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The market order as metaphysical loot: Theology and the contested legitimacy of
consumer capitalism
Stefan Schwarzkopf
Organization 2012 19: 281
DOI: 10.1177/1350508412437618

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Organization
19(3) 281­–297
The market order as metaphysical © The Author(s) 2012
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DOI: 10.1177/1350508412437618
legitimacy of consumer capitalism org.sagepub.com

Stefan Schwarzkopf
Copenhagen Business School, Denmark

Abstract
The mechanism through which the ideology of market capitalism emerged has mostly been
interpreted as part of an incremental, inevitable, and thus legitimate ousting of theological
concepts from a public sphere that became organized around the principles of the Enlightenment
as a secular project. This article stresses the illegitimate aspects of this process, that is the
expropriation and re-appropriation of theological devices and ideas for what was merely an
alternative political-theological project. This project, namely the establishment of the priesthood
of the individualized ‘common man’, allowed for the mobilization of individual choice as a principle
of social organization. The same process was responsible for underpinning the often unjust and
illiberal market order with the vision of the world as an ordered and benign kosmos that emerged
spontaneously from chaos.

Keywords
Carl Schmitt, Hans Blumenberg, history of ideas, markets, market ideology, theology

The market order as secularized religious order

In her magisterial survey of the rise of capitalism in the West, the economic historian Deirdre
McCloskey observed that by around 1800, people in North-Western Europe and North America
had come to accept the increasing dominance of the market economy over social relationships
with ‘more or less good grace’ (McCloskey, 2010: 23). Like McCloskey, most students of modern
capitalism have started their historical investigations with the insight that from the late 18th century
onwards, the emerging capitalist market order became slowly but steadily seen as a ‘normal’,
obvious and legitimate form of social organization. The legitimacy of this order, although

Corresponding author:
Stefan Schwarzkopf, Department of Management, Politics and Philosophy, Copenhagen Business School,
Porcelaenshaven 18A, DK-2000, Frederiksberg, Denmark
Email: ssc.lpf@cbs.dk

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282 Organization 19(3)

acknowledged by most authors as a fact, has of course not been left unchallenged. Marxist
historians have argued that the capitalist market order suited the increasingly mobile middle
classes and was thus imposed from above, often through violently removing opposition from the
lower social ranks whose communities were threatened by the needs of the voracious machinery
of global trade, finance and manufacturing.
Yet, when charting the intellectual history of the gradual embrace of market transactions, both
Marxist and non-Marxist historians agree that the ideological upheavals of the late 18th-century
Enlightenment forcefully undermined the boundaries that religious teachings had set for eco-
nomic activities. For better or worse, economic behaviour became ‘liberated’ from the moral
considerations thrust upon traders and consumers from the cloisters and the pulpits (Appleby,
2010; Hirschman, 1977; MacPherson, 1962; McCloskey, 2006; McCloskey, 2010; Rothschild,
2001). The historical narrative underlying this idea of capitalism as a form of secularization thus
takes on the following shape: the Middle Ages and much of the early-modern period were domi-
nated by theological concepts and religious norms that explained, governed and regulated market
activities. During that age, markets, like all other parts of the social-political world, stood on the
‘wrong’ side of the dichotomy that divided heavenly kingdom and sinful world. Although market
actors might have practically engaged in forms of economic behaviour that ignored religious
dogma, for instance by forming monopolies and by withholding goods from the market in order
to inflate prices, or by creating information asymmetries and exploiting whimsical fashions, the
economy was imagined by contemporaries in metaphysical terms as a moral-social realm within
which the salvation of the sinner could be won or lost. For that reason, as Pribram and Tawney
argued, the church felt legitimized, and indeed obliged, to rule on all matters economic (Pribram,
1983: 6–7; Tawney, 1998/1926).
With the Enlightenment, at least according to this well-established narrative, the metaphysics of
the market economy became radically changed by the process of secularization. The gradual dis-
mantling of the supremacy that theology held over moral philosophy and science created a ‘posses-
sive individualism’ (Macpherson) which saw man as possessor and proprietor of his own personal
capacities, who owed society nothing for them: ‘society [became] a lot of free equal individuals,
related to each other as proprietors of their own capacities’ (MacPherson, 1962: 3). Salvation seemed
no longer the starting point and key focus of economic theory-building, which instead came to rely
on a separation between religious, i.e. private, ideas and secular political-economic, i.e. public,
thought. In line with this narrative of separation between theology and the secular realm, most his-
torians today are keen to show that the Enlightenment did not alter the economic interests of past
market actors per se, but that it transformed the metaphysical imagination which grounded their
behaviour. In that very imagination, the market was removed from an overarching, transcendent
moral universe and placed into the hands of a moral philosophy which started from the immanent,
natural disposition to ‘truck, barter and exchange’ (Smith, 2003/1776: 25). The theological language
that could still be found in Adam Smith’s work, for example, is then interpreted merely as highly
persuasive ‘rhetoric’ (McCloskey, 1995: 95; Rothschild, 2001: 136–137).
Existing narratives of the intellectual history of modern market capitalism, thus, largely take for
granted the legitimatory discourses that the proponents of the European and North-American
Enlightenment constructed. There is perhaps no other scholar who better managed to wring together
the different strands of these discourses into one coherent philosophy than Hans Blumenberg in his
proclamation of the Legitimacy of the Modern Age (Blumenberg, 1999/1966). Blumenberg con-
structed an epochal shift from a pre-modern and religious to a modern and secular cosmology that
was based on and legitimized by notions of progress, innovation, individual self-determination and
human curiosity. This construction still stands as a silent saviour behind most accounts of the

