Its important to keep in mind that Marx was not a Marxist, just as Keynes was not a Keynesian and Ricardo was not a Ricardian. Marx elaborated the Classical model of the economy, and in his hands it led to vastly different conclusions than it did in the hands of Ricardo, Mill, and company. As is well known, he predicted that Capitalism was prone to crises, and would lurch from one to another in an escalating series until it collapsed from its own internal contradictions. Less well known is that he made very few predictions about what would, could, or should happen next. This is not really surprising: whether a good or bad student, he was a student of Capitalism---not Post-Capitalism.

So, when so-called ‘Marxist’ political parties took power and adopted Marx’s work as some odd kind of holy writ, Marx’s sloganeering about the triumph of the working class and predictions about the withering away of the capitalist state were used to fill the void in Marx’s serious work. Of course, the triumph of the working class may well have been fighting words, akin to brave words I might utter about the damage that my local soccer team, the Breakers (#10 out of 15) are going to visit upon South Melbourne (#1 out of 15) when they visit town. And the withering away of the capitalist state is just a direct implication of whatever it would be to be a capitalist state: just as the medieval state withered when cut off from the material support of the manor system.

What Marx got *right* was that Capitalism as he studied it was not a sustainable long term proposition. It could not persist indefinitely. Of course, in his theory of economic history, status quo meets its opposite, is eventually destroyed in the conflict, but is replaced by a new status quo that represented a synthesis between the two antagonists. Yet in applying his theory of economic history to Capitalism, this was going to be the conclusion of the process: the collapse of Capitalism would be the unalloyed victory of the antagonist ‘working class’ interests, and we would be at the end of history.

That’s the infamous Marxist ‘dialectic’ that a century of political slogans and ideological constructions and reconstruction had obscured: an argument between status quo and antagonist leading to a new synthesis. Its internal logic doesn’t really point to any end in the process. Indeed, as far as using it for prediction, it’s like a neo-Darwinian theory. Will a specific species go on to found a whole new Order, or will it be driven to extinction? The neo-Darwinian evolutionary theory predicts that its impossible to predict this kind of thing. It seems to me that if Marx’s cheering for one side in the then-current conflict is taken out of his theory, then (1) there really shouldn’t be any way to predict how the new synthesis will shake out and (2) there isn’t any reason to believe that the ‘next’ synthesis will actually be the ‘final victory’.

In fact, history tells us that the great age of Individual Capitalism did lurch from crisis to crisis. Look at any graph which guesses what total domestic product was in an industrial or industrializing country between 1820 and 1940. The turn of the century crisis was clearly outclassed by the Great Depression. Individual Capitalism as the dominant economic system collapsed in the Great Depression. So in terms of predicting the evolution of the system that he actually studied, Marx was spot on. In terms of speculation about what would happen next, he was dead wrong---which is a plausible prediction of the theory he worked with.

Instead we saw the rise of Corporate Capitalism. What happened was that the stock market played the role that the stock market plays. There is a widespread and mistaken impression that the stock market exists as a mechanism for raising capital---but any examination of new stock issue as a proportion of existing stock trades and as a proportion of new financial capital in any given year can put that misconception to rest. The role that the stock market plays is to let the sons of the founders of corporations hand over control of the assets of the business *before* they drive a business into bankruptcy, rather than *after*. That process was going on in the 20’s, and continued into the 30’s. And what we have as a result is the ‘collectivization of Capital’. Of course, the collective of corporate management and financial interests isn’t the collective that Marx saw, but all his *theory* says in terms of prediction is: firstly, that the new synthesis will be just that, a new system built out of elements and subsystems from the two antagonists; and secondly, that it will catch people used to the old system and its antagonist by surprise.

Historical analogy also suggests that economic theory which is suitable for the one system won’t be fully worked out until a new system is well on its way in. The fact that the new system shares substantial bits from the previous system gets developing a theory of the new system, since it makes it possible to focus on what has not changed, and ignore what has. And sure enough, we have a fine theory of how individual capitalism works when it does, in standard neoclassical economics, and a fine theory of how its breaks down as it eventually must, in Marx’s theory of capitalism, but precious little on how our system of Corporate Capitalism actually works.

