Modernity, Capitalism and Crisis: Understanding the New Great Transformation
| Published date | 01 February 2016 |
| Date | 01 February 2016 |
| Author | Peter Wagner |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/1758-5899.12308 |
Modernity, Capitalism and Crisis:
Understanding the New Great Transformation
Peter Wagner
ICREA and University of Barcelona
Homo Economicus: The (Lost) Prophet of Modern Times
by Daniel Cohen. Cambridge: Polity, 2014. 184 pp., £16.99
hardcover 978 0745680125, £12.99 e-book 978 0745685328
(first in French, 2012)
After the Crisis by Alain Touraine. Cambridge: Polity, 2014.
180 pp., £50 hardcover 978 0745653846, £14.99 paperback 978
0745653853 (first published in French, 2010)
Global Capitalism and the Crisis of Humanity by Wil-
liam I. Robinson. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2014. 258 pp., £19.99 paperback 978 1107691117, £55 hard-
cover 978 1107067479, $24 e-book 978 1316057827
Seven years have passed since Lehman Brothers declared
bankruptcy, but there is no sign that the seven crisis years
that ensued, in particular in the US and the EU, will soon be
followed by seven years of abundance. Notwithstanding
occasional upbeat public rhetoric by politicians and econo-
mists, gloomy expectations are widely shared: unemploy-
ment figures are unlikely to decrease in the near future;
inequality is high and likely to remain so or even increase
further; many societies have seen the emergence of sharp
divides between those who prosper and those who have
difficulties to cope. As one can witness most clearly in Eur-
ope, furthermore, the means supposed to overcome the cri-
sis have often tended to make the situation worse.
After so many years, it has become increasingly clear that
the western economies do not merely face one more of
their fairly frequent small dips in activity levels from which
recovery regularly occurs in due course. Rather, we witness
a major transformation in the ways the world economy
operates. Therefore, it is highly welcome that economists
and sociologists look beyond the short term and go beyond
using their standard tools to understand the background to
this transformation, assess its consequences and propose
remedies for the problems that it creates.
Towards this end, Daniel Cohen, economist and adviser to
governments and banks, reviews the history of ‘economic
man’, the human being who pursues single-mindedly his
individual interests in search for happiness. This homo eco-
nomicus has been hailed as the prophet for the better world
of modern times for more than two centuries, but today,
Cohen argues, we start to recognize that the supposed pro-
phet himself has lost all sense of orientation and tends to
mislead all of his followers. At the core of the issue is the
idea that the pursuit of one’s individual interests increases
one’s happiness. From the 1980s onwards, true, the idea that
we should see ourselves primarily as the entrepreneur of our
own self has become widespread. But Cohen sees the rise of
economic man in a longer perspective. He seems to agree
with Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels who observed in 1848
that the rise of the bourgeoisie ‘has left remaining no other
nexus between man and man than naked self-interest’,
drowning all other social bonds ‘in the icy water of egotisti-
cal calculation’. In Cohen’s words, economic man has dis-
placed ethical man and empathetic man. Cohen mobilizes
numerous sources, from ancient Greek thought to current
happiness studies, not shying away from the neurosciences
either, to argue that this is wrong individually and can be
disastrous for societies. His analysis includes observations on
the digital and the genetic revolution, both of which have
been hailed as projecting us into a bright future, but are
seen here as rather having the potential of further enhancing
the misplaced individualism of ‘economic man’. Cohen
underlines the need for urgent and radical change, but his
hopes are dim. He argues that competition must be rebal-
anced with cooperation, and that the means to achieve this
are democracy, social experimentation and recourse to good
knowledge. But he says so after having amassed arguments
as to why these means are unlikely to be sufficient.
Alain Touraine, the grand old man of French sociology
and eminent public intellectual, adopts at first sight a similar
analytical perspective. He, too, diagnoses a breakdown of
society over the past decades and identifies the ‘omnipo-
tence of profit’as the main cause. At a closer look, however,
strong differences between him and Cohen emerge. Cohen
defines homo economicus as a human being who tries ‘to
maximize his well-being, like a firm that maximizes its prof-
its’(p. 15). But for Touraine, the pursuit of individual inter-
ests is no problem at all in conceptual terms, and it is not
equal to profit maximization. To the contrary, it is exactly
the current crisis that ‘destroys all individual interests and
imposes on everyone the impersonal law of maximum
profit’(p. 57). Therefore, that which for Cohen is the rise of
economic man is for Touraine a much more ambiguous his-
tory. Individualization, including importantly the rise of the
idea of human rights, for him entails the possibility for sub-
jectivization, for empowerment to become actors determin-
ing their own destiny. In his succinct words, we need to
‘distinguish an individualism which rejects all forms of social
bonds from one which enlists them as the means of achiev-
ing its own subjectivation’(p. 129).
In historical terms, this implies that Touraine, in contrast
to Cohen, thinks that Marx and Engels were wrong rather
Global Policy (2016) 7:1 doi: 10.1111/1758-5899.12308 ©2016 University of Durham and John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Global Policy Volume 7 . Issue 1 . February 2016 127
Review Essay
To continue reading
Request your trial