July and August 1999: A History of Us: Cooney's Obelisks

The third volume of Anthony Cooney's magnum opus Social Credit, not very informatively entitled Obelisks, stand on its own and draws together the various strands of Cooney's thought in what becomes an original contribution to the philosophy of history and an original interpretation of Western history. 'Obelisks' is still waiting to be professionally published and so is virtually unobtainable but for the new Australian Heritage Society edition. This editor's rare Gild of St. George edition (1988) is riddled with typos, and pages 30 and 31 are printed upside down.

Cooney opens by delineating several concepts whose interaction makes what we call culture: habitat, "the physical characteristics of the lifespace of a culture, its climate, soil, water, vegetation and fauna"; artifacts and processes, the implements evolved in response to the problems posed by the habitat; and style, "an active element which conserves and selects, imposing on the solutions to the problems of the physical environment the standards of the culture." An example of style imposed on the solution of physical problems is the Greek rejection of the bow as a "cowardly" weapon (p. 1).

Since artifacts and processes are created by individuals, the mechanism of style must be 'mental schemata' of the culture in individuals, derived from their shared life in the habitat and shared experience of artifacts and processes. So strong is this conservative force that it frequently causes forms to survive their usefulness. The curved motif on the prow of sailing ships "quotes" a functional rope stay from the time when boats were built of reeds (pp. 1, 3).

The corresponding creative force is outstanding individual initiative, or genius: "It is genius which first totally assimilating the material of the culture, structuring mental schemata from it in action, associates distinct schemata in previously unrealized patterns. It expands the possibilities of the culture, not only in the present but through time. It is by genius that a culture is most effectively articulated" (p. 5; our italics).

A culture itself is "the interaction of men and their total environment, . . . a self-sustaining whole, feeding back from the physical forces of the habitat to the artifacts and processes evolved to master them, from these to the mental schemata they engender in its human material, from the schemata to the artifacts and processes, and from the artifacts and processes to the landscape, imposing upon it the habitation and productive patterns characteristic of the Culture." The "total environment" includes the whole culture itself up to the time in question, and the "human material" that interacts with it is, in reality, "a continuous flow of individual initiatives, conserving, selecting and discarding mental schemata perceived and inherited." The habitat is also natural resources and artifacts and processes are technology, whereby such resources are exploited for the betterment of life (pp. 1-2, 4).

The purpose of history, Cooney suggests, is to discover the causes that shaped the past, in order to understand the present. With characteristic compression, Cooney reviews the major schools of thought in history. Ranke, founder of the academic school, saw the goal of history as accomplished when it ascertained what happened at a given time and place. To this end, he pioneered the method of fact-oriented research on an intentionally narrowed topic, which still pertains. This method, forcing us to see history as disjointed episodes, is unsatisfying to the student who wants to know not only what happened but why (pp. 9, 14f.).

In reaction to Ranke arose metahistory, which sought to explain historical events by appeal to general laws. Comte and Marx offered linear theories of historical evolution, Spengler proposed a cyclical theory of growth and decay, and Toynbee combined the two into the image of an ascending helix. All these theories provide a corrective to the Rankeans by seeing Man embedded in Society and subject to social forces, yet all are essentially unhistoric because they reject the particular and unique, which is the stuff of history. If change through time were really determined by general laws, one could theoretically write a history of the future (pp. 15-18).

Nevertheless, these theories and variants of them held the intellectual field until Popper's Poverty of Historicism (1957). Popper argues that metahistory, seeing individual free will as essentially illusory, is cousin to totalitarianism in policy and that real history "arises from the actions, interactions, aims, hopes and thoughts of individuals." Does that mean we are back to Ranke? "Must History, as a discipline, eschew the idea of seeking for effective causes, lest it fall into the trap of [metahistory] which projects criteria ahead of knowledge, or avoiding that trap, fall back into . . . a world of causeless and unconnected events?" (pp. 19f.).

An alternate school of thought in history was propounded by William Gordon East in The Geography Behind History (1939). It ties in with the concept of habitat described above. This school "identifies the physical forces which act upon man and which men seek to control so that they may gather the increase of nature." It "looks first at the unique and particular and then seeks its cause in the physical situation: it explains the effect as the response of men to that situation. . . . The response could have been different" (pp. 20, 23, 33).

A precursor to both Popper and East was Belloc. Anticipating Popper, Belloc challenged H. G. Wells (whose Outline of History appeared in 1921) on the latter's postulate of
Belloc sought the causes of history in variable human motive. Anticipating East, Belloc systematically sought out geographic factors: "Belloc followed Hannibal's route across the Alps and posed serious questions. How many miles did the column reach back? How was it commissioned? How was it marshalled each morning? How was turmoil prevented each time a stumble sent a shock back through the column? He walked across Guadarama where, force- marched into the face of a blizzard the Grand Army came close to mutiny. He sailed the tides which lifted Caesar's ships from the Kentish beach. . . . He stood on the crest of Cressy and looked out across the roll of land that had accelerated the charge of the French chivalry into the deadly barrage of the English long bows" (pp. 24, 27f.).

