How Societies Change: The Modern Era
THIS IS THE FOURTH CHAPTER OF DANIEL CHIROT’S HOW SOCIETIES CHANGE.
THE PRINTED TEXT CAN BE FOUND IN THE BOOK WITH THIS TITLE PUBLISHED BY SAGE IN 2011.
4
THE MODERN ERA
The quantitative changes in human societies produced by the advent of the modern industrial age are staggering. We have already seen that whereas the human population went up roughly tenfold over the 7,000 years from the invention of agriculture until about 1000 BCE, and that it took another 2500 years for the population to go up another tenfold, but it took only about 300 years from 1700 to 2000 to go up yet another tenfold or more. Even though population growth first began accelerating quickly in Europe, tripling in the 200 years from 1700 to 1900, and going up at least fourfold if the European migrants to the Americas are counted as Europeans, in the 20th century the rest of the world’s population grew at an even faster rate. In fact, in the 1900s the world’s human population went up over fourfold, and outside of Europe it grew much faster than that. (See Chart 3.1 in the previous chapter.) All this took place despite the fact that the 20th century was full of terribly deadly wars and massacres of millions for political purposes. This was the direct result of the amazing technological progress that took place. These increased the food supply as well as the means of communication that allowed food to be rushed to places where inclement weather would otherwise have created famines, but also the understanding of how disease works and the spread of basic health measures hugely decreased infant mortality. This was the main cause of the immense surge in human numbers in the 20th century.
Other indicators of growth show similarly astonishing changes. In 1800, well over 90% of the human population lived in rural villages or very small towns, and most of these people were peasants. On the whole, whether in Europe or elsewhere, they worked hard, were not free to move as they pleased or to dispose of their goods as they wished, paid high taxes to their lords, were illiterate, and had no foreseeable way of improving their lives. They had many children, but half, or in bad times even more, died before they reached the age of five.
By the early 21st century in Europe, North America, Australia and New Zealand, Japan, and the other most advanced societies of East Asia or the Middle East, the vast majority of people live in cities or their adjacent suburbs. Almost all adults are literate. They have far fewer children, but almost all of them survive into adulthood. They pay an even higher portion of what they make in taxes than their peasant ancestors, but disposable income has gone up so much that the average inhabitant in these advanced societies has large amounts of money left over after paying for taxes and necessities. Much of the income of modern people is spent on what would have been considered unbelievable luxuries in the past: private cars; holiday trips; well-heated, clean, and spacious housing; durable and well-tailored clothing; immense varieties of healthy food available at low prices; and medical care that allows most people to live comfortably and productively into their 60s, 70s, and in increasing numbers, even into their 80s. In the 21st century, these benefits are spreading ever more widely and now include growing portions of the population in China, India, other parts of Asia, and Latin America. It is a natural human propensity to complain and to claim that the present is worse than the past. But no one who has actually lived in an authentic, vermin-infested, socially and politically oppressive agrarian village and compared this to life in a modern society can have many doubts about which one most people would prefer.
A proof of this is that the people from the remaining poor societies in the world have shown a strong tendency to want to migrate to their own growing cities or to the advanced parts of the world. This is how the United States was populated by European immigrants fleeing from the poorer parts of western Europe, then later from central and eastern Europe, and then from East and Southeast Asia, and from Latin America. The cities of western Europe were also filled by people from the hinterland escaping rural poverty, boredom, and social conservatism and repression, and this pattern continues as western Europe is now the target of migrations from the poorer parts of Europe, Africa, and Asia.
Within poorer countries themselves the old agrarian civilizations are breaking down, and societies in the early 21st century have become far more urban, far richer, more mobile, and more literate. In the first decade of the 21st century, for the first time in human history, more than half the world’s population lived in cities or their suburbs. Over 75% to 80% of the population in economically advanced societies now lives in cities or suburbs. But even less advanced societies are becoming urbanized. Over half of the people in the Middle East and Latin America and over one-third of those in Africa are urban. Even in the last large reservoirs of peasant life in East, Southeast and South Asia, at least one-third of the population is urban. In China, close to one-half of all people live in cities or suburbs, and the urban population is still growing quickly, and even in India the proportion of urbanites is 30 percent, more than double what it was a couple of decades ago.
Without huge improvements in agricultural technology, of course, it would have been impossible for most people to cease being food producers. Now, in the most advanced countries 2% to 5% of the working population grows food, and they produce almost unmanageable surpluses.
Despite the widespread belief that world poverty is increasing, this is simply not true. Between 1950 and 1980, per capita production in Asia and Latin America roughly doubled, and the rate of growth since then has accelerated, especially for the largest countries in those areas, i.e., Brazil, China, and India. Since the 1980s, China and India, the world’s two largest countries with a total of about 2.4 billion people in 2010 (35% of the global total) have had economic growth rates of between 8% and 10% a year, something unprecedented in human history. In the 2000s, Brazil’s growth rate has been slower, but at about 5% a year it is still faster than that of the United States or Europe. These areas are experiencing an economic growth rate about three to four times faster that of the most advanced western countries in the second half of the 19th century when industrialization and prosperity were increasing with then unprecedented speed. It is not that the formerly rich countries have become poorer, because they have also continued to become wealthier despite periodic economic crises, but their rate of growth is now far slower than that of the most dynamic economies, most notably China and India’s.
To be sure there are parts of the world that have not benefited. Much of Africa has had either slow per capita economic growth or none at all. That is also true for some Asian countries, notably Burma (now officially called Myanmar), Afghanistan, and perhaps part of Central Asia. In the Americas, Haiti has made little or no progress. As the population continues to grow in these places, the average person today is poorer than some decades ago. This presents a challenge to the world, but hardly means that the average person in the non-western world is poorer because the astounding growth in the most highly populated Asian countries means that the gap between them and the advanced West has actually begun to close.
The modernization that began in western Europe has now spread throughout most of the world and irrevocably changed societies. This is because West European societies evolved a way of life that produces stronger and better adapted societies than those that existed before. This hardly means that other societies are on their way to being physically exterminated by the Europeans, but that their cultures and social systems have been irrevocably altered.
It would be possible to give production statistics that underlie the vast progress made during the modern era: steel production, tons of coal mined, square meters of cloth manufactured, numbers of automobiles that have rolled off assembly lines, and so on. As far as most of us are concerned, however, it is not such production figures that matter but how our lives and the perception of our lives have changed.
Emphasizing the purely material aspects of change in the modern era can be misleading. If most people are better off than their ancestors, this does not mean that problems associated with modernization do not exist. On the contrary, the rapidity of change has had a wrenching effect on all the societies affected. Even in the most advanced parts of Europe these changes have occurred only in the past six to eight generations, and throughout most of the world, only in the past two to three generations. Thus, human societies have not yet had time to absorb the consequences of all these transformations or to find workable solutions to all the problems they have produced. After all, it took 2,000 years for agrarian-state societies to work out religious and ideological solutions to the moral problems raised by the changes they brought about. It will take at least a few centuries for modern industrial social systems to do the same.
Furthermore, the intellectual, religious, and political elites who produce the ideas through which human societies interpret their world have been far from universally happy about modernization. Many have devoted their lives over the past 200 years to resisting modernization, denigrating it, and proposing ways of reorganizing societies to nullify the effects of capitalism, markets, and industrialization. If material progress throughout the modern era had always been smooth, without periodic crises, and if it had been evenly distributed, so that all parts of every society had gained at an equal rate, these resisting and protesting elites would have had few followers. But social change in the modern era has been anything but smooth and evenly distributed.
It is to the problems raised by modernization, and some new, or returned negative aspects that we must now turn in order to better understand social and cultural change in the past two centuries.
The Industrial Revolution is usually thought to have begun in England in about 1780. Though no economic change can be dated precisely, it is certain that between 1760 and 1800 a major change took place. Wool and linen cloth manufacturing were vastly surpassed by the production of manufactured cotton cloth, and this cotton cloth started to be made in factories that were more mechanized than any large-scale manufacturing process had ever been before. In the 1750s to 1770s, England, which cannot grow cotton because it is too cold, imported an average of 1,000 to 3,000 metric tons of cotton per year, mostly from India. By 1790, that number shot up to 14,000 tons per year; by 1800 to 24,000; by 1810 to 56,000; and by 1840 to 208,000 tons. By 1840, the South in the United States had become the world’s major producer of cotton. The spectacular inventiveness of entrepreneurs in England yielded a long set of mechanical improvements that allowed cloth to be made faster, better, and more cheaply than ever before in human history, so that English cloth exports gained markets all over the world. Other advanced European countries and eventually the United States imitated England’s technology, but it took decades to catch up. During this time the English combined their advantage in cloth making with their older skills in shipping and long-distance trade to become by far the dominant economic power in the world. None of this would have been possible if private entrepreneurship had not been considered legitimate or if profits had been restricted for social reasons.
Yet even in England the social changes produced by this transformation were resisted. The increasing marketization of land and agricultural products forced out inefficient producers and broke up village communities. The English tried to pass welfare laws that would subsidize those who stayed in their native villages and small towns. But the pressures of the market were too strong, and those who considered capitalism legitimate were now too powerfully entrenched. Allowing labor mobility was as important a part of the growth of the English economy as allowing owners of capital to invest and sell as they wished, and restrictive laws that tried to keep poor villagers at home were removed to allow free entry into the factory labor force.
The first phase of the industrial era, based on improvements in textile manufacturing, lasted from about the 1780s until the 1830s and 1840s. But already by the 1820s it had produced the first of the great, periodic crises that have always marked the industrial era, and continue to this day. Excess investment in textile production, increasing competition, both in England and in other European countries, and relative saturation of the market meant that the less efficient producers were driven into bankruptcy.
In the early days of the textile cycle of the industrial age, less modern, less mechanized producers had been able to benefit from the general boom. Now those small artisans and producers who could not keep up with the costs of further mechanical improvements were ruined, thus throwing many workers and independent small owners of looms out of work.
It was the observation of the social crisis that this produced in the 1820s and 1830s in England and, about a decade later, through the 1840s in other textile centers of western Europe, that led Karl Marx to develop his theories about how capitalism would fail. With time, new technological improvements would yield ever less of a return as they were copied, and to keep up with the competition, manufacturers would be obliged to cut wages. The workers would become impoverished. But meanwhile the fantastic efficiency of capitalist competition would also ruin old-fashioned independent artisans and producers too weak to keep up with the rising cost of new machinery. So, in the end, a few very efficient manufacturers would take over the entire economy, while the rest of the population would be forced to become very poor, virtually enslaved workers.
