A Culture of Growth: The Origins of the Modern Economy
ISBN: 9781400882915
Platform/Publisher: JSTOR / Princeton University Press
Digital rights: Users: unlimited; Printing: chapter; Download: chapter
Subjects: Economic development; Economic history;

The Industrial Revolution sprang from cultural habits of inquisitiveness and hardheadedness in early modern Europe, according to this illuminating study from economic historian Mokyr (The Gifts of Athena). He discerns strands in Western European culture from 1500 to 1700 that predisposed it to intellectual advances that underpinned the Enlightenment and economic revolutions: the celebration of practical labor as a sacred calling, the impact of voyages of discovery on discrediting ancient worldviews, the Reformation's weakening of the Catholic Church as a cultural hegemon, and political fragmentation that helped dissidents evade state persecution. The result, he argues, was an elite culture oriented toward economic progress through increased knowledge and new thinking. These factors have been spotlighted by other historians, but Mokyr's discussion of them is wide-ranging and erudite, if sometimes dry and meandering. The book's most trenchant contribution is the author's investigation of the "competitive market for ideas" that sustained scientific "cultural entrepreneurs." Such figures as Francis Bacon and Isaac Newton won fame and patronage within a republic of letters by making scientific and technological breakthroughs. Mokyr offers a useful corrective to excessively deterministic and materialistic treatments of economic history, emphasizing ideas-the West, he argues, had a uniquely positive view about subjugating nature to human control-and individual agency in shaping broad socioeconomic shifts. (Oct.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

Joel Mokyr is the Robert H. Strotz Professor of Arts and Sciences and professor of economics and history at Northwestern University and Sackler Professor at the Eitan Berglas School of Economics at the University of Tel Aviv. His many books include The Enlightened Economy and The Gifts of Athena (Princeton). He is the recipient of the Heineken Prize for History and the International Balzan Prize for Economic History.

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