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Schwarzkopf 283

intellectual history of capitalism written today. Following Blumenberg, both modern science and
capitalist market organization came to be understood as the outcome of the Enlightenment’s
successful attempt at shedding off the yoke of Christian theology, and instead auto-create a cosmos
of norms, concepts and beliefs that superseded a less sophisticated past.
Blumenberg’s tract was intended as a refutation of Carl Schmitt’s idea of a philosophy of his-
tory as political theology, which saw the Enlightenment and modern rationalism not as the out-
come of the legitimate self-determination of an auto-created moral cosmos, but as an illegitimate
metaphysical coup d’état (Bragagnolo, 2011; Ifergan, 2010) For Schmitt, the modern age was not
much more than an unreflected, puerile aggression against medieval theology, which nevertheless
pillaged and plundered the Christian cosmos for conceptual constructions in order to stabilize
itself. Modernity came into existence metaphysically not via the separation from, but through the
usurpation and re-appropriation of the theological devices and techniques that had been devel-
oped during the ‘dark ages’ (Blumenberg, 1999/1966: 106–109; Schmitt, 1922: 41–55; Schmitt,
1970: 88–89; Schmitz and Lepper, 2007: 105–113).
With Schmitt, I argue that the emergence of the capitalist market order and its underpinnings
in moral philosophy and economic theory was not, as described by most economic historians, the
outcome of a separation of entrepreneurial curiosity and desire for economic innovation from
inhibiting religious dogma. In contrast, I argue that the metaphysical foundations of market capi-
talism were the outcome of an expropriation and appropriation of theological concepts, devices
and techniques. As such, this process resembled the illegitimacy of the original ‘secularization’,
the forceful expropriation of church property and its re-appropriation by the modern state. The
religious idiom found in 18th-, 19th-, and 20th-century economic and marketing theory does not
constitute merely the remnants of contemporary ‘Christian rhetoric’, but offers a glimpse on
theological riches, expropriated and appropriated metaphysical assets that had originally been
designed to enable individual salvation.
The focal point of a Schmittian unraveling of the intricacies of the capitalist market order is
Adam Smith’s attempt at identifying the unnatural and socially disruptive mechanisms of market
capitalism as the pillars of a somehow ‘obvious and simple system of natural liberty’ (Smith,
2003/1776: 873). Curiously, Smith’s natural disposition to ‘truck, barter and exchange’ existed
among all people throughout all ages, and yet nowhere did this disposition lead to the emergence
of modern, capitalist market societies other than in those cultural-geographical areas where a
specific constellation of theological concepts, devices and techniques infused market interac-
tions with salvatory qualities. Within this constellation, which expressed itself in the Netherlands,
in Britain, France, and North America from the 17th century onwards, the mobilization of the
calculating, opportunity-oriented individual and the political system of a democracy of valua-
tion, argumentation and persuasion became connected for the first time in a coherent form. This
constellation was not based on some kind of ‘natural propensity’ to earn money and seek profits,
which, as already Max Weber reminded his readers, existed in all ages and ‘among all sorts and
conditions of men’ (Weber, 1930/1905: 17). Instead, this constellation of ideas consisted of a
peculiar mix of three elements: firstly, the late-Scholastic theology of the accounting and the
accountable Self, especially as adopted and developed by Lutheranism and Calvinism; secondly,
Protestant ecclesiology with its emphasis on the priesthood of the common man and on the
importance of individual witness and testimony of God’s existence and grace; and thirdly, the
post-Reformation, Deist theology that presented God’s creation as a benign, self-ordering kos-
mos. In the course of my argument, I therefore largely follow authors like Colin Campbell,
Alexander Rüstow, Jacob Viner and Max Weber, who have located the ‘spiritual’ origins of the
social-economic logic of modern consumer capitalism in a peculiar mix of Protestant theology

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284 Organization 19(3)

and Enlightenment Deism (Campbell, 2005: 136–37; Rüstow, 1950: 15–24; Viner, 1972: 28–47;
Weber, 1930/1905). The conclusions reached by these sociologists and economists as regards the
metaphysical, ‘spiritual’ foundations of modern capitalism, however, deserve to be pushed much
further as they ultimately point in the direction of the disputed legitimacy of the modern age in
general and of market capitalism in particular.
The ‘extreme necessity’ for the self-determination of reason against the dogmatism of
theology, which Blumenberg invoked (Blumenberg, 1999/1966: 108), never existed. Against
Blumenberg, I argue that those trader-philosophers who created the metaphysics of the market
order merely felt inconvenienced by the moral norms of the medieval cosmos and therefore
knowingly and unscrupulously delved into the toolbox of religious thought and theological
devices not only in order make recurrent, organized profitability (Weber, 1930/1905) and the
sensuous enjoyment of material goods (Campbell, 2005) seem permissible and even advisable.
More importantly, they elevated the idée fixe that life was essentially a series of choices from
which there was no escape to the essence of human existence as such. Theology’s capacity for
empowering social structures that offered both salvation and justice was therefore not separated
from a newly emerging alternative, ‘modern’ cosmos, but the former was looted to avouch for
the construction of the latter. From the early 17th century onwards, economists, marketers, trad-
ers, and later the marketing profession itself, expropriated and then re-appropriated theological
and ecclesiological concepts that accommodated their metaphysical and political aims.

