In The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism (1976), Harvard maverick sociologist Daniel Bell popularized a new lens to grasp, translate and decipher the West’s post-industrial dysfunctions, a three-way slicing of society into ‘realms’ or ‘spheres’: the techno-economic, the cultural, and the political. This triad may be dismissed as a ready-made mold for the eclectic sensibilities of someone who once described himself as “socialist in economics, liberal in politics, and conservative in culture.” But Bell’s analytical tryptic, if well used, can also make sense of his epoch’s upsets and upheavals, and may even prove useful in diagnosing our own. The turmoil of post-1973 America stemmed, in Bell’s view, from an arithmetic inadequacy between the spheres. On the one hand, the country’s libertine counterculture and its leftward-lurching politics had been fomenting a kind of self-gratifying consumerism among the populace. On the other hand, those same hedonistic desires were, by the mid-1970s, proving too expensive to satisfy for the oil-shocked welfare state of the late Great Society. Much like a patient prescribed incompatible drugs or a lab experiment producing a reactive hazard, American social chemistry was being pulled in contradictory directions. The result was a radioactive mix of polarization, discontent, and strife.
Though derided at the time by Marxists and libertarians alike as either facile or over-ambitiously holistic, Bell’s template has outlived its critics. Dispelling the latter’s faith in the self-sustaining nature of Hayek’s spontaneous “extended order,” Bell argued that capitalism could turn, through the culture it unwittingly spawned, against the Protestant ethic that traditionally sustained it. As for the former’s belief that market society would come undone by class war, Bell countered with a more plausible route—again, through culture—to the same endpoint. The reason for Bell’s continued sway is that, while not every phenomenon can be snugly reduced to some underlying articulation between the spheres, a surprising number of radical rebellions, revolutions, and civil wars are better understood when pinned down and traced back to a Bellian “disjunction of the realms.” This is especially true of cultural ruptures.
What current phenomena can be thought of as the product of that asynchrony? In her acidic new polemic, Feminism Against Progress (2023), Mary Harrington argues that the ideology of female empowerment, whilst begat in the culture and the polity, can be best defined, grasped, and contextualized in terms of its relation to the material realm. The UnHerd columnist joins a transatlantic chorus of postliberal voices who, without deserting the necessary culture war against wokeism’s many variants, contend that those avatars will only begin to falter the moment the Right starts to address the socio-economic drivers of our postmodern zeitgeist. The book poses as a treatise against feminism’s umpteenth incarnation, but more crucially, it partakes in a novel right-wing assault on neoliberalism, equally championed by such authors as Sohrab Ahmari and Matthew Schmitz in the U.S. and Adrian Pabst and Nick Timothy in the UK.
Though her debt to him is unwitting, Harrington’s unabashedly materialist paradigm frames feminism—both cultural and political—as a lagging response to the shifts and alterations in Bell’s techno-economic order, such as improvements in productivity and well-being. Whilst that reaction has most often enhanced the material bonanza that spawned it, in other lesser-known instances feminism has stood in reaction to progress, course-correcting instances of overreach and questioning its inner dynamic. Take the Industrial Revolution. In the “cult of domesticity” that preceded England’s industrialization, agrarian labor and the household economy were enmeshed within one another. The home stood as a refuge from the ravages, rigors, and predations of market competition in what Harrington calls an “embedded pre-industrial domain of relational human activity” centered around childcare. Men’s entry into factory work initially shattered this domestic haven through what Harrington calls “enclosure,” a process that broke up the embedded home into disjointed spheres (domesticity on one side and the economics of sustenance on the other). Women, whose domestic chores couldn’t be measured in wage terms, suddenly stood at the mercy of their husbands.
This is where first-wave feminism played a role that today seems unimaginable, and that Harrington urges us to rediscover: it reacted to industrial modernity by (partly) restoring the older, fairer order based on the communal home, a project perhaps best encapsulated in the writings of Mary Wollstonecraft (1759-1797). Early women’s rights groups—Harrington’s model of feminist activism—sought greater recognition of shadow work. They campaigned for women’s ability, when not rearing children, to compete for jobs and recognition on terms of civic equality. They did so without the attendant devaluation of motherhood that defines contemporary feminism, while disputing the assumption that care should be exclusively a female duty. They sought, in other words, “a fair settlement for women” within the evolving techno-economic order—including for mothers. Female voluntarism, too, became a linchpin of 19th century civil society. And as industrialization grinded onwards, so did feminism’s efforts to secure women a status even beyond the traditional family. Whereas in pre-industrial days it had been the indispensable conduit to self-sufficiency, marriage around this time became “a vector for social aspiration,” even as the home remained a space of respite from the potentially sour defeat of those material ambitions. Harrington calls this “big romance,” or “an ideal of lifelong partnership founded on personal affinity and mutual respect that could then serve as a basis for all the work of the family.”
From there onwards, Harrington describes modern feminism as an ambivalent fusion of two factions. “Team interdependence” endeavors to elevate and enhance women’s role as productive members of society without denigrating or dismissing caring duties within the family. “Team freedom,” meanwhile, aims to liberate women from the admittedly self-imposed cage of those roles and obligations, and even to transcend the biological limitations of female embodiment in favor of a fluid conception of ‘gender.’ The movement’s debasement resulted evidently from freedom overtaking interdependence, but when did that inflection happen? Conservatives, notes Harrington, blame feminism for “a thinning social fabric, hollowed out families and a collapsing birth rate.” Yet in her view, they’re not looking far back enough. The invention of the pill and the depenalization of abortion in the 1960s—where “feminism came down unambiguously in favor of market society”—was a long-gestating culmination with antecedents in modernity itself. She impels us to “trace care’s defeat by freedom all the way back to its inception in the material conditions of market society as such.” If by market society she means the onset of manufacturing work, how long before industrialization is she hoping to take us?
