ABSTRACT
The success and failure of nations to compete is a contentious theme in the field of economic history. In The Gifts of Athena Joel Mokyr (2002) makes an argument for the relationship between institutions and useful knowledge. By the former, he refers to ‘the trustworthiness of government, the functionality of the family as the basic unit, security and the rule of law, a reliable system of contract enforcement, and the attitudes of the elite in power toward individual initiative and innovation’ (2002: 285). Mokyr claims that ‘propositional knowledge’ has been a driving engine of technological innovation in the modern ‘Western’ era. Propositional knowledge, he argues, is different from ‘prescriptive’ knowledge, which is codified as techniques (techne). Propositional knowledge is epistemic: it observes, classifies, measures and catalogues, as well as establishing regularities, principles and natural laws. Propositional knowledge therefore seeks knowledge about ‘what’ and ‘how’. It is concerned with both process and progress, and in this respect it is transformational. To this we might add culture. The economist Eric Jones (2005) argues that Europe institutionalised a form of creativity that depended for its energy on social competition, the foundation of which was its underlying pluralism.
