At the risk of sounding a bit uncool, I say to the graduating class that your success in life, and the success of our country, is going to depend on the integrity and other qualities of character that you and your contemporaries will continue to develop and demonstrate over the years ahead. . . . I could urge you all to work hard, save, and prosper. And I do. But transcending all else is being principled in how to go about doing those things . . . . And beyond the personal sense of satisfaction, having a reputation for fair dealing is a profoundly practical virtue. We call it ‘good will’ in business and add it to our balance sheets. Trust is at the root of any economic system based on mutually beneficial exchange. . . . Our system works fundamentally on individual fair dealing.
Alan Greenspan, Commencement address, Harvard University, June 1999.
Love figures in any human group, even a capitalist group, understanding “love” in an expanded sense to include more than Aristotle’s lower friendships for pleasure and profit. We do not have to be Hobbesians or utilitarians and reduce “love” to self-interest. We can be stoic or Christian, or followers of Grotius or Adam Smith, and suppose that people care. In fact I’d claim we had better, if we want to be Scientific about it.
Disinterested solidarity is necessary for any human activity—even, to take what would seem to be the hardest case, for the playing of a game. It has been discovered mathematically that games such as those contemplated by John Nash, that beautiful mind, cannot be played to mutual profit with Prudence-Only rules. For one thing, if the game is finite—even as long as 10 moves—it unravels into selfishness. For another, if it is not finite it has an infinite number of solutions. The second point is known as “the Folk Theorem,” because no one knows who first devised it—and perhaps because it is so destructive of game theory that no game theorist now will claim it.
As some of the theorists remarked in 1994, “[infinite] game equilibrium models of rational play lead to an outcome set where players can do almost anything and still be consistent with the theory. The prediction that individuals might do anything from a large set of feasible strategies is neither useful nor precise.” [1] The discoveries were logical, not factual, but they devastate the blackboard claims of Prudence Only to rule the world as we know it. Clever stuff.[2]
And anyone can understand that, say, chess players must adopt this or that rule of the game, such as the rook’s move, which is not itself derivable from the prudent pursuit of victory inside the game. Even to play the game, much less to achieve mutual profit, there has to be an outside. To play chess you must have at least the minimal amount of fellow-feeling needed to perform the Alasdair-MacIntyre-like “practice” called “playing a game of chess according to accepted rules.” It would wreck the game if you announced, because you noticed that if you could move your rook diagonally you would win, “This time I’m going to move my rook as though it were a bishop.”
Playing the board game Monopoly under a rule of no side deals, with children who have no grasp of the importance of building houses quickly, is a quite different experience from playing it with adults sophisticated in the game who live in a commercial culture accustomed to contingent contracts. “You sell me New York Avenue for $2000 and I’ll throw in two exemptions from rent if you land on any of my properties. . . all right, four.“
Alexander Field argues persuasively that “The willingness of substantial numbers of humans to violate the unambiguous predictions of game theory in both cooperating and in engaging in third party punishment underlies our ability to initiate and sustain social order.”[3] As noted from far outside the mathematical theory of games, by the philosopher John Searle and the literary critic Stanley Fish, any game depends on interpretive communities, all the way down.[4] And interpretive communities are just that—communities, commonalities, fellow-feeling, solidarity. That is, they are spheres of love.
One can object that disinterested solidarity is not “love.” But the stretch is not so great, and has a purpose. I mean by “solidarity,” besides the intense engagement of true love, the mere trust, good humor, neighborliness, respectfulness, cooperativeness, decent intentions of our daily lives.
These can be self-interested in part, just as Aristotle said. When a neighbor becomes bad company we walk away. When a beloved does, we try harder. It is as though love—or any virtue—is a gravitational force weakening with distance from the core. Admittedly, people can be courteous to neighbors and good humored with fellow game-players merely because they recognize they will be punished if they are not. That’s only Prudence.
The question here is whether the gravitational force of Prudence is enough to account for all of solidarity, or whether solidarity has an influence from the sphere of Love, or Justice, or Faith. Plainly, as a scientific matter, it does. The solidarity expressed in cheerfully greeting a neighbor is a kind of love. The fleeting solidarity of the deal agreed is a kind of justice. The solidarity of sports fans is a kind of faith.
