This kind of attempt to reconstruct the "logic of peasant economies" is explicitly presented by Wickham as a practice of "model-building." The "peasant mode of production" emerges as an answer to the question about what would have happened if peasants did not have to give a surplus to aristocrats because aristocracies had so weakened in the general "involution and abatement of the Roman Empire" (as Wickham might rephrase Gibbon's famous title). His answer, spun out over dozens of pages, is that in the absence of external coercion, people would work less, production would decline, technological innovation would be stifled, and family size would shrink to accommodate lowered food resources. And, of course, in the absence of demand, the quality of goods produced would also sink. This theoretical model, Wickham reports, is exactly what we find in the ground.
Tuesday, July 22, 2008
A smart guy, writing on the emergence of the new world from out of the old, illustrates why conservatives tend to think they understand the reality of things a lot better than liberals do: