Abstract
Reviewed by: Willie Thompson, South Shields, UK
The overall impression which emerges from this undoubtedly readable historical survey is that the authors write with well-intentioned, not wholly academic, motives but nevertheless achieve an outcome whose imperfections stand out more prominently than its merits.
The four big ideas of the title covered in Part I are those of Adam Smith, Karl Marx, Charles Darwin and the notion of democracy contested between Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton. Added to these in Part II are ‘Secular and Religious Reactions against Enlightenment’, including antimodernism and fascism, Christian fundamentalism and the rise of Salafist Islam. A concluding chapter examines ‘The Power of Ideas and the Importance of the Humanities’.
Conjoining all of these for examination as a single theme is a striking idea and one well worth pursuing under the attention-catching title of the volume. How well the undertaking succeeds depends on the effectiveness with which discussion of the separate areas is handled and linkages established. To summarize: the outcome is rather disappointing in spite of the authors’ best efforts. The opening chapter, that on Adam Smith, is of high quality, those on Darwin and the chapters of Part II are adequate and reasonably penetrating; that on the idea of democracy in the early US republic is weaker, and Chapter 2 on Marx and his successors very weak indeed. In discussing this volume constraints of space mean that not all of these chapters can be treated as extensively as they deserve.
Adam Smith is well placed in his historical context and the authors demonstrate effectively that he was primarily a moral philosopher seeking ‘the elemental laws of human behaviour and social existence’ (25) rather than anything that would today be recognized as an economist. Smith’s earlier volume was entitled The Theory of Moral Sentiments, and when it comes to his most renowned and influential work, The Wealth of Nations, published in 1776, Montgomery and Chirot insist that, ‘Economics and morality cannot be found separated anywhere in this work’ (41).
It is demonstrated here that the idea of Smith as a prophet of unconstrained and wholly unfettered market relations is a distorted caricature. These notions had their origins in the 1790s at the hands of his admirer Dugald Stewart, with the latter’s oversimplified and selective presentation of Smith’s writing, which went on to become the accepted narrative of his work. Following this account, the authors go on to deflate the market utopian fantasies of Smith’s distorting epigones such as Friedrich von Hayek and his epigones of the Chicago School.
Very different in style and content is the authors’ presentation of Karl Marx. Though Marx’s oeuvre can be validly criticized, together with his practice for he was not merely a theoretician, this chapter amounts to little more than a summarized rehash of the vulgar myths and misrepresentations that flourish in the public domain, the principal one being that Marx and Engels postulated a utopia of limitless perfection following the overthrow of capitalism by the industrial proletariat, a ‘near paradise’ (81). Marx’s ‘Big Idea’ is said to be dialectical materialism (87), a term he never used – it was in fact coined after his death by Joseph Dietzgen.
If Marx and Engels are badly misrepresented, their ideological successors fare even worse in this volume. There are serious errors of fact, not merely trivial ones, such as misdating one of Lenin’s important texts or classifying Michel Foucault as a Marxist. Lenin’s project and achievement is caricatured out of recognition and the authors achieve the seemingly impossible feat of misrepresenting even Stalin. Trotsky, seriously misrepresented of course, receives a few lines, Bernstein little more, Bukharin, Luxemburg, the Comintern, and Gramsci rate only a passing mention, Kautsky and the Mensheviks not even that.
The discussion of Darwin and the impact of his ideas is unexceptional apart from the authors’ apparent belief that Shrewsbury lies south of London! The argument between Thomas Jefferson’s limited stance of populism in relation to white Americans and Alexander Hamilton’s more elitist outlook is handled competently enough, but although slavery is discussed, the genocidal project against the indigenous population on which the infant United States was by then already embarked goes unmentioned.
When Montgomery and Chirot move on to Part II, ‘Secular and Religious Reactions against Enlightenment’ their account is reasonably informative. They cover ultra-right wing movements culminating in fascism and Nazism, at one point correcting an earlier statement that Hitler was democratically elected (125 and 315); and go on to examine reactionary Christian fundamentalism, particularly in the USA, and the eclipse of secular nationalism by Salafism in the Sunni Muslim world.
Taking the text as a unity, the strongest criticism that can be made of it is that it is idealist in the philosophical sense. What is implied is that ideas are the determining force in historical development, indeed the authors more or less say as much, and to be sure ideas which develop into ideologies exert powerful social influence, often at the expense of rational considerations. Nevertheless ideological significance in this context can be exaggerated when divorced from the material circumstances in which the ideas are embedded, a fault which characterizes The Shape of the New. For example, the grim history of the Soviet Union is attributed mostly if not entirely to the Marxist outlook of its rulers. Thus, the circumstances of forced industrialization are skimmed over and the realities of inherited material destruction, a shattered urban population and hostile encirclement are largely disregarded. In the other chapters this kind of shortcoming is less obtrusive, but is nevertheless apparent.
The authors conduct their analysis from a specific ideological standpoint of their own, as is inevitable with all historians and histories which handle subjects of controversy – and from which, admittedly, this review of the volume is by no means exempt. Montgomery and Chirot’s attachment to the values of the Enlightenment, social justice, democracy and what used to be described as ‘progress’ is apparent. The ideological standpoint from which they write is reminiscent of that which underpinned Daniel Bell’s End of Ideology of 1960. The concrete circumstances which gave rise to Bell’s interpretation – the post-war post-Stalinist bi-polar world of the 1950s Cold War where social progress and ‘convergence’ between the two blocs could be assumed to be the order of the day – have sunk beneath the waves and their ideological manifestation no longer has any intellectual traction. The authors recognize that fact of course and so The Shape of the New could be regarded as a tribute to and a funeral requiem for the times and hopes of the late 1950s.