Matt Zeitlin: Impetuous Young Whippersnapper

Greg Clark is on a interesting crusade. First in a piece for Chronicle of Higher Education, he lambasted left-wing, worlds-system theorist Giovanni Arrighi and his book calling China a fufillment of Adam Smith’s vision of the economy. Clark’s review made the book itself seem rather stupid, but he also included all sorts of potshots at the field of sociology (of which Arrighi is a rather eccentric member):

In summary, the evidence Arrighi offers for his sweeping cosmology is astonishingly thin. The book indeed is little more than an extended anti-market, anti-capitalism, anti-Western harangue. Statements of dramatic import are proffered with little explanation: “The decisive battle to contain the rising power of China is still being fought in Iraq”; the Iraq War “aimed at using military might to establish U.S. control over the global oil spigot”; “China is not a vassal of the United States, like Japan or Taiwan.”

The book offers more insight into the sad state of intellectual development in sociology departments, even at such prestigious institutions as Johns Hopkins, than it does into the realities of wealth and poverty in the world economy.

Clark was being incredibly abtuse by implying that world-systems theory is preponderant in American sociology or political science departments, because it isn’t. Most sociologists do rather careful work, much of which is quantitative. There are, of course, social theorists that Clark probably doesn’t care for, but if he really wants to cast out the work of Weber, Durkheim and even Benjamin and Adorno into the “romantic” left-wing trash bin, he would be making a rather silly move.

Greg’s second attack on the discipline goes to a work that is actually beloved by social scientists, especially sociologists – Karl Polanyi’s The Great Transformation. But once again, he radically overstates his case. The weird tension in his short essay is that he seeks to A. disprove Polanyi’s historical argument that free markets are deliberate political and human inventions and B. take potshots at his generally left-wing, anti free market politics. So Clark goes on to say that there were really free markets in pre-Industrial Revolution Europe, Ancient Greece, Mesomopotamia and so on. But how does this square with Greg’s own work, which makes the argument that the Industrial Revolution was a world-historical change like no other. This fairly problematic tension makes itself pretty obvious:

But Polanyi was no better a historian than a prognosticator. Indeed, the more we learn of history, the more evident it is that the free market was not an 18th-century innovation, but one of mankind’s oldest social institutions. Medieval England, for example, had elaborate free markets in goods, labor, capital, and land. Forget groaning serfs, over-weaning lords, the lash of the whip; think private property, wage labor, market incentives, and social mobility. By 1200, a large class of landless laborers worked for cash, bought their food in markets, and rented their dwellings. The free market indeed has some claim to be the natural habitat of modern people, not a perverse and unnatural innovation. (We have evidence for extensive markets long before the time of Christ: in the Roman Empire, in ancient Greece, and in ancient Babylon.)

The Industrial Revolution in England did not represent a trade-off between gains for plutocrats and the horrors of poverty and unemployment for the poor. Instead, the greatest beneficiaries of the Industrial Revolution were the unskilled; this truly great transformation reduced the terrible inequalities that existed since at least the Middle Ages. The elaboration of the modern credit nexus eventually produced cyclical unemployment, but the Industrial Revolution also reduced the enormous annual shocks to income pre-industrial workers endured because of harvest successes and failures.

But wait, I though free markets had always been around, then what was that innovation of “modern credit”? And if the Industrial revolution was just the continuation of institutions and practices that had been around forever, then why did all these good things happen because of it?

Clark and other free market advocates/libertarians need not be so afraid of Polanyi that they simply take a shotgun approach to his work. Instead, they should probably concede his argument that the free market we see today is a relatively recent human invention. They should just say that it’s a good human invention! That things really have gotten better since the Industrial Revolution! That the atomization Polanyi criticizes allowed individuals to break free from tyrannical social arrangements from which they previously had no hope of exit! Sure, go after his predictions and general left wing slant of his argument, but there’s really no reason to fear the fact that great political changes allowed the free market that you all love to exist in its beautiful form.

More Polanyi related commentary, check out Will WIlkinson and Mark Thoma.

And for sociology that doesn’t suck (but even has a fain echo of Polanyi) watch Will WIlkinson’s diavlog with Douglas Massey.