Jeune Street

I’ve recently discovered William H. McNeill, a pioneer in the field of ‘big history.’ As a reader, the appeal of these books lies in their distillation of huge expanses of time into their basic significance for world history. McNeill’s discussion of Marxism in his Rise of the West: A History of Human Communities is one of the best I’ve read:

Marx’s vision of the stages of human past and future — from slavery to serfdom to the financial exploitation of the free market and on to the perfect freedom of socialist and communist society — appealed both to the self-righteousness of industrial workers and to the rebellious idealism of intellectuals who found the confusion of things as they were hard to bear. Marxism thus quickly became a religion, whose strongest appeal was to populations emerging abruptly from age-old rural routines into the uncertainties of urban and industrial living.

It’s probably difficult for us to imagine today what astonishing change the world experienced in the throes of the industrial revolution. The displacement from traditional routines and expectations, together with the shameless exploitation of capital, would have — among workers and thinkers — coupled a longing for justice with a desire to believe in new certainties and the promise of a better social order. Marx’s thinking and its adoption by millions was, in some respects, an unsurprising response to world conditions a century or more ago.

But times have changed…