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The God of the Machine

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God of the Machine was my first clue that history could be more than a boring recitation of names and dates.

Paterson looks at the whole sweep of history, from ancient to contemporary, and relates it to the ideas and principles of freedom. Her central concern is to discover the political forms which freedom and civilization require. Her central unifying concept of "the long circuit of energy that makes civilization work" is both exhilarating and true: if economic thinking has not yet caught up to Isabel Paterson, so much the worse for it!

Written by a friend of Ayn Rand, and a lover of freedom, God of the Machine is a gem!

God of the Machine is well up in the top 10 of Random House's poll of most important non-fiction of the 20th Century.

"Most of the harm in the world is done by good people, and not by accident, lapse, or omission. It is the result of their deliberate actions, long persevered in, which they hold to be motivated by high ideals toward virtuous ends... ...when millions are slaughtered, when torture is practiced, starvation enforced, oppression made a policy, as at present over a large part of the world, and as it has often been in the past, it must be at the behest of very many good people, and even by their direct action, for what they consider a worthy object." (The God of the Machine)

"The hand-mill," wrote Karl Marx, summarizing his theory of historical materialism, "gives you society with the feudal lord; the steam-mill, society with the industrial capitalist." On his view, the cultural and political forms that appeared in any given society were mere "superstructure," determined by the society's material and technological "base."

This highly reductionist view of history has been enormously influential, but in her classic The God of the Machine, Isabel Paterson asks a devastating question: what gives you the steam-mill? Why have some societies had enormous scientific and material development while others stagnated? Or, as education scholar Andrew Coulson has wryly put it, why did Athens give us philosophy, mathematics, literature, and the natural sciences, while neighboring Sparta gave us little more than the names of a few high school football teams?

Paterson's search for an answer, articulated via a sustained metaphor of the "engineering principles" of political economy needed to sustain the "flows" of productive human energy, takes her from ancient Greece and Rome to Medieval Europe to the American Founding.

Paterson begins in the ancient world, considering popular explanations for the ascendance of Rome and, in particular, their victory over Carthage in the Punic Wars. Military discipline? Carthage's was more rigorous and severe. Strategic aptitude? But the strategically brilliant Napoleon routed by one loss, while Rome lost many major battles on the road to victory, and the Carthaginian general Hannibal was widely regarded as a military genius. Sea power? But Carthage had a huge naval advantage early on, with Rome catching up only long after the beginning of the conflict.

Rome's advantage, Paterson suggests, lay far from the battlefield, in its superior political structure. Carthage had expected the tributary peoples on Rome's boundaries to join the Carthaginian armies and rise against their masters; they did not. As Paterson observes, the Roman Empire was not really a military empire, in that its control over the periphery was not maintained by force of arms alone: "conquered" people found that Roman citizenship came with benefits. The secret to both Rome's expansion and its ability to harness the productive ability of its people, argues Paterson, was Roman law. Whereas all peoples have followed rules, Paterson sees in Rome the origin of law in its modern sense: an abstract set of principles, with their own internal logic, independent of the will of any particular ruler. She notes that despite strong local pressure to imprison or execute the apostle Paul, the Roman authorities were unable to do anything in the absence of a specific charge once he invoked his rights as a citizen. Rome also found a way to channel public "inertia" through the veto power of the Tribunes, which provided a feedback loop that prevented the imposition of laws intolerable to the plebes without giving them any affirmative power to create new law.

Like many historical theorists, Paterson identified a series of stages through which societies move. Her innovation was to see the structural features that characterized each stage as a mechanism for channeling the corresponding stage of technological development. Custom and taboo could provide the basic stability needed for early development, but were ill suited to contexts marked by high levels of innovation. The counsel of respected members of the community could provide greater flexibility, but only for relatively small social groupings. To deal with what F. A. Hayek called "an extended order," and Paterson described as a "long circuit of energy," formal hierarchy and, at still higher levels, abstract and neutral law were needed.

Turning Marx on his head, Paterson saw political ideology as the "base" and the technological level as "superstructure." Totalitarian regimes could achieve advanced technology only by parasitism on previous innovation, or free societies elsewhere. "Production methods," she wrote: will catch up with advanced political ideas; whereas if an advanced physical economy develops within a political framework that cannot accommodate it, production must either be choked down again or it will destroy the political entity, being subverted to the wrong ends. The Phoenician civilization, for example, disintegrated because in attempting to stifle trade as productive technology advanced, they "effected a hook-up of an energy circuit which their political mechanism could not accommodate."

It was, writes Paterson, the merger of the Roman concept of law with the Christian focus on the freedom and salvation of the individual soul and the Greek ideal of truth pursued through reason that allowed a mercantile "society of contract," with the United States as its prime example, to emerge in the West from a feudal "society of status." The negative force of contract law 'negative because given content only by the voluntary agreements of persons, and invoked only when one of the parties is dissatisfied' ensures the stability of the "circuit" through which productive energy flows. That "negative" character means that the stabilizing power of contract does not impede productive flexibility. The indispensable corollary of contract, she later explains, is privately held property, which eliminates the braking effect of centralized authority on innovation. Paterson contrasts feudal "status" societies. Like later planned economies, these locked workers in to particular roles, preventing adjustment to changing circumstances or in accordance with new ideas.

