The Great Degeneration:
How Institutions Decay and Economies Die
A.W. Purdue on the ramifications of the demise of
Western civil society’s foundational structures
Is the West in terminal decline? Niall Ferguson argues that, less than 25 years after the end of the Cold War and the apparent triumph of liberal democracy and the free market, the economic and political supremacy of Western Europe and North America is fading rapidly. This is, he says, because of the degeneration within Western societies of the institutions upon which that supremacy was based: representative government, the free market, the rule of law and civil society.
When the Western powers were expanding their political and economic power in the 18th century, Adam Smith wrote of the differences between the “progressive” and the “stationary” state. The progressive states were Britain and its American colonies, and it was China - a once “opulent” country - that had been “long stationary” under its centralised rule, its mandarins and its defective laws. Now it is China that has the dynamic economy with a per capita income that is rapidly catching up with that of the US, and it is expanding its geopolitical influence. Ferguson has reservations about the sustainability of China’s economic expansion as “its market reforms remain subject to an exclusive and extractive elite which continues to allocate key resources”, but he has few doubts about the decline of the West. One by one he examines the institutions that were the foundations of modern Western states and societies, and emanated largely from Britain, and finds them in a state of decay.
...............
THE GREAT DEGENERATION: HOW INSTITUTIONS DECAY AND ECONOMIES DIE
By Niall Ferguson
Allen Lane, 192pp, £16.99
ISBN 9781846147326
Published 17 October 2012
REVIEWER:
A.W. Purdue is visiting professor in history at the University of Northumbria.
No hay comentarios:
Publicar un comentario