The Wealth of a Nation: Institutional Foundations of English Capitalism.Geoffrey M. Hodgson, (Princeton University Press, 2023. pp. 304. ISBN: 9780691247014, Hbk £35)
本书从法律制度视角重新解读工业革命，强调制度、法律环境等非传统因素对英国资本主义发展的关键作用，适合对演化分析和经济史感兴趣的读者。
Geoffrey Hodgson is one of the world's foremost evolutionary and institutional economists. In The Wealth of a Nation, he provides a legal institutional interpretation of the Industrial Revolution. The book is arranged into three parts: explanatory structures are the focus of the first part. The second part, titled ‘Explaining England's Economic Development’, covers a range of topics including the relationship between finance and industrialization. The third part, titled ‘Legal Institutionalism and the Lessons of History’, includes a closing chapter comparing the British and Japanese industrialization experience as well as discussing more conceptual topics regarding economic and institutional evolution. The intended readership for this book is one that is open to evolutionary analysis being applied to economic history. Those readers hoping for an explanation of the Industrial Revolution viewed through the prism of national income accounting and/or the Solow growth model will be disappointed (Kuznets, for instance, does not even appear in the index and only one paper by Crafts finds its way into the bibliography). Yet as Hodgson indicates, such disappointment would be misplaced. In his view, the framework of growth accounting represents a physicalist perspective – an approach based on physical metaphors – and Hodgson, along lines drawing on Mokyr's writings, highlights the limitations of these metaphors (e.g. p. 171). For example, Hodgson notes that the physicalist perspective may lead to historically specific (often institutional) features that may be downplayed relative to more general features (p. 182). Hodgson, while having reservations with some mainstream economic approaches to the Industrial Revolution, is also critical of heterodox approaches. For instance, he rejects a Marxist interpretation, as he observes that it downplays external factors, the role of law, and the state in helping to constitute key institutions and facilitate economic development (p. 47). Schumpeter's analysis is more favourably assessed, though even his evolutionary arguments do not go far enough for Hodgson's liking in recognizing the importance of exogenous shocks (p. 49). Weberian and technology-based arguments, along with McCloskey's emphasis on liberalism and Mokyr's arguments concerning Enlightenment ideas, are also surveyed in chapter two. Hodgson's examination of Mokyr's arguments (pp. 62–71) is the most thought-provoking part of this survey largely because it is the perspective closest to Hodgson's own. Hodgson, however, contends that even what he describes as Mokyr's ‘forceful and persuasive’ argument (p. 65) rests excessively on contingency and inadequately on the legal environment in which these innovators rose to prominence. This survey material leads to the second part of the book, in which Hodgson develops further his own interpretation. Hodgson's interpretation can be summarized as suggesting the origins of the Industrial Revolution lay not just in the conventional factors of production, which lend themselves to cliometric exercises, but also to less measurable factors such as ‘novel institutions, social structures, circumstances and ideas’ (p. 182). The situation regarding the institutional preconditions for capitalism, including debt markets and a lender of the last resort, rather than class struggle (or for that matter a Panglossian North and Weingast property rights explanation) propelled industrialization. As he notes in the final sentence of chapter four, ‘The expansion of financial and other markets helped enhance the conditions for the Industrial Revolution’ (p. 157). The role of the Glorious Revolution was that it disrupted international alliances and thereby thrust Britain into a series of wars against France or Spain, culminating in Waterloo. It was the resulting need to finance such warfare, which (along with the associated procuring of outputs for its armed forces) further contributed to economic restructuring. It is this strategic aspect that Hodgson connects with Schumpeter's arguments concerning the connections between credit finance, innovation, and growth. Furthermore, Hodgson hypothesizes that restricted access to finance may contribute to explaining the low rate of growth experienced during the Industrial Revolution. Constraints regarding collateral and country banking are suggested as ensuring growth rates were restrained (p. 180). He concedes regarding the topic of access to capital that there are, however, remaining empirical gaps in our understanding (p. 183). Regarding patents, Hodgson posits that the weakness of the ‘cumbersome and costly’ patent system was a further institutional obstacle (p. 163). In the book's final comparative chapter, one of the lessons drawn from the study is that ‘institutions always depend on and are moulded by complex structures involving other institutions’ (p. 225). A related lesson is that exogenous shocks, rather than endogenous incremental changes, may be needed to jolt the institutional changes that promote economic development. This kind of punctuated equilibrium conclusion returns us to Hodgson's earlier engagement with Mokyr (p. 70). In formulating his legal institutionalist interpretation, Hodgson owes intellectual debts to an eclectic range of economists, including Veblen, Hayek, and Boulding, as well as Darwinism. This reviewer found this eclecticism a virtue, as it gives it a distinct emphasis that may make parts of the book particularly useful in graduate teaching. Some economic historians may equally find Hodgson's eclecticism disconcerting and the arguments not always easy to follow. I must confess finding the conceptual material regarding Darwinian economic history, as covered in chapter six, as challenging but stimulating. For educators as well as researchers, The Wealth of a Nation is a book well worth reading – it should have an impact in the years to come.