With that distinction in mind, Paterson considers antitrust law, and concludes that, far from preserving the competition associated with contract society, it tends to resurrect the society of status. In his 1970 book Power and Market, the libertarian economist Murray Rothbard called her treatment here "[o]ne of the few cogent discussions of the antitrust principle in recent years." After exposing several infamous "monopolies" as either chimerical or the product of government privilege, Paterson turns her attention to the putative remedy for monopoly. Laws banning practices "in restraint of trade," she argues, are meaningless: nobody can know in advance precisely what they forbid. Producers who charge more than their competitors, Paterson observes, can be accused of price gouging. Those who charge less are guilty of predatory pricing and unfair competition. Those who charge precisely the same must surely be engaged in price fixing. Any of these accusations might therefore be leveled against a firm by a competitor, making "status," or political power, crucially important to commerce. According to Paterson, the malleability of the notion of "anticompetitive" practices means that in effect, firms will seek prior approval before innovating, merging, or splitting and selling off subsidiaries. The effect, ironically, is to inhibit competition.

Readers with an interest in monetary policy, or public education, or wartime economics will find separate chapters, brimming with insight, on each area. But it is Paterson's broader ideas that made The God of the Machine a classic, and among the most enduring of these has been her image of "the humanitarian with the guillotine." The opening paragraph of the chapter by that name begs to be quoted:

Most of the harm in the world is done by good people, and not by accident, lapse, or omission. It is the result of their deliberate actions, long persevered in, which they hold to be motivated by high ideals toward virtuous ends' [I]n periods when millions are slaughtered, when torture is practiced, starvation enforced, oppression made a policy, as at present over a large part of the world, and as it has often been in the past, it must be at the behest of very many good people, and even by their direct action, for what they consider a worthy object.

In a few pages, Paterson makes a powerful case against the tendency, still all too common, to judge policies by their intentions rather than their effects. She points out that because capitalism channels selfish motives to the public benefit, the most widely beneficial actions will often appear morally ugly, because motivated by greed. The philanthropic impulse itself, she warns, can become a far more pernicious form of greed'desire for the satisfaction of acting as savior to the helpless masses. From the French Reign of Terror to the communist Gulag, Paterson observes that there are few atrocities that don't begin with a noble motive.

Paterson's one-time protegé Ayn Rand said of The God of the Machine:

It is a sparkling book, with little gems of polemical fire scattered through almost every page, ranging from bright wit to the hard glitter of logic to the quiet radiance of a profound understanding. Paterson's wit, logic, and understanding still cast light today, and The God of the Machine remains a source of illumination for modern readers seeking a better understanding of the preconditions for development and freedom.

From the Cato institute

It is a serious look at human energy and how it manifests itself most efficiently. If you are serious about understanding how the U.S. arrived to where it is today then you must get this book. I read this beginning to end. With that in mind, I think the book could be best digested as stand alone chapters as each lesson is timeless. It should be read and placed in a position of importance on every bookshelf. You will find yourself referring to it for the rest of your life.

Great!! Read it. It's brilliant. The only question is how do we get every one of the braindead yahoos in Washington DC to read this book? Especially the guy in White House. Of course that's assuming those people can read. I seriously doubt that at times. This book should be required reading for every man woman and child on Earth.

"The God of the Machine" is an important and enjoyable work for people interested in capitalist economics.

The book covers a series of historical periods from the Classical World up through the United States with a purpose of showing that capitalism (contract society) moves society forward and socialism does not.

While the writing style flowed smoothly and is not at all like a textbook, this is partly because Isabel Paterson believes in an "energy circuit" that causes human progress. This is where she diverges from Ayn Rand. Both ladies considered capitalism to be the correct way forward for mankind. However, Paterson uses religion to back up this belief while Rand builds solid arguments using only reason to back up this belief.

The introduction by Stephen Cox provided useful biographical information about Paterson.

John Christmas, author of "Democracy Society"

The topics covered in this book are extremely important and Ms. Paterson has for the most part taken the correct position on them. However, her writing style reflects her lack of formal education and varies considerably from paragraph to paragraph. Her organization of thought is haphazard at best, yet she was able to convey her points and make astute observations throughout. The common-sense approach should keep many readers interested through material that could be boring at the hands of other authors.

The most unfortunate aspect of the book is her continued attempt to force an analogy of the principals of electricy with human effort. At no time did I find this analogy appropriate or helpful. At other places in the book she tried to force an analogy of dimensional geometry that also failed to convey any additional meaning. I continually skipped these sentences and found that I lost no comprehension of the material.

For anyone interested in history of political thought this is a must read. A true work of genius. One of my top twenty books.

I was diappointed in the book, as it was not what I expected it to be after reading some brief excerpts in an anthology. There is too much historical theory, which seemed to me a lot of bobbledy-gook, and not enough libertarian philosophy.

It has been many years since I read this book, and I was looking to see if it was still available. I do not recall enough of it at this moment to really give a review, but I do want to read it again.