Marx and Marxists were wrong about the end of history, as everyone who has predicted the end of history has been so far. Marx’s theory of the dialectic seems better than Marx’s use of it, and far superior to the obscure mumbo jumbo that results when ‘dialectic’ is defined and redefined in order to justify the current policy position of a political party, whether in or out of power.

And a lot of economists are like a lot of generals: much better at preparing to fight the last war than preparing to fight the next one.

Fascinating to see Wittfogel discussed in this context; a very original thinker.

Wittfogel had some very interesting ideas, but I don’t think one can fairly call the Mogul Empire in India an "Oriental Despotism" in the sense he meant.

Particularly, it didn’t last until the Europeans overthrew it from without; the Emperor Aurangzeb (regnabat 1658-1707), its last great monarch, managed to wreck it rather thoroughly from within.

He did that essentially by reversing the policy of religious toleration towards Hindus that most of his ancestors had followed (reinstating the poll tax on non-Muslims, for instance, and denying their aristocrats careers in the Imperial service), and by reckless expansionism in the Deccan that overstrained the Empire’s resources. Together those policies goaded whole regions and communities (the Sikhs, for instance) into becoming implacable enemies of the Moghul power. Aurangzeb’s own personal competence and force of will ensured that he stayed on the throne long enough for the disaster to become irreversible. None of his successors had any real authority beyond a couple of day’s march from their capital.

By the end of his reign, the Europeans were still an exceedingly minor factor; but the Mahrattha rebellion was bleeding the Empire white, the revenue collecting service had broken down, and regional commanders were setting themselves up as de facto independent princes. By the time the Europeans _did_ start to be a real political-military presence in India, the Moghul Empire had become as much of a shadow as the West Roman Empire was in the time of Theodoric. The Persians had sacked and burned their way through the Khyber Pass to Dehli and back, carrying off the Peacock Throne; Afghans and Mahratthas and Pindaris and warlords and adventurers of every stripe were ripping the subcontinent up in a chaotic war of all against all, with the Emperor in Delhi merely the puppet of the nearest man with a sword.

As an aside, the founding of the British Raj was as much a stumble into a vacuum and a reaction against the intrigues of the French as anything else; the Directors of the East India Company were always reluctant to dabble in local politics. Men on the spot, at the end of a communications line with a minimum of ten weeks between letter and reply, took the initiative themselves. The Directors in London were left uttering weak bleats of protest and confirming what had been done in their name; particularly as it was so profitable.

One interesting aspect is the absence of any real technological gap between the Europeans and their Indian opponents. Both sides fought with pretty much the same weapons; smoothbore muskets, muzzle-loading cannon, and cold steel.

India had had gunpowder and cannon as long as Europe, and had a tradition of craftsmanship which enabled it to duplicate European weapons up to and through the main period of British conquest. As late as the 1840’s, the Sikh arsenals in the Punjab easily matched British infantry weapons and artillery—in fact the artillery park of the Khasla, the Sikh army of Ranjit Singh’s Punjabi kingdom, was superior to that of the Company’s armed forces. And the guns were well served, since Ranjit Singh employed some very capable European mercenaries to drill his forces.

Yet not even the well-armed, splendidly disciplined and courageous Sikhs were really able to fight British troops and British-trained and officered sepoys on equal terms; close but no cigar. Other Indian opponents couldn’t even come close; the forces of the Raj repeatedly thrashed them at odds of 15 to 1 and better.

The amusing thing about the discussion is that Marx was a journalist, not a scientist (even though he was one of the founders of American anthropology). He also believed in classical 19^th century economics, which is like being a classical Darwinist. On the other hand, his use of Hegelian dialectic was a precursor to the modern use of non-linear dynamics in similar problems.

Rather than discussing ‘hydraulic societies’ (yet another obsolescent concept), look at what characterizes relatively stable urban cultures during their histories. Here’s a very incomplete list:

1. Tokugawa Japan

2. Early Egypt

3. Rome to Diocletian

4. Minoan Crete

5. The Mayans (twice)

6. etc. (I can go on quite a while...)

