THE SPIRIT OF ENTERPRISE
George Gilder
New York: Simon and Schuster, 1984
274 pp., $17.75 (cloth), $8.95 (paper)
The twin subjects of George Gilder's latest book are announced in the title: "enterprise" and "spirit".
Although the theoretical basis for capitalism was developed over two centuries ago by Adam Smith, Gilder does not believe capitalism has ever been adequately justified, however successful it has been in practice. The defenders of capitalism usually treat it as a "system"--efficient, progressive, free, but impersonal. Nineteenth-century capitalism became Darwinian and Malthusian, arguing for absolute economic freedom as the necessary precondition for a kind of relentless progress in a world that resembled a cosmic state of nature. Even in our day, orthodox conservative spokesmen for free-market economics often sound grim and uncompassionate.
The conventional defense of capitalism has always been unsatisfying, most of all because of its low view of people; Mankind's deepest characteristic is selfishness. The world is moved by a greed Leo Strauss once described as the "joyless quest for joy". The most successful are said to be the most self-interested, driven by their passion to accumulate huge profits. There is some inevitable law of nature, an "invisible hand" that allows the profiteering of the greedy to trickle down and unintentionally benefit the rest of us. Private vice equals public benefit or, as one parodist put it: "Every man for himself, and the devil take the hindmost', said the elephant as he danced among the chickens".
Is it any wonder that many of the poor and the young reject an economic system that has no place for acts of generosity, benevolence, and giving? The strongest case for socialism, by contrast, was never its economic or growth potential but its appeal to community, morality, and human solidarity.
The radical left and traditionalist right, then, tend to agree about the "low moral stature" of capitalists. The unsatisfactory moral basis of capitalism guaranteed that socialism would always remain as a theoretical alternative which, when armed and in practice, would pose a threat to freedom. Gilder intends to provide a more satisfying moral defense of capitalism.
Gilder prefers speaking of "enterprise" because it focuses on the importance of the central actor of capitalism, the entrepreneur. An economy is not self-moving; it needs enterprising individuals to generate new products, its emphasis upon individualism, rather than egalitarianism, as the characteristic problem of American life. Whereas Tocqueville understands such individualism as of "democratic origin" and argues that it grows "as conditions get more equal", Bellah and his colleagues seem to sever individualism from its democratic and egalitarian sources (Mayer, p.507). Thus, whereas Tocqueville considers the crucial question of democratic politics to be how can the potential excesses to egalitarianism be checked, Bellah and his colleagues seem to argue that one can treat individualism in isolation from egalitarianism. Indeed, they go one better. They would seem to want to solve the problem of individualism by feeding the egalitarian spirit, thereby, from the Tocquevillian
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