자료: 구글도서
도서명: Unthinking social science: the limits of nineteenth-century paradigms
지은이: Immanuel Maurice Wallerstein
에디션: 2, 재판
발행인: Temple University Press, 1991
ISBN: 1566398991, 9781566398992
길이: 286페이지
* * * * *
제5부. Revisiting Braudel
제13장. Fernand Braudel, Historian "homme de la conjoncture"
In the tradition of Annales, all historical writings should be organized as histoire problème.[주1] An appreciation of Fernand Braudel and his historiography must start with its problème: how can we account for the successㅡthe success of the ^Annales^ schoolㅡagainst the dominant ideology of the Establishment in France (and in the world), and how can we account for the fact that success led to the creation of a new Establishment over which Fernand Braudel reigned and against which he protested?[주2]
[주2] Other accounts of Braudel, which pose different "problems" are to be found in Hexter(1972), Kinser(1981), and Stoianovich(1976).
Since Annales teaches us that the way to respond to a problème is with histoire pensée and not histoire historisante (that is, with analytical rather than a chronological history), I shall organize my answer in terms of the trinity of social times Braudel set forth: structure, , and event (Braudel 1972a). I shall try to remember that, even in biography, events are "dust"[주3] and that what ultimately serves as explanation is the combination of structure and conjoncture. I shall also try to remember that very long time (that is eternal, ahistorical time) is very unlikely to be real and I shall be careful not to invoke it. The Mediterranean, Braudel's major work, treats the three temporalities in the order: structure, conjoncture, event. I believe this is the one serious error in the book, and that its explanatory persuasiveness would have been increased had Braudel begun with events, then dealt with structure, and culminated with conjoncture. Believing this, I shall follow that order here, and begin with the events of the life of Fernand Braudel. (...)
제14장. Capitalism: The Enemy of the Market?
Forty years ago the role of the market in capitalism seemed quite straightforward. The market was thought to be a defining feature of capitalism, not only because it was a key element in its operation but because it distinguished capitalism from the two anththeses to which it was usually compared: on the one hand, from feudalism which preceded it; and on the other hand, from socialism which was supposed to come after it. Normally one presented feudalism as a pre-market system and socialism as a post-market one.
Today it is no longer possible to use such schema as the basis of analysis. This is not because this schema is simplistic; rather, the schema is unquestionably false, for at least three reasons.
- First of all, research on feudal society, considerably advanced since 1945, makes it quite clear that it is not possible to think of it as a closed system living on subsistence farming within a so-called natural economy. In reality, markets existed everywhere and were deeply enmeshed in the logic of the operation of this historical system. To be sure, there were many differences between it and a capitalist system. Commodification was limited, and the markets were usually either local or long-distance, but seldom "regional." The long-distance trade was primarily a trade in luxury goods. Nonetheless, the contrast with what developed later under capitalism has become increasingly blurred as we have come to study the realities of feudal society more closely.
- In the same way, really existing socialism has seemed to show tendency to develop the market, in two ways. First of all, analysts are more and more in agreement that it is simply not true that the so-called socialist/Communist countries have truly and definitively withdrawn from the world market. Secondly, at the national level, practically every country in the socialist camp has been the scene of a long internal debate about the virtues of some liberalization of the internal market. There is even a new concept these days, "market socialism." Thus the reality of feudalism and the reality of socialism have contradicted the old theoretical schema.
- But it is also true that capitalist reality contradicts as well. And here Braudel's work has been of central importance in understanding this.
By doing this, he turns the intellectual debate upside down. Rather than thinking of the free market as the key element in historical capitalism, he sees monopolies as being the key element. Monopolies dominating the market are the defining element of our system and it is this that distinguishes capitalism quite clearly from feudal societyㅡand perhaps as well from an eventual world socialist system, one that has been insufficiently noticed up to now.
잠깐. “시장을 지배하는 독점이야말로 자본주의를 봉건사회와 구분해주는 것”이라는 이야기는 무슨 소리일까? 봉건사회에서는 물질생활의 광대한 저변 위에 시장경제까지만 존재했고, 꼭대기 층의 자본주의는 없었다는 얘기?
