Adam Smith in Beijing
* Book: Adam Smith in Beijing: Lineages of the Twenty-First Century. by Giovanni Arrighi. Verso, 2009
URL = https://www.versobooks.com/en-gb/products/2025-adam-smith-in-beijing
Third in a trilogy, preceded by:
- The Long Twentieth Century: Money, Power, and the Origins of Our Times (London and New York: Verso);
- Chaos and Governance in the Modern World System (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press).
Context
"“Though Arrighi does not say this, his analysis implies that a future increase in political globalization based on hegemony would require a hegemonic national state that is significantly larger than the U.S. The fact that there are no states larger than the U.S. in terms of economic size (the European Union is about the same size, and China is much smaller) means that the hegemonic sequence as the evolution toward a more coordinated and integrated form of global governance by a single national state has probably come to an end. Of course a new period of hegemonic rivalry and deglobalization is likely during the decline of U.S. hegemony. Hopefully this will not devolve into another “Age of Extremes” of the kind that happened in the first half of the century. But eventual further integrative evolution of global governance will require condominium of existing states, or even a multilateral global state. As Peter Taylor (1996) said, the U.S. is probably the last of the hegemons.” (Chase-Dunn, 2010: 46).
- Burak GÜREL & Eylem TAYLAN [1]
Description
1. From the Publisher:
"In the late eighteenth century, the political economist Adam Smith predicted an eventual equalization of power between the West and the territories it had conquered. In this magisterial new work, Giovanni Arrighi shows how China’s extraordinary rise invites us to reassess radically the conventional reading of The Wealth of Nations. He examines how recent US attempts to create the first truly global empire were conceived to counter China’s spectacular economic success Now America’s disastrous failure in Iraq has made the People’s Republic of China the true winner in the US War on Terror. China may soon become again the kind of non-capitalist market economy that Smith described, an event that will reconfigure world trade and the global balance of power."
2. Burak GÜREL & Eylem TAYLAN:
"ASB clearly stands out with a long theoretical chapter which should be read as the summary of Arrighi’s overall theoretical standpoint cultivated throughout his scholarly life as a historical sociologist. It seems certain that this part will be discussed as an example of a particular theoretical genre not only within the discipline of historical sociology, but also within social science in general.
Second, ASB offers new insights into the development of the modern world system, as it revisits the economic and politico-militaristic aspects of world hegemonies with a particular emphasis on the US hegemony. It develops the historical perspective offered by the previous two volumes of his trilogy.
Finally, although the first two volumes also analyzed the decline of the US hegemony by placing it in the context of the long history of the world hegemonies, they did not provide a substantial analysis of the world system’s future after the US hegemony. In providing the origins and dynamics of the “New Asian Age” in general, particularly the Chinese ascent, ASB completes the puzzle arising from the decline of the US hegemony, carefully avoiding the projections of any singular development path for the future. As shown below, by reading the implications of the decline of the US hegemony and the nonhegemonic rise of East Asia together, Arrighi concluded (albeit he did not complete) his research on the rise and fall of the hegemonies in the (more than five hundred years old) modern world (capitalist) system with a declaration of the end of hegemony as we know it.
Arrighi’s book broaches key themes of the international political economy and historical sociology including the factors behind Europe’s divergence from China in the 19th century, historical sources of the rise of China in recent decades, the class nature of the contemporary Chinese state, the extent to which China catches up with advanced capitalist countries, and the future of the SinoAmerican relationship. For this reason, Arrighi’s book has been intensely debated. This paper aims to contribute to these debates by engaging with the criticisms of Arrighi’s book."
Reviews
Frank Dobbin:
"The current book is another exercise in world history from an orbit 10,000 miles out. A book of this scope can hardly nail down every argument put forth, and what Arrighi has going for him is a grand vision of where the world is heading based on where it has been. The book does several different things, and Arrighi warns us that most readers of early drafts liked one theme and advised him to cut the others. Some liked the theoretical treatise on Adam Smith. Some liked the analysis of U.S. decline since World War II. Some liked the critique of Bush's foreign policy in Iraq and Afghanistan. Some liked the survey of what is happening in modern China.
Arrighi begins with a rereading of Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations, which has long been read as a love song to capitalism and the West. For Arrighi, Smith's point was not that Western capitalism was the be-all and end-all, and it was not to develop a theory of capitalism. While Smith saw some Western efficiencies, in the division of labor for instance, his main point was that markets are a mode of organizing and dominating Recently China, along with other former Communist and authoritarian states, has reminded us that markets can be a source of domination and that they need not go hand-in-hand with democracy. This brings us to Smith's original discussion of the divergent paths of East and West. The "unnatural" Western capitalist path was the source of the economic dynamism and unending capital accumulation that created one world economic center after another. But by making capitalist markets the new principle of order that structures all else, China has now veered off its "natural" economic path and is positioned to resume the contest for global dominance.
