Transcribimos una reseña del reciente libro de Steven
G. Marks, The Information Nexus: Global Capitalism from the Renaissance to the Present.
New York: Cambridge University Press, 2016. xiv + 250 pp. $28
(paperback), ISBN: 978-1-107-51963-3. Steven Marks es profesor de historia en Clemson University, South Carolina, y escribió sobre historia económica y cultural de Rusia, incluyendo How Russia Shaped the Modern World (2003), y Road to Power (1991).
The Information Nexus: Global Capitalism from the Renaissance to the Present fue reseñado para EH.Net por Leonard Dudley (Université de
Montréal), quien es autor de Mothers of Innovation: How Expanding
Social Networks Gave Birth to the Industrial Revolution (Cambridge
Scholars, 2012) y “Language Standardization and the Industrial Revolution,” Oxford
Economic Papers (forthcoming).
En
la reseña que realizó Dudley de la obra de Marks leemos "In this disruptive study, Clemson
University historian Steven Marks redefines capitalism by breathing new life
into concepts recycled from nineteenth-century German sociology. In 1877 a
young German philosopher, Ferdinand Tönnies, published Community and
Civil Society, a book based on his habilitation thesis. Tönnies contrasted
two types of social structure, each of which he had come to know during the
preceding years of dramatic and often violent change in German society.
The Gemeinschaft, or community, was an “organic” society like that
of the small town in an agricultural region of northern Germany where he had
grown up. Here relationships were “natural,” governed by the proximity of
family, neighbors and friends. In contrast, the Gesellschaft, or
civil society, was the “mechanical” industrial society like that of the cities
he had come to know as a student living in different regions of Germany.
Whereas relationships in theGemeinschaft were governed by
familiarity and custom, those in the capitalist Gesellschaft were
determined by markets and prices.
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In The
Information Nexus, Steven Marks presents a very similar dichotomy between
two types of society. In pre-capitalist societies of medieval Europe or China,
he argues, while there were local markets and long-distance trade, the flow of
information was limited either by technology or government policy. The first
true capitalist economies appeared in the Dutch Republic and England/Great Britain
in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, where unrestricted publication
permitted the rapid circulation of information among a literate population.
Although Marks criticizes the “reductionist” approach of the German
sociologists (p. 53), Tönnies too distinguished capitalist from non-capitalist
economies by the nature of their information technologies. Tönnies’s Gemeinschaft is
bound together by oral communication — “the general use of a shared language” —
whereas at the initial core of his Gesellschaft lie two of
Gutenberg’s offspring, printed debt instruments and newspapers.
The
Information Nexus is
divided into two sections, each of which is composed of three self-standing
essays. In the Part I, Marks presents a review and critique of previous studies
of capitalism. Chapter 1 describes the origin of the word capitalism itself.
Writing in 1850, French socialist Louis Blanc defined it as the appropriation
of capital by the few, whereas in 1911 for German social scientist Werner
Sombart, capitalism was control by the Jews. In Chapter 2, Marks proceeds to a
description of changes in the meaning of the term capitalism in the United
States over the twentieth century. From 1917 onward, capitalism came to
represent the American political and economic system in contrast to the
communism of Russia or the Soviet Union. In Chapter 3, the author then
criticizes previous studies, arguing that features often identified with
capitalism — the protection of property, the presence of a monetized commercial
economy and production based on the division of labor — are all to be found in
many pre-capitalist societies.
In
the Part II, Marks offers his own definition of the concept of capitalism. The
reader learns in Chapter 4 that the essence of capitalism in the early-modern
period was the “free flow of information about capital markets and business
opportunities” (p. 100). Although there were precedents in the
Renaissance Italian city states, as mentioned, the crucial development came in
seventeenth-century United Provinces and England. In Chapter 5, the story then
jumps to the Second Industrial Revolution in the United States. After 1850, in
rapid succession, Marks explains, the railroad, the telegraph, the telephone,
the typewriter, the large-circulation newspaper and radio made possible the
mass market in what became world’s largest economy. Finally, in Chapter 6,
Marks turns to current trends in the global economy. He recognizes that
automation and globalization present challenges for the rich world. However,
the digital revolution holds great promise for emerging economies — provided
that their governments permit the “clear signaling of rules and prices.” China,
he asserts, despite its rapid economic growth, is having difficulty in
switching from imitation to innovation, in part because “government intrusion …
raises transaction costs and hampers the flow of information” (p. 227).
Marks concludes that capitalism is essentially “informationism” — an
“intensification of information gathering” (p. 234). Its presence in Europe
and its offshoots along with its absence elsewhere account for the “great
divergence” between the West and the rest over the past 400 years.
The
Information Nexus is
a remarkable study, not only for the power of its message, but also for the
clarity of its prose and for the vast field of research compressed into its 250
pages. However, I suggest three additions that would help to complete Marks’s
story of the rise of capitalism. A first point is the role of language. It is
hard to imagine the efficient functioning of financial markets without the
standardization of the vernacular — first written and then spoken — as
described by Milroy (1994) for the case of England.
A
second point concerns cooperation. Although Marks emphasizes price competition,
it required a high willingness to cooperate in order for capitalist markets to
function efficiently. Paradoxically, it was the intense military tournament
between emerging nation states in Europe described by Philip T. Hoffman (2015)
that seems to have provided the incentive for the citizens of each state to
work together to improve their nation’s position. David Hounshell (1984), for
example, has described how the collaboration between the French and American
governments and their private entrepreneurs led to the development of
interchangeable parts during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.
A
final issue is innovation. Ultimately it was the unprecedented divergence in
innovation rates between capitalist and non-capitalist societies that led to
dominance of the West. Marks mentions the Industrial Revolution only briefly,
and fails to discuss the unprecedented burst of technological creativity
between 1700 and 1850 described by Mokyr (1990).
As
the late William McNeill (1963, p. 567) observed, “the career of Western
civilization since 1500 appears a vast explosion, far greater than any
comparable phenomenon in the past both in geographic range and in social
depth.” Steven Marks’s study of the role of information flows in the creation
of this capitalist Gesellschaft definitely merits a place on
history bookshelves, whether real or virtual.”
Referencias:
Philip
T. Hoffman, Why Did Europe Conquer the World? Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 2015.
David
Hounshell, From the American System to Mass Production, 1800-1932: The
Development of Manufacturing Technology in the United States. Baltimore:
Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985.
William
McNeill, The Rise of the West: A History of the Human Community.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1963.
James
Milroy, “The Notion of ‘Standard Language’ and its Applicability to the Study
of Early Modern English Pronunciation,” in Dieter Stein and Ingrid Tieken-Boon
van Ostade, eds., Towards a Standard English, 1600-1800. Berlin:
Mouton de Gruyter, 1994, 19-30.
Joel
Mokyr, The Lever of Riches: Technological Creativity and Economic
Progress. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990.
Ferdinand
Tönnies, Community and Civil Society. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2001 (original 1887).
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