Recovering Personhood

Possessive individualism undermines the realization of full personhood, and it enables the capitalist firm to shed any sense of obligation to those who must rent or sell their labor power in order that they might eat. The fundamental crisis of capitalism is that the self-absorbed individual and the self-dealing capitalist firm are locked in a perverse contest in which their mutual dependence is both acknowledged and resented. Re-creating historic ideas of obligations—civic duties—seems impossible to imagine. A more plausible transition is to be found in the idea of loyalty: loyalty to others with whom we work, with whom we share social spaces, and with the community at large. Loyalty from the capitalist firm toward its workers would be a start. Loyalty from the acquisitive selfish individual would be helpful in restoring a shared and necessary sense of personhood.

Reimagining the Private Firm

Escape from possessive individualism requires that the terms of engagement between households and firms be rebalanced. Rarely is the firm seen as the essential component in the economic well-being of households. And when it is seen in this light, contestation over wages and work conditions arises. The post-revolutionary regimes in China and the Soviet Union then tried to situate that obligation on the government. We know how that turned out. A better solution—economically and politically—is to bring capitalist firms into a joint obligation with the government in this essential task. The persistence of union-busting, desultory pay and fringe benefits, layoffs, plant closings, automation, and out-sourced jobs to foreign countries ought to remind politicians—and capitalists—that radical solutions are always available if hope is too long delayed. We now concentrate on the difficult realm of ideas. For here lurks the greatest barrier to necessary institutional change—defective imagination.

Emergence of the Isolated Household

We here explore the gradual emasculation of the household as the basic unit of provisioning during the four evolutionary phases of capitalism. This economic history reveals a gradual redefinition of the purpose of the household from the center of entrepreneurial initiative to a besieged and insecure provider of inconvenient and unwanted labor to managerial capitalism whose central imperative is to reduce labor costs in the service of greater net returns to owners of capital. This evolutionary pathway will reveal the household to be an increasingly precarious and politically vexing participant in global capitalism.

Economics

Possessive individualism has acquired a profound grip on contemporary political thought and action—on daily life—because it relies on a number of economic notions that now constitute our civic religion. Central concepts of that creed—efficiency, rational choice, market exchange as an arena of liberty and autonomy, consumer sovereignty, price as a measure of value, assertions of aggregate well-being—are accepted as irrefutable truths that insulate them from serious challenge. These core attributes of contemporary economics are misleading and generally false. Recent efforts to attribute civic virtues to markets are incoherent.

The Isolated Periphery

Possessive individualism afflicts countries at the periphery of the rich metropole that are also trapped by economic isolation, dysfunctional governance, and social alienation. Households in these countries are precariously isolated relative to the political and economic power of international commerce. Managerial capitalism has rendered millions of these households as little more than residual suppliers of cheap labor. Why are these poor countries unable to offer compelling livelihoods to their citizens? Their colonial past is a part of the explanation, but contemporary capitalism continues to bear down on their economic prospects. In the absence of meaningful work, there can be no mystery why sectarian conflict emerges. And then such conflict both encourages the emergence of authoritarian leaders and reinforces it. The political climate in many countries of the isolated periphery is a minor variant of what is now occurring in parts of western Europe, Great Britain, and the United States.

The Crisis of Capitalism

Why are the richest and most advanced economies facing political turmoil? Why have so many poor countries in the agrarian periphery continued to languish under defective governance that yields livelihoods of despair and vulnerability? Possessive individualism—a joint phenomenon growing out of the Enlightenment and the emergence of contemporary economics as the civic religion of modern life—is at the core of the emerging world disorder. The evolutionary pathway of capitalism has undermined the idea of personhood and left the modern household dependent on a fickle world of managerial capitalism in which money managers exercise profound control over the life prospects of millions. Possessive individualism thrives in a world of ubiquitous assertions about individual rights. Meanwhile, notions of civic obligations are considered quaint and impertinent. This is the crisis of capitalism, and it offers clarity about the reasons for the current world disorder.

Reimagining the Individual

Beginning in the 1980s, inequality of incomes in the metropolitan core began to increase. This great divergence was most pronounced in the Anglophone world—Great Britain, the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. This divergence suggests that there is nothing inherent—structurally determinative—in capitalism as it operates in the rich metropole that brings about this unwelcome trend. Rather, inequality is willful—intended. Ironically, inequality is enabled by the prevalence of possessive individualism that reveals the acquisitive individualist to be the source of his or her own unwanted economic marginalization. The individualist’s embrace of a livelihood strategy based on the celebration of rights and the illusion of freedom—being free to choose—has placed him or her at the mercy of the capitalist firm equally committed to possessive individualism. The capitalist firm must be transformed into a public trust. However, this will not be sufficient. Improved livelihoods will also require that the possessive individual be reimagined.

Escaping Possessive Individualism

Contemporary economics stands implicated in the triumph of possessive individualism. In viewing the individual as nothing but a utility-maximizing consumer, economic theory offers apologetics for the self-interested tendencies that imperil personhood. Managerial capitalism reifies the acquisitive urges embedded in contemporary economics. As the defects of managerial capitalism become apparent, escape seems impossible. This mental barrier persists because economics is not an evolutionary science. An economy is always in the process of becoming, and yet economic theory denies this “becoming” to consumers whose tastes and preferences are assumed to be unchanging—and none of our business. The escape requires an evolutionary economics that recognizes the individual as constantly engaged in a process of experiencing life and necessarily adapting to it. In that dynamic process, individuals are also crafting their own future. An evolutionary economics can help light the way as societies seek escape from the grip of possessive individualism.

The Cleaved Core

The evolutionary trajectory of capitalism has now rendered the household precarious, economically disadvantaged, and vulnerable to the whims of firms under the authoritarian grip of the wrangler. Stagnant living standards for the vast majority of households in the metropolitan core is evidence that most households have been reduced to peripatetic hustlers in order to survive. Job loss haunts many areas within the core. Worker protections have been reduced to a minimum, and political alienation is on the rise. The Brexit decision in the United Kingdom, the election of an angry outsider to the presidency of the United States, and the rise of right-wing parties in Europe signal the extent to which households have become marginalized and angry.