‘This is a book about family and business, success and disappointment, love and discord…’ So opens the prologue to ‘Dynasties’, whose essential thrust is that relationships within dynastic families not only shape individual firms, but also have a profound impact on the national and global economy. Landes’s background as Professor Emeritus of History and Economics at Harvard suggests that his work will favour the academic field of ‘pure’ economics. But what ‘Dynasties’ shows is his ability to address economic history not through a codified historiographical system of political economy, Smithsonian hypothesis or Marxism, but in the fascinating light of human and social relations. Hence we gain insights into the paranoid world of Henry Ford and the hypocritical and vindictive private life of
the Rockefellers.
The impact of personal idiosyncrasies on family firms is undeniable. Rockefeller paid his children ten cents to sharpen pencils, while Ford refused to employ university graduates, possessed pacifist tendencies and had a pathological fear of innovation. Yet Landes somehow fails to crystallise a single overriding hypothesis. While the focus on his chosen families’ biographies sustains the reader’s interest, the final impression is not of profound scrutiny so much as observation supported by anecdote. Landes’s remark that ‘in some ways, all dynasties are alike’ is an inanity unworthy of the author of such rigorous works as ‘The Wealth and Poverty of Nations’ and ‘The Unbound Prometheus’.
‘Dynasties’ is an amusing book, but anyone seeking a more meticulous explanation of the phenomenon of the family business would do well to ignore it and skip to the admirable bibliography.
