The Acquisitive Society

"The prevalent insistence upon rights, and prevalent neglect of functions, brings men into a vicious circle which they cannot escape, without escaping from the false philosophy which dominates them. But it does something more. It makes that philosophy itself seem plausible and exhilarating... not only for industry... but for politics and culture and religion and the whole compass of social life."

"When a Cabinet Minister declares that the greatness of this country depends upon the volume of its exports, so that France, with exports comparatively little, and Elizabethan England, which exported next to nothing, are presumably to be pitied as altogether inferior civilizations, that is Industrialism. ...When the Press clamours that the one thing needed to make this island an Arcadia is productivity, and more productivity, and yet more productivity, that is Industrialism. It is the confusion of means with ends."

"As long as a minority has so large an income that part of it, if spent at all, must be spent on trivialities, so long will part of the human energy and mechanical equipment of the nation be diverted from serious work, which enriches it, to making trivialities, which impoverishes it."

"It is true... of all classes in a society which conducts its affairs on the principle that wealth, instead of being proportioned to function, belongs to those who can get it: They are never satisfied... for as they make that principle the guide of their individual lives and of their social order, nothing short of infinity could bring them satisfaction."

"Industrialism is no more a necessary characteristic of an economically developed society than militarism is a necessary characteristic of a nation which maintains military forces. ...the idea that it is something inevitable... is itself a product of the perversion of mind which industrialism produces."

"The essence of industrialism, in short, is not any particular method of industry, but a particular estimate of the importance of industry, which results in it being thought the only thing that is important at all, so that it is elevated from the subordinate place which it should occupy among human interests and activities into being the standard by which all other interests and activities are judged."

"Property and inherited wealth and the apparatus of class institutions have made opportunities unequal. Inequality... leads to the mis-direction of production."

"Part of the goods which are annually produced, and which are called wealth, is, strictly speaking, waste, because it consists of articles which... either should not have been produced until other articles had already been produced in sufficient abundance, or should not have been produced at all. And some part of the population is employed in making goods which no man can make with happiness, or indeed without loss of self-respect, because he knows that they had much better not be made; and that his life is wasted in making them."

"So to those who clamor, as many now do, "Produce! Produce!" one simple question may be addressed:—"Produce what?" ...What can be more childish than to urge the necessity that productive power should be increased, if part of the productive power which exists already is misapplied? Is not less production of futilities as important as, indeed a condition of, more production of things of moment?... Yet this result of inequality... cannot be prevented, or checked, or even recognized by a society which excludes the idea of purpose from its social arrangements and industrial activity."

"The true cause of industrial warfare is as simple as the true cause of international warfare. It is that if men recognize no law superior to their desires, then they must fight when their desires collide. For though groups or nations which are at issue with each other may be willing to submit to a principle which is superior to them both, there is no reason why they should submit to each other."

"The possibility that one aspect of human life may be so exaggerated as to overshadow and... atrophy every other, has been made familiar... by... "Prussian militarism." ...political institutions and social arrangements and intellect and morality and religion are crushed into a mould made to fit one activity, which in a sane society is a subordinate activity... but which in a militarist state is a kind of mystical epitome of society itself."

"Militarism... is fetish worship. It is the prostration of men's souls before, and the laceration of their bodies to appease, an idol. ...Reverence for economic activity and industry and what is called business is also fetish worship, and in their devotion to that idol they torture themselves as needlessly, and indulge in the same meaningless antics."

"Men may use what mechanical instruments they please and be none the worse for their use. What kills their souls is when they allow their instruments to use them."

"Because its function is service, an industry as a whole has rights and duties towards the community, the abrogation of which involves privilege. Because its method is association, the different parties within it have rights and duties towards each other; and the neglect or perversion of these involves oppression."

"The conditions of a right organization of industry are... permanent, unchanging, and capable of being apprehended by the most elementary intelligence, provided it will read the nature of its countrymen in the large outlines of history, not in the bloodless abstractions of experts."

"The first [condition of a right organization of industry is that it should be subordinated to the community in such a way as to render the best service technically possible, that those who render no service should not be paid at all, because it is of the essence of a function that it should find its meaning in the satisfaction, not of itself, but of the end which it serves."

"The second [condition of a right organisation of industry] is that its direction and government should be in the hands of persons who are responsible to those who are directed and governed, because it is the condition of economic freedom that men should not be ruled by an authority which they cannot control."