For Arrighi, China's ascendance creates the opportunity for the realization of Smith's vision of a world in which the West and the rest achieve equal footing. Smith had chronicled the rise of China and then the dominance of the West. But he had not seen the dominance of the West as stretching out into the foreseeable future. Arrighi, like many others these days, sees China as the next likely center of global capitalism. Or at least as one head of a two-headed dragon, though if one takes seriously Arrighi's argument in Chaos and Governance in the World System that having a world hegemon solves collective action problems by creating rules and norms and a role model for the organization of finance and commerce, then it seems likely that only one center can prevail at a time, and the message of this book may be that that center will not be New York. Despite its title, Adam Smith in Beijing is very much about the decline of the United States. America's slide in the 19605 and 1970s came about because Vietnam and the oil crisis chipped away at its political and eco nomic dominance. Following Smith, Arrighi argues that the capacity of economic centers to continue to grow is institutionally constrained, and in recent decades the U.S. ability to generate surplus was constrained by the industrial system. When mega-corporations were vertically and horizontally integrated, controlling their own costs and the prices they could charge, surplus continued to pile up. With their reconfiguration and with increased global competition, that nexus of profit making began to un ravel.
A continuing theme is that the capacity to generate and attract excess capital is what sustains hegemons. While America recovered from the crisis of the 19605 and 1970s, the failure of the Project for a New American Century and George W. Bush's failure in Iraq (and alienation of much of the world in the process) hastened the decline of the United States as world political-economic hegemon. Arrighi considers different possibilities for the future of East-West, and North-South, relations, drawing analogies to past configurations of the global system. The scenarios are not all rosy, and Arrighi makes clear how important America's stance toward China will be, and how badly things might go in a nuclear age if new divisions, political and economic, arise to replace the old. Arrighi's frequent refrain is that China will be the real winner of Bush's war on terror. China's red-hot growth rate and skyscraper race to the top altered its role in the global economy by 2007. China came to embody a new development model - a Beijing consensus to challenge the Washing ton consensus-that other countries began to follow. China's success, then, brought it to the center of the intellectual debate about development and made it the new prototype.
Since Adam Smith in Beijing was published in September 2007, Wall Street has confirmed Arrighi's concerns about the fragility of a financial system built on massive borrowing from China. This has further tarnished the United States as a political/economic model. Arrighi worried that if the new hegemon did not model democracy for the rest of the world, but modeled authoritarian capitalism, we could see the connection that the utilitarians made between democracy and capitalism vanish. If that happens, we must give up the Western vision of a ceaseless global march toward universal suffrage and universal capitalism. Many futures are possible."
(https://scholar.harvard.edu/sites/scholar.harvard.edu/files/dobbin/files/2009_ajs_arrighi.pdf)
Discussion
Themes in the book and the reviews of the book:
See: On the Historical Relationship Between Military Technology and Industrial Production
Hegemony vs Domination
Burak GÜREL & Eylem TAYLAN:
" Arrighi defines hegemony with reference to the works of Antonio Gramsci and Ranajit Guha. According to Arrighi, Gramsci viewed hegemony as a specific combination of coercion and consent, which enables the dominant classes “to present their rule as credibly serving not just their interests but those of subordinate groups as well” (Arrighi, 2007: 150). On the other hand, “when such credibility is lacking or wanes, hegemony deflates into sheer domination,” (Arrighi, 2007: 150) which Guha identifies as a “dominance without hegemony” (Guha, 1992, as cited in Arrighi, 2007: 150). This is also true for the interstate system where a hegemonic state could establish its hegemony through a combination of military force (preferably by the other states or agencies on behalf of the hegemonic state) and consent which gives the hegemonic state a capacity to lead the interstate system. ASB argues that the character of the US power shifted from hegemony to domination without hegemony. Arrighi links the economic crises and the crises of hegemony of subsequent world hegemons through a historical analysis of their signal and terminal crises. In other words, he provides a structural analysis of hegemony and the crisis of hegemony in the world system rather than just making a conjunctural analysis based on the failures and mistakes of the leaders of the powerful states."
More information
More at:
- by Eric Sheppard, https://www.jstor.org/stable/27806897