Liberation
Modern economic historians, situated for the most part in the advanced capitalist countries, tend to describe the growth of capitalism as a liberating force. Individualism is modernity: it is associated with adjectives rational, economic, or secular, contrasted with the emotional, spiritual, or religious.
At first glance it might seem inconsistent with Christian injunctions to love our neighbors as we love ourselves. Jesus warns men not to store up treasure on earth, warning that it is ‘‘easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God.''5 But perhaps the ‘‘eye of the needle'' was actually a narrow gate in the city wall of Jerusalem that a camel could squeeze through on its knees.6Max Weber's influential writings insisted that capitalism was not associated with any weakening of religion, but rather with a new Protestant ethic that promoted savings and investment: Economic success could reflect
God's favor. Weber argued that traditional societies were not self-interested enough.7 In the absence of cultural values urging them toward personal advancement, men might be satisfied by the comfortable indulgence of habit. Such would always tempt women. Weber described young girls as particularly inefficient workers, because they lacked the energetic capitalist spirit.
The concept of a Protestant ethic soon lost its sacred undertones. By the twentieth century, Weber acknowledged, the pursuit of wealth had been ‘‘stripped of its religious and ethical meaning'' (especially in the United States).9 Economists began to preach that prosperity promised happiness.10
In the late twentieth century, ethical concerns that conflicted with economic growth were often derogated as timidity. In The Rise of the Western World,
Douglass C.
North and Robert Paul Thomas announced that, ‘‘the acquisitive spirit triumphed over moral qualms''. 11 In his authoritative history of the family, sex, and marriage in England from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century, Lawrence Stone warbled that ‘‘Man was now freed to seek his own personal pleasure here and now, no longer hedged in by the narrow boundaries laid down by moral theology or traditional custom.''12The triumphalist view that economic development represents a shining path to freedom is not confined to the United States. Fernand Braudel, the highly respected French historian, inverts the religious metaphor by claiming that a widening of the needle's eye can lead men back to a world not unlike Eden:
The market spells liberation, openness, access to another world. It means coming up for air. Men's activities, the surpluses they exchange, gradually pass through this narrow channel to the other world with as much difficulty at first as the camel of the scriptures passing through the eye of a needle. Then the breaches grow wider and more frequent, as society finally becomes a ‘‘generalized market society''.13
Braudel mentions men's activities and the surpluses they exchange. Women engage less in labor markets than do men, even in the most advanced capitalist countries in the world. They cross over to the ‘‘other world'' in rather different ways.