why he simultaneously called himself a partisan of progress and conservation, because in reality we need both in order to make a healthy society flourish.

Françoise: Proudhon made particularly virulent statements regarding ecclesiastical institutions but in parallel he was also very conservative in regards to morality. What was his relation to the religious question?
Thibault Isabel: Proudhon was inspired by religion. Raised firstly in Catholicism by his mother, he progressively freed himself from theist mysticism in order to orient himself towards a sort of pantheism, under the notable influence of traditional Freemasonry (not secular Freemasonry of course). Proudhon felt very close to the old pagan religions, and was particularly interested in Taoism, even Amerindian religion, even if he had a very limited knowledge of it.

Françoise: De la justice dans la révolution et dans l’ Église, then La pornocratie (published incomplete and posthumously), earned Proudhon a reputation as a misogynist…. Are his visions of the Woman and his critique of the feminization of society essential to his economic and political thought?
Thibault Isabel: No, frankly I don’t think so. The Proudhon’s statements on women, while rather lamentable from my point of view, had no effect on his deep philosophical thought. I will ever go as far as saying that he didn’t succeed in extending his philosophical principles to the question of the sexes, which would have allowed him to prefigure the idea of “equality in difference,” dear to many contemporary differentialist feminists. Proudhon remained stuck to biological inferiority of women, which he only nuanced on rare occasions in his books.

Françoise: Proudhonian thoughts on property are particularly cliched today … Could you clarify his famous phrase “Property is theft?”
Thibault Isabel: Essentially Proudhon was a stubborn defender of small private property, which seemed to constitute a restraint on the development of big capital. When Proudhon affirms that “property is theft,” he only denounces the accumulation of capital, that is to say the fact that small independent property owners have increasingly been replaced by big capitalist property owners. The first works of Proudhon remain a bit ambiguous about this distinction, but the later works will set the record straight in a very explicit manner.

Françoise: One calls Proudhon an anarchist or socialist, but could one also consider him as a precursor of ‘de-growth.?’

Thibault Isabel: In the strict sense, no, as in the 19th century there was little sense in calling for more frugality in order to fight ecological devastation, the effects of which were not as visible as they are today. On the other hand, Proudhon was incontestably one of the great precursors of ‘de-growth’ through his general philosophy. He questioned the accumulation of wealth for its own sake and privileged the qualitative over the quantitative. One also finds a quasi-religious relation to nature with him.

Françoise: Could the Paris Commune, which occurred a few years after his death, be seen as an attempt (consciously or unconsciously) to put some of his ideas into practice?

Thibault Isabel: Of course, especially since the majority of the Communards were Proudhonians! Don’t forget that, at this time, Proudhon was more famous than Marx … On the other hand, the defeat of the Commune put a sudden halt to the expansion of Proudhonian thought in France: many Proudhonians lost their lives in the course of events in this period.

Françoise: Proudhon was a socialist deputy and he affirmed that “One must have lived in this voting booth called the National Assembly in order to understand how the men who are the most completely ignorant of the state of the country are nearly always those who represent it.” What was his general vision of democracy and politics?

Thibault Isabel: Proudhon didn’t like parliamentary democracy, which he judged to be technocratic and potentially dictatorial. He would have had no liking for “Jupiterian presidents,” for example. Instead Proudhon defended local and decentralized democracies, where the people express themselves in a much more direct manner and participate in politics.

Françoise: Proudhon considered France as the “country of the happy medium and stability … despite its rebellious spirit, its taste for novelty, and its indiscipline” and that “a conservative and a revolutionary” slumbers in each Frenchman. What relationship did Proudhon, proud native of the Franche-Comté region, defender of federalism and the principle of subsidarity, entertain with the French nation? And the French state?
Thibault Isabel: Proudhon didn’t like France very much, which he associated with Jacobinism, centralization, and contempt for local particularities. Rather he was a regionalist. But his federalism implied the coexistence of different scales of power, where France could serve as a intermediate stratum between the region and Europe. Proudhon believed that French nationality was an abstraction and that it didn’t correspond to any physical fatherland. Only the regions found favor in his eyes, because they were closer to man. The soil is what immediately surrounds us and concretely shapes our way of seeing the world.

Françoise: What books by Proudhon should be read first?

Thibault Isabel: It’s rather difficult to say. Proudhon wrote a lot, and he had the annoying habit of diluting his thought with interminable digressions which haven’t aged well. His later works are the best in my opinion, and the most synthetic. I especially recommend The Federative Principle, which condenses his principal political thoughts regarding democracy.

