The Ideologies of Capitalism and Socialism

[Chris]

I don't see capitalism, in the sense of emergent free markets, as an ideology, but still the old conservative Russel Kirk makes some sense here in arguing economy should not be primary on people's lives.

Russel Kirk The Ideologies of Capitalism and Socialism

“Capitalism” and “socialism” both are 19th century ideological tags; they delude and ensnare, as do all ideologies. Zealots for “democratic capitalism” seem to have forgotten that it was Karl Marx who made the word “capitalism” a theoretical concept. Surviving enthusiasts for an abstraction called “socialism” impose killing burdens upon themselves by endeavoring to maintain a cause hopelessly discredited by the squalid oligarchs of actual socialist states.

The conservative, no ideologue, does not believe that human existence is mostly a matter of economics; but both the belligerent “capitalist” and the fervent “socialist” do so believe. I recall the sentences of my old friend Wilhelm Roepke, writing nearly four decades ago in his important book The Social Crisis of Our Times:

“Socialism, collectivism, and their political and cultural appendages are, after all, only the last consequence of our yesterday; they are the last convulsions of the nineteenth century, and only in them do we reach the lowest point of the century-old development along the wrong road; these are the hopeless final stage toward which we drift unless we act…

“Socialism—helped by the uprooted proletarian existence of large numbers of the working class and made palatable for them by just as rootless intellectuals, who will have to bear the responsibility for this—is less concerned with the interests of these masses than with the interests of these intellectuals, who may indeed see their desire for an abundant choice of positions of power fulfilled by the socialist state.”

Amen to that. The ideologies of capitalism and socialism are the two sides of a counterfeit coin. We ought to discourse in other terms, employing some moral imagination and confronting honestly our disorders, public and private, at the close of the 20th century. Indeed we seem to be drifting into what Irving Babbitt called “a devil’s Sabbath of whirling machinery;” but the human condition would not be improved by substituting “socialist” social engineers for “capitalist” social engineers.

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[Chris]

So some five years later a follow up: The Humane Economy of Wilhelm Roepke

...Roepke was the principal champion of a humane economy: that is, an economic system suited to human nature and to a humane scale in society, as opposed to systems bent upon mass production regardless of counterproductive personal and social consequences. He was a formidable opponent of socialist and other “command” economies; also a fearless, perceptive critic of an unthinking “capitalism.”...

...Roepke’s “third way” is not “gas and water socialism” or consumer cooperatives or a managed economy. Instead it is economic activity humanized by being related to moral and intellectual ends; humanized by being reduced to the human scale. Roepke proposes to abolish the proletariat, not by reducing everyone to proletarian status, the method of socialism, but by restoring property, function, and dignity to the mass of men. His ideas, although not new, are put with a clarity, practicality, and assurance that other people who wish to simplify and decentralize the economy sometimes lack. A liberal in the tradition of Tocqueville, Roepke believed in the restoration of local institutions and local choices, not in a centralized bureaucratic elite. He desired a society with reverence, stability, personal rights, and manners; he saw that, if we do not restore such a society, presently we may have no civilized society at all. The work of the French Revolution must be undone, he reasoned, not to reinstate a rule of force, but instead to recognize order and authority, established by prescription and consent. Society cannot be organized, he wrote, “in accordance with rational postulates while disregarding the need for genuine communities, for a vertical structure.”

That same infatuation with “rationalism,” which terribly damages communal existence, also produces an unquestioning confidence in the competitive market economy and leads to a heartless individualism which, in Roepke’s words, “in the end has proved to be a menace to society and has so discredited a fundamentally sound idea as to further the rise of the far more dangerous collectivism.” In such a world, where old landmarks have been swept away, old loyalties ridiculed, and human beings reduced to economic atoms, “men finally grasp at everything that is offered to them, and here they may easily and understandably suffer the same fate as the frogs in the fable who asked for a king and got a crane.”...

Read much more at the link.