Adam Smith and Karl Marx agreed on certain things. One of the most fundamental of their common views was to consider that competition is what is normal in capitalismㅡnormal ideologically and normall statistically. Consequently, monopoly was exceptional. Monopoly had to be explained, and to be fought against. This ideology is still deeply rooted in the views of people today, not only in the general public but among social scientists.
However, it is not true that monopoly is statistically rare. Quite the contrary. The evidence mounts up on all sides, and one has but to read the work of Braudel to see how far back this goes. Not only have there always been monopolies in capitalism but they have always been of the utmost importance. Furthermore, it has always been the powerful and largest accumulators of capital who have controlled these monopolies. In fact, one could argue that the ( 203쪽의 끝 )
( 204-205쪽: 애석하게도 미리보기가 제공되지 않는 쪽 ...)
(...) some kind of state action, does it follow that the struggle against the various inequalitiesㅡeconomic, political, culturalㅡis in fact one and the same struggle? Monopolies dominate by denying liberty and equality in the economic arena and therefore necessarily in the political arena and quite as much (though we haven't discussed it) in the cultural arena. To be in favor of a Braudelian "market" seems to me in the end to be for the egalitarianization of the world. That is to say, it is to struggle for human liberties. And therefore for fraternity (since the logic of such a struggle does not permit the existence of subhumans). And that brings us to the final reversal of perspective. It may be that the triumph of the market (in Braudel's sense), no longer being the sign of the capitalist system, turns out to be the sign of world socialism. What a stunning reversal!
Obviously we are now discussing not the historical past but a future that is difficult to construct. And that is the last lesson we can learn from Braudel. It will not be in the least easy to bring about the triumph of Braudel's market. In a way one could say that the story of the last 500 years has been that of the constant defeat of this market. The only hope that Braudel offers us is that this market, or rather the people who constitute it, have never accepted this defeat. Every day they take up the hard struggle anew to constrain the constrainers, by sabotaging them economically and undermining their essential political structures.
제15장. Braudel on Capitalism, or Everything Upside Down
Fernand Braudel asked us to take seriously the concept of capitalism as a way of organzing and analyzing the history of the modern world, at least since the 15th century. He was not alone in this view, of course But his approach must be said to have been an unusual one, for he developed a theoretical framework{역사 기술을 위한ㅡ느슨한ㅡ방법적 모델이었지 이론적 틀이라고까지 하는 건 좀 심한 듯} which went against the two theses that both of the two great antagonistic world-views of the 19th century, classical liberalism and classical Marxism, considered central to their approach.
Braudel starts with an analogy of a house with three storiesㅡa groud floor of material life "in the sense of an extremely (207쪽의 끝...)
209쪽:
(...) capitalism, was also opaque, but in this case because capitalists wanted it so. It was the zone in which "central groups of privileged actors were engaged in circuits and calculations that ordinary people knew nothing of." They practiced "a sophisticated art open only to a few initiates at most." Without this zone that existed "above the sunlit world of the market economy," capitalism, that is, "real capitalism" was "unthinkable" (Braudel 1981-1984: vol. 1, 23-24).
(3) The zone of the market, which he occasionally calls the zone of "micro-capitalism," was a zone of "small profits." Its "face was not unacceptable." The activities there were "barely distinguishable from ordinary work."
Originally, the anti-market particularly flourished in long-distance trade. It was not distance per se, however, which accounted for the high profits. “The indisputable superiority of Fernhandel, long-distance trading, lay in the concentrations it made possible, which meant it was an unrivalled machine for the rapid reproduction and increase of capital" (Braudel 1981-84: vol.2, 408). In short[:]
(6) The issue of power then brings us to the role of the state. Here Braudel makes two points, one concerning the state as regulator. And his argument is paradoxical. As regulator, the state preserves freedom; as guarantor, it destroys it. His logic runs as follows. The state as regulator means price control. The ideology of free enterprise, which has always been an ideology that served the monopolists, has always attacked price control by governments in its many forms. But for Braudel, price control ensured competition:
But the state was a guarantor as well, a guarantor of monopoly, indeed its creator. This was not true of every state, however; only some states were able to do this. It was not only that the biggest monopolies, the great merchant companies, "were set up with the regular cooperation of the state" (Braudel 1981-84: vol.2, 421). There were many monopolies that "were taken so much for granted that they were all but invisible to those who enjoyed them" (Braudel 1981-84: vol. 2, 423).
