DANIEL BELL
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a radical in one realm, he is a radical in all others; and, conversely, if he
is a conservative in one realm, then he must be conservative in the
others as well. Such an assumption misreads, both sociologically and
morally, the nature of these different realms. I will begin with the
values I hold, and deal with the sociological distinctions in the
following section.
About economics: The economic realm today is usually thought to
be simply instrumental. One of my arguments is that capitalist society,
in its emphasis on accumulation, has made that activity an end in
itself. But no moral philosopher, from Aristotle and Aquinas, to John
Locke and Adam Smith, divorced economics from a set of moral ends
or held the production of wealth to be an end in itself; rather it was seen
as a means to the realization of virtue, a means of leading a civilized
life.
The turning point in modern thought comes with Bentham.
Bentham assumed that all men desired happiness, which he described
simply as the maximizing of pleasure and the minimizing of pain. In
practice this meant that whatever individuals defined as their own
good was to be accepted as an "end" to be pursued. Adam Smith had
written, besides
The Wealth of Nations,
a book entitled
The Theory of
Moral Sentiments,
in which an " impartial spectator" represented the
judgment of the community, which all right-thinking men would have
to take into account. But for Bentham, in the
Introduction to the
Principles of Morals and Legislation,
"the Community is a fictitious
body" and the interest of the community is "the sum of the interests of
the several members who compose it."
Modern capitalist thought has accepted that argument to its own
detriment, for a justification only or largely on the basis of individual
interest is a weak moral argument. As my colleague Irving Kristol
points out, economics is necessarily bound with normative con–
siderations-the judgments whether the consequences of aggregated
individual decisions are just and fair. No society can escape the
necessity of making a reasoned judgment about what is proper and
desirable, and of assessing the consequences of economic decisions in
the light of those standards.
Modern economics has become a positive science in which the
ends to be pursued are assumed to be individual and varied, and
economics is only a science of "means," or of rational choice in the
allocation of resources among competing individual ends. The price
system, however, is only a
mechanism
for the relative allocation of
goods and services within the framework of the kinds of demands
