Behemoth: A History of the Factory and the Making of the Modern World by Joshua B. Freeman (review)

The factory, according to Joshua B. Freeman, epitomizes the modern world. It is the most important site of the centralized production of mass commodities, taking traditional manufactories the decisive step forward into the age of industrialism: factories contained, Freeman maintains, “a large workforce engaged in coordinated production using powered machinery” (2). The fusion of new sources of energy and ever more sophisticated machinery made this step a “giant leap for mankind.” This leap propelled centralized manufacturing toward the “giant factory,” the chief protagonist in this wide-ranging book.

The story takes us from the eighteenth-century textile mills in the English Midlands to the overpowering iron and steel plants of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to the automotive juggernauts of the “age of wheels” in Detroit and, say, Wolfsburg in Germany, where the first globally sold popular car, the Volkswagen Beetle, rolled off the assembly lines by the millions during the 1950s and 1960s. Yet Freeman continues his narrative up to present times and convincingly constructs a long-term continuity portraying, in one of the most instructive chapters of his book, “Foxconn City,” a product of twenty-first-centuryChinese party-controlledcapitalism.

The continuities over time — a stretch of almost three centuries by now — and the diffusion across the globe are at the core of Freeman’s argument: the “giant factory” as the paradigmatic economic institution of modernity straddling a whole spectrum of political and economic systems, from democracy over fascism and socialism to communism, and therefore connected to but not dominated by capitalism. Of course, one could ask what modernity could mean without referring to capitalism as one of its formative characteristics, but the book even stops short of exploring in detail whether the “giant factory” has been a product of modernity in the first place or, rather, a major shaping force. Without taking a clear stance, the book suggests the latter, since it emphasizes the large-scale industrial production system in its sweeping effects on entire societies involved. The conditions and logics of the installment of such overpowering manufacturing facilities are in most cases only glossed over. Thus, it is no wonder that the politically and culturally alarmingly devastating processes of offshoring and deindustrialization are dealt with only on the margins. And the often-overlooked fact that the “industrial age” has always been dominated in numbers by small and medium-sized enterprises, whereas the “Big Business” of multinational corporations, let alone “giant factories,” has played the role of the tip of the iceberg, eludes discussion in this book.

The book’s title, Behemoth, is in danger of creating a false impression, since it invokes allusions to an independent superorganism (a “beast”) with a life script of its own, a down-to-earth material counterpart to airy “Leviathan” (the polity) hovering over the seas. Freeman’s story in fact, fortunately, does not make efforts to elaborate on this myth. Rather, his narrative explores the historical pros and cons of the factory system — with a balance slightly tipped toward its positive effects of material, social, and cultural achievements — contrasting his rich own empirical findings to the highly controversial observations, analyses, and judgments by contemporary intellectuals, writers, photographers, and artists. In the end, Freeman succeeds in portraying the era of the “giant factory” on the discursive level as a debate about romanticism — a disappointed romanticism that provoked the harsh and gloomy criticism of the modern factory pitted against enthusiastic visions of the factory as a blueprint for social harmony and cultural refinement, a romantic projection of a utopian future.

Freeman is — despite the sweeping scope of his book — not a “lumper” but a “splitter.” It is definitively not his mission to develop clear-cut categories, to sketch long-term developments as stages of an evolutionary process, or to engage in theoretical discussions on capitalism, the possibly significant distinctions between business enterprises (here: large corporations...