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
-30-