Source: http://leblogdethibaultisabel.blogspot.com/2017/07/entretien-Pierre-Joseph-Proudhon.html

Friedrich-Georg Jünger’s “The Perfection of Technology” – Robert Steuckers – March 30th, 2017

15 Saturday Jul 2017

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A denunciation of the mechanized titanism of Western thought, this work is the quarry from which all contemporary ecological thought draws in order to refine its critiques. Divided into two parts and one excursus, themselves divided into a multitude of small concise chapters, the work begins with an observation: Utopian literature no longer takes politics as its subject matter, but technology, which causes a disenchantment with the Utopian line of thought. Technology resolves none of man’s existential problems. It doesn’t increase leisure time; it doesn’t reduce work: it only replaces manual labor with “organized” labor. Moreover, it doesn’t create new wealth, on the contrary it condemns the condition of the worker to pauperism.

The deployment of technology was due to a general lack that reason sought to fill. But this lack didn’t disappear with the encroachment of technology: it only camouflaged it. The machine is a devourer, annihilating substance: its rationality is henceforth illusory. The economist believes, at first, that technology is the generator of wealth, then he realizes that its quantitative rationality is only an illusion, technology, in its infinite will to perfect itself, only follows its own logic, which is not economic. The modern world is henceforth characterized by a tacit conflict between the economist and the technician: the latter seeks to determine the processes of production despite profitability, a factor judged to be too subjective. Technicality, when it attains its highest degree, leads to a dysfunctional economy.

This opposition between technology and the economy will astonish more than one critic of contemporary uni-dimensionality, accustomed to putting economic and technological hypertrophies on the same level. But Friedrich-Georg Jünger saw economy as its etymology implicitly defined it, setting the standards of oikos, the housekeeping of man, well circumscribed in time and space. The establishment of oikos doesn’t proceed from an excessive mobilization of resources, similar to the economy of pillage and la razzia [Translator’s note: referring to slave raids conducted by the Barbary Pirates] (Raubbau), but a parsimonious enrichment of the place one occupies on earth.

The central idea of Friedrich-Georg Jünger regarding technology, states that it is an automatism dominated by its own logic. Once that logic starts forward, it escapes its creators. It multiplies itself in an exponential manner: machines demand the creation of other machines, until achieving complete automation, both mechanical and dynamic, at an extremely regimented pace, thus in a fatal pace. This fatal pace penetrates into the organic tissue of the human being and submits man to its deadly logic. Henceforth man no longer possesses his own pace, internal and biological, but feverishly seeks to adapt to the inorganic / fatal pace of the machine. Life inexorably comes to be submitted to the grand automation that technology produces, which ultimately regulates life entirely.

This generalized automatism is the “perfection of technology,” to which Friedrich-Georg Jünger, an organicist thinker, contrasts maturation (die Reife), which only natural beings can attain, without violence or coercion. The major characteristic of gigantic technological organization, dominant in the contemporary era, is the exclusive domination exercised by technology’s own determinations and causal deductions. The state, as a political body, can acquire, by means of technology, more power. But that is, for him, a sort of pact with the devil as the principles of technology then imply the extirpation of organic substance and its replacement by technological automation.

Whoever says total automation means total organization, in the sense of management. Labor, in the era of the exponential multiplication of automation, is organized to the point that it detaches itself from the ergonomic immediacy provided by hand and tool. This detachment leads to excessive specialization, normalization, standardization. To this Friedrich-Georg Jünger adds the concept of Stückelung (splitting, cutting, “division into pieces”) where “fragments” are no longer parts (pars, partes, Teile) of a whole but pieces (Stücke) reduced to serving a function in a device.

Friedrich-Georg Jünger joins Marx to denounce the alienation of these processes but distinguishes himself from Marx when he considers the process to be fatal so long as one remains chained/ connected (gekettet /angeschloßen) to the technological-industrial apparatus. The worker (Arbeiter) is a worker precisely because he is connected volens nolens [Translator’s note: Latin, willingly or unwillingly] to this apparatus. The condition of the worker doesn’t depend on the modesty of his wages but on this connection, independent of the amount of salary. The depersonalized connection causes the loss of the personal quality. The worker is he who has lost the internal bond that ties him to his work, the relation that makes interchangeability impossible, between him and another worker or between his purpose and another purpose. So alienation is not primarily economic, as Marx thought, but technical.

