Paper Summary:

The paper states that Daniel Bell's " The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism" was originally published to critique the dominant American assumption that capitalism promoted individualism. The paper comments that Bell instead believed that capitalism had come to promote standardization and had created corporate bureaucracies as powerful as church or state bureaucracies of the past. The paper continues by relating that Bell also believed that the counter cultural reaction to capitalism was also misguided, as capitalism had begun with the Protestant work ethic, and its spirit of individualistic austerity, puritanism, and freedom from Church institutional authority. The paper concludes that this sense of Protestant freedom and independence had slowly been eradicated, and this value was taken over by the Modernists, and then ineffectually by 'counterculture' as the anti-capitalist youth movement was still called when Bell wrote his work.

From the Paper:

"The cultural contradiction of capitalism is that capitalism began as a kind of radical, austere Protestantism, with a heavy emphasis on rejecting the collective Catholic dogma of the past. Protestantism developed a new attitude towards wealth. It stressed pursuing excellence and perfect standards with relentless individualism and drive. But this rigidity made the originally radical notion of capitalism eventually become conservative in terms its morality. This evolved to create the uniform, imposed standards of large corporations and state bureaucracies, including, ironically, the Soviet bureaucracy. In response to what came to be seen as bourgeois values, the cultural beliefs of Modernism began to react against capitalist values and celebrate the function of culture as a kind of misrule, not capitalist order. Capitalistic Protestantism came to deny its original individualistic ethos, and this value of individualism was taken over by artists and anti-capitalism."

Sample of Sources Used:

• Bell, Daniel. The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism. New York: Basic Books: 1997.

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