Money  /  Q&A

Has Capitalism Become Our Religion?

On the myths and rituals of the market, the lost radicalism of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and the rise of neoliberalism.

Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins: What is the disenchanted view of capitalism that your book rejects? And why have we assumed this view of capitalism to be true for so long?

Eugene McCarraher: The “disenchantment of the world,” as Max Weber called it (he borrowed the phrase from Friedrich Schiller), is one of the basic assumptions of modern cultural and intellectual life. It marks the belief that a hallmark of modernity is the loss of belief in enchantment—those mysterious, immeasurable forces that rule over, pervade, and animate the universe. During the Middle Ages, Catholic Christianity exemplified this enchanted understanding of reality in its sacramental rituals and imagination. According to Weber, Calvinist theology and capitalist enterprise gradually demolished this enchanted sacramental perspective, reducing matter to an inert and inanimate substance. The capitalist quest for profit not only relaxed medieval strictures against avarice and usury; it mandated that material reality had to be stripped of all spiritual significance.

It’s a compelling story, one that unites Wall Street banksters, Silicon Valley tech bros, the socialists at Jacobin, and probably most readers of The Nation. It’s so compelling that it convinces even religious intellectuals: In his monumental A Secular Age (2007), the Catholic philosopher Charles Taylor pretty much retold this conventional tale—even though there’s the twist of a possible re-enchantment at the end. And it certainly has a convincing superficial plausibility. Set aside the fact that religious belief has declined in the capitalist world over the last two centuries; one finds this to be the case in everyday life. Except perhaps for evangelical Protestants, businesspeople don’t say prayers at board meetings; they don’t consult soothsayers about the next quarter or base their investment decisions on horoscopes. Even if they believe in these things, none of it enters into their calculations.

DSJ: And so your book sets out to tell a different story?

EM: You can see the glimmerings of a very different story even among the most secular and “disenchanted” critics of capitalism. Weber thought that the old spirits of enchantment hadn’t simply hobbled off into oblivion; they’d morphed into the laws of the market. And as you can read in Marx’s 1844 manuscripts, the Grundrisse, and the chapter on commodity fetishism in Capital, he perceived the persistence of enchantment in the allegedly secular mechanics of capitalism. Marx saw that money had become a divinity, the creator and legitimator of moral reality in capitalist civilization. In Capital, commodity fetishism becomes the capitalist surrogate for Catholic sacramentality: Where sacrament directs divine grace through material objects or religious rituals, commodity fetishism conducts the power of money through a pecuniary alchemy of objects. So one way to read modern history is as a story of capitalist enchantment and a theology of money, as it were.