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What implications does it have to see capitalism "upside down" in this manner? For one thing, it changes the historiographical agenda. For a second, it contains an implicit critique of Enlightenment theories of progress. For a third, it gives a very different policy message for the comtemporary world. These are not implications that Braudel made explicit. It was not his habit to explicate the implications of his scholarly work. If he occasionally did so in interviews, his comments often had an off-the-cuff quality which reflected less his views about the world than this views about interviews. Perhaps Braudel believed that the subtext has more influence if the reader discovers it himself. Perhaps he did not want to be drawn into too politicized a controversy, though he was scarcely shy of intellectual combat. Whatever the explanations of Braudel's own hesitances or silences, they should not prevent us from using his work as a basis for our own inflections.
The agenda of History (with a capital H), since at least the middle of the 19th century, has been dominated by an explanatory myth[주7] which runs as follows.[:]
215쪽: 미리보기 지원되지 않음.
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It should be clear, then, that Braudel's imagery accords ill with the more stultified views of our dominant ideologies. No doubt both Adam Smith and Karl Marx were subtle thinkers and anticipated much of what we can derive from a reading of Braudel. But liberalism as an ideology is different from the views of Adam Smith, and Marxism has been different from the views of Karl Marx. And it is liberalism and Marxism that have dominated our horizons, not the views of either Adam Smith or Karl Marx.
By reconceptualizing capitalism, Braudel has undercut the baisc argument that Both liberals and Marxists have used to justify their adherence to the theory of inevitable progress. Both liberals and Marxists have seen historical sequence in which capitalists and/or bourgeois and/or the middle class rose and developed their structures in particular ways. For liberals, when completed, this process would culminate in a sort of utopian apotheosis. For Marxists, when completed, this process would culminate in an explosion, which in turn would lead to new structures that would arrive at a sort of utopian apotheosis.
Braudel instead sees not a linear progression, but a continuing tension between the forces of monopoly (so-called real capitalism) and the forces of liberation who seek this liberation through self-controlled economic activities within the framwork of a complex of competitive markets, one in which their activities are "barely distinguishable from ordinary work."
Braudel himself goes no further. We can assume this conflict is eternal, or we can look for secular trends that would transform this historical system by making it unstable equilibria increasingly untenable. It is for us to fill this lacuna. I for one believe that such secular trends do exist within the capitalist world-economy, and that the increasing contradictions will result in a systemic "bifurcation" that will force a transformation of the system into something else. I also believe that what the something else will be is open, in the sense that it depends on our collective historical choice, and is not preordained. This is not the moment to develop this views, which I have done elsewhere.
What I think is important to understand is that Braudel's views do not reflect a hidden Poujadism honoring a putative "small businessman." Quite the contrary. Braudel's "liberatory" market is not what we have come to recognize as a market in the real world. It is truly competitive, in that supply and demand really do determine price, that is, potential (or fully realized) supply and demand. The "profits", it would follow, would be miniscule, in effect, a wage for the work. Whether such a system is historically viable remains a question. But his invocation of the "market" cannot be confused with the so-called neo-liberal ideology of the 1980s. It is in fact the very opposite.
Finally, its policy implications for the contemporary world are massive. If capitalism, real capitalism, is monopoly and not the market, real markets, then what is to be done is a question that gets answered perhaps very differently from the ways in which anti-systemic movements have been answering it for the past 100 years.
I have tried here to expound the ways in which Braudel has gone against accepted conceptualizations of capitalism. I have called this seeing capitalism "upside down." I have then tried to do what Braudel restrained himself from doing, make explicit the intellectual and social implications of this reconceptualization. Braudel should not be blamed for the latter effort. Perhaps others will take Braudel's reconceptualization and draw from it other implications. It will in any case be useful for all of us to allow mises about the central institutional forms of the historical system in which we live.