"The purpose of industry is obvious. It is to supply man with things which are necessary, useful or beautiful, and thus to bring life to body or spirit. In so far as it is governed by this end, it is among the most important of human activities. In so far as it is diverted from it, it may be harmless, amusing, or even exhilarating to those who carry it on, but it possesses no more social significance than the orderly business of ants and bees, the strutting of peacocks, or the struggles of carnivorous animals over carrion."

"The rise of modern economic relations, which may be dated in England from the latter half of the seventeenth century, was coincident with the growth of a political theory which replaced the conception of purpose by that of mechanism."

"In the eighteenth century both the State and the Church had abdicated that part of the sphere which had consisted in the maintenance of a common body of social ethics; what was left of it was repression of a class, not the discipline of a nation. ...government passed into the lethargic hand of classes who wielded the power of the State in the interests of an irresponsible aristocracy. ...what was Christian in Christianity had largely disappeared."

"The conception of men as united to each other, and of all mankind as united to God, by mutual obligations arising from their relation to a common end, which vaguely conceived and imperfectly realized, had been the keystone holding together the social fabric, ceased to be impressed upon men's minds, when Church and State withdrew from the centre of social life to its circumference. What remained... was private rights and private interests, the materials of a society rather than a society itself."

"The most obvious and fundamental of all rights was property—property absolute and unconditioned—and those who possessed it were regarded as the natural governors of those who did not."

"Society assumed something of the appearance of a great joint-stock company, in which political power and the receipt of dividends were justly assigned to those who held the most numerous shares."

"The eighteenth century found, in the beneficence of natural instincts, a substitute for the God whom it had expelled... and did not hesitate to identify them. "Thus God and nature planned the general frame And bade self-love and social be the same.""

"Society... was ruled by law, not by the caprice of Governments, but which recognized no moral limitation on the pursuit by individuals of their economic self-interest."

"In the world of thought... a political philosophy... made rights the foundation of the social order... The first famous exponent of this philosophy was Locke, in whom the dominant conception is the indefeasibility of private rights, not the pre-ordained harmony between private rights and public welfare."

"In the great French writers who prepared the way for the Revolution... there is an almost equal emphasis upon the sanctity of rights and upon the infallibility of the alchemy by which the pursuit of private ends is transmuted into the attainment of public good. ...The attempt to refound society upon rights... springing... from the very nature of man himself, was at once the triumph and the limitation of the Revolution."

"English practical men... had scanty sympathy with the absolute affirmations of France. Adam Smith and his precursors... showed how the mechanism of economic life converted "as with an invisible hand," the exercise of individual rights into the instrument of public good. Bentham, who... thought the Declaration of the Rights of Man as absurd as any other dogmatic religion, completed the new orientation by supplying... the principle of Utility."

"The change is significant. It is the difference between the universal and equal citizenship of France... and the organized inequality of England established solidly upon class... the descent from hope to resignation, from the fire and passion... to the monotonous beat of the factory engine, from Turgot and Condorcet to the melancholy mathematical creed of Bentham and Ricardo and James Mill."

"Mankind has... this superiority over its philosophers... great movements spring from the heart and embody a faith; not the nice adjustments of the hedonistic calculus."

"The magnificent formulæ in which a society of farmers and master craftsmen enshrined its philosophy of freedom are in danger of becoming fetters used by an Anglo-Saxon business aristocracy to bind insurgent movements on the part of an immigrant and semi-servile proletariat."

"This doctrine... implies... that the individual enters the world equipped with rights to the free disposal of his property and the pursuit of his economic self-interest, and that these rights are anterior to, and independent of, any service which he may render. True, the service of society will, in fact, it is assumed, result from their exercise. But it is not the primary motive and criterion of industry, but a secondary consequence... It is not the end at which economic activity aims, or the standard by which it is judged, but a by-product, as coal-tar is."

"That conception is written large over the history of the nineteenth century... The doctrine which it inherited was that property was held by an absolute right on an individual basis, and to this fundamental it added another... which grew to its full stature only after the rise of capitalist industry, that societies act both unfairly and unwisely when they limit opportunities of economic enterprise. ...private rights... are thought to be primary and absolute, and public interests secondary and contingent."

"During the greater part of the nineteenth century the significance of the opposition between the two principles of individual rights and social functions was masked by the doctrine of the inevitable harmony between private interests and public good. Competition, it was argued, was an effective substitute for honesty. Today... few now would profess adherence to the compound of economic optimism and moral bankruptcy which led a nineteenth century economist to say: "Greed is held in check by greed, and the desire for gain sets limits to itself.""

