Customer Reviews

The Long Twentieth Century

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Giovanni Arrighi's text is the most under-rated as well as the most brilliant of all theoretical works on historical capitalism and its futures. Unlike the claims of recent scholars like Hardt and Negri, the text is NOT about one historical cycle succeeding another. Such a claim is one of the worst examples of intellectual misrepresentation that I have ever come across. Their own work ('Empire' and then 'Multitude') are vain and failed attempts to come to terms with Arrighi's work. As a student of Marx, Braudel, and Schumpeter, Arrighi knows better than most that no two systemic cycles are ever the same. Each one not only ruptures the world system, it also creates conditions for its own supersession, in what Arrighi, drawing upon Braudel, calls 'financial expansions', and what David Harvey following Arrighi, calls 'accumulation by dispossession'. By drawing insightful comparisons between four long systemic cycles starting with the medieval Genoese financial expansion, Arrighi demonstrates the novelty of the cycle underlying the long twentieth century as well as pointing to what lies ahead. This is an absolute must read for anyone interested in capitalism, the interstate system, the social movements (though here the text is somewhat deficient), and the possibility of a future different from the lackluster present. Arrighi's work is simultaneously historical and theoretical (theory after all comes from a deep grasp of historical currents). Although much misunderstood, misinterpreted, and misrepresented, and often appropriated without adequate acknowledgement, The Long Twentieth Century is destined to become the classic work of the 21st century. Ten years after it first came out, almost all of Arrighi's predictions are turning out to be accurate, so much so that his school of imitators is becoming as vast as his train of never-ending admirers. To those who like large meta-narratives that combine spatial dynamics with temporal rhythms - and there are only a few out there (Marx, Weber, Braudel, Schumpeter, Perry Anderson, Michael Mann, Immanuel Wallerstein, and Charles Tilly)- Arrighi's work will be the unsurpassable horizon of our times. Arrighi is a master-synthesizer. One of the challenges he raises is the question of synthesis itself. What is entailed in the act of synthesizing without distorting particulars, is the capacity to give each particular its due (as if that were ever possible!). Arrighi's deep compassion for the struggles to bring about a different global future guide much of his architecture. Unlike many who call themselves socialists, Arrighi carries none of their presumptuous and often ridiculous baggage. To read this text is like experiencing a breath of fresh air after so many sterile polemics on the Left. It is a tall order to go beyond the Long twentieth century. Future attempts will invariably find themselves repeating an insight already developed in some obscure page of the Long Twentieth Century. It is the challenge of the 21st to come up with something at least as good as the offering of the Calabrian maestro.

If you are a student of the international system or international relations this is a must read. It should be considered the second part in a five volume set. The first should be something about world systems theory by Wallerstein, a reader will do, then Fernand Braudel's Perspective of the World, followed by Hopkins and Wallertein's Age of Transition. For the final book I recommend Robert Gilpin's response to these works, The Challenge of Global Capitalism published in 2000.

Anyone interested in Paul Kennedy, McNeil, Braudel, Frank, Chase-Dunn, or Wallerstein's work must read this! It's simply among the most brilliant analyses of the origins of capitalism as a historical social system, uncovering the changing logic of its political-economic contradictions. Arrighi very lucidly and tightly brings together the relation of military power and capitalist accumulation through an insightful examination of the long waves of capitalist expansion of the world-economy since the age of Venice and Genoa. He explains how the system repeatedly recontructs itself through successive world-hegemonies (UP,UK, US) and shifts in the center of the world-economy that entail new forms of global rule and regimes of production which build upon each other, each being world-scale solutions the success of which nonetheless generate world-scale contradictions. He ends with an interesting discussion of the recent break with all past cycles tied to the shift in the center to East Asia.

Giovanni Arrighi's "Long 20th Century" is a must-read for those who want to understand the global history and dynamics of power and capitalism, and especially the likelihood that in the next couple of decades, the U.S. will continue its current trend, and finally undergo a decisive loss of economic hegemony and power, quite likely to be replaced by China and other Asian economies. Whether such a shift will be accepted by the U.S. and its allies without a cataclysmic resort to military violence is very much in doubt--Arrighi demonstrates that the 3 major similar shifts in the past have been concomitant (both as cause and effect) with continental or global wars.

Arrighi's is a bird's-eye view of history from the 14th century onward, focusing on the repeated, cyclic tendency of leading capitalist groups/states/empires (hegemons) to be superceded by larger and more organized such groups. This has been due, roughly, to increasing nation/state competition for surplus capital that is largely not re-invested in trade and production by the existing hegemon. Such "finance" capital is sought most successfully by the hegemon that will overtake the existing one, but the competition in general has inevitably led to war, after which the superceding hegemon emerges as best positioned to lead the building of a larger world-capitalist system of trade and production.

Eventually, though, the cyclic process begins anew, though Arrighi doesn't claim that the "cycles" are closed loops--the means by which these new hegemons succeed involve technological, political, military, and organizational innnovations. Thus, Arrighi is a small-m marxist, retaining the best of, and building upon, but not limiting himself to, Marx's analysis, particularly regarding the tendency of capitalist re-investment of growing profits in production to eventually depress said profit-rates, as competition for limited markets drives them down. This has happened most significantly to 4 major hegemons: Genoese Italy's 14th century dispersed capitalist merchants, the Dutch nation/state, the British Empire, and finally the U.S. Any notion that U.S. power has ended such cyclic processes, and will "dominate" the world forever, is undermined by his argument--which only goes to 1994, yet is uncannily predictive (in general) of the effects of current events.