Traders, consumers and god as shopkeeper

One of the key moments in the intellectual history of capitalism occurred in March 1656, when the
testament of the notorious Boston trader, shopkeeper, and marketer Robert Keayne was opened. It
revealed a 53-page document that justified Keayne’s life-long devotion to the perfection and
exploitation of life’s choice architecture. What became known as the Apologia of Robert Keayne
was in fact one of the first coherent outlines of reasons for why profit-seeking through the creation
of information asymmetries between market actors, calculated price escalation for imported goods,
and the dexterous management of profit-margins across a portfolio of market offerings was not a
‘sin’ but a legitimate and justified form of social behaviour. Keayne had overcharged customers for
the linen and needles they bought from him and he was duly hauled in front of local Presbyterian
Church committees several times to explain his actions. Embittered, he penned his apologia to
write off the debt he had incurred on his soul and on society. Keayne’s testament seems to confirm
the narrative that market capitalism was brought about by modern mavericks, who attacked the
firm hold that religious elites, like Boston’s Presbyterian church-elders, had on all matters pertain-
ing to the social-moral fabric of the community (Bailyn, 1950; Tawney 1998/1926: 128–131).
A closer inspection of the public trials and private justification of Robert Keayne however shows
him as extremely well-versed in the interpretation of the Bible and the history of religious thought.
His employment of the genre of the apologia as a theological device for the defense of his actions
was in itself a citation of the Apostles Peter’s and Paul’s, and St Augustine’s use of this genre to
explain the hope they had that the sinful world they saw around them was indeed saved and justi-
fied (1 Peter, 3: 15; Romans, 1–3; St Augustine, 1998).
From the time of the Reformation, trader-philosophers like Keayne had at their disposal a
unique combination of theological devices and techniques that allowed them to present the order-
ing of economies around profit-motive and free consumer choice not as sinful and destructive but
as benign, just and conforming to God’s will. As mentioned earlier, we can identify the ingredi-
ents of this mix, which provided the metaphysical leaven for the emerging capitalist market order

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Schwarzkopf 285

as, firstly, Scholastic teachings about the nature of the soul, which gave rise to the confessional
habit, resulting in turn in a specifically Western culture of accounting, auto-consultation and
diary-writing. The painstaking soul-searching which became a unique feature of late-medieval
Western culture directly influenced the Augustinian monk Martin Luther, whose interpretation of
St Paul led him to develop the second ingredient, an ecclesiology which understood transcendent
belief as a form of personal conviction and testimony, and the individual believer as a priest in
their own right. The third ingredient was added by the Deists of the early Enlightenment, who
revived interest in Platonist cosmology and neo-Platonist theology. The theology of Deism
directly provided metaphysical ammunition to economists who argued that one should desist from
trying to micro-manage the behaviour of traders and consumers for the common good, because
market-based economies had a habit of bringing about that common good by themselves if only
left to their own devices.
The intellectual journey of the modern market order thus begins with scholastic thinkers like
Avicenna and Thomas Aquinas, who laid heavy emphasis on the individuization enabled by the
existence of the soul, which allowed self-awareness and self-consciousness in human beings.
According to Chloe Taylor (2009), these teachings became increasingly central to practical reli-
gious life during the Middle Ages, especially when in 1215 the Fourth Lateran Council decreed
that all believers should at least once a year give an account of their behaviour through the
Sacrament of Penance. Now commonly known as confession, this sacrament allowed the indi-
vidual conscience to express itself and it therefore fulfilled an important spiritual role (Hahn and
Schorch, 2007; Taylor, 2009: 51–55). Both the individually expressed belief in its normative
content (Apostolic Creed), and the verbal account of one’s actual behaviour became key institu-
tions that enabled people’s access to the re-enactment of the Lord’s Supper. This re-enactment not
only (re)created the body of Christ but also that of the church and confirmed the real presence of
Christ among the living. The existence of this collective body of believers and the real presence
of Christ in the Supper saved the world that had fallen from paradise. Thus, a good and justified
social order rested on a verbal expression of one’s belief, on making the right choices, and a full
verbal account of these choices. By enumerating, describing and declaring their sinful behaviours,
entire populations in Europe were introduced to the idea that both an immaterial soul and an indi-
vidual Self existed and that this Self was made up of the attitudes one developed and the choices
one made in life (Foucault, 1993; Le Goff, 1986; Taylor, 2009).
The ‘truth’ and legitimacy of these choices and attitudes resided in the ‘sacred heart’, a visual
representation of the heart of Jesus which symbolized the justification of mankind in the eyes of
Christ (Hoepfl, 2008). While the Catholic version of the ‘sacred heart’ often showed it enclosed
in small glass-boxes or burning within the body of the resurrected Christ, the Reformation
‘revealed’ the closed nature of attitudes and choices and threw open the sacred heart for the sake
of deeper, and more public, investigation. Protestant religious thought with its emphasis on choice
and individual belief as a form of becoming witness to God’s grace instituted a movement of
constant self-examination and deep anxieties over salvation. Eventually, an entire body of confes-
sional literature emerged which advised people on how to search their souls for hidden attitudes
and how to give an honest account of one’s behaviour before confessing one’s sins.1 But the
Catholic Church had already connected this mental preparation for confession to the idea of mak-
ing decisions, of choosing and of voting (lat. votum = prayer, wish, desire, promise). Long before
voting became part of the struggle for democracy and universal suffrage, the Catholic Church
developed the institution of the ‘suffrage of the faithful’, also known as ‘prayers for the dead’,
which allowed the living to pray for, and thus to ‘vote’ (lat. suffragari = to vote) for the poor souls

