Marshall Hodgson. Rethinking World History: Essays on Europe, Islam and World History
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4 The great Western Transmutation
47
pened
in
Sumer soon
(as
ancient time-spans
go)
determined
the
fate
of
much
of the
Eastern hemisphere. Among these societies
on an
agrar-
ianate level,
the
character
of
historical change
was so
altered that what
had come before
we
sometimes call "pre-history":
for
instance,
its
pace
was immensely speeded
up, so
that
a
degree
of
change which before
consumed thousands
of
years
now
consumed merely centuries. Simi-
larly, after
the
Western Transmutation
the
kind
of
changes that earlier,
in
agrarianate times,
had
required hundreds
of
years
now
required,
at
most, decades.
Moreover, just
as
civilization
on an
agrarianate level
had
appeared
in
one
or at
most
a
very
few
spots
and
spread from there
to the
greater
part
of the
globe,
so the new
modern type
of
life
did not
appear
everywhere among
all
citied peoples
at the
same moment,
but
first
in
one restricted area, Western Europe, from which
it has
spread every-
where else.
It was not
that
the new
ways resulted from conditions that
were limited entirely
to the
Occident. Just
as the
first urban, literate life
would have been impossible without
the
accumulation among
a
great
many peoples
of
innumerable social habits
and
inventions, major
and
minor,
so the
great modern cultural mutation presupposed
the
contribu-
tions
of all the
several citied peoples
of the
eastern hemisphere.
Not
only were
the
numerous inventions
and
discoveries
of
many peoples
necessary
- for
most
of the
earlier basic ones were
not
made
in
Europe.
It
was
also necessary that there exist large areas
of
relatively dense,
urban-dominated populations, tied together
in a
great interregional
commercial network,
to
form
the
vast world market which
had
gradu-
ally come into being
in the
eastern hemisphere,
and in
which European
fortunes could
be
made
and
European imaginations exercised.
Technicalism
and
society:
The
decisive
institutional traits
of
the
Transmutation
At this point, we must consider just what happened in the Occident
itself.
For though these events have been analyzed innumerable times,
the analysis has not normally been made from a genuinely world-
historical viewpoint, but virtually always from the standpoint of the
local Occidental past. The Western Transmutation can be described, for
our world-historical purposes, as consisting primarily in transforma-
tions of culture in three main fields: the economic, the intellectual, and
the social. In economic life there took place that great increase in
productivity - due to a sequence of new techniques, and carried out
48
I
Europe
in a
global context
through
a
concentrated control
of
production based
on
capital accumu-
lation
and
mass markets
-
which
led up to and
culminated
in the "In-
dustrial Revolution"
and the
accompanying "Agricultural Revolution."
In intellectual life there came
the new
experimental science, from
Kepler
and
Galileo
on, and
more generally
the
philosophical explor-
atory independence made widely popular
in the
Englightenment.
In
social life there came
the
breakdown
of old
landed privileges
and su-
premacies
and
their replacement with
a
bourgeois bureaucratic
or mer-
cantile power which ushered
in the
American
and
French revolutions,
with their repercussions throughout Europe.
In
all
these fields
the
changes which
in
retrospect
can be
seen
as
decisive, from
the
viewpoint
of the
Occident's level
of
social power
in
the world
as a
whole,
can be
dated
to a
period
of not
much more than
two centuries.
In the
sixteenth century
on the
whole,
as we
have seen,
the parity
of the
citied societies
of the
Oikoumene still prevailed: despite
the general Occidental florescence associated with
the
Renaissance,
po-
litically
the
West-Europeans were even receding before
the
Ottoman
empire,
and
commercially
the
Muslims were still
at
least their equals
in
most parts
of the
Oikoumene. Culturally
too, the
Muslims were
in one
of their most brilliant periods. This fact
of
world history reflects
the
fact
of European history that
the
Renaissance florescence
did not yet, in
itself,
transcend
the
limitations
of
agrarianate-level society.
But the cru-
cial changes were clearly under
way by the end of the
sixteenth century.
By
the end of the
eighteenth century already, they were
all of
them
completed
at
least
as
regards some particular field
in
some particular
place,
e.g., as
regards astronomical physics throughout
the
Occident,
or
cotton cloth production
in
England. Correspondingly, Islamicate society
was routed
in a
land like Bengal.
Just
as to
include
the
Renaissance within
the
actual transition
to Mo-
dernity, rather than among
its
prior conditions,
is to
falsify
the
picture
from
a
world-historical viewpoint,
so
also
to
extend
the
critical period
beyond
the
eighteenth century
is to
confuse arbitrarily
one or
more
phases
of the
unfolding consequences
of the
decisive event with
the
world-historical event
itself.
