David Landes, author of The Wealth and
Poverty of Nations: Why Some Are So Rich and Some So Poor, credits the world’s
economic and social progress over the last thousand years to" Western
civilization and its dissemination." The reason, he believes, is that Europeans
invented systematic economic development. Landes adds that three unique aspects
of European culture were crucial ingredients in Europe’s economic growth. First,
science developed as an autonomous method of intellectual inquiry that
successfully disengaged itself from the social constraints of organized religion
and from the political constraints of centralized authority. Though Europe
lacked a political center, its scholars benefited from the use of a single
vehicle of communication: Latin. This common tongue facilitated an adversarial
discourse in which new ideas about the physical world could be tested,
demonstrated, and then accepted across the continent and eventually across the
world. Second, Landes espouses a generalized form of Max Weber’s thesis that the
values of work, initiative, and investment made the difference for Europe.
Despite his emphasis on science, Landes does not stress the notion of
rationality as such.
In his view," what counts is work, thrift,
honesty, patience, [and] tenacity." The only route to economic success for
individuals or states is working hard, spending less than you earn, and
investing the rest in productive capacity. This is his fundamental explanation
of the problem posed by his book’s subtitle: "Why Some Are So Rich and Some So
Poor." For historical reasons---an emphasis on private property, an experience
of political pluralism, a temperate climate, and an urban style--Europeans have,
on balance, followed those practices and therefore have prospered. Third, and
perhaps most important, Europeans were learners. They" learned rather greedily,"
as Joel Mokyr put it in a review of Landes’s book. Even if Europeans possessed
indigenous technologies that gave them an advantage (spectacles, for example),
as Landes believes they did, their most vital asset was the ability to
assimilate knowledge from around the world and put it to use-- as in borrowing
the concept of zero and rediscovering Aristotle’s Logic from the Arabs and
taking paper and gunpowder from the Chinese via the Muslim world. Landes argues
that a systematic resistance to learning from other cultures had become the
greatest handicap of the Chinese by the eighteenth century and remains the
greatest handicap of Arab countries today.
Although his analysis
of European expansion is almost nonexistent, Landes does not argue that
Europeans were beneficent bearers of civilization to a benighted world. Rather,
he relies on his own commonsense law:" When one group is strong enough to push
another around and stands to gain by it, it will do so." In contrast to the new
school of world historians, Landes believes that specific cultural values
enabled technological advances that in turn made some Europeans strong enough to
dominate people in other parts of the world. Europeans therefore proceeded to do
so with great viciousness and cruelty. By focusing on their victimization in
this process, Landes holds, some postcolonial states have wasted energy that
could have been put into productive work and investment. If one could sum up
Landes’s advice to these states in one sentence, it might be" Stop whining and
get to work." This is particularly important, indeed hopeful, advice, he would
argue, because success is not permanent. Advantages are not fixed, gains from
trade are unequal, and different societies react differently to market signals.
Therefore, not only is there hope for undeveloped countries, but developed
countries have little cause to be complacent, because the current situation"
will press hard" on them.
The thrust of studies like Landes’s is
to identify those distinctive features of European civilization that lie
behind
Europe’s rise to power and the creation of modernity more
generally. Other historians have placed a greater emphasis on such features as
liberty, individualism, and Christianity. In a review essay, the art historian
Craig Clunas listed some of the less well-known linkages that have been proposed
between Western culture and modernity, including the propensities to think
quantitatively, enjoys pornography, and consumes sugar. All such proposals
assume the fundamental aptness of the question: What elements of European
civilization led to European success It is a short leap from this assumption to
outright triumphalism. The paradigmatic book of this school is, of course, The
End of History and the Last Man, in which Francis Fukuyama argues that after the
collapse of Nazism and communism in the twentieth century, the only remaining
model for human organization in the industrial and communications ages is a
combination of market economics and limited, pluralist, democratic
government. |
