Revolução Industrial: mais algo a considerar

Via Economist's View: links for 2008-06-07 acedi a esta nota no İyigün Blog: You Say You Want a Revolution?. Transcrevo-a abaixo: é sobre, de novo, as causas da Revolução Industrial, relembrando um aspecto que terá tido, também, um papel importante na conformação desse período - penso que tem outras implicações [embora tão subtis (serão?) que daria muito trabalho estar a explicá-las agora].

"You Say You Want a Revolution? Then empower the eccentrics. At least, if your are interested in the revolution of an economic kind.

In an earlier post, I had discussed the anticipated arrival of Joel Mokyr's new book,
The Enlightened Economy: An Economic History of Britain, 1700-1850 (Yale University Press and Penguin Press). I have now had the opportunity to peruse a polished draft and I have to say it is every bit as good as I expected it to be.

In our unending pursuit to answer ‘why the West?’, ‘why Britain?’ and ‘why not the rest?, we now have a long checklist of explanations, such as the Reformation, geography, institutions, sociopolitical fragmentation, human capital accumulation and even genetic evolution. Somehow along the way, however, we lost interest in Enlightenment. The book does not deny that some of these factors were important, but reminds us that this has been a case of ‘group think’. It lays out a painstaking case for how Industrial Enlightenment transformed the social, political and economic culture of Britain between 1700 and 1850.The Industrial Revolution elevated technological change to center-stage
and made it the driver of modern, sustainable economic growth.

But how did that happen?Joel leaves no doubt: "intellectual innovations could only occur in the kind of tolerant societies in which sometimes outrageous ideas proposed by
highly eccentric men would not entail a violent response against "heresy" and "apostasy".

By our standards, Britain in the eighteenth century may not seem very tolerant. But after 1680 or so, few Britons got into serious trouble because they proposed new ideas about theology or chemistry that went against the grain... Issues of ideology and knowledge are decided by the rhetorical criteria that society sets up for persuasion: what kind of evidence and logic are permissible, what kind of experiment is decisive, when is a "proof" correct and what is meant by a "true statement." These decisions were to play a growing role in the history of knowledge in the eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries."