Intellectuals and Resentment Toward Capitalism

Excerpt

This article revisits a central “thought-style”, to use Karl Mannheim’s term, among intellectuals: resentment toward capitalism. A generalized hostility to capitalism has taken many forms in industrial modernity. Marx was the ideal-typical resentful intellectual, whose visceral hatred of capitalism was a constant presence in his supposedly scientific historical materialism. The rise of socialism in 18th and 19th century Europe and global communist totalitarianism in the 20th century were fundamentally driven by intellectuals who were marginal to capitalism and who transformed their hatred of it into a class war against the bourgeoisie. In its most extreme forms, bitter and resentful intellectuals aimed to redress a diffused sense of social and economic injustice through murder and mayhem against capitalists; where real “enemies of the people” did not exist they were created in a simplistic cosmology in which the capitalist system and capitalist classes were seen as the most demonic forces of evil. …