This was a dark vision that promised that industrial society would be even poorer and less free than agrarian societies, where at least peasants were somewhat protected by their village communities and customs. But redemption could come through revolution. Eventually, the workers would organize to overthrow the system, and there would be socialism. Thus the beneficial technological ingenuity of modern capitalism would be harnessed by socially aware forces; the irrationalities of overproduction and the inequities of early capitalism would be eradicated. Furthermore, the modern sense of alienation, of separation from community and morality imposed by the ruthlessness of market forces, would be overcome in socialism. The supposed warmth of the original, pre-industrial family and village would be recreated.
It was a view of history that was quite similar to the Christian vision. In the beginning, said Marx, there was perfect equality and a strong sense of community, a kind of Garden of Eden. Then, with the coming of agrarian societies, there was the invention of private property, of social stratification, and of inequality and oppression. The few with power and property used these to enrich themselves while the masses were enslaved. Capitalism was making the situation even worse and destroying what was left of community and social solidarity by intensifying competition and greed. But then a prophet, Karl Marx, would come to show the way to a better future. Eventually there would be a great battle between the forces of good and evil, a kind of apocalyptic Armageddon. The struggle would be won by the forces of good, that is the Marxist socialists, and humanity would be saved; it would return to a paradise in which all property would be communal, there would be perfect equality, and general happiness would reign.
No 19th century social thinker proposed as seductive a vision as Karl Marx, and none was as influential in the 20th century. Marxists always claimed to be hostile to religion. Indeed they were, but that was because they offered their own substitute faith. They claimed that they had scientific proof, based on the study of economic history, that their vision would prove correct. But in reality, this was the first of the great new religions thrown up by the Industrial Revolution, based on as much wishful thinking as the faiths it was supposed to replace. We will see what it led to.
Marx’s vision was based on a complete misunderstanding of industrial cycles. The progress of capitalism did not cease with the growing troubles of the textile-led economy. A new “high-tech” product was invented, the railroad, that became, literally as well as figuratively, the engine of an enormous new burst of growth. The railroad, unlike the mechanical loom, was an invention that was out in the open for everyone to see, and it was a marvel of modern engineering. It made cheap and rapid land transportation available for the first time in human history. It brought remote regions into contact with the rest of the world. It greatly lowered the cost of transporting people and bulk goods. Thus it revolutionized all aspects of the economy and brought modernization everywhere it went.
Along with railroads there had to be a variety of other industrial products. Demand for iron and coal went up. Steam engines were perfected, and this had an effect on all spheres of production.
In the second cycle of the industrial era, which lasted from the 1840s to the 1870s, the railroad and iron cycle, England continued to dominate the world. It was able to use its accumulated capital and expertise in engineering, commerce, and manufacturing in the new industries. The wave of social unrest that had troubled much of western Europe from the 1820s to the 1840s died down as new jobs were created, new industries flourished, and general prosperity returned.
Then in the early 1870s another collapse occurred. By now transportation and communications were much better, and the European economies were more closely tied with each other and with that of the United States, so that a nearly simultaneous depression rolled over the entire advanced world. There had been too much railroad construction, and many companies went bankrupt. The boom had created too much supply of many goods, and a string of bankruptcies ensued. Stock markets crashed in 1873, and once again it began to seem that Marx’s predictions were right. Capitalism was in crisis and might soon come to an end as labor militancy rose, and the threat of socialist revolution began to frighten the authorities.
But the passing of the second industrial cycle in the 1870s only heralded the start of a third phase. This time, the leading “high-tech” products were organic chemicals (used at first to produce dyes for textiles), steel (which replaced iron), and, in the 1880s, electrical machinery.
Just as railroads had seemed a fantastic product of high technology, so did the new discoveries bring about more wonders. This time, however, there was something new. Textile manufacturing had used not advanced science but inspired tinkering and clever entrepreneurship to make its advances. Railroads were much closer to being a product of genuine scientific progress, but even there, the actual scientific knowledge required to make such machines, if not yet the engineering, had been available for many decades. But with the advent of organic chemistry as a vital component of industry, pure scientific research came into its own. It required advanced scientists to keep up with what was going on, and the first society to actively finance research into this area through its universities, Germany, gained a huge advantage. From the last part of the 19th century on, the relationship between science and technology became much more direct, and only those societies willing and able to finance scientific research could hope to keep up. This meant that scientific research now had to receive much more financing than ever before, from both governments and private firms eager to find new processes and products.
The third industrial cycle also saw something else. Contrary to the expectations of Karl Marx and other foes of capitalism, the most advanced industries no longer needed just masses of poorly paid unskilled laborers. Growing technological sophistication required a better educated workforce.
It is not surprising, therefore, that the two western societies that invested the most in the late 19th century in research universities and in giving a larger proportion of their population a sound secondary education, the United States and Germany, moved ahead of England. England did not lose ground in any absolute sense, but it grew more slowly and lost its primary position in the world economy.
But the intense international competition produced by Germany’s rise as the major European economy increased tensions. This was combined with an interpretation of Charles Darwin’s work (first published in 1859) that made intellectuals and leaders believe that nations were locked in the same kinds of competition for survival as biological organisms. The belief that to be fit and survive it was necessary to expand produced not only a mad race for colonies outside of Europe but also an armaments race, and eventually the First World War.
This war, which went from 1914 to 1918, marked the end of the third industrial cycle, and again produced widespread belief that capitalism and its attendant political innovations, democracy, and greater respect for individual freedom, were now obsolete. Yet once again, despite the difficulty of adjusting to a new industrial cycle, capitalism did not end. In the 1920s and 1930s there began the fourth period, the age of automobiles, petrochemicals, and mass-produced electrical consumer goods. This started in the United States and was marked by an enormous increase in the availability of high-technology popular goods such as refrigerators, cars, and radios. World War II, fought from 1939 to 1945, interrupted this cycle, but it resumed again in the 1950s and spread its benefits to large parts of the world. Huge advances in airplane technology made rapid transportation throughout the world possible. Another important aspect of this cycle was the growing importance of services, and contrary to Marxist predictions, employment in service jobs actually surpassed industrial working class employment, thus creating a class structure quite different from what had seemed to be the future in earlier industrial cycles. In this period, the world economy was dominated by the United States.
By about 1970, however, new signs of trouble began to appear. Competitors in Japan and western Europe were gaining ground on the United States. Throughout the formerly most advanced industrial parts of the world, obsolete plants with highly paid workers were starting to lose money. New factories and entire new industries sprang up, making the industrial giants of the previous industrial cycles vulnerable. Just as the textile manufacturing heartland of England had suffered at the time of the end of the first industrial cycle, so now the Middle West of the United States, and the industrial cities of Great Britain, northern France, Belgium, and the Ruhr Valley of Germany faced declining employment, intense pressure to lower high wages, and a string of bankruptcies of venerable old firms. Within the United States, new industrial regions in the West and South prospered while old centers declined. In Germany, it was Bavaria that made gains against the older industrial centers. But because of the crisis in the old centers of industrial production there was again a sense that capitalism was on the verge of failure. As always at the end of one industrial cycle and the start of another, uncertainty produced growing social unrest in the 1960s and 1970s. This period also saw the high point of Marxism.
Marxist revolutionaries had taken power in Russia in 1917, in eastern Europe after 1945, in China in 1949, in North Vietnam in 1954, in Cuba in 1959, and in South Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia after a long war against the United States in 1975. It began to seem that Marxist socialism was the inevitable future of the world and that capitalism was doomed to decline in crisis and internal unrest. But this was no more the case in the 1970s than it had been in the 1920s and 1930s, in the 1870s and 1880s, or in the 1830s and 1840s.
Instead, the 1970s saw the start of the fifth industrial cycle. This period was dominated by electronics and the computer revolution. It also saw the growth of a new industry that was destined to play an even bigger role in the sixth cycle, biotechnology. The basis of the computer revolution was first of all the transistor and then the silicon computer chip. As in past industrial cycles, innovations in one area spread quickly to others. Automobile, machine tool, and textile manufacturing were all revolutionized by the new technologies. Computers have made communications fantastically faster than ever before and have made it possible to store and manipulate giant amounts of information. This in turn has changed business practices as well as accelerated scientific research.
But the momentous changes in our understanding of biology also began during this period. Advances in fundamental theoretical biology in the 1950s and the discovery of how genes work led in the 1980s and 1990s to the start of a whole new branch of the economy. Biomedical manufacturing began to change health care, agriculture, and other aspects of economic life. It also began to produce miracle medical products as dramatic as those that came in the first half of the 20th century when a variety of infectious diseases were brought under control. Whereas the world demand for certain goods, such as food, textiles, televisions, or cars can reach an upper limit, the demand for greater health and longevity is unlikely to be sated at any time soon. Those who believed in the past that capitalism was doomed because of overproduction and sated demand were proved as wrong this time as in the past.
For reasons that are not entirely clear, but probably have something to do with generational changes, each of the cycles has lasted about 30 to 60 years, from one to two generations. It may be that once a new period begins, it takes a full generation for people to get used to it, and then the next generation, or the one after that begins to look for new solutions to accumulating problems. These are not just scientific or technological issues, as science and technology advance more or less continuously, but institutional ones. Political systems, social mores, and cultural values tend to be inherently conservative and resist changes until forced to adapt. In the pre-industrial past, this took very long periods of time, but even in the rapidly moving modern era, it still does not take place easily or quickly. As science and technology now change very fast, a generation or two seem like a long time, but social and institutional change still consistently lag behind technology because it takes that long for peoples’ orientations and habits to adapt.
In the first decade of the 21st century, the fifth industrial cycle started running into serious problems. One reason was that despite the fantastic advances of the previous period, institutions in the leading countries did not adapt well to what had happened. As usual, some older firms found themselves bypassed by new products, conservative political institutions resisted change, and investments went too much into well-established but not very productive areas. Interestingly, what provoked the financial and economic crash of 2008, the most severe economic downturn since the 1930s, was overinvestment and speculation in real estate in most of the advanced capitalist economies. Instead of finding new ways of funding health care to take advantage of new discoveries, and of increasing funding for higher education and research, money poured into dubious financial instruments and unsound mortgages. This is exactly what Karl Marx had predicted would spell the ultimate end of capitalism, and once more, critics said this heralded the death of that system.
