PINKER AND PROGRESS

Condorcet's classical Enlightenment statement of human progress became an essential element of nineteenth‐ and twentieth‐century consciousness, but by the millennium grand narratives had fallen victim to a disillusioned cultural climate. Now Steven Pinker, like Condorcet drawing on a wide range of contemporary “knowledges,” has reasserted a sweeping narrative of human progress in The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined. Mapping a spectacular long‐term decline in person‐on‐person violence and reduction in deaths due to war, Pinker celebrates the spread of a cultural pattern of self‐restraint, sensitivity to human suffering, and recent regard for human rights, due to the modern state and gentle commerce capitalism. For Pinker the human condition has gotten steadily better, the decline of violence is an accomplishment we can savor and an impetus to cherish the forces of civilization and enlightenment that made it possible. Why then are so many so negative about modernity? Citing the psychology of temporal proximity to horrific events and the bad‐news predilection of the media, Pinker ignores the specifically modern and less directly brutal institutionalized forms of violence as well as the profound ambivalence of progress. He decisively demonstrates the drop in certain kinds of violence, but his account becomes strangely ideological, recapitulating key Cold‐War themes—the individual against totalitarianism, the Enlightenment against the counter‐Enlightenment, rationalism and freedom against murderous utopianism—distorting his study in the name of gentle commerce, Marxism, and anti‐Communism.     

HOW TO CHANGE HISTORY

The recent death of Eric Hobsbawm provides a fitting occasion to take stock of the entire trajectory of his work. Taking his final book, How to Change the World, as its starting point, this essay considers Hobsbawm's effort to change the way history was written. It divides his career into three main phases: 1) during the 1940s and 50s when he served his apprenticeship and emerged as a leading labor historian of modern Britain. Working in conjunction with colleagues in the Communist Party Historian's group, Hobsbawm helped to raise Marxist history to academic respectability; 2) during the 1960s and 70s, Hobsbawm reached the apogee of his career, publishing the first two volumes of his synoptic history of modern capitalism, as well a multitude of more specialized and critical works. No longer just one among a group of Marxist scholars, he—along with E. P. Thompson—became one of the most famous and influential historians in the world. 3) For Hobsbawm, as for other Marxists, the 1980s and 1990s were a time of crisis, when Marxism was destabilized and communism collapsed. Ironically, this essay argues, it was during this challenging period that Hobsbawm's most influential work appeared—most notably, his studies of modern nationalism and his analysis of the “invention of tradition”. Whereas the early Hobsbawm had worked to bring Marxist history into the academy, the later Hobsbawm (perhaps inadvertently) showed how the academy could absorb analytical elements initially formulated in a Marxist framework by translating them into non‐Marxist terms. Whatever one thinks of Hobsbawm's intellectual legacy, one must acknowledge his status as a polymathic giant who wrote global history that was at once theoretically grounded, publicly accessible, and historiographically consequential.     

Getting the China Story Right: Insights from National Economic Censuses

Two Hong Kong-based geographers critically interrogate competing interpretations of the nature and dynamics of China's ongoing economic transformation. Based on the data gathered from China's first and second national economic censuses, they examine the pattern and process of ownership transformation in the Chinese economy, focusing on employment, capital assets, and output as well as productivity and industrial innovation. Emphasis is placed on the following critical issues: (1) after three decades of opening, China's national economy continues to be dominated by domestic enterprises (with foreign and overseas Chinese-invested enterprises limited to only a few industrial sectors and highly specific locales); (2) the bulk of capital assets and key large-scale industrial sectors remain in state ownership; and (3) spontaneous, bottom-up privatization of the labor market has occurred without a corresponding privatization of the capital market. In examining these and other issues, the authors argue that the evolving, complex "China story" can be better understood only after abandoning reliance on preconceived theoretical models derived primarily from Western experience. They support their case by first challenging the conventional neoliberal view of privatization as an independent force or predetermined condition, arguing instead that it is conditioned by prevailing social and political influences. Likewise, they posit that rapid expansion of private and individual businesses at the grassroots level has owed more to relaxed state control than to active state involvement envisioned by the thesis of state corporatism. Journal of Economic Literature, Classification Numbers: E22, E23, E24, O11, P20. 8 figures, 6 tables, 87 references.     

Archaeology in Antarctica: Nineteenth-Century Capitalism Expansion Strategies

Antarctica was the last continent to be discovered in the early nineteenth century. In order to become acquainted with the process of incorporation of Antarctica to the scope of the capitalist system we have focused on particularity: i.e., specific economic and technological and ideological aspects of everyday life in sealer camps spread along the coastline of the South Shetland Islands. Archaeological research in Byers Peninsula–Livingston Island provides an approach to the mechanisms implemented to organize the first resource exploitation in these lands.