The Origins of Sustained Growth

Did the scientific revolution, the British or French enlightenment, or the introduction of new forms of proto-capitalism create the conditions for sustained development? Kenneth Pomeranz’s The Great Divergence, published in 2000 by Princeton University Press, argues that none of these theses are supported by anything other than blind speculation. The evidence for all of them is weak, contradictory, and tentative. This book juxtaposes regions from various places throughout the world demonstrating these theses' flaws. While a confluence of technologies coupled with new forms of economic behavior became available to Europeans, New World resources, stolen from native Americans, abolished the land constraints experienced in Europe.

Pomeranz equates development in Western Europe with various areas of East Asia. Using this framework he investigates themes commonly argued regarding what made Europe unique in its early growth. He illustrates that cultures all over the world experimented with systems of proto-capitalism, had access to similar technologies, and used and demanded luxury items. Various theorists argue that these sets of features caused the divergence in economic and social prosperity experienced in the West. A gross misrepresentation develops at this loci: that if ‘western’ patterns of economic engagement and scientific progress preceded it’s take off then the west’s philosophical thinking was more ‘advanced.” Pomeranz exhaustively shows that these features did not arise uniquely in Europe and that something else must have paved the way towards the initial jump to sustained growth. Chapter by chapter he demolishes these theories which claim an account of the divergence in prosperity experienced at the onset of modernity. Access to New World land and resources are the only clear differences that careful investigation reveal.

Additional resources and land in the New World gave its newcomers the ability to develop more rapidly and ultimately culminated in the Industrial Revolution in his assessment. The New World took pressure off of the land in Europe facilitating a rise in economic growth. Pomeranz attributes some development to newly acquired New World food stuffs like the potato and guano, both of which allowed Western European farmers to grow more calories with the same amount of land at home, further easing pressure. This coupled with the ability of Europeans to move to the New World, relieving Europe of excess population eased the press of consumption. Thus, for Pomeranz, Europe’s position in accessing colossal new land and resources, at great cost to its inhabitants, differentiated it from other segments of the world.

Self-Promotion or Self-Critique?

Milton Fisk reviews a volume (in which I am a contributor) in "Radical Thought in the Time of Corporate Globalization," in Capitalism, Nature, Socialism, Vol. 18 n. 4 (Winter 2007), pp. 148-150.

His overall judgment on Philosophy Against Empire, Radical Philosophy Today, Vol. 4, edited by Tony Smith and Harry van der Linden (Philosophy Documentation Center, 2006):

Editors Tony Smith and Harry van der Linden have put together an excellent volume on a wide range of important social and political problems. A notable exception is the absence of an essay devoted to the impact of corporate globalization on the environment, which reflects the absence of a major focus on the environment within this group of radical philosophers.

On my contribution, Fisk writes:

In “Biopolitics and the State of Exception,” Devin Zane Shaw criticizes the state from the perspective of immigration. Following Giorgio Agamben, Shaw sees migrants as exposing a crisis that affects sovereignty, democracy, and human rights. Sovereignty leads to treating migrants as outcasts, as bare individuals with no democratic or human rights. Due to the nature of sovereignty, failure awaits reformists who accept the sovereign state. Moreover, human rights, being for Shaw only the creatures of sovereignty, lack liberatory potential. The implication is that the plight of migrants can be resolved by doing away with the state.

That's a decent synopsis. Although I must admit that I have since been rethinking whether that implication should be that the state form should be abolished, especially if that means that multinational corporations will take over its functions. If I had to write the piece now, I don't think I would rely as heavily on Foucault and Agamben. I now think he overstates his case because the 'state of exception' appears to be a metaphysical destiny, which has those same fatalist overtones that Heidegger's later work possesses. This would require rereading Agamben, but I am currently busy with philosophy from the 1920s to 1940s (at this moment, Benjamin and Sartre, an odd couple if there ever was one), which is over a century after the stuff I was reading for the primary sources of my dissertation (Schelling's work from 1795-1810).

In retrospect, I think that one of the major problems with Agamben's (and, in a different way, Foucault's) analysis is that while it talks biopolitics quite well, it has trouble linking this with a critique of capitalism. I do, however, still think that politically marginalized populations tell us important things about globalization, which is why I discussed the figure of the immigrant and his or her relationship to sovereign power. What my article stressed is that anybody's encounter with the state as police force depends on the caprice of this force, and that formal rights don't guarantee anything in this encounter.

What I had not worked on so much, as I wrote that essay (from 2003 to 2005), was a theory of ideology. I think a theory of ideology would have allowed me to render less abstract, and less global, statements about things such as the mobilization of human rights in the war on terror. Now I would try and pinpoint the history of human rights as they are mobilized for intervention and when they are not, to show how these interventions correspond to some other interest (like geo-political dominance, economic benefit, etc.). It seems to me that this would lead to a distinction between formal, individual rights and collective economic justice (including environmental justice, since Fisk mentioned that the Radical Philosophy volume did not display interest in this topic) and that the left should advocate the latter.