The Victory of Reason: How Christianity Led to Freedom, Capitalism, and Western Success.

• Author: Woods, Jr., Thomas E.
• Position: Book review

The Victory of Reason: How Christianity Led to Freedom, Capitalism, and Western Success By Kodney Stark New York: Random House, 2005. Pp. xvi, 28. $25.95 cloth, $15.95 paperback.

In recent years, a number of important books have offered a counternarrative to the version of European history that has seared itself into the Western consciousness since the Enlightenment, in which religious obscurantism suppressed learning and progress until unfettered reason at last delivered us from the clutches of superstitious ecclesiastics. Works by David Lindberg, Edward Grant, A. C. Crombie, Stanley Jaki, and Thomas Goldstein have revised to one degree or another the received view that the Christian religion was nothing but a hindrance to the rise of science.

In The Victory of Reason, Rodney Stark attempts to carry this revision forward by extending it to the success of the West in more general terms: not only in science, but also in the growth of capitalism and the development of political freedom. He suggests that Western success in these areas was not inhibited but rather encouraged by Christian ideas, albeit ones that took some time to develop fully. The very possibility of the development of doctrine, whereby ideas first introduced in germ are elaborated upon with the passage of time, is likewise a strength of the Christian faith, according to Stark, and is one of many examples of its commitment to reason.

One development in particular that pleases Stark is the evolution away from condemnation and suspicion of commerce, trade, and merchants, and toward an appreciation of their value. An unfavorable ideological climate can stop the growth of capitalism in its tracks, as history amply reveals. Stark provides the example (among others) of iron production in eleventh-century China. The late tenth century saw the development of an iron industry in parts of northern China; by 1018, approximately thirty-five thousand tons were being produced every year. But by the end of the century, the industry was dead and its facilities abandoned. What happened, Stark explains, is that the imperial court came to the conclusion that the new industry-created wealth tended to undermine Confucian values as well as social harmony and stability because it implicitly challenged the view that commoners should be content with their state and should not seek after riches. "So, they declared a state monopoly on iron and seized everything" (p. 72).

Stark shows that the Christian...