Subsequent changes have been
of
enor-
mous importance;
for
instance,
the
later introduction
of
electricity
as a
basic form
of
industrial energy,
or the
theory
of
relativity
in
physics.
But
as regards
the
nature
of the
historical change involved, they merely
carried further
the
Modern pattern
of
development already established
in nucleo about
the
year
1800. In any
case,
it was
transformations
of the
seventeenth
and
eighteenth centuries that served
to set off
decisively
the
Westerners from
the
rest
of
mankind.
4 The great Western Transmutation 49
What was the relation among all these changes, that they should all
happen at once? What was it that made for such a relatively sudden and
comprehensive transformation of the society, with such far-reaching ef-
fects? It is clear that the changes were closely interrelated and, indeed,
interdependent. However, this was not always in the sense that particular
changes in one field depended on particular changes in another (thus
scientific and industrial developments long went parallel, with only rela-
tively superficial contacts); rather, all the changes presupposed common
social resources and even common psychological patterns of expectation. 3
For historical purposes, one ought to analyze the Great Transmutation
as a historical event or process, not merely as the presence of a new state
or age of human culture; but such attempts have been infrequent.
Schumpeter, however, successfully transforms what even for the Marx-
ists is a relatively static capitalist "stage" of society into a complex and
real equilibrium, and a foreseeable end. In such a perspective, the analy-
ses of the capitalist market by the conventional bourgeois economists as
if it were a condition essentially based on an approximated equilibrium,
take on an unreal air: at most, they are analyzing short-term equilibri-
ums in a process which itself is creating and modifying the market which
they purpose.
In this perspective my own study is doubly lacking. I have treated the
Transmutation primarily as a shift from one state to another, as being
completed with the generation of 1789, when it was achieved in nucleo in
certain fields in certain places. In the long run, it must probably be
treated as a completed process only from the perspective of the day
when all relevant fields of social life and all parts of the world will have
been technicalized, if such a day comes. From such a vantage point, the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries will seem merely preliminary,
though they will still retain their special status. At present, however, I
cannot venture to assume such a perspective.
Hence many have seen the Transmutation as the expression in many
fields of a single overall basic change: a change from what is called a
"traditional" to what is called a "rational" society. In a "rational" society,
choices can be determined less by the dictates of ancestral custom and
3 From the time of Burckhardt, we have had many perceptive attempts to analyze just
what "modern man/' that is a European of the Technical Age, really
"is."
However, apart
from some distorted information on what is called "Oriental," these attempts have usu-
ally made use only of data from within west European and ancient Greek history. Hence
they have blurred the difference between local stages within the Occidental evolution,
and changes more universally relevant. Area-studies men, on the other hand, rarely
know anything about any part of the world before the nineteenth century. Hence I have
had to develop my own analysis.
50 I Europe in a global context
more by practical calculation of immediate advantage. Persons, then,
will be granted status and authority less on the basis of their birth and
family connections, and more on the basis of their effective competence
as individuals. Efficient, predictable organization will prevail over famil-
ial,
patriarchal arrangements and social relations will be determined less
by private personal commitments and more by impersonal legal status.
Immediate efficiency will be valued more highly than continuity with
the past, and people will be less hesitant about change lest it prove
degeneration, and instead continuous practical improvement, even at
the expense of what has been valued before, will be not only welcomed
as "progress," but expected as a natural social condition. Once "rational-
ity" was established and innovation was accepted as normal, all the
economic, social, and intellectual improvements followed naturally.
Some such shift did occur in the Transmutation. But this change was by
no means so sharp a change as is often assumed, for in fact the standard
picture of a "traditional" society is rather a fiction. As we have seen in dis-
cussing the nature of a cultural tradition, even in a very "primitive" so-
ciety, cultural traditions must be in constant development to remain via-
ble,
for they must always effectively meet some current need or no
amount of ancestral privilege can save them. Moreover, the rationality re-
ferred to, that is, the impersonal and innovative private calculation called
"rationalization" in industry, is a relative manner. Most agrarianate-level
societies could even be evaluated as relatively "rational," indeed, as
against even the relative "traditionally" of most pre-literate societies. In
respect simply of "rationalization," the sort of shift that occurred in the
Transmutation was one that had occurred, on one level or another, time
and again in history - not only at the advent of cities, but in every great
cultural florescence and even, on a lesser scale, whenever a new religious
or political tradition was being initiated. At all such times, independent,
innovative calculation (but not necessarily human rationality as such) has
been more emphasized and traditional custom less. Moreover, some resi-
due of such attitudes had commonly been institutionalized in subsequent
social life, especially in the more cosmopolitan societies.
