Never Just Business

David Landes writes beautiful sentences. They are elegant and robust: "In the beginning there was Smith, and Smith told us about the division of labor."¹ They are also bold and barbed: "Cynics might even say that dependency doctrines have been Latin America's most successful export."² His unadorned voice and unsentimental stance are reminiscent of the art of his hard-boiled contemporaries, Norman Mailer and Saul Bellow. For Landes, history, especially the history of economic development, has always been about winners and losers. He is sure that triumph or tragedy was determined by clinging to a particular path: "As the historical record shows, for the last thousand years, Europe (the West) has been the prime mover of development and modernity."³ He is impatient with those who reject this certainty: "Some would say that Eurocentrism is bad for us, indeed bad for the world, hence to be avoided. Those people should avoid it. As for me, I prefer truth to goodthink. I feel surer of my ground."⁴ He has no tolerance for academic diplomacy where Truth is concerned: "I have a rule," Landes says. "You never say 'I won't say this because I don't want to hurt somebody's feelings.'"⁵ Perhaps such a forceful mind and unrepentant pen—as well as extraordinary learning—are necessary to compose a powerful, enduring, historical synthesis. And The Unbound Prometheus is just that.

It is remarkable that thirty-four years separate the first and second editions of The Unbound Prometheus.⁶ After all, generations of students have debated Landes's analytical aphorisms and cultural certainties. Landes came of age as a scholar in the aftermath of the Second World War, an era when mainstream Western economists trusted in the coordinating capacity of markets and in their slide rules and equations to navigate the market's shoals. But others were increasingly of a different mind, most notably Leland Jenks of the Research Center in Entrepreneurial History at Harvard University. Jenks was concerned with the assumptions and values of decision makers, and with the social sanctions and role-playing that figured into entrepreneurial activity.⁷ Landes, who was affiliated with the center, evidently took this message to heart. In 1949, at the age of twenty-five, he published a stunning indictment of French businessmen. They were frugal to a fault, obsessed with privacy, and handicapped by the close identification of family and firm. As a result, they were slow to mechanize, incapable of appraising instruments and products impersonally, and unwilling to seek outside capital to retool their works. Their attention to the rate of profit, a reflection of the premium they placed on security, inhibited their turn to best practice and the relentless expansion of output. In sum, their "entrepreneurial psychology" had shortchanged French economic development.⁸ The architects of the Marshall Plan, Landes seemed to imply, should be forewarned that the provision of capital alone would not refurbish French industry.

In 1991, Landes offered a more favorable assessment of French industrial performance. He recognized that France had followed an alternate pattern of growth, one that favored light over heavy industry and the manufacture of quality, high-markup goods.⁹ Two years later, he celebrated early French gains in the production of silk and alkalis. But that was as far as he would go: France did not have the makings of an industrial revolution. Advances in the manufacture of cotton and iron, not silk, "were the stuff of an industrial revolution," as were British improvements in power technology.¹⁰ Here he returned to the firm castings of The Unbound Prometheus: the English, distinctly Smithian, features of the industrial revolution, the central place of cotton, steam, and iron in this great transformation, and the dynamic role of entrepreneurship—that is, culture—in the remaking of production and the coming of the factory. As for the Continent, in these major theaters of change its part was largely restricted to that of mimic.

The heart of The Unbound Prometheus appeared in 1965, under the title "Technological Change and Development in Western Europe, 1750-1914," in...