Authority, Power, and the Economy

For much of the last century, it has been common knowledge among thinking men that the great beast known as the Modern Economy was both out of control and in total control. Out of control: unconstrained by governments, social norms, traditions, soldiers, priests, or anyone or anything else. In total control: not only of much of people’s lives, but also of political and social power structures, ethical and aesthetic judgments, developments in science and technology, religious and philosophical beliefs, and even emotional and psychological tendencies. This conventional wisdom is not wrong. The modern economy is strangely powerful. However, it is only powerful by default, that is, because modern authorities are too weak to do what they should.

My description relies on the difference between power and authority. Power is the crude and ultimately violent potential to act as desired, while authority is the ordered, broadly accepted, and transcendentally grounded responsibility and capability to guide people and institutions to promote the good of all. The difference between these two concepts is often not noticed. For example, “authoritarian” governments are the way they are largely because they rely on power and not on authority. Philosophers such as Hannah Arendt and D. C. Schindler have explored the implications of this distinction in the generally power-rich and authority-poor modern world.

The conventional understanding of economic power is basically Marxist, in the sense of assuming that economic forces and conflicts are at the center of everything, everywhere and always. According to this “masters of suspicion” narrative, despite what appearances and reasoning might suggest, all aspects of how we live and move and have our being are actually always, at the deepest level, shaped by the power of the economically rich. Pure Marxists are confident that the pattern has been and always will be the same until the arrival of the Communist utopia. It is in the nature of human society, they say, that the few rich necessarily use their economic power to exploit, oppress, and expropriate the many poor.

For Marx and some of his followers, the economic oppression is always precarious. The rich always recognize, although often not consciously, that if the poor were united and aware, they could easily take power. To prevent such unity and awareness, the rich hide, soften, and beautify the inherent violence of the current power relationship by developing misleading myths of authority. They say something like, “We are not violent oppressors who rule by fear. We are chosen by the gods to guide the people.” Marxists consider these myths to be a sort of upholstery, like the stuffing and covers of a sofa. They amount to a comforting and distracting superstructure. However, just as the sofa’s real structure is its wooden frame, the real structure in any society is the violence of economic oppression.

The belief in and reality of economic pre-eminence is both unnatural and exclusively modern.

From this perspective, there is no mystery in the power of the modern economy. There are only questions about who exercises economic power. In Marx’s day, capitalists were in control. Today’s economic elite is harder to identify. There are still old-fashioned business-building, uber-rich capitalists, but they are part of an amorphous and almost borderless network of institutional investors, investment bankers, and senior executives, who are supported by a collection of experts and hangers-on: consultants, academics, governmental bureaucrats, fawning journalists, and so forth. Compared to Marx’s crude capitalists, the current elite is more sophisticated and less cruel. They are technocrats who preside over a highly successful economic system, one which offers unprecedented affluence to almost everyone. However, the affluence has been purchased at a high price. Elites and commoners are all immersed in and psychologically and spiritually immiserated by the economy’s oppressive structures.

This quasi-Marxist analysis captures something important about modern power-structures, but it is built on the deeply and dangerously erroneous core Marxist assumption: the economy is always at the center of the human condition. In reality, the economy does not naturally—this is in accord with human nature—dominate all other social structures. Nor do economic concerns naturally dominate the lives of individuals, certainly not once people have enough food, shelter, and energy to survive. The belief in and reality of economic pre-eminence is both unnatural and exclusively modern. Always and everywhere in the premodern world, economic success was considered less central to human flourishing than worship, than military and other sorts of glory, than living in accord in harmony with the cosmic order. In all of the leading premodern philosophical, religious, and spiritual revelations and traditions, an excessive dedication to the search for greater economic prosperity was judged to be an ethical error and a distraction from the goals that are more suitable to the rational, religious, and loving creatures that humans are. Considering this unanimity, it looks like the thinking man’s Marxist analysis just skips over the most important question about the modern social order: Why did prosperity, and eventually ever-increasing prosperity, become the predominant modern standard of cultural success?

My answer to this question starts with the observation that the rise of the economy is not the only modern social-cultural novelty. Rather, it is inextricably intermingled with such unprecedented innovations as massive secularization; large, complex, and intrusive governments; an ideological commitment to social equality; mass education; mass entertainment; various sorts of individualism; more advanced science; and predominantly urban living. What needs to be explained, then, is what is it about modernity itself that it places the economy at of the center of human concern?

After all, there is no good reason to think that economic factors have always guided or dominated the modern world. On the contrary, the great economic changes came centuries after many other profound innovations. By the time large-scale industry was a big thing, in the mid-19th century, modern science, law, and religion had been developing for two or three centuries. Marxists can claim that the controlling economic forces were simply working below the surface for all that time, but such claims only make sense to true believers. A more plausible explanation must include some of the other new things—the non-economic ideas, beliefs, and practices that increased the social interest in economic pursuits, that allowed economic gains, that allowed those gains to become so much more important for societies and individuals, and that hollowed out the non-economic premodern institutions which had guided the much more tractable premodern economies.