In fact, we are now just starting to enter a sixth industrial age that will probably pick up steam in the 2010s and last for at least another generation or two, 30 to 60 years. In this one nanotechnology, perhaps even the programming of living cells, tremendous biomedical discoveries, and new sources of energy to start replacing carbon-based fossil fuels will change the world as much as previous cycles have done. The question, however, is where will the main centers of this age be, and will the world adapt peacefully to possible changes in leadership. The rise of Germany and the relative decline of Great Britain toward the end of the third industrial cycle produced the catastrophe of World War I, and the birth of the fourth cycle was even worse as it saw the Great Depression of the 1930s and World War II. If the United States loses its dominant position, what might the consequences be? Will China emerge as the new leader, or India, or some combination of Asian countries? Will the Europe keep up? Will the United States? In the 1980s as the world was shifting from the fourth to the fifth industrial period, it seemed that Japan might become the new leader, but this did not happen at all, and the United States maintained its dominant position. Will that happen again?
Each new industrial cycle brings enormous new demand in previously unanticipated sectors, as well as new jobs, new opportunities for profit, and a thorough renewal as old, seemingly all-powerful firms lose ground to more innovative little enterprises.
In the late 19th century, it was feared in the United States that a few railroad magnates would take control of the country. In the early 1900s, those who feared the power of the biggest capitalist firms thought that Carnegie (U.S. Steel) and Rockefeller (Standard Oil) would take over the world. In the 1950s, it was thought that General Motors might become so powerful that it would come to dominate the globe. In the 1970s, IBM seemed poised to take on this role. In the 1990s, a giant firm that did not even exist in the 1970s, Microsoft, was considered dangerously powerful by its enemies. In 2010, it was Google, and neither Microsoft nor IBM seemed all that dangerous. No doubt in the next sixth stage of this century some as yet unknown biotech firm will appear out of nowhere and threaten to monopolize the economy. Of course, no one knows if it will be a European, Chinese, Indian, or American firm. But the pattern repeats itself, and will continue to do so for a long time to come.
The only certainty is that education and scientific research will continue to play an ever-increasing role in determining economic success. And those societies that apply this lesson best will dominate the future even more surely than Great Britain did in most of the 19th century and the United States in most of the 20th.
Before going on to an examination of the consequences of these industrial cycles or stages, it is worth summarizing them in a table (see Table 4.1).
Industrial Cycles
Table 4.1 Six Industrial Cycles or Ages
The social consequences of the Industrial Revolution were enormous. Some have already been mentioned: urbanization; very rapid population growth; a much higher level of education for the average person; the transformation of old solidarities in favor of a more individualistic, market-driven type of behavior; and great improvements in material well-being. There were many others. Families became smaller. They had fewer children, and because of much greater physical mobility, fewer close relatives continued living near each other. Monetary calculations became a much more important part of daily life because virtually all economic life was monetized; that is, whereas in the past peasants directly raised much of their own food and made many of the goods they needed, modern workers are paid in money and buy what they need. Almost no family in the advanced parts of the world still produces a significant proportion of the necessities it needs to live, and the number still doing so in poorer parts of the world is rapidly shrinking.
At one time or another all of these changes have been resisted, either by the leaders of the agrarian societies being transformed who were afraid of losing status and power, by idealistic intellectuals who wanted to regain a purer, less materialistic way of life, or by people thrown out of work and home by the attendant economic changes. It was said that working for money instead of directly producing goods is unwholesome and alienating. Smaller families were called lonely. Spending too much time in school was said to deprive children of a healthy existence. Obliging everyone to calculate their actions in terms of how much money they stood to make or lose was said to be dishonorable and unnatural. Turning life into a series of rational economic calculations, which is what sound market behavior consists of, was deemed boring, and many intellectuals said that it robbed the modern world of beauty and poetry, as did the machines produced by the Industrial Revolution.
These types of criticism are common enough among intellectuals and also among old elites who were losing ground in the best of times. But they become particularly acute and much more widespread during those moments of crisis when industrial cycles are in their declining periods, unemployment is high, and the future seems uncertain. Such declines have brought about a series of recurring problems that intensified the sense of alienation and unfairness created by the uneven spread of modernization.
By going through the three main sets of problems produced by the declining phase of industrial cycles, we can see why there is a certain repetitive pattern to the kinds of complaints raised against each of them. As industrial cycles continue to occur, we can predict that the same kinds of problems will recur in the future, and so will the complaints and hostile reactions to continuing modernization.
The first set of problems that beset societies in the declining phase of an industrial cycle is a function of the loss of competitiveness of certain firms and geographic areas because of changes in technology. What were highly successful firms and areas may find themselves bypassed, and previously well-paid laborers may be forced to take cuts in pay or even become unemployed. To some extent, migration can take care of this problem, and firms or areas with sufficiently balanced infrastructures can adapt and survive. But readjustment always entails some suffering, and of course those caught by such problems are upset and seek explanations. They also seek redress, by political means if that seems possible. This is why Marx was certain that eventually, during a moment of crisis, the workers would organize a revolution that would end capitalism once and for all. But instead, the tendency, more often than not, has been that those upset by change become more conservative and wish for a return to what is remembered as a better past. The fact that eventually the first industrial period gave way gave way to the second, and that in turn to the third, fourth, fifth, and eventually the sixth is no comfort to those who feel they have lost out to such transformations.
Each time, new technologies have been invented that have taken pressure off the economy by providing new sources of profit, new employment, and a higher level of productivity. Cyclical crises in the past have always ended with capitalist economies at higher standards of living, with higher real wages, and with new periods of accommodation between capital and labor. In the long run, economic change has been anything but a zero-sum game, with any winner having to be balanced by a loser, though in the short run, during periods of crisis, it has been a different story.
We have already mentioned a second, parallel set of problems associated with major industrial shifts. The first industrial age was dominated by England (or better, Great Britain), the most advanced and powerful economy of its day. The accumulated capital and experience gained by Britain during this age allowed it to dominate the second, railway and Iron Age too. But the third age was different. Germany, and even before its unification in 1871, the individual German states, tended to support university scientific research much better than the English, and they reaped rewards for this. Also, Germany, like the United States, educated a considerably larger portion of its population than the English (or for that matter the French).
So Germany and the United States moved ahead of Britain in this age, and it was particularly the German success that was striking, because Germany did not have the immense advantage of endless resources and cheap immigrant labor possessed by the United States. Also, Germany threatened the British hegemony in Europe much more directly. This problem eventually led to the mad race for empires that dominated international relations in the last part of the 19th century and finally produced World War I.
But the feeling shared by the great and medium powers of the world during that time was based on a thorough misunderstanding of how progress and economic success worked. Just as Marx felt that technological progress in industrial societies had to be a zero-sum game in the end, with the workers losing whatever capital might gain, so did the statesmen and generals and captains of industry in the late 19nth century believe that progress and prosperity had to be zero-sum games. Countries that could not protect their markets and sources of raw materials by acquiring colonies had to suffer for it. It was barely understood, if at all, that education and research were the basis of Germany’s strength, not its army and martial bearing.
Though it took a long time to produce the conditions that led to World War I, it can be shown that the fundamental problem was failure by the Europeans to adjust to the third industrial cycle or to understand its implications.
Similarly, the aftermath of Word War I was bad enough, but the coincident shift from the third to the fourth industrial period compounded the problem. In the fourth industrial age, research and education assumed an ever greater importance, but so did something quite new. Automobiles and the spread of electrical consumer appliances demanded a rapidly broadening mass consumer base. The Great Depression of the 1930s was primarily a failure of demand to keep up with increasing productivity. What would have been required was a highly stimulating macroeconomic policy on the part of the main industrial powers, chiefly the United States, the only country able to go through the transformation of the fourth industrial age in the 1920s. But the United States did not follow such a policy, particularly abroad, and this made it virtually impossible for the world economy to adjust to the changes occurring.
In contrast to this, the United States after World War II refloated the world economy and created the conditions for the greatest economic boom in history. During that time, the fourth industrial age flourished; its benefits spread throughout the advanced Western countries and Japan and even began to spread beyond that into formerly poor countries. Despite some relatively difficult economic times in the 1970s, the transition to the fifth industrial age was relatively easy, and the United States successfully maintained its dominant position. But now that age is ending, and the United States is losing the hegemonic preponderance it once had. The transition to the sixth industrial age, though unlikely to be as rocky as some of the past transitions, may be quite difficult. That is what much of the discussion about the decline of the United States in the 2000s has been, and will be into the 2010s.
There is no question that the transition from one cycle to another produces great international stress. Nationalism, an invention of the modern era, intensifies it. Competition seems to take on a particularly bitter edge because of the fear that a temporary downturn is really the beginning of a final collapse. And those who are gaining at the expense of others demand greater power and privilege in the world political system, while the old hegemons try to keep their power intact. The possibility of conflict between major advanced countries is therefore greatest during the shift from one industrial age to another.
The third problem associated with the industrial era is the problem of backwardness. Of course, there were always more or less advanced parts of the world, but only in the modern era has backwardness become so perilous. Only since the industrialized revolution have the technological advantages of the leading industrial nations given them the potential to dominate the more backward regions so thoroughly. Ever since this perception has come into being, ideological solutions have been proposed.
One, first suggested by the German economist Friedrich List in the mid-19th century, has been at the heart of a whole number of nationalist economic theories that have tried to overcome backwardness among both socialist governments and supposedly very conservative ones. That is to close off developing economies from world markets in order to give them a chance to establish their own industrial base. The idea is that the advanced economies are just too efficient to take on. But this solution has produced very uneven results, generally making the protected economies weak and uncompetitive. Today the search for a solution continues, and while absolute closure, as practiced by former communist powers has been shown to be self-defeating, variations have emerged that stress protectionism. Government policies that stimulate exports while restricting imports, such as those practiced for decades by China, work for a time but ultimately provoke trade disputes that can hurt economic growth everywhere.
The perception of international unfairness is an important cause of anti-Western ideological movements in parts of the world that have in the past been more backward, even among those who are now rapidly catching up. It is clear that western science and technology are superior and that they must be adopted, but the feeling that the older, established industrial powers are simply using their economic and political muscle to keep other societies poor exacerbates jealousy and resentful nationalism. It creates a climate of deep resentment among the proud intellectuals of emerging countries, and this in turn makes them distrust the ideologies of individualism and democracy practiced by the most successful western countries. They claim that even though they are technologically more backward, at least they have maintained traditional communal solidarities and less materialistic values. They claim to be morally superior to the greedy and exploitative West.
Thus the social tensions of modernization, exacerbated by the industrial cycles that have caused disruptions even in the most advanced economies, have led to a variety of political protest movements both within advanced societies and internationally.
