The Capitalist Revolution

...From the point of view of pure social science, Berger's greatest contribution may be the power and range of his distinction between capiteilism and modernization...

...This definition distinguishes capitalism from traditional economic orders (feudalism, etc...

...Next, he "disaggregates" capitalism from many of the other forces that have accompanied it historically, but that may or may not be intrinsic to it: the amelioration of the historical lot of the poor, technological progress, modernization, individual autonomy, and democracy...

...Some years ago, Berger assembled a team of firstrate scholars to bring together the necessary evidence (then diffused in far-flung professional journals in various fields...

...Berger's argiunent is far more finely grained...

...Berger does not claim that the fifty strands he himself separates are the only strands...

...There are sound reasons for some degree of such emphasis: the emergence of the individual in modern societies is both startlingly new and rich in significance...

...Thus, it is sometimes publicly unclear whether they are, in fact, democratic capitalists in principle (who merely prefer higher taxes and broader political controls over economic decisions) or, rather, true democratic socialists, who for tactical reasons sometimes deny it...

...Capitalist theory, in Berger's view, is not and cannot be mythical...

...Nonetheless, it is in chapters two through six that most of the meat of The Capitalist Revolution is to be found...

...For him, it is mostly a tool, a technique, a set of arrangements...

...equality...

...This is useful to state, because incautious reviewers have already played fast and loose with his definitions...

...Peter Berger's new book arrays such massive empirical evidence against the beliefs of socialists, however, that some new strategy has become necessary...

...It also matches common sense...

...one cannot imagine private property apart from habits of respect for law...

...all four sets of habits atrophy...

...Chapter nine is given over to the asymmetry between theories of capitalism and theories of socialism...

...Peter Berger's ambitious new work is of considerable theoretical significance...

...or the pursuit of profit apart from a wiUingness to sacrifice present consumption for investment in future gain...

...That there may be a few close calls is normal...

...individual autonomy...

...The reaction to his book by socialist writers will add a great deal of evidence on this question...

...Think of it this way...

...Much of the strength of his argument derives from such abstraction...

...Berger's Kronstadt, so to speak, sprang from his encounters with East Asia beginning in the mid-1970s...

...Apparently, we are all capitalists now...

...One of Berger's virtues is to maintain a sharp, quizzical, noncommittal standpoint— and a quick sense of the comic...

...This first use will give us an empirically founded description of capitalism as it actually exists...

...It is this vast body of evidentiary material that Berger here draws upon with economy and clarity...

...An ambiguous word such as "optimal" has its locally assigned context, criteria, and range...

...It may not have been his 'present concern to unscramble "good" and "bad" forms of state intervention,' but that, and not the rightness of capitalism, is the real issue...

...In the light of others, there seems to be little difference...

...Berger has chosen his own formulations rather carefully, as his discussion following each of his fifty "hypotheses" makes clear...

...personal liberation...

...The second use is to elicit a set of social and moral values in whose light capitalism as an economic system is to be judged...

...This is a large, and worthy, ambition...

...the protection of human rights (both civil and social-economic...

...In each chapter, Berger distinguishes between the effects of capitalism and those of modernization...

...At the loss of which hair does a man become bald...

...When he saw his earlier hypotheses falsified, he had to abandon socialist theory...

...and, under traditional regimes, both the general cultural ethos and the range of private virtues are quite different...

...The social texture of capitalism is far too much neglected in sociological literature, even though the literature of management bends under the weight of questions of human personality, motivation, and interaction...

...His last few pages are disappointing...

...His own systematic purposes oblige him to abstract capitalism from such concrete settings...

...I know of no major American economist or intellectual, for example, who has called for government ownership of the means of production in the last 40 years," writes Lester Thurow, reviewing The Capitalist Revolution in the New York Times Book Review (September 7)—except, he says, John Kenneth Galbraith, in a limited case, and "no one took him seriously...

...That is a massive concession...

...He has not yet thought out clearly what the next questions are...

...Modern engineering, wheresoever practiced, disciplines the human mind to habits of order and precision...

...They cannot be falsified by fact...

...For example, in illustrating the distinction between an "intrinsic" and an "extrinsic" relation, Berger early points out that "modern technology" and "a rational engineering mentality" are related intrinsically...

...In the field of "political economy," they favor the "political...

...The essays he then collected will soon be pubUshed by the University Press of America in two volumes, Capitalism and Equality in America: Modem Capitalism, vol...

...Since Daniel Bell in The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism makes a similar error, I suspect that there is some oversight in current sociological method that regularly leads it in this direction...

...The top ten among them generally get to review one another's books in the New York Times and the New York Review of (Each Other's) Books...

...There is, alas, much more to do...

...When the farmer cocked his rifle at the door, one of them in terror clucked: "Ain't nobody here but us chickens...

...His earlier work having prepared him thoroughly for discussing modernization, Berger is here able to make systematic distinctions that have escaped most others...

...They oblige the reader to take a global view and to confront evidence that has seldom been brought together and set forth so compactly...

...But how do such habits and attitudes compare with those inculcated by traditionaUst (pre-capitalist) or socialist economies...