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286 Organization 19(3)

in purgatory. Catholic chapels still provide spaces for prayer, donations and the lighting of candles
in order to enable the living ‘to vote’ for the dead and promote their ascension to heaven.
The more radical reformed churches then merely transported this voting mechanism from the
transcendental world of souls, heaven and hell into the immanent sphere of the living. The over-
bearing importance of the word, the truth and the testimony in Calvinism, and its literal-legalistic
interpretation of the Bible consequentially expressed itself in public spectacles. A person arriving
in the Puritan communities of New England during the 17th century, for example, had to go through
a vetting process which was based on a jury of community members and church-elders scrutinizing
the testimony given by this person. Acceptance into the group, and thus the salvation that came
with being part of the ‘community of saints’ as the Puritans saw themselves, was dependent on
being ‘voted in’ (Brauer, 1958; Champion, 1998; Hardman Moore, 2007).
Although, as in the Catholic Church, salvation was the key focus of all these concerns, Calvinism
activated believers so that they would worry about every aspect of their lives in a constant search for
evidence of damnation or salvation. Calvin’s predestination theory encouraged people to tirelessly
look for signs of God in their lives. This total preoccupation with Self and salvation in turn gave rise
to the confessional diary which first emerged among reformed Protestants. English Puritans wrote
diaries to examine themselves and see whether their lives showed signs of having been chosen
among ‘the Elect’ (Maculloch, 2004: 379, 457). With the diary, a cultural system of recording for the
aim of self-improvement, self-motivation and self-activation emerged, which ended up being used
by the market research industry from the early 1930s in form of the purchase diary.2
Seeing God as the world’s ‘other’ (Schmitt, 1922: 53), and teaching unquestioned acceptance
of man’s status as guilty and saved, both Luther and Calvin opened up a total focus on the Self
as the object and the vehicle of salvation. In addition, individual choice and judgment became
elevated to a quasi-sacred status. Although the Bible became the sole authority in spiritual
matters, individuals were bestowed with the freedom of conscience to interpret it according
to the stages of their individual life-journey (Chillingworth, 1638). To understand life as an
auto-directed journey of the Self, whose course and progress could be charted through the
type of written and tabulated accounts that Benjamin Franklin perfected in his diaries, enabled
17th-century trader-philosophers like Robert Keayne and John Bunyan to transfer knowledge-
practices of hope and salvation on ‘hopeless’, but lucrative pursuits (Sloterdijk, 2006: 89–95).
The English Baptist preacher Bunyan, whose life-journey turned him from an itinerant trader
haunted by inner voices that told him to ‘sell Christ’ into the author of the Pilgrim’s Progress
(1678/1684), embodied this connection between the Self-enabling account-book and the market-
oriented mindset. According to Weber, Bunyan’s vision of the relationship of the sinner to God
was that of the customer to the shopkeeper: ‘one who has once got into debt may well, by the
product of all his virtuous acts, succeed in paying off the accumulated interest but never the
principal. … The process of sanctifying life could thus almost take on the character of a business
enterprise’ (Weber, 1930/1905: 124).
Accounting historians and historical sociologists have debated whether the institutionaliza-
tion of the confession and of the religious diary had an influence on the development of early-
modern capitalism through the emergence of accounting and double-entry book-keeping (Derks,
2008; Schumpeter, 1994: 121–130; Sombart, 1902; Yamey, 1949). What these debates have ignored
so far is that constant soul-searching, the ‘accounting’ of one’s choices (Romans, 14: 12) and voting
behaviour (Acts, 1: 23–26) were at the heart of Christian theology from the 13th century at least, and
remained so until well into the 19th century. In the social context of the United States, these traits of
Christian theology were even strengthened as church institutions became increasingly ‘democra-
tized’, for example through the influence of widely-read religious magazines (Hatch, 1989).

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Schwarzkopf 287

In medieval theology, the church had occupied an important mediating role in the justification
of the individual because of the sacraments, like the confession, which it was able to administer or
deny. These sacraments and their observance in ritual helped the believer to be justified and ‘saved’
in the eyes of God. Luther rejected this position and argued that man could never be justified by his
own actions but instead remained always both a sinner and justified (simul iustus et peccator). For
Luther, people needed to gain subjective confirmation about their spiritual place in life, and this
perpetual status-update only came through one’s individual belief in Christ, whose grace needed no
church hierarchy as mediating authority. According to Luther’s interpretation of St Paul, it was
only the Bible, now understood as God’s verbum externum, and the conscious faith and the belief
(i.e. the interpretations) of the individual which ensured salvation.
Luther’s and Calvin’s emphasis on conscience and choice motivated and activated trader-
philosophers, who from the mid-16th century began to promote the theological program of the
Reformation and its teachings about man’s essential claim to ‘freedom’. This claim was
supported by the juridification of the economy of salvation and grace which above all Martin
Luther’s interpretation of St Paul introduced into Western theology and religious life. While St
Paul had associated faith in Christ with being ‘made righteous’ and ‘set free’, Luther, who had
studied law both briefly and unwillingly, re-contextualized these terms by interpreting ‘justifica-
tion’ as a declaration of innocence in a judicial sense (Sanders, 2001: 53–58; Westerholm,
2004: 22–23). Protestant ecclesiology followed this re-contextualization with some stark conse-
quences. Lutheran churches ‘democratized’ their structures of decision-making, and Presbyterian
(Calvinist) churches turned from a collective body of all Baptised, as envisaged by Paul (1
Corinthian: 12–27), into what was essentially a series of courts, from the smallest gathering
up to the General Assembly (Dörfler-Dierken, 2001: 13–32). Luther’s and Calvin’s teachings
‘activated’ believers by reinterpreting life as a series of choices and judgements that needed
constant accounting and justification. Experienced and lived faith became a form of ‘witness’
and ‘testimony’ in the great courtroom of life.
In its account of the possibility of salvation, Lutheran and Reformed Protestantism assigned
priority to individual choice and conscience. In the two centuries that lay between the
Reformation and the Enlightenment, God was slowly replaced by an ‘Inner Light’ that burned
in all members of the human race (Moore, 2000). In that process, God’s grace also ceased being
a public good, administrated by the Catholic Church as monopoly supplier. The privatization of
salvation naturally affected those who tried to square religious teachings and the economic
practices of the multitude of priests that Lutheran ecclesiology declared all baptised Christians
to be. The theory of capitalist markets that gradually became formulated during the 18th century
continued to promote the idea that individually expressed choices, through some hidden mecha-
nism like an ‘invisible hand’, led to a just and legitimate, that means righteous, social order.
This particular nexus was perhaps best expressed by the German author Johann Andreas
Wiegleb, who around 1715 penned a poem that boldly presented God as ‘a capitalist who
betrays nobody’ and as a debtor who sought merciful individuals to be trustees of the Kingdom
of Heaven (Stenzel, 1969: 85).
At the time of the publication of Wiegleb’s poem, the excesses of Calvinist teachings about
predestination and condemnation of souls had become superseded by the more optimistic theolo-
gies of the Pietists and the early representatives of the Enlightenment. The combination of post-
Calvinist reformed Protestantism and enlightened scepticism about miracles and revelation became
particularly productive during the eighteenth century. After God had first become neatly separated
from ‘the world’ and then internalized and privatized as ‘Inner Light’, early-modern thinkers
like Adam Smith were now able to re-introduce God into the workings of the socio-economic

