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Richard Lachmann (May 17, 1956 – September 19, 2021) was an American sociologist and specialist in comparative historical sociology who was a professor at University at Albany, SUNY.
Lachmann is best known as the author of the book, "Capitalists in Spite of Themselves", which has been awarded several prizes, including the American Sociological Association Distinguished Scholarly Book Award. In this work, Lachmann shows that relations among elites rather than class struggle, or any other set of factors proposed by other historians, primarily determined the creation or non-creation of capitalism in early modern Europe. Later, he used his elite conflict theory to analyze the political crisis in the United States. He died after a heart attack in 2021 at the age of 65.
Lachmann graduated from the United Nations International School becoming one among the first cohorts to receive an International Baccalaureate. He attended Princeton as an undergraduate and Harvard for his PhD, studying historical sociology at both universities. He met his partner, Arlyn Miller, at Princeton. They had two children together.
"Why did soldiers line up to die in imperialist wars? Why did workers put up with bad wages and alienating and dangerous labor? Even then, well before the piggishness of the Reagan and Bill Clinton eras and still far from the unrestrained and boastful viciousness of the current George W. Bush administration, I was stunned at what I read in the New York Times (and even more so when I saw the fuller reality presented in small leftist outlets). On many days I would walk outside after reading about the latest outrages and wonder more than half seriously: Where are the guillotines?"
Lachmann recalled that after reading Marx's "Das Kapital" he had the feeling that in this work were the answers to his questions, in the form of historical analysis. The young scientist was highly influenced by modernization theory, which then was the dominant approach in Princeton University's sociology department. By his own admission, it took him a few years to realize that modernization is not the same as capitalism. At Harvard, which gave graduate students almost total freedom to design and pursue their own research projects, Lachmann could focus on the question that interested him most: the genesis of capitalism. He believed that only if we understand the origins of this social formation, can we fully understand the current trends of its development.Lígia Ferro. Building bridges across time and space (Richard Lachmann interviewed by Lígia Ferro) : англ. // Sociologia, Problemas e Práticas. — 2014. — No. 74. — P. 135—139. — DOI:10.7458/SPP2014743204 Having familiarized with the works of the major historians and sociologists who have studied the subject of the genesis of capitalism, Lachmann came to the conclusion that none of their works offered a convincing explanation for the differences in capitalist development across nations. As he developed his own theory, Lachmann realized "that Marx and later asked the right questions but that the answers required a heavy dose of Weberian and elitist analysis".
The book was highly appreciated by both sociologists and historians. Peter Bearman praised the originality of ideas and its logical, well-structured presentation.Bearman, Peter. Review: // Contemporary Sociology. — 1988. — Vol. 17, no. 6. — P. 758—759. Retha Warnicke commended the work with the words: "his provocative and clearly stated analysis responds to questions left unanswered by the other theories".Warnicke, Retha. Review: // International Review of Modern Sociology. — 1988. — Vol. 18, no. 1. — P. 86—87. The most critical was a well-known British historian, an expert on agrarian history of England, Joan Thirsk, whom Lachmann had critiqued in the book for neglecting to take the high inflation of that era into her analysis. Thirsk chided the author for relying on secondary sources and a stubborn desire to subordinate historical facts to sociological concepts.Thirsk, Joan. Review: // The Economic History Review, New Series. — 1989. — Vol. 42, no. 3. — P. 406—407.
Lachmann consistently traces elite and class conflicts to explain the outcomes in each of his cases. He shows how the fights against the French and Burgundian kings, the German emperors and the Roman Papacy, combined with geopolitical stalemate to provide the conditions for the autonomy of the Italian cities in the Renaissance, and then at the local level conflict elites launched the development of urban trade and efficient business techniques by defining the institutional specificity of mature institutions and the limits of urban capitalism. Critically important here is the case of Florence: cut off from the super-profits of transnational trafficking, Florentine elite were forced to focus on the production of wool and silk, as well as on the financial support of the Pope. Florence was marked by centuries of elite and factional conflict that periodically led elites to "lower" themselves and ally with hierarchically subordinate groups. As a result, power passed from the aristocracy to the patricians, and then to the new elites, each of which, seeking hegemony, tried to block the next phase of the conflict. The desire of elite to consolidate its hegemony stabilized social structure and become an obstacle on the path of capitalist development. Similarly, elite conflict resulted in a rapid stasis in Habsburg Spain that prevented kings or metropolitan elites from exerting decisive control over their empire and the revenues it produced, thereby blocking every possibility of capitalist development. Dutch elites quickly grabbed trade routes and colonies but their settlement through Contracts of Correspondence immobilized resources and power preventing the reallocation of military force needed to defend their commercial hegemony from Britain. Wealth and entrepreneurship were diverted into finance and elites focused on controlling state offices that became the main source of wealth and the site from which they could manipulate the prices of government bonds.
