Is Capitalism Natural?

A celebrated new book by a Harvard historian says capitalism is NOT natural, it's just virtually universal. Or something.

Ancient obsidian blades

A problem that social constructionist academics often run into is that while social constructionism is of course Good, their theories of who did the constructing tend to be Eurocentric, which is Bad.

For example, as a college freshman at Rice in 1976, I took a 300 level course on Europe in the eventful years of 1789-1815. At that time, the cutting edge conventional wisdom among historians was that nationalism was socially constructed for the first time in Paris in 1789-1792, culminating in the landmark victory of the French citizen army over the invading Prussian professional army at Valmy. The poet Goethe, who accompanied the Prussians, said afterward: “Here and today, a new epoch in the history of the world has begun, and you can boast you were present at its birth.”

Still, as dramatic as Valmy was, the standard conception that nationalism had only then and there first come into existence seemed dubious to me at the time. I kept pointing out to the professor previous examples of nationalism in action, such as the Corsican war of independence against Genoa and then France in 1729-1769.

In Boswell’s Life of Samuel Johnson, the exiled Corsican nationalist leader General Paoli, the President of the Corsican Republic from 1755 until the French conquest of the island in 1769 (the year Napoleon was born), is an honored and popular guest at London dinner parties in the 1770s. Nobody in Dr. Johnson’s circle was baffled that this heroic man had dedicated his life to national freedom for his people. Dr. Johnson liked to think that he would do the same for the English nation if necessary.

Of course, nationalism was more likely to become the default political ideology on an island like Corsica where it was easy to tell what was Corsica and what wasn’t. Similarly, England’s borders had been clearly demarcated since the Dark Ages: England got most of the best land on the island of Great Britain, and the Scots and Welsh had to make do with the lumpy parts.

Of course, nationalism raised tricky questions among elites in an imperial capital, since James Boswell was a Scot, Oliver Goldsmith was born in Ireland but his father was an Anglican curate, and Edmund Burke was an Irishman with one Protestant and one Catholic parent. But nobody could doubt that Dr. Johnson was a patriot of English nationality.

What about capitalism, another concept that social constructionists would like to deconstruct?

If it’s not natural, then it had to be constructed. But where and when? In Lombardy or the Low Countries or the Midlands 300 or 800 years ago? If it was invented recently in one place, then we can de-invent capitalism!

But aren’t all those candidates in Europe? Are you saying that People of Color couldn’t have constructed capitalism? That sounds pretty racist!

But if you are saying that it’s not just Bad white people who invent capitalism for themselves, but also Good nonwhite people, then, well, it’s get really confusing, as demonstrated by a celebrated new book by a Harvard historian:

CAPITALISM: A Global History, by Sven Beckert

Its Amazon blurb sermonizes:

By chronicling capitalism’s global history, Beckert exposes the reality of the system that now seems simply “natural.” It is said that people can more easily imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism. If there is one ultimate lesson in this extraordinary book, it’s how to leave that behind. Though cloaked in a false timelessness and universality, capitalism is, in reality, a recent human invention. Sven Beckert doesn’t merely tote up capitalism’s debits and credits. He shows us how to look through and beyond it to imagine a different and larger world.

Thus, in a laudatory book review in the New York Times there is much excitement over a non-Eurocentric history of capitalism that proves capitalism isn’t natural, it’s just universal. Or something. I dunno…

Paywall here.