Whose Measure of Reality?

Abstract

MODERN SOCIOLOGY AROSE in the mid-nineteenth century. Western Europeans such as Auguste Comte, Alexis de Tocqueville, Henri de Saint-Simon, John Stuart Mill, and Karl Marx sought to understand what they perceived as a radical transformation of society. Those twin whirlwinds, democracy and industrialization, seemed to have created an entirely new form of society, distinct from the aristocratic agrarian societies that had been typical of all civilizations around the globe for the previous five thousand years. Today, there is still a great gap-in incomes, in lifestyle, and in governancebetween the societies that spawned early sociology and the rest of the world. Some non-European societies have caught up with the West and become democratic, urban, and industrialized. But most of the nations of Africa, Latin America, the Middle East, and Asia still are lacking in one or more of these characteristics; if we add up those people who remain either under authoritarian rule, bound to rural life, or with pre-industrial levels of income, they would be the majority of humankind. This puzzle-in the words of David S. Landes's title, why some are so rich and some so poor, remains central to understanding the condition of the world today.' Until recently, the answers to this question have been of two kinds. One answer is that, for a long time, the Western nations had been better-more industrious, more skilled, more inquisitive, graced with a better mix of natural resources, more disciplined-than other nations in ways that mattered for economic growth; this is the argument that Landes presents. The other answer, from the Marxist tradition, is that Western nations and their elites had been more aggressive, more rapacious, and more effective at subjugating other peoples and climbing up over their enslaved and exploited bodies. Either way, the great divergence is due to something the West had that the rest of the world lacked.