Cooney identifies three particular insights of Belloc. The first is that history "is first and foremost self-knowledge." We study the past in order to understand ourselves in the present, to lay claim to our inheritance. As a consequence, history can only be written "from within"; and as a consequence of that, a purely "objective" history, even if it were possible, would be meaningless. The history of the West is history for Westerners. The second insight is that history "must be efficiently caused; it is not caused by an abstract `Zeitgeist', nor is it merely episodic." An efficient cause, in logic, is an active power to change: "A diversity of causal lines act together to produce history, but each causal line acts in its own way" (our italics).

The third insight is related to the first. It is that history has differentiated men into a few great cultures (or "races") with different metaphysical, or psychic, bases. Such are Arabian culture based on Islam, Greco-Roman culture based on the gods, and Western culture based on Christianity. Differing even in such things as sense of time and space (not to speak of justice), their mutual opposition is fundamental. Because they are a product of history, they cannot be reconciled without undoing history and thus undoing themselves. They cannot be expected to form a single society. Christendom could assimilate the barbarian, but the barbarian thus assimilated became radically differentiated from the world he left behind (pp. 30-33, 4f.)

Finally, there is C. H. Douglas. Like Belloc, Douglas recognized a culture's need to know itself through history and recognized the remote foundations of culture as metaphysical. Like Belloc, he sought causes of events in human will and action and further observed that "consistent human activity which acts as the cause of significant events is policy." It was Douglas who first identified the money-and-price system as "the mechanism of one of the dominant policies since the break up of Christendom. His definition of the just relationship of the individual to the group as `the Social Credit' enables us to consider Change and Continuity in terms of the social increments and decrements they produce. The integration of the Bellocian thesis and the Douglas analysis makes possible a Social Credit History which is neither episodic nor holist, but which concerns itself with the human causes of events, the accumulation of which is policy" (pp. 34, 24). The credit for integrating "the Bellocian thesis and the Douglas analysis" belongs to Cooney himself.

Historians have been puzzled by the phenomenon of inertia in the industrial arts in classical antiquity: "The Athenians built a navy, the ships of which were supremely adapted to their tasks and purposes. Light, swift and manoeuvrable they destroyed the Persian quinqueremes at Salamis. . . . Still standing are the great aqueducts which carried water to every part of Rome, employing gravity and the height of its sources, far from the city, to feed it to fountains and faucets. At Masada they built an earthen ramp to the top of the plateau and then hauled it up a siege tower laden with armed men. The belaying of the ropes alone, to transform backward drag into forward thrust, must have been no mean mechanical achievement. At the Puy D'Isolde in the Dordogne, . . . the Romans tunnelled into the hill to drain away and lower the water table and leave empty the wells the Gauls had sunk: a feat which would be noteworthy to-day" (pp. 40-42).

Beyond dispute, the Romans had "the ability to apply primary energy to moving parts, the mechanics to transfer motion from one plane to another, and therefore the capability to devise implements utilizing mechanical laws in their operation, the geometry to design working parts and the accumulated physical capital to finance major work programs." Yet while Roman roads marched out "league after league across hill and plain, bridging rivers, raised above swamps, to the outposts of the Empire, the speediest freight was by shambling oxen teams, and the most urgent communication was by gasping, lathered horses" because the Romans never designed an adequate harness (pp. 41f., 44).

The Achaean maritime civilization "required an immense servile work force to supply the never ending demand for sail and cordage." The Roman Empire's huge demand for ropes, sails, and clothing was met by organizing slaves into forty-loom factories. Yet neither the Greeks nor the Roman devised an efficient timber-frame machine to spin or weave. They never advanced beyond the most primitive spinning and weaving methods or utilized the potential of water-power. The Roman water wheel was "an under-shot wheel, the rim fitted with large paddles to catch the force of the water, and therefore restricted to the banks of rivers. With all their knowledge of water, Roman engineers never built a mill race nor tackled the problems of returning the tail-race to the river" (pp. 40-44). Why not?

