Valuing Culture and Economy

We live in a highly economised culture, one that has accommodated to division of labour, class, commodification and instrumental rationality to a considerable degree. A long tradition of social theory has been concerned with precisely this. In different ways, thinkers such as Habermas, Polanyi, Weber, Marx, Smith, and as far back as Aristotle have argued that this economisation has detrimental effects on culture, including the moral fabric of societies. Such theory arguably presents too narrow a view of modernity, as the dominant focus on capitalism and the public sphere overlooks important other aspects of contemporary society. In the last thirty years forms of oppression and degradation relating to gender, race, sexuality and cultural imperialism, which were largely ignored by the older critical theory, have been exposed. At the same time, this more recent work either ignores or offers a more positive view of the targets of the older theory. Especially with the cultural turn, it provides a more favourable view of features of modernity such as commodification and the aestheticization of politics which the previous generation attacked to such an extent in some cases that it might be regarded as complicit in those tendencies. In particular, the treatment of culture as 'the stylization of life' in recent cultural studies is arguably complicit in the aestheticisation of moral-political issues or the de-moralization of culture.