The Economy of Desire: Christianity and Capitalism in a Postmodern World by Daniel M. Bell Jr. (review)

This book, the latest to appear in Baker Academic’s Church and Postmodern Culture series, would be easy to read with a degree of cynicism, given that “history,” as Francis Fukuyama once declared, has purportedly come to an end with the triumph of laissez-faire capitalism. Daniel Bell, a Methodist moral theologian, rejects this stance, countering the widely held acceptance of capitalism’s self-evident pre-eminence.

To understand Bell as advancing a rejection of market economics in toto would be an overstatement. He is, instead, offering a direct, deliberate, and prognostic assessment of the insidious and pervasive nature of the kind of totalizing transnational capitalism that has emerged after the Second World War. According to Bell, capitalism is not simply a “mode of production”; it is a way of being that wholly captivates our desires and ultimately turns them against us. Capitalism is akin to a “spirit” that subtly disciplines, orders, and shapes our lives. It goes on without our awareness and, more often than not, contours our desires in ways that are incompatible with the ways of God. Bell intends his book to help order “our desires so that we desire the good that is God and the role that economies play in that order” (28). When our desires are correctly ordered, Bell argues, they are oriented toward God and God’s abundant life.

Bell begins his book by sketching a picture of our present context. We no longer live in a world that simply extols the self-determining autonomous individual, though this attitude remains. Instead, alongside unbridled individualism, collectivity, mélange, cacophony, diversity, unrepresentativeness, distinction, and locality are all championed. This postmodern reality, which Bell also regards as an intensification of modernity, remains the framework in which capitalism as an economy of desire runs amok. In order to diagnose the current socio-economic situation, Bell relies on two pre-eminent postmodern thinkers: Gilles Deleuze and Michel Foucault. Both see the globalized “total market” as “deeply implicated in forming and shaping human desire such that economy not so much serves human ends as subdues and shapes human desire in service of capital ends” (79). Deleuze and Foucault show how the activities of the nation-state reify capitalism, disciplining our desires toward individual self-interest, personal choice, competition, insatiable desire, and commutative justice. For Bell, however, capitalism’s pervasiveness goes further in effecting the very ways in which we think about God. We come to see God’s economic presence in the world as resembling the free market: invisible, non-redemptive, scarce, and yet salvific.

Bell is adamant: this corrupted soteriology is incompatible with an ecclesially rooted and scripturally based vision of a Christian economy of desire, because anything that corrupts our desires, as capitalism does, is sin. Unlike the economy of desire shaped by capitalism, God’s economy, in light of Christ’s death and resurrection, is visible, merciful, redemptive, abundant, fulfilling, and mutual. Human beings were made, first and foremost, to desire God, to reflect God’s glory, and to be in relationship with God and others. The economy of desire that proceeds from this ontology is not a simplistic or foolish utopian vision. Rather, it is a diasporic or pilgrim economics in which the works of mercy are “an intrinsic expression of the economy of desire that is the church’s life” (199).

Bell concludes by providing a rather brief review of some of the current alternative economic movements that reflect more appropriately a Christian economy of desire, such as the Catholic Worker movement, New Monasticism, Focolare, and Economy of Communion, among others. To be sure, these are not irreproachable attempts. Yet they go beyond the inadequacies of philanthropy and welfare, Bell argues, offering prospects of hope and thoughtful resistance.

That Bell presents an argument that tackles not only the social consequences of capitalism but also its spirit and...