These societies were generally not faced with problems that required a creative or non-linear response for a good while. But look what happened—their social systems lost the mechanisms that allowed them to respond to non-linear challenges. Meanwhile, long term dynamics gradually degraded their ecological environment, eventually resulting in non-linear challenges (the term Iain Banks uses is ‘outside context problems’) that they couldn’t handle. Many of these cultures didn’t need outsiders to push them over—insiders could do the job just as well.

I did a paper on this for an archaeology conference about ten years ago, where I noted that the result was theoretically chaotic social system dynamics. Tain’t deterministic by any measure.

Cheers,

 

---

The whole of the 'civilized' premodern world seems to have been locked in a cycle of war, empire, decline, and war. Warring states get incorporated into vast structures of imperial control; the empire gradually undergoes institutional decline, splinters into fragments, and the whole thing starts over again.

The systems weren't completely uniform over time, of course. Some things did change; there seems to have been a slow increase in the _scale_ of the pre- modern empires, with gradual increases in the effectiveness of the 'technology of control'. The first empires based on the Iraqi plains barely got north of Baghdad. The last great one, the Abbasaid Caliphate, reached all the way from Spain to India.

The Dark Age periods tended to get shorter and be less absolute; no subsequent collapse in the Middle East was as complete as the one that hit after 1200 BCE, and the same is true of the post-Harrapan recovery in India. Cultural developments like Confucianism, post-Vedic Hinduism, and Judaism- Christianity-Islam did change things. More and more territory previously at a pre-urban/barbarian level became part of the 'high culture' zone, with cities and a literate class.

And there was a continual, if very gradual and irregular, decline in the carrying capacity of the original centers of agricultural/urban civilization. Iraq probably never again reached the productivity it had under the Ur III dynasty in the 3rd millenium BC. The Sassanid Persian period came close, but that was in decline even before the Mongols wrecked the area.

But at a fundamental level, things remained very stable. The system got bigger, but didn't change in its basic structure; villages of peasants, and a state superstructure built on extracting the surplus from the peasants. Areas that had once been rather exceptional -- Greece, or the Phoenecian city-states -- were incorporated into the mainstream of the empires. Technological change was very gradual, and population always increased to consume the whole of the surplus it created. Once an area had a dense agricultural population, it reached a plateau and fluctuated around that level.

The Americas were evidently following the same path, with a 3000-year lag due to a later start. In fact, I'd say that the rise of Western civilization and its transformation of the world has to be a consequence of a whole series of wildly unlikely historical accidents -- political/military, cultural/ideological/religious, and economic/technological. Taken together, they're vanishingly improbable.

Perhaps that's the solution to Fermi's Paradox. There may be thousands of intelligent species out there, but if they get as far as agriculture then they lock themselves into cycles of Oriental-style empires, which continues until something wipes them out. An asteroid impact, or some other natural catastrophe that a pre-scientific culture can't cope with.

Altmail: improbable historical accidents and Psychodynamics

Steve Stirling

One reason I never bought either Marxism or Asimov’s futuristic "Foundation" version of it is the highly _contingent_ nature of history—particularly political/military history, which often determines the outcomes of the other varieties. Individuals and their chance-determined fates do matter.

Eg., Alexander the Great died young, although he was strong as a bull physically and had repeatedly recovered from wounds and illnesses that would have killed most men.

Result: the Hellenistic world immediately fractured as his marshals fought over the corpse of his dominions. He had two posthumous sons; if he’d lived as long as his father Philip, who lead a similarly dangerous life, they’d have been in their 20’s when Alex kicked off, and his empire might have hung together for a century or more. Probably aborting the rise of Rome in the process; or to look at it another way, the Seleucid monarchs nearly did suppress the Maccabees. A stronger Hellenistic state might well have done so... and so Judaism ceases to be an important force, and isn’t there to be the seedbed of Christianity, which in turn remade the world and made our own culture possible.

