Demythologizing Innovation: Steven Usselman, Regulating Railroad Innovation

摘要

In the United States, economic and business history and a great deal of the history of technology have been dogged by claims that market forces automatically yield efficiency, rationality, utility, and innovation: "Build a better mousetrap and the world will beat a path to your door." Such claims posit straight-line linkages between good ideas and their realization; whenever that does not happen, look for the weasel (or should I say rat?) who upset the natural order. The resulting literature is often adversarial, more interested in scoring points than explaining complex phenomena. It serves badly as a platform on which to explore the extraordinary interconnections that occur when creative minds produce tools, technologies, systems of technologies, businesses, industries, commercial-social complexes, political economies―in short, the history of technology in context over time. Steven Usselman's Regulating Railroad Innovation: Business, Technology, and Politics in America, 1840-1920 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002, $65) calls historians back to what we do best: empirical study of what happened and how people tried to deal with it in their own times. Such is the historian's unique contribution to scholarly inquiry, and in this case it repays any reader's investment many, many times over. Those of you who have taken the "literary turn" bear with me for a moment. I know we construct these cultural realities and impose hegemonic narratives on hopelessly imperfect documents; but when confronting flat-footed positivists left over from the nineteenth century we cannot afford to join you yet on the other side of the postmodern looking glass.