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The Luddites understood, from the start, that the mechanical loom was only a symptom and instrument of a larger change. Loom smashing was as much a form of publicity as a vehicle of policy. Indeed, Sale writes, "the workers' grievance … never was just the machinery," but rather a new "political economy and the … principles of unrestrained profit and competition and innovation at its heart." The new political economy was destroying an older moral economy based in communities, where economic questions like value and moral questions like integrity were answered by common consent and tradition. In the new economy, such issues, insofar as they had meaning, were determined by capital and the good of machinery, and imposed on the workers by force.
And force it was. As is often true in public uprisings, the tools of real violence lay in the hands of the authorities. There was, as Sale shows, no general conspiracy among the Luddites. There was not even a common political program: most Luddites were so far from being revolutionaries that they hoped Parliament would help them. Instead, Parliament attacked them with an army larger than it sent to Spain to fight Napoleon.
The disparity of forces in this domestic war can be seen in what it cost. Beginning in November 1811 in the "Luddite triangle" in Britain's industrial midlands, the Luddites smashed and burned perhaps £100,000 worth of stocking frames, mills, and houses. The government spent roughly 15 times that much to put the Luddites down—that is, in specific terms, to isolate, capture, and sentence about 100 men out of the thousands who had risen.
Sale has told his story well; his research disposes of many myths about the Luddites. What is harder to ascertain is whether the Luddites were being at all realistic in their rebellion against the new industrialism. Were the conditions all that bad? Here there is, as Sale says, a small academic industry devoted to interpreting inadequate data in conservative or liberal ways. But the debate is not merely academic. We base present decisions on our estimates of the past.
A writer like Paul Johnson will draw on scholarly skepticism about the social observations of Engels and others to support his own technological optimism.
Recognizing the project's difficulty, in any case, wielding his own knowledgeable skepticism, Sale has waded into the evidence, original documents as well as modern history. His final picture of industrialism's results is uncompromisingly grim. The Luddites were not, in his account, being melodramatic. If anything, they were moderate in responding to the degradation of life and work, the destruction of community; they were suffering.
What joins their predicament to ours, however, is less specifically social conditions than a common economic principle—the theory that constant technological innovation supported by capital provides, in the long run, a better society by increasing economic productivity. If this theory were correct, of course, there would be less reason in Luddite objections. But we must be careful in testing the theory: for one thing, we must disentangle it from accidental advantages. If it works, it must work apart from extraordinary exploitable resources (like America's) or an empire (like Britain's) built to provide labor and markets at the point of a gun. Such accidents cannot be evidence for the theory; indeed, they show only that it needs inputs of energy and people it cannot provide for itself.
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