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tensions between bureaucracy and equality frame the social conflicts of
the day.
Finally, the cultural realm .is one of self-expression and self–
gratification. It is antiinstitutional and antinomian in that the individ–
ual is taken to be the measure of satisfaction, and
his
feelings,
sentiments and judgments, not some objective standard of quality and
value, determine the worth of cultural objects. At its
mos~
blatant, this
sentiment asks of a poem, a play, or a painting, not whether it is good
or
meret~icious,
but "What does it do for
me?"
In this democratization
of culture, every individual, 'understandably, seeks to realize his full
"potential," and so the individual "self" comes increasingly into
conflict with the role requirements of the technical-economic order.
A number of critics have objected to these formulations on the
ground that "power" still lies primarily in the economic realm,
principally in the hands of the large corporations, and that the
impulses to self-expression in the culture hflve been "co-opted" by the
capitalist system and converted into commodities, i.e., objects for sale.
Such questions are empirical ones
tha~
test particular assump–
tions, not whether this mode of analysis, Le., the idea of the disjunction
between the realms, is useful or not. The answers lie in the court of
history, and I shall return
to
them at the close of my historical
exposition, the second thread of my analysis.
III
Much of the prevailing view of capitalism (that of the last thirty
years) was shaped by Max Weber through his emphasis on Calvinism
and the Protestant ethic-the role of methodical work and the legitima–
tion of the pursuit of wealth-as the doctrines that facilitated the rise of
the distinctive Western organization of rational production and ex–
change. But the origins of capitalism were twofold.
If
one source was
the
asceticism
which Weber emphasized, the
o~her
was
acquzsztWf!–
ness,
a central theme of Werner Sombart whose work was almost
completely neglected in that period of time.
Sombart located the main areas of capitalist undertaking not in
the Protestant countries, such as Holland, England or the
Uni~ed
States, but in the Florentine world, and he argued that the same kind
of
prudential bourgeois maxims associated with Benjamin Franklin (who
in personal life was a
bon viveur)
could
be
found several hundred years
earlier in the writings of Leon Batista Alberti, whose book
Del governQ
della famiglia
was a classic in its time , and whose views of middle-class
