John Gray reviews a new book and reflects on how capitalism utterly dominates our way of thinking. Excerpts:

As with Tony Blair’s “third way” and David Cameron’s “big society”, an elastic understanding of capitalism allows governments to condemn the market’s excesses while continuing to entrench market forces in every corner of society. In narrowly political terms, the advantages of such elasticity are obvious. Yet there are corresponding costs – particularly if you think what is needed at the present time is some clarity about which areas of society should be ruled by the market and which should not.

Mulgan can’t offer much help in this respect, since it is a feature of his analysis that every aspect of human activity is described using categories that derive from the market. “The idea of entrepreneurship,” he tells us, “applies as much in politics, religion, society and the arts as it does in business.” From this point of view, John Keats was someone who invented a new brand in negative capability and the Buddha was a pioneer in the mindfulness market. Describing poetry and religion as branches of business enterprise is absurd but it is also increasingly common and is worth asking why.

All human action may be entrepreneurial in some (not particularly illuminating) sense; but the reason there is so much talk of “social entrepreneurship” and the like is not that any profound truth of the human condition has suddenly been grasped. Rather, the political triumph of market liberalism has delegitimated any other way of thinking. Not much more than 30 years ago, it was taken for granted that social institutions could and should be animated by a diversity of values. Old-fashioned conservatives and social democrats both accepted the central role of markets in the economy, while believing that the NHS, universities, the arts and public broadcasting should operate outside the market. Today, with market concepts being applied in every sphere of human activity, such a stance is almost literally unthinkable. As the late Tony Judt noted in Ill Fares the Land (2010), the language of ethics has been usurped by that of economics.

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Where Mulgan’s argument is problematic is in accepting that all human relations can be understood as forms of exchange and suggesting that we can enjoy the market’s benefits without any of its hazards. Rather than leading us out of the current impasse, ideas of this kind are symptoms of what has gone wrong. Capitalism needs to be complemented by strong institutions with a different ethos. This will not come about in some benign process of social evolution but only when governments have shaken off the idea that every institution has to be turned into a business. Capitalism may be the only game in town but it doesn’t have to be the whole of life.

But it is. This is why that Sprint ad I pointed out yesterday really is the purest expression of the reigning ideology of our culture. Everything is about liberation of the self through freedom of choice. What is chosen, and how we choose, doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter in pure capitalism, and it increasingly doesn’t matter in the moral life. When progressive politics ceased to be primarily about economics and rather became focused on culture, capitalism’s final victory over socialism was complete. But as Gray points out, this was not a victory that cultural conservatives should have welcomed unambiguously.

The Christian conservative friend who sent the link to the Gray review writes:

In the wake of Obama’s re-election, the conservative movement, which is distinct from conservative intellectuals and thinkers, has doubled down on the whole “everything is markets and markets are everything” rhetoric. If I hear or read the word “entrepreneur” one more time I may hurl.