BOOKS

Very few revs per century

Colin Welch

THE CULTURE OF CAPITALISM by Alan Macfarlane

Basil Blackwell, £19.50

Favourable noises about Dr Macfar- lane's book have emerged from that shrewd judge of historian-flesh, Mr Ferdi- nand Mount. Worth watching, should be good, bound to come off, were the tips relayed to me. They were based on Mr Mount's happy experience at Dr Macfar- lane's last outing on Individualism or, more correctly, The Origins of English Individualism, warmly reviewed by Mr Mount in these pages on 17 February 1979 — 'Goodbye to the Peasants'.

The thesis advanced in Individualism was that England was not before the so-called industrial revolution in any con- ventional sense a feudal peasant society, perhaps had never been. If it was feudal at all, which it certainly was, it was feudal only in its own unique and idiosyncratic way. This thesis was absolutely revolution- ary — not a word dear to Dr Macfarlane: he is a very strong continuity man himself, a loyal and unrepentant follower of such great and foolishly neglected continuity men as Stubbs and Maitland.

His thesis provoked roars of dissent from academic bigwigs who, influenced by Marx, Max Weber, Tawney, Postan, Hill and others, took a quite opposite and then conventional view. Some were very rude. Professor David Herlihy of Harvard thought Individualism 'a silly book, found- ed on faulty method and propounding a preposterous thesis'. Professor Lawrence Stone of Princeton found it put forward 'an implausible hypothesis based on a far- fetched connection with one still unproven fact of limited general significance'.

If it did, the fuss was surely disprop- ortionate. Silly books and implausible hypotheses are usually ignored, or used with contemptuous ingratitude to make the truth clearer. Unrepentantly combative, Dr Macfarlane returns in these present essays to justify his thesis, to flesh it out, to shore it up with new buttresses, to defy his critics.

He ranges far and wide through English pre-industrial social culture, exploring its attitudes to population and reproduction, to violence, to nature, evil and romantic love. Nowhere in these fields does he find the revolutions so dear to historians — why so dear? Because revolutions are more interesting than slow evolution? Or be- cause many historians are now themselves consciously or subconsciously revolu- tionaries, influenced directly or indirectly by Marx or Marxists, keen thus to prove that the evil industrial system engendered by one supposed revolution has in con- sequence very shallow roots and can thus easily be destroyed or set right by another revolution of a more suitable sort. Every- where where these revolutionary historians find dramatic and arbitrary upheavals, Dr Macfarlane finds continuity, deep roots, an industrial revolution (if such it can be called) emerging from a society ready for it, already adapted for many centuries in all or most of its principal aspects to its emergence.

What were those aspects? Dr Macfar- lane quotes with approval Max Weber's six preconditions for capitalism: 'rational capital accounting', 'freedom of the mar- ket', 'free labour', a 'rational technolo- gy. . which implies mechanisation', 'cal- culable law' and 'the commercialisation of economic life'. With the exception of mechanisation, Dr Macfarlane finds all these preconditions operating in England long before the industrial revolution. When did they not? That is the puzzle for him.

Their presence was sufficient to ensure that mechanisation, when it became possi- ble, was hospitably received and exploited. Capitalism here is thus not a rootless novelty or artefact but the expression or fruit of forces and factors long present in England, perhaps in a sense even more natural and universal than Dr Macfarlane allows, part of a natural order existing everywhere in posse if not in esse. For Dr Macfarlane limits his case (perhaps on 'The future's in the leisure industry.' purpose, for he is everywhere concerned to emphasise the uniqueness of England) by over-estimating the extent to which genuine peasantries, such as, say, in India or formerly in Russia, are inaccessible to market forces. Who were the kulaks? And have not Indian economists found their peasants astonishingly responsive to eco- nomic stimuli and penalties?

I must confess that it took me a while to realise how absolutely sound Mr Mount's tip was. I did read Dr Macfarlane with mounting excitement and enthusiasm. But his start was for me disconcerting, even shocking.

To be fair, it was his ending rather than his beginning which nearly derailed me. He is talking about capitalism, one of those 'hundreds of words in the historian's voca- bulary' which, as Weber opaquely pointed out, 'are ambiguous constructs created to meet the unconsciously felt need for adequate expression and the meaning of which is only concretely felt but not clearly thought out'. Such words need to be defined afresh by everyone who uses them. How does Dr Macfarlane use 'capitalism'?

I turned at once for enlightenment to his final appendix, 'A Note on the Nature of Capitalism', and found there stuff sadly familiar. Weber is again quoted, to the effect that 'the central peculiarity' of capi- talism is the ethic of endless accumulation, as an end and not as a means. 'Economic acquisition is no longer subordinated to man as the means for the satisfaction of his material needs.' (What about his spiritual or intellectual needs, some of us might at once demur. Did not Schliemann make a fortune to dig up Troy?) This ethic or spirit, according to Dr Macfarlane, 'could flourish in the backwoods or be absent in the great markets in ancient civilisations'. Yes, indeed it could: it can flourish any- where, wherever there are greedy, acquisi- tive people, misers and hoarders, in the Bible as in the Arabian Nights. Thus what is solemnly described as 'a central peculiar- ity' of capitalism turns out to be almost universal outside religious orders. To de- scribe capitalism merely as a systematised aspect of original sin damages capitalism without being helpful in any other way.

