LAUD, THE LEVELLERS, AND THE VIRTUOSI 



ciently realised. Does not the shift of emphasis from the mediaeval 

 state, carrying out in practice the detailed instructions of theology, 

 Regina Scientiarum, to the seventeenth-century capitalists, men like 

 Sir Thomas Gresham, pressing for the removal of every inhibiting 

 influence on financial transactions — does not this shift of emphasis 

 mirror in the economic sphere the transition from the four elements of 

 the aristotelians and the three primary substances of the alchemists to 

 the ''corpuscularian or mechanical philosophy" of Gassendi and Boyle? 

 "No one can deny," wrote the foreign merchants of Antwerp, about 

 1590, to Philip II, in a protest against an attempt to interfere with 

 the liberty of exchange transactions, "that the cause of the prosperity 

 of this city is the freedom granted to those who trade here." And the 

 unrestricted competitiveness of later capitalism, the continual demand 

 that the activities of the State should be restricted to the bare minimum 

 necessary to safeguard property, has something so obviously atomistic 

 about it that the nineteenth century seems surprisingly late for the 

 appearance of the codifier of chemical atomism, John Dalton. To- 

 day we are living in the time of the dissolution of this atomic form . 

 of society. 



Of course, anarchic social atomism still (1941) finds theoretical 

 support. M. Polanyi^ seems to take the view that the laws of the 

 "fortuitous concourse of particles" have the status of laws eternally 

 applicable to human society. He first shows without difficulty that 

 "order spontaneously arising from the mutual interactions of particles 

 (dynamic order)," as in the crystallisation of several solutes simul- 

 taneously present in a system, much exceeds, in the inorganic world, 

 anything that "mechanically imposed order (corporate order)" could 

 perform. He then from this suddenly assumes the structure of com- 

 petitive atomistic capitalism as the analogue of this dynamic order 

 at the higher social level, perfect, ideal, and unalterable; apparently 

 quite unconscious that the problem is what precisely are the mutual 

 interactive forces between human "particles." Those who consider 

 that anarchic social atomism has no longer a progressive role to play 

 in human evolution do so precisely because they see that there are 

 important interactive forces the action of which is inhibited by this 

 system. 



The fundamental drawback of atomistic capitalism^ is that its parts 



^ In Economica, 1941, 8, 428, an article full of the most interesting fallacies. 

 2 Long after making this correlation between atomism and capitalism, I found that 

 it had been described by others also, e.g. A. M. Deborin in the Marx Memorial Volume 



87 



