The relentless revolution: a history of capitalism Read Online Free PDF Page A

capitalism through a circuitous route. All the American history instructors there used the same book in our introductory course. It was a collection of readings that demonstrated the origins of modern social thought through a succession of major texts from the sermons of Puritans who settled New England, through Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan, John Locke’s Second Treatise of Government, Smith’s Wealth of Nations, Thomas Paine’s Common Sense, The Federalist Papers, and onward.
    Teaching is a great revealer of one’s ignorance. Everything seems to fit together while one is taking notes from someone else’s lecture. When the task of making sense of the past falls on you, gaps and non sequiturs stand out like hazard lights. The glaring anomaly I quickly discovered dealt with definitions of “human nature.” A term introduced to eighteenth-century public discourse, our ideas about human nature go unexamined because they spring from the commonsense notions of our society. Yet our understanding of human nature grounds just about everything else we believe, whether about politics, the workings of the economy, friendship, marriage, or child rearing. The problem that popped up in my teaching was how to account for the radical change in descriptions of human nature during the course of the seventeenth century. In the early selections in our textbook, the Puritan sermons and Elizabethan plays described men and women as thoughtless and capricious, if not usually downright wicked. Yet fast-forward a hundred years, and assumptions about basic human traits had changed dramatically.
    The new view of men and women can most easily be found in Smith’s Wealth of Nations . Yet Smith took his opinions about human nature for granted. Listen to him: “The principle which prompts to save is the desire of bettering our condition, a desire which tho generally calm and dispassionate, comes with us from the womb, and never leaves us til we go into the grave.” He speaks of the “uniform, constant, and uninterrupted effort of every man to better his condition.” 8 Where, I wondered, had Smith got this view of people as fundamentally rational and self-improving? Certainly it bore little resemblance to the characters that Shakespeare created or to Puritan conviction that “in Adam’s fall did sin we all.” Being in England for a year’s sabbatical, I became a permanent fixture at the British Museum, where I began reading in a new genre, the writings about commerce that began appearing in pamphlets, economic tracts, broadsides, and advice books from the 1620s onward. Following this paper trail through the rest of the century, I discovered abundant clues about the break with conventional opinions about human nature. I saw that most authors tangled up their policy recommendations with assertions about human tendencies or what they often called the natural order of things. 9
    Capitalism as a Cultural System
    Economic systems do not exist in isolation; they are intimately and crucially intertwined in their country’s laws and customs. Capitalism, even though it relies on individual initiatives and choices, is no different. It impinges on society constantly. Social mores channel desires and ambitions. Social norms help determine family size, and family size influences population dynamics. Neither the landlords, nor laborers, nor merchants, nor manufacturers were—or are—purely economic actors. They all had complex social needs and played many different roles in society as parents, subjects, neighbors, and members of a church, political party, or voluntary association. We could consider contemporary entrepreneurs, corporate managers, bankers, and large shareholders of stocks and bonds as now constituting something of a capitalist class with common interests in their financial well-being, particularly protecting capital from taxation and enterprises from regulation. Yet these men and women are not just capitalists. They’re parents, athletes,