The Industrial Division of Labour and National Cultures

Extract

THE ORIGINS OF INDUSTRIAL SOCIETY CONTINUE TO BE AN object of scholarly dispute. It seems to be very probable that this will continue to be so forever. An enormously complex transformation occurred in a very large, diversified and intricate society, and the event was unique: no imitative industrialization can be treated as an event of the same kind as the original industrialization, simply in virtue of the fact that all the others were indeed imitative, were performed in the light of the now established knowledge that the thing could be done and had certain advantages (though the emulated ideal was of course interpreted in all kinds of quite diverse ways). So we can never repeat the original event which is to be understood, which was perpetrated by men who knew not what they did, and this was of its essence: we cannot do this, for quite a number of cogent reasons - the sheer fact of repetition makes it different from the original occasion; one cannot in any case reproduce all the circumstances of early modern Western Europe; and experiments on such a scale, for the sake of establishing a theoretical point, are morally hardly conceivable. In any case, to sort out causal threads in so complex a process, we should need not one, but very, very many re-runs, and these will never be available to us.