Or to take another example, Augustus Caesar lived to be an old man, despite being in frail health most of his life. Not only was he an administrative and political genius, but he simply lasted so long that, as a distinguished Roman historian pointed out, by the time he died nobody but a few old men actually remembered living under the Republic. Without him, the Roman hegemony might well have gone down in the same sort of mad-dog scramble that the Hellenistic world did, torn apart by rival warlords. The Triumvirs had already divided it, and shown that you didn’t need Italy to have a workable power-base.

As I pointed out earlier, the rise of Western civilization is full of these wildly improbable events. Despite being haunted by the ghost of Rome, for instance, nobody in the West ever succeeded in re-establishing a Universal State—and this despite the fact that some very able men tried, and that such arrangements are quite common elsewhere. China had an area and population roughly comparable to Europe’s, for instance, and was always stitched back together after an interval of contending states. For that matter, if a camel driver in Medina hadn’t seen visions, Byzantium would probably have been strong enough to retake the Western provinces over the centuries.

I could go on for hundreds of pages—the Reformation, for instance, or the "luck of the English" that enabled them to defeat Habsburg Spain, get rid of the Stuarts, stumble their way into Parliamentary government, get William of Orange as a ruler, which let them beat the French under Louis XIV, virtually by accident develop the institutions which let the entrepreneurs of the Industrial Revolution overcome the resistance of vested interests (historically very rare)... and on and on. America has had the same astonishing run of luck, on a larger scale. (America being to England as Christianity is to Judaism.)

For that matter, look at the way the World Wars and then the Cold War of this century turned out—odds were we’d end up with a world empire run by some very nasty people.

If I believed in Secret Masters, I’d swear that a bunch of super-aliens were hiding under the Himalayas _forcing_ us down a particular historical path.

As it is, I’m forced to conclude that sometimes you just flip ‘heads’ fifty times in a row... 8-).

A good deal depends on how sensitive you think history is to initial conditions.

Eg., I agree that Alexander’s empire would have split up eventually; the Greeks just weren’t the sort of institution-builders that the Romans were. But an Alexandrian Empire that lasted 120 years—a tiny fraction of Rome’s duration—would have changed everything in unpredictable ways.

And since the outcome that led to us (post-Renaissance Western civilization) was so unlikely, any substantial change would probably have aborted it. That isn’t a question that can be definitively settled, of course, but all my study of history gives me a strong gut feeling that it’s right.

On a collateral issue, I don’t think Americans are good candidates for an imperial role—which, if the power positions were reversed, the Chinese would be, for instance. This isn’t a intended as a slur on Americans, a people I greatly like and admire. It’s just that the national character just doesn’t suit; particularly the lack of patience, and the desire to be liked. As a great power with global interests the US will undoubtedly act to sustain them—maintaining its _de facto_ protectorate of the Gulf while the oil lasts, for instance—but I just can’t see the United States as Universal State.

Now, in terms of cultural and economic hegemony, it’s a different matter. It’s visibly true that the world is more and more forced to imitate the US in order to compete with it—the agonizingly long-drawn-out restructuring of Japan, for one example, or the way the Europeans are reluctantly but inevitably embracing ‘shareholder value’ business methods and downsizing.

And US popular culture is irresistibly seductive, as witness the futile ranting of various mullahs against satellite TV. Or the tormented ambiguity of various tyrants about the Internet, which they must embrace for the sake of economic efficiency but cannot because of the loss of control it implies.

(Which leads to comical situations in places like the Middle East—where Syria is debating whether to allow any Internet nodes, while Microsoft just bought an Israeli software startup for $265 million.)

The US has learned to live with and thrive upon the forces of rampant possessive individualism, cultural chaos, and anything-goes laissez-faire. That gives it a tremendous advantage, in an era when those forces are slurping around the world at the speed of light like an irresistible bath of acidic plastic foam, turning the world into a bath of globalized goo, or a paradise of infinite individual choice, depending on one’s prelidictions. As California is to America, so America is to the world... 8-).

