There are two different questions here: one concerns an appreciation of the flexibility of capitalist development and the other is the recurrence of patterns, and the extent to which these are determined by contingency or necessity. On the first, the adaptability of capitalism: this is partly related to my personal experience in business, as a young man. Initially I tried to run my father’s business, which was relatively small; then I did a dissertation on my grandfather’s business, which was bigger—a medium-sized company. Then I quarrelled with my grandfather and went into Unilever, which in terms of employees was the second-largest multinational at the time. So I had the luck—from the point of view of analysing the capitalist business enterprise—of going into successively larger firms, which helped me understand that you cannot talk about capitalist enterprises in general, because the differences between my father’s business, my grandfather’s business and Unilever were incredible. For example, my father spent all his time going to visit customers in the textile districts, and studying the technical problems that they had with their machines. Then he would go back to the factory and discuss the problems with his engineer; they would customize the machine for the client. When I tried to run this business, I was totally lost; the whole thing was based on skills and knowledge that were part of my father’s practice and experience. I could go around and see the customers, but I couldn’t solve their problems—I couldn’t even really understand them. So it was hopeless. In fact, in my youth, when I used to say to my father, ‘If the Communists come, you are going to be in trouble’, he said, ‘No, I’m not going to be in trouble, I’ll continue to do what I’m doing. They need people who do this.’

When I closed my father’s business, and went into my grandfather’s, it was already more of a Fordist organization. They were not studying the customers’ problems, they were producing standardized machines; either the customers wanted them or they didn’t. Their engineers were designing machines on the basis of what they thought there would be a market for, and telling the customers: this is what we have. It was embryonic mass production, with embryonic assembly lines. When I went to Unilever, I barely saw the production side. There were many different factories—one was making margarine, another soap, another perfumes. There were dozens of different products, but the main site of activity was neither the marketing organization nor the place of production, but finance and advertising. So, that taught me that it’s very hard to identify one specific form as ‘typically’ capitalist. Later, studying Braudel, I saw that this idea of the eminently adaptable nature of capitalism was something that you could observe historically.