Brutishly Short?

Slouching Towards Utopia: An Economic History of the Twentieth Century, J. Bradford DeLong, 2022.

Thumbnail: Truck and Driver, Jeffrey Smart, 2001.

Eric Hobsbawm’s The Age of Extremes is without doubt one of my favourite books. At the very least, it had a formative impact on how I thought about history. Entertaining and encyclopaedic, Hobsbawm tells the story of his “short” twentieth century, 1914 to 1991 - an especially impressive achievement if you remember the great man was born in 1917, and wrote the book in 1994. His twentieth century was defined by cataclysm: war, fascism, and the - rather tragic - arc of really-existing communism.

But is this nasty, brutish and short twentieth century the best model to have in our heads? J. Bradford DeLong thinks not. In Slouching Towards Utopia, DeLong postulates his own grand narrative, contra Hobsbawm: a long twentieth century stretching from 1870 to 2008, with a more upbeat - while by no means panglossian - flavour. To sculpt his narrative, DeLong calls upon two thinkers: the (in)famous Austrian economist Friedrich von Hayek, and Karl Polanyi, whose The Great Transformation I wrote about recently. This long century, DeLong believes, can be read as an exchange between the two; between the belief that “the market giveth, the market taketh away: blessed be the name of the market”, and the riposte that “the market is made for man, not man for the market”, to quote DeLong’s oft-repeated mantras. While the give and take of the market gripped the first half of DeLong’s long century, the attempted compromise between Hayek and Polanyi - a marriage officiated by Keynes - defined the second. If the twentieth century ended with a long-awaited divorce, we presently live amongst the proceedings; while perhaps, as DeLong does, holding out hope for a reunion.

Slouching Towards Utopia is enormous - at just under six-hundred pages, it presents a grand narrative of the twentieth century which includes demography, technology, macroeconomics, politics, military history, and - curiously enough - many personal anecdotes. To try to summarise a text that is itself an exercise in summary would be near impossible, if also, I think, rather pointless. Instead, I will try capture where I think the book succeeds, and where it falls short; if, albeit, in a more decontextualised manner. Long story short? I found DeLong’s core thesis compelling, and with a good (and entertaining!) eye for detail; however, I think that - as Adam Tooze noted in his review for the FT - the book grows too focussed not just on the United States (which is understandable), but on the many domestic political concerns which occupied said hegemon towards the end of the long twentieth century. That said, DeLong is quite upfront about this - so I hesitate to overstate the significance of the critique. More concerning, I think, is how Polanyi feels conspicuously absent from large parts of Slouching: a surprise, given his importance to DeLong’s grand narrative.

The inchoate ‘market society’ of 1870 brought with it a basket of technologies which enabled the American century, and hence, the ‘slouch’ towards utopia DeLong thinks accompanied it. The advent of the modern corporation - boasting industrial research labs and globally-connected operations - presented the possibility of higher rates of technological growth than the pre-1870 world had known. This new, improving rate of technological growth produced ever greater - while increasingly uneven - prosperity and interdependence. In this section of his book - which I believe one of the strongest - DeLong marshals a collage of evidence. A nice touch, however, was the pleasantly surprising inclusion of many personal and biographical vignettes. From his own grandparents to Nikola Tesla, Herbert Hoover to Leon Trotsky, Delong illustrates the ‘newness of everything’ this world brought forth with a deft lightness.

For DeLong’s Hayek, the unevenness of this development - the widening gulf between the metropole and its periphery - is a false concern. The market drove prosperity: any step away from it, towards non-marketable rights or obligations, necessarily pushed society back towards the stagnant waters of serfdom. Democracy, egalitarianism, and “permissive” politics could only endanger this progress. In characteristically informal style, DeLong describes this Hayekian perspective as a “this-is-as-good-as-it-is-ever-going-to-get” utopianism. His assessment is not altogether critical, but hardly warm.

This tepid account of Hayek serves as a foil for DeLong’s Polanyi: the true inspiration of his grand narrative. Polanyi’s observation that humanity cannot help but to struggle against Hayek’s beloved if brutal market logic - that we are constantly on the search for alternatives, for good or for ill - frames DeLong’s book; which is, in essence, post-Polanyian. I add the ‘post’ because it differs in one crucial aspect: the prognosis for the future of market - and human - society. Whereas Polanyi, writing in 1944, saw no future for market society other than collapse; DeLong’s narrative is transfixed on the “shotgun marriage” between Hayek and Polanyi arranged in the postwar period. This trente glorieuses (1945-75) combined a market economy - moderated by Keynes - with a redistributive social democracy. Polanyian rights may not have been fully asserted, but there was enough insulation from the market that, as long as incomes kept rising, a social peace was established - at least, for most white men in the global North.

So why did this marriage break down? This feels like a good jumping off point to discuss my reservations with Slouching Towards Utopia, because it is where the book shifts to a decisively US-centric perspective. For Tooze, it is not just that the answer DeLong gives is “parochial”, but that the framing - centring this question at all - is. I can see where he is coming from: in later chapters, the deep focus on the breakdown of the Western post-war social contract risks myopia - China and Africa, in particular, feel conspicuously under-studied. Environmental history and resource-led growth also could have used benefited from more treatment, although I am more open than Tooze seems to the notion that such concerns demarcate the 20th from the 21st century; and hence, can be de-prioritised in a narrative of the former. But I also take DeLong’s point that, as Leon Trotsky observed, America was “the furnace where the future is [was] being forged”. If there exists a country deserving singular focus in the twentieth century, the United States is it - and I think Hobsbawm would have agreed. There is a plausible case that the Polanyian-Hayekian struggle over political economy was the central story of the 20th century, and one worth taking seriously.

However, in taking that story seriously, I felt there was was still something missing from Slouching. Polanyi’s bold point was that social-economic conflict the onrush of market society generated was the mechanism of history. Fascism, for example, was nothing to do with racism, nationalism, conservatism, and so forth. But DeLong’s narrative is, in this regard, strikingly non-Polanyian. The collapse of the post-war social democratic consensus is attributed to, in no particular order, fear of ‘moochers’ and the free-rider problem, policy misadventures in government monopolies, and the failure to combat inflation effectively in the early 70’s. These are, of course, arguments worthy of exploration. I would not expect, nor want, DeLong to take a bold Polanyian line without taking them into consideration. It is also not true that DeLong ignores this side of Polanyi - in his treatment of inflation and declining economic growth, the Great Transformation looms large. But given Polanyi’s importance to Slouching, I would have expected the harsher, more restrictive side of his argument to have been given more airtime; or at least, served as a counterpoint. At times, it seemed to me that DeLong’s grand Polanyian narrative was without the grand Polanyian mechanism.

By way of conclusion, I would like to return to Hobsbawm: was the twentieth century long or short? It is, admittedly, a facetious question: different narratives can be useful for different historical purposes. As mentioned earlier, Hobsbawm’s century was short because the combined struggle of liberalism and socialism against fascism, and then against each-other, was, for him, epochal. Tooze, perhaps, may also observe a shorter century: bookended by the emergence of - initially hesitant - American hegemony and the dual onslaught of multipolarity and climate change; the “great anxiety”. I have not yet read Giovanni Arrighi’s The Long Twentieth Century, but I might hazard to presume his narrative would resemble DeLong’s, albeit in a more New Left Review-y way. How should we decide which narrative to internalise? As Zhou Enlai (apocryphally) said of the French Revolution, it is still “too early to tell”. The future of American capitalism is riven with uncertainty, and climate change - or as DeLong insists, global warming - may render any claim to even a slouch towards utopia rather hollow. But it also may not. We will have to wait and see.