Historians suggest that the institution of slavery retarded development. But how exactly did it do so? Cooney proposed an answer based on individual initiative in relation to artifacts and processes. Initiative passed downward through the pyramid of Roman society until it reached the slave base held in place by force, where it stopped. This suppression of initiative in often highly skilled individuals rendered the stability of Roman society fragile. "The end for which slaves exist is to work. . . . This necessitates that slaves be fully employed for all their waking hours, for only in this way can total force be applied to them. Clearly then the necessary policy of such a servile society would be one of inertia in the industrial arts; devices to save labour would be a de-stabilizing factor, for it would be the slaves who would be set free from tedious routine work. . . . All factors in an association are effective in their own way and it was slavery as a factor of association in the civilization of the Ancient World which generated the decrement, or Negative Social Credit, in the development of the industrial arts" (p. 46f.)

The areas in which the ancients did exploit their mechanical and hydraulic expertise were civil, maritime, and military engineering (p. 41). Although Cooney doesn't mention it, these areas differ from textile production in one vital particular, namely, they do not add to the number of products that have to be sold. From the point of view of the Douglas analysis, it makes sense that inertia was overcome in just these areas, because these areas usefully distribute money without calling it back.


Cooney's fourth chapter considers the cause of the medieval (14th-century) Renaissance in painting, music, poetry, architecture, and learning. Cooney's argument is that "the ferment of ideas and arts of the Early Renaissance was a distinctly Western phenomenon, that, fertilized by the classical scholarship which the Byzantine theologians brought to the Council of Florence [1439], produced the learning of the High Renaissance" (pp. 51f., 57). In other words, the medieval Renaissance was the flowering of a unique European culture that was differentiated from the Greco-Roman culture by a radically different set of mental schemata.

If the institution of slavery retarded technology in the ancient world, its gradual extinction in the Middle Ages removed the obstacle. The thirteenth and fourteenth centuries saw new land clearances, and by the end of this period, freehold land predominated over feudal tenure: "The army which Henry V took to France [1413] was composed entirely of free men" (p. 52; Cooney, Social Credit: Politics, p. 44).

With the obstacle removed, there was an industrial revolution. An advance in metallurgy "made possible the founding of bigger and more powerful cannon and plate-armour resistant to the shaft of the long-bow." Improvement in ship design "produced the ocean going caravels of Spain and Portugal." These developments "enabled Christendom at last to turn upon its tormentors of the past eight centuries and with comparatively small armies to begin to inflict upon them the series of defeats which were to lead to the world-wide expansion of Europe, but the immediate effect of which was to leave the Nations and cities of the West secure behind their frontiers" (p. 56).

During the same period, textile technology was transformed by a series of inventions: the fulling machine driven by a forty-horsepower overshot or breast-fed water wheel, the horizontal shedding loom, and the spindle wheel. The new water wheels featured chambers set into the rim of the wheel, instead of paddles: "The breast fed wheel utilizes gravity and the weight of water, instead of the force of the flow of water. It can therefore be used on still water by the construction of sluices which, when opened allow water to flow into the chambers in succession. The siting of mills was freed from the banks of fast flowing rivers. Leets [peat-stacks] were constructed to bring water to any chosen site, where it was held in dams to provide a head for the turbine. The over-shot wheel also employs the force of gravity in the same way as the breast fed wheel, but can also generate energy from the force of flowing water, though for this it requires an uninterrupted flow, achieved by the construction of a mill-race either in or near a river. The new and more powerful turbines were used to lift and drop, by clockwork, half ton hammers into a fulling trough" (p. 52f.).

Primitive "vertical looms could not keep the new fulling industry supplied with web." To meet the new demand, "the weaving frame was tipped into the horizontal plane and a new kind of heddle was devised; a rectangular frame divided by narrow metal bars, each pierced by an eyelet, the warp threads being passed alternately through the slots between the bars and the eyelets in the bars. The heddles were worked by cords passed through pulleys in a beam across the loom and fixed to treadles. In this way, using foot-power it became possible to `shed' alternate threads of warp so that shuttles carrying the weft could be thrown through, passed back and forth by two apprentices as the master-weaver worked the treadles" (p. 53)

Primitive drop-spinning, in turn, could not keep the new weaving industry upplied with yarn. The answer was the spindle wheel, invented in 1298: "The spindle, fixed in the horizontal plane, is attached to a small pulley, . . . which is turned by a belt driven by a large hand-turned wheel. Two distinct operations are involved: the drawing back with the left hand of the slubbing from the spindle tip [i.e., in a line with the spindle], the while rotating the driving wheel to twist the fibres together as they are drawn to their full length, and then, changing the angle of the thread to the spindle, counter-rotating the wheel to wind on the new-spun thread" (p. 54).

With the fulling industry relocated near its new power source, spinning and weaving, too, gravitated out of the towns and into the rural areas. While hitherto the weaving-and-spinning industry was in the hands of women, it now became shared with men, because the new loom was heavier to operate: "So began the phenomenon of rural industry carried on by families not dependent upon agricultural work for their livelihood" (p. 56).

