William Leiss on the Problem of Needs and Commodities

With William Leiss’s The Limits to Satisfaction: An Essay on the Problem of Needs and Commodities , we have perhaps the most penetrating and sophisticated of recent critiques of civilisation. His analysis owes as much to Weber as to Marx as a sustained exploration of modernity and its peculiar rationality, the rationality of utility, efficiency, need gratification, economic and affectional ties, source of liberation from those historical accidents of class, region, race, religion, sex, ethnicity and nationality, which represent barriers to the self-actualisation of man as species. ‘Modern society represents the first large-scale attempt to found stability and authority not upon the earlier patterns of inherited privilege or traditional associations’, Leiss argues, ‘but rather directly on the achievements of economic production and the satisfaction of needs’ (1976, p. 4). It is taken as axiomatic in this system that intermediate social bonds that stand between the individual and the totality, as represented by the traditional institutions and associations of pre-modern society: family, estate, church, guild, and corporation, merely frustrate a natural identity between ‘the self-interest of the individual, intent upon maximizing the satisfaction of his needs’ and ‘the interest of society as a whole, which is to maximize total productive output’ (p. 4). Economic expansion had its own justifications, as Albert Hirschman ( 1976 ) has convincingly argued: the production of useful things and the channelling off of aggressive instincts into the economic sphere seemed to promise the removal of these irrationalities from the political arena.