Why do intellectuals oppose capitalism cato

There is only so much status to go around. The old resent the young because they cannot ever be young again. Women in patriarchal societies resent men because they can never be men. Intellectuals enjoy a most unique kind of freedom in modernity—the freedom to think without regard for practical outcome—yet they often live in a state of resentment against the system that affords them this freedom.

This resentment entails a sense of victimage, even while those who feel such victimage are, objectively, superordinate both economically and culturally in the social hierarchies of the market societies in which they live. And this sense of resentment often fuels social action against the market system, most often through acceptance of redistributive policies that are justified by the sedimented, essentialized, negative social constructions of capitalism.

Contemporary intellectuals have long since abdicated the role of revolutionaries: the true revolutionary intellectuals devoured each other in the conflagrations of the last century and have given way now to a bureaucratized class of thinkers who, more often than not, cannot see any real practical economic or political outcomes of their thinking and, as I discuss below, are bothered by this fact.

From this perspective, anti-capitalist critiques are seen as a product of the particular existential conditions and experiences of anti-capitalist intellectuals within capitalist society itself. This is a rather uncommon theoretical move, since most intellectuals, being hostile to capitalism, would not conceive that this hostility itself could be unit of analysis.

Their critical capacities are reserved for capitalism itself, rather than knowledge about capitalism and the ideological dimensions of such knowledge. Sedimented realities resist reflexivity even among the most highly reflexive. Their work represents just two approaches to a more general, but inchoate sociology of anti-capitalism. They grasped the fundamental reality of anti-capitalist thought-styles as social products and as dispositions of intellectuals gained from their social positions, experiences and their phenomenological life-worlds.

A more sustained analysis of anti-capitalist thought styles would involve unpacking these cultural meanings and myths from the stocks of knowledge that see themselves as merely objective renderings of the capitalist system as such. Lewis Feuer was deeply interested in the ways in which the emotional states of intellectuals influenced their intellectual work.

His work on the scientific intellectual, as well as on Marx and the Marxists, explored the curious antinomies between rational, and irrational forces. He was particularly interested in looking at the irrational, or emotive, bases of what purported to be the most scientific and rational thought systems. Feuer clearly saw subjectivity as fundamentally linked to social and cultural structures and his psychoanalytic interpretations were his major avenue for exploring the more general sociological issue of irrationality.

At times, his reliance on psychoanalytic reasoning was excessive, yet the idea of linking rational intellectual productivity to unconscious irrational motives and emotions was unique and often powerful.

Feuer had been a leading intellectual of the s left in the United States, and a major scholar and interpreter of Marx and Marxisms. His sociology of Marxism avoided the fellow-travelling of similar efforts by scholars such as Alvin Gouldner.

Like many of his contemporaries, he was disillusioned with the failed Soviet experiment in socialism and increasingly moved to a strong conservative position, which was intensified by his close observations of and involvement in the student movements of the s at the University of California in Berkeley which resulted in a book The Conflict of Generations: On the Character and Significance of Student Movements [].

Feuer established a pattern of providing intense analytical scrutiny of movements of which he once been had been a part, using his own experiences and observations as ethnographic data. This also made him not just a critic of left-wing, radical movements, but an apostate who earned the scorn of the left intellectuals.

His willingness as a professor to to expose the irrationality of the student movements and to stand up to puerile student demands and the obsequious kowtowing of radical professors led to his resignation as a full professor of philosophy from Berkeley. What interested Feuer were how the supposedly rational thinking of intellectuals was fundamentally influenced and prefigured by a priori socially and cultural mediated irrational forces, and how these irrational forces were overtly denied and repressed by the intellectuals themselves and their followers.

Intellectuals think, but their thinking is not doing , in the sense of pragmatic and discernible outcomes such as the production of things of material value. The value of intellectual work, in its ideal typical sense, is cultural and intellectuals are rewarded for producing knowledge, which even in its most applied forms, is still symbolic rather than practical activity.