Cooney comments: "These labour saving devices of the first industrial revolution represent a considerable Social Credit--'the efficiency of humans in association, measured in terms of human satisfaction'. The generating of the increments of association represented by mechanical advantage could not have taken place in the slave societies of Antiquity. . . . Before the inventions the chief English export had been the wool staple, afterwards it became finished cloth. . . . The supply of staple to spinners, yarn to weavers, web to fullers and finished cloth to international markets fell naturally and increasingly into the hands of merchant capital which provided the patronage of the explosion of art, architecture and learning. . . . Wherever the new textile technology of the 14th century brought prosperity and leisure, the ferment took hold" (pp. 55-57). In short, textile technology freed men from their environment sufficiently to enable them to devote more energy to things of the soul.

Fourteenth-century Flemish painting bears comparison to that of the High Renaissance and, according to some tastes, is superior. Allied schools of painting arose in Burgundy, Prague, and Florence (silk-throwing was converted to water power by an Italian in 1272). "The art of the 1300's stretching from Florence to the Netherlands has more recently been termed 'International Gothic'." Fourteenth-century poetry is represented by Dante, Petrarch, Dafydd, and Chaucer (p. 57f., 55).

The latter part of the century saw the spread of lay orders, communities- without-vows and an upsurge in books of lay mysticism such as The Cloud of Unknowing and Julian of Norwich: "The pious practices, the popular mysticism, the intellectual curiosity, all testify to a metaphysical shift, to the belief that the soul can aspire to ascend to God. Not Pelagianism, certainly, . . . but a new sense of the capability and potential of the individual" (p. 62f.) In the very seat of the new textile industry, England, the later fourteenth century saw the rise of Perpendicular Gothic architecture. Significantly, a majority of the Perpendicular churches were built by wool merchants. In terms of function (solution of statical problems), "stone curtains were replaced by windows. As far more of the thrust of the vault was now flung upon the buttresses, downward resistance was increased by massive pinnacles above, and this in turn led to the most developed Perpendicular, such as the Henry VII chapel, to a simplification of the arcade piers; the piers being continued on to the vault as great concave `fans'. The fan vaulting of naves eliminated the triforium and brought down the height of the building. To restore height stepped towers and steeples were developed.

"In its design [aesthetic principles], Perpendicular lays stress upon the artistic unification of the building, aiming at the blending together of both vertical and horizontal divisions. The vertical unification was helped where the triforium was eliminated and the fanned pillars swept from floor to vault apex in single curving lines. The uninterrupted repetition of the fans and the standardization of the piers also decompartmentalized the church and this led to the abandonment of transepts, simple rectangular plans being typical. . . . To emphasize height, to carry the eye upward, the walls above and below the windows were panelled to continue vertically the lines of the mullions, so creating vertical unity.

"Of equal importance as height was the stress laid upon light, hence the enlarging of windows.

To leave as little stonework as possible the window arches were flattened. The vertical emphasis was continued in the windows, the main mullions' vertical lines being continued to the last possible point and the smaller traceries between the flattened arches of the main lights being subdivided vertically horizontal plane. Richard II's 'West- minster Hall' with its splendid double hammer beam roof is a prime example of the use of Perpendicular for secular buildings.

"The significance [idea symbolically expressed] of Perpendicular lies in the uninterrupted ascent of vertical lines, the heightened tower, and even more the steeple; it signifies the soul of man aspiring to God. One fact is evident, the rigid Platonic geometry of pristine Gothic [12th/13th century] has been consciously modified. . . . In the Thomist system things come into their own, not as mere images of an Ideal, mathematical and abstracted, but as ends. . . . In the Perpendicular we see, on a substructure of creation by Platonic geometry and order, myriad real and substantial things ascend from earth and in straight and curving lines rush up to heaven. If Clairvaux offers us a vision of the Neo-Platonic Universe, the well chapel at Holywell, with its fragile traceries and delicate groining, offers us a glimpse of heaven; and it is small and intimate and glad, like faerieland" (pp. 63-65).instead of into quatrefoils. To dispense with the obstruction to light of the flying buttresses, stone vaults were replaced by low pitched hammer beam timber roofs. These were not only lighter, but the low pitch reduced the downward thrust, whilst the carving of the hammer ends gave greater visual unity to the interior.

Part II
In Part I we followed Anthony Cooney as he elaborated an original philosophy of history and causation drawing on Belloc, Douglas, East, and Popper. He employed this philosophy to explore the phenomenon of inertia in the industrial arts (specifically textiles) in classical antiquity contrasted with the industrial revolution and cultural renaissance in the Middle Ages. The next historical problem Cooney takes up is the Industrial Revolution.

