[
4 ] The Great Transformation
whatever measures it took impaired the self-regulation of the market,
disorganized industrial life, and thus endangered society in yet an-
other way It was this dilemma which forced the development of the
market system into a definite groove and finally disrupted the social
organization based upon it.
Such an explanation of one of the deepest crises in man's history
must appear as all too simple. Nothing could seem more inept than
the attempt to reduce a civilization, its substance and ethos, to a hard-
and-fast number of institutions; to select one of them as fundamental
and proceed to argue the inevitable self-destruction of civilization on
account of some technical quality of its economic organization. Civi-
lizations, like life itself, spring from the interaction of a great number
of independent factors which are not, as a rule, reducible to cir-
cumscribed institutions. To trace the institutional mechanism of the
downfall of a civilization may well appear as a hopeless endeavor.
Yet it is this we are undertaking. In doing so, we are consciously ad-
justing our aim to the extreme singularity of the subject matter. For
the civilization of the nineteenth century was unique precisely in that
it centerd on a definite institutional mechanism.
No explanation can satisfy which does not account for the sudden-
ness of the cataclysm. As if the forces of change had been pent up for a
century, a torrent of events is pouring down on mankind. A social
transformation of planetary range is being topped by wars of an en-
tirely new type in which a
score of states have crashed, and the con-
tours of new empires are emerging out of a sea of blood. But this fact
of demoniac violence is merely superimposed on a swift, silent cur-
rent of change which swallows up the past often without so much as a
ripple on the surface! A reasoned analysis of the catastrophe must ac-
count both for the tempestuous action and the quiet dissolution.
Ours is not a historical work; what we are searching for is not a
convincing sequence of outstanding events, but an explanation of
their trend in terms of human institutions. We shall feel free to dwell
on scenes of the past with the sole object of throwing light on matters
of the present; we shall make detailed analyses of critical periods and
almost completely disregard the connecting stretches of time; we shall
encroach upon the field of several disciplines in the pursuit of a single
aim.
First we shall deal with the collapse of the international system. We
shall try to show that the balance-of-power system could not ensure