A full explanation requires a book, but here is a sketch, in four claims.

First: The economy is ill suited for being the power at the center of society. Whatever the economic good is—presumably some combination of creature comforts, good work, and ample choices for everyone of both consumption and labor—that good is far too modest to be justly preeminent. The problem is that human nature is oriented to greater things than what the economy can offer: immortal things, wondrously beautiful things, things worth dying for. The economy’s goods are far too modest to inspire the best people to keep doing their best to achieve them.

As already mentioned, the modest rank of economic goods was rightly understood throughout premodernity. Even when the gods or the Lord were expected to reward the righteous with prosperity, the primary communal goal was always the righteousness, not the rewards. When new technologies were developed in premodernity, they were almost never originally aimed at producing more or better goods for everyday life. Rather, their purpose was to win battles, to make more beautiful things, or to increase knowledge. In reality, the cultural centrality of economic goals was quite new when Marx postulated it as a timeless truth.

Of course, the temptation to pursue riches is part of what Christians know as the fallen human condition. The universality of this vice is demonstrated by the presence in every culture of both ethical exhortations to avoid it and of extensive legal and cultural rules to regulate, mitigate, and often to limit affluence. The ubiquitous premodern complaints about economic greed should not be taken as evidence that something good was being repressed. Even Marx, at least in his utopian mode, accepted that economic considerations should—and would under Communism—lose the central cultural position that he thought they had held up to the present.

Second: The modern pre-eminence of the economy is justified by power, not by authority. In other words, the economy rules through coercion, not through respect.

The lack of respect for economic greatness is easy to understand. While the modern economy is certainly impressive, it is not sublime, divine, or a clearly unmixed blessing. Rather, the endless political talk of the importance of economic growth and the standard economic vocabulary of jobs, employment, careers, production, and brands reek of the temporary, contingent, and superficial. The quasi-anonymous bureaucracies which actually supervise these economic systems inspire nothing like reverence, dedication, or even durable respect.

As for economic authority, the best evidence for the absence of it may well be the almost hysterical efforts to identify something greater than power and pleasure as the controlling principles in the economy. Economists’ dedication to entirely fictitious models that show the “market” economy’s higher purpose, the extensive resources dedicated to building up images of corporate solidity and virtue through advertising and marketing, the vastly exaggerated cults of charismatic corporate leaders, and the breathless search for the next new thing have many goals, but at the deepest level they all aim to create a simulacrum of authority. The ever-changing and resolutely worldly economy is simply incapable of creating or embodying anything worthy of near-transcendent respect. Confidence in divine providence gave authority to premodern generals, kings and popes. Its rival in the rhetoric of modern economics, the fully human process of the market’s supposed “invisible hand,” gives no lasting authority.

While the lack of genuine economic authority is as easy to see as the closely related lack of economic greatness, the presence of economic power is more hidden, because it is increasingly exercised without physical violence. Worker riots, strike-breaking toughs, and debtors’ prisons have pretty much disappeared in prosperous countries. There are no men with bayonets standing behind the terms and conditions set by Microsoft and Amazon. However, indirect economic violence is ubiquitous in the modern economy. At the most material level, anyone living in the modern economy is compelled to participate in the “technocratic paradigm.” All of us necessarily search for technical solutions to many of the problems and challenges of life. We must install the latest software to deal with the world, book flights to visit friends and family, and call up a technician when the house is too cold or too hot. Birth, illness, and death, learning, worship, and loving—all are necessarily mediated by the mindset of worldly costs and worldly benefits. At the more social level, men force men, including themselves, to abandon some of their humanity to fit better into systems of production that are bureaucratic and atomized. Men bombard men, including themselves, with dishonest and psychologically disorienting tools of persuasion. Men find solutions that often cause more problems than they resolve. The indirect violence in all this force is found in its inescapability. The only way to avoid the power of the economy is by a sort of self-imprisonment in communities that are intentionally non-modern in their economic organizations. Even those efforts are, like the resistance to totalitarian power, generally more symbolic than effective.

Third: The modern world as a whole is increasingly deprived of any real authority. As Arendt points out, modern thinkers, from Hobbes onward, have rarely even recognized the difference between rule that is accepted because it is endorsed by, or springs from, some transcendental reality and rule that relies on the ability credibly to threaten to destroy the lives or—as in the modern economy—the livelihoods—of any dissenters deemed to be dangerous.