The general progression of automation devalues all labor directly derived from the interior character of the worker and triggers the process of natural destruction, the process of “devouring” (Verzehr) substance (the resources offered by Mother Nature, the generous donor). Because of this alienation by the technical order, the worker is hurled into a world of exploitation without the least protection. In order to benefit from a semblance of protection, he must create organizations, notably unions, but those remain connected to the technological-industrial apparatus.

The protective organization doesn’t emancipate, it enchains. The worker defends himself against alienation and “division into pieces” but paradoxically accepts the system of total automation. Marx, Engels, and the first socialists only saw political and economic alienation, and not technological alienation. Among them, no one took machines seriously. The dialectic of Marx, from this fact, became a sterile mechanicism, in the service of mechanized socialism. Socialism retained the same logic as total automation under the capitalist aegis. Even worse, its triumph would not put an end to automated alienation but would cause this movement to accelerate, by simplifying it and increasing it.

The creation of organizations generalizes total mobilization, which makes all things mobile and all places like workshops or laboratories buzz with incessant agitation. Any social sphere that tries to escape this total mobilization counteracts the movement and consequently endures repression: thus concentration camps open, mass deportations and collective massacres begin. It’s the rule of the unrestricted manager, a sinister figure appearing under a thousand masks.

Technology doesn’t produce harmony, the machine is not a goddess that dispenses blessings. On the contrary, it sterilizes the giving natural substrates, it organizes pillage to the ends of the Wilderness. The machine is a devourer, it must be unceasingly fed and, because it consumes more than it gives, it exhausts the riches of the Earth. Enormous elementary natural forces are hijacked by the gigantic technological machinery and its imprisoned retinues, which often leads to explosive catastrophes and demands constant surveillance, another facet of total mobilization.

The masses embroil themselves, voluntarily, in this total automation, annihilating isolated resistances, individual consciences, in the same stroke. The masses allow themselves to be carried by the hectic movement of automation, so that in the case of failure or a momentary halt in the linear movement towards automation, they experience a feeling of emptiness that seems insufferable to them.

Henceforth war is also totally mechanized. The destructive potential are amplified to extremes. But the shine of uniforms, the mobilizing worth of symbols, the glory, fades. We expect nothing but endurance and tenacious courage from soldiers.

The absolute mobility initiated by total automation turns against everything that retains endurance and stability, notably property (Eigentum). Friedrich-Georg Jünger, by posing this assertion, defines property in an original manner: the existence of machines rests on an exclusively temporal conception; the existence of property rests on a conception of space. Property implies limits, demarcation, hedges, walls and fences, enclosures. Technological collectivism wants to make these limits disappear.

Property creates a limited, circumscribed field of action, enclosed in a determined, precise, space. In order to progress vectorially, automation must break down the locks of property, the obstacle to the establishment of its omnipresent communication and connection networks. A humanity deprived of any form of property cannot escape total connection.

Socialism, by denying property, by refusing what remains in the world of “enclosed” zones, exactly facilitates absolute connection. Thus the possessor of machines is not an owner; the mechanized capitalist undermines the order of property, characterized by endurance and stability, to the benefit of an all-dissolving dynamism. Personal independence is only possible if there is no connection between events and the technical apparatus’ way of thinking and organization.

Between his critical and acerbic reflections on automation and the excessive technicality of modern times. Friedrich-Georg Jünger challenges the great philosophers of the European tradition. Descartes initiated a dualism that established an insurmountable separation between the body and the mind and eliminates the systema influxus physici that both relied on, in order replace it with punctual divine intervention that made God a watchmaker. The res extensa [Translator’s note: corporeal substance] is a dead thing: it its explained as an arrangement of mechanisms in which man, the instrument of the watchmaker God, can intervene at any moment with impunity. The res cogitans [Translator’s note: the mental substance] is then established as the absolute master of the mechanical processes ruling the universe. Man can become like God: a watchmaker who can manipulate everything to his will, without fear or respect. Cartesianism gave the signal for the exorbitant technical exploitation of the planet.

Source: http://www.in-limine.eu/2017/03/la-perfection-de-la-technique-de-friedrich-georg-junger-par-robert-steuckers.html

Proudhon for Today and Tomorrow – l’Action Française 2000 n° 2958 – July 6th 2017

13 Thursday Jul 2017

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Editor in chief of the magazine Krisis and author of numerous essays, Thibault Isabel just published a work devoted to Proudhon (1809-1865). The latest news on the thinker from Besançon from the perspective of Maurrasian traditionalism.