Off the blackboard and the game board it is becoming increasingly clear that real economies depend on real virtues. If one performs economic experiments on students and other hired victims the love, justice, temperance, faith, hope, and courage come tumbling out even from the laboratories. A pioneer in the field, Vernon Smith, puts it this way:
laboratory experiments also support reciprocity in two person extensive form games under very unfavorable conditions in which we give the self-interest its best shot: complete anonymity. Hence these norms are so strong that half the subjects cooperate without ever knowing the identity of their matched counterpart. Moreover, we can show that this depends on the second mover seeing the payoffs foregone by the first, and therefore knowing what he/she has done for me lately.[5]
Experimental economists are, with economic historians, among the minority of reliably scientific economists—the others tend on their bad days to wander off into meaningless speculation and arbitrary tests of “significance,” and they have a lot of bad days. The economic experimentalists would do well to test explicitly for virtues other than Prudence. Substantively speaking they would then merge with social psychologists, as economic historians have merged with historians.
An economic actor must have a social stage, since no contract can be explicit about every aspect of a complex transaction, or even of a simple transaction. In selling a newspaper to me the newsagent trusts that I won’t at the last minute snatch back the money and run out of the store with the paper he has just handed me, or take out a loaded Magnum 45 when he opens the cash register. It’s not exactly because I love the newsagent, though a weak form of love develops if I buy from him every day. But it shows a form of justice, surely, and a faithful identity as a law-abiding citizen who does not rely on stealing, who pulls her weight.
A classic paper in 1963 by the legal sociologist Stewart Macaulay studied firms that did business in Wisconsin. He confirmed what everyone in business knows, that business normally depends on a state of trust, not on explicit contracts to be enforced in courts. One large manufacturer of cardboard boxes looked into how many of its orders had no agreement on exact terms and conditions that would satisfy a lawyer looking for a “contract.” The manufacturer found that in the mid 1950s the percentage ranged from 60 to 75 percent of the orders, in an industry in which an order canceled means you end up holding a lot of useless boxes shaped and printed to the particular customer’s specifications.[6]
It drove the company lawyers crazy. One said, “Often businessmen do not feel they have `a contract’—rather they have `an order.’ They speak of `canceling the order’ rather than `breaching the contract’.”[7] Another lawyer declared that he was “sick of being told, `We can trust old Max,’ when the problem is not one of honesty but one of reaching an agreement that both sides understand.”[8] The non-lawyer businessmen didn’t see it that way. “You get the other man on the telephone and deal with the problem. You don’t read legalistic contract clauses at each other if you ever want to do business again. One doesn’t run to lawyers if he wants to stay in business because one must behave decently.”[9] One uses the courts only when someone defects. But few defect. There’s a purely prudent reason, to be sure—that it’s bad for business. But there’s a just, faithful, loving (”good old Max”) reason, too.
People want to be virtuous in business as elsewhere in their lives. Macaulay concluded that “Two norms are widely accepted. (1) Commitments are to be honored in almost all situations; one does not welsh on a deal. (2) One ought to produce a good product and stand behind it.”[10]
In 1912 before a House committee on the money trust J. P. Morgan was being questioned by a hostile Samuel Untermyer:
Untermyer: Is not commercial credit based primarily upon money or property?
Morgan: No sir; the first thing is character.
Untermyer: Before money or property?
Morgan: Before money or property or anything else. Money cannot buy it. . . because a man I do not trust could not get money from me on all the bonds in Christendom.
Of course. If you want to be frightfully sophisticated about people’s real motives and claim that these are not the rules of bourgeois life you will need to explain why you get indignant when they are violated, and why in your daily transactions you assume they will be obeyed.
That does not mean you need to abandon tough-minded economic reasoning. Here’s some tough-minded economic reasoning: the bigger the game the easier it is to cheat, a new sucker coming along every minute. But the incentive to cheat is balanced by love, by shame, by the Man Within. That’s sociology. Both Prudence and Solidarity rule. Here’s some related economic reasoning: solidarity is especially, though not exclusively, powerful in small groups, Prudence in large. But such reasoning is also classical sociology, the point of Ferdinand Tönnies’ book of 1887, Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft, natural community and unnatural society, loving family and associational firm. And it is also, for that matter, classical political philosophy, the point of Aristotle’s Politics..
