DANIEL BELL
213
virtues, the proper coordination of actions and the profitable employ–
ment of time, were adopted by large numbers of bourgeois entrepre–
neurs and
commer~an ts
in Italy and France.
Whatever the exact locations of early capitalism, it is clear that,
from the start, the two impulses of asceticism and acquisitiveness were
yoked together. One was the bourgeois prudential spirit of calculation;
the other, the restless Faustian drive which, as expressed in the modern
economy and technology, took as its motto "the endless frontier," and,
as its goal, the complete transformation of nature. The intertwining of
the two impulses shaped the modern conception of rationality. The
tension between the two imposed a moral restraint on the sumptuary
display that had characterized earlier periods of conquest. What is also
evident is that the ascetic element, and with it one kind of moral
legitimation of capitalist behavior, has virtually disappeared.
On the level of philosophical justification, the major attack on
ascetici m was mounted by Jeremy Bentham, who argued that asceti–
cism ("miseries" inflicted by sectarians on unwilling others) violated
the "natural" hedonism which rules men-the search for pleasure and
the avoidance of pain. Its "mischief" is that, whatever its pure
intention , asceticism leads to "despotism" over men. The principle of
utility alone could serve as the regulating instrument of men 's search to
satisfy their diverse ends. Thus the notion of common ends was
dissolved into individual preferences.
On the plane of history, the "economic impulse" had been
constrained earlier by the rules of custom and tradition, to some extent
by the Catholic moral principle of the just price, and later by the
Puritan emphasis on frugality. As the religious impulses diminished, a
complex history in its own right, so did the restraints. What became
distinctive about capitalism-its very dynamic-was its boundlessness.
Propelled by the dynamo of technology, there were to be no asymptotes
to its exponential growth. No limits . Nothing was sacred. Change
became the norm. By the middle of the nineteenth century, this was the
trajectory of the economic impulse.
It
was, as well, the trajectory of the
culture.
IV
The realm of culture is the realm of meanings, the effort in some
imaginative form to make sense of the world through the expressive–
ness of art and ritual, particularly those "incomprehensions" such as
tragedy and death that arise out of the existential predicaments which