As cultural capital, then, knowledge is valuable in and of itself precisely because it is not practical, or if it is the practicality of it is masked. This is the case in economics, for instance, where students receive degrees in the field, which have symbolic value, but are not specifically referred to as vocational training indeed, to say that a degree in economics from a liberal arts college is a credential of purely practical value, or some kind of vocational training, would be an insult.

So, in the first instance, intellectuals would be disposed to be hostile toward capitalism because they see it as entirely practical, and construct this practicality as devoid of conceptual or moral substance and value.

The dialectical personality, for Feuer, was represented in crystalline form in the work of earlier thinkers such as Karl Marx, George Bernard Shaw, and Thorstein Veblen; in his own contemporaries, Herbert Marcuse, Erich Fromm, and Paul Goodman; and in a collective form in the student radicals and their acolyte professors in the s. The most horrifying consequences of this position were evident in the state sponsored totalitarian experiments of the 20th century and in lighter forms such as the left-liberal social democratic impulse to empower the state in all spheres of social life, without regard for classical individual rights.

The s critique of the war against the environment provided the seeds of the environmental movements of the early 21st century, in particular the war against climate change and global warming. While the issue of climate change is a complex one, the central argument of the campaign against global warming is that it is caused by anthropogenic, or man-made forces. These forces are industrial, and attributed primarily to capitalism. Feuer notes that the record of environmental catastrophe produced by Soviet industrialism was always rendered invisible in preference to attributing industrial evil to capitalism in Western democracies alone.

Such cognitive maskings themselves become objects of sociological analysis. While modern environmental movements do not always specifically cite the arguments of anti-capitalists such as Marcuse and Fromm, their structures of thinking are remarkably homologous with those of this earlier generation of anti-capitalists. It is unregulated capitalism that is the source of the coming climactic apocalypse and the response has been toward intense regulation, not from within capitalism itself—say, through competitive market mechanisms that reward green innovation and consumer satisfaction—but from the state.

Anti-capitalism is always associated with a push toward the intensification of the power of the state and any negative effects from the latter in terms of the abridgments of negative freedoms and individual rights is unaddressed, or consciously repressed.

This is the most fundamental reality of anti-capitalism as a movement from its earliest origins, say in 17th century France to the modern day: it is always in movement against the upper classes with the intensified power of the state as its main instrument of coercion. And while students no longer worship so much at the altar of Marx and Marcuse, the sustainability movement is a new form of bureaucratic compulsion, grounded in a fundamentalist belief that capitalist industrial society is the motor force of the coming climactic apocalypse.

Quite respectable scientists among them several Nobel laureates who want to explore scientifically alternative hypotheses regarding climate change, and economists who want to question whether a new regulatory monolith should be created as opposed to market forces, can quite easily be grouped with anti-scientific religious fanatics and easily dismissed.

Scientific skeptics are epistemologically annihilated. All of this takes place simultaneously with the rejection of reflexivity necessary to understand the a priori social and cultural forces that shape knowledge production in the scientific fields of climate change, in this case the anti-systemic generational dispositions of the anti-capitalist intellectuals.

The contemporary environmentalist movement embodies a deep hostility and resentment toward capitalism, is willing to unleash virtually any form of state regulatory power against it, and denies that there can be alternative or skeptical ideas or solutions.

The dialectical personality type in this case counters all external realities but rigidly blocks, neutralizes, and annihilates any dialectical challenge to its own though structures, knowledge, and ideological positions. Feuer was writing primarily about the enduring legacy of the anti-capitalism of the s generation, but a major question is how the dispositions of these generations have persisted in modern intellectual life, especially in the modern academy.

That class domination is a central focus of the modern academic intellectual is expected given the fact that the most powerful leaders within the status group of such intellectuals were product of the s. The then inchoate feminist and black power movements of the s have dispersed more widely throughout the academy and, though sounding quite revolutionary, are quite disconnected from radical social change.

Just as overt anti-capitalism has and continues to be the cultural capital of intellectual classes, diversity is now a form of capital that is an entry ticket to higher socio-economic status.

