DANIEL BELL
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perhaps be true, but it is abstract. What would seem to be the more
likely historical explanation is that the bourgeois attitudes of calcula–
tion and methodical restraint came into conflict with the impulsive
searchings for sensation and excitement that one found in Romanti–
cism, and which passed over into Moder{lism. The antagonism deep–
ened as the organization of work and production became bureaucra–
tized and individuals were reduced to roles, so that the norms of the
workplace were increasingly at variance with the emphasis on self–
exploration and self-gratification. The thread connecting Blake to
Byron to Baudelaire-who is the avatar of Modernism-may not be
literal, but it is a figurative symbolic lineage.
So long as work and wealth had a religious sanction, they
possessed a transcendental justification. But when that ethic eroded,
there was a loss of legitimation, for the pursuit of wealth alone is not a
calling that justifies itself. As Schumpeter once shrewdly remarked:
The stock exchange is a poor substitute for the Holy Grail. The central
point is that-at first, for the advanced social groups, the intelligentsia
and the educated social classes, and later for the middle class
itself-the
legitimations of social behavior passed from religion to modernist
culture.
And with it here was a shift in emphasis from "character,"
which is the unity of moral codes and disciplined purpose, to an
emphasis on "personality," which is the enhancement of self through
the compulsive search for individual differentiation. In brief, not work
but the " life style" became the source of satisfaction and criterion for
desirable behavior in the society.
Yet paradoxically, the life style that became the imago of the free
self was not that of the businessman, expressing himself through his
"dynamic drive," but that of the artist defying the conventions of the
society. Increasingly, it is the artist who begins to dominate the
audience, and to impose his judgment as to what is to be desired and
bought. The paradox is completed when the bourgeois ethic, having
collapsed in the society, finds few defenders in the culture (do any
writers defend
any
institutions?) and Modernism as an attack on
orthodoxy, has triumphed and become the regnant orthodoxy of the
day.
v
Any tension creates its own dialectic. Since the market is where
social structure and culture cross, what has happened is that in the last
fifty years, the economy has been geared to producing the life styles
paraded by the culture. Thus, not only has there been a contradiction
