THE JOINT CENTRE FOR HISTORY AND ECONOMICS
BOOK PARTY
SOCIOLOGIE HISTORIQUE DU CAPITALISME

 

Questions and Answers

 

David Todd (King’s College London): Congratulations, this is a wonderful book, humbling in its breadth and vision. I just wanted to ask for a clarification on causality - the causality of what brings about capitalism and its transformations: what causes the beginning of the Age of Commerce, the transition to the Age of Factories and finally the transition to the Age of Finance? In the book’s conclusion, you stress two very sociological factors: class struggles, understood in a subtler way than in doctrinaire Marxism, and the division of labour, in an homage to Durkheim. However, throughout the book, you frequently allude to the role of politics. For instance you mention more than once the role of empire in relation to long distance trade and you often stress the importance of “political will”. I therefore wondered if you could clarify your conception of the significance of politics–domestic and international–in the ushering in and mutations of capitalism.

Pierre François: It is true that one of the main arguments of the book is that the history of capitalism is very much a political one. We do not mean, by that, that it has to do, first and foremost, with the state. Of course the state is important for the history of capitalism, and we dedicate a long chapter to their connections. But this chapter is also the last one of the book – and by putting it at the end of book, we intend to say that no history of capitalism can be written without taking the state into account, but that many things, which can described as political, also occurred that had nothing to do with the state. When we talk about political will, actions or logic, we first and foremost designate the fact that capitalism and its evolutions have to do with the actions of groups which do not share the same visions of the world (what used to be called ideologies) and the same interests; these groups engage in conflicts; and therefore the main features of capitalism (the way firms are organized, the way work relationships are defined, the way accounting is conceived and used, etc.) are not functional answers to problems. Instead, they result from a balance of power between conflicting groups.

 

 

Deirdre McCloskey (University of Illinois at Chicago): I would like to ask about the defective definition of capitalism. For instance, do you consider, contra Braudel, that societies before capitalism were made of non-profit-seeking, friendly, possibly socialist peasants?

Claire Lemercier: Thanks Deirdre; this makes me realize that we do not really discuss how societies worked before capitalism. Our main point is that the early modern period was not that of an imperfect first stage of modern capitalism, but an age in itself. We certainly do not want to apply crude primitivism to older periods either; indeed, we write that there were capitalists in these older periods–their activities were just not as strongly related to a majority of the population around them. Ronan Shenhav, 'Inequality'. Taken on April 7, 2018. Flikr. Also, even if we adopt the basic idea that individual capitalists seek profit, it is not meant as a moral judgment. Even more importantly, we discuss different ways to seek profit, related to changing definitions of what profit is. We also show how many capitalists and clergy members in all major religions devised ways to make profit-seeking compatible with faith. Where we differ from you, however, is possibly in our emphasis on conflict (although we don’t mean systematically bloody, or morally problematic, conflict; we mostly react against narratives of smooth functionalism), and certainly in our main question: we are not trying to decide whether people were better off or worse off before and after the late seventeenth century.

Deirdre McCloskey: I have grave doubts that this endless search for an essence of something called “capitalism” is fruitful of insight. The unicorn tends to have the characteristics that the seeker finds fascinating. In the book under discussion, it seems, what is fascinating to the authors is conflict and the rise of “consumerism” (one unicorn is used to define another) and a rise of “money profit.” My own books, and those of the little band who believe that a rise of real income for the poorest of 3,000 percent since 1800 is the central fact of modernity, seek a quite different unicorn (as it may be). Such books speak of labor and land sales in Mesopotamia in 2000 BCE or banking in fourth-century BCE Athens or half of the population of southern England in the thirteenth century employed for money wages or the concentrated rise in the eighteenth century of the idea of equality of permission.

 

 

John Raphael Smith after George Morland.
Slave Trade, 1791. National Gallery of Art.Vivian R. Gruder (Queens College, CUNY): Since one feature of capitalism is labor paid in money, how do the economic activities based on slave labor fit in the system of capitalism?

Claire Lemercier: Thank you very much Vivian, I was too quick in my mention of paid labor when I answered Mary’s question. Yes, of course, labor paid in money (for example that of spinners in rural England) was only one part of labor, and is only one part of our narrative of what we call, for want of a better metaphor, an “entry into capitalism” in the early modern period. Slavery had existed before, and slaves were crucial for international trade, both because they were themselves considered as a commodity and in their role as producers of goods that were central in new consumption patterns, such as coffee and cotton. And as we define “entry into capitalism” as the moment when the daily life of a much larger proportion of the population became shaped by the behavior of capitalists, enslaved individuals are a large and substantively important part of this population.

 

 

Phyllis Chan (Cambridge): In terms of the three “eras” you posit, you stressed that this doesn't presuppose any judgement on being in one era or another. But isn't an “era” quite similar to developmental stages, which carries quite a lot of chauvinism?

