Noneconomic Man in Modern Europe

photo: Tal Bright

Thomas Barnett bemoans the grotesque state of economics education in Europe, which often ranges from the anti-capitalist to the simply fatuous. But consider this item he cites:

Great French HS textbook: “Globalization implies subjugation of the world to the market, which constitutes a true cultural danger.”
(Thomas P.M. Barnett)

Somewhat bemused by this, Barnett asks “why is Europe so antagonistic on capitalism?” Perhaps the better question is why is Europe so antagonistic toward economics, because the item above isn’t really criticism of an economic philosophy. By elevating the primacy of culture over the market, we’re looking at the rejection of the economic premise, which is a concern for the material welfare of mankind. This is what Peter Drucker used to call the dream of “noneconomic man” and in his early work The End of Economic Man, he supplied some explanations for this impulse which might be of enduring relevance to Barnett’s question.

For Drucker, writing in the world of 1939, the crisis of economic, national, and social identity that characterized the Western European prelude to the Second World War, was a rebellion not against capitalism or communism, but against economics. A desire rising out of what he called the “despair of the masses” over the collapse of the old European social and spiritual order. A rebellion that would eventually find its perfect expression in fascism.

This revolt against economics was induced by two cataclysms: the First World War’s destruction of the European intellectual’s belief in the international solidarity of socioeconomic classes, and the dramatic social inequity induced by the world boom and subsequent depression that followed the war. What these two catastrophes did was destroy the enduring 19th century promise of both left and right that economics could unify the mutually conflicting ideals of freedom and equality through material progress. In the Drucker view, the crisis of capitalism and the crisis of socialism in the years following 1918, are actually the same thing. It was a crisis not of socialist or capitalist men, but of economic man.

What European fascism promised ultimately to satisfy was the creation of a totally noneconomic society. A society predicated upon a spirit of soil, a culture of flesh, a politics of ecstasy. Most notably the Nazis devised a system of noneconomic incentives in a pursuit of the abolition of a monetary expression of human labor. Using what Drucker called the “noneconomic paraphernalia of economic privilege,” culture and sociality sought to replace money, as Kraft durch Freude became the largest tourism operator in the world and theater tickets became rewards for work achievement. To varying degrees the democratic regimes that inherited the ruins of Central Europe have similarly prized this thinking, if not always practiced it (the Swedes in the most extreme case).

This is of course a vision of immaterial society that could be systematically driven into the ground economically and never apprehend its own ruin, because the very intellectual instruments of economic awareness had been invalidated. The failure of fascism in war may have destroyed a solution, but only amplified the spiritual bareness that had stimulated it to begin with. It could be argued that the two events that broke “economic man” in Europe and then the event that destroyed the Central European noneconomic alternative, have left the noneconomic impulse in European dreams alive, while Europe remains as yet spiritually unrepaired.