Judicious appraisal, however, of those who’ve scaled the capitalistic heights is rare enough to deserve high billing on the literary marquee. They must content themselves with the money - and perhaps the fawning authorized biography that celebrity of all sorts can command. Well, droll as it may seem, let us now praise famous capitalists.
Sociologist Peter Berger put it neatly when he wrote that capitalism is "particularly deprived of mythic potency." That status will change, he writes, only "on the day when poets sing the praises of the Dow Jones and when large numbers of people are ready to risk their lives in defense of the Fortune 500." Berger does not assign high probability to either. It is an ambivalence that rises nearly to the level of a national characteristic. In this country - the right auricle of democratic capitalism - there has long been a tension between admiration for material achievement and resentment of it as an insult to our fiercely egalitarian ethos.
It does not present itself as cozily as can socialism - or, now, the "Third Way" of splitting the ideological and economic differences that the center-left is adopting since the command economies collapsed. $30.00Ĭapitalism has never suffered from a glowing reputation, of course. Woody West is associate editor of the Washington Times.
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