Internal and International Social Consequences of Modernization and Industrial Cycles
Economic Class and Political Power in Modern Societies
Just as the invention long ago of agriculture and the state drastically changed the pattern of social stratification, the distribution of power, and privilege in human societies, so did the Industrial Revolution. Peasants gradually disappeared. This class, which included the vast majority of human beings who lived between the 4th millennium BCE and the 20th century CE, virtually vanished in less than 150 years in the advanced societies of the world. The old nobilities who had controlled the land and been the military elite in most agrarian societies began to disappear in all but name at about the same time, though they maintained their social prestige even as they were losing their political and economic power. Almost all of the princes, kings, and emperors who had ruled agrarian societies lost their powers and remained only as national symbols, or were eliminated entirely, though in some Arab counties and a very few Asian ones hereditary kings continue to rule with real power. Cities grew enormously but gradually the old urban merchant classes were transformed into new kinds of middle and upper classes, while traditional urban artisans almost disappeared as a distinct class.
The new economic classes that replaced the old ones were, at the top, owners and controllers of capital: entrepreneurs, financiers, and top managers of businesses. Immediately below them there developed a class of specialized professionals: doctors, lawyers, engineers, researchers and high level educators, journalists, and other media specialists whose advanced education and skills were necessary to keep evermore complex economies and societies functioning smoothly. This was the new upper middle class. Below them there grew a large new middle class of people who were neither owners of businesses nor very highly qualified specialists, but rather bureaucratic, mid- and lower-level managers. These kinds of white-collar occupations also proliferated in government machines that became increasingly bureaucratic and intrusive as modernization advanced and the powers of the state to administer society grew. The middle class was more varied than this, however, as it included owners of small businesses, and also at a level just below the white-collar middle class was another growing class, clerical workers, who formed a kind of lower middle class with higher aspirations. Those who provided most of the labor during the first century and a half of the Industrial Revolution were a new working class involved in manufacturing, those usually called “blue-collar workers.” There remained diminishing numbers in agriculture, but traditional peasants were replaced by farmers: private businessmen on the land following the dictates of the market rather than of tradition or community restrictions. Finally, at the bottom were members of the poorest classes such as servants, day laborers, manual workers without regular employment, and a new urban criminal class living on the margins of industrial societies.
In the late 19th century, we know that the middle classes in even the most economically advanced societies were far less numerous than they are today, but they were already bringing about major social and political changes. In Great Britain in the 1870s, about 4% to 5% of all households were solidly in the upper ranges of the middle class or even above that in wealth, but still with less prestige than the aristocracy. This well off upper middle class of owners and manages of enterprises and the new professionals used to be called the “bourgeoisie.” (The term comes from an old French word that meant townsmen and came to be applied to prosperous urban merchants even before the transformations of the Industrial Revolution.) Above them there still remained the old aristocracy, and below them were the clerks and small shopkeepers and artisans who made up a lower middle class, as well as the new urban working class. (Marxists called this lower middle class the “petty bourgeoisie,” a term of considerable and unjustified contempt.) Most owners of enterprises had small businesses rather than very large ones, and most of the new middle class worked for others instead of for their own businesses. But even so, this broad middle class, ranging from the well-off bourgeoisie to the small shopkeepers and clerks was of growing importance. By the early 20th century, the bourgeoisie included close to 10% of the households in Britain, and slightly more than that in the United States. If the lower middle class, including the clerical workers who aspired to being bourgeois, is included, the middle class as a whole included about 20% of the households in the most advanced western societies of the early 20th century. Working classes, the “blue collar” class in Great Britain and the United States were also growing and by the early 20th century were close to 50% of households. Not only that, but with the spread of democracy, this working class was starting to be politically influential.
Nor was this a purely British and American pattern, as the most advanced western European societies were all heading in the same direction and had similar class structures. In all of them, the middle classes from higher to lower were growing, as were the numbers of those in the modern working class.
Nothing like this had ever existed before. The number of people between the princes and nobles on one hand and the peasants on the other had always been small in agrarian societies. Now those in the middle were not only a growing portion of the population, but they were demanding privileges and rights that underlings had never had before. In Europe, the middle classes were hostile to the remaining power of the old aristocracies and monarchs, and pushed for more democratization. This had the effect of also increasing the political influence of the working classes who organized themselves into socialist parties. In the United States, where there was no traditional aristocracy, the growing middle classes nevertheless gained more influence, and though the working class did not turn to socialist parties in large numbers, many of its members did join unions to force reforms that helped them.
The rising power of middle and working classes in the advanced countries in the 20th century brought about important changes. Inequality diminished as the majority gained more benefits and higher wages and elites lost some of their share of wealth, though this did not happen quickly or evenly across all highly industrialized countries.
In the United States, there was some wage compression, that is, a trend toward greater equality in the 1910s, and then again from the 1930s to the 1960s. It is not that advanced countries like the United States ever became all that egalitarian, but that the situation of those below the upper class, especially in the middle and working classes, substantially improved. In the United States in 1928, just before the start of the Great Depression of the 1930s, the top 10% of Americans earned about 50% of all income, and the bottom 90% of the population earned the remaining 50%. (This includes income from all sources, including investments, not just direct compensation for jobs.) The top 1% in 1928 earned 24% of all income. By the 1970s, however, the share of all income earned by the top 1% had fallen to about 10% of all income, and the top 10% to about 33% of the total income earned by Americans. (See the discussion of sources with bibliographic references at the end of this chapter. The most comprehensive and up-to-date income distribution data are in the Atkinson, Piketty, and Saez article.) Middle and working classes made important gains, not only in their earning power, but also in improving their educational level, which in turn increased their earnings. (Note below that this pattern of improvement was reversed after 1970 in the United States and in some other, but not all, wealthy countries.) A roughly similar pattern characterized other economically advanced societies, though the effects of World Wars I and II and changes in political regimes in Europe and Japan during the 20th century caused important temporary divergences. Still, overall, at least well into the last part of the 20th century, the trend was clear. Industrialization somewhat decreased inequality, contrary to Karl Marx’s dire predictions.
As the middle class, especially its upper portions that could be called the high bourgeoisie, becomes politically more powerful, its cultural habits became dominant as well. The way in which its members lived set the standards for society as a whole. They were utilitarian, business-oriented, and practical. They believed in hard work, thrift, and sexual self-control, at least for women. Their families were the primary focus of their social lives and economic calculations. Their cultural tastes and habits have been named “Victorian” after the Queen of the British Empire who reigned (though with little political power) from 1837 to 1901.
“Victorian bourgeois” values have been derided by intellectuals and by opponents of capitalism, especially its British and American forms, from the late 19th century until the present. Yet these repressed, often hypocritical, disciplined, striving people were actually carrying forward the old values of the rational townspeople who had begun the transformation of the European economy and made modernization possible. Bourgeois culture was highly adaptive and successful in modern societies. Not only did it make individual families successful, but the spread of these habits throughout other social classes, particularly into the working class, created the self-restraint, discipline, and order necessary to make industrial systems function well. Again, it was not just in Victorian Britain that this happened but in the United States and much of western Europe as well.
A similar transformation was to occur in the second half of the 20th century in East Asia, and is now spreading elsewhere. Progress is led by a growing middle class whose hard work, thrift, desire for education, ambitions for their children, and self-control closely approximate the Victorian bourgeois culture of western Europe and the United States in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Meanwhile, in the old rich societies, such Victorian values have weakened and a more self-indulgent, consumer-oriented social morality has emerged. This poses the question of whether or not the formerly dominant societies in the West will be able to keep up with the striving emergent economic powers in Asia in the future.
Of course the class structure of the early 20th century has not remained fixed. The multiplication of special professions and the continual changes in technology over the life of the five industrial cycles has continued to change class structures in modern societies, and the coming of the sixth cycle will do the same. The role of the old blue-collar industrial worker has hugely diminished, while the number of poorly paid people in low-skill service jobs grew, so that today the working class is more in service jobs than in manufacturing. This trend will continue in the sixth industrial cycles. Private business and public bureaucracies grew and were staffed by white-collar, lower middle-class people. Highly educated professionals in management, research, education, and health care became more numerous and important. They will continue to play an evermore significant role in the coming new age. They now make up the upper middle class. At the top, political and business leaders, including the small minority that controls a large share of capital assets, is now the upper class, and they like all past elites try to find ways to pass on their positions to their children, though in open, meritocratic, modern societies that is harder to do than in the past. That elite today makes up no more than 1% of the population of advanced countries. In the United States, that top 1% began in the 1970s to increase the proportion of all income it earned, and by 2007, this top percent was making as large a proportion of total income as the top 1% had been in the late 1920s, i.e., 24%. The top 10% of the population in the United States was earning 50% of all income by 2007, again a proportion as large as in the 1920s. In fact, however, the top one-tenth of 1% took most of those gains, while the middle and working classes below the top 10% of the population lost shares of income, and most of the lower middle class and working class actually lost absolute income, not just a proportion of the total. In 1949, the top one-tenth of 1% of Americans made 3.3% of total income in the United States, but by 2005, that proportion had risen to 7.7%, more than doubling. (Again, these numbers are from the article by Atkinson, Piketty, and Saez referenced at the end of this chapter.)
Other rich societies are less unequal than the United States (as we will see below), but they do exhibit a similar trend toward rising inequality since roughly the 1970s, with the upper middle class sharing some of the increases in wealth, and the rest of the middle class and the lower classes being slowly squeezed into more difficult and precarious lives.
At least until the 1970s, the United States had been a land of immense opportunity in which it was easier for people to advance themselves than elsewhere, and as the world’s economic and political leader, the American promise was held out to the rest of the world. “Be like us,” it claimed, “and you will prosper as more opportunities open up for everyone.” This no longer seems to be the case. Until then, the United States also led the rest of the world in its ability to educate more of its population, but by the early 21st century, this was no longer true, either.
It is difficult to numerically describe who is in what class in contemporary societies, because it is really a matter of definition. Clearly, the top 1% of income earners in any society makes up an upper class. In Great Britain they earn about 20% of all income, in Canada about 19%, in Germany about 15% to 16%, in France 11%, and in Japan about 12%. In the rapidly modernizing country of China, the top 1% of Chinese earns 7% of all income and in India between 12% and 13%. In the most egalitarian western European societies, the top 1% makes a smaller share of total income: about 8% in Sweden and between 6% and 7% in the Netherlands. The United States stands out as having the richest upper class by far among rich countries.