Thus Islamdom, being more cosmopolitan in the Mid-Islamic periods
than was the Occident, embodied more provision for rational calculation
and personal initiative in its institutions. Indeed, much of the shift from
"traditional" to "rational" which in Europe was a part of the Mutation's
"modernization" has the air of bringing the Occident closer to what was
already well-established in the Islamicate tradition. (This is especially
true of those "Modern" developments which were beginning already in
the Renaissance and are often cited to show that "Modernity" had al-
4 The great Western Transmutation 51
ready begun then.) The depreciation of aristocratic birth in favor of
greater social mobility did not go so far in the Occident as it had in
Islamdom. The inclination to allow a primary role to freely made individ-
ual contracts as against the authority of guilds and estates was in accord
with the principles of sharia law.
The shift from reliance on custom and continuity to reliance on reason
and innovation, although it occurred only in a limited measure, was not
in itself what was specific to the Modern Western Transmutation. It was
not this that set the Westerners apart from both their ancestors and the
rest of the world. It merely accompanied and facilitated a change in the
patterns of investment of time and money. This, as we shall see, oc-
curred only in a special form, one that I shall call
technicalistic,
so that
specialized technical considerations tended to take
precedence
over all others.
Indeed, in that special form - rather than in other forms - the shift went
to unprecedented lengths, so that the results set new conditions for all
historical life. It was not that the human mind as such was suddenly
emancipated, as if by some mutation, and could therefore begin freely to
explore all calculable possibilities where, before, new paths could be
opened only by chance and despite the weight of customary
bias.
Rather
new concrete sorts of opportunity for social investment, hitherto imprac-
tical even for the most emancipated mind, became praticable, attracting
even minds that still, by and large, resisted any deviation from intellec-
tual habit. And then the resistance was gradually reduced.
To
begin with, we must identify what was distinctive in the new forms
of investments, as such. The calculative innovation in the Renaissance
still presented a degree of initiative and creativity "normal" for great
florescences in the Agrarian Age. But in time such a florescence would
normally taper off. Usually such activities had found sooner or later a
point at which further cultural complexity was so subject to interrup-
tions by historical accidents that it did not repay the risks it incurred.
What made the difference was that the tendency toward rational innova-
tion, always present in the very nature of tradition, was permitted - in
certain forms (and only in those forms) - to be carried to unprecedented
lengths, and to set the conditions for all historical life. In sum a critical
point of social development was reached, at which types of investment
(material and mental) which had before been sporadic and precarious
were occurring on a sufficiently large scale so that they could be institu-
tionalized and built on further - and finally be made socially irreversible.
This new situation offered new opportunities to human enterprise, new
occasions for cultural creativity of many sorts. The new opportunities
were rapidly taken
up.
On the basis of the new creativity, new and rapidly
52 I Europe in a global context
developing traditions proliferated, and the new patterns were established
as rapidly as the process of evolution in cultural traditions could carry
them. When the inner dialogue in a tradition is unhampered and its field
of action is unexploited, this can be very fast. The historical conditions
which allowed this at all, allowed it in many fields of endeavor at once.
The precariousness of cultural complexity beyond the agrarianate base
level of the urban-rural symbiosis was at last overcome, and a new, higher
base level was presumably established.
The rational innovation in the Renaissance still presented a degree of
initiative and creativity "normal" for great florescences in the Agrarian
Age.
Usually, such activities had found sooner or later a point at which
further cultural complexity was so subject to interruptions by historical
accidents that it did not repay the risks it incurred. This was especially
true in any field that required large-scale social investment of time or
money, and hence freedom from such disorganization or arbitrary inter-
vention as would disrupt the peace and social orderliness which such
investment presupposed. This was a far more pressing danger than the
oppressiveness of too grand an internal balance which might trap men's
minds in some form of style cycle. By the end of the sixteenth century,
just those kinds of calculative, innovative investment that were most
dependent on freedom from social disruption were reaching levels rarely
reached before: that is, improvements in technical methods of achieving
concrete, material ends by way of multiple, interdependent specializa-
tion. And, despite such disasters as the Thirty Years' War and the En-
glish Civil War, nothing happened to stop the process as a whole, espe-
cially in northwest Europe. A very similar process had been stopped in
later Sung China under the nomad dynasties.