Chetham's Library. Walpole's account book for building Strawberry Hil. Flikr. Taken on May 24, 2012.Claire Lemercier: Yes, we should mind the terminological problem here if there is to be an English edition, which of course we very much hope. The connotations attached to “âge,” the term which we use in French, are perhaps not as stark, although they are similar. It is very difficult to get over this idea of developmental stage. Indeed, a reviewer, who had otherwise made very insightful remarks, asked us: “OK, so you mean that whenever a country develops, it goes through the age of commerce, then of factories, etc.?” This could not be further from what we mean to say. This is because, first, our ages are global: capitalism is a global phenomenon, even though, of course, people experience it quite differently in dominated peripheries; but what is characteristic of our ages, preferred modes of organization, slogans, etc., is found everywhere – sometimes imposed by the centre on peripheries, yet often through more complicated circulations. So when, say, Cambodia returns to capitalism after the Khmer Rouge (one of our case studies), it experiences the age of finance, as do France and Honduras. And second, we really do not think that any age is more sophisticated, or modern in any way, than the others. This is really where we draw on Weber’s questions to give quite different answers. When we discuss the history of accounting, for example, we take pains to emphasize that accounting has changed, along with definitions of profit, but it is not a move toward better, more accurate accounting, or part of a narrative of progress.

 

 

Rani Perinparaja (Birkbeck, University of London): What do you have to say on the longue durée? How does it relate to the several definitions of the phrase that Braudel gave along his career?

Pierre François: The idea of longue durée, as Braudel defined it, is not central to our purpose. We picked and chose in Marx’s, Weber’s and Braudel’s propositions those that helped us formulate our arguments, and the longue durée is not one of the ideas that was crucial for our purpose. What we wrote could be referred to as the longue durée, but in a way that has little to do with the geological conception that Braudel developed in his Méditerranée. But a set of ideas that can be loosely related to longue durée is important to us, or at least to me, as a sociologist. First: the idea that the history of capitalism did not start with the second half of nineteenth Century, with the “industrial revolution” and with the process of rationalization, as Weber describes it. It started long before, about two centuries earlier. And these two centuries were not simply paving the way for what was going to happen after 1850 or 1880: they had their own logics, very different from what happened later, and nonetheless building a capitalist society, as we define it. Two centuries is quite a long time: it can be conceived of as a longue durée, in a sense that has nothing to do with Braudel’s ideas. Another idea was crucial for us, when we were to define our chronology. We wanted it to be quite homogenous–or at least not completely inconsistent–in terms of duration. When they try to make a chronological argument, sociologists or political scientists always tend to consider the past as simple and more or less motionless, while contemporary periods are cut in chronological slices that get thinner and thinner as they get closer to today. We wanted to avoid that, and with “the age of finance” we feel like we point at something that is now well-established, since it began about 50 years ago. 

Claire Lemercier: Let me just add a few things because it also gives a partial answer to Mary’s difficult question as to how we come back to the “macro” and avoid fallacies of composition (or don’t). I think the longue durée of our three ages of capitalism is mostly related to the sociologist’s idea of “institutions” (not the neo-institutionalist economists’ definition of the term). For sociologists, something is an institution when it is taken for granted: it has effects, but is rarely discussed. Our ages are quite long: 40 or 50 years and counting for the age of finance, one or two centuries for the other ages. We are in an age when most aspects of how to organize firms, how labor markets work, the role the State plays in capitalism, and also the role of women in firms, for example, are taken for granted; not that everyone agrees (conflicts are everywhere), but the arenas of debate and the words used to gauge the best solutions do not change too much. And there is a transition between ages when all this is not taken for granted anymore. So this is a longue durée that is substantively quite different from Braudel’s, as Pierre said, and it calls for a different focus of observation, and different methods. Not that we don’t want to quantify anything at a macro scale. Some of you know that I am a promoter of quantitative history, and Pierre, as a sociologist, is also a quantifier. But we do not trust long observations of large quantitative aggregates, such as GDP, simply because conventions of measurement (what is important to measure, how to measure it) and the very production of data are specific for each age. They are part of what is taken for granted. So for us, pushing back the taken-for-grantedness of 2020, or 1960, to measure something in 1800 makes little sense, and it is a fundamental disagreement that we have with some types of economic history.

 

 

Amalia Kessler (Stanford): Do you have thoughts about the relationship between the three ages of capitalism and the particular form that politics take in each? For example, politics of identity, notions of citizenship, etc.

Pierre François: This question is fascinating but difficult! Answering it is far beyond the scope of the book. We dedicate a whole chapter to the state and this chapter is, in a way, intended to address the kind of question that you raise, but in a very modest way. Considering the number of works in sociology, in political science or in history that have been dedicated to the relationship between capitalism and the state, we had to make choices. These choices can be formulated along very simple questions and propositions. The first one is widely accepted: the state is not against capitalism. Quite the opposite, actually: the state is one of the main builders of capitalism. Another point we wanted to stress may be a little less intuitive. Our argument is that the tools that the State uses to build capitalism have changed. We describe these tools in the ages of commerce, of factories and of finance, and we show that the tools used in the age of commerce to build capitalism did not disappear with the age of factories. Some new tools were added to the older ones. So some tools changed, but overall the role of the state cannot be described as more and more important, or (in the last decades) as less and less important. In order to make our points, we focus on two main questions, much simpler in a way than the themes you point at: does the state act to serve the interest of capitalists? The answer is nuanced, but on the whole negative. And we stress the role of the law in the construction of capitalism.