As with anti-capitalism, the ideology of multiculturalism must always mask its role as a technique of insertion into the capitalist system itself. In the new regime of diversity, there can never be enough diversity in social and cultural life, just as in previous eras there could never be enough rich, powerful white men dominating in all spheres of social life. Robert Nozick, one of the foremost philosophers of his generation, gained notoriety as a libertarian-anarchist philosopher in the midst of a sea of Marxian left-wing and Rawlsian liberal intellectuals.

His book, Anarchy, State, and Utopia , presented an unflinching critique of radical and liberal philosophies of revolutionary and legislative redistribution and systemic degradation of individual rights. Nozick challenged the most sacred principles of radicalism and liberalism, arguing in Lockean fashion that the right of individuals to their own bodies and products of labor were non-derogable. His anarchistic position was that the forced transfer of property by other people, states or institutions, except under very limited conditions, was an unjustifiable and fundamental violation of human rights.

Like Feuer, Nozick was marginalized within contemporary academic settings, though Nozick was afforded much more respect by fellow intellectuals and was a distinguished professor of philosophy at Harvard. It is always fascinating to speculate on the the autobiographical motives for the sociology of knowledge: in this case, both Feuer and Nozick were not only offering original sociological and philosophical arguments, but also seeking to understand the social foundations of the latter.

These wordsmiths include poets, novelists, literary critics, newspaper and magazine journalists, and many professors. Nozick rightly argues that intellectuals are mainly on the left. He finds it odd that so many intellectuals should oppose capitalism, since others of similar socioeconomic status do not. He considers that the positions of these intellectuals, in relation to the latter, are anomalous and in need of explanation.

One gets the sense that Nozick wanted to know about hostility toward capitalism as a way of understanding the hostile reception to his own anarcho-libertarian ideas. Nozick offers two types of explanation for hostility toward capitalism, but focuses on one in particular, the unique factors that push intellectuals toward anti-capitalism.

In some ways, he is quite like Feuer in looking for the a priori dispositions that drive anti-systemic thought. His theory has to do with the perceived value of intellectuals in their own minds and in terms of their objective socioeconomic status.

This propinquity, coupled with a perceived recognition of the lesser intellectual skills of most capitalists, only serves to increase the resentment of the intellectuals to capitalism. For Nozick, market societies reward those who supply the demands of others in the most efficient way. While he does not draw on Weber, Nozick is basically arguing that it is instrumental rationality that is rewarded, rather than substantive values, which in the case of intellectuals are their own intellectual capabilities and ideas for their own sake.

Intellectual status groups are based almost entirely on the construction of the substantive value of ideas and as noted above, in this case, even anti-capitalist ideas are expected to be somehow valuable in the market society.

Communities of intellectuals imagine that rewards ought to be determined by the value of their ideas. To some extent—and Nozick does not mention this—academic intellectuals do link the value of their ideas directly with market value, as evidenced in the widespread practice among them of testing the demand for their ideas in the academic marketplace. But she can only do so by masking this fact and, instead, constructing the search for upward mobility purely as a status game in which knowledge itself is the object of reward.

In these calculated efforts to achieve more remuneration for ideas, academic intellectuals must always believe that their ideas are, in and of themselves, the source of value in an institution and can never state the obvious: that the ability of others to reward them for their ideas is itself a quest for socioeconomic status within capitalism.

Aspirational and acquisitive intellectuals seek a place within the capitalist hierarchy, which they resent, through the chimerical ruse of attributing ontological value to their ideas as things of worth in-and-of-themselves. Thus, intellectual participation in capitalism must proceed in a roundabout way, in which any insinuation of the market value of their cultural capital must be rendered invisible.

Nozick argues that this sense of intellectual superiority is derived from the fact that the intellectuals, in school, are always the most rewarded with high grades, honors, admissions to the best universities, and then are severely disappointed when, all of a sudden, the market system not only fails to remunerate them, but also rewards the non-intellectuals.