The Occidental florescence did not taper off. Rather, innovative invest-
ment persisted till a critical point of social development was reached by
about 1600. By then, certain types of investment (material and mental)
which all through the Agrarian Age had been sporadic and precarious,
even during florescences (and during the Renaissance), were now occur-
ring on a sufficiently large scale so that they could be institutionalized,
built on further, and finally be made socially irreversible. This new situa-
tion offered a new set of opportunities to human enterprise, new occa-
sions for cultural creativity of many sorts. The new opportunities were
swiftly taken up. On the basis of the new creativity, new and rapidly
developing "technicalistic" traditions proliferated, and the new patterns
were established as rapidly as the process of evolution in cultural tradi-
tions could carry them. When the inner dialogue in a tradition is unham-
pered and its field of action is as yet unexploited, this can be very fast.
4 The great Western Transmutation 53
The historical conditions that allowed this at all, allowed it in many fields
of endeavor at once. As a result, the previous precariousness of any
cultural complexity beyond the agrarianate base-level of the rural-urban
symbiosis was at last overcome. A new higher base-level was presum-
ably established.
These new impulses carried everything with them, including old insti-
tutions. Existing institutions had, to be sure, proved sufficiently open to
make such an advance possible. (Probably any set of mature institutions
can provide a great deal more flexibility than is at first apparent.) But
such institutions were hardly well adapted to it, surely no more so than,
say, the Islamicate institutions. Yet they were pressed into serving the
new possibilities, or were superceded. A good deal of institutional rigid-
ity was implicit in the Occidental corporative expectations, and some of
this rigidity acted as an obstacle to the new impulses. (For instance, the
church Inquisition was more oppressive to the ordinary thinking citizen
that anything found in Islamdom.) Nonetheless, this very corporative
structure - when the occasion was ripe - did act to protect individual
innovation at least as effectively as might the social mobility and the
sharia autonomy of Islamdom.
At the core of the new innovation was the pattern of multiple technical
specialization. Such technical specialization was not altogether new:
since the introduction of gunpowder weapons, that aspect of military
practice had represented a microcosm of the innovative technical special-
ization which was to be the hallmark of the Transmutation. But now it
reached a breadth of scale, a "critical mass," which allowed much more
extensive institutionalizing of such innovation than before, an institu-
tionalizing which was to embrace and finally dominate all the key sec-
tors of the whole society. Economically, it appeared in forms of industrial
and commercial investment in the seventeenth century in northwest
Europe during the seventeenth century: capital was systematically re-
invested and multiplied on the basis of continuing technical innovation
and of anticipated expansion in market patterns. Intellectually, it ap-
peared in the work of such associations as the Royal Society: in many
cultures there had been associations for cultivating existing scholarly
learning, which might welcome the occasional piece of new information.
In the seventeenth century the Royal Society aimed explicitly at gather-
ing and disseminating that new knowledge which would replace the
old, and did so largely in expectation of the continual new inventions of
the by then professionalized instrument-makers and the new observa-
tions they would make possible.
One must suppose that the intellectual side of the movement was
54 I Europe in a global context
dependent on the economic side, but not in the sense that the natural
sciences benefitted directly from the inventiveness of industry. Rather,
the expansion of industrial investment released more resources to the
whole economy. These were then made use of, among scholars, in a
manner consonant with the expansive mood of which the pace was
surely set by the exhilaration associated with the new mercantile and
industrial ventures. The intellectual development was apparently quite
autonomous. After a certain point is reached in the development of
natural sciences, at any rate, it cannot advance further without a dispro-
portionate amount of human investment on all fronts at once: i.e., in-
creasing specialization in many different fields. Whether or not we sup-
pose that a lull in scientific work in the Occident after 1300 resulted from
the difficulty of proceeding further with the then available level of hu-
man resources, it nevertheless seems that the science had reached the
point where the sudden increase of such resources could have great
liberating effects - and precisely in those aspects of knowledge that
were most dependent on multiple specialization. To the extent that in-
dustrial experience entered into scientific advantage, it was mostly by
way of the increasing skills and technical resources of the instrument-
makers, whose specialized innovations surely confirmed the techni-
calistic tendency in science.
In both scientific and economic life, the scale of increasing technical
specialization brought with it qualitative changes. Perhaps most obvi-
ously it reached a level on which it paid to invest the requisite time,
funds,
and concern into institutions that embodied and further con-
firmed the technical specialization. These very institutions, then, helped
to hasten the process. Gradually, in the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries, it became so well-rooted and widely ramified in Occidental
society that no social process or historical event originating outside the
process could reverse it or seriously slow it down.
