Franklin's autobiography demonstrates a truly American kind of businessman, because he so neatly embodies all of the assumptions and logical fallacies that American capitalism depends on in order to justify its dominance in an ostensibly equitable and representative society.
Where Franklin's autobiography demonstrates the peculiar appeal to divine right that is used to justify the inequity of American capitalism, Herman Melville's Bartleby the Scrivener demonstrates the almost willful obtuseness necessary for any apologists of capitalism who must interact with the exploited lower classes on a regular basis. The narrator of Bartleby the Scrivener is entirely unaware of anything outside the extremely limited range of his own preconceived ideas, which is both why Bartleby's passive resistance stuns him so much and he is ultimately unable to come to terms with Bartleby's death. He practically admits as much when he says "the easiest way of life is the best," because the easiest way of life for any white male living in America is to go along with the political and economic hegemony enjoyed by white males, rather than attempt to disrupt that system of injustice (Melville, 1856, p. 3).
The narrator cannot see any reason why Bartleby might not want to perform the rote, low-paying, ultimately meaningless job he has been hired for, because in the narrator's mind, maintaining the status quo by seamlessly fulfilling one's obligations to the larger economic system is the best kind of life available. In other words, the narrator is careful to never let himself see the world outside of his own, management-centric perspective, because otherwise...
This is why Bartleby's refusal to take action to the point of starvation can be seen as a kind of protest against the hegemony of management within a capitalism system; in a space where every action is subject to the surveillance and commentary of a higher-up, the only means of exercising free will is to not exercise it at all.
Benjamin Franklin's autobiography and Herman Melville's Bartleby the Scrivener both offer important insights into the internal ideological function of American capitalism. The texts demonstrate (whether intentionally or unintentionally) how American capitalism attempts to paper over the contradiction between America's rhetorical focus on liberty, equality, and freedom, and its economic focus on profit at the expense of essentially everything else. Franklin embodies the myth of American meritocracy and reveals the appeal to divine right that underlines the legitimacy of the upper classes' economic dominance, while Melville's narrator demonstrates the strict blinders that must be maintained in order to deny the existence of the injustice and inequality that is inherent to capitalism. Taken together, these texts allow one to better understand how the seemingly obvious contradiction between America's ostensible political ideals and its economic realities has far not been able to diminish capitalism's hegemonic control of the country for over two hundred years.
References
Franklin, B. (2008). Autobiography of benjamin franklin. New York: Forgotten Books.
Melville, H. (1856). Bartleby the scrivener. New York: Plain Label Books.
