Hoover Institution Press: The Second Twentieth Century: How the Information Revolution Shapes Business, States, and Nations, by Jean-Jacques Rosa

Thursday, October 26, 2006
Stanford—The worldwide wave of democratization and the nearly total disappearance of communism at the end of the twentieth century were major economic and political changes of our time. These earth-shaking changes lead us to raise the question, Why now? Why did these developments occur as they did, when they did?
In The Second Twentieth Century: How the Information Revolution Shapes Business, States, and Nations (Hoover Institution Press, 2006), Jean-Jacques Rosa outlines his view that, during most of its course, the twentieth century was basically a time of universal expansion for large organizations—both firms and states—and then, during its last third, a time of dismantling and fragmentation for the same giant organization. “The aim of this book,” Rosa says, “is to provide a rational economic explanation of the great cycle of organization that so profoundly affected and shaped the evolution of human societies during the twentieth century.”
Rosa explains why:
  • Democracy was abandoned by nearly every country in the world between the 1920s and 1960s.
  • The information revolution has led to the downfall of hierarchical giant corporations and to an unremitting trend toward “downsizing.”
  • Totalitarian regimes prospered in the 1950s but began to rapidly fall behind democracies in the 1980s.
  • Secessionist and regionalist movements will continue to multiply throughout the world.
  • The European Union is ultimately doomed to failure.
  • Terrorism is here to stay for as long as the disintegration of large state hierarchies continues to be determined by the information revolution.
Jean-Jacques Rosa is a professor of economics and finance at Institut d’Etudes Politiques (Sciences Po, Paris) and dean of the MBA Sciences Po Program, which he launched there in 1993. He is a member of the Mont Pélerin Society, the American Economic Association, and the American Finance Association.
The Second Twentieth Century: How the Information Revolution Shapes Business, States, and Nations (translation from the French)
by Jean-Jacques Rosa
ISBN: 0-8179-4742-6           $15.00, paperback
376 pages                            October 2006
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