Cooney associates the medieval industrial revolution with the disappearance of serfdom. By the end of the fourteenth century, rural families living on their own land spun and wove on their own wheels and looms to meet the increasing demand for English worsted; fulling was done by water power; and merchant capitalists supplied the raw materials, moved the semifinished products, and marketed the napped and sheared broadcloth. Such a complex organization of producers and middlemen only makes more marked the revolutionary character of the 1760-1830 period. Why didn't the Industrial Revolution begin in 1560 instead of 1760 (Social Credit: Obelisks, pp. 69. 74)?

Whereas the distinctive feature of the domestic system was that the owners of the land and equipment (habitat and artifacts) were master-workers who supplied their own physical labor, the distinctive feature of the Industrial Revolution was concentrations of land and equipment in the hands of nonworker owners, with all the physical labor supplied by a new social class, the non-owner worker-for-wages (pp. 69, 78). What brought about this change?

The delicate organization of producers and middlemen was disrupted by the invention of the flying shuttle in 1733. The flying shuttle was "an ordinary shuttle with small wheels fitted to its keel. A rail was fitted so that it passed through the warp without fouling the shedding. movable block of wood was fitted at each end of rail. After shedding his warp the weaver tugged a cord attached to the blocks, so delivering a sharp blow to the shuttle, which `flew' through the shed paying out the weft thread behind it." As a result, the spinners could not keep the weavers in yarn. Prizes were offered for a spinning machine that could keep up. The gap was finally closed around 1760 with the jenny, followed by two water-powered machines, the waterframe (1769) and the mule (1779). The weaving industry responded with a water-powered loom in 1785 (pp. 70f., 73).

Yet for all that, the flying shuttle was a simple device that "would surely have been child's play for a 14th Century master clockmaker," and all of these inventions employed medieval mechanics: gears, ratios, transfer of motion, and overshot and breast-fed water wheels. Cooney described the operation of the jenny. It was essentially "a spindle wheel tipped on its side to give clearance to a number of driving bands operating from one wheel and kept from tangling by passing through what looks [on the patent drawings] like a large comb. It turned multiple spindles and bobbins by replacing the spinner's left hand with a long wooden clamp, drawn back and forth across the drafting space of the machine. In addition to the hand-operated driving wheel there was a treadle operated deflection wire. The spindles are placed at an angle so that the thread slips the `nose' at each revolution, being twisted as it does so. . . . Upon the counter rotation of the wheel, . . . the deflection wire is worked with the toe, moving the wire downward so that the thread is wound evenly onto the spindle" (pp. 70, 73).

The Industrial Revolution was also accompanied by a revolution in ideas, the idea of industrialism. Just as militarism is not just maintaining an army but making war a way of life, so industrialism is not just producing things but making producion a way of life. That is, the individual quest was subordinated to the overriding function of production. Britain was the Workshop of the World, producing to export to the four corners of the earth. Not unrelated to this revolution was the mystique of the machine. As early as 1719, a water-powered silk mill at Derby "exercised a mesmeric effect upon the first machine worshippers" (pp. 74f., 70).

But is this revolution in ideas in itself a sufficient condition of the "new form which production took" that defines the Industrial Revolution? In logic, a sufficient condition reasons inductively forward (and therefore causally) to a given event and therefore can be an efficient cause, which is what we are looking for. (A necessary condition reasons deductively backward from a given event.) An idea may be a formal cause (motive) of change, but it cannot in itself be an efficient (active) cause: it has to work through a mechanism (p. 76).

"The many facts we have consid- ered--inventions, familiar sources of power, population explosion, markets; these are but factors of an association which is greater than their sum, for all pre-existed the condition which Ashley identified as a `Bolt from the Blue'. The important thing is the catalyst which brought them together, for once they were brought into association the problems of historical priority . . . are soluble. The phrase `Industrial Revolution' describes a new association of these factors. Of course the factors pre-existed it and it is beside the point whether they pre-existed it by decades or by centuries, for the new association has its own characteristics, increments and effects. Its relatively sudden formation is revolutionary. It seems self-evident to say that the catalyst of a monetary economy is money" (p. 76).

The opening of country banks issuing their own paper after the 1850s corresponds in time to the onset of the Industrial Revolution and s16iss0 a sufficient condition of the new form of association taken by production: "Inadequate financial methods and arrangements were as much an impediment to the early industrialists as bad transport. . . .The widespread development of country banks after the `Fifties made the development of enterprises easier. . . . Country banks rose in number from less than three hundred to over seven hundred between 1780 and 1815. . . . They inspired confidence and there was little hoarding. Each bank issued its own paper money . . . and the country was flooded with paper" (p. 77, quoting Plum's England in the Eighteenth Century).