"Economic egotism is still worshipped. ...economic rights remain, whether economic functions are performed or not."

"Revolutions, as a long and bitter experience reveals, are apt to take their colour from the régime which they overthrow. Is it any wonder that the creed which affirms the absolute rights of property should sometimes be met with a counter-affirmation of the absolute rights of labour, less anti-social, indeed, and inhuman, but almost as dogmatic, almost as intolerant and thoughtless as itself?"

"A society which aimed at making the acquisition of wealth contingent upon the discharge of social obligations, which sought to proportion remuneration to service and denied it to those by whom no service was performed, which inquired first not what men possess but what they can make or create or achieve, might be called a Functional Society, because in such a society the main subject of social emphasis would be the performance of functions. But such a society does not exist, even as a remote ideal, in the modern world."

"Modern societies aim at protecting economic rights, while leaving economic functions, except in moments of abnormal emergency, to fulfil themselves."

"The motive... is not the attempt to secure the fulfilment of tasks undertaken for the public service, but to increase the opportunities open to individuals of attaining the objects which they conceive to be advantageous to themselves."

"Such societies may be called Acquisitive Societies, because their whole tendency and interest and preoccupation is to promote the acquisition of wealth. The appeal of this conception... has laid the whole modern world under its spell. ...It is an invitation to men to use the powers... without inquiring whether there is any principle by which their exercise should be limited."

"By fixing men's minds, not upon the discharge of social obligations, which restricts their energy, because it defines the goal to which it should be directed, but upon the exercise of the right to pursue their own self-interest, it offers unlimited scope for the acquisition of riches... To the strong it promises unfettered freedom... to the weak the hope that they too one day may be strong. Before the eyes of both it suspends a golden prize... the enchanting vision of infinite expansion. It assures men that there are no ends other than their ends, no law other than their desires, no limit... Thus it makes the individual the centre of his own universe, and dissolves moral principles into a choice of expediences. And it... relieves... the necessity of discriminating between... enterprise and avarice, energy and unscrupulous greed, property which is legitimate and property which is theft, the just enjoyment of the fruits of labour and the idle parasitism of birth or fortune... and suggests that excess or defect, waste or superfluity, require no conscious effort of the social will to avert them, but are corrected almost automatically by the mechanical play of economic forces."

"Under the impulse of such ideas [upon which an Acquisitive Society is based] men do not become religious or wise or artistic; for religion and wisdom and art imply the acceptance of limitations. But they become powerful and rich. They inherit the earth and change the face of nature, if they do not possess their own souls; and they have that appearance of freedom which consists in the absence of obstacles between opportunities for self-advancement and those whom birth or wealth or talent or good fortune has placed in a position to seize them."

"It is not difficult either for individuals or for societies to achieve their object, if that object be sufficiently limited and immediate, and if they are not distracted from its pursuit by other considerations. The temper... dedicates itself to the cultivation of opportunities, and leaves obligations to take care of themselves... The eighteenth century defined it. The twentieth century has very largely attained it."

"What gives meaning to economic activity... is... the purpose to which it is directed. But the faith... that riches are not a means but an end, implies that all economic activity is equally estimable, whether it is subordinated to a social purpose or not."

"Wealth in modern societies is distributed according to opportunity; and while opportunity depends partly upon talent and energy, it depends still more upon birth, social position, access to education and inherited wealth; in a word, upon property. For... property... is the sleeping partner who draws the dividends which the firm produces, the residuary legatee who always claims his share in the estate."

"In all societies which have accepted industrialism there is an upper layer which claims the enjoyment of social life, while it repudiates its responsibilities. ...and a whole world of rising bourgeoisie eager to imitate them... The second consequence is the degradation of those who labour, but who do not... command large rewards; that is, of the great majority of mankind."

"When.. the meaning of industry is the service of man, all who labour appear... honourable, because all who labour serve, and the distinction which separates those who serve from those who merely spend is so crucial and fundamental as to obliterate all minor distinctions based on differences of income."

"An Acquisitive Society reverences the possession of wealth, as a Functional Society would honour, even in the person of the humblest and most laborious craftsman, the arts of creation."

"To escape such inequality it is necessary to recognize that there is some principle which ought to limit the gains of particular classes and particular individuals, because gains drawn from certain sources or exceeding certain amounts are illegitimate. But such a limitation implies a standard of discrimination, which is inconsistent with the assumption that each man has a right to what he can get, irrespective of any service rendered for it."

"It is the social purpose of industry which gives it meaning and makes it worth while to carry it on at all."