Over the last number of decades, Max Weber's theory of modernity, one that revolves around the core concepts of rationalization and disenchantment, has come under increasing pressure. Historians of American business culture, such as Amanda Porterfield, Kevin Kruse, Darren Grem, and Bethany Moreton, have added their voices to this important debate. In many ways, Eugene McCarraher's eight-hundred-page tome follows this trend, yet it also expands the historical and philosophical scope of the revolt against the concept of disenchantment. The author takes the reader on a journey from the Pilgrim Fathers to the Oprah Winfrey Show in a search for evidence for his claim that American capitalism derives much of its disruptive and creative power from its continued ability to mystify and enchant money, markets, corporations, brands, entrepreneurs, and innovation. Some readers might now suspect that McCarraher merely replays a tune familiar from the Frankfurt School version of Marxism, which claimed that a marketing-and-media complex re-enchants core elements of capitalism's economic-ideological order to produce false consciousness. Yet, McCarraher moves very much beyond this somewhat hackneyed charge and argues that capitalism, and the modern world in general, was never dis-enchanted in the first place: like other systems that establish a coherently ordered cosmos, capitalism, too, is a “regime of enchantment” (p. 4).
The first chapters of the book begin with the relatively well-rehearsed story of how pious sectarian Protestantism became a hotbed of new moral attitudes toward trade, profit, and private property. The new gospel of work valorized the idea of living up to one's individual “calling,” and it exhorted adherents of the faith to engage in constant “improvement.” When the Pilgrim Fathers began to settle in the New World in late autumn 1620, these ideas made their way across the Atlantic. Later, Christian economists provided theological entry points for the idea of god's “Providence” into economic theorizing. The outcome of these two developments was that a missionary zeal underpinned the American capitalist project from the very beginning. It was in the image of Protestant eschatology that early American businessmen believed to be working toward a new covenant, a City on a Hill. Unsurprisingly, therefore, the early American business literature was interlaced with the vocabulary of spiritual improvement. The first monthly business periodical, Freeman Hunt's Merchants’ Magazine and Commercial Review (founded in 1839), for example, featured not only reports on industry and law but also edifying sermons on how a Christian merchant's counting-house or shop was in fact a sanctuary. The magazine's founder-editor often reprinted entire sermons, such as one that eulogized the good merchant as “the saint of the nineteenth century”: “Build him a shrine in Bank and Church, in the Market and the Exchange” (original quotation from 1847; p. 135).
The strength of McCarraher's book lies in showing how this language persisted down the ages and how American business culture has always been saturated with belief in new saints and spirit(s), both Christian and non-Christian. J. P. Morgan, for instance, not only was an Episcopalian vestryman but also toyed with astrological charts, occult séances, and other supernatural media. The book provides hundreds of examples of how the divine, the sacred, and the transcendent affected very specific business models and economic institutions. American captains of industry, for example, really took the notion of the company as a persona with its own “corporate soul” very seriously—almost literally in some cases. For King Camp Gillette, the corporation even had an eschatological element. One day, he dreamt, all the world would come together again into one great ekklesia, only this time the church would come in the form of a “People's Corporation” in which all men and women would be stockholders: “Heaven will be on earth” (original quotation from 1924; p. 253). Much of Gillette's utopian writings were in fact post-Christian restatements of the covenant theology that his own forefathers, Huguenots who had settled in the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1630, had brought to America. For Gillette and his generation, corporations and markets had enough “soul” of their own to bring about heaven on earth—in this life, not the next.
For McCarraher, Gillette's writings mark an important transition to the next development stage of American economic theology, which was to slowly unfold in the form of a libertarian and a conservative response to the New Deal and the onset of the Cold War, respectively. Covenant theology and providentialism remained the two core elements that underpinned the rise of new economic theologies in mid-twentieth-century American capitalism. Among them were the prosperity gospel, which was widely popularized by Pastor Norman Vincent Peale, whose Manhattan church services were also attended regularly by Donald Trump. Postwar prosperity gospel is an interesting case that allows the author to highlight the gradual shift from a community-oriented economic theology to one focused on purely individual success based on the power of “positive thinking.” McCarraher shows skillfully how even avowedly antireligious figures, such as Ayn Rand, need to be understood against the background of the capitalist enchantment of success and profit. Rand became an important driver in the valorization of rather simplified stereotypes of “the entrepreneur.” This new hero, McCarraher argues, helped dissolve the remaining specifically Christian elements of capitalist enchantment and replaced them with other elements that created a new faith. In Rand's published novels, but also in her diary and in letters to friends, she expressed dissatisfaction with the institutionalized weakness and conformity of Christian morality: “A new faith is needed,” she wrote. “We will give people a new faith,” a “belief in the system of free enterprise” (p. 602). McCarraher's book reminds us that a long trail of sacred concepts and religious attitudes connects the year 2020 to 1620; after Rand, American capitalism was left de-Christianized, but not de-sacralized—secularized, but not disenchanted.
McCarraher's work is a genuine achievement, especially (but not only) because of the wealth of historical material the author marshals to support his argument. What limits his inquiry is that the book's focus seems overly limited to U.S. capitalism. First, the term “capitalism” is never fully defined; nor are we given a detailed explanation of what is—and what isn't—religion. This is an important issue, as the reader is often left wondering whether everything that is not related to rational calculation is therefore automatically within the purview of the enchanted. In the book, corporate behemoths like General Motors and more craft-based workshops of industrial artists stand side by side to represent this rather mysterious, yet ever-present, entity: capitalism. When the author speaks of such things as “capitalism” and “modernity,” he clearly means contemporary American business culture. There are a number of very good reasons to privilege the American historical experience, but in order to make wider claim about “the religion of modernity,” as the book's subtitle suggests, it would have been interesting to learn at least a little bit about the different pathways that led to the creation of economic theologies outside the U.S. context. In as much as a variety of capitalisms exist in the world today, one would expect a similar variety of economic faith systems.
