The capitalist revolution; fifty propositions about prosperity, equality, and liberty.

The Capitalist Revolution: Fifty Propositions about prosperity, Equality, & Liberty.

The Capitalist Revolution, by Peter L. Berger (Basic, 262 pp., $17.95)

THE FULL TITLE of this book is The Capitalist Revolution: Fifty Propositions about Prosperity, Equality, & Liberty. This isn't another apology for capitalism, but an attempt to define it in terms broader than the merely economic. Peter Berger is concerned less to praise or blame capitalism than to identify it in relation to socialism and democracy.

Accordingly, he tries first to disengage such terms as capitalism and socialism from their polemical associations. He defines capitalism as "production for a market by enterprising individuals or combines with the purpose of making a profit.' He cautions that to speak of a "capitalist society' is to speak of an ideal type. No society commonly classified as capitalist, he observes, remotely resembles what Adam Smith (who never spoke of "capitalism') would have recognized as a free society. For that matter, no society is purely socialist. But socialism stands for an ideal in a way capitalism doesn't, and some regimes proclaim themselves socialist--whereas no regime claims or aspires to be purely capitalist.

That, in a way, is one of capitalism's major problems. It suffers from "an intrinsic incapacity to generate legitimations, and it is particularly deprived of mythic potency; consequently, it depends upon the legitimating effects of its sheer facticity or upon association with other legitimating symbols.' Men won't die for capitalism, though they will give their lives for the freedom of which capitalism may be a component.

But is capitalism necessarily connected to other freedoms? Is it their foundation? Can it exist without them, or they without it? Here Berger insists that the empirical evidence is, though not final, strong enough to warrant provisional conclusions.

His conclusions aren't surprising, but they are gratifyingly discriminating. He holds that capitalism is a necessary but not a sufficient condition of democracy, that capitalism tends to produce pressures toward democratization, that socialism has inherent authoritarian tendencies and an "affinity' for totalitarianism. He carefully notes that capitalist development and technological modernization are analytically distinct, but that, in fact, the Industrial Revolution occurred within a capitalist framework, and, moreover, that "capitalism provides the optimal context for the productive power of modern technology. To date, there are no empirically available countercases.' I, for one, can't think of a single household appliance we owe to socialist development. (I'm reminded of P. J. O'Rourke's hilarious description of the old fellow-travelers who went to the Soviet Union convinced that they were visiting the Workers' Paradise but bringing along their own toilet paper.)

Berger takes a particular interest in the Weber thesis of the Protestant work ethic, especially in the light of the capitalist boom in the Far East. Japan and Singapore aren't exactly strongholds of Calvinism, but they have become highly productive. East Asia, he observes, is "bad news for Marxists,' but also for laissez-faire ideology, since its economic development has occurred under (thanks to?) strong policies of dirigisme. And the success of capitalism in the Orient has generated no great pressures toward democracy in those parts, Berger says--though he adds, somewhat puzzlingly, that capitalism has greatly strengthened movements there in the direction of democracy and individuation.

As for the West, Berger contends that individualism generated modernization and not vice versa as is usually thought. Nevertheless, modernization does seem to result in institutions that accord status to the individual for his own sake. The hard part is locating the causes. With a nod to Eric Voegelin, Berger speculates that it may have started not with Luther but with Moses.

However it all began, capitalism does undermine traditional hierarchies. In a market system one is no longer assigned by birth to a given role in the system of production. This fact creates both social turbulence and strong resistance. The resistance may be either conservative or "leftist,' depending on what principle of social order one prefers to the fluid order of the market.

Despite Berger's care in defining his terms, I wonder if "capitalism' is even a coherent concept. It obviously stands for several related realities that we are all familiar with, but do these have a single essence? What does the idea of capitalism add to the simple idea of commerce? Shakespeare's Timon blames gold for doing all the things capitalism is now accused of. The term "capitalism' was coined as a sort of bogey concept by people who said they opposed it. Rather than try to invest their word with meaning, maybe we ought to revert to more basic words that aren't haunted by ambiguity and polemical overtones.

Nevertheless, one rarely finds a book so readable at this level of abstraction. The Capitalist Revolution is thick with ideas, fine distinctions, and erudition, but Berger writes with a vigor that makes sociology almost a pastime: Common sense always governs amiably. Amid paeans to capitalism and diatribes against it, he simply asks what it is and gives a plausible answer. Even those who don't entirely agree will find him well worth listening to for the sake of many insights along the way.