Bell's Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism: A Critical Review

Introduction and Overview

Daniel Bell's The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism was originally published during the mid-1970s to critique the dominant American assumption that capitalism promoted individualism. Instead, Bell believed that capitalism had come to promote standardization and homogenization, and had created corporate bureaucracies as powerful as the church or state bureaucracies of the past. Bell also believed, however, that the countercultural reaction to capitalism was equally misguided. Capitalism had begun with the Protestant work ethic and its spirit of individualistic austerity, Puritanism, and freedom from Church institutional authority. Yet this sense of Protestant freedom and independence had slowly been eradicated, its values taken over first by the Modernists and then ineffectually by the "counterculture," as the anti-capitalist youth movement was still called when Bell wrote his work.

Over the course of his text, Bell gives an overview of the establishment of modern capitalism during the Industrial Revolution, followed by his dark vision of a future in which citizens would become increasingly dependent upon large institutions to fulfill their basic needs rather than upon their own initiative. Although some of his predictions have not come to pass, his discussion of the need to provide a different vision than the standardization characteristic of modern capitalism remains worth considering in light of the issues that preoccupy Americans today.

The Cultural Contradiction: Protestantism to Corporate Bureaucracy

According to Bell, individualized culture should promote creativity and diversity — the things that make us human. In contrast, the social structure that capitalism eventually fostered came to measure human worth in terms of rationality, measured efficiency, and pure productivity. The allocation of resources came to be based upon the need to meet certain standards and benchmarks of production, not innovation. Capitalism, in contrast to the "prodigal, promiscuous" and "antirational, anti-intellectual" temperament created by stressing the value of the arts, demanded data, not belief (37). Originally, standards created by culture and faith grew organically rather than being mechanically imposed from without by organizations such as corporations.

The cultural contradiction of capitalism is that capitalism began as a kind of radical, austere Protestantism, with a heavy emphasis on rejecting the collective Catholic dogma of the past. Protestantism developed a new attitude towards wealth, stressing the pursuit of excellence and perfect standards with relentless individualism and drive. But this rigidity made the originally radical notion of capitalism eventually become conservative in terms of its morality. This evolved to create the uniform, imposed standards of large corporations and state bureaucracies — including, ironically, the Soviet bureaucracy. In response to what came to be seen as bourgeois values, the cultural beliefs of Modernism began to react against capitalist values and celebrate the function of culture as a kind of misrule rather than capitalist order. Capitalistic Protestantism came to deny its original individualistic ethos, and this value of individualism was taken over by artists and anti-capitalists.

Capitalism, Individualism, and Contemporary Social Issues

Although this dichotomy of culture versus capitalism may initially seem like an overly schematic view of history, it is worth pondering in light of many issues dominating the headlines today. What of the current capitalist system that denies the need for affordable healthcare for all Americans, and health insurance companies that put profits ahead of fairness and human needs? What of the problems created when it is more profitable for companies to harm the environment, even though such an immediately efficient use of economic resources may damage the health of human beings and the planet in the long term?

Capitalism eradicates such questions about the whole human picture and dismisses emotions and far-reaching concerns that are not based on immediate corporate self-interest and predetermined standards. In dismissing such concerns, the corporation has subsumed the interests of the individuals who make it up. Capitalism has become a bureaucracy as powerful, complex, and anti-individualistic as the dogmatic institutions against which the early Protestants were reacting.