In the most prosperous societies, the 10% to 20% below the small upper class make up an upper middle class of moderately successful business people and professionals, and a much larger number—40% to 50%—make up a lower middle class of small business owners, white-collar workers, and the better off members of the clerical and blue-collar class as well as owners of small, precarious businesses. The bottom third of the population are also mostly in the working class, working in service jobs or as manual laborers, but unable to afford the security, good housing, and proper education for their children that would make them middle class. In bad times, such as the Great Recession (as it is now called), which began in 2008, the number grows and includes 10% to 20% who are either unemployed or underemployed. In the most economically well-off countries of the world, including those of western Europe and the United States, that lower class consists heavily of ethnic minorities (Blacks and Hispanics in the United States) and low-skill immigrants from much poorer countries. This lower class lacks the political clout to affect any kind of change that would benefit it, but increasingly, much of the working class is finding itself in the same situation. Almost everywhere, unions are weaker than they once were, and the gains made earlier in the 20th century by the lower middle and working classes are endangered.
In less advanced countries such as China, and even more India, of course there are still many peasants who are mostly quite poor, and the middle classes are smaller, though growing.
Historically, the rise of the middle classes brought with it political democracy as they demanded a say in ruling their countries and fought against domination by small autocracies. The question now is whether that pattern will continue, particularly in the rapidly growing but still one-party autocracies of East Asia, China, and Vietnam. Does evolution toward democracy always accompany economic progress? That seemed to be the case historically, and it was confirmed when communist dictatorships in Europe and Russia collapsed in 1989 to 1991. There, modernization created better-educated middle classes who began to demand more rights and less autocratic government. Whether that will happen in China is not yet clear, and we cannot be certain that it will. Whether in fact democracy, as it was known in the second half of the 20th century in western societies, can survive growing inequality is also a question whose answer is no longer as clearly positive as it once was.
A sobering thought is that perhaps everywhere, but especially in the world’s two most powerful countries, China and the United States, a new kind of aristocracy is arising. In the United States that would be the upper 1% (or at most 2%) of the population who can now afford the best private schools for their children, can pass on fortunes, and insure that the top ranks of the society remain in the same families’ hands. In China, something like this is also happening. In 1949, a communist revolution committed to egalitarianism overthrew the old order. The Communist Party of China then took over all elite positions and tried to construct a socialist economy and society. It failed, but after reverting to a more open and capitalist economic plan in the 1980s, it nevertheless maintained its hold on power. Now, the Communist Party of China, while no longer socialist or Marxist is the new aristocracy using its prestige and political power to control lucrative businesses and turn itself into an almost hereditary ruling class. Conflict between this class and the rising middle class will make up much of the drama in internal Chinese politics in the coming decades. The Chinese elite, however, controls its large army, and top military figures are prominent owners of businesses, so that it will be difficult to overturn this upper class.
On the other hand, in the United States and other western democracies, the small elites who control a large portion of assets and earn a disproportionate share of the income now have fewer restraints on their power than a few decades ago. They control so much of government power that perhaps in that sense advanced societies are returning to a kind of elite domination that was more characteristic of the past.
The main political difference between the most successful modern societies of the 20th century and agrarian societies was that a mechanism for the renewal of power through the periodic displacement of elites was available. That is the chief function of democracy: not to represent all the various interests in a modern society perfectly, which is impossible, but to limit the tenure and power of the professional power seekers and top elites, and to keep some control over corruption.
There is a significant danger in the concentration of power in evermore powerful governments doing the bidding of the upper classes. This is what made agrarian societies fail to keep up with industrializing ones in the 19th and 20th centuries, and modern societies cannot continue to thrive with highly unequal structure of reward of the sort that characterized the agrarian and early industrial past. A modern economy needs a large proportion of highly educated people who demand a greater share of the rewards available, but if the upper and upper middle classes monopolize too much wealth and do not provide enough education and opportunity for those below them, economies will lack sufficient numbers of skilled workers, and discontent will destabilize political and social institutions.
Data from the World Bank indicate that in the 1980s income distribution in the richest, most modernized countries was more equitable than in poorer countries. This reflected a historical pattern, in which income becomes more highly concentrated as industrialization begins, but then becomes better distributed as interest groups become better organized and the society becomes wealthier as a whole. But as pointed out above, by the late 20th century, and in the early years of the 21st, this pattern may once again be in the process of being reversed.
Part of the reason for the greater concentration of income and wealth in advanced societies like the United States, but also in some European cases, may be that the most advanced economies demand smaller numbers of more highly educated workers, so that those who lack the education to succeed but were once assured of better paid manufacturing jobs are now unable to keep up. Partly, the new rise in inequality may be the result of political changes that have weakened labor unions and discredited expensive welfare policies that were instituted after the Great Depression and World War II. In any case, the problem of inequality is not limited to the richest societies, as rising inequality is a problem in rapidly emerging economies such as China and India as well. Those with education have been moving into prosperous positions, while those who are mostly rural and poor find themselves increasingly under stress. The old preoccupation with the politics of equitable distribution of economic gains, once thought to be a relic of the earlier Industrial Revolution, turns out to continue as a major social problem. (See Table 4–2).
The best and simplest way of measuring the degree of income inequality is to use something called the Gini coefficient. (Anyone interested in finding out how it is calculated can look this up in a statistics book, or by looking it up on Wikipedia.) The way it is calculated, if one person has all the income in a particular country, the Gini coefficient is equal to 1, and if income is perfectly distributed, it is equal to 0. Typically, for illustrative purposes, the number is multiplied by 100, so that perfect inequality equals 100, and perfect equality equals 0. In practice, any number higher than 50 for a country indicates that income is unevenly distributed, with a small percentage of the population capturing a very large proportion of all income. Any number lower than 30 suggests that a society is highly egalitarian, though of course not perfectly so. In general, poorer countries are less egalitarian than richer ones, though Latin American countries typically have higher Gini coefficients than their level of development would warrant. Some African countries also have high Gini scores. Europe has some of the lowest scores. The United States, not surprisingly, has higher scores than European countries, and is the least egalitarian of any advanced country. (The data in Table 4.2 are taken from the United States Central Intelligence Agency Factbook, available on line. See references at the end of this chapter.) Averages for each type of country (poor economies, emerging and middle range economies, rich economies) are calculated on the basis of those presented in the table, and not weighted by population.
Table 4.2 Gini Coefficient of Inequality for Selected Countries, late 1990s to early 2000s
If it were not for the inclusion of South Africa, one of the world’s most unequal countries because of the legacy of Apartheid in which the White minority held most of the property and monopolized educational opportunities, emerging and middle ranking economies in this table would be even less unequal than poorer countries listed in this table. Brazil, with its legacy of slavery and a large population descended from disadvantaged former Africa slaves, is particularly inegalitarian, though in recent years it has begun making some progress in reducing poverty and providing more opportunities for its poor. Without question, richer countries are less unequal than poorer ones, and this reflects the historical legacy of early industrialization and a long period in the 20th century when middle and working classes obtained greater rights and benefits. Richer countries also have long had better public education systems that have greatly improved their productivity and made for greater equality as well. Of course the most troubling fact for Americans is that the United States is now heading in the opposite direction with greater inequality and a diminishing capacity to educate its lower middle and lower classes.
The examination of economic and political power in modern societies has left us with a set of paradoxes. The potential for centralized bureaucratic rule obviously increased with modernization; yet in the most successful capitalist societies there was a trend toward democratization of politics and greater income equality until the last part of the 20th century. Has this trend toward greater equality now been reversed? Is the United States, once the leader in modernization, pointing to a darker future and, if so, can this create the kinds of political problems that can lead to extremism and violence? The spread of commerce and manufacturing made it possible to overcome many of the problems of agrarian societies; however, we know that the recurring problems caused by periodic industrial cycles continued to create conflict within and between different societies. No period in human history has so liberated individuals, but even a cursory look at the political history of the 20th century will show that it has experienced the most brutal wars and forms of ruthless dictatorship ever witnessed in human history. The passing of the worst of these brutal regimes with the defeat of fascist countries during World War II and the transformation followed by the collapse of most communist governments late in the 20th century promised an easier 21st. However, the economic crisis that erupted in 2008 and the coming of a new industrial cycle in the 2010s, along with the possibility that some Asian societies will emerge as rivals of the West, and especially of the United States during this cycle, suggest that the world may be in for a whole new set of conflicts and challenges.
To begin to address these contradictions it is necessary to review the ideologies and forms of political protest that have characterized the modern world.
Political Ideologies and Protests: Two Centuries of Revolutions
For an economic historian, the modern, industrial era began some time in the last third or quarter of the 18th century. For a historian of ideas it started a bit earlier, with the English and French Enlightenment political philosophers who wrote in the late 17th and 18th centuries. For a political historian who can date changes more precisely by dramatic events, the modern political era began either with the American Revolution of 1775 or the French Revolution of 1789.
It is easy to confuse the general sweep of history with the particular causes of this or that event. Many European intellectuals in the late 18th century understood that the old political systems of agrarian states would not be able to survive unchanged in an age when philosophers were proclaiming that proper government had to be a compact between the people and their state in which individuals were protected from arbitrary power. Nor were they unaware that the social changes that accompanied rising commerce, growing education, and many impressive technological innovations would require political adaptations. That is why so much was written speculating about the best possible forms of government. Nevertheless, the immediate causes of revolutions were more mundane. The American Revolution began because of a dispute over taxes with the British Parliament. But once under way, it produced a new form of government based largely on British Enlightenment thought. This meant that in principle the rights of all individuals were protected, and legitimate government could only come from free elections of representatives who would pass the necessary laws to operate the state. We all know that in practice what occurred was not so pure. Slavery was maintained to provide a labor force to grow cotton that met the huge leap in demand from England’s textile mills. The writers of the Constitution of the United States knew that with respect to slavery what they were doing violated their principles, and in many cases their writings show that they had a bad conscience about it. Ultimately, this contradiction between crass reality and higher principle caused a great split in the United States and a Civil War from 1860 to 1865 that killed more Americans than any other of its wars.
The enduring problems caused by that original contradiction between principle and the interests of the slave owners should be emphasized, because it brings out the significance of the Enlightenment principles that guided Americans then and now. These principles did not make America perfect, but they caused violations of the principles of democracy to be challenged and provided an abstract model toward which government was supposed to move.
The same has been true in the most democratic western European countries, starting with Great Britain and France. It was in these few most advanced western societies that the almost universal and deeply constraining institutions of agrarian societies—slavery, serfdom, judicial torture, the humiliation of the many by the few, and the reduction of all women to an inferior, servile status—were first brought into question and eventually abolished. The movement throughout the world to abolish these and to make individuals freer is far from complete even to this day, but its impetus still comes out of the West in the early 21st century.