L’Action Française 2000 – Why did you publish this book on Proudhon’s thought today? Does it carry a certain relevance in our post-modern times? What could Proudhon still tell us?

Thibault Isabel – For a century, the Marxist domination of ideas prevented us from conceiving a non-communist alternative to the hegemony of the liberal system. Whether one was in the camp of the USSR, or in the camp of the United States. Henceforth, the fall of the Berlin Wall changed the situation. But this situation left us orphaned: even those who wanted to oppose the neoliberal system didn’t truly know what intellectual corpus to mobilize. So it is salutary to return to the pre-Marxist sources of the critique of liberalism, in order to understand what we can think regarding a coherent alternative without sinking into collectivism. In addition, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon anticipated numerous central problems of our time: the stranglehold of technocratic governance over the citizen’s sovereignty, the false opposition of the left and right (which both carry out liberal policy, in a form of false alternation), the financialization of the economy, the cult of consumption, etc.

Your book is entitled “Pierre-Joseph Proudhon – Anarchy Without Disorder.” Why is anarchy not disorder? And what ends up linking it to federalism?

To be clear: Proudhon never supported violence, chaos, and moral laxity. Quite the opposite! He defended extremely rigorous ethical positions, condemning riots for their bellicosity and even accusing strikers or saboteurs of showing too much intransigence. Don’t forget that the adjective “libertaire” [Translator’s Note: referring to anarchists who reject moral boundaries] was initially coined in the framework of a polemic against Proudhon, judged to be excessively conservative. Proudhon believed in liberty, but not in individualism or moral nihilism. What he called “anarchism” corresponds to a radical form of democracy, supposed to give sovereignty to the people in the framework of a decentralized order, organized around the local sphere.

What is political federalism and economic mutualism? How are they complementary?

Proudhon was horrified by everything big and he adored everything small. He was convinced that men would only rediscover their autonomy within a human-scale order. He despised bureaucratic mega-structures, which alienate individuals and groups. From this point of view, he prefigured not only the Orwellian critique of dictatorial Stalinism, but also the critique of hyper-administered societies where the state machinery inflates to the point of absorbing everything. This observation evidently applies to modern Western nations, having become Jacobin, particularly France, as it applies supranational structures to governance like the European Union or the IMF. Federalism is a weapon against these processes of centralization. He aims to re-localize politics so that the citizens can retake control of their lives. This measure must be accompanied by economic decentralization, as the processes of bureaucratization are expressed in the private sphere as much as in the public sphere, with the development of multinational corporations which alienate the worker in the exact same way as the bureaucratic state alienates the citizen. So we should favor small tradesmen over big planetary corporations, small artisans against big de-localized factories, and the small peasants against big industrial agriculture. This occurs through mutualism, which consists of workers banding together into independent federations so that they can better resist multinational corporations. In other terms, we must implement economic federalism, in addition to political federalism, in order to protect ourselves against foreign powers while strengthening the local social fabric.

In his book Décoloniser les provinces [Translator’s Note: To Decolonize the Provinces], Michel Onfray – who prefaced your book – aligns Girondism with Proudhonian federalism. Does that seem erroneous to you?

The Girondins, under the Revolution, defended very different ideas. But overall they were driven by a visceral contempt regarding the politicians in the capital: in effect it’s this Parisian confiscation of power which then gave birth to the Terror. Proudhon shared this fear entirely, especially since he defended the provinces and their identities as well. Would you be surprised if I mention that the political and economic capital of a country is concentrated exactly within its administrative capital, in this case Paris for France? As such Proudhon could recognize his thought in Girondin provincialism. Moreover I would like to mention a point: Girondism gave birth to the French intellectual conservatism of the 19th century. Tocqueville, for example, considered today as a “right wing” author, supported ideas very similar to Proudhon. In reality, at the time, Proudhonian socialism wasn’t really a left wing ideology (in the sense of the statist, liberal, or libertarian left of the time), and conservatism was not really a right wing ideology (in the sense of the Orleanist, Bonapartist, or Legitimist right). Tocqueville, upon entering into the Assembly, even asked to be seated on the left! All our political labels have to be reviewed. From the start, anarchism and conservatism constituted two complementary branches of the same family of thought.