Cooney concludes: "The great expansion of credit made possible the accumulation of capital equipment which characterized the Industrial Revolution. It was credit which brought together the men, the tools, and the materials which made possible the canals, the factories, the waggons, the houses, the aqueducts, the leats [water conduits; read leats for leets in last issue, p. 3, col. 2], the machinery and all the other capital equipment. . . . It was this vast capital investment, through credit, and the transformation of production which resulted from it, which defines the revolutionary character of the industrialization of the period 1760- 1830. The many forces which had grown separately for centuries were brought together in novel association by the widespread creation of credit, and by their coming together they transformed both production and the organization of production, and that transformation fell upon England like a bolt from the blue" (p. 78) culture, we said at the beginning, is articulated in a style:"The aspects of the culture from music to manuring fields are . . . manifestations of a single Style." A culture "engenders a common motif in all its expressions." Style is "an active element which conserves and selects, imposing on the solutions to the problems of the physical environment the standards of the culture" (pp. 4, 82, 1).

Industrialism meant production was to be a way of life; Britain was designated not just a workshop but the Workshop of the World. Indeed, "the aim of all Revolutions is not simply to take political power," writes Cooney, "but to change culture, to structure a new race. The Capitalist Revolution was . . . internationalist. Its aim was not merely a new kind of man in Britain, but a Universal Man. Cobden and Bright [the propagandists of Free Trade] were obligingly explicit about this. . . . The necessary outcome of Free Trade was a World Order, perfectly regulated in its economic activities by the operation of an invariable economic law which would be articulated by everyone buying in the cheapest and selling in the dearest market unhampered by national laws or national boundaries. By the operation of this law each region of the earth would produce only what it was most suited to produce at the lowest cost" (p. 84).

Clothing and shelter are conspicuous "solutions to the problems of the physical environment," and so we see the new vision symbolically expressed in dress and architecture. In dress, "the working culture, we said at the beginning, is articulated in a style:"The aspects of the culture from music to manuring fields are . . . manifestations of a single Style." A culture "engenders a common motif in all its expressions." Style is "an active element which conserves and selects, imposing on the solutions to the problems of the physical environment the standards of the culture" (pp. 4, 82, 1).

Industrialism meant production was to be a way of life; Britain was designated not just a workshop but the Workshop of the World. Indeed, "the aim of all Revolutions is not simply to take political power," writes Cooney, "but to change culture, to structure a new race. The Capitalist Revolution was . . . internationalist. Its aim was not merely a new kind of man in Britain, but a Universal Man. Cobden and Bright [the propagandists of Free Trade] were obligingly explicit about this. . . . The necessary outcome of Free Trade was a World Order, perfectly regulated in its economic activities by the operation of an invariable economic law which would be articulated by everyone buying in the cheapest and selling in the dearest market unhampered by national laws or national boundaries. By the operation of this law each region of the earth would produce only what it was most suited to produce at the lowest cost" (p. 84).

Clothing and shelter are conspicuous "solutions to the problems of the physical environment," and so we see the new vision symbolically expressed in dress and architecture. In dress, "the working clothes of the busy capitalist, trousers designed for speed of dressing so that no minute of the day might be lost [from] pursuit of gain; coat skirts buttoned back as tails so [as] not to impede haste in pursuit of debtors or flight from creditors, had become the formal dress of the New Order." In 1820 the Duke of Wellington, the most famous man in Europe, was refused admittance to his club for wearing such attire. By 1834 trousers, tails, and top hats were the rule, and "only the older squires stuck stubbornly to the breeches and hose of their youth" (p. 81).

In architecture, "the Capitalist Revolution transfigured the British architectural landscape. The ugliness of its utilitarian buildings, mills, foundries, factories and industrial housing, is all too apparent, but should not distract attention from the significance [idea symbolically expressed] of its formal architecture. The Revolution was internationalist and so its conspicuous structures raided the world for models. The architecture of Greece, Rome, India and Egypt was imitated. Furniture and decor were copied from China and Japan, though somehow leaving behind the delicacy and importing the gross. Even the Gothic Revival . . . was borrowed from by the new elite for the construction of make believe castles congruent with their new status as Lords of Wealth. [The] vision of a World Order and a World Man by its own internal logic assimilates the forms and artifacts of every culture. It is this which accounts for the amalgam of forms in Victorian architecture and the absence of any coherent motif" (p. 83f.).


In 1963 a debate raged in the pages of the Economic History Review between R. M. Hartwell and the Marxist Hobsbawn about the condition of life in England in the period 1800-1830. Hartwell proved that there was a gradual increase in real wages over the whole period. Hobsbawn, however, maintained that such increase does not automatically--and did not in the event--translate into adequate diet, housing, and working conditions (p. 91f.).

