Voltaire and commercial society

 

Voltaire’s history of the reign of Louis XV begins with a study of the system of John Law, seen from the point of view of the civilizing process – or at least the domesticating process. Voltaire is at pains to put Law’s bubble in the context of the “habit of obedience” ingrained in the French under the reign of Louis XIV, comparing the troubles that the latter Louis faced, in his regency, from an upstart aristocracy, with the mildness faced by the regent, the Duc D’Orleans, even in the exercise of truly autocratic power. Out of the disempowerment of the nobility brought about by autocracy of the Sun King, Voltaire spotted another power on the rise, which would maintain a social order by the somewhat paradoxical support of those whose political power was abridged by it.  This passage should be underlined by those looking for the genealogical ancestors of Marx’s sociology of capitalism:

“Finally, Law’s famous system, which seemed that it must ruin the regency and the state, actually sustained, in effect, both one and the other by consequences nobody had foreseen. The cupidity that it awoke in all conditions of the population, from the basest upt to magistrates, bishops and princes, turned away the attention of all minds from the public welfare, and from all political and ambitious views, in filling them with the fear of losing and the avidity of gaining. It was a new and prodigious game, where all citizens wagered one against the other. The obsessed players hardly quit their cards in order to trouble the government. And so it happened, by a prestige of which the hidden mechanisms could not be seen except by the finest and most practiced eyes, that a chimerical system gave birth to a real commerce, and played the midwife to the rebirth of the Indian company, established in the past by the celebrated Colbert, and ruined by the wars. In the end, if there were many private fortunes destroyed, at least the nation become more commercial and richer. This system enlightened minds, as the civil wars, in the past, had sharpened braveries. It was an epidemic sickness which spread itself in France, Holland and England. It merits the attention of posterity, for here it was not a question of the political interest of one or two princes that sent shockwaves through the nations; rather, the people themselves hurried into this madness which enriched some families, and reduced others to beggary.”

Voltaire sees this as a madness, but it is now a norm. The rise of the financial industry in all its branches is a sort of surprising result of industrial society. In defiance of the economist’s fetish of “efficiency”, the very size of finance in contemporary capitalist society is a marker of vast inefficiencies, of rent-seeking for its own sake.

Because most economists work for the man, though – the financial man – or hope to, this little insight is lost in the footnotes. We don’t want to bring to the floor the fact that our form of capitalism is, by its own standards, a vastly inefficient machine. That would discourage the poky and the plunky – the little ones who have to be taught to identify with the plutocrats.