How is Proudhonian anarchism anti-modern? How is Proudhon a visionary critic of consumer society?

It was the process of modernization which lead to the concentration of political capital in the hands of the bureaucratic technocracy, and its this same process of modernization which lead to the concentration of economic capital in the hands of international finance. Proudhon expounded an anti-modern vision of society, certainly open to social justice and progress, but desirous to re-root culture. He also initiated the critique of consumer society in the measure where he advocated a form of “happy frugality.” He said we should free the poor from misery but we should not live with the obsession to become rich or always consume more.

Why was Proudhon favorable to patriarchy? You write: “Proudhon the anti-capitalist anarchist ended up warmly appreciating the most conservative ideas, not because he thought they were superior, but because he understood their share of legitimacy.” An adept of social progress, was not Proudhon anti-progressive in the moral and politico-cultural scheme?

Proudhon believed in the autonomy of individuals, who must exercise their sense of responsibility, but he questioned the liberal conception of the atomized individual, enclosed within himself. Though one could reject various types of communitarianism and integralism, which enclose the individual in an oppressive tradition, one mustn’t reject community solidarity or the value of heritage. The individual naturally lives among others. He doesn’t live for solitude. So this anthropological position is neither liberal, nor reactionary. It’s neutral. Nevertheless, that didn’t prevent Proudhon from being particularly backward looking in moral matters. It’s doubtlessly the aspect of his thought that is the most old-fashioned: even in Catholic Traditionalist milieus, I don’t think that many people would adopt the Proudhonian vision of wife and family, much more rigid than any vision we can see today! In any case that’s a paradox which deserves to be underlined, regarding a man who objectively was the principal founder of French socialist thought.

Proudhon was hostile to “the power of parties” and the “electoral game,” but yet he defended the institution of organic democracy? In what way was he even tempted by the royalist solution? Georges Sorel, Édouard Berth, and Les Cahiers du Cercle Proudhon (of Maurrasian origin), claimed this exact Proudhonian heritage a century ago. How did Proudhon reconcile anarchy, federalism, and monarchism?

Proudhon was not a monarchist. On the other hand, he wasn’t part of the cult of the Republic. He underlined that democracy, which he strongly believed in, could be combined with any type of regime (even dictatorship, which he abhorred). So there exists deeply democratic monarchies as there exists deeply dictatorial republics. That’s why rapprochements between certain Proudhonians and certain Maurrasians could take place in the 20th century. But their agreement was not easy, because strong ideological disagreements remained. Maurras said that “monarchy, it’s anarchy plus one.” Proudhonian federalism put the emphasis on local power instead. Bridges were possible between both doctrines, but only up until a certain point. Nevertheless, we sometimes find a common inspiration with Maurras and Proudhon, which also is found with Georges Bernanos, Charles Péguy, and the Non-Conformists of the 1930s.

You write, “Traditionalist in his mannerisms, Proudhon reconciles us with the most ancient thoughts, against foolish modernism – this strange two headed hydra that reveals itself in Adam Smith, the father of liberalism, as well as with Karl Marx, the father of communism.” Elsewhere, you qualify him as “protectionist” before his time. Do you confirm this statement?

Protectionism constitutes one of the best means to re-localize the economy! Proudhon castigated protectionist measures when they served to aid the development of big national industry against foreign industry: if Coca-Cola was a French company, would that change its detrimental effects on society? But on the other hand, the philosopher called for the establishment of federal protectionism, which simultaneously expresses itself on continental, national, and regional scales. Thus each level of power would support local production. This multifaceted protectionism would guarantee the equitable distribution of resources by preventing dumping, by which bosses – or shareholders today – put downwards pressure on wages and put the workers of every country into competition. Economic production would develop as locally as possible. We should understand that the development of globalized liberalism undermines the sustainability of concrete solidarity. Only the return to a world of independent workers can restore self-mastery. This project is less Utopian than it seems. The “uberization” of labor and the multiplication of speculative bubbles makes turbocapitalism increasingly fragile. The classical wage earner is on the way to extinction. The economy is metamorphosing. We must simply desire that the change occurs in a way favorable to human dignity. The ideas of Proudhon can help us there.

