Too Little and Too Late

Abstract

David Levine's article examines a time-honored topic?the transition to industrial capitalism?in ways that represent a departure from traditional approaches. More than forty years ago, Maurice Dobb wrote classic Marxist work on this topic, Studies in Development of and fashioned an entirely economic explanation for emergence of English proletariat.1 David Levine, in contrast, explores psychological, political, and demographic dimensions of this larger process. There is much that is rich and provocative in Levine's account. Drawing upon writings of Michel Foucault, Levine emphasizes several interrelated themes. Foremost among these is shift from a discipline based on tradition and overt power differences to a more subtle exercise of authority based on rationality and administration. A second important theme concerns role of demographic transition in emergence of early industrial capitalism. Levine argues that relative overpopulation evident in period 1780-1870?resulting primarily from declining mortality?was crucial to economic development and transformation in early phase of industrial revolution in Europe. Much of emphasis of article is on growing concern for discipline of working class on part of emerging European bourgeoisie in eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The concern for cultural issues in transition to industrial capitalism is salutary, though not in itself particularly novel. E. P. Thompson, after all, in his pathbreaking article, Time, Work Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism, pointed out that more than economic subordination was entailed in creation of modern proletariat.2 Levine casts this process in more social-psychological terms, yet despite different vocabu lary he is exploring much same terrain. What seems problematic about Levine's account is way he views bourgeoisie as all-powerful. He states at one point that the modern [proletarian] family is impotent to resist intrusions into its space. . . . The paternalism of state and its agencies has been substituted for power of patriarch. There is in Levine's view an overdrawn totality (and totalitarian character) to bourgeois authority that separates modern world from early modern. Yet one only has to consider massive conflict and violence that marked nineteenth century to wonder about totality of transformation that emerges. As plebeians became citizen/workers (following Levine's usage), they did not become unmitigated individualists, but acted in collective ways to challenge