The new spirit of capitalism

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The new spirit of capitalism is the title of a book published in 1999 - in the French original: Le nouvel Ésprit du Capitalisme - by the French social scientists Luc Boltanski and Ève Chiapello on the character and changes in ideological justifications of capitalism. The empirical basis of the book is the systematic evaluation of contemporary management literature. The title was chosen in conscious connection with Max Weber's famous treatise The Protestant Ethics and the “Spirit” of Capitalism .

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In their book, the authors want to follow the ideological changes in the change of capitalism and uncover the current “spirit” of capitalism. The book is essentially a criticism of ideology , whereby the authors understand the “spirit of capitalism” as an ideology “which justifies commitment to capitalism”, since the “willingness of the workforce” cannot be achieved solely through wage incentives and coercive measures. As long as one disregards ideologies, one cannot understand the “continued existence of capitalism as a mode of coordination of social action and as a lifeworld”.

The authors consider “how a way of life must be designed in accordance with the accumulation requirements so that a large number of actors consider it worthwhile” as a central focus of the investigation. The authors see the spirit of capitalism at home primarily in the “management discourse”, which is primarily aimed at managers and engineers. The capitalist spirit is also equated with an “apparatus of justification” which - despite all historical variability - serves to tie up the labor that is essential for steady accumulation . It has to meet three requirements: “attractive and exciting life prospects”, “security guarantees” and “moral reasons for one's own actions”.

The authors distinguish three historical stages of the capitalist spirit. They locate the first at the end of the 19th century as the “person of the bourgeois and entrepreneur”. A second high point for them were the years 1930 to 1960, in which the organization, “the large, centralized, bureaucratic and gigantic industrial enterprise” with the “company director” was the focus. This period was replaced by a globalized “corporate capitalism” based on new technologies .

The authors regard criticism as an important “motor for the changes in the capitalist spirit”; they provide the models of justification that make him attractive. According to the authors, the criticism is fed by four sources of indignation :

  1. Source of disenchantment and the lack of authenticity of things, people, feelings,
  2. Source of oppression by the rule of the market and the relationships of dependency in work and professional life,
  3. Source of labor poverty and inequalities,
  4. Source of opportunism and egoism with the result that social cohesion is undermined.

You differentiate between a social criticism and an artist criticism of capitalism. The first says that capitalism is socially unjust, the second that it suppresses the self-activity of autonomous subjects. They assign both reviews to different sources and support groups. The artist's criticism has its origin in the Bohème way of life and is mainly fed from the first two sources. The social criticism is of socialist and Marxist origin, which feeds on the last two sources.

Based on the systematically complex comparison of extensive management literature on the subject of “management personnel” from the 1960s and 1990s, the authors draw the conclusion that “capitalism has largely changed its spirit over the past thirty years”. The changes in new management are interpreted as a recording of the artist's criticism with the two sources of indignation assigned to it. Their needs for authenticity and freedom would be taken into account insofar as the new spirit emphasizes characteristics such as "autonomy, spontaneity, mobility, availability, creativity, pluralism (...), the ability to form networks" as guarantees of success; they are "borrowed directly from the world of ideas of the 68ers".

Primary text

  • Luc Boltanski, Ève Chiapello: Le nouvel Esprit du Capitalisme . Editions Gallimard, Paris 1999, ISBN 2-07-074995-9 .
  • Luc Boltanski, Ève Chiapello: The new spirit of capitalism . UVK, Konstanz 2003, ISBN 3-89669-991-1 .
  • Luc Boltanski, Ève Chiapello: The New Spirit of Capitalism . Verso, London / New York, NY 2007, ISBN 978-1-84467-165-6 .

literature

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Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Luc Boltanski and Ève Chiapello: The new spirit of capitalism , p. 37.
  2. ↑ Luc Boltanski and Ève Chiapello: The new spirit of capitalism , p. 43.
  3. ↑ Luc Boltanski and Ève Chiapello: The new spirit of capitalism , p. 48.
  4. ↑ Luc Boltanski and Ève Chiapello: The new spirit of capitalism , p. 48.
  5. ↑ Luc Boltanski and Ève Chiapello: The new spirit of capitalism , p. 51.
  6. ↑ Luc Boltanski and Ève Chiapello: The new spirit of capitalism , p. 58.
  7. ↑ Luc Boltanski and Ève Chiapello: The new spirit of capitalism , p. 64.
  8. ↑ Luc Boltanski and Ève Chiapello: The new spirit of capitalism , p. 54.
  9. ↑ Luc Boltanski and Ève Chiapello: The new spirit of capitalism , p. 55.
  10. ↑ Luc Boltanski and Ève Chiapello: The new spirit of capitalism , p. 57.
  11. ↑ Luc Boltanski and Ève Chiapello: The new spirit of capitalism , p. 68.
  12. ↑ Luc Boltanski and Ève Chiapello: The new spirit of capitalism , p. 80.
  13. ↑ Luc Boltanski and Ève Chiapello: The new spirit of capitalism , p. 81f.
  14. ↑ Luc Boltanski and Ève Chiapello: The new spirit of capitalism , p. 142.
  15. ↑ Luc Boltanski and Ève Chiapello: The new spirit of capitalism , p. 143f.