...They are holistic smd fantasize an entire way of life, ends and means together...

...Michael Harrington, Robert Lekachman, Michael Walzer, Irving Howe, Robert Heilbroner, Robert Solow, John Kenneth Galbraith, Richard Barnet, Gar Alperowitz, and Lester Thurow take turns praising one another's intellectual stature—and then will also review in the same journals the works of anyone else who dares to enter the field...

...It is simply workable—it works, it's there...

...Berger lists seven such values, commonly employed by social thinkers: the material well-being of the poor...

...Berger understands socialist thinking quite well...

...While he introduces the concept of "economic culture" in chapter one, in order to show how his own approach will differ from a merely economic approach, he never fully exploits the idea...

...So powerful is the argument of Peter Berger in The Capitalist Revolution that America's "democratic socialists" are likely to deny from the henhouse that they are now, or ever have been, serious socialists...

...Thus, modern factories, whether in sociaUst or in capitalist systems, share some characteristics...

...To be sure, Berger has promised no more than an "outline" of a theory, a skeleton in need of flesh and blood...

...American intellectuals...

...The four main ingredients of a capitalist economy, in Berger's definition, are markets, enterprise, profit, and (implicitly) a transgenerational legal system establishing rights concerning property...

...i.e., those nations designed upon sociaUst principles...

...For one thing, a market is a social institution...

...the preservation of tradition...

...Architecturally, Berger's design emerges from two considerations...

...Clearly, capitalism is "related" to such things...

...Accordingly, his first step is to define capitalism and socialism neutrally...

...But these four institutional arrangements also presuppose and inculcate certain habits and attitudes—a specific sort of culture...

...By separating ideological claims about capitalism and socialism from their empirical strands, and putting these to tests of falsifiability, he has already flushed several prominent American socialists out into the open...

...His second is to separate all the strands of argument that have been woven together in historical debates on the subject, in order to isolate the associated empirical claims...

...Thirdly, Berger places great—in my view, excessive—emphasis upon the emergence of the "autonomous individual" in capitalism...

...Not every ethos is supportive of such habits...

...What effects do capitalist institutions have upon virtues and character...

...Entrepreneurs almost always construct new social institutions...

...It enV capsulates Marx, Sombart, Weber, Schumpeter, and the others...

...He then re-states each of these strands in the form of a proposition subject to empirical falsification...

...This requires chapters two through six...

...It takes no sweat to discern that Belgium, by this standard, is "capitalist" and Bulgaria "socialist...

...The second runs deeper...

...He invites social scientists to test his fifty hypotheses, to winnow them or to expand them, to reformulate them or to amend them, above all to decide empirically which are to fall and which are to stand, according to accumulated evidence...

...they seldom act atomistically...

...and international development...

...He is, in effect, asking the elites of the planet's 165 or so nations to examine the empirical basis for deciding what sort of economic system to choose...

...More profoundly, no person of enterprise can succeed in isolation, atomically...

...Every word has its assigned meaning and sweep...

...enterprise without confidence in creative practical intellect...

...In the light of some of these values, the empirical picture of capitalist economies earlier arrived at compares favorably with the empirical picture of socialism...

...But the price to be paid comes due in chapter nine...

...But certain institutions are inconceivable without habits...

...The decisive definitional point is the "predominantly market economy...

...Their second characteristic is that, being unaccustomed to anything but adulation, they do not take kindly to a challenge...

...Understandably, weariness overcame him at the end...

...Hayek, or any other social scientists (including the nonscientist Karl Marx...

...What is the proper "culture of capitalism...

...Let me propose thesis number 51: Capitalist societies tend to generate modes of social cooperation qualitatively different from the forms of community found in traditionalist and socialist societies—more various, less total, more challenging, and of at least comparable affective satisfaction...

...But one can hardly make an informed assessment without that empirical picture...

...At what point will Sweden (described by its own socialists as "capitalist") pass over into the paradise of socialism...

...For nearly a decade beginning in the mid-1960s, he was not only open to socialist theories but leaned heavily in the direction of affirming their humane possibilities, as he did in Pyramids of Sacrifice...

...In fact, Berger's purpose is to develop a theoretical model for discussing economic systems within the social sciences beyond anything available in Max Weber, Joseph Schumpeter, F.A...

...Thus, chapter seven is given to the capitaUsm of East Asia, in some ways quite different from Western capitalism but empirically decisive in several respects (in falsifying "dependency theory," for example...

...political liberties...

...Third, taking pains outside New York and Boston to hide their socialism, they often prefer to be designated as "liberals" (which they certainly are not...

...Thurow thereby concedes the "rightness" of capitaUsm...

...Capitalism is not the sort of thing for which one gives three cheers...

...Against his arguments, one may predict that socialists will deny that there are any socialists among Michael Novak is the author of The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism...

...I, and Capitalism and Equality in the Third World: Modern Capitalism, vol...

...The new forms of human cooperation distinctive of capitalist societies—from teamwork to committees to associations of many sorts—generate powerful forms of sociality, not inferior in their way to the ancient Gemeinschaft and its pathologies...

