Capitalist market habits of trust gave rise to humanitarian sentiment

Evidence

As Weber so well understood, the “structures of domination” that bureaucracies have embraced, called for, and valued “cultivated men” with “cultural quality” more than specialized expertise. These “qualities of life conduct” that included feelings of sympathy and compassion are more often associated with eighteenth-century “masculine sensibility.” But those “moral sentiments” that so concerned Adam Smith—what Julie Ellison calls the “core curriculum of liberal emotion” that embraced “emoting across the empire”—extended well into the political life of the nineteenth century. Thomas Haskell makes a strong case for just that. He compellingly argues that the market gave rise to “new habits of causal attribution that set the stage for humanitarianism” by making trust and breach of promise central to the character of capitalist social relations. — Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain_ Epistemic…, 403

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to Weberian bureaucracy and Haskell’s market-humanitarianism thesis which resonate with the Frankfurt School material on bureaucracy and instrumental reason.