Emotions

From Courtly Lavishness and Puritan Asceticism to the Romantic Ethic of Modern Consumption

Among those trying to explain the roots of modern capitalism, two different lines of argumentation can be found out. There is a dominant tradition that links them to Western urban, mercantile, and artisan strata, but the idea to seek them in the aristocratic environment of courts and palaces has also never disappeared. As Jean-Christophe Agnew outlined, the answers to the question of the birth of consumer societies have moved from the eighteenth to the fifteenth century, while the temporal location of their final arrival as a mass-consumer society has shifted to the middle of the twentieth, not earlier. Norbert Elias showed that the rich courts of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries represented the centers of command and consumption of the aristocratically dominated societies of the ancien régime, turning thus into centers of taste refinement at the expense of growing inhibitions on the expression of emotion and under the demand of postulates to behave in a nonviolent manner (pacification). These three dimensions were joined by the art of observing the behavior of others (psychologization) and conscious self-control (courtly rationality—rationalization). Nonworking people of high, aristocratic rank were forced to a wasteful and often ruinous status competition. Pierre Bourdieu's concept of “distinction” is anticipated here. Chandra Mukerji's highly influential study has also shown that luxury consumption antedates the advent of industrial capitalism by centuries by pointing to the Elizabethan court of the sixteenth century. Aristocratic models were imitated by the rising bourgeoisie; the aristocracy answered with strategies securing distinction. In the second stage of this process, people of working, bourgeois origin started to develop their own lines of demarcation, their own imperatives and standards, until both codes merged, while the elaborate courtly standard for refined behavior (so central for the “good society” on the basis of personal contact) gave way to [Page 523]an “affective household,” shaped by the demands of work and profession in the sphere of work and education. How these might have looked like has been told by Max Weber in his now equally famous and often-criticized narrative on the Protestant ethic and English Puritanism: gregariousness, luxury, bad language, even sleeping longer than six or seven hours was to be eschewed. The result was the breaking of the spontaneity of life and enjoyment, engendering melancholy and moroseness. Constant reflection was called for, watchfulness an imperative. Work was the royal road to ecstasy. Sexuality—unless for reproductive purposes—was condemned. God did not condone seigneurial ostentation (or the gentleman's focus on standing and rank). All forms of enjoyment were to be shunned—whether these were football, lyric poetry, singing, the theater, nudity, fashion, or simply idle speech.

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