And all this oft-repeated nonsense about endless accumulation for its own sake. In a free capitalistic society some accumulate endlessly, some try to and fail, and some, including perhaps many university dons, don't. It is up to them. Adam Smith did not prescribe: he described. He did not com- mand 'accumulate He just noted how a widespread propensity to accumulate could be turned to public good. 'As an end and not as a means', moreover: these words may describe some capitalists who, in the animal excitement of creative and competi- tive life, have forgotten what their ends were or conceivably may never have had any. More often, I suspect, they mean only that the ends pursued are no more readily intelligible to dons, intellectuals and ega- litarian agitators than a musical score is to the tone-deaf or normal sex to those not inclined that way.

These failures of perception, if such they are, are common among enemies and denigrators of capitalism. Is Dr Macfarlane then one of these? I'm not sure. Vestigial traces of hostility remain, as here, relics of a former more orthodox Macfarlane. But I would never have expected from any such enemy an analysis so calm, so fruitful, original and penetrating. Nor indeed, in- cidentally, would I have expected it from anyone whose bibliography omits Hayek, von Mises and all the other classics of capitalism. He has managed without their help: the more remarkable his achieve- ment.

Three epithets are applied by the dust- jacket to Dr Macfarlane's book: 'scholarly, spirited and highly readable'. 'Scholarly' it certainly is, firmly attached to its sources, if perhaps a shade too inclined to take as absolutely typical small areas for which records survive which Dr Macfarlane hap- pens to have studied.

`Highly readable' is not the first phrase I would have found for a book initially so thickly clotted with social-historical jargon. But one gets used to it. The obstacles to understanding drop away. The meaning and the importance of it become clear, and one is swept along by the fact that it is indeed so 'spirited'. The spectacle of jar- goneers hoist with their own jargon is enlivening, and I suppose you can't win at mud-wrestling without getting muddy. On page six Dr Macfarlane even permits himself a long table, normally a sure put-off for people like myself who read history partly for pleasure. On the left, `variables'; then in column two, character- istics of a 'model peasant society'; then in column three characteristics of 16th- and 17th-century England. But truly, this table is so clear and persuasive that it earns its place. If a sibylline choice forced one to throw away all but two pages of the book, the two with the table might be the ones to keep. In a model peasant society the extended household is the basic unit of production and consumption; the link between land and family is very strong; the village is almost entirely self-sufficient; production is for immediate use; ownership is not individual but household; children remain at home; fertility is high, children are regarded as an economic asset; women marry soon after puberty; there is little social or geographical mobility; community bonds are strong, marriages are arranged; patriarchal authority is great; and so on. And how many of these characteristics were found in 16th-century England? According to Dr Macfarlane, not one, and not for some centuries before, either, if ever. QED.

The industrial revolution made us for a time obviously different from everyone else; but the reason it did so was because, in ways slightly less obvious, we were different already. Just as scientific discov- ery occurs when chance strikes a prepared mind, so economic advance occurs when certain new possibilities and stimuli hit a prepared society. Already long before the industrial revolution English society was governed by money and the law, and English people were related to each other not by stable membership of groups but by money, paper and citizenship. By the 14th century more than half the English popula- tion was probably working for wages.

If all this is so, what does it matter except to historians? If this philistine ques- tion be put, I would refer to the immense importance of all this to so-called develop- ment economists, who often behave as if investment alone were sufficient to secure growth in backward countries, without regard to prevalent conditions and mores. These economists and their demographic friends will also incidentally find in Dr Macfarlane's pages some of the reasons why their tasteless birth-control campaigns so rarely work in peasant societies.

One of Macfarlane's most percipient passages emphasises the significance of domestic pets, notoriously and from time immemorial prized by the English, not wholly understood or easily afforded by true utilitarian peasants. One of his most fascinating but, to me, least persuasive passages discusses the alleged obsolescence of evil. Its disappearance as a concept is for him one of the most extraordinary features of modern society. Agreed, if it had disappeared, it would be extraordinary: but has it? Has it, as he supposes, dis- appeared from modern capitalist society, from the world of `Benedorm' (sic) and Monte Carlo, of Jeux sans Frontieres and the Eurovision Song Contest, of the EEC and butter mountains? From Hungerford?

Surely evil is a bit more durable, inven- tive and adaptable than he concedes? A more 'rational' world may indeed explain away evil as the morally neutral product of impersonal forces. 'Evil' thus eliminated, we may be free to 'investigate the real causes of pain and misfortune'. Indeed we are. And where have many of us, in this poor deluded 'rational' 20th century, found them? In Jews, in kulaks, in the rich, in the capitalists whom Dr Macfarlane so sym- pathetically analyses. Are we not here confronted again in modern guise with `the demons' which 'infested Europe from the fall of Rome to Hieronymus Bosch'? Is this the 'science' which has for us replaced Frazer's 'magic'? Is this a grim continuity which has somehow eluded Dr Macfar- lane's normally unsleeping eye?