Claire Lemercier: It is true that, generally, we tend to emphasize political continuity. We mention the changing repertoires of social movements, but there, too, we find continuity. For example, we devoted a large share of the book to law. We show how law has shaped capitalism and has been used by capitalists, but how it has also been a weapon for social movements, sometimes successfully– for the civil rights movements in the 1960s or for trade unions in earlier periods. But we write very little about democracy per se; elected officials, for example, mostly appear as targets for lobbyists. This is perhaps part of our “feel bad book” stance.

Photographer: DONALD HUEBLER. 1976.  EQUAL EMPLOYMENT OPPORTUNITY MEETING. National Archives and Records Administration, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

 

 

Naomi Lamoreaux (Yale): I have a question about the relationship between the micro and the macro, and how the behavior of ordinary people differs, or not, under capitalism. I am thinking of the book by Peter Temin, Taking New Medicine, about drug regulations in the US in the twentieth century. He shows the coexistence of three decision-making methods, not just the “instrumental”, but also the “customary” and the “command” method (when you do as you are told to do).

Pierre François: This question is central for two of our chapters. When we deal with consumption, in chapter 2, we describe the central role, for the extension of capitalism, of what could be described as a “customary,” not “instrumental,” way of making decisions and behaving. Consumption is not driven by instrumental motives: ordinary people do not calculate when they decide to use this or that product; nor are they impelled by the (many) devices producers and sellers develop to make them buy this or that good or service. They rely on their habitus–a Bourdieusian concept that is, for us, a convincing way of explaining how and why behaviors are “customary.” More precisely, throughout the history of capitalism, the dialectic between imitation and distinction is crucial to explain the continuous expansion of markets: how come more and more abundant goods and services are created, and exchanged through market mechanisms? And how is it that more and more people are willing to consume these goods and services?

Claire Lemercier: The other place place where we discuss something similar is chapter 7, when we address social capital. Many narratives of capitalism, including Weber’s, imply that it became more impersonal over time. On the contrary, we discuss the coexistence, in all periods, of an individual behavior of self-interested profit-seeking, and of transactions that are more embedded in interpersonal ties or constrained by, for example, religious norms. So we don’t say that everything is instrumental in a capitalist society, but that different motives coexist in daily life; and we add that profit is often made by playing these different games simultaneously, for example using family ties or religious ties when they are useful.

 

 

Alexia Yates (Manchester): How do the authors anticipate their intervention will be taken up differently in distinct national historiographies/scholarships of capitalism? What are the interventions that you hope to make, within French scholarship and in terms of perspectives to bring to English-language historiography?

Claire Lemercier: This is also an opportunity to elaborate what we said earlier in the discussion about the role of Pierre Bourdieu in our book: his theses on distinction and habitus play an important role in our chapter on consumption, where they resonate nicely with historical work; we also discuss his stance (among those of others, e.g. Charles Wright Mills) as to the relationships between capitalists and the state elite. As to our contributions to history, in France, a few colleagues, such as Natacha Coquery and Clotilde Druelle-Korn, have already read the book with their students, to our delight. But it is a more receptive audience for us, because economic history is still part of History departments in France, with close ties to social history and business history; and even though many historians don’t like sociology or don’t have a good command of it, history stills stands on two feet, the one in the humanities, the other in the social sciences. We know that the situation is different in many countries, especially in the US. As for new historians of capitalism, we do not consider all their works, but we hope that they will be interested in what we have written. Our research interests very much overlap, and they seem to be caught in a complex dialogue with economists, or economic historians in Economics departments. We think that they could be interested in reading sociology, for a change, especially the type of historical sociology that we draw on.

Pierre François: If I may say a word on this in a sociological perspective, I would say that the ambition of the book was not only to get historians and sociologists to know a bit better what their colleagues from other disciplines are doing. It was also to bring together the agendas of French and American research in economic sociology. In the United States, economic sociologists such as Neil Fligstein, Dobbin, Mark Mizruchi, and Gerald Davis focus on questions that have to do with delineating broad changes in the (more or less) recent history of US capitalism. That is much less the case in French economic sociology, where the research agenda has for a long time been more theoretically driven. Bringing together the results of these two literatures, developed from very different perspectives, in a shared narrative, was one of the book’s ambitions. We hope that it could be interesting for US economic sociologists to see how the questions that they raise in relation to the US might receive different answers in relation to Europe; and that French economic sociologists might be interested in seeing their results in a comparative and longer-term perspective. 

 

« Response
Home »