Ideas of Decline

Sheldon Rothblatt

• English Culture and the Decline of the Industrial Spirit, 1850-1980 by Martin Wiener
  Cambridge, 217 pp, £9.95, April 1981, ISBN 0 521 23418 2
• Peaceful Conquest: The Industrialisation of Europe, 1760-1970 by Sidney Pollard
  Oxford, 451 pp, £7.95, June 1981, ISBN 0 19 877093 6

With a titular allusion to Max Weber’s famous essay on the rise of capitalism, Martin Wiener discusses the bewildering question of Britain’s current economic stagnation, retardation, ‘de-industrialisation’ or decline – the word chosen depends upon how the magnitude and finitude of the situation are assessed. Wiener prefers ‘decline’, since he traces the present worrying business posture of Britain back to the later 19th century. Demonstrating a nice eye for the right quotation and example, he has put together lengthy excerpts and a long list of statements from an exceptionally varied range of sources to argue that cultural even more than economic factors account for Britain’s secular slide. Wiener is too careful a scholar to believe that historical causes can be neatly compartmentalised. As he says, culture and economics cannot be separated: but heuristically he has selected culture as the operative variable. He briefly defines culture as the outlook and mentality of the élites who influence the values of the rest of society.