England was fortunate in that it had maintained an ancient institution from the Middle Ages, a parliament that brought together the various competing elements in society, commoners, lords, the Christian Church, and the king in order to work out their political differences. On the continent of Europe, with the exception of the Netherlands and Sweden, such institutions had been brought under the control of the kings and princes or had simply decayed and become ineffective. In England, however, Parliament provided the basis through which politics could be modernized without revolution, simply by progressively extending the franchise in the 19th and through the early 20th centuries. In the United States, also, the colonists were used to functioning with English kinds of elected councils and legislatures, and this provided them with a model of how to create their new government after independence.
France was not so fortunate. Its parliamentary institutions had been abolished by its kings in the early 17th century, and by the late 18th century, when pressures for more representative government forced the king and his ministers to call some sort of assembly together, there were no rules of behavior or parliamentary experience to guide them. The result was a bloody mess in which the various parties, the king, the lords, the Church, and the commoners who wanted more representation, maneuvered against each other without knowing how to reach a satisfactory compromise. They wound up fighting a civil war against each other, but the victory of the commoners let loose a reign of terror against the old order and finally a military dictatorship under Napoleon. Imbued with the certitude that French revolutionary principles were just, backed by rising French nationalism, and in command of the most powerful state in Europe, Napoleon tried to conquer the continent. He failed, but introduced the more backward parts of central and southern Europe to the new nationalism that had united the French and provided the popular support for Napoleon’s Empire that briefly made it so powerful.
This was only the beginning. After Napoleon’s defeat in 1815, the European powers tried to still the revolutionary, nationalist current the French had let loose. They failed because it was too closely tied to the social and economic changes going on in the most successful societies of western Europe, and so it continued to be an example to be followed by the rest of Europe. But the central contradiction of the French revolutionary experience was never resolved. On the one hand, revolutionaries were motivated by nationalism, defending the rights of the people of their nation against all others. On the other hand, what this meant in states with several different nationalities, languages, or cultures was that the dominant group felt free to force the others to change. So nationalism brought new internal conflicts, new wars over borders, and greater militarization by competing nationalisms. Relying on brute force, persecution of minorities, and the construction of state power for its own sake was the antithesis of the democratization and social progress that Enlightenment thinkers had had in mind.
This contradiction has yet to be resolved. As we saw earlier, with the mixture of nationalism and Darwinian theories of the “survival of the fittest” in the late 19th century, nationalist conflicts took on an even more desperate form. Throughout the 20th century, nationalism has drifted ever further away from the individualistic, liberating ideology it originally embodied and ever more toward its more violent, authoritarian, and intolerant side.
Along with rising nationalism, industrialization produced another new ideology in the 19th century, socialism. The principal idea behind socialism is simple. Capitalism is based on self-interest and greed, and therefore, say socialists, it is morally inferior to communal forms of organization that take into consideration the general welfare over that of individuals. Furthermore, basing action on higher considerations than pure self-interest is presumed to yield a more humane type of society.
There were many different forms of socialism. At one extreme, anarchists believed that destroying the state would automatically liquidate capitalism and social injustice. People would spontaneously form themselves into cooperative associations and work out their own problems. This was their rationale for assassinating heads of state and other powerful people. The idea was that if only a few such people were removed, the rest of society would rid itself of the state and oppressive private property rules.
More realistic socialists, however, recognized that eliminating a few people at the top was unlikely to bring about fundamental change. Revolutionary organization was necessary in order to bring about the systematic conquest of power. Socialist ideas were developed primarily by intellectuals who found capitalist bourgeois life unfair, dull, and crass; but they needed troops to back them, and these they hoped to find in the growing class of factory workers. Indeed, as industrialization advanced, workers learned to become better organized in unions and socialist parties. By the late 19th century, socialist parties representing the workers’ interests had become a significant force in Germany, France, Great Britain, and the other advanced European countries. In the United States, which lacked a socialist party, the unions and the urban wing of the Democratic Party served the same purpose.
From the point of view of true revolutionaries, however, this was not satisfactory, because the stronger the workers became the more they insisted on using their influence to obtain better wages and working conditions. As capitalism was an engine for producing ever greater amounts of wealth, it was possible for the owners and managers of enterprises to pay higher wages to the workers and satisfy their demands. Unions and democratic socialist parties thus became less revolutionary and more practical. For intellectuals who loathed the very idea of capitalism this was treachery, and they remained unhappy with the “corruption” of unions and democratic socialist parties.
In Russia and other backward societies that began their industrialization only in the very late 19th or in the 20th century, revolutionary intellectuals were better able to recruit substantial numbers of workers and discontented peasants to their cause because the standard of living remained low and inequality higher than in more advanced societies. Thus in Russia the revolutionary Marxists led by Lenin were more successful than their extremist counterparts in Britain, France, Germany, or the United States. This pattern would be reproduced elsewhere later in the 20th century. Marxist revolutions that led to communism wound up taking place only in newly industrializing, relatively backward societies: China, Vietnam, Yugoslavia, and Cuba. Marx’s prediction that socialist revolutions would take place in the most advanced economies proved to be wrong.
But the revolutionary Marxists left a very deep imprint on the 20th century despite the inaccuracy of Marx’s predictions. In 1917, Lenin’s party seized power in Russia and set up the world’s first communist state, the Soviet Union, which would become the world’s second greatest power and last for 74 years. In the 1920s, the Chinese Communist Party was formed, and after a long, bloody series of civil wars, it took power in 1949. With the occupation of eastern and central Europe by the Soviet Union after World War II and the triumph of communism in China, by 1950 Marxist communists ruled one third of the globe.
The appeal of Marxism was that it promised equality and the end of the alienation supposedly produced by capitalism. But since it was more successful in relatively backward societies, the first item on its agenda in the 20th century was to modernize the economy, industrialize, and strengthen the state in order to preserve the gains of communism against hostile and advanced capitalist powers.
The Marxist vision of history as a matter of unending and fierce class struggle that was bound to lead to revolution and the sense of isolation in a capitalist world produced a feeling in all communist societies that they were under perpetual siege from internal and external enemies. This resulted in ruthless dictatorships that justified their execution of millions of class enemies, the mass confiscation of property, and the militarization of society by an appeal to the ultimate, utopian principles of socialism. Because the ultimate goal was to return to a kind of Garden of Eden, and because the propertied classes of the world were presented as demons out to stop progress, any means were considered justified to carry out the revolution. Also, since industrial backwardness weakened these societies, they had to force huge investments out of their people in order to catch up. This meant that evermore force had to be used to deprive people of consumption goods, to take food and land away from recalcitrant peasants, to prevent strikes by workers, and to stop the discontented professionals in the middle class from fleeing.
It all worked up to a point. Factories were built, most communist societies were substantially industrialized and modernized, and the biggest ones, Russia and China, became great world powers. The military success and power of communist states managed for a time to capture the sense of nationalism in their societies. Communism promised to make backward nations catch up to the powerful West. It was based on ideas that claimed to be scientific, but that rejected free market, individualistic capitalism. This was more congenial to non-western societies than western liberal ideology, but it avoided the danger of remaining too traditional.
The flaw was that by centralizing economic control into the hands of communist parties and its elite planners, communism created an unworkable system. Lenin, his successor Stalin, Mao Zedong in China, and other early communist leaders based their model of an advanced industrial society on what they learned about the advanced West during the third industrial cycle. They applied force to create the same conditions: giant steel mills, huge electrification projects, extreme concentration of capital and workers in giant factories, and an emphasis on goods that were used to build more factories instead of consumer goods. But such centralization worked less well in the fourth industrial cycle that required the production of consumer goods and much greater sensitivity to consumer demands. No communist economy ever fully mastered the technology and innovative drive of the fourth industrial cycle. Finally, none could cope at all with the fifth cycle.
In the age of computers extreme flexibility was required. Not only free thought to allow scientific innovation but also good marketing that allowed a firm to adapt quickly to changes in demand were necessary. No highly centralized, planned economy could hope to achieve this as quickly as a decentralized economy used to dealing with free markets.
Communist economies, even the most advanced, never caught up to the foremost western industrial economies. By the fifth industrial age, they were falling behind quickly. Not only that, but the relatively free market economies of East Asia, starting with Japan and followed by Taiwan, South Korea, Hong Kong, and Singapore, proved to be far more adaptable than the communists in making progress. It became obvious that the oppression and suffering imposed by communists on their people were not leading to faster progress and that the possibility of achieving a socialist utopia was becoming increasingly remote. Communist elites lost faith in themselves.
The collapse of communism in eastern and central Europe and the Soviet Union from 1989 to 1991 proves that no matter how powerful a modern state, in the long run it must rest on a certain degree of ideological legitimacy. Democratic capitalism provides this through the ideas of the Enlightenment. Communism based its legitimacy on the predictions of Marx. When these turned out to be empty, the system rotted from within and fell apart.
The other major anti-capitalist and anti-democratic ideology in the 20th century was fascism. Though fascism is supposed to be “right wing” and communism “left wing,” and though they were enemies, the two ideologies have much in common. Fascism was also primarily the creation of intellectuals hostile to European bourgeois culture, to democracy, and to free markets. It sought to return to a more heroic and less crassly materialistic age, to eliminate the alienation of modern society, and to recreate communal bonds. But unlike socialism it did not promise to return to the equality of preagrarian societies. Instead, it sought to revive the institutions of agrarian societies in which everyone had a place and the strong led the way.
At its most creative, fascism came up with the idea of corporatism. All social groups would be organized in something resembling medieval guilds, protective associations that would represent their members and protect their interests. But instead of being based on class, with the working class and capitalists being on opposing sides, fascist corporations were going to be based on the branch of activity from which people gained their livelihood. Thus factory workers and managers in a given industry would be in the same corporation. All people in agriculture would be in a common corporation, as would those in education, or creative artists. Above this structure there would be a grand arbitrator, a council of corporation representatives led by the supreme leader of the state and his ruling party, to adjudicate between conflicting claims of corporations. The society as a whole would be held together by intense nationalism.
In practice, this system is surprisingly similar to what communist societies worked out for themselves. It also suffered from many of the same problems, particularly excess centralization, dictatorship, and the corruption of unchecked power that allowed those in charge to exploit their positions for personal gain at the expense of the general welfare.
After the collapse of the main fascist powers, Germany, Italy, and Japan at the end of World War II, most advanced capitalist societies adopted some corporatist principles. The idea that mediation between interest groups had to be enforced by a strong state, that social institutions that protected communal relations and could override market forces were necessary, and that an impartial state bureaucracy that stood above politics was necessary to make modern society work became widely accepted in western Europe and Japan, though somewhat less in the United States. At least this was the case until the early 21st century when the economic crisis ushered in by the sixth industrial cycle has weakened these social institutions and brought into question once more how to cope with inequality and the economic suffering brought about by the decline of some industrial sectors combined with the rise of new ones.
