The Evolution of Modern Capitalism A Study of Machine Production

Excerpt

INTRODUCTION.

§ 1. Industrial Science, its Standpoint and Methods of Advance.

§ 2. Capital as Factor in Modern Industrial Changes.

§ 3. Place of Machinery in Evolution of Capitalism.

§ 4. The Monetary Aspect of Industry.

§ 5. The Literary Presentment of Organic Movement.

§ 1. Science is ever becoming more and more historical in the sense that it becomes more studiously anxious to show that the laws or principles with whose exposition it is concerned not merely are rightly derived from observation of phenomena but cover the whole range of these phenomena in the explanation they afford. So likewise History is ever becoming more scientific in the sense that facts or phenomena are so ordered in their setting as to give prominence to the ideas or principles which appear to relate them and of which they are the outward expression. Thus the old sharp line, of distinction has slipped away, and we see there is no ultimate barrier between a study of facts and a study of the laws or principles which dominate these facts. In this way the severance of History and Science becomes less logically justifiable. Yet it is still convenient that we should say of one branch of study that it is historical in the sense that it is directly and consciously engaged in the collection and clear expression of facts or phenomena as they stand objectively in place or time without any conscious reference to the laws which relate or explain them; of another branch of study that it is scientific because it is engaged in the discovery, formulation, and correct expression of the laws according to which facts are related, without affecting to give a full presentment of those facts. The treatment in this book belongs in this sense to economic science rather than to industrial history as being an endeavour to discover and interpret the laws of the movement of industrial forces during the period of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

It cannot, however, be pretended that any high degree of exactitude can attach to such a scientific study.

Two chief difficulties beset any attempt to explain industrial phenomena by tracing the laws of the action of the forces manifested in them. The first is that only a limited proportion of the phenomena which at any given time constitute Industry are clearly and definitely ascertainable, and it may always be possible that the laws which satisfactorily explain the statical and dynamical relations of these may be subordinate or even counteracting forces of larger movements whose dominance would appear if all parts of the industrial whole were equally known.

The second difficulty, closely related to the first, is the inherent complexity of Industry, the continual and close interaction of a number of phenomena whose exact size and relative importance is continually shifting and baffles the keenest observer.

These difficulties, common to all sciences, are enhanced in sociological sciences by the impossibility of adequate experiment in specially prepared environments....