Moving in 1980 from Chicago to Iowa City I was startled by the reduction in the cost of doing business, and noticed the cost going up again when I moved back to Chicago in 1999. Even in near-suburban Oak Park, where I lived for a few months before I moved downtown, a store selling Irish merchandise would not take back the same afternoon a cloak bought, but not worn, which I had decided after a couple of hours I didn’t want at the price. No way, the owner said. Tough luck, dearie. The virtue I thought we shared had disappeared once money changed hands. We had a contract, not an order. In Chicago in 2003 trying to sell a car, before finding CarMax and plain dealing in the suburbs, I spent half a day swimming through commercial slime on Western Avenue. “Your car, ma’am? That Toyota Avalon outside? I’ll give you $2500.”
I love commerce and I love Chicago. I love even my newly established identity as A Tough Urban Girl Who Can Take It As Well As Dish It Out. But every transaction in Iowa City or Schaumburg was easier. Checks passed, grocery clerks smiled, auto mechanics did what they said they were going to do, clothing stores and Toyota dealers wouldn’t think of treating you in any fashion but the Golden Rule. When I visited for a number of weeks at Denison University in little Granville, Ohio, after three years of Chicago re-hardening, with episodes in tough old Amsterdam as well, there it was again, like taking off tight shoes. I knew the local jeweler in Granville would do a good job of resizing my rings. He did. In tough old Rotterdam in 1996 the jewelers needed close supervision, and often took advantage—well, not Marianne’s and Trees’ jeweler on Mauritsweg, whom we had grown to trust.
You can’t run human groups on Prudence only, not well. And “well” means not merely prudently and profitably—though the Iowa-City/ Schaumburg/ Granville monetary gain is not trivial, Gemeinschaft in aid of Gesellschaft, J. P. Morgan’s test of character in aid of smart loaning. But humans want more. Depending on Prudence Only makes it harder to achieve a transcendent, sacred goal such as communal love or social justice or scientific progress. And such a transcendent goal, I repeat, is necessary to make the prudence have a point.
On the other hand, when I moved back to Chicago from Iowa City and later from Granville I noted also a rise in the richness of the gemeinschaftlich attachments I could form in the big city: thirty Episcopal churches within easy driving distance instead of four or five; seventy ethnic groups in bulk instead of two; twenty Irish pubs instead of one. Iowa City is a little jewel, and so is Granville on an even smaller scale. But they are little, SMAs of perhaps 100,000 all told in Iowa, 20,000 in Ohio, as against millions within a similar travel time in Chicago.
Tönnies, with many sociologists since, predicted that the big places such as Chicago would be soulless. He and the others have claimed that over time the soulless Gesellschaft replaces cozy Gemeinschaft. What is wrong in Tönnies is just what is wrong with most German social thought in the 19th century, a belief in historicism before the facts had been ascertained by professional historians—though professional history, too, was a 19th-century German planting, which bore its fruit in the 20th century outside of Germany. True, a big city has of course more businesslike Gesellschaft—admittedly or splendidly depending on how you feel about “unnatural” human projects. But it has more Gemeinschaft, too, more loving human connection, and that in enormous bulk. In consequence it has more of that third thing, the invisible-hand specialization that make for a rich life. A big city has more of everything. That’s why there are so many people there.
The historian Wilfred McClay praises another historian, Thomas Bender, for arguing that “the most influential of all sociological dualisms—Gemenschaft and Gesellschaft—[is] to be understood, not as designating strictly discrete and sequential phases in the evolution of human social relations, but as signifiying two kinds of relations that, particularly in a modern society, coexist and contend with each other.” McClay observes that “one benefit of this approach is that it helps us account for the ways that premodern, traditional, and gemeinschaftlich ways and values coexist with, and even interpenetrate, the characteristic ways of the modern world, contrary to a more monolithic understanding of modernization.”[11]
Brian Uzzi in an elegant 1999 paper in the American Sociological Review showed that borrowing firms did best—saving 3 percentage points on their borrowings, which is very large on loans costing 6 or 10 percent—when they mixed strong-tie relations with bankers (”X has been our bank for fifty years”) and arm’s-length ties. The firms mixed love/faith with prudence.[12]
You can do this in a big city. Focusing on the alienating, disintegrative results of big scale is a problem with the focus, not with the scale. And anyway a French peasant in the 12th century was as “alienated” from the goings-on of the upper levels of European Christendom as much as is a modern bourgeois from the goings-on of the upper levels of global capitalism. Yet both the peasant and the bourgeois live in families, have friends, have projects. All human communities work with prudence and solidarity. Both.
