Frank-Landes Debate, Page 2
Andre Gunder Frank: Thank you. This doesn't work. Is it supposed to? Are these supposed to work? Bill, you can't count that as part of my time nor the next two statements that I make which is contrary to what Pat and Jeff said. I am actually the country bumpkin form Peoria here who is stepping into the ring with the world champ. And therefore I require, he requires, actually a handicap. One of which is that you count what I am now saying as part of his time, not my time. Secondly, it reminds of a debate between Paul Sweezy and Milton Freedman in which Sweezy said to the audience, ”Please make your judgment on the basis of the evidence, and not on the basis of the renowned debating skills of my worthy opponent.” I make that statement again. Please the evidence and thirdly on the evidence, I have to quote in order to do justice to David and his alleged evidence. I have to quote some of which takes more time. Now comes the prepared statement.... You better believe me and the wealth of my preordained gospel truth, or I will bring down on you the wrath of my Judeo-Christian God and have you condemned to everlasting damnation and poverty in hell by the ghosts of my like-minded fellow evangelists John Calvin and Karl Marx. For in my wealth of nations, wealth and poverty of nations, I contend that it is our precious Judeo-Christian culture and values that fundamentally distinguish the west from the rest. This contention which for me is self-evident, the same as its demonstration, also comes for the wealth of the west and the poverty of the rest. Except of Japan and others that don't fit into your scheme of things. In so doing, this book continues the tradition of political economy sociology in history that established itself in the mid-nineteenth century after the Industrial Revolution and at the beginning of European colonialism and imperialism and has remained dominant ever since. This, then at that time, newly established tradition had some forerunners like Montesquieu and Malthus and so forth, which had begun to revise what had previously been the dominant view in Europe held by people like Leibnitz, Voltaire and still Adam Smith. However, as Weber later recognized, it was none other than Karl Marx who finally codified and imposed this new historiography and social theory. Already in the Communist Manifesto whose hundred and fiftieth anniversary is being celebrated this year in Lenin Capital, Marx argued that the European Feudalism already contained the seeds of it's own transformation and of the transition to ongoing capital accumulation by the then germinating and sprouting of a progressive bourgeoisie that would pull itself and their economies up by their own boot straps through the development what that has since become to be known as Capitalism. Landes, too, writes that, “Britain made itself.” And Marx showed that India, alleged, that India shows the mirror of its future... Sorry... that Britain shows India the mirrors of its future. On the other hand, according to Marx, the rest of the world was characterized instead by the Asiatic mode of production, hydraulic society and oriental despotism whose traditional societies lacked these essentials and essentialist transformatory qualities and therefore condemned their society's and people to remain mired in everlasting poverty and ignorance. Until the West arrived to waken the rest from the traditional slumber. The West-Rest term was just introduced by Landes' Harvard colleague and influential cold war ideologue, Samuel Huntington, in his 1993 article on foreign affairs. But this already shows how ubiquitous and still dominant is the now - quote - “traditional” - theory that after Marx would only be embellished and was simply renamed by the other fathers of the new history and sociology predominantly the German Ranke School but also Compte and Durkheim in France and Sir Henry Main in England. The fundamental essential of this late 19th century theory was and remains as essentialist dualism that distinguishes between us in the West contracting mechanical, allegedly universal, scientific Gesellschaft, etc... Versus them and the rest traditional particularist organic Gemeinschaft, etc. The very same theme has only been further refined throughout the 20th century, first in Europe by Sombart and Simmel, rationalism. Weber and Tawney, the partisan ethic and the spirit of capitalism. Toynbee and Polanyi, civilizations and the great transformation. And then in the United States by the also Harvard Sociologist Talcottgutt Parsons, universalism vs. particularism and so forth. The Anthropologist Redfield, with whom I studied, low civilization - folk and high civilization - urban society and most universally” end quote. In that white building at MIT across the river here where I was myself visiting in 1958 when the CIA was financing the birth of modernization theory at CENDES through the pens of Walt Whitman Rostow's Stages of Economic Growth, from Daniel Lerner's Passing of Traditional Society to the late David McClelland's Achieving Society. A decade later in 1969, David Landes would codify this same thesis in his Unbound Prometheus. And today, another 3 decades later, in his Wealth and Poverty of Nations. And he's still espousing the very same theory of