> If I were to engage in such amateur mass psychologizing I would
> think Thoreau's quiet desperation a more useful start, but I don't
> have
> much evidence for that either. I think we would do best to knock
> off on
> the amateur psychology.
Is all "mass psychologizing" to be avoided as necessarily amateur? What about Marx's for instance?
Given that insightful mass psychologizing is possible, on what sort of evidence must it be based?
Marx and Engels treat literature, e.g. Shakespeare, Goethe and Balzac, as a source of such insight.
Here he Marx making claims about different kinds of class psychology and supporting them by drawing on what he claims is Balzac's "profound grasp of reality."
"In the face of the habitual mode of life of the old feudal nobility, which, as Hegel rightly says, 'consists in consuming what is in hand,' and more especially displays itself in the luxury of personal retainers, it was extremely important for bourgeois economy to promulgate the doctrine that accumulation of capital is the first duty of every citizen, and to preach without ceasing, that a man cannot accumulate, if he eats up all his revenue, instead of spending a good part of it in the acquisition of additional productive labourers, who bring in more than they cost. On the other hand the economists had to contend against the popular prejudice, that confuses capitalist production with hoarding, [12] and fancies that accumulated wealth is either wealth that is rescued from being destroyed in its existing form, i.e., from being consumed, or wealth that is withdrawn from circulation. Exclusion of money from circulation would also exclude absolutely its self-expansion as capital, while accumulation of a hoard in the shape of commodities would be sheer tomfoolery. [13]"
Footnote [13] cites Balzac in support of the idea of "the accumulation of a hoard in the shape of commodities" as "sheer tomfoolery." <http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch24.htm#13a>
"Thus for instance, Balzac, who so thoroughly studied every shade of avarice, represents the old usurer Gobseck as in his second childhood when he begins to heap up a hoard of commodities."
The irrational accumulation and hoarding of gold is a feature, Marx claims, of the form of the capitalist "passions" dominant in capitalism's "childhood," a form to which there is regression is what Marx calls a "monetary crisis."
In vol. 3 of Capital he draws on Balzac to support the claim that "in a social order dominated by capitalist production even the non- capitalist producer is gripped by capitalist conceptions."
"In a social order dominated by capitalist production even the non- capitalist producer is gripped by capitalist conceptions. Balzac, who is generally remarkable for his profound grasp of reality, aptly describes in his last novel, Les Paysans, how a petty peasant performs many small tasks gratuitously for his usurer, whose goodwill he is eager to retain, and how he fancies that he does not give the latter something for nothing because his own labour does not cost him any cash outlay. As for the usurer, he thus fells two dogs with one stone. He saves the cash outlay for wages and enmeshes the peasant, who is gradually ruined by depriving his own field of labour, deeper and deeper in the spider-web of usury.?" http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1894-c3/ch01.htm#r7
Here is Engels on Balzac:
"Let me refer to an example. Balzac whom I consider a far greater master of realism than all the Zolas passés, présents et a venir [past, present and future], in “La Comédie humaine” gives us a most wonderfully realistic history of French ‘Society’, especially of le monde parisien [the Parisian social world], describing, chronicle- fashion, almost year by year from 1816 to 1848 the progressive inroads of the rising bourgeoisie upon the society of nobles, that reconstituted itself after 1815 and that set up again, as far as it could, the standard of la viellie politesse française [French refinement]. He describes how the last remnants of this, to him, model society gradually succumbed before the intrusion of the vulgar monied upstart, or were corrupted by him; how the grand dame whose conjugal infidelities were but a mode of asserting herself in perfect accordance with the way she had been disposed of in marriage, gave way to the bourgeoisie, who horned her husband for cash or cashmere; and around this central picture he groups a complete history of French Society from which, even in economic details (for instance the rearrangement of real and personal property after the Revolution) I have learned more than from all the professed historians, economists, and statisticians of the period together. Well, Balzac was politically a Legitimist; his great work is a constant elegy on the inevitable decay of good society, his sympathies are all with the class doomed to extinction. But for all that his satire is never keener, his irony never bitterer, than when he sets in motion the very men and women with whom he sympathizes most deeply - the nobles. And the only men of whom he always speaks with undisguised admiration, are his bitterest political antagonists, the republican heroes of the Cloître Saint-Méry, the men, who at that time (1830-6) were indeed the representatives of the popular masses. That Balzac thus was compelled to go against his own class sympathies and political prejudices, that he saw the necessity of the downfall of his favourite nobles, and described them as people deserving no better fate; and that he saw the real men of the future where, for the time being, they alone were to be found - that I consider one of the greatest triumphs of Realism, and one of the grandest features in old Balzac." <http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1888/letters/88_04_15.htm>
Is this use of class psychology to explain economic behaviour itself mistaken?
If it isn't, are Marx and Engels mistaken in making use of the mentality and methods underpinning Shakespeare's and Balzac's understanding of psychology as opposed to the mentality and methods dominant in modern American economics and psychology departments, i.e. the mentality and methods that, in the case of economics, implicitly treat the minds of Hayek and John Nash as much more capable of attaining insight into motivation than those of Shakespeare and Balzac?
Ted