1 Civilizations and the organization of economies
In the Vatican, in a large vaulted room once designed to be the private library of the pope, called the Stanze della Segnatura, is Raphael’s majestic fresco, Disputa, or Disputation over the Sacrament. Nested under the vault and filling one of the dome-shaped sides of the wall, the fresco is one of the finest representations of authority in Western civilization. Immersed in the neo-Platonic intellectualism of his time, which glorified art as a “new instrument of an investigation of reality in all its complexity”, Raphael self-consciously used his painting as a way to transcend the images of his composition (Becherucci 1969: 90). In this, his most brilliant creation, he drew what is certainly the finest line-and-block chart ever drawn.
Clearly laying out the command structure of Western Christendom, the fresco describes three levels of power. At the uppermost part of the dome is God, depicted as a man wrapped in upward-seeking energy emanating from the surrounding heavenly host. His body, centered at the top, is steady and his gaze fixed outward and downward, as if he is looking directly at the observers of the fresco. One shoulder juts forward slightly with a hand raised and fingers extended in a gesture of complete wisdom. His other hand holds a globe, signifying, in the year 1509, the roundness of the earth and God’s complete and knowing control.
The second level, occupying the entire middle portion of the fresco, portrays Jesus sitting, slightly elevated, at the head of a neatly arranged semicircle of seated figures floating on a layer of clouds borne by angels. His head framed by a large halo, Jesus is in the middle of the semicircle, directly below God. The Virgin Mary is to his right, John the Baptist to his left, and they are flanked on either side by the disciples from the New Testament and the patriarchs from the Old. Jesus alone, like God above, looks out and down at the observers of the fresco. He has both hands raised, palms out, as if blessing those below.
The third level, the ground level, depicts those who are in charge on the shop floor, so to speak. These are the earthly rulers, the theologians empowered with duties and responsibilities among the living and who, in this portrayal, are arguing about the meaning of the sacraments. In contrast with the tranquility of the second level, the earth-bound figures are caught in motion – standing, stooping, reading, gesturing, and debating with all the vehemence that earthy power demands. Locked in disputation, these figures do not look out from the fresco. Nevertheless, no observer of this Raphael masterpiece could doubt that, whatever vagaries exist in its exercise, earthly authority has layers upon layers of transcendental legitimation.
This fresco is a picture of Western civilization. The term “civilization” itself, even when modified with “Western”, is an ambiguous term,1 but Raphael’s depiction of the earthly right to rule is unequivocal, for it captures a quintessential element of rulership and domination common to all societies that claim Western origins. The powers that be in these societies legitimate their authority over earthly jurisdictions, including the economy, by invoking abstract, transcendental justifications, whether God or natural law or a generalized will of the people. Raphael’s fresco convincingly portrays the logic of Western power: legitimate authority comes from the top down, an arrangement that represents a fundamental ordering of the world.
There are many representations of this same motif in Western art and architecture – in the sculptures on the facade of the north transept of London’s Westminster Abbey, in a sculptured frieze on the ancient gate of Paris, in the ornamentation on innumerable medieval tombs, and in many court and religious paintings – but none of these representations is so superbly crafted and so minutely detailed as the Raphael fresco. Whether well crafted or not, the depictions of this motif should not be seen simply as artistic embellishments, but rather as symbolic enactments of real worlds of power and privilege. In Western states, these symbolic enactments belong, more properly, to a world of discourse, to a broad vocabulary of legitimation, in which the phrase “one nation, under God” has literal as well as figurative meanings. In a literal sense, while the substance of earthly judgments may be open to question, the invoked abstract right to make those judgments is indisputable. The institutionalized structures of legitimate command in the West are always configured from the top down, as if they had been certified by God or by some other combination of forces that are beyond the actual circumstances of domination.