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288 Organization 19(3)

machinery. Smith’s famous dictum about the ‘obvious and simple system of natural liberty’ that
established itself of its own accord as if guided by an ‘invisible hand’ was in truth a Deist theologi-
cal concept based on Platonist cosmology (Rüstow, 1950: 23–27; Viner, 1972: 47). The idea of the
market as a beautiful and rational kosmos that should be protected from political meddling was
later used in the same form by Friedrich August Hayek to legitimize the market as a principle of
social-economic organization. For both the Deist moral philosopher Smith and the Kantian econo-
mist Hayek, the market had all the qualities of a kosmos, a ‘spontaneous order’ which regulated and
balanced itself and needed protection from people trying to manipulate it in the pursuit of social
justice, a term Hayek once derided as ‘an empty phrase with no determinable content’ (Harcourt,
2011: 128–130; Hayek, 1976: 133; Smith, 2006: 151–58). The ‘immense machine of the universe’
and the ‘universal happiness’ of those who inhabited this universe was ‘the business of God and not
of man’, according to Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments (1976/1759: 236).
Smith, little busts of whom were put by Glaswegian traders into their shop-windows as a
political statement in favour of free trade and low taxes, showed himself a child of his times
when he described the free production and distribution of goods in the same language that con-
temporary Deist theology used in order to describe all creation as a great machine that followed
natural laws by itself (Alvey, 2007; Denis, 2005; Hill, 2001). Any form of interference with this
machine, whether practiced by men or imagined in their ideas, constituted a disruption of its
natural, law-based and regular organization and was thus as superstitious as other supra-natural
inclinations like magic or the belief in miracles and revelation (Thomas, 1991: 786). It was
Deist theology which allowed Smith to see order and grace in the disorderly and often disgrace-
ful reality of economic exchanges.
Smith’s vision of markets and society was ultimately based on an idea that Platonist theologi-
ans had propagated for centuries, namely that there existed a kind of universal purpose that acted
to produce good even amidst the most unlikely of circumstances (Psalm 19: 1–6; Philippians 2
:13; Romans 8: 28). Smith’s socio-economic theorizing stood in the philosophical traditions of
this kind of ontology. In The Theory of Moral Sentiments, Smith argued that all human beings had
been created with the innate capacity to sympathize with others. Because of the divinely designed
law of original sympathy, human beings felt a constant desire to being held in high regard by their
fellow creatures. By stepping into the role of another person, and thus feeling and seeing as they
felt and saw, people naturally succumbed to take part in a perennial ‘race for wealth, and honours,
and preferments’, in order to ‘outstrip all [their] competitors’ (1976/1759: 82–83). This race, or
competition, which emerged from people’s desire to seek the approval and positive disposedness
of others around them, then produced the circumstances in which people tried harder to better
their own situation as well as that of others (Denis, 1999; Forman-Barzilai, 2010: 196–210;
Otteson, 2002: 205–228).
The notion of the divinely created sense of universal ‘sympathy’ later returned in Smith’s
writings on economics, this time in form of the general principle of exchange by barter and trade.
In Smith’s Wealth of Nations, individual subjects enacted God’s providence because their choices
and urges ultimately created a good and stable order of affairs regarding resource allocation and
the mutual adjustment of prices and demand. For Smith, it was the seeming egotism and unruli-
ness of individuals that created a benign order, a kosmos, out of chaos (Smith 2003/1776: 568–
72). The theological nature of Smith’s economics, its Deist-Platonist underpinnings, made his
theory of markets an important predecessor of the political Romanticism of the nineteenth cen-
tury (Schmitt, 1919). Rather than accept that markets are situations of resource conflict in which
political decisions have to be made and are continuously being made, economic Romanticists
like Smith were unwilling to recognize the essentially political, conflictual nature of such

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situations. Smith eschewed politics and fled into the fantasy-world of self-regulating market
mechanisms. His economic theory thus merged Protestant sensibilities about the solitary nature
of individual choice with political Liberalism, ‘where the emancipated private individual of the
bourgeois social order is the only metaphysical authority’ left (Critchley, 2004: 109).
Like Robert Keayne a century before him, Smith provided a justification and legitimization
(apologia) for the social order which traders and marketers aimed to establish. But each apologia
has its transcendental sources, even if unacknowledged. Smith’s Deist economic theory did not
expunge God at all: the world’s happiness was still God’s ‘business’, and divine providence ensured
that individuals as the new metaphysical core of the market order brought about this happiness
through their actions. This world was, thus, still constructed in terms of theological concepts, this
time the divine design of universal happiness brought about by the ‘invisible hand’ of providence,
and was arguably not the result of a shift from faith to reason (Nelson, 2001: 55–59, 101, 278–280;
Oslington, 2011; Petsoulas, 2001: 147–48; Viner, 1960).