I am happy to see that one of the big questions of "world system" theory has come close to the surface in this discussion: Why Europe? Why not China?

I take it as obvious that the detailed outcomes of social evolution are the result of fork-in-the-road events. The question for social evolution, then, is to what extent large scale outcomes are sensitive to the detailed outcomes. And that might depend on the question that is being asked. Are there two nation states in the Iberian peninsula, or one, or three? How should we view a social evolutionary story that gives the reason why we ought to expect two? I’d see it as a case of 5-20 hinsight, seeing far more in retrospect than there is to see.

But at a courser resolution, the case might be more plausible. The crux of one argument, more or less Stephen Sanderson’s in _Social Transformations_ (but radically simplified to fit email) is this: if there are more unstable types of social systems than stable types social systems that can be supported at any particular level of technology, then different peoples developing or adopting that level of technology might at first adopt a wide variety of social systems. After all, the long-term stability of a system doesn’t exert any ‘weight’ in its immediate prospects of being instituted. But the unstable systems are exactly that, and so peoples with those types of systems will see social systems come and go, while those that stumble on stable systems will persist. If neighboring peoples adopt aspects of the stable systems, they may stumble on their own version of that stable type of social system, and gradually (that is, over millenia) become the dominant, ‘normal’ social system over a large number of peoples in contact with each other.

So the sketch of social evolution here is of particular systems which are not necessarily very contagious, but have great staying power. Other systems that are very contagious may rapidly sweep over a large number of peoples in contact with each other, but if they are unstable, will not persist.

The argument here is that, especially in the east-west Eurasian axis after the agricultural revolution, what Marxists call ‘the hydraulic state’ is an example of a very stable system for that level of technology.

But it is not a stable system in all contexts in that range. In particular, it is unstable when there is a rough balance in the importance of land power and sea power. Looking at the map, and population levels over this period, this holds for Peninsular West Asia, which we call Europe, and for an archipelago of large islands unusually close together that we call Japan. These are exactly the areas where feudal systems developed, rather than being supplanted by imperial systems. Because of the difficulty in establishing a universal authority in this context, there are a series of compromises and power sharing arrangements which would never persist in an area where dominance in land power alone could support an imperial structure.

Of course, in the terms of the agricultural age, big whoopydydo. The systems persist in these areas because taking them and holding them keeps on being not worth the trouble. But that is only partly ‘hard to do’: it is also ‘why bother?’. Such fractious area with their complicated power sharing arrangements and mixes of allegiences and personal ties are unlikely to prove a threat to a big empire in any event.

Down to a particular consequence, with substantial differences in details between the two. This piece is due to E.A.J. Johnson’s _Space in Developing Countries_ (referring to geographical space, rather than space programs). In Europe, part of the power base of monarchs dealing with unruly and independent-minding feudal barons, etc., were the free cities. Cities grew up in part because the manor is not a conducive environment for some activities, and they received support and encouragement from feudal kings exactly because they provided a counter - weight that helped the kings retain their own independence from feudal lords. In Japan, under the Tokugawa shogunate, feudal lords were kept in line by forcing them to keep their household in castle towns, rather than on their lands, and to reside at the imperial court in alternate years.

In one case, feudal rulers encouraged cities to engage in lucrative activities to be able to lend support against feudal lords. In another, because of the system which developed to keep feudal lords in check, feudal lords encourage castle towns to engage in lucrative activities to provide a source of finance for the stay in the imperial court. But in either case, the brakes on commercial and manufacturing progress which were a normal part of the stability of an imperial system were removed in the ongoing development of feudal systems. And feudal systems persisted not because they were particularly stable in their own right, but because they were the most stable system in a peculiar environment.

Back to Sanderson. Capitalist systems developed in both Europe and Japan. It’s important to catch a misconception about Japanese economic history here. Capitalist systems developed within feudal systems, in both places, which really needs little argument unless we think they sprang from the forehead of Zeus. The closing of Japanese ports to Europeans was not a closing of trade: trade in the South China sea expanded after the closure. This was a mercentalist action that is in the same spirit as European actions against European trade rivals—especially since at the time a lot of what the Europeans produced were shoddy knockoffs of East Asian manufactures, competing primarily in terms of price.