Marx, Weber, M-A-R-X, Weber. Landes credits Marx only two times very briefly while he devotes a half a dozen pages to insisting that Weber was right on. Although, Landes also repeatedly cites Adam Smith, Landes avoids any mention of how fundamentally he neglects and denies, as I will demonstrate in this debate, the very fundamentals of Smith's own analysis of the nature and causes of the wealth of nations. For Smith's famous analysis of the relations between the extent of the market and the division of labor was already global in 1776 and recognized that China is a much richer part, is much richer than any part of Europe. Only since then from Marx to Landes has it become “traditional,” like Landes still is to dismiss the alleged Asiatic mode of production among pourome despotism. Particularly in China as incapable of generating any development whatsoever. Thus overall, thus, although Landes also writes that we must study China, he claims, and I quote, here comes a long list of things that David actually says about China. That China is a culturally and intellectually homeostatic society that could live with little change, that they had indifference to technology, technological and scientific torpor, lacked institutions for finding and learning, abhorred mercantile success and were not motivated by greed and passion. They showed deliberate introversion, isolationism, risk aversion, irrationality, xenophobia, arrogance, haughtiness, unsubmitiveness, I'm running out of breath, self-defeating escapism, were insecure and brittle, and so on, and on and on and on. More than three decades of historical research of empirically have completely disconfirmed these theses about China and other parts of the world but David either ignores these findings all together or he finds them dismissible on the simple ground that they do not fit into the simple scheme of things of what we already know... to be true. Landes also uses the same theory of knowledge to characterize the West. He asserts again and again that we know that the West is essentially different and has been so for at least for the past thousand years. Over all this time and in feudal society already, Western values and progress supposedly prepared the way and 500 years ago, Europe already allegedly had a head start over the rest of the world for promoting the purported invention of inventions, his chapter four's title, and the 17th century's scientific revolution to generate the technology of the industrial revolution through what, from the title of Eric Jones' 1981 book, has become to be known as the European Miracle. More and more historical research has also disconfirmed these allegations and critiques so much so, about the West itself, so much so that by 1988, even Jones himself renounced and even denounced if not all of his account, at least his European exceptionalist title. None the less, David still sticks to his unbound Prometheus guns and continues to believe in what James Blaut has aptly termed “the myth of the tunnel perspective in history of the orient express traveling only on the Westbound track for more than the past 1000 years.” Indeed I don't know why you say thousand, because if it's Judeo-Christian values, then, why not since two and more thousand years. Therefore, Landes concludes in Wealth and Poverty that, “if we learn anything from the history of economic development, it is that culture makes all the difference.” This is what Landes has studied and learned in the thirty years since Unbound Prometheus. Yet, unfortunately, according to David, others have been unable to learn as much because, “the new economic history is beguiled by numbers.” Marxists, leftists and globalists, political economists and historians suffer from, “anti-intellectual and wrong Europhobia.” And especially Gunder Frank and other e-mail discussions on the H-WORLD net, that is organized right here by Pat Manning and the World History Center which is our host, “advance folklore fantasies and fallacies,” and Gunder Frank in particular does bad history. Landes himself says that his position is the expression of his Calvinist ideology. His review in the New York review of books, William McNeill called them unabashedly triumphalist dubious exertions. Landes' Harvard colleague Samuel Huntington even celebrates them and wants us to defend them in the present and coming clash of civilizations. I contend that this whole school of thought and Landes' right to call it ideology is a politically charged, is as politically charged and dangerous as it is scientifically baseless and wrong. If I may be permitted to encapsule the whole position in a three letter caricature, it could as well be called B-M-W, the acronym used to call, used to stand for Bayerische Motoren Werke but for David, it also stands for Baron Montesquieu-Marx/Weber, that is, I now drive a BMW because, I, in my exceptional values and superior qualities deserve it. I got it made, Jack! And the devil take the hind-most. That's my summary of David's book. Now comes his summary of my book.
William Fowler: Thank you professor Frank. And now, professor Landes.
Page 1 / Page 2 / Page 3 / Page 4 / Page 5 / Page 6 / Page 7 / Page 8 / Page 9 / Page 10 / Page 11 / Page 12
Photo 1 / Photo 2 / Photo 3 / Photo 4 / Photo 5 / Photo 6 / Photo 7 / Photo 8 / Photo
