To
some, world history can seem a tricky
subject. For one, we have to consider
questions that are not even addressed in a common national history curriculum such
as “American History from 1776-1865.” Questions
such as the role of statehood, the rise and fall of state models, the
cultivation and manipulation of trade/exchange, as well as the nature of
history itself as a method (social science).
Georg Hegel described world history as a subject “not concerned with
general deductions drawn from history, illustrated by particular examples from
it—but with the nature of history itself.”[i] World history is much more than simply
depicting and interpreting external actions and events; it is a process of
reason, culminating into an over-arching theory for not just society, politics,
and economics—it is a process of the development of all ideas through reason. Few books
have I come across in recent years that have the quintessential essence of
Hegel’s historical logic than Giovanni Arrighi’s The Long Twentieth Century, which is the focus of this
review.
This
review is part of a series of reviews I’m writing not only for others but also
for myself, to keep a log of some of the particular texts that have a large or
profound influence on the way I develop my understanding of history in general
as well as my specific field in world history—historical capitalism. This is the first review I’m actually posting
from this series, but is not necessarily the first review written on major
books that I’ve read. I am also engaging
in this project (so to speak) because
of an article in one of the more recent editions of the American Historical
Association’s Perspectives on History. The article, by Seth Denbo, emphasized that history as a subject was losing traction
as a “book discipline” due to “rapid changes” with both “engagement” as well as
“the communication of ideas” among scholars and their students.[ii] Overall, it is important for emerging
scholars and especially historians to consider the utility of the blog format
in order to not only maintain standards of writing and professionalism but also
to maintain flexibility and roots with dominant streams of communication and
student engagement.
Arrighi’s
subtitle to his early 1990s text is “Money, Power, and the Origins of Our
Times,” but the typical reader might be off put when they learn the real
meaning of Arrighi’s overall title; “The Long Twentieth Century.” Arrighi’s work stems from two schools of
thought primarily, a tradition following Braudel and Immanuel Wallerstein, and
a tradition following Joseph Schumpeter; all of whom examined what Wallerstein
described as “historical capitalism.”[iii]
Arrighi’s title comes from Braudel’s
notion of a longue durée, or a prolonged
period of historical development outside the strict confines of “centuries.” Braudel credited his concept to Karl Marx,
stating that it was ultimately his “true genius.”[iv] Because of this, Arrighi’s “Twentieth Century”
spans nearly 450 years, from the mid-16th century to the late 1980s,
and with good reason. Arrighi’s central
concern, made clear in his preface, is an attempt to examine the confusion and
bewilderment by social historians over the rapid development of a flexible
economic order with hegemonic control remaining in the West, and no possible
hint of an overall collapse:
“Over the last quarter of a century something fundamental
seems to have changed in the way in which capitalism works. In the 1970s, many spoke of crisis. In the 1980s, most spoke of restructuring and
reorganization. In the 1990s, we are no
longer sure that the crisis of the 1970s was really resolved and the view has
begun to spread that capitalist history might be at a decisive turning point.”[v]
On this premise, we are invited to understand the
development of capitalism from a big scale view—one where the immediate
instances of crises actually are found to have a pattern, rooted in the very
development of capitalism as a world-system.
Expanding onto the works of David Harvey and
other 20th century Marxist economists/social theorists, Arrighi
described the perceived rigidity of the Fordist-Keynesian period of the
1920s-1960s as an illusion: its rigidity
was one sway of a larger process between flexible and structural capital
investment. These fluctuations exist on
the larger, “long twentieth century” scale, and can be read “as a restatement
of Karl Marx’s general formula of capital: MCM’.” This is directly related with the
long-standing notion that Marx’s reduction of capitalism’s overall crisis,
the tendency for the rate of profit to fall (P), was proven false by the 1970s. Even recent publications such as Thomas
Picketty’s Capital in the 21st
Century alluded to such an idea because of the fact that “after the
initial boom of mechanization, the most advanced kind of capitalism reverted to
eclecticism—to an indivisibility of interests.”[vi] Referencing the bounce-back of capital gains
during the 1980s, the seemingly flexible nature of world capitalism appeared to defy the long-standing
perception of an overall crisis. In other words, it appeared that capitalism was adaptive as opposed to rigidly fixed. Utilizing a longer time scale, however, Arrighi suggested that Marx’s formula for capital contained the explanation of capitalism' flexibility long
before Marx even addressed P, two volumes later in Das Kapital:
“Marx’s formula tells us that capitalist agencies do not
invest money in particular input-output combinations, with all the attendant
loss of flexibility and freedom of choice, as an end in itself. Rather, they do so as a means towards the end of securing an even greater flexibility and
freedom of choice at some future point.
Marx’s formula also tells us that if there is no expectation on the part
of capitalist agencies that their freedom of choice will increase, or if this
expectation is systematically unfulfilled, capital tends to revert to more flexible forms of investment.”[vii]
In other words, we can understand the flexible nature of
capitalism as a system if we simply accept that P (the tendency for the rate of
profit to fall) explains the cause of
this flexibility, as opposed to being the reason
for its rigidity and supposed-necessary crisis.
Capitalist agencies “prefer liquidity,” but need periods of rigidity to
maximize the potential flexibility at
some future point.