Now to someone who’s name escapes me, in an article in a book in my office down at Ourimbah. And back to China. As China expanded, it is an interesting little tidbit that each new dynasty began with an expansion in the number of imperial walled cities, but then settled down to a similar number of imperial walled cities as the previous dynasty had. In other words, when the Chinese state expanded to cover new ground, it kept discovering that there was a rough upper limit on the size of the imperial bureaucracy, and pruned down the number of imperial walled cities. Of course, no walled cities were permitted that were not imperial walled cities! So over centuries when the network of cities in both European states and Japan were becoming progressively denser, the network of cities in China was becoming progressively sparser.

Now back to just plain old development economics. An industrial revolution rides on the back of a second agricultural revolution, in which there is an explosion of agricultural productivity. It is this second agricultural revolution which makes it possible to have large industrial workforces to achieve the economies of scale which the industrial revolution must ride to get off the ground. And the spark for this second agricultural revolution is the opportunity offered in the rural market center to exchange rural produce for things which cannot be reproduced back on the farm. The denser the network of cities, the denser the accompanying network of market towns feeding produce to the cities in exchange for imports and the products of the cities, and the more widespread the incentive to generate a marketable surplus is throughout the agricultural population.

To begin with, pace Mr. McFarling’s interesting comment, the Chinese did have a quite dense network of urban sites, true commercial cities, as far back as the Sung—certainly the Southern Sung. In some respects, that’s a particularly interesting period of Chinese history; it’s when rural China assumed its "modern" form (the one that more or less lasted down to the early 20^th century). Previously it had had something resembling a manorial economy in large parts (in that landlords played a large part in organizing production); after that, it moved to a purely _rentier_ form of landlordism.

China is a good example of what happens if you introduce technological changes gradually. It had many of the crucial Industrial Revolution innovations long before Europe; not only the well-known ones like paper and the compas, but coal-fueled blast furnaces operating on a very large scale, textile machinery, advanced farming, quite sophisticated merchant banking, and a very good internal communications network (the Grand Canal, for instance). Hence the extremely high level of handicraft skills, and the very large cities—all the world’s largest cities were in China until well into the 18^th century.

However, leaving aside the negative effects of Imperial unification, the Chinese economy was never _revolutionized_. Population always increased to swallow the entire surplus created by any innovation. The level of productivity was very high for a preindustrial society, but the standard of living was low. An Industrial Revolution requires a positive feedback cycle of rapid increases in surplus production, allowing heavy investment and the prospect of profit through cost reduction and mass production. China had gotten itself into a situation where all the easy, simple innovations—those Europe, and particularly Britain, made in the lead-up to the Industrial Revolution—had _already been done_, and done long ago.

One author called it a "high-level equilibrium trap". Once you’re in it, there’s no way out without a massive input of technology and resources from the outside to kick-start the stalled balance.

By contrast, the only way to keep your head above water is to paddle at a _continually increasing speed_, which is precisely what a modern market economy forces one to do willy-nilly. You can never _stop_. Or even slow down, much. That means continuous economic revolution, the end of all stability, endless creative destruction. The speed of innovation is a _qualitiative_ as well as a quantitative factor.

I think the failure of China (and Japan, which as Mr. McFarling correctly points out, was much more similar to pre-modern Europe) to make the leap into modernity on their own stems to a large extent from their _intellectual_ and cultural history.

Specifically, they didn’t have the Classical heritage of Greece and Rome, and they’d never been Christians—especially not Latin Christians.

Absent these, neither people—despite their undoubted gifts and brilliant cultural achievements—could develop a true science, or a scientific world-view.

The contribution of the Greeks, I assume, is obvious; but Christianity was important too, particularly in the form it took in the Catholic (and later Protestant) worlds.