Religious concepts and their consequences: the formatting of

the market
In contrast to the more radical strands of the European Enlightenment, American social and
political philosophy continued to invest in the idea of social order as a manifest covenant with
God (Moots, 2010). As shown by Nelson (2001) and Viner (1960, 1972) for the case of econom-
ics as an academic discipline, 19th- and 20th-century American trader-philosophers also contin-
ued to selectively appropriate elements of medieval and early-modern theology in order to
construct an overarching metaphysics of the capitalist market order. These mechanisms through
which markets became ‘moralized’ (Stehr, 2007) and infused with salvatory capacity can also be
studied in the case of advertising and marketing as a field of commercial practices. These
industries provide a fitting example for how a particular set of theological concepts came to be
mobilized in the formatting of industrial market societies. American advertising agencies in
particular promoted the Protestant conviction that individual choice was a form of ‘testimony’
and thus part of the pathway to salvation and justification.
The two foremost American advertising agencies, J. Walter Thompson (JWT), founded in 1864
in New York, and N. W. Ayer & Sons, founded in 1869 in Philadelphia, both enjoyed very close
connections to the Christian publishing industry on the eastern seaboard and in the mid-West. The
rapid growth of JWT, Ayer’s and many other American advertising agencies was propelled by a
thriving market for religious weekly magazines, monthlies and annuals (Goldstein and Haveman,
2010; Lears, 1994: 46–53, 138–147; Moore, 1989). The strong relationship between religious
organizations and the printing press had its roots in the belief that the Kingdom of God needed the
convictions and actions of human beings in order to be brought about. Accordingly, an editorial in
the Christian Herald in 1823 taught its readers: ‘The kingdom of God is a kingdom of means. …
Preaching of the gospel is a Divine institution—“printing” no less so. They are kindred offices. The
pulpit and the press are inseparably connected. The Press, then, is to be regarded with a sacred
veneration and supported with religious care. The press must be supported or the pulpit falls’
(quoted in Hatch 1989: 142).
This veneration of the press as the mouthpiece of a chosen people in search of God’s own coun-
try rubbed off on the nascent American advertising industry because the periodical press needed
advertisements in order to sustain its business model in a competitive media environment. Unlike
the Catholic Church, which saw heavenly grace accessible through the institutional settings of the
sacraments, the reformed churches became obsessed with the printed word of the Bible as the only

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290 Organization 19(3)

divine institution permissible. American advertising professionals, who mostly hailed from a
middle-class, white Anglo-Saxon Protestant background, shared this logo-centrism and viewed
advertising as a way of forming consumer convictions mainly through the printed word (Hopkins,
1923; Lears, 1994: 110–111; Marchand, 1985: 32–38).
The American outlook on advertising as a commercial activity was thus underpinned by a theo-
logical position with regards to the powers of the printed word, which could form convictions in
people and could lead them on the path of right choices. Advertising agents used the nexus
between ‘verbum externum’ and human behaviour in order to justify their profession. In 1875, the
Baptist Francis Wayland Ayer, founder of what was then America’s––and perhaps the world’s—
largest advertising agency, N.W. Ayer & Son, wrote to a business friend who had expressed doubts
over the moral worth of the advertising profession: ‘I have put my hand to this plough and by the
help of the Lord I am going to finish the furrow. Before I have finished, you will come to me some
day and say that you respect me for my business as well as myself’ (quoted in Lears, 1994: 93).
Before settling in the advertising industry, Ayer had worked for periodicals like National Baptist
and he built his agency around servicing religious weeklies. While building America’s number
one advertising agency, he was a Sunday school superintendent and served for 25 years as presi-
dent of the North Baptist State Convention of New Jersey (Hawkins, 1999). About him it was said
that he was ‘such a man as Oliver Cromwell would have been had Oliver been allowed to become
an advertising agent’ (Rowell, 1906: 258).
The Protestant faith in the market as the realm of a religious ‘calling’ was perhaps best rep-
resented by Bruce Fairchild Barton, co-founder of the then fourth largest advertising agency in
America, Batten, Barton, Durstine and Osborne (today BBDO), one-time Republican
Congressman and Public Relations advisor to US-President Calvin Coolidge (Buckley, 2003).
Barton was born into a family of itinerant preachers, who in the 1880s settled in Oak Park,
Illinois, where they formed the First Congregationalist Church. Barton attended Berea College,
a Protestant liberal arts college in Kentucky and began work as editor for various religious and
consumer magazines during the 1910s and 1920s. His magazine and newspaper essays quickly
gained a large following among American readers because of their optimistic and positive out-
look on life. Infused by the Protestant principle of pro-actively shaping one’s own fate, Barton
used newspaper and journal columns to promise ‘More Power to You’ (Barton, 1917) and
‘Better Days’ (Barton, 1924). In 1925, Barton published a book entitled The Man Nobody
Knows, in which he depicted Jesus as the ‘world’s greatest salesman’, an advertising executive
whose power of speech attracted and motivated men and who instilled optimism and a sense of
personality in all people he met (Barton, 1925; Fried, 2005: 4–20). In 1926, Barton followed
this success story with The Book Nobody Knows, an interpretation of the Bible from the
view-point of Madison Avenue, and a year later he summarized his secular sermons in the tract
What Can a Man Believe? (Barton, 1926; Barton, 1927).
Just as the nascent advertising industry was strongly rooted in the religious fervour of the 19th
century, the Anglo-American market and consumer research sector also seems to have been the
precinct of distinct religious communities characterized by anxieties over salvation. Virtually the
entire first generation of English and American market and consumer researchers was born into a
religious constellation which ensured that notions of the individual conscience as the centre of
salvation became the founding stone of the metaphysics of the market (Bercovic, 2010; Buckley,
1981; Macloughlin, 1971; Tomlins, 2010; Valeri, 2010). Early market researchers and consumer
psychologists like George Gallup, Elmo Roper, Charles Coolidge Parlin, Walter Dill Scott, James
McKeen Cattell, Edward Kellog Strong, Robert J. Silvey, and Henry Charles Link, marketing
theorists like Wroe Alderson, and firms that committed themselves to the techniques of market and