Imagine, for a moment, a civilization that was not historically shaped by Christianity or by any other form of monotheism and that, in addition, did not, as matter of course, conceptualize a meaningful level of human action and causation beyond the world of human experience. As will be outlined in the final section of this chapter, the Confucian regions of East Asia, stretching from Korea and Japan in the north to China and Vietnam in the south, fit this definition. In such a location, then, further imagine how political orders are legitimized and institutionalized so that rulers and subjects alike articulate and justify, in their own distinct vocabulary of legitimation, the prevailing patterns of authority. Given this context, would power be legitimized in the same top-down fashion as it is in the West?
For most Westerners, this is a difficult mental experiment. While it may be easy for many Westerners nowadays to imagine a world without Christianity, it is nearly impossible for most to envision a world without the institutions that Christianity and other forms of transcendentalism have shaped historically. These very institutions now constitute the reality in which Westerners live themselves, but the patterning of these institutions is so taken for granted that it is difficult to imagine a world put together in any other way.
Such a mental experiment, however, is useful to try. An integrated world economy has become a reality only in the most recent times. If we are to comprehend this world economy, it is important to understand the influence of civilizational forces on economic activity. To oversimplify this point, one can think about these influences by posing two diametrically opposed lines of argument. On the one hand, one could argue, as many have, that Western capitalism and Western ways of life more generally have swept away the great non-Western world civilizations – the Chinas and the Indias – and have created the conditions for the formation of a single worldwide civilization: global capitalism.
On the other hand, one could argue, as some have, that such a characterization of modernity is so crude as to miss all the subtleties of civilizational forces. What we witness with the development of a global economy is not increasing uniformity, in the form of a universalization of Western culture, but rather the continuation of civilizational diversity through the active reinvention and reincorporation of non-Western civilizational patterns. This line of argument leads to the conclusion that Japanese, Chinese, and Indian styles of capitalism build on and revitalize their own distinct institutional patterns. Though these societies assimilate diffused economic practices from the West, they have incorporated these practices into consistently understood ways of life that are very different to those found in Western societies. As Eleanor Westney (1987) put it in her study of the nineteenth-century Japanese incorporation of European organizational forms, the very act of imitation involves innovation. In copying others, people re-create themselves, by fashioning new versions of their own way of life.
Both lines of reasoning represent alternative ways to interpret the spread and trajectories of globalized economic activity. Although it is important to evaluate these alternatives, because they point to very different conclusions about the direction of the world economy, such an evaluation is rarely attempted. Most analysts simply assume the universalization of Western civilization. To do otherwise would require a civilizational analysis, and that is difficult to do well, since it must include an examination of the taken-for-granted aspects of a lived-in world. These aspects are particularly elusive. They span both historical time and political boundaries. They are pervasive, and therefore very difficult to pin down empirically. For this reason, when people examine how economies actually work, a civilizational level of analysis is rarely considered, even in passing, by anyone – by sociologists, historians, not to mention economists. To most students of the economy, whatever their discipline, a world in which the Eucharist is an important topic of dispute seems as far removed from markets as Raphael does from Adam Smith, and yet it is the integration of these levels that a civilizational analysis must attempt.
This chapter aims at such an integration. It begins by summarizing the works of the major scholars who have examined the interaction between civilization and economic life. These works can be divided into two varieties of interpretation that correspond roughly to the two lines of argument outlined above, one for the global spread of Western civilization and the other for a continuation of civilizational diversity. The second of these two lines of interpretation will be stressed here, particularly in describing the sociology of Max Weber. A variety of Weberian theories will then be used to outline the relation between Western civilization and the rise of the Western capitalism. Finally, a sociological sketch will be given of the civilizational context and organizational structure of modern capitalism in East Asia. It will be argued that, although capitalism has become nearly a universal way of life, a more adequate interpretation of global capitalism grows out of the second line of reasoning; civilizational factors continue to be significant, because they distinctively frame and structure the actual organization of economies.
