Alan Macfarlane

The Culture of Capitalism

Intuitively there seems to be something plausible in the idea that the individualism of love marriage is linked to the individualism of modern society and of the 'free' person operating within a monetized, market, capitalistic system where he, or she, has individual property in his or her own body. The link which Marx and Engels made between certain relations of production and this ideology seems right; it is merely the timing of the association that is wrong. A world of individual private property, of contract, of high social and geographical mobility, of decisions made by the individual rather than the family, of constant choice and weighing of advantages, fits well with individual-choice marriage on an open market.

Even the apparent paradoxes support the association. The greatest of these has been noted by Greenfield, that between the supposed 'rationality' of capitalism and the 'irrationality' of love. This has been resolved by Weber, who delicately shows how it is not merely that frustration creates the passion of love, but that passion is sustained by the loneliness and alienation created by this particular form of society. Weber showed that the central emotional feature of 'love' is a necessity where capitalist economic structures have developed most fully. At first sight, sexual passion and 'love' seem to be totally at variance with what is needed by capitalism. Weber, summarized by Watt, observed that 'being one of the strongest non-rational factors in human life' sexual drives are 'one of the strongest potential menaces to the individual's rational pursuit of economic ends.' Yet, by a subtle shift, love and sex were domesticated, the force was channelled, and love became one of the central dynamic elements in the capitalist system. Romantic love is, of course, possible and present outside capitalism, but only in capitalist, or capitalist-influenced societies, is it made the cultural pivot of the ideology.

Weber saw that as societies became more bureaucratic and 'rational,' so at the heart of the system there grew an impulsive, irrational and non-capitalistic emotion at the level of the individual. We can see the same paradox in the treatment of the natural world. As things become more orderly, a desire for disorderliness and wildness grows; as the world is conquered by money and calculations of profit and loss, certain areas become reserved as totally outside any calculations based on profit. So it is with the growing desire for the totally overwhelming, irrational escape into romantic love. Just as he had caught the paradox of other-worldly mysticism leading to capitalistic accumulation, so Weber hints at the way in which love marriage lies at the heart of rational capitalism:

the erotic relation seems to offer the unsurpassable peak of the fulfilment of the request for love in the direct fusion of the souls of one to the other. This boundless giving of oneself is as radical as possible in its opposition to all functionality, rationality, and generality. It is displayed as the unique meaning which one creature in his irrationality has for another, and only for this specific other...The lover...knows himself to be freed from the cold skeleton hand of rational orders, just as completely as from the banality of everyday routine.

Romantic love gives meaning in an otherwise dead and cold world. It promises that fusion with another human being which is so conspicuously lacking in the lonely crowds of autonomous individuals. It overcomes separation and gives the endlessly choice-making individual a rest, a categorical imperative which resolves all the doubts and indecisions. Furthermore, the emotion of desire, to have to own, to possess, fits very well with those similarly irrational desires to accumulate, possess and own which are the basic drive in the economic sphere. In the modern world it is obvious how consumer society has harnessed the romantic passions to sell goods, and how its enormous emphasis has raised love to a high cultural pinnacle. Love provides the promise of freedom, meaning and a return to Eden.

The opposition between the seeming 'rationality' of modern society and 'irrationality' of love is, of course, more complex than this. To start with, we need to distinguish between the irrational, passionate, love that helps in selecting a partner, and companionate love that maintains a relationship. Choice, whether in the market of marriage or other goods, is always difficult. The information is always so insufficient, the variables so complex that some external force of desire is needed to help the individual to make a choice. Hence passionate 'love' overwhelms and justifies and provides compulsive authority. But the love within marriage is not necessarily as passionate or 'irrational.' It can be calm calculating, ends and means closely connected, very like any other 'work.' If a decision has to be made to sever a relationship, the loss of mysterious 'love' is given as the justification. Love thus seems to be at its most intense when uncertainty and risk are greatest, in that phase when humans have to choose. When they make the most momentous decision of their lives, which will turn a contractual, arbitrary relationship into the deepest and most binding of a person's life, love steps in as though from outside, blind and compelling. The heart has its reasons, even if the mind is perplexed.