BOOKS
623
IN DEFENSE OF CAPITALISM
THE CAPITALIST REVOLUTION: FIFTY PROPOSITIONS ABOUT
PROSPERITY, EQUALITY, AND LIBERTY. By Peter
L.
Berger.
Basic
Books. $17.95.
The most striking thing about
The Capitalist Revolution
is
its unyieldingly empirical character. Peter Berger is not without
strong values, expressed in many books and a great deal of effective
writing, some of it in
Partisan Review.
But here, despite the polemical
character of his title (in which he enters the enemy camp, so to
speak, to appropriate "revolution" for "capitalism"), values are, in
the language of the economists, "exogenous":
!fyou
favor prosperity,
equality, and liberty, he says, then let us consider how capitalism is
related to the enhancement or achievement of a condition of greater
prosperity, equality, and liberty.
If
there have been few reviews of this book by Marxists - I have
not noticed any - it may well be because of its committed empiricism
as well as because of a distaste for a book which argues that
capitalism, on the whole, has advanced such values.
It
says, here are
capitalist countries, more or less , here are socialist. Let us see-tak–
ing into account different conditions, times, cultures- as best we
can , which pa ttern of arranging economic life has advanced the
values most of us consider desirable. The formulation
"if .
..
then"
is
no game: There are people, if only a few, who do consider too much
prosperity or equality or liberty inimical to the good life, or the best
life, or the most admirable community.
It
is of course of the essence
of Marxism that its version of science refuses a strictly ,empirical ap–
proach, in which one divorces fact from value: Marxism, Marxists
argue, is a science meant for practice , implicated in action, not one
in which social scientists separate themselves from the social world,
and look at it
ilS
an object, akin to the objects of natural science .
That very divorce , the fact-value distinction which is at the heart of
modern science , according to Marxists, distorts and falsifies one's
analysis. And similarly , in Marxist analysis, normative values are
incorporated
ab initio:
this is perhaps what makes it possible for
Marxists , like early Christians, to ignore the failure of historical
development to follow the course that this new science, so closely
enmeshed with action and value, projected and predicted . Among
these predictions were the increasing immiseration of the working