Cooney agrees with the Marxist: "To concede a marginal improvement in wage rates between 1800 and 1830 is to concede very little." Cobbett, J. P. Kay, Tocqueville, and Frederic Ozanam (founder of the St. Vincent de Paul Society) testify to the misery of these times. Cobbet, who thoroughly toured the country to observe conditions, wrote in 1825, "The lot of the [agricultural] working classes has become worse than it formerly was." The diet of Manchester cotton workers consisted of "weak tea without milk, oatmeal, potatoes with bacon fat, lard or butter, a little bread" (p. 90f.). Tocqueville saw immense workshops and, in their shadow, below the level of the river, on "marshy land which widely spaced ditches can neither drain nor cleanse," miserable one-story houses. Still poorer families lived in the cellars: "Twelve to fifteen human beings are crowded pell mell into each of these damp repulsive holes." Ozanam gives a similar description of the London slums, and Kay paints an equally dire picture of the mills (p. 92f).

It is clear from the inscriptions on tombstones, as well as other sources, that even apart from infant mortality, people died young. "They died young because they had nothing decently human to live for: no cessation from labour, no freedom from fatigue, no sweetness of clean linen, . . . no joy in social eating, no spaciousness of life: brutalized by toil and squalor like beasts oppressed beyond endurance." If "this condition of life represents an increased standard of living," comments Cooney, "it cannot be considered a significant increase, for it has left the quality of life scarcely above the brutish" (p. 92f.).he first wave of the Industrial Revolution (1760-1830) was based on water power and country-bank paper. The second wave (1830-50) was based on steam power and Bank-of-England gold: "The political balance of power was shifted to the manufacturer-exporter and the economic policy of Great Britain was changed from autarky to trade dependence. . . . Water wheels gave way to boiler houses, and canals to railways. The crucial materials of industrial culture were no longer cotton and wool but coal and iron. The dominant product was no longer cloth, destined for direct, personal use, . . . but machines and iron structures. . . . Since more capital was required for steam driven factories than for water powered mills, for the floating of a railway company than for running a business as carter or bargee, it also marked the beginning of amalgamations" (p. 89).

Cooney's final chapter takes up the paradox of Britain's Great Depression of 1873-96. Home prices and profits were falling, production was off though still increasing, and more were jobless. Yet the leading statistician of the day, Sir Robert Giffen, commented in 1885 that never had there been "a great commercial crisis in England which caused so little suffering to the mass of the nation." Real wages were rising,"more houses were being built, twice as much tea was being consumed, and even the working classes were eating imported meat, oranges and dairy produce in quantities unprecedented" (pp. 97, 99f.).

Cooney looks at these facts in the light of the Douglas analysis. By 1873 the machinery of the Industrial Revolution had been paid for. Cheaper goods and less work is just what one would expect from mechanization and the harnessing of primary energy. A power-tool economy "produces, as it is intended to produce, a considerable tradable surplus. It is axiomatic therefore that monetary supply must increase with production. However, during the 1870's and 1880's there was no increase in world-gold production. . . . If the supply of metal money was static during the period, we find the same is more or less true of bank credit. . . . During this time however we have the remarkable fact that interest rates remained low, which indicates that there was no great or pressing demand for bank credit; in short new money must have been available from another source (pp. 98, 103f.).

There was such a source, the favorable balance of trade: "Throughout the period the terms of trade, after an initial drop, climbed steadily in Britain's favour until 1900." Free trade had ruined British agriculture, but imported food was cheap, and Britain could still command high prices for her exported coal and manufactures because she retained a virtual monopoly of supply in major fields. In short, Britain was "making money." "The real physical loss of products in a `favourable' balance of trade is offset by new, debt-free and non-repayable [gold] money, . . . which is available as effective demand on the home market of the successful nation," he writes. "The effect of this release of new money into the home market of the successful country is to increase the purchasing power of its citizens, without a corresponding increase in the prices on its home market. [because it doesn't add to cost]. Allied to a falling cost of production this explains . . . a falling price level and a rising real wage level throughout the 'Great Depression' and 'Little suffering to the great mass of the Nation', save of course for the unemployed, who by that fact, were disbarred from access to the new money earned by surplus exports" (pp. 101-3).

This solution to the paradox of a prosperous Great Depression is itself a paradox. During the first wave of the Industrial Revolution, country banks supplied paper credit at the cost of debt. During the Great Depression of 1873-96, the favorable balance of trade supplied gold credit at the cost of a transfer of physical wealth away from Britain. Britain was thus able to "keep working" for the World. "A similar situation arises when a conquered people are required to yield a portion . . . of the product of their industry and agriculture to the conqueror as tribute, yet tribute has never been considered 'favourable' to those paying it." But debt and tribute of the product of industry are both very cumbersome ways to solve the problem of credit in ower-tool economy (p. 102).

