146
PARTISAN REVIEW
Strachey writes in a tradition which academic economics has
shunned for a long time. He writes about the
political
economy rather
than in terms of those ever more refined, abstract and "pure" economic
models which so engross the economists of our day. Instead of speculat–
ing how economic factors might operate within an institutional vacuum
in which "all other elements remain equal," he is aware that these
elements have the deplorable tendency of never doing this; therefore
he finds it more profitable to analyze the dynamics of contemporary
capitalism within a total institutional framework in which economic,
political and social factors are intertwined.
The only book that comes to mind when one attempts to measure
Strachey's contribution against others that have been made in the
last two decades is Josef Schumpeter's by now almost classic
Capitalism,
Socialism and Democracy.
Indeed the two men, though deeply divergent
in their values, ideas and backgrounds, have a great deal in common.
Both exhibit the same tough-minded resolve to discover the main
trends of the latest stage of capitalism, the same refusal to be satisfied
with the desiccated models of pure economics, the same grasp of the
central role of the institutional framework in which economic forces
operate, even the same admiration for the work of Karl Marx. But
while Schumpeter, the last great representative of classical liberal or–
thodoxy, described with resigned and melancholy regret the demise of
a system which he loved and the emergence of a planned economy
which was to him as inevitable as it was obnoxious, Strachey, while not
believing in the
inevitability
of socialism, is convinced that it is ethically
as well as politically desirable. His book is the first serious attempt to
answer Schumpeter's magistral work on Schumpeter's own grounds.
It is a modest and a tentative book. While the Strachey of the '30s
was among those who pronounced the verdicts of the
W eltgeist
with
supreme confidence, the Strachey of the '50s writes in full awareness
of the fact that the socialist tradition has been seriously weakened in
the last few decades. It is now necessary, he feels, to undertake a labor
of patient and tentative re-examination of the capitalist and post-capi–
talist world at a time when the older certainties are no longer available.
While to many of his generation the rejection of a Marxism which
they had never fully assimilated in the first place meant the acceptance
of whatever antisocialist creed seemed currently most fashionable,
Strachey is at pains to stress his continued indebtedness to the Marxian
heritage, especially to the Marxian method of procedure, even when
he discards a number of crucial Marxian findings.
IJ
Strachey begins with the familiar thesis that modern capitalism
no longer resembles in any way the harmonious models of the classical