Fascism in the 1920s and 1930s, however, developed another trait that was far less benign than the ideal of corporatism. The idealization of heroism and brute strength over the rational, petty calculations of the bourgeoisie fit very well with grand ideas of nationalism. In the case of German and Japanese fascism, these ideas were combined with a sense that their nations were racially superior. Nationalism mixed in with a popularized, simplified version of Darwinism and an admiration for brute strength and heroism led the fascist powers into great wars of conquest. This was the main cause of World War II, and it was only their military defeat that caused fascism to fall into such disrepute. Yet the fascist critique of democratic bourgeois society continues to appeal to many intellectuals, as well as to leaders in poorer countries who are still looking for ways to catch up to the West without having to adopt the same ideologies of democracy, individualism, and the free market. In some parts of the world, particularly in but not only in Muslim countries, this now takes the form of the revival of extremist religious ideologies that blend into ultra-nationalist, anti-western, anti-Enlightenment, authoritarian, and violent ideologies that resemble some aspects of old-fashioned fascism.
There is little doubt that in the early 21st century the collapse of communism and the decline of socialist idealism have left an ideological vacuum. Opposition to reliance on market forces and the desire to return to a more communal, traditional way of life continue, especially in times of crisis, but now religious ideologies once thought to be anachronisms from the past are coming back into fashion in various parts of the world.
Fascism and socialism had more than certain organizing principles in common. They rejected the liberal assumption that somehow free markets, that is, purely impersonal, undirected economic mechanisms, were really capable of solving the economic crises engendered by the industrial age. What socialism tried to overcome by more rational planning and internationalist appeals to working class interests, fascism sought to overcome by rebuilding the bonds of a supposed racial community and destroying the crass materialism of bourgeois capitalism. Both aimed to rebuild a sense of lost communal solidarity.
In conclusion, then, three great revolutionary ideologies have dominated the modern era until recently: Enlightenment liberalism, socialism, and fascism. The first, which emphasizes individual rights against the state, the importance of democracy, and the need to let the economy be regulated by markets, came out the winner in the 20th century. The most radical form of socialism, communism, sprang originally from the Enlightenment but abandoned the idea of individual rights and tried to plan economic growth. It failed in the late 20th century. Fascism, which began as an anti-Enlightenment ideology, led the world into the greatest war it has ever known at mid-century, and has been in relative eclipse since then.
But Enlightenment liberalism has its problems, too. It has fostered nationalism, which can easily be accommodated by both the extreme left and right and which continues to cause violent conflict. It has encouraged scientific advances that are generally misunderstood by most people, and can turn into extremist, pseudoscientific excuses for bloody tyranny, such as Soviet communism or German fascism and extremist racist ideas. And it has led to an economic system that, for all its success, goes from one cyclical crisis to the next and leaves unsolved the problems of internal and international inequality. Therefore, it would be difficult to predict that the age of revolutions and political unrest that began in the late 18th century is really over or that the 21st century will see the peaceful spread of democratic capitalism without international or internal social conflicts. The very success of radical religious opposition to Enlightenment liberalism, while it pretends to be traditional, is actually a newer form of potent modern protest that will gain ground in times of crisis.
In a very different way, the economic success of China and its rise as a major global power also questions Enlightenment liberalism. Chinese leaders maintain they are still communists, even if they have accepted market forces and entered the global capitalist economy in full force. China accepts and fosters modern science and technology and in no way rejects the benefits of western modernity. But Chinese leaders also claim that western democracy and liberal respect for individual rights are neither necessary nor useful, and are best left aside. Will this, then, provide a new kind of ideology to guide much of the world in this century? There are many who think so. To balance this, however, it is well to remember that India’s economic growth is now almost as rapid as China’s and that its population will soon surpass China’s. Still, it is firmly committed to remaining a democratic state with regular elections and a host of contending political parties. In short, the claim made in the 1990s and early 2000s that the success of American democratic capitalism opened the way to a peaceful spread of that ideology throughout the world has turned out to be very misleading. What ideological models will dominate the world in the 21st century remains to be seen.
The Unending Effort to Adapt to Modernity
The modern era has experienced so many and such rapid changes in two centuries that it is easy to think that old rules of social and cultural evolution no longer apply. To believe this is as foolish as to believe that because human beings are far smarter than other mammals they have escaped the rules of biological evolution.
Certain habits, social structures, and ideologies are better adapted to the modern world than others, and as our social, economic, and political environment changes so quickly, what worked well at one time may no longer be as suitable a short time later. Western European societies became rich and powerful because they allowed their intellectuals greater freedom to explore new ideas, because towns were more independent, and because commercial rationality became a more important part of social life than elsewhere. Westerners developed new religious ideas that emphasized the rational pursuit of truth by each individual instead of mere acceptance of ancient dogmas; and they pioneered the idea that individual rights had to be protected against state power. The democratic political organization of the most successful western states, their inventiveness in science and technology, and their successful industrialization all flowed from these attributes. Together, they formed the basis of a liberal world view that within 200 years created greater prosperity and a freer environment for the inhabitants of advanced societies than anything that had ever existed in agrarian societies.
Nevertheless, during much of the 20th century it seemed that the liberal, bourgeois, democratic, and capitalist view of the world was obsolete and that it would be replaced by more efficient, more ruthless, and more communal ideologies, fascism or communism. In the end, however, these anti-liberal ways of thought built monstrous tyrannies that provoked wars and repression on an unprecedented scale. In their search for racial purity German fascists, the Nazis, murdered 10 to 15 million people, of whom 6 million were Jews, and started a war that killed another 20 million. The Japanese invaded and brutalized China in the 1930s and then set out to conquer Southeast Asia. At least 25 million died as a result of this. In the Soviet Union, Stalin’s policies that were supposed to bring about socialism resulted in the murder and forced starvation of at least 8 million peasants, and in the political purges, deportations to forced labor camps, and mass shootings that followed at least another 10 to 15 million were killed. In Mao’s China at least 40 million and perhaps far more were starved to death or murdered, or died in prison camps as part of the attempt to create socialism. In Cambodia, in 4 years, from 1975 to 1979, a communist government killed close to one-fifth of the entire population in order to create a purer society devoted to communal values and to purify the Cambodia race by eliminating Vietnamese, Chinese, and other minorities.
In the 20th century, governments run according to the major anti-Enlightenment, anti-liberal principles that have formed the backbone of protest against western democratic capitalism have often been murderous tyrannies that have brought their people war, economic ruin, and ultimate destruction. This has been true of regimes as different from each other as that in South Africa, which enforced racial separation from the 1940s to the early 1990s, Mussolini’s fascist government in Italy from 1922 to 1943, Nazi Germany, Mao’s China, Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge, the supposedly egalitarian and progressive communist government of North Korea, and the nationalist and isolationist regime that has ruled Burma for decades. Nor have the western democracies escaped the consequences when they have betrayed their own principles by trying to maintain foreign colonies. These colonial empires, built largely in the late 19th century when social Darwinism was at its height, ended in the mid-20th century, often through bitter wars, especially in Africa and Southeast Asia.
This is, after all is said and done, a proof that the cultural traits that have been best adapted to the modern world have been those produced by the democratic and liberal western heirs to the Enlightenment. When the British and French were forced to give up their colonies and adhere to the political philosophy that made them democratic and successful in the first place, their societies benefited. When the Germans or Japanese had these liberal values forced on them, as they were after World War II, they prospered and were freed from the tyrannies that had ruled them.
But though this should be a comfort to the world, because it suggests that by adopting and adapting to western cultures and practices it is possible to modernize successfully, it would be a mistake to believe that the future necessarily will flow in that direction. First of all, in the poorer parts of the world, there is continuing hostility and jealousy against the prosperous societies in the world. Their intellectuals and leaders admired communism as long as it held out any prospect of overcoming the West, and more recently these societies have experienced extremely angry movements that so loathe western Enlightenment culture that they cannot accept its main principles.
Second, throughout the world there is nationalism that brought the most advanced nations to war against each other in the early 20th century, and this could happen again.
Third, even within the most advanced western nations there remains much discontent that rejects the liberal tradition that was so successful in the recent past. Discontented intellectuals continue spinning out theories of why capitalism, liberalism, and individualism are evil and should be opposed by anti-market, communal values. At a less abstract level, high unemployment and a sense that the United States is in decline are producing a reaction of near panic and fear that can play into the hands of political extremists. In moments of crisis, when industrial cycles are shifting, when old centers of prosperity are declining and being replaced by new ones, when some previously strong nations are losing ground to others and competition is increasing, then such ideologies of resentment will thrive and gain political converts. This is what happened as a result of the chaos of World War I, when from 1917 to 1939 most of Europe became fascist or communist. It happened again in the chaos after World War II, when communism made such immense gains.
Finally, an even greater reason for doubting that the future will unfold in the same direction as the recent past is that the conditions that originally produced the modernizing impulse in the West are now long gone. In a very crowded, wealthy world, new types of organization and new ideologies may be necessary to adapt successfully. We will touch on this briefly in the next section of this chapter, and in the book’s conclusions.
Ideologies are like the genes that shape cultures and societies. They provide the blueprints from which realities are constructed. Most of the new ideological movements brought up by modernization have been neither benign nor adaptive; yet, they have been strong enough to rule large parts of the world and almost take it over.
Ecological Pressures Persist
In the late 20th and early 21st centuries, the general public gradually became aware of the global strain on resources, wildlife, air, and water caused by industrialization. Global warming is now an accepted fact, though controversy remains about what portion of it is caused by the polluting effects of industrial life. We know, of course, that the interaction between human beings and their environment has repeatedly caused ecological stress in the past.
There were many preindustrial examples of overuse that resulted in severe problems. North American hunters seem to have played an important role in exterminating many of the largest species of mammals after migrating into the continent from Asia during the last ice age. Middle Eastern civilizations caused excess salinity of their fields by irrigating them too much. Nomads from Arabia destroyed agricultural productivity in North Africa by bringing in too many sheep and goats and overgrazing the land, and Mongol invaders did the same in Iraq in the 13th century. The ancient population cycle in agrarian societies was an almost inevitable by-product of the interaction between humans and their environment, and there was no permanent solution to this recurring ecological problem before the technological progress made by industrial societies.
The ecological problems caused by the interaction between industrial societies and the environment, therefore, are a continuation of a very old pattern that has in the past only been solved by new technological advances. New advances that will solve present problems will undoubtedly create new ecological problems of their own that we cannot even foresee. The idea that some present ecological crisis can be remedied by returning to old ways is false because to do this would only bring back some previously solved crises, except that with the human population so much greater than it was in the past, any attempt to reimpose agrarian cultures on the world would result in an even more massive agrarian demographic catastrophe than any in the past. But new solutions can never be permanent, either.