Analyzing the transformation of the British and French elites, Lachmann considers the Reformation as a moment of "strategic breakthrough" in European history, but, unlike Weber, sees this process not so much as an ideological, but rather as a structural transformation. At the end of these processes of elite conflict, two sorts of absolutist states emerged: "horizontal" in England and "vertical" in France. were unable to overcome the clergy and magnates at the national level and were forced to create an apparatus of multiple 'state' offices in an effort to manipulate competing elites in their struggle for lucrative positions. This generated a power structure different from that in England, where the crown achieved dominance at the national level at the cost of severing links down to local offices. Two horizontal elites, crown and gentry, each controlled a level of social structure, but the crown was unable to reach down to the local level to exert power or extract resources, leading to its defeat in the Civil War. The gentry took advantage of the crown's weakness, and, as Lachmann showed in From Manor to Market, established capitalist relations in the countryside.
British historian Rosemary Hopcroft and American sociologist Jack Goldstone have criticized this book. Hopcroft noted two important points: 1) it was absolutely unclear for her why the gentry, occupying a dominant position in the society, did not become rentiers, but instead continued to participate actively in the production of surplus product; 2) secondly, according to Hopcroft, capitalism had the strongest positions in that places where there had always been few of communal rights to land and control of the elites has been extremely weak.Hopcroft, Rosemary L. Review: // Comparative & Historical Sociology. The newsletter of the Comparative and Historical Sociology Section of the American Sociological Association. — 2003. — Vol. 15, no. 1.
Jack Goldstone, a leading representative of the California School, stating that until the mid-19th century, there was no difference in the agricultural development of Europe and China, considered almost all Lachmann arguments inconclusive, including his analysis of the difference between horizontal and the vertical absolutism. Goldstone rejects Lachmann's claim that elite conflict was the driving force of social change and instead suggests that European development took off only after an "ideological and epistemological break", which is more related to the fields of science and philosophy than to the economy or elite and class relations.Goldstone, Jack A. Review: // Comparative & Historical Sociology. The newsletter of the Comparative and Historical Sociology Section of the American Sociological Association. — 2003. — Vol. 15, no. 2. — P. 6—11
Lachmann found that since the 1980s national and state level elites combined through mergers and changes in governmental regulations. This unity allowed elites to block state reforms and to appropriate ever more resources from the mass of Americans while starving the state of revenues. This elite autarky parallels in crucial ways the elite structures of Spain, France, and the Netherlands when they failed to achieve or lost hegemony. He argued that even if a new hegemon doesn't emerge, the U.S. will not be able to mobilize the resources and channel state power to ensure that it can govern the world geo-politically or manage the global economy. The U.S. created financial bubble that led to the 2008 crash is likely to be repeated in different forms, further undermining America's ability to finance hegemonic projects or to win the consent of other nations to its policies.Lachmann, Richard. The Roots of American Decline : англ. // Contexts. — 2009. — Vol. 10, no. 1. — P. 44—49.Lachmann, Richard. From consensus to paralysis in the United States, 1960–2010 : англ. // Political Power and Social Theory. — 2014. — Vol. 26. — P. 195—233. — DOI:10.1108/S0198-8719(2014)0000026007.
In his book, "What is the historical sociology?" Lachmann reviews and critiques historical studies of the origins of capitalism, revolutions and social movements, states, empires, inequality, and gender. He discusses how the strengths and weaknesses of work in those areas suggest ways in which historical sociology can be developed most fruitfully. Lachmann was researching media coverage of war deaths in the United States and Israel from the 1960s to the present.
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