Social Theory and the Transformation of Capitalism in the Twentieth Century

Abstract

industrialization is identified with many of the great theorizers of economic development in the twentieth century: Schumpeter, Veblen, Trotsky, Lux emburg, Keynes, Rostow, Gerschenkron, Chandler, Galbraith, and Schon field. Each of these thinkers, while differing amongst themselves on a broad array of issues of theory, shared in common the view that there was an epochally specific social system of capitalism, founded on private property and free markets for labor power. In its early phases, this system operated according to a very specific logic of task- and product-specialization, guided by rational market exchange, that led to increases in the scale of production. This dynamic yielded a process of centralization and concentration in the organizational and property forms governing the social division of labor which, as the system matured, ultimately led to the displacement of market rationality by a rationality of hierarchy and bureaucracy. Naturally, these unitary theorists of capitalism held that different societies would experience this common process in different ways, owing to the contingencies of timing and the greater and lesser tractability of tradition. But that there was one process and that it had a single and determinable directionality was never doubted. Indeed, it was taken to be one of the great discoveries of modern economic science. This unitary view of capitalism and its trajectory of development was also a core part of classical social theory as it emerged in the first fifty years of the twentieth century?in particular in the work of Weber, Polanyi, Parsons, Aron, Bell and the neo-Marxian tradition of critical social theory represented most notably by Horkheimer, Marcuse, Pollock and Neumann.