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And for Weber, mainstream European sociology, and subsequently hegemonic American sociology as well, modernity was capitalist modernity, ‘the spirit of the age’. ’16 His answer was immediate and succinct: ‘No, ladies and gentlemen, it cannot’. This summary judgement must have been alarming for his audience at the United States Department of Agriculture Graduate School in Washington, DC. Schumpeter posed the question again in his distinguished book, Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy, originally published in 1942 during the darkest days of the Second World War.

And for Weber, mainstream European sociology, and subsequently hegemonic American sociology as well, modernity was capitalist modernity, ‘the spirit of the age’. ’16 His answer was immediate and succinct: ‘No, ladies and gentlemen, it cannot’. This summary judgement must have been alarming for his audience at the United States Department of Agriculture Graduate School in Washington, DC. Schumpeter posed the question again in his distinguished book, Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy, originally published in 1942 during the darkest days of the Second World War.

Curiously, however, the bourgeois worldview and Modernist culture both value individual freedoms. 28 Modernism, instead, retains the Romantic ideal of the rebellious bohemian, in effect, the artist rejecting orderliness, seeking immediate sensation, and calling into question codes of representation. These values flow into a more generalised hedonism, which is not the exclusive preserve of alienated artists. Modernism as a revolt of intellectuals against the capitalist system, Bell notes, is now established routine for ‘the cultural class’, McGuigan 01 text 20 20/8/09 12:46:24 The Spirits of Capitalism 21 but its political challenge is, at the same time, exhausted due to the eclipse of socialism whilst, also simultaneously, popular hedonism is on the rise.