I wrote:
> >
> >I think it has less to do with capitalism in general and more to do
> >with the nature of the US society - government policies, land use,
> >consumerism, media, value systems, etc. The EU style capitalism does
> >not seem to suffer from the same maladies, at least not to
> the same degree.
>
Doug responded:
> 1) Give Europe time, and 2) Europe has, and has had, many
> non-capitalist and anti-capitalist tendencies and movements,
> unlike the USA, which has known little other than capitalism.
May be or may be not. Clearly Europe has a very different institutional and socio-demographic setup, which explains different outcomes, and at his point we have no way of knowing how this institutional "path dependence" will play in the process of globalization.
My point was to question the need for abstract concepts, like capitalism, when less abstract and more geography- and history-grounded ones can do an adequate job? What does the poorly defined and abstract notion like "capitalism" add to our understanding of the US system, in addition to power relations among specific interest groups, like developers, speculators, or industrialists, specific political arrangements like machine politics or non-parliamentary system, socio-demographic conditions like massive immigration, ethnic fragmentation or low population densities, geographical-historical conditions like isolation from major competitors at the time of development, land availability and use, etc.
I am a philosophical nominalist - naturally suspicious of abstract concepts. It is not that that they are always useless (that would be an easy way out of the problem) but that they are sometimes useful, but more often useless or even deceptive. So the trick is to tell the difference between the two. This, however, is a rather challenging intellectual task. Useless and deceiving abstractions often provide some emotional gratification to people who use them. They may lack empirical meaning in the scientific sense of the word, but they make people feel being in the know, secure, assured, or vindicated. The prime example is the notion of "god" - the concept is absolutely meaningless, no one can define what it really is other that by listing what it is not - yet people use it, worse yet, kill each other in the name of it, because it gives them considerable emotional gratification.
I suspect that "capitalism" is one of abstract concepts that is low on empirical meaning but high on emotional gratification. I think it is possible to define "capitalism" but the content of such concept would be of such a general nature that would make it rather useless in explaining social and historical particularity. I mean, profit making and private ownership are pretty universal features in human societies throughout recorded history, so one needs to be more specific than that to explain different historical outcomes (Mill's methods of inductive reasoning are worth mentioning in this context). But then, if we can explain these outcomes by those specific features, why do we need the abstract concept in the first place (Ockham's razor is worth mentioning here).
I think there is a certain tendency in the human thought, called monistic idealism and manifested inter alia in Platonism, to reduce all empirical complexity to one single, and abstract cause. I think that it is more of an aesthetic or emotive preference than a practical need. A singular theory of everything seems more sexy than multiple and disjoined theories of particulars. The left developed its own variants of that monistic idealism in the form of theoretical Marxism, and the world system theory.
I personally find monistic idealism laughable, but then again it is mainly for aesthetic reasons, like preference for art, music or food. It is not that I reject the empirical contents claimed by these theories (or at least most of it) - but rather the theoretical superstructure in which this empirical contents is placed. In plain English, I do not disagree that the US politics is run, for the most part, by business interests, and the latter are driven for the most part by profit expectations - what I object to is the conceptual apparatus, causal relations, and the level of abstraction. This is, btw, why also hate economics and religion - they are too evocative of one big ultimate all powerful thing, hanging like the sword of Damocles over our heads, that started it all (which, some may say, is sublimed phallic imagery). But then again, de gustibus non est disputandum.
Wojtek