By incorporating standards of reward that are different from the wider society, the schools guarantee that some will experience downward mobility later. Nozick argues, as well, that intellectuals are rewarded in school by central authorities such as teachers, and avoid the more cacophonous and non-intellectual students who have their own status groups based on non-intellectual criteria and competition, much like in the capitalist system.

Intellectuals become dependent on centralized power for their own sense of self-affirmation, which is ironic given the rebellious nature of their subjectivity.

This might explain why left-wing intellectuals are so favorably disposed to seek solutions in and even sacralize state power and centralized planning, since they are so obsequious to centralized power in their own localized academic environments.

Intellectuals, in spite of their supposed dialectical temperaments, are remarkably conformist. Radical intellectuals celebrate radicals, but very few of them are really radicals themselves, either in their thinking or in their personal lives; the principal habitus of the academic intellectual is a rather stark conformity. The continuance of the intellectual life beyond the school almost always entails a distancing from capitalism, and thus the intellectual, while imagining himself as destined for greatness by virtue of superior performance, is actually destined for the opposite track of downward mobility and the resentment that this entails this is especially the case when the academic intellectual works for a modest salary at an academic institution which is opulent, well-endowed, and run by boards of trustees whose members are chosen almost exclusively from the world of successful capitalists.

Moreover, those constituting the upper class within the hierarchy of this first extra-familial institution who then experience or foresee experiencing movement to a lower relative position in the wider society will, because of their feeling of frustrated entitlement, tend to oppose the wider social system and feel animus toward its norms.

Within this environment, intellectuals are able to see more clearly the rewarding of non-intellectual pursuits, as for instance, when the student with the brightest future in a high-school is a boy who develops a rap music repertoire based on the vernacular and life-style of the black underclass, or the son of the rich car dealer secures a high paying job right out of school, with all the usual accouterments of higher status.

Nozick does not mention diversity in the modern multiculturalist sense of the concept, yet one might imagine the resentments that increases in diversity might create. So we have to get those people to believe in capitalism before we can really change the world.

Jason Kuznicki: Right, right. Because how many people actually sit down and read academic papers by Nobel Prize winners? Trevor Burrus: I want to go more into that because the most interesting thing that I find in this essay is the discussion of the value that the intellectual holds for himself. I think they certainly got a very high level prestige.

We say this about our intellectuals. So for example, even in my relatively conservative family. But the broader society is not paying attention to that kind of thing. Aaron Ross Powell: Yeah. I think that matters but I think that the other thing is — was more what Aaron said, the question of whether or not an intellectual thinks. Regardless of their specific place, but is more of a general proposition, is the world valuing the right things correctly?

In many ways, one of the reasons that Marxism is like a religion in many ways is because the — many religions say essentially the world is run by false values. Like the basic core bottom thing is that the world is run by false values. It should be piety and not money. It should be these and not that. Marxism says this too to some degree. You can always feel this idea in a lot of speeches. The point is that the world is being run by false values and we need to figure out some way to correct that.

Aaron Ross Powell: But to pull this back to — so when Nozick, he says — there are the two ways of answering the questions. Like the intellectual can say, look, capitalism means a world based on false values.

I think these are the correct values, therefore not capitalism. That that is a society that rewards intellectual kind of things, that you get praise from your teacher when you write the really good paper or you ask the smart question or you can articulate the answers in a way beyond what your fellow students can do.

The society that makes us happy is the right kind of society and so you come to think that the values that are important are the ones that happen to be praised, happen to be rewarded within the school system. They are going to look as if nothing of value has been provided. So your judgments about that are likely to be or have a good chance of being false. The market does things that are crazy and I have knowledge that enables me to make that judgment and I can judge it.

I think it sits on the edge because of what it had said. I think that you could say this is the — maybe the reason, the subset of reasons why they think capitalism is wrong. Jason Kuznicki: And when is it really necessarily committed to thinking that either value system is false? Be open to new experiences. Welcome strangers and treat them fairly as you would treat your friends.