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Schwarzkopf 291

consumer research early on, like Rowntree’s in Britain and Quaker Oats in the United States, all
belonged to a trans-Atlantic commercial culture dominated by Baptists, Quakers, Congregationalists,
and Evangelical Christians (Alderson, 1956; Jeremy, 1998; Link, 1936; Schwarzkopf, 2011;
Tamilia, 2007; Ward, 2010: 183; Wooliscroft, 2000).
Out of this large group of people, I will focus here on one market and consumer researcher
whose publications highlight the direct line that can be drawn from Protestant theology to
‘modern’ consumer capitalism. This protagonist, the staunch Southern Baptist Henry Grady
Weaver, was General Motors’ first director of consumer research and a great popularizer of
the market and consumer research agenda in the United States. Although perhaps best known
for publicizing the benefits of consumer research for both the general public and corporate
management, for example by appearing on Times magazine’s front-page in November 1938,
he also authored widely read texts on the political-theological underpinnings of the American
market economy (Marchand, 1998).
In 1947, Weaver published a book entitled Mainspring, a bestselling Libertarian-Protestant
apologia for free-market capitalism and its inherent Christian-Judeo ‘virtues of self-reliance,
self-improvement, self-faith, self-respect, [and] self-discipline’ (Weaver, 1947: 26). In the book,
Weaver rejected all government control of private enterprise by reminding his readers that
‘Christ spoke of the God of Abraham. The God of Truth. The God of Rightness. The God that
does not control any man but who judges the acts of every man’. Weaver also used the book to
advocate a political structure that ‘unleashed the creative energies’ of individuals, leaving them
free to work and consume as they pleased (Weaver, 1947: 66, 5). In the book, Weaver brought
together two strands of intellectual developments which together made up the metaphysical
basis of 20th-century consumer capitalism: the Protestant emphasis on life as individual effort
and hard work, and the Deist belief in universal harmony. For Weaver, competition was
the ‘practical manifestation of human beings in free control of their individual affairs, arriving
at a balance in their relationship with one another’ (Weaver, 1947: 16). Attempts to regulate this
‘balance’ through the meddling authority of political decisions merely destabilized the ‘natural
order’ that emerged between individuals in society (Weaver, 1947: 16–19). To Weaver, this principle
was ‘as inexorable as any law of physics’ (Weaver, 1947: 203), but it relied on human beings re-
organizing and mobilizing themselves as fully independent individuals: ‘There are no substitutes for
self-faith, self-reliance, self-development, individual effort and personal responsibility. Life on
earth is no bed of roses. The end of man is not self-indulgence––but achievement. There are no
short-cuts, and no substitutes for work’ (Weaver, 1947: 225).
The remarkable role that Quakers and Baptists played in the emerging market and con-
sumer research industry becomes perhaps more understandable if one considers the overall
influence that the Protestant-Congregationalist ecclesiology had on the making of social sci-
ence research methods particularly in the United States. The insistence of Calvinist, Baptist
and Quaker communities on local self-governance and the independence of their congrega-
tions was based on an anti-Catholic theological teaching which held that the church was
brought about by the voluntary co-operation of free and equal members with direct access to
a Holy Spirit that acted as a deposit for one’s inheritance in heaven (Ephesians, 1: 13–14). The
Baptist denomination, in particular, is characterized by a strong emphasis on individual choice
and behaviour, and it considers the adult choice to be baptised as the main pillar of its theology
and ecclesiology. The emphasis on small, independent congregations as ecclesiological organ-
izing units predestined American social scientists and consumer researchers to privilege small
survey groups, like consumer juries and focus groups, as a key approach to understand the
complexities of society (Didier, 2002; Silver, 1990).

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292 Organization 19(3)

With the arrival of liberal European emigrants in the United States during the interwar years,
two strands of metaphysical reflections about market economies that had become separated during
the 18th century finally came together again. Although the likes of Ludwig Mises, Friedrich Hayek
and Ayn Rand were deeply suspicious of organized religion, their visions of the free market order
became infused with the religious idiom of those American trader-philosophers who had eagerly
worked towards turning that vision into reality. As Bethany Moreton, Michael Novak, Stephen
Long, and many other authors have shown, from the 1920s onwards the culture of ‘free enterprise
and consumer choice’ retained the character of a theological project that it had first adopted during
the early 17th century (Long, 2000, 104–106, 203–207; Moreton, 2009; Nelson, 2001: 35–48;
Novak, 1982: 333–360).

