The Passions and the Interests

 As I've argued before on this blog, the core challenge for every modern society—regardless of its political structure—is how to get large numbers of genetically-unrelated strangers to cooperate with one another in complex enterprises for long periods of time. In order to achieve this seemingly miraculous feat, as I've pointed out, states tend to rely on some mix of three basic motivators: coercion (Max Weber's "organized violence"), economic self-interest, and voluntary altruism (a.k.a. morality). 

A key objection to capitalism and market society from their inception has been that they rely too heavily on the second of these three motives, at the expense of the third. As Marx and Engels put it, capitalism had reduced human relations to nothing but "callous 'cash payment.'" Thomas Carlyle famously made the same critique, warning against the "cash nexus" becoming the sole basis of human society.  

Indeed, the great Albert O. Hirschman shows in his delightful book The Passions and the Interests, "Romantic" and "nostalgic" criticisms of capitalism have taken roughly this same form since the 18th century. Capitalism was accused of replacing the "natural affections" of home and village, of Gemeinschaft (to use Tönnies's term), with the selfish motive of economic advantage. 

Hirschman quotes Bolingbroke to the effect that, under nascent capitalism, "money" had become "a more lasting tie than honour, friendship, relation, consanguinity," and the Scottish Enlightenment thinker Adam Ferguson as warning that under "the spirit which reigns in a commercial state [...] man [...] deals with his fellow creatures as he does with his cattle and soil, for the the sake of the profits they bring," whereas "the bands of affection are broken."

I was reminded of the passage from Oliver Goldsmith's The Traveller—which dates as well from the eighteenth century period of relatively early capitalism: 

As social bonds decay,

As duty, love, and honour fail to sway,

Fictitious bonds, the bonds of wealth and law,

Still gather strength, and force unwilling awe.

In other words, Goldsmith was lamenting—in his usual pithy and emotionally resonant way—the passage of the motives of Gemeinschaft, of voluntary altruism, and their replacement with the motives of mere coercion ("law") and economic self-interest ("wealth").

This critique of capitalism retains eternal emotional appeal precisely because it is true. A society that depends exclusively on motives of economic exchange, to the exclusion of appeals to voluntarism, morality, and public spirit, will eventually lose not only much that makes human life worthwhile—but even those norms that make economic exchange possible—since a market society depends in part on mutual trust (here is one of those famous "cultural contradictions of capitalism"). 

But Hirschman's book also reminds us that many of the earliest advocates of capitalism were concerned not so much with the sorrow of losing the third motive (voluntarism)—as they were the fear of the excesses of the first (coercion). 

Measured against the standard of an idealized Gemeinschaft, where people help one another and cooperate in joint enterprises out of the goodness of their hearts, capitalism is indeed a hard-hearted system, and the "cash nexus" between man and man sounds chilling indeed. 

But measured against the world of the seventeenth century—with its despotisms and wars of religion—as many of early modern political philosophers were—the second motive—"gain," economic self-interest, mutually beneficial exchange—could seem downright benign. 

Judith Shklar, in Ordinary Vices, talks about how proto-liberals like Montaigne and Montesquieu often contrasted humankind unfavorably with the animals, because our lofty human ideals, our manias to remake the world, seemed to lead us only only into wars, persecution, and cruelty. Whereas the animals—who sought only to survive and reproduce—knew the proper measure of their own abilities, and therefore seldom came to grief.

One sees traces of these same attitudes in the early modern thinkers Hirschman cites. They praised capitalism, "lucre," and the "love of monetary gain" not because they came to see these motives as any more noble than people had before. Indeed, they regarded them as humble, animalistic, porcine sorts of desires—but ones which could be praised for that very reason, as a satire on the dangers inherent in the "passionate" pursuit of "greatness." 

"In an age in which men were searching for ways of limiting the damage and horrors they are wont to inflict on each other," Hirschman writes, "commercial and economic activities were therefore looked upon more kindly not because of any rise in the esteem in which they were held; on the contrary, any preference for them expressed a desire for a vacation from (disastrous) greatness, and thus reflected continuing contempt. In a sense, the triumph of capitalism, like that of many modern tyrants, owes much to the widespread refusal to take it seriously[.]"

The thinkers of the early modern age weren't trying to reject the Gemeinschaft/moral motives, then, out of some sort of preference for monetary avarice and "cash nexus." Indeed, if you had asked them whether it would be better for people to be motivated by pure altruism and voluntarism, they would probably have said yes, if possible. 

But the world of despotism, persecution, and warfare they confronted was one in which—Hirschman observes—the motivator of mere "religious precept" and "moralistic exhortation" had already proved itself inadequate to the task of restraining human violence. The thinkers of the time were engaged in a desperate hunt for "more effective ways of shaping the pattern of human action," since sermons—when they were not actively contributing to the problem—had so conspicuously failed to stop the bloodshed during the wars of religion. 