The "favorable balance of trade," Cooney summarizes, "provided a source of new money which raised the value of wages above the cost of living because it did not enter home market prices" (p. 105). This editor initially balked at this sentence and indeed this whole thesis. For one thing, on the theory that reduction of cost through mechanization and the harnessing of primary energy made prices fall, money wages would only have to remain constant and real wages would automatically rise. So the rise in real wages doesn't itself presume a new source of money. (A business financed by the owner's personal fortune would not have to fear falling prices, because his money would buy more too. It was only the businessman who was not free to spend his money, because he had a debt to pay, who would be hurt.) Second, if there were a new source of money and it were paid into wages, by that very fact it would be a cost of business and so enter home market prices.

However, there is another possibility. Cooney's theory would make sense on the assumption that businessmen were using the bonanza in foreign-exchange gold to subsidize both wages and prices in the home market. They were saving costs through mechanization and the harnessing of primary energy, and they were "making money" on foreign exchange. The favorable balance of trade could have enabled them to weather the fall in prices while continuing to pay the same or better wages. That would mean that foreign trade was being used to subsidize the domestic economy. Cooney does not say this explicitly, and this editor has no evidence that it was in fact the case. It is merely offered as an idea consistent with Cooney's theory.

Although falling prices are here posited to be the natural consequence of mechanization and the harnessing of primary energy, the twentieth century has seen the opposite effect: "From 1900- 1914 a great overhaul of British industry was carried through, and this was followed by the colossal cost of the 1914-18 war." These ventures "required sums far greater than the personal fortunes and local borrowings which had built the jennies and mills. . . . As all costs, including the cost of war, must be recovered in consumer prices, then every modernization, every cost-reducing advance, financed by bank credit in the continuous modernization since 1900 adds to prices, and every ultimate product carries its share of the load of debt and interest thereon. . . . Reduced cost [is] negated by prices bearing forever the financial debt of capital equipment. [This was] the prime cause of the decline of Britain's basic industries after the 1914-18 war" (p. 104f.; our italics).

The period of the Great Depression was the "Private Heaven" because of Free Trade and "the Empire on which the sun never sets." Cooney concludes: "The period was one of heady optimism in Great Britain. To the Empire, and perhaps more so to foreign lands, went our exports, first of commodities, then of the machines to make the commodities and then of the machines to make the machines. In return came the tribute [sic] of the Empire and the products of the world. The Manchester School appeared vindicated beyond the possibility of refutation, for Great Britain was a working model of its theory. In the sphere of the idea there was bred an invincible and over-weening confidence, a tower of pride which, when trade war inevitably became bloody war, toppled the nation headlong into the maelstrom. . . . The first moulty chickens of the Capitalist Revolution [were] coming home to roost" (p. 105).Human beings are naturally creative. Artifacts and processes have the natural function of freeing men and women from dehumanizing toil to enable them to exercise their creativity. In ancient Rome, however, the slave had the function of toiling, and this function took precedence over the natural function of artifacts and processes to free him. The latter had to be diverted from their natural function in order to keep the slave working. Thus, slavery as a factor of association in ancient Rome resulted in the decrement of inertia in artifacts and processes. The removal of this obstacle in the Middle Ages resulted in the increment of mechanical advantage in various inventions, which in turn released individuals from toil and resulted in the further increment of a renaissance in arts and learning. These medieval increments were the fruit of a new set of mental schemata, Christianity, which, for the first time, assigned artifacts and processes their proper function.

In the Capitalist Revolution, on the other hand, we see a further exploitation of mechanical advantage to be sure, but also a defeat of the ends of that advantage. For the natural subordination of artifacts and processes to the service of human beings again became distorted. The human being became mere raw material with which to make the New Man. The function of the British man, whether factory-worker or industrialist, was business, and artifacts and processes had to be diverted from their natural function in order to keep the British man busy. This was indeed the resurrection of slavery in a new form. This decrement was the poisonous fruit of a new set of mental schemata, capitalism, which represented a complete departure from Western culture: "There was fashioned a Viewpoint of Reality which was utterly different from the Medieval viewpoint which had slowly decayed in the intervening centuries. William Morris perhaps put his finger on it . . . when he said that the products were not made to use but to sell." NOT TO USE. In fact, it no longer mattered whether the products were ultimately used or not, or whether they were even suitable for use. It only mattered whether they could be sold (p. 75).

Bearing in mind that a culture is articulated in a style, and a style is "an active element which conserves and selects, imposing on the solutions to the problems of the physical environment the standards of the culture," we might be tempted to call capitalism not just an economic system but a new culture. But in that it rejected the natural relation of artifacts and processes to human beings that was available to it because it was its legacy (which cannot be said of the ancient Romans), and given also the cultural omnivorousness of its art, it would be more appropriate to call it an anticulture. No renaissance should be expected.