The spirit of the democratic capitalism

Abstract

Around the world, capitalism evokes hatred. This word is associated with selfishness, exploitation, inequality, imperialism, war. Even within the United States, a shrewd observer will not be able to fail to observe relatively low morale among business executives, workers, and publicists. Democratic capitalism seems to have lost its spirit. The invocation of loyalty to democratic capitalism because it generates prosperity seems a purely materialistic attitude. The Achilles heel of democratic capitalism is the fact that for two centuries it has appealed too little to the human spirit.
This deficiency is not the work of doom. It is not an absolutely inevitable failure but an intellectual omission. If the system in which we live is better than any theory about it, as Reinhold Niebuhr has suggested, the guardians of his spirit - poets, philosophers and priests - have not penetrated their secret springs. They have not deciphered or taught their spiritual wisdom. They haven't loved their own culture.
Of course, this deficiency reveals something wrong in the core of democratic capitalism. Daniel Bell recently tried to give a name to the flaw in The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism, a generation ago, Joseph Schumpeter predicted his course with mysterious precision.
The ironic flaw that such authors warn of in democratic capitalism is this: that their successes in the political order and in the economic order look at it in the cultural order. The more he succeeds, the more he fails. Let's look at some of the most common censorship.