* * * *
A balanced set of virtues within Prudent, economical, capitalist, market-oriented behavior is not merely a supplement, a nice thing if you happen to have a taste for it. It’s virtuous, and necessary for a good life. It’s necessary for transcendence, which gives life its worldly and its otherworldly value. Business, Michael Novak argues, is a “morally serious enterprise.”[13] By contrast, the Prudence-Only behavior celebrated in recent economic fable is bad. Bad for prudent business—consult on this point Arthur Andersen. Bad for a just and faithful life. Bad for children and other beloveds. Most important, bad for the soul. We call it greed.
The ethical wholeness matters. When the unionized teachers of Philadelphia quarreled with the superintendent in the 1990s about reward-by-result their anger came from the insult as much as from a prudent regard for their tenure. Are we—we professionals—to be trained with incentives like seals? Their indignation cost the school system millions of dollars and its chance to teach the children to read.
Professionals are educated to consider something other than pocket-book prudence. It’s the very meaning of the word “profession,” as distinct from “racket.” I recently was introduced to an architect and told him I was an economist. He replied, only half joking, “I hate economics,” and explained amiably that what he meant is that all day long he has to ask if Prudence is worth this or that sacrifice of Quality. A friend who is a professional lighting designer says that the pressure of Prudence Only is something he has to resist all day. He could get a little more profit by doing a little worse job, using the wrong wattage here or there, cutting this or that corner. But he won’t. He’s a lighting designer, not a crook.
It’s a matter of identity, and makes society possible. We tell jokes about doctors performing surgery on our pocketbooks and about lawyers closing the curtains and asking us how we want it to come out. But most people would reject a career of doctoring or lawyering if they actually credited the jokes, since most people do not want to be thieves or con men. Law and health would collapse if the only careers were such dishonest versions. Politics threatens to, always. Cynicism about careers on the Cook County Board or in the Italian Parliament means that the government is left to the crooks, and republican virtue is put under siege.
Blair Kamin, an architecture critic for the Chicago Tribune, rails often against a local architect named Loewenberg for his cookie-cutter skyscrapers. The buildings are so notorious that they have spawned a noun to describe how they “blight” a neighborhood, “Loewenbergization.” The other Chicago architects are scandalized that Loewenberg will put up a high-rise a mere twenty blocks from another that reuse the very same blueprints. Goodness. In Chicago such economizing at the expense of Art matters because the place fancies itself the architectural capital of the known universe. According to Kamin the offending Loewenberg buildings exhibit a “sterile symmetry and unarticulated surfaces that recall the old housing blocks of East Berlin,” “dismal themes,” “overgrown and under-detailed,” “comically bad.”[14]
You can see that Mr. Kamin does not like Mr. Loewenberg’s work. To which Loewenberg calmly replies, “We design to a budget.” Kamin in turn fumes, “That attitude is as cynical as it is lamentable, an abrogation of the architect’s responsibility to design for the broader public.” Kamin is trying to shame Loewenberg, and any architect who might think to imitate Loewenberg, into being professional beyond Prudence Only. Loewenberg and his clients aren’t buying. Kamin and I think they should.
The conflict pervades our culture. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance is still assigned in the business schools as a deliberation about quality and rhetoric. But most of what the students are taught there is a variation on Prudence Only.
The English aristocracy defended itself in a democratic age as a service class, going to Eton the better to serve King and country. Dedicated to loving England, and incidentally getting employment in politics and the Empire, they viewed themselves as upholding an alternative to a bourgeois ethic imagined as Prudence Only. Remember John Gielgud as Master of Trinity College in Chariots of Fire scolding the Ben Cross character for transgressing the code of the amateur, the lover. Now the children of the aristocracy go to Eton and thence to careers as chartered accountants in a global economy—nothing so quaint as England, my England. Prudence Only reigns, it is said. Love is devalued, at least in capitalist theory.