This institutionalization presupposed further a close interrelation
among specializations. There was no mere conglomeration of individual
technical advances. As isolated technical specialization, the techniques
of mechanized cotton spinning, for instance, could be reckoned equiva-
lent to the highly specialized and relatively efficient ancient techniques
of the Coptic land surveyors in Egypt. Especially within the main fields
in which the process occurred, all depended on the growth of an increas-
ingly inclusive and interdependent nexus of technical specialism, such
that the technical efficiency of any particular activity was increased by its
use of the fruits of other specialties, and it in turn served to increase their
efficiency. For such a process to be carried far, a major part of all the
4 The great Western Transmutation 55
activities of a society must become involved. Once this process was well-
established, new discoveries and inventions, along with the human and
financial investment needed to realize them, grew at a geometric rate of
progression. Each new round of inventions, once exploited, cleared the
way for yet another.
It will readily be seen that such a technicalistic process left behind most
basic presuppositions of all agrarianate society. Even those agrarianate-
level societies that were not themselves immediately agrarian - being,
say, pastoralist or mercantile - had depended for their existence on the
social relations prevailing in their agrarian hinterland, in which the agrar-
ian surplus provided the chief income on which the carriers of the high
culture, the chief market of the mercantile cities, depended. The growth
of inter-dependent technical specializations freed the income structure of
the privileged classes in large areas from primary dependence on agrarian
exploitation of the agriculturalists.
It did so, of course, not because industrial production could take the
place of agricultural in providing the common necessities of life, such as
food. Rather, what the non-agricultural sectors of the economy could
support now was the special income of the privileged, the carriers of the
high culture; and this was not only in a few immediate urban situations,
as before, but in the overall economic nexus. Even with no increase in
the agricultural surplus, that is, with no increase in the number of non-
agricultural laborers that could be fed, technical specialization could
vastly increase productivity, and hence total production, till so much of it
was nonagricultural that a correspondingly large proportion of income
in the society need not be determined by agrarian relationships. If the
technicalistic process was to progress far (and if the proportion of the
privileged in the society was ultimately to expand) not only greater
productivity per laborer was required, but also more laborers (and also
more agricultural raw materials). Hence even the limitations on agricul-
tural production, imposed by localized manual and animal methods,
must be escaped by extending the new social process to agriculture itself
(though a partial alternative could be to import agricultural products
from distant lands not yet undergoing the technicalistic process - which
could mean exporting manufacturers thither, displacing the local crafts-
men, and turning those lands more solidly to agriculture than before).
All phases of the new roles of agriculture and agrarian relations were to
become significant in the future of Islamdom.
This overall process, and then the condition of society in which it has
resulted, I call technicalization, which I will define as a condition of ratio-
nally calculative (and hence innovative) technical specialization, in which the
56 I Europe in a global context
several specialties are interdependent on a large enough scale to determine pat-
terns of
expectation
in the key
sectors
of
a
society.
I choose the word "techni-
calization" in contradistinction to "industrialization," which is only one
aspect of the whole process. The Industrial Revolution at the end of the
eighteenth century was constituted by the joining of specialized ma-
chines, adapted to an expanding "mass" market, to the indefinitely ex-
pandable resources of steam power. "Industrialization" has meant the
prevalence of such power-mechanized industry in a country's economy.
(When steam power is replaced by electric power or by atomic power, or
when the efficiency of any source of power is multiplied by the use of
assembly lines or of automation, the human consequences may
be
impor-
tant but the basic equation established at the end of the eighteenth
century, marking the contrast to the role of industry in agrarianate-level
society, remains essentially unchanged.) This was certainly the culmina-
tion of the seventeenth and eighteenth century economic transforma-
tions,
and in recent times the preponderance in a country's economy of
power-mechanized industry has been taken as the essential mark of
Modernity. For a country to be Modern has meant for it to be industrial-
ized. But this is as yet only a token.
For our purposes we need a far broader conception. "Industrialization"
may not exclude a highly technicalized modern land like Denmark for,
though Denmark is primarily agricultural, the prevalence of power-
mechanization in agriculture
itself,
and especially in the processing sub-
sidiary to agriculture, may be included by extension under "industrializa-
tion. " But the whole process of technicalization
is
far more
inclusive.
Even
in the economy proper, there could be a high degree of technicalization
without power-mechanization - at a time before power-mechanization
had imposed itself (as it did once it became available at all) thenceforth on
any participants in innovative technicalization. Thus the pre-power-
mechanized industries of France in the eighteenth century already dis-
played many of the traits of technicalization in their internal evolution and
in their consequences in world trade. The process of technicalistic special-
ization in the sciences and in social organization and even in other aspects
of society was equally important with that in economic production. A
term like "technicalization" will neutrally cover all aspects of the process,
without assigning primacy to any given aspect.
Moral dimensions of
technicalism
Now we must look to the indispensable psychological side of such invest-
ment patterns. Reliance on multiple technical specialization was corre-