Civilizations and the analysis of Western modernity
What is the role of civilization in patterning economic activity? Very few theorists have asked this question directly, because to do so one needs to construct a conceptual framework that allows for a continuity of causation – for a production and reproduction of similar forms – across time and space. Most social theorists have been relatively uninterested in understanding historical and spatial continuities. They have wanted, instead, to explain the collapse of tradition and feudalism and the formation of what they call “modernity” in all its positive and negative forms. Therefore, when theorists have analysed the relation between civilizations and economies, they have usually done so in the course of explaining the break from the past in connection with the rise of a modern way of life.
In describing the formation of modernity, theorists normally account for civilizations, in the form of trans-societal patterns, in one of two ways. The most common way is for them to explain the causes of the transformation in Western Europe by showing that one or two key institutional spheres led the way for a break with the past. Using their historical analysis as the basis for a general theory, they then go on to argue that the same or similar sets of factors have been responsible for the globalization of patterns that originated in the West. Scholars do not agree on which spheres were historically the most crucial, but most of them narrow their argument to whether states or markets have casual priority. The substantial literature making this kind of an inference, it will be suggested, has only limited utility in understanding how civilizations structure economies.
The non-Weberian debate over the historical causes of Western modernity centers on which institutional sphere has causal priority: politics or economics. Proponents of each point of view have developed theories of economic organization that align with their distinctive slant on the rise of the West. In each case, the search for the causes of modernity focuses on explaining discontinuities – the revolutions, disruptions, and transformations that occurred in Western Europe from the 16th century onwards.
States and political economy
In the debate over what caused the rise of the West, many scholars have argued that the key institutional arena creating the break with the past was establishment of a new type of political order, the nation-state. As many have described from various points of view (Anderson 1974a; 1974b; Bendix 1964, 1978; Eisenstadt 1963; Foucault 1979; Huntington 1968; Poggi 1978; Tilly 1992; Wallerstein 1974), the nation-state rose gradually but decisively in the sixteenth century in Western Europe. The reasons for its formation are many and diverse. The legal foundations of feudalism changed to favor the kings’ courts over other possible assemblies (Strayer 1970); with the diffusion of gunpowder, the technology of warfare altered the pursuit of political power (McNeil 1982); taxation and administration created organized regimes that turned kingdoms into centralized regimes (Mann 1986; Tilly 1975, 1992); and overseas territorial and economic expansion led to new sources of revenue, creating more interstate competition that fueled and even accelerated the cycle of nation building (Wallerstein 1974). Whatever the historical and sociological causes for the nation-states, many theorists (Eisenstadt 1963; Bendix 1978; Tilly 1992) interpret the rise of the nation-state as the decisive turning point in modern world history and of particular importance to modern economic development.
Theorists who argue for the causal priority of political over economic institutions advocate theories of economic organization that can be identified as political economy, that is, theories arguing that the economy is decisively shaped by political forces. Despite a general agreement on the importance of politics over other institutions, political economists have, over the years, differed somewhat on how to conceptualize the state and how to explain its influence on the economy. On the one hand, there are those who view the state as an organized regime and, on the other hand, those who view the state as an organized political community.
The first group of political economists, the strong state theorists, conceptualizes the state as simply an organization for holding and exercising power (e.g., Evans, Rueschemeyer, and Skocpol 1985). States create internal jurisdictions, mark boundaries, and control the means of coercion. States, however, differ among themselves in terms of their autonomy from internal class forces and their administrative capacity to accomplish goals. Authoritatively claiming territory, controlling people, and organizing activity, states are, therefore, the basic actors in world-historical changes. Moreover, with the rise of the nation-state in Western Europe, a new type of state came into existence, a state with a bureaucratic administrative organization that was capable of exercising vastly more power than states had been able to exercise before (Tilly 1975, 1992). The new organizational power of the state was directed inward to control its subjects and their livelihood and outward to compete with other states.