Be enterprising. I found myself thinking, well, of course the market is in the — the commercial system and the academy is much more like the guardian system and Jacobs actually does not want to say that either of these are necessarily wrong or evil. But they have particular roles to play in society. We have governments for a reason and governments operate on the guardian morality.

To a great extent, I think the academy does also. We get mad at the Republican Party for saying, oh, we support markets. Like at every opportunity, you want to make interventions to stack the deck in favor of different groups. So what my — my question is, is the — is what Nozick explaining here not something unique to intellectuals but is instead simply that we want a system — we think an economic system ought to align with our tastes and our values, because we think our case and our values are correct.

That might explain a bit of the economist being more in favor of free markets because the economist has studied — has more of a big picture view. Therefore a market is bad. Trevor Burrus: Well, yeah, the idea that — Schumpeter was very interested in whether or not a free market society would be perceived as just by those who were in it and whether or not because of the randomness of the order. Maybe intellectuals have done it because they write and speak more often.

Aaron Ross Powell: Well, this gets to — so Nozick, after setting up why intellectuals might be frustrated with capitalism, we have to move into the question. But why socialism, right? Like we will stipulate that because I think the intellectuals are largely wrong about that.

We need to have an argument for why and so what Nozick is saying — this gets to the expertise is if we look at the characteristics of the classroom, what you have is a — a single — usually a single authority figure who stands at the front of the classroom and hands out rewards based on what to the intellectual looks like merit. Their stuff comes in. We got school supplies. We got prestige. We got ….

I mean Nozick actually does mention some intellectuals who were right wing. Yeats, Eliot, Pound he says and I could easily add many more. You could talk about Carl Schmitt or Martin Heidegger.

It does not necessarily have to skew left wing. It could skew right wing authoritarian. So yes, why socialism? So that would seem to cut against authoritarianism [ ] and the mistake obviously that — I mean we would argue this is a mistake is that they see socialism as central planning plus freedom in a way that strict authoritarianism would be central planning plus no freedom.

Ideas are what matter and we will have free ideas under socialism while technocratically managing stuff. Now this is a false picture of socialism. This is not accurate at all. In fact, command economies have to have censorship. You control individual lives. Well that makes it very relational. If you had a Soviet Union where the university was a thriving system, it had an intellectual class, they could say …. Trevor Burrus: … intellectuals in the Soviet Union in that hypothetical situation be capitalists?

Jason Kuznicki: Well, when they tried that in China, that is exactly what happened. So yeah, there was a period in China that — the Hundred Flowers period and they had to crush it. They had no way of dealing with that kind of descent. Trevor Burrus: Yeah, the idea here is essentially that the — intellectuals as contextuals rage against the machine and the machine is an abstract of concept.

The machine would be the socialist because just like intellectual — juvenile delinquency is contingent upon what the established standard is. Perhaps intellectual and maybe called intellectual delinquency is also contingent upon what the standard is. But if we set aside the notion of the truth value of their views, there is some level of rebellion in the — you need to listen to me and so by listening to me, you should be doing something different from whatever it is you happen to be doing.

In an open society, nobody really does know their place. You could be very wealthy tomorrow. You could go broke, depending on choices that you make. There would be more mobility and mobility not just in money but in prestige, in location, in tastes and values. You were born into the nobility and you had that level of status or you were born into serfdom. You had that level of status and then your role in society was very clearly defined.

You knew what it was and you knew what responsibilities you had to other people, what responsibilities other people had to you. Aaron Ross Powell: Your status can change over time as you age into the different levels of being a professor and getting tenure and all of that. Aaron Ross Powell: But the argument was that it was better because there were going to be people that were going to be poor people and that in — this is a mischaracterization of the Middle Ages to say the least.

It was …. Aaron Ross Powell: So that makes me think. A return to a society of status. Jason Kuznicki: Well, Ezra Pound exactly made this point in a lot of his poetry, that now we are without clear markers of status. We are beset by — what do you call it? Usura, the goddess of usery and that upsets everything.