But love in the extended sense is necessary for a company, or England, or any human project. Love does make the world go ‘round. Robert Frank has argued at length that the trustworthiness necessary for business “is motivated not by rational calculation,” which would reduce all virtues to Prudence, “but by emotions—by moral sentiments, to use Adam Smith’s term.”[15] True. But there is a deeper argument available. Harry Frankfurt points out that “love makes it possible . . . for us to engage wholeheartedly in activity that is meaningful.”[16] Humans want meaning. They just do, and they do not make an exception for capitalism.
C. S. Lewis composed a paean to male friendship—he wisely realized he had a less-than-reliable understanding of women’s friendships—in which the friends sit side by side looking at a beloved object, trading remarks about it. Aristotle also thought this third thing to be looked at together was essential for friendship. So it is with the project at the office this week, or the Superbowl on TV, or Shane and Starrett in the movie bonding in work, “their minds . . . on that old stump.”[17] “Friendship must be about something,” writes Lewis, “even if it were only an enthusiasm for dominos or white mice. . . . Friends. . . are all travelers on the same quest.”[18] Such male friendship is how a company of men works wholeheartedly to make deals or automobiles.
A woman would say that friendship is about the friend or, still better, about the relationship. She or it, not the Superbowl, is the object. The female version of friendship is how a company of women works wholeheartedly. Think of women cleaning up after a meal, the point being to help Jane. I have a friend who founded a small publishing company, and at first she tried an exclusively motherly style of leadership. She found she had to bring in some of the father. Her company works on loving relationships, prudently judged, balanced in style between male and female. A company or a market runs partly on Love.
Of course a company and a market work also on Prudence. But the modern academic theory of market capitalism, that Samuelsonian economics I studied so passionately in the 1960s and 1970s, goes astray in imagining that the only character we need in understanding capitalism is Mr. Maximum Utility, the monster of Prudence who has no place in his character for Love—or any passion beyond Prudence Only. Recall Steven Pinker’s Max-U—or Max -G[enes]—analysis of love. Max U does not work scientifically, the only terms the Samuelsonian economists profess to care about, for which see the economists Frank and Frey and Akerlof.[19] And in terms that the rest of us can appreciate, he is a menace. Iris Murdoch describes Max U as “the agent, thin as a needle, [who] appears in the quick flash of the choosing will.”[20]
Such a fellow would view friendship, philia, as an exchange, and would never achieve what Aristotle saw as the highest stage of friendship, love for the friend’s own sake.[21] Another’s “own sake” is meaningless in a Max-U view of the social world. Things in such a world are valued for their capacity to yield utility, with the result, as Michael Stocker has noted, that people disappear.[22] The so-called “man” Max U does not value even himself as a person, and leaps at the chance to hitch himself up to an Experience Machine. Impulsive, manipulative, shallow. How many sociopaths can there be? Max U is a chimera conjured by the clerisy, left and right. They portray a world impossible for most actual human beings.
This is the point of a famous paper by Amartya Sen in 1977, just as Sen was working his way out of a Max-U intellectual world, “Rational Fools: A Critique of the Behavioral Foundations of Economic Theory.” The founder of modern Max-U reasoning, Francis Y. Edgeworth, had acknowledged in 1881 that such a fellow as Max U depended on “unsympathetic isolation abstractly assumed in Economics.”[23] But as you can see, economists think that “sympathy”—literally in Greek (which Edgeworth knew well) “fellow feeling”—is all there is to inter-human relations. I am sad because you are sad. “Behavior based on sympathy,” Sen writes, nice though it is, “is in an important sense egoistic, for one is pleased at others’ pleasure and pained at others’ pain, and the pursuit of one’s own utility may thus be helped by sympathetic action.”[24] In virtue-ethical terms, sympathy is a matter of Prudence and lower-level (that is, not transcendent) Love. Or maybe it is a matter of mere Prudence, since this “Love” is itself derivative, a sympathy because it gives prudent pleasure. Recall your mother getting derivative utility from your graduation from college.