Interviewer: Arnaud Guyot-Jeannin

Source: https://www.actionfrancaise.net/2017/07/07/proudhon-aujourdhui-demain/

Werner Sombart on the Ethic of Subsistence and the Capitalist Spirit – Philitt – May 22nd, 2017

15 Thursday Jun 2017

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A figure of the German Conservative Revolution, Werner Sombart devoted a large part of his work to the analysis of the capitalist spirit and the research of its origins. By focusing on the genesis of capitalism which he situated in the Late Middle Ages, the German sociologist highlights the opposition between a pre- capitalist European commercial ethic, called subsistence, and a specifically capitalist ethic. This latter was firstly influenced by Christian thought, which limited it, before it freed itself from it.

The feudal and corporatist economy of the Middles Ages was dominated by the idea that everyone should be capable of living from his work in conformity with his rank and by leading an honest life. The statement of Sigismond, the Germanic Holy Roman Emperor at the start of the 15th century, recounted by Werner Sombart, transcribes this ideal: “Work exists so that each man can earn his bread by performing it and so that no one can impinge upon the trade of another. Thanks to it each man can satisfy his needs and feed himself.” The economic logic governing such a society was thus subordinated to the necessity of providing for the producers and the determination of prices was essentially based on the costs of production. Usage value took priority over exchange value: prices didn’t depend on supply and demand in the pre- capitalist commercial spirit. Likewise, any maneuver aiming to depress prices, like a fire sale, was judged immoral.

This ethic, which Werner Sombart qualified as the ethic of subsistence, created a particular conception of the notion of competition. In order to assure price stability and the means of survival for everyone, tradesmen and artisans were restrained to the domain of a particular activity and a defined clientele. Impregnated with the peasant spirit, this commercial morality considered that “the client was for the city dweller, what the plot of land was for the peasant,” according to Sombart. Any pursuit of clients was thus prohibited and the actions aiming to attract clients from one’s neighbor were forbidden. Relying on the commercial regulations and the legal records of large commercial cities, Werner Sombart showed that any attempt at commercial promotion could lead to sanctions.

Moreover, by assuring the organization and regulation of professions, the guilds watched out to make sure no one impinged on another person’s realm of activity. Regarding the prohibition of lending at interest that predominated at the time, it conformed to the ethic of guarding against any panic by forbidding the production of money from money. The sociologist remarked that this pre- capitalist economy was not very productive. The lack of commercial rigor, the multitude of holidays, and the slowness of transaction speed reduced the efficiency of a society in which economic work was not the central point, a society in which the elites were not legitimized by their commercial prowess. In effect, this spirit corresponded to European societies in which life was regulated by social, popular, and religious events, which imposed their imperatives upon commerce. Moreover, Werner Sombart was well aware that the principles of this ethic of subsistence were regularly violated. Yet the regular transgression of the forbidden, even the occasional tolerance of this transgression, did not weaken the principle nor its mark left on the spirit of the age.

The emergence of the first forms of capitalism in Italy in the 13th and 14th centuries, notably in Florence, broke with the preceding eras not only by valuing wealth obtained from work, but especially by rationalizing economizing attitudes. Werner Sombart underlined the role of certain aspects of Catholicism in this evolution. By advocating the idea of a chaste and moderate life but also the absolute mastery of oneself and rigor in work, the Thomist doctrine of Catholicism encouraged the rationalization of life and created a fertile ground for the development of homo economicus. Honesty and rigor in business were no longer solely constraints imposed by reputation but virtues required by the personal conscience of the individual, which increased the degree of necessity. These Christian virtues were a catalyst for the capitalist spirit but they were equally an important limit. Thomism did not condemn wealth but it distinguished it from enrichment. Movement, dynamism always excites mistrust and the fear of a violation of limits. Furthermore, even when it is allowed, this enrichment must not be the end goal. Man must remain the ultimate ends of the economy.

