Why Do Intellectuals Oppose Capitalism?

Because, according to Robert Nozick, intellectuals can’t get over the fact that school’s over.

It is surprising that intellectuals oppose capitalism so. Other groups of comparable socio-economic status do not show the same degree of opposition in the same proportions. Statistically, then, intellectuals are an anomaly. … Intellectuals now expect to be the most highly valued people in a society, those with the most prestige and power, those with the greatest rewards. Intellectuals feel entitled to this. But, by and large, a capitalist society does not honor its intellectuals. … What factor produced feelings of superior value on the part of intellectuals? I want to focus on one institution in particular: schools. … The schools … exhibited and thereby taught the principle of reward in accordance with (intellectual) merit. To the intellectually meritorious went the praise, the teacher’s smiles, and the highest grades. … The wider market society, however, taught a different lesson. There the greatest rewards did not go to the verbally brightest. There the intellectual skills were not most highly valued. … There is a further point to be added. The (future) wordsmith intellectuals are successful within the formal, official social system of the schools, wherein the relevant rewards are distributed by the central authority of the teacher. The schools contain another informal social system within classrooms, hallways, and schoolyards, wherein rewards are distributed not by central direction but spontaneously at the pleasure and whim of schoolmates. Here the intellectuals do less well. It is not surprising, therefore, that distribution of goods and rewards via a centrally organized distributional mechanism later strikes intellectuals as more appropriate than the “anarchy and chaos” of the marketplace. For distribution in a centrally planned socialist society stands to distribution in a capitalist society as distribution by the teacher stands to distribution by the schoolyard and hallway.

Is that really plausible?

• First, what about the mathematically gifted? I find Nozick’s argument for excluding them from his general prediction wholly unpersuasive:
  

  [The school system] produces anti-capitalist feeling among verbal intellectuals. Why do the numbersmiths not develop the same attitudes as these wordsmiths? I conjecture that these quantitatively bright children, although they get good grades on the relevant examinations, do not receive the same face-to-face attention and approval from the teachers as do the verbally bright children. It is the verbal skills that bring these personal rewards from the teacher, and apparently it is these rewards that especially shape the sense of entitlement.

  There is nothing to suggest that the math and science crowd is held in lower esteem by the teachers, that they have an easier time on the schoolyard than the fast-talking debate club crowd (please!), and that they are more successful in the “real world” compared to their humanities peers.

• Secondly, what about countries such as France, Germany, Italy, Spain, and the UK where intellectuals are held in much higher public esteem than in the US? Shouldn’t one expect them to be more at peace with their (mellower) brands of capitalism? Let me think: Adorno, Barth, Baudrillard, de Beauvoir, Berlin, Brecht, Blackburn, Camus, Eco, Foucault, Flusser, Grass, Habermas, Havel, Kojeve, Kundera, Lukacs, Marcuse, Pinter, Rushdie, Safranski, Saramango, Sartre … no love lost for capitalism there.

Alienation and exploitation are the key concerns that animate intellectual resistance to capitalism. The beauty of a capitalist system is that it creates order without anyone being in charge, and that our complex internal lives, our hopes, dreams, aspirations, world-views, histories, etc. are relevant only to the extent that they influence our revealed preferences for existing goods and services. Capitalism is social reductionism in action, which is why it works so well. But the price we pay is alienation — more for some than for others, to be sure, but alienation nevertheless. And where there is alienation, exploitation can’t be far off. In my view, much of this criticism is vastly overstated, and many of my friends on the (non-libertarian) left completely ignore capitalism’s history of liberation from tradition and authoritarian rule, and the freedom we enjoy in private matters as a result of their irrelevance to the functioning of the system. (Freedom is inexorably linked to irrelevance.) But those are valid differences of opinion. I just don’t think that Nozick’s “we liked it better in school” explanation goes very far.
[tags]economics, capitalism, intellectuals[/tags]

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