제15장. Braudel on Capitalism, or Everything Upside Down
Fernand Braudel asked us to take seriously the concept of capitalism as a way of organzing and analyzing the history of the modern world, at least since the 15th century. He was not alone in this view, of course But his approach must be said to have been an unusual one, for he developed a theoretical framework{역사 기술을 위한ㅡ느슨한ㅡ방법적 모델이었지 이론적 틀이라고까지 하는 건 좀 심한 듯} which went against the two theses that both of the two great antagonistic world-views of the 19th century, classical liberalism and classical Marxism, considered central to their approach.
- First, most liberals and most Marxists have argued that capitalism involved above all the establishment of a free, competitive market. Braudel saw capitalism instead as the system of the anti-market (contre-marché).
- And secondly, liberals and most Marxists have argued that capitalists were the great practitioners of economic specialization. Braudel believed instead that the essential features of successful capitalists was their refusal to specialize.
I.
Braudel starts with an analogy of a house with three storiesㅡa groud floor of material life "in the sense of an extremely (207쪽의 끝...)
209쪽:
(...) capitalism, was also opaque, but in this case because capitalists wanted it so. It was the zone in which "central groups of privileged actors were engaged in circuits and calculations that ordinary people knew nothing of." They practiced "a sophisticated art open only to a few initiates at most." Without this zone that existed "above the sunlit world of the market economy," capitalism, that is, "real capitalism" was "unthinkable" (Braudel 1981-1984: vol. 1, 23-24).
(3) The zone of the market, which he occasionally calls the zone of "micro-capitalism," was a zone of "small profits." Its "face was not unacceptable." The activities there were "barely distinguishable from ordinary work."
- How different this was from real capitalism, "with its mighty networks, its operations which already seemed diabolical to common mortels"(Braudel 1981-84: vol.1. 562).
- The zone of capitalism was "the realm of investment and of a high rate of capital formation" (Braudel 1981-84: vol.2, 428).
- "Where profit reaches very high voltages, there and there alone is capitalism, yesterday like today" (Braudel 1979: 378).[주2] But although profits of capitalists were high, they were not regular, like an annual harvest. "Profit rates varied all the time" (Braudel 1981-84: vol. 2, 430).
- "What is clear ... is that the really big profits were only attainable by capitalists who handled large sums of moneyㅡtheir own or other people's ... Money, ever more money was needed: to tide one over the long wait, the reverses, the shocks and delays" (Braudel 1981-84: vol.2, 432).[주3]
[주2] For some reason, probably an editor's lapsus, this sentence is not translated in the English version. See the parallel English paragraph in Braudel (1981-84: vol.2, 428).(4) "The market spells liberation, openness, access to another world. It means coming up for air" (vol 2, 26).
[주3] Braudel is speaking here of long-distance merchants, but the description fits quite well for a contemporary firm like Boeing Aircraft.
- This description presumably fits the late Middle Ages.
- It might also be said to reflect the sentiments of post-Cultural Revolution China.
Originally, the anti-market particularly flourished in long-distance trade. It was not distance per se, however, which accounted for the high profits. “The indisputable superiority of Fernhandel, long-distance trading, lay in the concentrations it made possible, which meant it was an unrivalled machine for the rapid reproduction and increase of capital" (Braudel 1981-84: vol.2, 408). In short[:]
- economic life is being defined by Braudel as those activities which are truly competitive.
- Capitalism is being defined as the zone of concentration, the zone of a relatively high degree of monopolization, that is, an anti-market.
(6) The issue of power then brings us to the role of the state. Here Braudel makes two points, one concerning the state as regulator. And his argument is paradoxical. As regulator, the state preserves freedom; as guarantor, it destroys it. His logic runs as follows. The state as regulator means price control. The ideology of free enterprise, which has always been an ideology that served the monopolists, has always attacked price control by governments in its many forms. But for Braudel, price control ensured competition:
Price control, which is used as a key argument to deny the appearance of the "true" self-regulating market before the 19th century, has always existed and still exist today. But when we are talking of the pre-industrial world, it would be a mistake to think that the price-lists of the markets suppressed the role of supply and demand. In theory, severe control over the market was meant to protect the consumer, that is competition. One might go so far as to say that it was the "free" market, such as the "private marketing" phenomenon in England, that tended to do away with both control and competition. (Braudel 1981-84: vol.2, 227)Here the role of the state was to contain the forces of the anti-market. For private markets did not arise merely to promote efficiency, but also to "eliminate competition" (Braudel 1981-84: vol. 2, 413).