Arrighi
uses the oscillating phases of Marx’s MCM’ formula throughout the text to
continue to explain the development of “material expansion” versus “financial
expansion.” Material expansion finds its
highest levels of success in (MC) phases of production, where “the capitalist
world economy grows along a single developmental path,” while financial
expansion sees success only after “the established path has attained or is
attaining its limits, and the capitalist world economy shifts through radical
restructurings and reorganization onto another path.”[viii] It is precisely these “radical restructurings
and reorganization” that direct Arrighi towards his sense of historical
agency. Examining the three major
hegemonies of historical capitalism, Arrighi draws on the dynamic shifts—both internal
and external—to the capitalist world system under, first, the Italian
City-States during the Renaissance, second, the rise of Dutch trading and its
supremacy under the English/British, and third, the global hegemonic order
established by the United States.
Mixed
into the shifts of capital investment during this time, however, Arrighi does
take the time to address periods of state-formation which highlight the various
regime orders that existed throughout capitalism as a world-system. In doing so, he makes some very powerful
observations and arguments by building off the works of Wallerstein and Janet
Abu Lughod. By discussing the
development of capital alongside state-formation, Arrighi coaxes the reader
into the notion that the two are directly linked; a prime example being his
explanation of why Europeans discovered America:
“It follows that the expected benefits for Portugal and other
European states of discovering and controlling a direct route to the East were
incomparably greater than the expected benefits of discovering and controlling
a direct route to the West were for the Chinese state. Christopher Columbus stumbled on the
Americans because he and his Castilian sponsors had treasure to receive in the
East. Cheng Ho was not so lucky because
there was no treasure to retrieve in the West.”[ix]
Following Arrighi’s logic to its natural conclusion, the “West
was won” by simply a matter of beneficial economics working through the powers
and accumulated wealth of states. It
should not be considered, however,
that Arrighi is suggesting that agencies of capital and agencies of statehood
operate on the same motives, nor that states themselves always operate on the
same developmental path. In fact,
Arrighi splits the motives for power into two categories.
“Capitalism,”
for Arrighi, represents the first and primary strategy for state-formation and “logic
of power.” It is contrasted with “territorialism,”
which seeks “control over territory and population.” The "territorialist" logic of power utilizes mobile
capital and the flexibility of exchange as a means to an end: “mobile capital
[is] the means of state- and war-making.”
For the "capitalist" logic of power, “the relationship between ends and means
is turned upside down….and control over territory and population” become the
means for advancing capital return.[x] This not only explains the aforementioned
example of how the West was “won,” but also the variances of state formations
throughout the world-system in all its regions; the Core, the Semi-Periphery,
and the Periphery (Third World).
Arrighi
concludes his text by reminding readers of the persistent crises in capitalism as
illustrated by former great thinkers.
Rather than perceive "crisis" as a single, history-defining event, Arrighi poses to us
the suggestion that crises are not only a recurring tendency of capitalism, but also serve as
a self-balancing mechanism which allow flexibility of investment, which then
sustain capitalism by handicapping
it. In other words, Schumpeter’s 1941
suggestion that capitalism might survive another prolonged run of development
has “been proven right; but the chances are that over the next half century or
so, history will also prove right his contention that every successful run
creates conditions under which it becomes more and more difficult for
capitalism to survive.”[xi] This further highlights a powerful argument
against perceptions of an unfettered, anarchistic capitalism:
“Such an institution could not exist for any length of time
without annihilating the human and natural substance of society; it would have
physically destroyed man and transformed his surroundings into wilderness. Inevitably, society took measures to protect
itself, but whatever measures it took impaired the self-regulation of the
market, disorganized industrial and agricultural life, and thus endangered
society in yet another way. It was this
dilemma which forced the development of the market system into a definite
groove and finally disrupted the social organization based upon it.”
Tracing the development of historical
capitalism across three hegemonic epochs and examining the world-system from
the top down (that is, from the Core to the Periphery), Arrighi sets a gold
standard for examining world history that could effectively replace the
traditional Western Civilizational
approach. For too long history has been
a narrative of nation versus nation, people versus people. Arrighi’s text challenges that perception by
examining social order versus social order, and class versus class. Nations, statehood, and people are the
agencies by which social orders and classes act, or cause, history. Hegel would
certainly appreciate Arrighi’s contribution here, as it breaches further away
from the “original history” of Herodotus and Livy, the “reflective history” of
Braudel and Wallerstein, and instead embodies “philosophical history;” or—to paraphrase
Hegel—a strand of history that is both conscious of itself and conscious of its
effect on social ideas.
[i]
Hegel. “The Three Methods of Writing
History,” in Reason in History: A General
Introduction to the Philosophy of History (New York: Bobbs-Merrill Inc,
1953), 3
[ii]
Denbo, Seth. “History as a Book
Discipline” in Perspectives on History,
Vol. 53, No. 4 (April 2015), 19
[iii] See: Wallerstein, Immanuel. Historical
Capitalism (New York: Verso, 1983)
[iv] Braudel,
“History and the Social Sciences” in On
History, p. 50-51
[v]
Arrighi, Giovanni. The Long Twentieth Century (New York: Verso, 1993), 1
[vi]
Braudel. The Long Seventieth Century, quoted in Arrighi, 5
[vii]
Arrighi, 5
[viii]
Ibid, 9
[ix]
Ibid, 35
[x]
Ibid, 34-36
[xi]
Ibid, 325
No comments:
Post a Comment