Introduction

‘I do not know’, Alexis de Tocqueville says in Democracy in America, ‘if one can cite a single manufacturing and commercial nation – from the Tyrians to the Florentine and the English, – that has not also been free. Therefore a close tie and a necessary relation exists between those two things: freedom and industry.’ Tocqueville expresses what could be called a development truism of half a thousand years from late Renaissance city-states to Marshall Plan and Havana Charter. Indeed, during the Enlightenment, civilization and democracy were understood, through the analysis of people like Montesquieu and Voltaire among many others, as products of a specific type of economic structure. When German economist Johan Jacob Meyenn stated in 1770 that ‘it is known that a primitive people does not improve their customs and institutions later to find useful industries, but the other way around’, he expressed something which could be considered common sense at the time. We find the same idea – that civilization is created by industrialization or, to put it more specifically, by the presence of increasing returns activities – in the nineteenth century in thinkers across the whole political spectrum from Abraham Lincoln to Karl Marx.