The brief summary above does not do justice to the book, which is fascinating in every detail, and truly comprehensive in its consideration of the history of world power and politics. The level of writing is high, but not incredibly dense--it does require close reading, but most educated and interested lay readers should find it amenable. It also has a great bibliography of similarly fascinating reading on related topics. Finally, Arrighi has many articles available online, of which several that I have read are just as cogent and valuable, including a couple recent ones in New Left Review that update his arguments from Long 20th Century to 2004.

Giovanni Arrighi reexamines, following Braudel's steps, the expansion of capitalism. In spite of its title, the research goes back to 15th. Century. But the adventure is not a gratuitous one. Depth and clearness are successfully binded. At his close, the book intrigatingly questions : can capitalism survive, IN SPITE OF its sucess?

G. Arrighi's Twentieth Century is very long indeed. It begins in the fourteenth century.

The author wants to lay bare Braudel's third layer of economic power (the real home of the predators), which covers the self-sufficient economy (the 1st) and the market economy (the 2nd). The predators are those particular communities or governmental and business blocs who accumulate on a world scale an ever-increasing capitalist power.

The author sees 4 historical centers of global accumulation: 1. the Italian city States (Venice, Genoa); 2. the Seventeen Provinces (Holland); 3. Great-Britain; 4. US; 5. ?

Each of these global accumulations is characterized by three capitalist cycles: 1. financial expansion; 2. consolidation and accumulation; 3. renewed financial expansion and emergence of competition.

His analysis is profound and detailed. However, the author doesn't take enough crucial demographic and political factors or decisions into consideration.

There is a phenomenal difference between the first two and the third and fourth accumulation. The 3rd one caused a demographic explosion which is still going on. Its success for the human species is truly exceptional (E. Hobsbawm).

The fall of the British empire was at least accelerated by two world wars which were declared by foreign countries and which left Great-Britain bankrupt (Keynes, Skidelsky).

The basic of the US empire is the dollar (W.G. Tarpley). The fall of the dollar in 1971 was countered by a political decision to inflate the oil prize (W. Engdahl), whereby the dollar recaptured its lost central place in international finance and US banks and oil corporations were catapulted at the zenith of world power (the real predators).

This book is already partly out-of-date. It ends with the Japanese formidable but already extinct expansion, not with the lurking Chinese one (a truly perfect combination of State and capital).

Do we see actually the final capitalist crisis, so many times claimed by pure Marxists? Absolutely not. Engel (not Engels)'s law is still highly in force with a nearly unlimited supply of cheap labor at the disposal of all transnational corporations.

Adam Smith's (and Marx's) law of the tendency of a falling rate of profit is an illusion, because in the long run capital chases earnings.

Finally, in our society, capitalism is not an end but a means to grab power and power means survival. Through history, the members of the ruling class live much longer than the ruled.

This book is a very worth-while read, although its analysis and vocabulary is nearly pure Marxist.

I consider myself fairly well educated: I have a Ph.D. and I've thrived on books in this genre, such as _Europe and the People Without History_ and _The Colonizer's Model of the World_. But I find Arrighi's book a difficult one--a little beyond most readers, I should think.

There are three main reasons for this: a.) Arrighi fails to write for a larger audience and b.) fails to write as clearly as he could; and c.) Arrighi is assuming fluency in Braudel, Wallerstein, Abu-Lughod, and a host of other scholars who have tackled the rise of capitalist empires.

I think most Americans, who have a mediocre background in Marxist theory, world systems theory, class dynamics, and hegemony, might want to pass. Does the name Gramsci ring a bell? How about the basic premises of Lenin? Which way did you nod your head when I mentioned Abu-Lughod? If these notions aren't a part of your working knowledge, take a pass on this book. Try one of the two books I mentioned at the top. And if you *are* well-versed in Braudel, macro-economic theory, and critical discussions of imperialism, you might venture to read this difficult work. Arrighi has put together an ambitious, provocative work, a serious investigation into the power-economies of empires.

There are already many good reviews so I will only suggest reading the following books (whose scope is amazingly global) in addition to Arrighi's work: 1) Economy: 1.1 "Power and Plenty: Trade, War, and the World Economy in the Second Millennium" by Ronald Findlay and Kevin H. O'Rourke; 1.2 and 1.3: "The world economy. A millennial perspective" (2001) plus "The world economy: Historical Statistics" (2003) by Angus Maddison (a combined edition of these two volumes appeared on December 2007); 2) Agrarian cultures: "Pre-industrial societies" by Patricia Crone; 3) Government: "The History of Government" by S.E. Finer; 4) Ideas: "Ideas, a History from Fire to Freud", by Peter Watson; 5) Political Thought: 5.1. and 5.2: "The West and Islam. Religion and Political Thought in World History" plus "A World History of Ancient Political Thought" by Antony Black; 6) Religion: "The Phenomenon of Religion: A Thematic Approach" by Moojan Momen; and 7) War: "War in Human Civilization" by Azar Gat.

This book is for hardcore intellectuals with a bit of a leftist bent. It was written before the current expansion began so it has the premise of a failure of capitalism to create prosperity. It is also written from a very academic view point therefore many of its observations are not rooted in practicality. I found the writing style very dense.

If you like the usual Marxist c**p you will like this book.