The Passions and the Interests

In 1977, Hirschman traced a transformation in Western moral philosophy that had governed the relationship between capitalism and human psychology for three centuries. Between the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, European intellectuals gradually replaced the concept of destructive passions — lust, greed, ambition, the violent impulses Machiavelli and Hobbes had catalogued as permanent afflictions of human nature — with the concept of productive interests: calm, rational, predictable motivations that could be harnessed for social benefit. The merchant's greed became the merchant's interest in profit. This transformation produced the moral framework within which capitalism operates: economic activity is civilizing because it channels dangerous passions into productive interests, and productive interests are safe because they are rational, self-regulating. The AI transition has revealed the fragility of this distinction with alarming speed.