Sen argued that important realms of our lives are governed instead by “commitment.” Unlike sympathy, a commitment reduces your utility, at any rate your first-order utility in the manner of ice-cream eaten or son’s-college-degree-attained. In Kantian terms commitment is a duty. In virtue-ethical terms, commitment is a matter of Justice, Faith, and Transcendent Love. Recall Adam Smith on Justice for the Chinese. Not Prudent. Commitment involves “counterpreferential choice, destroying the crucial assumption [in Max-U, Samuelsonian economics] that a chosen alternative must be better than . . . the others for the person choosing it.”[25] Acknowledgement of the virtues beyond prudence and passion, in short, “drives a wedge between personal choice and personal welfare.” “Much of traditional economic theory relies on the identity of the two.”[26] In doing so, economics assumes a world without ethical commitment: “The purely economic man is indeed close to being a social moron.”[27] Come to think of it, no “close” about it.
To speak instrumentally against instrumentalism, actual human businesses would collapse into dissembling and advantage-taking à la Dilbert if the businesses did not practice friendship and other forms of non-Prudence-Only virtue. Look round at your own workplace. How does your office actually operate? Really, now. As a hell? With monsters of prudence running around taking care of Numero Uno? No, not really. Admittedly in some Departments of Economics you will meet one or two such people, who declare candidly that “our model in economics proves” they should act like jerks. But outside economics everyone knows that a corporate office runs on love.
Everyone also knows that the love can be trumped. In this and other contexts you will see people who think that greed is good or that the story of My Brilliant Career trumps ethical considerations or that maximizing stockholder value settles every ethical question in business. In his commencement address at Berkeley in May of 1986, the year before he was jailed, Ivan Boesky told the kids that “Greed is all right, by the way. I want you to know that. I think greed is healthy. You can be greedy and still feel good about yourself.”[28] The kids cheered. Now most of us laugh sardonically.
We find the cartoon strip Dilbert funny, if we do, because the avaricious behavior of its central characters is over the top, crazy-funny, unacceptably and indeed imprudently Prudent. True, when an office is led badly it becomes a bit Dilbertian. I’ve been in such organizations, and so have you. But usually it is not actual Prudence, the good of the company, that is served by on-the-job jerk-ness. As Dilbert itself shows, ego tripping and irrational obsession runs a bad business into the ground, and some of the good ones, too. Likewise in Doonesbury what is funny about Duke, the recurrent Hunter-Thompson figure, is his single-minded if drug-addled pursuit of self-interest, set off against the selflessness of his girl-friend Miss Honey.
The point is that actual workplaces are not often really like Dilbert’s or Duke’s. Robert Solomon puts it this way: “Is the community we work for a white-collar version of hell, or is it a community where (despite the early hour) we are glad to see our colleagues and get on with the work of the day?”[29] More so as capitalism enriches its workers, and as its worker-consumers require to be treated like free citizens, the workplace becomes a home place. More’s the pity, some have said, for it tempts people away to a comfortable place, The Job, The Office, to the loss of the home.
I say again: look around at your own workplace. In the capitalist West now the chances are that it is not a satanic mill in which you labor in noise and dust and isolation for twelve hours a day. It’s not the carding room of a Yorkshire woolen mill in 1830. A recent survey finds that even in I’m-All-Right-Jack Britain half of the workers “look forward to going to work.” In the Tough-Guy United States two-thirds do, and elsewhere in the developed world still higher percentages.[30] Such employees go to work expecting to be treated like human beings, expecting to be even a little loved. An employee of modern capitalism is ethically offended when her boss complains about the harmless decorations festooned on her cubicle. Who does she think she is. Doesn’t she love me? A wholly prudential worker, the economist’s monster of prudence, or a pre-industrial slave accustomed to abuse, would be incapable of such indignation and sorrow.
The writer Don Snyder tried construction work to survive one winter in Maine:
There were six of us working on the crew, but the house was so large that we seldom saw one another. . . . Once I walked right by a man [without greeting him] in my haste to get back to a second-story deck where I had been tearing down staging. [The contractor] saw this, and he climbed down from the third story to set me straight. “You can’t just walk by people,” he said. “It’s going to be a long winter.”[31]
Consultants on workplace politeness emphasize that saying hello to people is basic. Not saying hello is of course imprudent—you alienate your co-workers by failing in this elementary acknowledgement of solidarity. But why are people so offended? On the vending-machine characterization of others that the Max-U model assumes, no offense would be taken. But people do take offense. Even in a workplace of tough-guy American men the avaricious, competitive, Dilbertian, “businesslike” Prudence can’t be all there is.
