Fred Block - Postindustrial possibilities: a critique of economic discourse

Preface

This small book has three large goals. The first is to restate and revitalize postindustrial theory. The second is to demonstrate the power of economic sociology as a method for understanding contemporary economies. The third is to offer an alternative framework for thinking about economic policy and social choice in developed capitalist societies. Clearly, any of these tasks alone is far too ambitious for a single volume. Moreover, the topics are so large that the substantive chapters only scratch the surface of the data and scholarship relevant to my argument, and new articles and books that should be incorporated into the analysis are appearing almost daily. Nevertheless, if it encourages others to take up these issues in a more sustained and systematic fashion, I think I am justified in publishing an essayliterally, an attemptthat is provisional and incomplete. Without this kind of intellectual chutzpah, there is a real danger that serious scholarship will confine itself to narrow questions that lend themselves to mastery by a single scholar, and that the great issues of our time will go unstudied.

I have incurred numerous debts in the preparation of this volume. The German Marshall Fund of the United States provided me with support during the 1986-87 academic year; without that year devoted to research and writing, this volume could not have been written. I am also indebted to the University of Pennsylvania's Program for Assessing and Revitalizing the Social Sciences for research support over several summers. Even more important, the arguments of this book reflect what I have learned from my colleagues in seminars sponsored by this program.

Chapter One

The Postindustrial Context

This is a strange period in the history of the United States because people lack a shared understanding of the kind of society in which they live. For generations, the United States was understood as an industrial society, but that definition of reality is no longer compelling. Yet no convincing alternative has emerged in its absence.

This confusion and uncertainty is reflected in both commonsense views and social theory. Contemporary social theorists tell us remarkably little about the kind of historical era in which we live.1 Social theorists have become preoccupied with questions of metatheory; much theoretical debate centers on defining the proper scope and ambition of social theory and on determining the kind of theory that should be created. Recent years have seen relatively few efforts to define the nature of contemporary societies and to delineate their major dynamics. It is almost as though such an effort is now seen as an old-fashioned exercise, an anachronistic return to the lofty ambitions of nineteenth-century theorists.2

1. More accurately, they tell us little directly; their silence on the classical issue of defining the nature of the society is itself deeply revealing. There are exceptions to this prevailing silence, but an examination of the essays in a recent volume designed to reflect the state of the debate in social theory (Anthony Giddens and Jonathan Turner, eds., Social Theory Today [Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1987]) provides strong support for this conclusion. Important partial exceptions include the recent multivolume work by Roberto Mangabeira Unger, Politics: A Work in Constructive Social Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), and Anthony Giddens's own multivolume study, A Con temporary Critique of Historical Materialism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981, 1987). The second volume is entitled The Nation-State and Violence.

This silence of contemporary theorists has real consequences, because individuals cannot do without some kind of conception of the type of society in which they live. In modern societies, social theory plays an indispensable role in providing us with a roadmap to our social environment. While there are complex mediations between high social theory and everyday "common sense," the two are connected in important ways.3

In those periods when social theory fails to define the nature of our society, other ideas tend to fill the void of popular understanding. As Keynes said of economics, those who profess not to be influenced by any theory are usually enthralled by the ideas of some long-forgotten scribbler. In our own period, it is economic ideas and, ironically, pre-Keynesian economic ideas in particularthat have filled the vacuum left by the silences of contemporary social theory. The remarkable revival during the 1980s of classical freemarket economics has served to fill people's need for some kind of social understanding to guide their day-to-day actions.4

The relative silence of social theory is rooted in events of the 1960s and 1970s that critically weakened the previously dominant theories of post-World War II American social science. Structuralfunctionalism in sociology, pluralism in political science, and liberal Keynesianism in economics shared in common an evolutionary triumphalism that saw American society as having evolved new institutional arrangements that provided solutions to such historic problems of industrialism as class conflict, economic crises, and exploitation. All three approaches proclaimed the arrival of a new stage in history in which enlightened state action and a spirit of consensus would make possible the gradual solution of the remaining social problems. All three of these approaches were unapologetically liberal in their political and social outlook.

2. This is, in fact, the position of many who have been influenced by poststructuralism. They see any attempt to create a unified theory of society as intellectually indefensible and as potentially coercive.

3. The classical source of the idea that social theory plays a critical role in shaping popular perceptions of reality is Gramsci. See Antonio Gramsci, Selec tions from the Prison Notebooks, vol. 1 (New York: International Publishers, i97i).

4. Fundamentalist religious ideas have also filled this space for many. There are, of course, affinities between free-market ideas and the Christianity of the Gospels. See Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation (1944; reprint, Boston: Beacon Press, 1957), 249-58B.