The Mind and the Market: Capitalism in Modern European Thought (review)

Muller is at his best in his text-based account of Adam Smith's view of the benefits of free trade, the division of labor and exchange, and the self-interest that brings imperfect human beings into civilization. Smith's "invisible hand" was really an awareness of the unintended but often beneficial consequences of human actions, coupled with the conviction that individual economic agents know better where to invest their energies than legislators. Such is the secret of "the market." Not all self- interested conduct is socially beneficial; the exploitation of power to create monopoly is certainly harmful. Still, the "cash nexus" is preferable to the personal dependencies that it replaced. Smith knew perfectly well that the visible hand of the state was needed to protect property and to provide a legal framework for economic rationality. Smith also recognized that specialized production could lead to the degradation of the producer, but he hoped that education would compensate for the effects. Because Smith believed that there was a need for a few men to cultivate extraordinary virtues, he was not just an economic liberal, not to mention the prophet of selfishness that he became for many. That Friedrich Hegel, Muller notes, was at least partly a disciple of Smith is evident from the "civil society" that he described in his Philosophy of Right (Berlin, 1821; orig. pub. in German).

Less convincing are Muller's comments about Edmund Burke, Justus Möser, Matthew Arnold, and Hans Freyer. He focuses upon Burke's interest in the phenomenon of the market, upon Möser's defense of historically local culture against capitalist and bureaucratic rationalism, and upon Freyer's totalitarian racialism as a failed alternative to capitalist internationalism. But Burke and Möser were social and political conservatives, not economic commentators. Thus, Muller's discussion of them is incomplete, and he never does justice to Arnold's complex views. Moreover, the further Muller strays from thought about the market, the more he neglects the close reading of texts in favor of tediously psychologizing biographical narratives.

This problematical shift is aggravated by a sub-theme in Muller's work about Jewishness and antisemitism. He touches upon the outsider status of the medieval Jews as moneylenders necessary to secular princes in an environment of Catholic hostility to "usury," but he neglects the equally serious issue of joint meals celebrated by municipal guilds and corporations, which Max Weber discussed in The City (New York, 1958; orig. pub. in German). In any case, Muller feels able to treat Voltaire's well-documented antisemitism as a projection of his own shady speculations upon the Jews.

Muller's discussion of Karl Marx is distressingly personal and close to vicious. Muller begins by accusing Marx of disloyalty to his Jewish heritage, an unhistorical judgment in relation to Marx's time. Muller's attention is directed chiefly to Marx's comments on the "Jewish question," which, Muller believes, inspired the antisemites from Werner Sombart to Alfred Rosenberg. Many critiques of Marx's labor theory of value and of his analysis of capitalism have been based upon a close reading of Marx's texts—just as critiques of Georg Lukacs, for example, have exposed the flaws in his fancy footwork about the "objective" and the "subjective" interests of the proletariat—not upon his biography. Muller's treatments seem excessively personal—and angry by comparison. If intellectual history is the contextual analysis of texts, then much of Muller's work is not intellectual history.

Muller is downright perfunctory about Weber, Georg Simmel, and Werner Sombart.¹ He ignores Weber's "Protestant Ethic," tacitly following Sombart, and he makes no effort to distinguish Weber's cultural individualism and his concept of social action from the economic individualism that is at the center of Muller's own commitments. So this is a good place to declare my own contrary allegiances, which are to Weber, to reason, to society, to value pluralism, and to an individualism not limited...