The Relentless Revolution

The Relentless Revolution

Review by Fraser Harbutt

This timely book is a splendid exercise in clarification. It explains a large much-debated conundrum: the development of modern capitalism. When professional economists take on this challenge, they tend to get tangled up in the veils of mystification characteristic of their discipline. But Joyce Appleby is a highly respected, communicating historian, known for the range of her interests. Her approach is distinctive, presenting a primary focus upon the cultural wellsprings of our capitalist framework, which seems to give her account more breadth than a treatment built on a foundation of, say, geopolitics or technological innovation. And she brings to the undeniable complexities of the topic a reassuring common sense and an admirably lucid, accessible prose style.

In tracing the origins of capitalism, Appleby draws her inspiration neither from Adam Smith, whom she finds at fault in assuming that the vital prompt to economic transformation was a natural, inborn instinct for self-advancement, nor from Karl Marx, whose notion of a purposeful class of entrepreneurial exploiters has been similarly influential. Rather than these giants she looks to the culturally-conscious German social theorist, Max Weber. Weber also had a penchant for the governing impulse—in his case the emergence of the God-fearing Protestant—but his approach was more open-minded and emphasized the importance of chance and unintended consequences. Appleby similarly elevates contingency, though in defining capitalism as “some scattered ways of doing things differently that proved so successful that they acquired legs” she appears to concede a degree of self-conscious experience and adjustment.

In some essential respects Appleby conforms to traditional interpretations, though often with an engaging gloss or a bold qualification. Thus England is confirmed as the place where capitalism got started, but the time is pushed back from the conventional starting point of the 18th-century Industrial Revolution (which she suggests “is to start an account of a pregnancy in the fifth month”) to changes she discerns in the late 16th century. From that point on a sequence of developments—an agricultural revolution freeing up labor and capital, the appearance of risk-taking entrepreneurs, technological advances and so on—brought significant economic change which in turn began to transform the culture from which it sprang.

Much of the book traces these gradual, sometimes haphazard but relentlessly interweaving changes up to our own time. Major themes such as the influence of slavery, the coming of factory systems, the faith-sapping business cycles and depressions, the impact of 20th-century wars, the advance of globalization bringing in countries like India and China are balanced by the discussion of topics like the American and German challenge to British supremacy and supplemented by intriguing references to subjects like the role of banks and the rising significance of consumerism.

Overall this is a very enjoyable book that is also an excellent overview, combining fresh interpretation and critical commentary on a subject of surpassing contemporary interest and importance.

Hardcover: 512 pages

Publisher: W.W. Norton & Co. Inc. ( January 01, 2010 )

Item #: 78-4715

ISBN: 9780393068948

Product Dimensions: 6.125 x 9.25 x 1.2 inches

Product Weight: 24.0 ounces