Consumer capitalism and the political economy of salvation

To identify the capitalist market order as a theological project moves the debate about the rela-
tionship between capitalism and religion somewhat beyond its current limitations of the question
whether capitalism ‘is’ a religion (Benjamin, 1991/1921), and whether there ever was a
‘Protestant Ethics’ (Weber, 1930/1905). In the light of the discussion above, the market order is
revealed as a project which to its very core is imprinted by the theological concepts, techniques
and devices it freely borrowed from a metaphysical warehouse that offered everything from
Platonist cosmology and medieval theories of the soul to Protestant ecclesiology and Lutheran
theories of justification. This hotchpotch of theological ideas in fact formed the nucleus of the
‘modern’ market order, which has its sources firmly rooted in pre-modern, religious notions of
the mobilized and resourceful Self.
Naturally, the rise of this market order and its unique moral philosophy of individual rights
contains and accommodates many narratives. Some of these narratives privilege the role played
by the early-modern secular state in the making of the Enlightenment and later the moral phi-
losophy of classical liberalism. Other narratives might point at the undeniable influence that the
human sciences and the experimental natural sciences had on the creation of a modern sense of
subjectivity. Yet, what has become clear from the above discussion of the intellectual history of
market capitalism is that the ‘modern’ metaphysics of markets as socio-political designs is not
based on immanent sources of legitimization, like capitalism’s capability to produce growth,
jobs, wealth, and innovative products. Instead, capitalism is also able to draw on transcendent
sources of legitimacy that originated in pre- and early modern theology. Theological concepts
and devices, not empirical data or ‘reason’, helped first promote consumers’ choices as testimo-
nies that enable salvation. Similarly, it was first theological concepts which helped justify and
legitimize the idea that markets could act as ordering mechanism if only they were liberated
from the supremacy of politics. The argument that the world would be set right by handing it
over to the mechanism of individual self-guidance was first made as an ecclesiological point, not
as one of economics or secular political theory. To interpret the rise of modern consumer capital-
ism in terms of a legitimate break with a pre-modern past, as a historical disruption based on an
essentially new vision of individual and society, therefore presents a warped version of capital-
ism’s intellectual history. The market order, although visibly constituting a break with pre-mod-
ern forms of social ordering and organization, does not dispose of a metaphysical model upon
which it could construct a legitimate foundation. This order, as we have come to accept it either
jubilantly or grudgingly, is an illegitimate reconfiguration of selected elements of pre-secular,
Christian metaphysics—illegitimate because the main reason for its existence comes disguised
in form of the conditio moderna which is in denial of its essentially theological roots.

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The strong influence that Protestant sects exerted on the making of consumer- and choice-centred
market capitalism during the late 19th and early 20th century can be interpreted as an outcome of
the perennial oscillation in religious thought between liberation and sin (Metz, 1998). From the late
19th-century Social Gospel Movement to 20th-century Liberation Theology, and Pope Benedict
XVI’s encyclical Caritas in Veritate at the beginning of 21st century, Christianity’s socially progres-
sive potential has brought together Catholic, Lutheran, and non-Conformist denominations in the
ideal of developing alternatives to capitalist market organization, including social welfare work,
mutualism, and solidarity. The second major streak of Christianity, its emphasis on the individual
conscience, on choice and the ever-present danger of sinning, fed into the capitalist entrepreneurial
spirit which ignored the image of the suffering Christ and instead reconstructed social relations
around the idea of the perfectibility of the Self.
Critics have often noted that the rampant consumerism experienced in our time is the long-
term consequence of this choice-oriented ideal of working to consume. Precisely this self-
centeredness was already inherent in the Judeo-Christian moral universe, only that its religious
institutions, like the confession, had been constructed to prevent people from descending into
mere ‘self-fulfillment’. Modern notions of the creative and consuming Self and of the market
order organized around these Selves therefore need to be understood as secularized theological
concepts that were stripped off the safety devices which had once ensured that the development
of the Self remained connected to the well-being of the community.
This observation brings us back to Bruno Latour’s question whether we have ever been
‘modern’, and to the confrontation between Carl Schmitt and Hans Blumenberg (Latour, 1993;
Schmitz and Lepper, 2007). Blumenberg took Schmitt directly to task and argued that the
modern world was born out of a necessary struggle against a religious-dogmatic interpretation
of the world, and with the specific aim in mind to trade transcendent ontological security for
curiosity and the embrace of the essential insecurity that came with individual freedom. For
Blumenberg, modernity constituted a radical break with humanity’s past and it derived its legiti-
macy from the necessity of that break: the self-created disruption of the metaphysics of
Christianity declared the human being transcendentally homeless and its life an open project.
Modernity was thus anything else but ‘merely the Middle Ages, just by other means’ (Blumenberg,
1999/1966: 107). With Blumenberg, most social theorists have identified modern market capital-
ism as part of an essentially, that is ontologically, new and self-created age of reason, innovation,
and curiosity, which consciously understood itself as a permanently provisional, non-metaphysi-
cal, arrangement. With Schmitt, one might argue that the insecurities which underlie this modern
utopia are tenable only because the early proponents of the capitalist market order spun a web of
very metaphysical obligations, while outwardly cloaking themselves as agents of immanence to
conspire against the transcendental. The outcome of this conspiracy plot was that societies and
communities became restructured around the needs of those who profited most from markets as
a form of ordering social relations.

Notes
1 In late-medieval and early-modern German, this genre of literature was called ‘Beichtspiegel’, which
translates as ‘book of confession’.
2 Because the image (eidos) that people formed in the memory of their own actions could be treacherous,
the written and spoken word (logos) was needed to circumvent the fallacies of the human condition and
so consumers were asked to record every single purchase they made over a week in a little book which
eventually could be analysed by market researchers. This method was co-developed by the JWT advertis-
ing agency and the A. C. Nielsen market research company, which used the purchase diary in conjunction
with its radio audience analysis during the 1930s.

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294 Organization 19(3)

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Biography
Stefan Schwarzkopf is Associate Professor of Business History at Copenhagen Business School.
He has published widely on the history of advertising and consumer research, the emergence of
a marketing ideology, and on the political-theological underpinnings of market societies. His
publications have appeared in Contemporary British History, Management and Organizational
History, Journal of Cultural Economy, Journal of Macromarketing, Theory, Culture and
Society, Journal of Historical Research in Marketing and in numerous anthologies. He is cur-
rently working on a monograph on the history and global entanglement of the British advertising
industry from the 19th to the late 20th century. Address: Department of Management, Politics
and Philosophy, Copenhagen Business School, Porcelaenshaven 18A, DK-2000 Frederiksberg,
Germany. Email: ssc.lpf@cbs.dk

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