While the intellectual denial of the existence of authority has dominated non-Catholic intellectual discourse for centuries (spurring Catholics to ever more fervid defences of the authority of current popes and various traditions), actual authorities endured for a long time. It took many generations for the new ideas to overcome belief in and loyalty to divinely rooted monarchies and aristocracies, anointed priests, god-fearing legislators, tribal leaders, judges, and even fathers of families. The sense that there was something godly about all sorts of rule persisted until well into the secular age.

Most notably, in political matters, the thinkers in the Enlightenment tradition rejected crude power in favor of a quasi-transcendental and psychologically and ontologically inferior substitute for real—that is divinely sourced—authority. In particular, Rousseau, followed and elaborated by both American revolutionaries and Hegel, attributed a certain transcendental weight to the often hidden but supposedly unified “general will” of the governed: vox populi, vox dei. Other authorities lasted longer. The practical discrediting of paternal, intellectual, and artistic authority was not widespread until well into the 19th century, and the denial that even the Bible could provide religious authority had to wait until the historical-critical school came to undermine the Protestant substitute for apostolic authority. In the economy, the rising bourgeoisie did not at first look only to the power of their money. Rather, they searched for some sort of divinely-sourced authority in their success and their opulence.

Marx was wrong to think that everything was always economic; but he was prescient to see all modern secular claims to authority as thin veils that were designed to hide the shame of relying only on crude power. He did not live to see all the veils torn off. But by now, it is power all the way down. Outside of the Catholic Church, authority is a distant memory in every part of life. There are just the powers of the age: the potential and actual violence of political regimes, the technocratic control of welfare states and educational systems, the life-shaping and death-shaping power of the medical machine, the contested powers of different “identity” groups, and the soft and persuasive power of the economy. The powers are sometimes in conflict, but mostly they work together, reinforcing the culture of worldly aspirations, spurious and lonely individualism, and groupthink.

Myths of economic authority are still rolled out. Just as politicians still murmur about democratic choices, academic economists promote a quasi-mystical trust that individual economic decisions in the modern economy are more controlling than controlled. But both state and market are much better understood as guided by modernity’s authority-free technocratic powers. Those rational, pragmatic and bureaucratic powers long ago swept away the lingering vestiges of true authority, seen for example in Catholic Archbishop Edward Manning’s successful mediation of the 1889 London dock strike, or even in the wide support given to the governmental programs of post-Second World War welfare states. There are now only economic powers, squabbling over the details of how to direct the search for ever more economic power. The result of the authority vacuum is the dispiriting and dispirited inevitability of bad economic decisions, creating such modern economic monstrosities as hugely expensive and bleakly impersonal health care and universally available pornography.

Fourth: The economy is going to remain in and out of control. In other words, it is all but impossible for any true authority to replace or even substantially to curb economic power. The impediment is modernity’s ever more thorough dissolution of all sorts of authority. This process has advanced so far that there are almost no non-State authorities left which could even imagine building up the skills and respect needed to influence economic governance. Even if the members of the dominant technocratic elite wanted to overpower the economic forces that promote unlimited consumption and unneeded innovations, they lack the intellectual-spiritual capacity and the necessary institutional anchoring. Quite the contrary, they are so deeply entwined with economic power (in large part through the modern medium of high finance) they can barely imagine what authority would feel like.

In theory, my bleak prediction is undoubtedly an exaggeration. Human freedom is ineradicable and divine providence is omnipotent, so the creation of some genuine authority that can guide the modern economy is always a possibility. Besides, since modernity is ever developing, it certainly could develop away from the directions it has followed with hardly any detours or reversal for the last five centuries. However, induction suggests such a change will not occur. Since the Protestant Reformation first challenged the authority of the Catholic Church, modern “rationalism” and the modern search for “freedom” have first seriously wounded and then effectively obliterated a long series of premodern authorities. Their initial modern replacements were always weaker than their predecessors and even they have all but disappeared in the rubble of ever more secularized modernity. No one has yet even imagined a plausible source or expression of authority appropriate to the industrial, urban, self-perpetuating, technology-driven, and bureaucratic modern economy.

In my judgment, there is only one non-miraculous path that could lead to the development or discovery of a modern economic authority: the way of cataclysm. If a great war, some unstoppable environmental event, a plague, or merely rapid depopulation were to destroy much of human life, the next generation’s elite might hold modernity responsible for its misery. In such dire circumstances, perhaps a faithful remnant—the few who have not bent the knee to the modern Baals of economic comforts and growth, or who have firmly repented of their idolatry—would be granted the authority that comes from God, the unchanging divinity who outlives all civilizations.

The scale of disaster needed for such a conversion should not be underestimated. The two great wars of the 20th century were not enough, although they generated a temporary religious revival. While waiting, with dreadful anticipation, for an even greater modern disaster, we can only live in the far-from-divine hope that the non-authoritative economic elite do not use their technological-bureaucratic power too irresponsibly.