It turns out that Harrington is indeed less fond of “big romance” than of its even more embedded predecessor, the “companionate marriage” she traces back to Jane Austen (1775-1817). The anonymous turn-of-century English novelist is known for depicting a world of marital bonds corrosively conditioned by financial and symbolic dependencies, even reciprocally offsetting ones, such as the expectation for a woman of the time to marry a breadwinner, or a childless breadwinner’s need to bequeath his estate to a son that only a wife can provide. Such unions can only be assured a firmer footing, Austen suggested, by unlearning and overcoming Pride and Prejudice (1813), per the title of her magnum opus, namely the biases and expectations surrounding the accident of social class. Austen, however, lends herself to a more traditionalist reading. Yes—for marriage to be healthily nurtured, love, respect and affection should naturally prevail over economic interests, even the common material concerns that “big romance” sprung up to meet contemporaneously. But more importantly, any pretension to marital parity—an aspiration in sync with material affluence—ought to confine that equality to the civic realm, in full recognition that instead of equals, men and women in the home are unequally complementary with respect to reproduction and the rearing of children.
So, when did women’s role in the family—and thus in society—go haywire? Modern feminism’s drive to erase these “normative sexed differences,” in Harrington’s formula, began not with the 1960s sexual revolution. It is instead rooted in the market’s intrusion into the domestic realm at the onset of modern capitalism, which enabled a slippery slope of flattening sexual asymmetries that—yes—infamously culminated with contraceptives and abortion, beginning in the 1960s. “As the industrial era advanced,” writes Harrington, “the social and legal efforts to level the playing field were increasingly supplemented by technological remedies long before the pill.” Restoring the traditional familial order of stable interdependency will therefore require turning the clock back further than feminism’s initial resistance to industrial modernity. Neither does the project run through first-wave feminism’s operational formula, namely, the dangling of new market rigors to be jointly tackled by the family in the hope of eliciting a newfound marital cohesion. To the contrary—and this is Harrington at her zenith of heterodoxy—fixing women’s familial and social roles necessitates extirpating the market out of the home altogether. It requires reversing the corrosion wrought by the industrial era. It demands overturning the past two centuries of the women’s movement, including “big romance” and the first wave she had earlier praised.
This doesn’t mean that the 1960s weren’t singularly harmful in their own way. The rest of Harrington’s book, dealing with this latter period, is every bit as scorching, but somehow less controversial (and harder to review, given the word soup of roughly synonymous terms she employs to define our current predicament, including “progress theology,” “bio-libertarian feminism,” “Meat Lego Gnosticism,” “cyborg theology” and more). It is also the likelier part to earn Harrington some appeal among non-progressive feminists who believe some reaction, if not as severe as what she has earlier outlined, is indeed necessary. Harrington naturally surfs on the trans-skeptic wave. She argues that modern feminism has betrayed women by seeking to overcome sex dimorphism, in pursuit of a fluid version of human nature where femininity is a fungible asset men can-self-identify into. She also panders to the chad-ish, Petersonian male crowd when noting that feminism’s desire to place women on par with men across every domain has deprived the latter of male-only spaces where a healthier vision of masculinity could emerge to dislodge the self-destructiveness wrought by involuntary celibacy and porn addiction.
There are pages that may turn Harrington into a meme of maidenly chastity. She argues that contraception has de-risked and de-enchanted sex, making it hyper-available through the loosening of social mores whilst degrading the average sexual intercourse into a loveless banality (“we must heal our polluted erotic ecologies by rewilding sex”). She’s nowhere near calling for the banning of condoms and the pill, but she comes down severely against hook-up culture, social mediam and dating apps. And then there are the bits, in proper postliberal fashion, that reveal Harrington’s reactionary feminism to be wrapped up into a larger argument about social class and cultural power, such as when she tackles female careerism. The belief that professional advancement, she argues, is a woman’s only path to emancipation whereas motherhood and child rearing amount to servitude is an elitist invention dressed in egalitarian garb that alienates working-class mothers.
Harrington must know a thing or two about being accused of “false consciousness” when rejecting these mantras. Her introduction recounts her youth as a “queer radical” until a spell of unemployment and loneliness around 2008 prompted an existential crisis. She writes movingly of the years-long struggle to barrel out of the “smoking ruins of her queer-theory-inflected, double-liberal, anti-hierarchical idealism.” She eventually got to Damascus through having a child, “the wonderful and disorienting experience of finding one’s sense of self partly merged with a dependent infant.” The boldness and brilliance of her theoretical scaffolding notwithstanding, it is the hardship of Harrington’s conversion that can make her post-liberalism palatable to the uninitiated. She spent her formative years chasing self-emancipatory chimeras, only to find them to be a profoundly sinister mirage. She scraped the “barrel of freedom” long after its “best fruits” had been exhausted. Now she is back within the comforting certainty of limits, summoning us into a future beyond liberalism. See you on the other side.