But the state was a guarantor as well, a guarantor of monopoly, indeed its creator. This was not true of every state, however; only some states were able to do this. It was not only that the biggest monopolies, the great merchant companies, "were set up with the regular cooperation of the state" (Braudel 1981-84: vol.2, 421). There were many monopolies that "were taken so much for granted that they were all but invisible to those who enjoyed them" (Braudel 1981-84: vol. 2, 423).
- He cites the example of currency as a monopoly that is taken for grantedㅡin the Middle Ages, monopolists possessing gold and silver and most people only copper;
- today, monopolies utilizing so-called strong currencies and most people only "weak" currencies. {???}
- But the biggest monopoly of all was that possessed by the hegemonic power, the guarantor of the whole system. "The position of Amsterdam as a whole constituted a monopoly in itself, and that monoploy was the pursuit not of security but of domination" (Braudel 1981-84: vol.2, 423).
- Economic life is regular, capitalism unusual.
- Economic life is a sphere where one knows in advance, capitalism is speculative.
- Economic life is transparent, capitalism shadowy or opaque.
- Economic life involves small profits, capitalism exceptional profits.
- Economic life is liberation, capitalism the jungle. Economic life is the automatic pricing of true supply and demand, capitalism the price imposed by power and cunning.
- Economic life involves controlled competition, capitalism involves eliminating both control and competition. Economic life is the domain of ordinary people; capitalism is guaranteed by, incarnated in the hegemonic power. (211쪽의 끝)
213쪽:
Let me emphasize the quality that seems to me to be an essential feature of the general history of capitalism: its unlimited flexibility, its capacity for change and adaptation. If there is, as I believe, a certain unity in capitalism, from 13th-century Italy to present-day West, it is here above all that such unity must be located and observed. (Braudel 1981-84: vol.2, 432-33)Once it is established that profit opportunities determine the shifting location of the capitalist in the circuit of capital, it remains to be seen how the capitalist achieves this "unlimited flexibility." The answer for Braudel is simple. The real capitalist always resisted specialization, and thus being trapped in one arena by past investment, past networks, past skills. Specialization exists, of course, but for Braudel, it is the work of the lower stories:
Specializatin and division of labour usually operated from the bottom up. If modernization or rationalization consists of the process whereby different tasks are distinguished and functions subdivided, such modernization began in the bottom layer of the economy. Every boom in trade led to increased specialization of shops and the appearance of new professions among the many hangers-on of trade.
Curiously enough, the wholesaler[le négociant] did not in fact observe this rule, and only specialized very occasionally. Even a shopkeeper who made his fortune, and became a merchant, immediately moved out of specialization into non-specialization. (Braudel 1981-84: vol.2, 378-79)The attitude of the capitalist is quite different from the attitude of the shopkeeper:
The characteristic advantage of standing at the commanding heights of the economy, today just as much as in the days of Jacques Coeur (14th-century tycoon) consisted precisely of not having to confine oneself to a single choice, of being eminently adaptable, hence non-specialized. (Braudel 1981-84: vol. 2, 381) [주6][주6] I have altered the translation of the last four words, because the English translation "able ... to keep one's options open," while perfectly correct, loses the explicitness of the French original: "D'être éminemment adaptable, donc non spécialisé" (Braudel 1979: vol. 2, 335).
III.
What implications does it have to see capitalism "upside down" in this manner? For one thing, it changes the historiographical agenda. For a second, it contains an implicit critique of Enlightenment theories of progress. For a third, it gives a very different policy message for the comtemporary world. These are not implications that Braudel made explicit. It was not his habit to explicate the implications of his scholarly work. If he occasionally did so in interviews, his comments often had an off-the-cuff quality which reflected less his views about the world than this views about interviews. Perhaps Braudel believed that the subtext has more influence if the reader discovers it himself. Perhaps he did not want to be drawn into too politicized a controversy, though he was scarcely shy of intellectual combat. Whatever the explanations of Braudel's own hesitances or silences, they should not prevent us from using his work as a basis for our own inflections.
