The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism

I mentioned in a previous post some of my reactions to Patrick Deneen's interesting book Why Liberalism Failed.  I noted that many of his arguments are evocative of earlier critiques of liberalism written in the 1960s and early '70s.  One of the most important of those critiques was Daniel Bell's "The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism."  As Marx had noted, one effect of capitalism was to disrupt settled societies, to "make all that is solid melt into air."  The decidedly anti-Marxist Joseph Schumpeter emphasized the importance of "creative destruction" in the capitalist project, i.e., to destroy existing industries and the communities that might have been based upon them upon the discovery of new and better mousetraps.  Although it is not my primary interest in this post, I do note a story in today's New York Times that emphasizes, altogether accurately, the extent to which  Donald Trump is…

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