Published by:  Master Artisan
Author:  Master Artisan (follow this link for previous authors)
Copyright (c) 2006 Master Artisan
   
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Despite its advantages for agricultural and artisan producers, the guild became a target of much criticism towards the end of the 1700s and the beginning of the 1800s. They were believed to oppose free trade and hinder technological innovation, technology transfer and business development. According to several accounts of this time, guilds became increasingly involved in simple territorial struggles against each other and against free practitioners of their arts, but the neutrality of these claims is doubted. It may be propaganda.
 
Two of the most outspoken critics of the guild system were Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Adam Smith, and all over Europe a tendency to oppose government control over trades in favour of laissez-faire free market systems was growing rapidly and making its way into the political and legal system. Even Karl Marx (not normally in league with Adam Smith) in his Communist Manifesto criticized the guild system for its rigid gradation of social rank and the relation of oppressor/oppressed entailed by this system. From this time comes the low regard in which some people hold the guilds to this day. For example, Smith writes in The Wealth of Nations (Book I, Chapter X, paragraph 72):

It is to prevent this reduction of price, and consequently of wages and profit, by restraining that free competition which would most certainly occasion it, that all corporations, and the greater part of corporation laws, have been established. (...) and when any particular class of artificers or traders thought proper to act as a corporation without a charter, such adulterine guilds, as they were called, were not always disfranchised upon that account, but obliged to fine annually to the king for permission to exercise their usurped privileges.
In part due to their own inability to control unruly corporate behavior, the tide turned against the guilds.

Because of industrialization and modernization of the trade and industry, and the rise of powerful nation-states that could directly issue patent and copyright protections — often revealing the trade secrets — the guilds' power faded. After the French Revolution they fell in most European nations through the 1800s, as the guild system was disbanded and replaced by free trade laws. By that time, many former handicraft workers had been forced to seek employment in the emerging manufacturing industries, using not closely-guarded techniques but standardized methods controlled by corporations.

This was not uniformly viewed as a public good: Karl Marx criticized the alienation of the worker from the products of work that this created, and the exploitation possible since materials and hours of work were closely controlled by the owners of the new, large scale means of production.


References

  • Dolven, Arne S.: Vocational Education in Europe in Dolven, Arne S. and Gunnar Pedersen (eds): Fagopplaeringsboka 2004, Oslo: Kommuneforlaget 2004 (in Norwegian)
  • Eggerer, Elmar W.: Sworn Brethren and Sistren — Britische Gilden und Zünfte von der normannischen Eroberung bis 1603, München 1993 (in German)
  • Söderlund, Ernst: Den svenska arbetarklassens historia — Hantverkarna II frihetstiden och den gustavianska tiden Stockholm 1949 (in Swedish)
  • Rouche, Michel, "Private life conquers state and society," in A History of Private Life vol I, Paul Veyne, editor, Harvard University Press 1987 ISBN 0-674-39974-9
  • Thomas Weyrauch: Handwerkerorganisationen in der vorindustriellen Stadt. Wettenberg/Germany (VVB Laufersweiler) 1996 ISBN 3-930954-02-8
  • Thomas Weyrauch: Craftsmen and their Associations in Asia, Africa and Europe. Wettenberg/Germany (VVB Laufersweiler) 1999 ISBN 3-89687-537-X
  • Craft, Trade or Mystery: Part One — Britain from Gothic Cathedrals to the Tolpuddle Conspirators By Dr Bob James (revised 2002)