5 - Angels of the State

Summary

By the end of the Second World War, the professional class presided over a massive alignment of national and global institutions with virtue capitalism. This global ‘welfare state’ moment makes it seem that virtue capitalism went hand in hand with state control. However, professionals were often ambivalent about their connection to the state. When Canada first ventured into nationalised healthcare, for example, doctors in Saskatchewan went on strike to avoid it. Despite often rejecting state interference, which many professionals feared might impede the integrity of their work, professionals held a moral relationship between knowing and doing, where they sought to use expertise to effect material change in the world and in individual lives. Such technocratic planning was fundamentally moral, embedding into mid-twentieth century capitalism the internalized, disciplining practices known as governmentality. Professionals were, to use Giorgio Agamben’s framing of the governmental economy, angels of the state. Human capital investment entangled industry, military, and education but, perhaps most importantly, led to an internalized, universal industriousness. The material effects of this ‘angelic’ work were sometimes deeply damaging, building social and economic ‘dependencies’ through the economy that mirrored, in individual lives, the hierarchies constructed by the colonial world.