The Persistence of the Ethic of Subsistence

However the principles of the ethic of subsistence remained omnipresent in this first form of capitalism. More rational and effective than before, commercial activity remained low intensity. The ideas of limits combined with the ethic of subsistence had lost none of their importance and commerce remained subordinated to the social life of individuals. Devoting one’s life to the expansion of one’s wealth was not the capitalist ideal of this era, it was to earn enrich oneself rapidly and retire from business in order to enjoy and live on the earned wealth. Werner Sombart explained that during this period of primitive capitalism, prices remained essentially determined by the usage value of goods and competition was strictly subordinated to the principles of the pre- capitalist economy: “Even during the first half of the 18th century, the merchants of London saw the efforts of some of their colleagues to decorate their shops or attract clients with tasteful and elegant displays as unfair competition.” The sociologist illustrated this late remnant of the ethic of subsistence by citing the writings of Daniel Defoe, author of Robinson Crusoe but also a figure of English capitalism and editor of the Complete English Tradesman published in 1725. In this work, the entrepreneur didn’t hesitate to take a position against unregulated commerce. He accused it of lowering prices by drastically diminishing the jobs necessary for an equal amount of production in order to concentrate profit in the hands of a few. Werner Sombart also recalled the mistrustful attitude of Italian Guilds in the 16th century towards the first machines in the name of defending labor. So this first capitalist period remained profoundly enclosed by social life, limiting any desire for the autonomy of economic logic in relation to religious and traditional principles.

The mutation of this classical capitalism into modern capitalism began the 18th century but it only truly revealed itself in the 19th. The economy then became autonomous and was no longer subordinated to the limits of traditional society. Man was no longer the center of the economic universe. The old principle of “earn as much as possible by the doing the least amount of business possible” was no longer fashionable, on the contrary, it was to always produce more in order to compensate for ever falling prices. Commercial advertising became widespread and attempts to attract and seduce the clientele were no longer objects of moral condemnation. All the juridical and moral shackles of the past ages were treated like obstacles to destroy in order to liberate commerce. Economic efficiency became the only moral principle in business. Werner Sombart remarked the former virtues of primitive capitalism (rigor at work, a spirit of thrift and honesty) survive in the modern world but under an “objectified” form. These virtues are justified as long as they prove their economic effectiveness but are no longer followed if their utility ceases, in private life for example.

The Modern Cult of Growth and Movement

For Werner Sombart, the principal mutation of the modern capitalist spirit resides in the motive of the capitalist. In the era of primitive capitalism, the merchant was animated by the love of profit and the will to conform with Christian virtues, the latter stimulated but limited the capitalist spirit. In the modern era, the love of profit was accentuated, the virtues objectified, but the capitalist was especially moved by a new force. It is the will to grow and the love of this growth that motivates him before all. The limitless expansion of business constitutes his supreme goal. This imperative of growth suppose an absence of limit on work, production, and the creation of wealth. Werner Sombart explained that modern commercial activity achieved an unbounded wealth, but also and especially a depth and intensity previously unparalleled: “Forward, forward! Such is the watchword of our times. The advance of the market and furious commotion: that is what characterizes it before all. We know to what extent this excess of activity exhausts bodies, withers souls. All the inherent values of life are sacrificed to the Moloch of work, all the aspirations of the heart and the spirit must give way to a single interest, a single preoccupation: business.” The sociologist did not hesitate to compare this psychology of the modern businessman to the psychology of a child whose mental world rests upon permanent agitation, the desire to always attain more, the love of novelty, and the feeling of power. Education permits the regulation of such caprices by imposing limits on the desires of the child. The modern commercial ethic rests on this infantile psychology freed from any educational shackle.

This fundamental rupture brought by modernity created the cult of movement and change. Negatively perceived, stability became, on the contrary, a synonym for immobilization and sterility. At the end of the tumultuous 19th century, Charles Péguy still perceived the vestiges of the old ethic of subsistence: “They said that a man who works well and conducts himself well will surely never lack anything … this whole old world was essentially the world of making a living” whose disappearance constitutes what is properly modern: “And maybe that’s the most profound difference, the abyss that exists between the ancient, pagan, Christian, French world, and our modern world.” The dynamic of modern capitalism analyzed by Werner Sombart in the first part of the 20th century has continued to our day. The recourse to publicity and marketing, the race to lower prices, and the imperative of economic growth have intensified since the writings of the German intellectual. While the fluidification of society appears to be the ideal of the modern world now more than ever, the practices condemned by the ethic of subsistence are made commonplace. Yet one still finds significant traces of this ethic in the deontological rules of certain so-called “regulated” professions. The lawyer’s organization thus forbids the canvassing of clients from a member in the name of the principle of brotherhood and restrains advertising to preserve the dignity of the profession. Through his original approach to notions of economic growth, competition, and price determination, the historical and worldly wise analysis of Werner Sombart constitutes a relevant tool to address contemporary questions of growth and the local or alternative economy.

Source: https://philitt.fr/2017/05/22/ethique-de-subsistance-et-esprit-capitaliste-chez-werner-sombart/