The thinkers of the early modern age didn't reject the third motive because they disfavored it, then; they merely argued that it was too weak—on its own—to sustain human cooperation at scale. (And indeed, as I've argued before, it is probably still too weak to perform this task unassisted today—hence a core weakness in various left-communist, anarchist, and voluntarist programs for society). 

If the third motive—morality—was not up to the task of restraining human "passions," what was? Hirschman notes that the obvious candidate was the first motive—state violence, a.k.a. "coercion and repression." But when it was precisely state violence that was causing the problem—when the unbridled "passions" of despotic rulers was exactly what most needed to be curbed—fighting coercion with still more coercion seemed like scarcely the answer (though some solution along these lines would eventually be tried in our own constitution's theory of the separation of powers). 

This leaves only the second motive—economic self-interest. And one can see how, having reached this stage of the argument, this motive could present itself to thinkers of the time as relatively benign and innocent (even though, as Hirschman points out, this was the era of the slave trade and of what Marx called "primitive accumulation," when commercial enterprise was, in practice, often scarcely less violent than the depredations of absolutist governments at home). 

Hirschman's point in reconstructing this intellectual genealogy is not to argue that these early modern defenses of capitalism and market society (the second motive) were correct; to the contrary, he argues that modern events had bestowed upon these arguments "an air of unreality." His point, rather, is that these arguments at least made sense in their context. "I can see how you got there" is kind of the best he can grant them.

Part of the reason I found Hirschman's book so resonant and interesting in our present historical moment, however, is that in many ways it feels like our politics are devolving back into something closer to the early modern condition. The checks and balances of our system are breaking down. We plainly have to worry about governing the ambitions and "passions" of dangerously powerful men, again, who would carry us back into a world of ceaseless war, persecution, and despotism. 

If, for Hirschman, writing in the 1970s, the wrenching experience of modernity and industrialism had given the early modern theory of a gentle "doux commerce" an "air of unreality"—to us today—faced with a president who recognizes no checks on his personal power, and who has started multiple illegal wars, and deported and imprisoned people without due process, and corrupted the federal government's prosecutorial powers to persecute and harass his critics—the concerns of the early modern thinkers he describes now sound all too relevant and close to home. 

We, like them, are faced now above all else with what Hirschman calls the task of "restraining the destructive passions of men." 

In our context, then, it is not so much the early modern theorists of capitalism as the romantic and nostalgic criticisms of capitalism that suddenly have "an air of unreality." 

Noah Smith penned a review recently of J.D. Vance's god-awful-sounding new book, for instance, in which Vance apparently recycles a lot of these Gemeinschaft-style "communitarian" critiques of consumerism and economic development. One feels one's eyes going into dizzy cartoon spirals at the spectacle of Vance of all people making these arguments, when he is currently serving as vice president to the most crassly and brazenly materialistic administration ever to strut its way through Washington. 

If anything has an "air of unreality" to us in 2026, it is our vice president making psuedo-"small is beautiful" style critiques of economic selfishness, while actively serving in a government that has bilked billions of dollars out of the American people in order to serve the personal enrichment of Donald Trump and his plutocratic cronies, while actively seeking to deport human beings to torture and indefinite confinement and to jail Trump's political opponents for having the audacity to stand against him. 

Since we are now back in the world the early modern thinkers faced—struggling to figure out how to once again cabin the "passions" of war, persecution, and despotism so as to preserve some modicum of human rights and human security—the problem of "one-dimensional man" raised by those Hirschman dubs the "nostalgic" and "romantic" critics of capitalism suddenly seems much less urgent. 

It has taken a back seat to the types of even more basic political problems—how not to be killed, jailed, or tortured, and how to prevent the same fate from befalling others—that the early modern thinkers confronted. And so, it's worth taking seriously and investigating in detail the ways these thinkers proposed to solve this problem. 

They may have been wrong to portray economic self-interest as "innocent," for all the reasons Hirschman lays out in the book's final part. ("As economic growth in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries uprooted millions of people," he writes, "impoverished numerous groups while enriching some [...] it became clear" that these forces could in turn unleash "passions" and violence upon the world. Capitalism no longer seemed like a gentle and peaceful alternative to absolutist statecraft.)

But they were not wrong to sense that mere moral exhortation and "precept" was too weak to restrain human evil. We are plainly seeing this again today, when everything in our governmental system that depended on mere "norms" and voluntary self-restraint on the part of rulers is being thrown into the dust heap. Today as in the seventeenth century, the "third motive" on its own is just not sufficient to secure the level of cooperation and mutual trust we need to make a complex society function. 

In such a context, the idea of trying to enlist or "harness" people's economic self-interest to achieve a more benign result has a new and urgent appeal. I'm not sure I'm satisfied with the proposals the early modern thinkers offered for how to perform such a paradoxical operation. But Hirschman is plainly right to call attention to their efforts, and to insist that this is a chapter of intellectual history still pregnant with meaning for the modern age.