The agenda of History (with a capital H), since at least the middle of the 19th century, has been dominated by an explanatory myth[주7] which runs as follows.[:]
Out of some earlier, simpler, smaller system, characterized by landlords exploiting peasants in one way or another, emerged the "middle classes" or the "bourgeoisie" who eventually became the dominant force of the modern nation-states. The growing strength of this "new group" and of the economic system they practiced, capitalism, accounts for the two great revolutions, the industrial revolution in Great Britain and the bourgeois French Revolution, which together constitute a great temporal divide of world history at the turn of the 19th century.[주7: On the role of historical myths, see McNeill(1986) as well as ch. 4.]All our periodization is based on this myth: the break between medieval and modern times; the break between early and late mondern history (or in European terminology, between modern and contemporary history). But, even more, this mythology is located in our adjectives, which in fact means that it is lodged in our unexamined premises. We talk of "post-industrial" ones, both of which adjectives assumes measurable periods of something called an "industrial society." Finally the mythology is located in our problematics: why was the bourgeois revolution so late in Italy? When did France, or Russia, or India have its industrial revolution? Were slave owners in the US South feudal partriarchs or capitalist entrepreneurs? Braudel, I hasten to add, was not himelf liberated from (... : 214쪽 끝)
215쪽: 미리보기 지원되지 않음.
216쪽:
It should be clear, then, that Braudel's imagery accords ill with the more stultified views of our dominant ideologies. No doubt both Adam Smith and Karl Marx were subtle thinkers and anticipated much of what we can derive from a reading of Braudel. But liberalism as an ideology is different from the views of Adam Smith, and Marxism has been different from the views of Karl Marx. And it is liberalism and Marxism that have dominated our horizons, not the views of either Adam Smith or Karl Marx.
By reconceptualizing capitalism, Braudel has undercut the baisc argument that Both liberals and Marxists have used to justify their adherence to the theory of inevitable progress. Both liberals and Marxists have seen historical sequence in which capitalists and/or bourgeois and/or the middle class rose and developed their structures in particular ways. For liberals, when completed, this process would culminate in a sort of utopian apotheosis. For Marxists, when completed, this process would culminate in an explosion, which in turn would lead to new structures that would arrive at a sort of utopian apotheosis.
Braudel instead sees not a linear progression, but a continuing tension between the forces of monopoly (so-called real capitalism) and the forces of liberation who seek this liberation through self-controlled economic activities within the framwork of a complex of competitive markets, one in which their activities are "barely distinguishable from ordinary work."
Braudel himself goes no further. We can assume this conflict is eternal, or we can look for secular trends that would transform this historical system by making it unstable equilibria increasingly untenable. It is for us to fill this lacuna. I for one believe that such secular trends do exist within the capitalist world-economy, and that the increasing contradictions will result in a systemic "bifurcation" that will force a transformation of the system into something else. I also believe that what the something else will be is open, in the sense that it depends on our collective historical choice, and is not preordained. This is not the moment to develop this views, which I have done elsewhere.
What I think is important to understand is that Braudel's views do not reflect a hidden Poujadism honoring a putative "small businessman." Quite the contrary. Braudel's "liberatory" market is not what we have come to recognize as a market in the real world. It is truly competitive, in that supply and demand really do determine price, that is, potential (or fully realized) supply and demand. The "profits", it would follow, would be miniscule, in effect, a wage for the work. Whether such a system is historically viable remains a question. But his invocation of the "market" cannot be confused with the so-called neo-liberal ideology of the 1980s. It is in fact the very opposite.
Finally, its policy implications for the contemporary world are massive. If capitalism, real capitalism, is monopoly and not the market, real markets, then what is to be done is a question that gets answered perhaps very differently from the ways in which anti-systemic movements have been answering it for the past 100 years.
I have tried here to expound the ways in which Braudel has gone against accepted conceptualizations of capitalism. I have called this seeing capitalism "upside down." I have then tried to do what Braudel restrained himself from doing, make explicit the intellectual and social implications of this reconceptualization. Braudel should not be blamed for the latter effort. Perhaps others will take Braudel's reconceptualization and draw from it other implications. It will in any case be useful for all of us to allow mises about the central institutional forms of the historical system in which we live.
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