We can be quite certain that because climatic changes occurred in the past, they will continue to take place in the future, and almost certainly, the byproducts of modernity will accelerate the rate of these changes. Global heating and cooling have come and gone, sometimes in just a few centuries, and these contributed to agrarian population cycles as well. Adaptable human cultures have managed to thrive despite these changes, and can again, but failure to adapt for some societies, now as before, will mean massive suffering and death, while successful social change will propel the most flexible and innovative cultures to new levels.
This is not the place to catalogue the strains on the earth and on human populations created by the huge increases in productivity and population over the past 200 years. Nor would it be very useful to speculate about what technological and scientific solutions will be found to solve these pressures, much less about the inevitable new problems that will be created by these solutions. Nevertheless, some generalizations based on our knowledge of past social change are in order.
The greatest danger is not that present ecological problems are impossible to solve, but that the cultural forces that oppose continued modernization will be politically triumphant. If this were to happen in the most developed industrial societies, as it happened in the past in some of the most advanced agrarian societies like ancient Egypt or China in the Middle Ages, who then will take the role of bringing about the necessary progress and pushing forward social evolution?
We can guess that in the future, as in the past, certain societies will be more innovative than others. Some have organizations that adapt more quickly than others. Will the tighter, more authoritarian, centrally controlled political system and social structure of China turn out to be more adaptable than the more individualistic and decentralized form of organization in the United States? Will societies where population is now declining, as in some of the richest European countries, in Russia, and in Japan be able to compete successfully in the future?
Past experience suggests that new solutions will come from the most flexible, less tradition-bound, more secular, and less centralized societies. For one thing, in such societies highly motivated, somewhat marginal migrant or “stranger” subcultures that have fled from bad conditions in their homelands have the opportunity to put their talents and energies to use. This is why migrating Chinese throughout the world but especially in Southeast Asia were long economically and culturally more dynamic than those in China itself, and why certain small minority populations who are considered strangers, for example, Jews in Europe and America or East Indians emigrants in many parts of the world, have played such an important role in promoting economic and cultural progress. Then too, more open societies are more tolerant of new ideas and less likely to impose conformity. It is from the nonconformists—from those who are different and from those who do not blindly follow the conventions of the majority—that there come fresh ideas that provide the blueprints for social evolution and adaptation. So, probably the fear that authoritarian and politically intolerant societies will turn out in the long run to succeed better will be proved wrong once again, as it was in the 20th century. But we cannot be sure of this because new circumstances could make what worked best in the past no longer useful in the future.
All that is certain is that some societies will adapt better than others, that different strategies for solving problems will be offered and tried, that severe ideological conflicts will occur over such issues, and that competition between different countries and social systems will continue, sometimes violently. Those in more open and tolerant societies will probably do better, but that cannot be taken for granted, and this time, unlike in the 20th century, unpleasant, oppressive social systems may come to prevail. We can hope this will not be so, but we have to work to make sure it does not.
Reference Notes
Eric Hobsbawm’s four volumes The Age of Revolution, The Age of Capital, The Age of Empire, and The Age of Extremes are the most lively and theoretically informed social, political, and economic histories of how Europe changed from the late 18th to the end of the 20th century. Hobsbawm is also the world’s most sophisticated Marxist historian of our times, and though Marxism is in a state of general decline, his books will remain classics in the 21st century because they are so balanced and convincing. Hobsbawm does a superb job of explaining changing class structures and patterns of political power since the first Industrial Revolution until now.
Karl Marx himself left a huge opus. The most important of his writings were assembled and edited by David McLellan in Karl Marx: Selected Writings. But for anyone interested in Marxism, it is also essential to read a much more critical evaluation in Frank E. Manuel’s A Requiem for Karl Marx.
The idea of industrial cycles based on technological change owes much to David Landes, whose Unbound Prometheus meticulously details the connection between science, technology, and economy during the first two centuries of the industrial age. Walt Rostow’s The World Economy presents vast amounts of data to support the notion of regular economic cycles. In an earlier book on social change, Social Change in the Modern Era, I used these works and those of other economic historians to spell out in more detail than in the present book the nature and social consequences of these cycles. Charles Kindleberger’s economic history of the Great Depression of the 1930s, The World in Depression, is worth reading now that something similar has happened. It shows that although disruptive changes would have created economic problems in any case, these were greatly aggravated by policy errors and poor economic theory. More recent scholarship by Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff in their masterful This Time is Different: Eight Centuries of Financial Folly explains how common economic crises have been, and why they continue today.
The philosophical and historical origins of Enlightenment liberalism are discussed for the United States in Bernard Baylin’s The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution. Isaiah Berlin, one of the 20th century’s foremost political philosophers, makes the nature of modern liberalism, both its benefits and its potential for turning into something sinister, clearer in his Four Essays on Liberty. Such works can be demanding, but they get beyond the simplistic propaganda that too often passes for political thought these days. In two massive volumes (with more on the way), Jonathan I. Israel has laid out the importance of the Enlightenment. For our purposes, the most important is Enlightenment Contested: Philosophy, Modernity, and the Emancipation of Man 1670–1752.
The awful consequences of anti-Enlightenment political ideas, many of them coming out of misguided attempts to overcome the problems of industrial society, are spelled out in the book that I co-authored with Clark McCauley, Why Not Kill The All?, and in my older book, Modern Tyrants. A more recent discussion of the catastrophic effects of Nazism and communism in Europe are elegantly laid out by Timothy Snyder’s Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin. Communism’s crimes around the world are catalogued by Stéphane Courtois and his co-authors in The Black Book of Communism. Iris Chang’s controversial The Rape of Nanking lays out the consequences of Japan’s brutal military culture during its attempt to subjugate China.
The seeming early success but eventual failure of communism in Russia has to be understood by students of social change because the collapse of Soviet communism was the most important global political event of the late 20th century. Geoffrey Hosking’s Rulers and Victims: The Russians in the Soviet Union is a good account of that history.
Understanding industrial societies, and why some succeed so well while others do not, requires some knowledge of basic facts about such things as rates of economic and demographic growth and income distribution. No source is better than the annual volumes put out by the World Bank in their annual World Development Report. Also useful is the United Nations’ annual Human Development Report, particularly the 2010 edition that examines the changes in well-being around the globe during the previous 20 years. The political economy of modern development—what works and what does not—is studied in a set of essays edited by Dani Rodrik, In Search of Prosperity. A leading economist who is very critical of how poorly globalization has been managed by the United States is Joseph Stiglitz whose Globalization and its Discontents criticizes economic strategies that rely too much on pure market mechanisms, and whose more recent Freefall: America, Free Markets, and the Sinking of the World Economy looks at the nature of the economic crisis that began in 2008.
Also useful for comparative statistics about the world are the U. S. Census Bureau’s annually published Statistical Abstract of the United States and the American Central Intelligence Agency’s World Factbook. Both are available for free online and are packed with international statistics as well as a lot of information about the United States itself.
Equally important are the World Bank’s annual African Development Indicators that presents data and analysis about the condition of the world’s poorest region, and the United Nation’s yearly Arab Human Development Report that not only present data but also try to explain why a region that is rich in resources has remained so hostile to many aspects of modernization.
The issue of whether or not the western model of capitalism with democracy and Enlightenment liberalism is likely to spread as non-western societies modernize and become economic powers is approached from an East Asian, particularly Chinese viewpoint by Daniel A. Bell’s Beyond Liberal Democracy. The more general issue of democracy and whether or not the western model is exportable is discussed the volume Is Democracy Exportable? edited by Zoltan Barany and Robert Moser. Martin Jacques’ recent book, When China Rules the World, provocatively looks at why China is such a rising power. But for a more balanced view of the rise of Asia, it is also important to read Arvind Panagariya’s India: The Emerging Giant.
To learn about changing patterns of equality and inequality, it is necessary to go to more technically demanding work by economists, as well as to data sources, such as those listed above put out by the United States. The best recent economic work on inequality of incomes is work like the major article by Anthony Atkinson, Thomas Piketty, and Emmanuel Saez, “Top Incomes in the Long Run of History.”
Thinking about the rising inequality in the United States and its causes leads to two important books. Claudia Goldin and Lawrence Katz’s The Race Between Education and Technology suggests that America’s prior success was based on its excellent public education, and as this is now slipping, the United States is offering its less affluent classes fewer opportunities. The United States is also in danger of becoming a less viable society than other wealthy societies that educate their people better and are also more egalitarian. More Equal than Others by the British historian Godfrey Hodgson traces the many things that have gone wrong in the United States in the past few decades. On that note, the economist Richard T. Gill wrote a pessimistic book, Posterity Lost, about the decline of traditional bourgeois morality in the United States and its nefarious consequences. Hodgson and Gill are worth comparing because the former is more on the left, and the latter more conservative, but both arrive at equally gloomy conclusions about America. Fareed Zakaria’s The Post-American World is more hopeful, but goes over many of the same problems from the point of view of America’s relatively declining international power.
On the rise of postwar European welfare states and Europe’s greater willingness to be egalitarian than just about any other part of the world, Tony Judt’s great volume, Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945 explains why the shock of their catastrophic experiences in the 1930s and 1940s prompted the West Europeans to reform themselves and create better societies. A more narrowly focused book on modern welfare states is Jonas Pontusson’s Inequality and Prosperity: Social Europe vs. Liberal America.
It is worth remembering the importance of the past if we are to understand problems of inequality and social tension in some of the world’s most important countries. Anthony Marx’s Making Race and Nation explores the legacies of racism and slavery in the United States, Brazil, and South Africa. The history of these nations has much to do with the fact that they all suffer from an exceptionally high degree of inequality today when compared to places that are at equivalent levels of development. This is a subject not often broached by economists, but is, rather, something political scientists and sociologists look at more closely. My recent short textbook, Contentious Identities: Ethnic, Religious, and National Conflicts in Today’s World examines the subject of identity conflicts in general.
To understand more about the problems with our energy sources, and the prospects of finding solutions, Scott Montgomery’s superb new book The Powers That Be is a must read. Bill McKidden has been warning us about climate change for some time, and now that it seems that political forces are not going to do anything meaningful about this, he presents some new ideas on how to cope in Eaarth (yes, with two ‘a’s).
Finally, on the issue of Islam and the general rise of politically active extremist religions, two French experts need to be consulted. Gilles Kepel’s latest book is Beyond Terror and Martyrdom, and Olivier Roy’s is Holy Ignorance.