This view of the state as an organized apparatus implies that the state, as a condition of its power, must organize its economic base and encourage economic growth as an ongoing source of revenue. This need for revenue, therefore, from this perspective, is the invisible motor of economic development. In recent times, this general line of reasoning has become what some writers have called “a new paradigm”, “an intellectual sea change” (Evans, Rueschemeyer, and Skocpol 1985: 347; Evans and Stephens 1988). Following Alexander Gerschenkron (1962), many students of Third World development are now arguing that the late-developing states, if sufficiently strong (i.e., authoritarian), will be able to industrialize successfully (Amsden 1989; Evans and Stephens 1988; Woo 1990). Among development economists, notes Gordon White (1984: 97), the strong state perspective has become orthodoxy: “The modern notion of ‘development,’ and not least the discipline of ‘development economics,’ rests on a more or less explicit concept of the state as crucial stimulant and organizer of socio-economic progress.” Similar theories, most closely associated with the work of Theda Skocpol (1979, 1985), Fred Block (1987), and Peter Evans (1979, 1985; Evans and Stephens 1988), also dominate the investigation of the newly industrializing societies.
The second group of political economists, the pluralists, conceptualizes the state as being constituted by a political community, with the economy being one of several sources of power within that community.2 Having its origins in eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century European liberalism, this interpretation maintains that states develop from natural historical collectivities, the people; the people establish the governments; and the governments, in turn, create a climate conducive to the livelihood and interests of their citizens. In this characterization, the nation embodies the state; pluralism and diversity of interests prevail, and therefore government is an essential means by which individual interests are reconciled for the common good. From the state flow the guarantees for individual rights, social order, and economic prosperity. The state represents its people and, therefore, ought to be, in some measure, representative or democratic; and the economy that grows from this pluralist base rests on the free interactions of people whose individual economic interests lead them to pursue a course of political stability. Here, the economy is a spontaneous creation of the community that constitutes the state, which in turn represents them.
From this point of view, economies are, by definition, essential parts of nations. An economy emerges from the natural resources owned publicly and privately and from the labor and entrepreneurial talents of its citizens. From the eighteenth century on, the view that all economies are really “domestic” national economies emerged as the dominant perspective, and one that strong state theorists have readily accepted. Theorists of political pluralism, however, typically argue that creating a sound democratic state is a necessary step toward establishing a genuine progressive national economy. Without democracy, believed many such theorists (e.g., Almond and Coleman 1960; Almond 1966; Apter 1965), there is a limit to capitalistic development.
In both the strong-state and pluralist versions of political economy, the state or nation is the essential actor. Both sets of theorists argue that the creation of the nation-state, with sovereignty vested first in the absolute monarch and later in a nation’s citizens, created the conditions for the transformation from a feudal past to a modern world. From its European origins, according to these theorists, the nation-state, as a model of both political order and belligerence (Tilly 1992), spread around the world, creating a nearly universal concern with human rights, citizenship, and democracy. Becoming a global form of political institutions, each nation-state constructs its own economy, and, hence, the world economy represents an aggregation of national economies.
A civilizational level of analysis has very little room to operate within a political economy perspective. The state so dominates every interpretation that a perspective transcending the state, as does a civilizational approach, makes little sense. Therefore, when state-centered theories are used to analyse trans-societal phenomena, the state continues to be the unit of analysis.3
Economies and capitalism
In opposition to state-centered theories of modernity, another equally diverse group of scholars argues that the economy and not the state created the conditions for the modern transformation. Unlike the state-centered approaches, however, economy-centered approaches assume a trans-societal focus, and accordingly scholars writing from this perspective have been concerned with a civilizational level of explanation.
An economy-centered perspective first took shape in Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations ([1776] 1991). Like other Enlightenment thinkers, Smith took a statist view of the economy, but to this view he added a new way to see God’s design for mankind. Neither the state nor the political community was responsible for creating the livelihood and wellbeing of a nation and its individual citizens. Rather, nations rested on their economies, and economies worked according to natural laws. These God-given natural laws operated, said Smith, through self-equilibrating markets. The state could either enhance the natural workings of ...
