No American had a landline telephone in 1880 28 percent had one in 1914, 62 percent in 1950, and 87 percent in 1970. As DeLong notes, “Four percent of Americans had flush toilets at home in 1870 20 percent had them in 1920, 71 percent in 1950, and 96 percent in 1970. The wonder of the twentieth century, DeLong observes, was the attainment of previously unimaginable material gains amid a global population explosion. Mill saw no way out absent a rigorous program of global birth control. Almost everywhere, life remained uncertain and short, if not nasty and brutish. Even those who had thrown off the yoke of slavery had been delivered from the cruelty of forced labor into the cruelty of fate a bad harvest or an unusually cold winter could bring mass death. The planet could support more people than it had been able to when Mill was born, but living standards had not improved for anyone outside a tight circle of elites. He quotes an aging John Stuart Mill, who lamented in 1870 that the triumph of so many liberal reforms-the abolition of slavery, the expansion of the franchise, the growth of international trade-had not produced a healthier or happier world. The era of economic revolution is not 1789–19–2010 the transition is not from barbarism to socialism but from squalor to social democracy.Īccording to DeLong, the Industrial Revolution was just one of several economic innovations that improved humanity’s lot at the margins without fundamentally changing the trajectory of the human experience. DeLong spends much of his book detailing the horrors engineered by Stalin and Mao but ultimately offers a revision of Hobsbawm’s thesis in lieu of an outright rejection. Hobsbawm was very good at what he did-so good that many of his most strident political opponents still take a great deal of his intellectual framework for granted. In Hobsbawm’s telling, the Industrial Revolution and its political handmaiden, the French Revolution, opened the door first to liberal progress and then to the possibility of egalitarian salvation under Soviet Communism. For Hobsbawm, everything changed between 17, as humanity established the material foundations that could support true liberation and the political structures to deliver it. Kindleberger) that DeLong alternately channels and challenges throughout Slouching Towards Utopia. DeLong’s long twentieth century is a nod to the idea of the long nineteenth century developed by Eric Hobsbawm, one of two great economic historians (the other is Charles P. “Why, with such godlike powers to command nature and organize ourselves, have we done so little to build a truly human world, to approach within sight of any of our utopias?” DeLong asks in his final chapter, only to dodge an answer: “A new story, which needs a new grand narrative that we do not yet know, has begun.” Modesty is a virtue in a historian of long centuries, but after the persistent enlightenment of the book’s first 450 pages, this limping denouement is a disappointment.Īh, but those first 450 pages. Slouching Towards Utopia is a rise-and-fall epic, but it is better at depicting the rise than explaining the fall. This perspective is refreshing precisely because everyone, DeLong included, knows that something has gone terribly wrong. Not that long ago, we did so all the time. But his narrative is fundamentally hopeful: people can accomplish amazing things on a colossal scale. DeLong does not avert his readers’ eyes from the brutalities of imperial conquest, genocide, and revolution gone awry, which define the political milieu of the era under his microscope. In the grim morass that has followed the financial crisis of 2008, it is refreshing to receive a dose of rational optimism-however tempered-from a serious intellectual examining our place in the grand scheme of history. Humans did not find utopia, DeLong argues, but we stumbled in its general direction. Arenas of intellect and creative expression that were once accessible only to the most privileged of elites became the common experiences of mass cultures. But in the “long twentieth century”-the period between 18-an almost miraculous transformation took place: more and more people lived longer, healthier, more prosperous lives than ever before. Humanity, the Berkeley economist argues, spent nearly the entirety of its history condemned to poverty by an insufficient supply of calories and a chronically excessive birth rate. Bradford DeLong’s Slouching Towards Utopia, and a very interesting muddle. Slouching Towards Utopia: An Economic History of the Twentieth Century Carter ▪ Fall 2022Ī cover of Scientific American portraying Thomas Edison’s electric dynamometer, mirror galvanometer, and electric generator (Universal History Archive/Getty Images) Slouching Towards Utopia is a rise-and-fall epic-but it is better at depicting the rise than explaining the fall.
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