Conservatism by Jerry Z. Muller

Author:Jerry Z. Muller
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2020-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

Joseph A. Schumpeter,

“Aptitude and Social Mobility” (1927)6

We shall for the moment postulate given class situations, as though every social class that ever existed were made up simply of a certain number of family units, which, for some reason or other, had chanced into their class and had persisted in it, forbidding other people access to it—in other words, as though class barriers were insurmountable. Now it is beyond dispute that within a class the relative position of families is forever shifting, that some families rise within their class, while others fall. And we are interested in the reasons why this happens. This can best be studied in individual historical situations. . . .

In the case of the capitalist bourgeoisie of Europe—say, of the post-Napoleonic period—. . . . how does it happen that one family rises, while the other falls—quite apart from accidents, to which we attribute a certain importance but not the crucial role? The rising and falling are facts. No matter which area we study, we always find that the relative position of families in the class situation we have described—other families are of no concern to us at this point—undergoes change, not in such a way that the “big” ones grow bigger and the “small” ones smaller, but typically the other way round. In the textile area of Brno, the silk region of Krefeld, the iron-working district around Birmingham, for example, certain families have maintained their position for more than half a century, in many cases considerably longer. Yet, by and large, the families that led around the middle of the nineteenth century are not on top of the heap today. Some of those that are most successful now were then scarcely recognized as members of the class, while some of those that were most successful then are accepted only with reservations today. Manifestly, concentration and the formation of corporations complicate our analysis, and it will be well if we make a distinction between the private and one-man firm in a competitive economy on the one hand, and the modern large-scale enterprise and trust, on the other.

The characteristic feature of the private firm is the element of family property and the coincidence of family and business success. One theory which is offered to account for shifting family positions is that of the automatism of accumulation, asserted by Marx. The “capitalist” who is bigger at the outset of any period is able to exploit more profit than the smaller one. His proportionate accumulation is therefore larger, and he improves his productive apparatus more rapidly. The difference grows continuously, until the wealthier exploiter drives out the poorer exploiter through competition and expropriates him. This view is a typical example of how bias in favor of a theory blinds the theorist to the simplest facts, grotesquely distorting their proportions. Clearly, the captured surplus value does not invest itself but must be invested. This means on the one hand that it must not be consumed by the capitalist, and on the other hand that the important point is how it is invested.

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