The long Christian tutelage of Europe firmly implanted the idea that the entire universe is obedient to one, single, unalterable set of laws. The specifically Western aspect of that was the triumph of Aquinian rationalism in Catholic theology—a similar controversy in Islam came out exactly the other way, with the declaration that further interpretation was banned, an event of considerable consequence. By stating that reason and faith could not conflict, that Catholic theological tradition did a good deal to free reason; it began the "disenchantment" of the world, a process still under way. And it clearly implied, a thread taken up by Bacon quite soon thereafter, that those unalterable, universal Laws could be _determined by observation and logic_. ‘twas only a relatively small step to secularize that outlook, and you end up with guys like Laplace.

On other subjects: In re Albright’s ultimatum to the Serbs... well, you can’t have an Imperial regime without an Empire, I’d think.

Shoving Serbia around, or running Bosnia and/or Kosovo, or for that matter Kuwait, is not going to transform the US into a great World Empire. Not with an army of 480,000 men—smallest in 50 years or more—and a public adverse to all expensive committments. A few small protectorates do not an Empire make. There’s a difference between being a Great Power and a Universal State.

Frankly, to me it seems like the same sort of thing Great Powers have always done, not significantly different from Teddy R. bullying the Columbians in the 1890’s, or Great Britain settling the fate of Egypt in 1882, or France forcing Austria to get out of Italy in the 1860’s, or President Polk grabbing Texas and California, or Jefferson buying Louisiana, or whatever.

General Sir Garnet Wolseley, who led the British expeditionary force in Egypt, had blood-curdling fantasies of being another Cromwell and making Liberal politicians like Gladstone clean officers’ boots at bayonet-point. But he kept them private in his diary. If he’d spread them abroad, he would have been _laughed_ out of public life.

The Great Powers have always been jockeying for position, grabbing off this or that titbit, relinquishing it later, competing for a strategic spot or a trade route or a "friendly" local regime in Country X—and it hasn’t turned any of them into the New Rome. In fact, except when a miscalculation made them stumble into a major war, it usually didn’t have more than a trivial impact on their domestic politics.

Dr. Pournelle,

I’ve been reading your "determinism" discussion on alt.mail with interest. At its deepest the debate’s probably unsettleable: it touches on two very hard problems, whether individual human beings really do make large differences in history, and whether what you and I would probably agree constitutes "good" behavior is also "practical over the long run."

do what can be done to raise economic growth higher on the list of policy makers’ priorities [De Long grimly comments: "this is hard."]

The question of why Japan failed to develop on its own is an easy own to answer. It developed on its own to the same extent that North Atlantic Europe did. Whether that is succeeding or failing to ‘develop on its own’ is only a question of how the phrase is defined.

The roots of Japanese capitalism were in the shogunate; the roots of west Atlantic capitalism in the medieval states. The Meiji Restoration saw a burst of social innovation under the cover of borrowing from Europe and the US; the Enlightenment saw a burst of social innovation under the cover of borrowing from classical Greece and Rome. Neither developed on their own in the sense of developing all their own technology from scratch; both developed on their own in the sense of technological and institutional innovations (defined as the putting into a place changes in the way that things are done).

Attributing the industrial revolution in the West Atlantic to Greek antiquities is a bit like attributing the success of an portrait painter to the paints. In the Enlightenment, the folkviews of the West Atlantic states meant that the antiquities were a legitimate source for social ideas. And as a general rule, when people are pursuing innovations, they try to find a way to dress them up as legitimate.

I think I must be misunderstanding Bruce McFarling’s statement that Japan modernized "on its own".

Japan under the Tokugawa Shoguns remained a static society—a highly advanced preindustrial state, but one that showed absolutely no sign of developing a true science or of generating an Industrial Revolution. Those phenomena have occurred exactly once in all human history.

The Meiji Restoration was the direct result of Western pressure on Japan; the economic and intellectual transformations it launched involved wholesale borrowing from the West.

Japanese technology and science are, quite simply, Japanese technologists and scientists working in a tradition wholly Western; if you take their contemporary examples and trace them back, in the 1860’s they take a right turn and move thousands of miles to the west, to Europe. They have no local roots.