In other words, it’s not the case that market capitalism requires or generates loveless people. More like the contrary. Markets and even the much-maligned corporations encourage friendships wider and deeper than the atomism of a full-blown socialist régime or the claustrophobic, murderous atmosphere of a “traditional” village. Modern capitalist life is love-saturated. Olden life was not loving, communitarian life was not, and actually existing socialist life decidedly was not. No one dependent on a distant god such as the Gosplan or Tradition can feel safe. Paradoxically, a Market linked so obviously to our individual projects makes us safer and more loving.
As the libertarian Catholic economist, Jennifer Roback Morse, puts it, a capitalist business partnership is like a marriage, not like a temporary contract:
The contract between the partners does not govern every detail of the relationship’s functioning. The partners do not attempt to specify every duty of each party during the course of their relationship: only the most basic duties are so specified. The contractual relationship between partners is not the end of the relationship or the method for how the parties relate to one another. The parties expect to do a great many things of mutual benefit that cannot be included in the set of legally enforceable promises.[32]
She argues that contract-like marriages, or contract-like business partnerships, do not work very well. A lack of committed love “undermines the self-giving required at the heart of the committed marriage: we practice holding back on our partners; we practice calculating.”
[1] Ostrom, Gardner, and Walker, Rules, Games, 1994, p. 322,
[2] A guide to the devastation is Heap and Varoufakis, Game Theory, 2004, for example on defection in finite games (for instance, Nash backward induction), p. 122 and the pages leading up to it, p. 203 (quoting Roger Myerson); on the Folk Theorem, pp. 202, 206, 208; and p. 247: “a new type of Folk Theorem. . . . ends all hope that evolutionary [game] theory will be indeterminacy’s death knell.” The Folk Theorem is a mathematical hell.
[3] Field, “Review of North,” 2005.
[4] Searle, Speech Acts, 1969 and Fish, Is There a Text? 1980.
[5] V. Smith, Letter to Frans B.M. de Waal, April 9, 2005.
[6] Macaulay, “Non-Contractual Relations,” 1963, p. 196.
[7] Macaulay, “Non-Contractual Relations,” 1963, p. 197.
[8] Macaulay, “Non-Contractual Relations,” 1963, p. 195.
[9] Macaulay, “Non-Contractual Relations,” 1963, p. 198.
[10] Macaulay, “Non-Contractual Relations,” 1963, p. 199.
[11] McClay, “The Strange Career of The Lonely Crowd,” 1993, p. 432. The Bender book he is admiring is Community and Social Change in America (1978).
[12] Uzzi, “Embeddedness,” 1999.
[13] Novak, Business as a Calling, 1996, pp. 8, 10, and Chp. 3.
[14] Kamin, 2003, p. 6.
[15] Frank, “Motives,” 2005, p. 370.
[16] Frankfurt, Reasons of Love, 2004, p. 90
[17] Schaefer, Shane, 1949, p. 97.
[18] Lewis, Four Loves, 1960, p. 98f. I am told that Antoine de Saint-Exupéry somewhere says much the same.
[19] Frey, Not Just For the Money, 1997; Frey and Stutzer, Happiness & Economics, 2002.
[20] Murdoch, “’God’ and ‘Good’,” 1969, p. 53.
[21] Aristotle, Nic. Ethics, c. 330 BC, VIII, iii, 6 (1156b).
[22] Stocker, “Schizophrenia,” 1976, p. 72.
[23] Quoted in Sen, “Rational Fools,” 1977, p. 326.
[24] Sen, “Rational Fools,” 1977, p. 326.
[25] Sen, “Rational Fools,” 1977, p. 328.
[26] Sen, “Rational Fools,” 1977, p. 329.
[27] Sen, “Rational Fools,” 1977, p. 336.
[28] Quoted in Ridley, Origins of Virtue, 1996, p. 263, p. 260f.
[29] Solomon, Ethics and Excellence, 1992, p. 104.
[30] Freeman, “Not Your Father’s (or Mum’s) Union,” 2003.
[31] Snyder, “Winter Work,” 1995 (1997), p. 74
[32] Her summary of Roback-Morse 2001, at http://www. hooverdigest. org/013/ morse. html.