...Berger's achievements are so colossal that one wishes he could have done everything instantly and completely...

...This is shown by the propensity of socialists, faced with the failure of socialist predictions, not to abandon the theory but, instead, to go looking for some other case in which such predictions may yet (somehow) turn out to be true...

...The game is over...

...A natural system, it needs no extraneous myth...

...markets without respect for free compacts mutually arrived at...

...In this respect, his seventh and eighth chapters (on East Asia and on Industrial Socialism) are especially important...

...poUtical Uberties and democracy...

...That depends upon one's higher values...

...He has learned, the hard way, not to expect most socialist intellectuals similarly to pursue disconfirming evidence...

...They have had a monopoly...

...What, after Berger, no one will be free to do is to evade empirical tests concerning assertions about capitalism and socialism...

...These chapters deal, respectively, with raising up the poor...

...one cannot imagine the first without the second...

...Indeed, under socialism...

...In modern conditions (large populations, international interdependence), there are no more than two choices: either an economy based predominantly upon markets or a command economy based predominantly upon political allocation...

...It is based upon observation...

...In the light of some (community, for ecample) socialist movements seem to do better, although socialist regimes once established do worse The empirical picture of capitalist as against socialist economies does not predetermine one's options either for or against capitalism...

...He is also able to show that most citizens of capitalist countries welcome capitalism as a fact, but do not invest it with mythic content...

...At this point, Berger sells his own viewpoint a trifle short...

...In the same way...

...Anyone is free to add to them or to re-formulate them...

...In the real world, one must be satisfied with "predominantly...

...it can only be empirical, for the economic system is conceived of solely as a means, not as an end...

...Economic culture'' is a concept Berger needs to explore more deeply...

...For one thing, sociology proceeds from outside-in...

...The operative noun, pain them as it might, is capitalism...

...Second, two highly significant bodies of information, newly available in the years since World War II, need to be assessed...

...By contrast, socialist theories have historically been (and are intrinsically) mythical...

...and community...

...Berger's tenth and last chapter allows him to put to use the fifty empirical strands he has brought together in the eight preceding discursive chapters...

...There are three interesting characteristics of the leading socialist writers of the U.S...

...But the character of such relations must be specified empirically...

...Any suggested reformulation will have to be at least equally careful...

...Modern technologies, whether in socialist or capitalist lands, permit certain great gains in productive power...

...Further, since sociological method requires sustained scrupulosity concerning values, it does not spontaneously proceed into an inquiry concerning moral habits...

...Capitalism, he says, legitimates itself by its facticity...

...First, the relation of capitalism to five main themes (set forth below) must be untangled in appropriate sets of empirical propositions...

...Thus, a little reflection will show that what is most characteristic of capitalist action is its social nature...

...and from socialism...

...class and social mobility...

...Every existing capitalist nation indulges in a high degree of political allocation, since each capitalist economy is embedded in social, political, and moral systems that represent not only "economy" but also "political economy...

...J ust the same, three things about this powerful book leave me unsatisHed...

...The context in which Peter Berger writes is global and worldhistorical...

...Berger's method tends to take a too severely instrumentalist view of capitalism...

...If they concede that the "rightness" of capitalism is no longer in question, their next move (in the socialist direction) will have to be to increase within it the number of decisions subject to political allocations rather than to markets...

...Berger's book is that it avoids the real issues," Thurow writes, employing the same evasive tactics Robert Solow took in the New Republic...

...Berger defines capitalism consensually: production for a market by enterprising individuals or combines with the purpose of making a profit...

...Enterprise is constituted by alertness to new social possibilities in oiganization, production, or exchange...

...The major critique one can make of Mr...

...Enterprise consists in estabUshing new relations with others: not only at the point of sale or in altering the process of production, but also in modifying the existing texture of laws, traditions, and tacit understandings in which heretofore socially unstructured aims and needs come to be known, identified, and met...

...Today intellectuals are more interested in making a lot of money working for capitalists than they are in overthrowing capitalism," Thurow writes...

...These it is Ukely to assign to the "cultural" or "moral" sphere, while it keeps its own social scientific eyes focused upon external institutions and arrangements...

...Clearly, Lester Thurow needed to shift Berger's definition from "predominantly political allocation" to "nationalization...

...Berger's great achievement is to place future debate within that framework...

...That is one source of dissatisfaction...

...And chapter eight is given to the "control case," an empirical survey of Industrial Socialism...

...Early on, Berger observes that in the real world capitalism is never found naked and alone, but always embedded in a political system and a moral system...

...If they choose to defend socialism, they must put up or shut up...

...There Berger is able to show easily the power of the socialist myth, undaunted by the evidence of fact...

...He does not even claim that he has stated them exactly...

...The two "pure" theoretical cases are nowhere to be found among the world's nations, yesterday or today...

...Still, even in his definition of capitalism, the facts of the matter obliged Berger to add "combines" to his crucial phrase about "enterprising individuals...

...One may predict that they will also change the subject...

...He does not fully examine capitalism— despite his promise to do so—as an "economic culture...