The enchantments of Mammon
how capitalism became the religion of modernity
- ISBN: 9780674984615
- Editorial: Harvard University Press
- Fecha de la edición: 2019
- Lugar de la edición: Cambridge (MSS). Estados Unidos de Norteamérica
- Encuadernación: Cartoné
- Medidas: 24 cm
- Nº Pág.: 799
- Idiomas: Inglés
Far from displacing religions, as has been supposed, capitalism became one, with money as its deity. Eugene McCarraher reveals how mammon ensnared us and how we can find a more humane, sacramental way of being in the world.
If socialists and Wall Street bankers can agree on anything, it is the extreme rationalism of capital. At least since Max Weber, capitalism has been understood as part of the “disenchantment” of the world, stripping material objects and social relations of their mystery and sacredness. Ignoring the motive force of the spirit, capitalism rejects the awe-inspiring divine for the economics of supply and demand.
Eugene McCarraher challenges this conventional view. Capitalism, he argues, is full of sacrament, whether or not it is acknowledged. Capitalist enchantment first flowered in the fields and factories of England and was brought to America by Puritans and evangelicals whose doctrine made ample room for industry and profit. Later, the corporation was mystically animated with human personhood, to preside over the Fordist endeavor to build a heavenly city of mechanized production and communion. By the twenty-first century, capitalism has become thoroughly enchanted by the neoliberal deification of “the market.”
Informed by cultural history and theology as well as economics, management theory, and marketing, The Enchantments of Mammon looks not to Marx and progressivism but to nineteenth-century Romantics for salvation. The Romantic imagination favors craft, the commons, and sensitivity to natural wonder. It promotes labor that, for the sake of the person, combines reason, creativity, and mutual aid. In this impassioned challenge, McCarraher makes the case that capitalism has hijacked and redirected our intrinsic longing for divinity—and urges us to break its hold on our souls.
Prologue
I. The Dearest Freshness Deep Down Things: Capitalist Enchantment in Europe, 1600–1914
1. About His Business: The Medieval Sacramental Economy, the Protestant Theology of “Improvement,” and the Emergence of Capitalist Enchantment
2. The God among Commodities: Christian Political Economy, Marx on Fetishism, and the Power of Money in Bourgeois Society
3. The Poetry of the Past: Romantic Anticapitalism and the Sacramental Imagination
II. A Hundred Dollars, a Hundred Devils: Mammon in America, 1492–1870
4. Errand into the Marketplace: The Puritan Covenant Theology of Capitalism
5. The Righteous Friends of Mammon: Evangelicals, Mormons, Slaveholders, and the Proprietary Dispensation
6. Glows and Glories and Final Illustriousness: Transcendentalism, the Religion of the Slaves, and the Romantic Imagination in Antebellum America
III. The Mystical Body of Business: The Corporate Reconstruction of Capitalist Enchantment, 1870–1920
7. God Gave Me My Money: The Incorporation of America and the Persistence of Evangelical Enchantment
8. The Soulful Corporation: Corporate Fetishism and the Incorporation of Enchantment
9. Blazers of the One True Way: Corporate Humanism, Management Theory, and the Mechanization of Communion
10. The Spirit of the Thing: Advertising and the Incorporation of the Beatific Vision
11. Modern Communion: Corporate Liberalism and Imperialist Eschatology
IV. The Beloved Commonwealth: Visions of Cooperative Enchantment, 1870–1920
12. The Producers’ Jeremiad: The Populist Reformation of the Covenant Theology
13. The Cross Is Bending: The Socialist Jeremiad and the Covenant Theology
14. The Priesthood of Art: Anarchism, Arts and Crafts, and the Re-enchantment of the World
15. Another Kingdom of Being: The Crisis of Metaphysical Experience and the Search for Passionate Vision
V. The Heavenly City of Fordism: Enchantment in the Machine Age, 1920–1945
16. Business Is the Soul of America: The New Capitalism and the Business Millennium
17. The American Century and the Magic Kingdom: Mythologies of the Machine Age
18. A New Order and Creed: Human Relations as Fordist Moral Philosophy
19. Beauty as the New Business Tool: Advertising, Industrial Design, and the Enchantment of Corporate Modernism
VI. Predicaments of Human Divinity: Critics of Fordist Enchantment, 1920–1945
20. The Mysticism of Numbers: Postwar Enthusiasm for Technocracy
21. Secular Prayers and Impieties: The Cultural Front as Migration of the Holy
22. Small Is Beautiful: The Religion of Small Property and Lewis Mumford’s Novum Organum
23. Human Divinity: F. Scott Fitzgerald, James Agee, and the Son of God
VII. One Vast and Ecumenical Holding Company: The Prehistory of Neoliberal Enchantment, 1945–1975
24. God’s in His Heaven, All’s Right with the World: The Political Economy of Containment and the Economic Theology of the Cold War Consensus
25. Machines of Loving Grace: Auguries of the Corporate Counterculture
26. The New Testament of Capitalism: The Resurgence of Evangelical Enchantment and the Theology of Neoliberalism
27. The Statues of Daedalus: Postmaterialism and the Failure of the Liberal Imagination
28. To Live Instead of Making History: Herbert Marcuse, Norman O. Brown, and the Romantic Eschatology of Immanence
29. Heaven Which Exists and Is Everywhere around Us: The Sacramental Vision of Postwar Utopians
