Life in the Market Is Good for You

The clerisy of artists and journalists and college professors thinks that capitalist spending is just awful. In 1985 the historian Daniel Horowitz argued that the American clerisy had been since the 1920s in the grip of a “modern moralism” about spending. The traditional moralism of the nineteenth century looked with alarm from the middle class down onto the workers and immigrants drinking beer and obeying Irish priests and in other ways showing their “loss of virtue.” Traditional moralists like the U.S. Commissioner of Labor Carroll D. Wright “had no basic reservations about the justice and efficacy of the economic system—their questions had to do with the values of workers and immigrants, not the value of capitalism.” The modern moralist, post-1920, in the style of Veblen and Mencken and Sinclair Lewis, looks down from the clerisy onto the middle class. Therefore “at the heart of most versions of modern moralism is a critique, sometimes radical and always adversarial, of the economy.”1 Horowitz is polite to his fellow members of the clerisy—Veblen, Stuart Chase, the Lynds, Galbraith, Riesman, Marcuse, Lasch, and Daniel Bell—and does not say that their concerns were simply mistaken. He does observe that “denouncing other people for their profligacy and lack of Culture is a way of reaffirming one’s own commitment.”2