Against the Dead Hand: the Uncertain Struggle for Global Capitalism.

• Author: Hanson, John, R., II.
• Position: Book Review

By Brink Lindsey New York: John Wiley & Sons, 2001. Pp. 368. $29.95 cloth.

Today it is visceral for the ordinary citizen to sec economic globalization as a relentless and irresistible force shaping political, social, and especially economic conditions throughout the world. Sovereign governments, we have come to believe, are increasingly passive respondents to the initiatives of international capital. Brink Lindsey, however, challenges the new consensus in his sweeping book Against the Dead Hand: The Uncertain Struggle for Global Capitalism. He portrays globalization as a kind of wholesome vacuum filler, the vacuum having been created by the loss of credibility and authority of statism and collectivism, the regnant economic and political doctrines in the world for most of the twentieth century. Near-universal statism, he maintains, choked off the naturally expansive impulses of capital, the precedent for which was the explosion of the world economy in the half-century or so before World War I. He claims that blame for the interwar implosion of the world economy lies with statism and collectivism. He sees the future as a struggle between forces of globalization--a liberal world order, that is--and the remnants of statism, giving the nod to liberalism in this contest because of its successful record in promoting economic welfare, in contrast to the proven failure of statism and collectivism.

Lindsey's thesis is grounded in extensive knowledge of the economic history of the modern era. He starts blandly, stating the consensus view that the Industrial Revolution made possible an unprecedented degree of international integration by means of plunging transportation and communication costs in the second half of the nineteenth century. Then, becoming boldly original, he identifies a nasty by-product, the rise of a widespread engineering attitude toward economics and a concomitant faith in technology and science as the engines of economic progress. This belief, he claims, in turn fostered faith in top-down control and central planning as the appropriate means for encouraging economic development. The results at the political level were a set of policies and programs that he labels the Industrial Counterrevolution. Generally speaking, this sensibility was conducive to a collectivist or at least nonliberal social order because social institutions and the rule of law were deemed at best secondary or at worst irrelevant in promoting economic progress...