The Riddle of the Modern World: of Liberty, Wealth, and Equality.

• Author: Lal, Deepak K.
• Position: Book Review

By Alan Macfarlane Basingstoke, England: Macmillan, 2000. Pp. xiii, 326. $65.00 cloth, $21.95 paper.

Alan Macfarlane is the author of a marvelous book, The Origins of English Individualism: The Family, Property, and Social Transition (1978), which places the origins of English individualism in the twelfth century. In his most recent book, The Riddle of the Modern World, he seeks to find the sources of English exceptionalism that ushered in the modern world, looking through the eyes of a number of witnesses from the seventeenth to the twentieth centuries who have thought about these sources in a comparative framework. The first of these authors is Baron de Montesquieu (1689-1755), who lived around the time England was breaking away from the European herd and establishing the institutions that would bring about the Industrial Revolution. The next is Adam Smith (1723-90), who lived just at the cusp of the changeover from an organic agrarian economy to an industrial mineral-energy-using economy. The third is Alexis de Tocqueville (1805-59), who lived when modernity had become manifest both in England and in its offshoot, the United States of America. the fourth is the contemporary sociologist and anthropologist Ernest Gellner (1920-95).

This strategy is an interesting one, and Macfarlane's thumbnail sketches of the lives and thought of these thinkers are cogent and concise. I learned a great deal from his discussion of Montesquieu, and I am sure that readers who do not know the writings of the other thinkers discussed in the book will likewise find much of interest in it.

There are two separate questions about the escape from Agraria, as several of Macfarlane's thinkers were aware. The first is why, of all the Eurasian civilizations, western Europe became the pioneer of the Great Transformation. Second, a narrower question is why, within the West, a small off-shore island took off before the others. Much of the book pertains to this second question.

On the first question, Macfarlane says that the riddle of the modern world is how the natural tendency of states toward predation, which had kept agrarian civilizations in a static state, was overcome so that the natural powers of human beings to be productive and creative could be unleashed. Economic historians and development economists have spent much time and effort researching this question, and we now are beginning to see parts of the answer. From Macfarlane's bibliography, it appears that he...