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94 6 Democracy’s Debt Capitalism and Cultural Revolution Stephen L. Gardner Since the French Revolution, writers Left and Right have famously lamented the nihilism of bourgeois society. Take the Communist Manifesto for example: “Constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into the air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses, his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.”1 Thus Karl Marx channels Joseph de Maistre. Tellingly, though, the sentiment of this famous passage is conflicted. Marx’s scandal at bourgeois society betrays sacred terror of its revolutionary drive, suggesting even that it may be more radical than its socialist rivals. The specter of communism wants to rob the “bourgeois epoch” of its revolutionary genie, perhaps in order to stuff it back into the bottle at the same time. In any case, Marx reveals more than he realizes here. Even when he misses the point he sometimes has an uncanny ability to put his finger on it. What is revolutionary about the epoch is that it makes revolution itself its driving principle. There has always been but one revolution in modernity, and that (pace Marx) is the bourgeois one. Relentless and irresistible, it has accelerated mightily since Marx’s time. The substance of its principle is equality, and its form is the market—things Marx elsewhere protests as not revolutionary enough. What his ambivalence perfectly crystallizes, though, is the Jekyll-and-Hyde character of modernity, revolutionary and counterrevolutionary at the same time, split into warring personalities. Democracy’s Debt | 95 Like Marx, other critics moderate or radical, from Tocqueville and Kierkegaard to Nietzsche and Heidegger, have criticized nihilism or cognates such as leveling, alienation , or decadence. They variously ascribe these to equality, democracy, capitalism, liberalism, or technology, but their reaction unites them despite their differences. The nihilist lament is also a fixture of conservative and communitarian social criticism of the loss of capacity for greatness or for awe and wonder, the desecration of tradition , the destruction of community, or the ethos of hedonism. What its critics ignore, though, is just how efficacious nihilism is in the social mechanisms of liberty, how indispensable to the moral economy of equality. They fail to describe its functionality within the democratic universe as a cultural means of mediating the exigencies of a world transformed by equality—or at least seeming to mediate, since all it may really do is defer insoluble dilemmas of modern life. Even so, the culture of nihilism is, alas, very far from being stale, flat, and unprofitable. To describe the functionality of nihilism, its debt to debt, and how it intimates the mortal limits of democracy, is the aim of this paper. Democracy generates a teleology of nihilism, but one it cannot do without, even if in the end it is fatal. Democracy strives to replace what once appeared as a “natural” or “divinely legislated” order with a “cultural” or “aesthetic” one in which individuals are free to invent themselves, a virtual reality predicated on individual will or imagination. The revolution in debt affords critical leverage in this. If not the cause of it, the exponential expansion of debt (especially since World War II) is at least joined at the hip to a wholesale revolution in democratic culture driven by the market at least since the Jazz Age. The spiritual economy of democracy seems unable to sustain itself without a vast amplification of credit, personal and national. This affords the possibility of the privatized utopias of consumerism. Sooner or later, of course, the bill comes due. In the meantime, though, this economy operates by a dual action projecting the future—partly by conjuring up an imagined tomorrow and partly by fending it off. In a word, it keeps the future open and ongoing in ostensibly perpetual postponement. Within this context, debt is not a peripheral liability of economy but its foundation, the “material” equivalent of a future that must never arrive. Ostensibly it affords an instrument by which reality itself may be kept at bay. This is not simply bad policy; it is anthropological necessity. All social orders have cultural means for dealing with conflicts, containing the violence...

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