Editing Guild (section)

=== Fall of the guilds ===
[[Sheilagh Ogilvie|Ogilvie]] (2004) argues that guilds negatively affected quality, skills, and innovation. Through what economists now call "[[rent-seeking]]" they imposed deadweight losses on the economy. Ogilvie argues they generated limited positive externalities and notes that industry began to flourish only after the guilds faded away. Guilds persisted over the centuries because they redistributed resources to politically powerful merchants. On the other hand, Ogilvie agrees, guilds created "social capital" of shared norms, common information, mutual sanctions, and collective political action. This social capital benefited guild members, even as it arguably hurt outsiders.<ref>{{cite journal |first=Sheilagh |last=Ogilvie |title=Guilds, efficiency, and social capital: evidence from German proto-industry |journal=Economic History Review |volume=57 |issue=2 |pages=286–333 |date=May 2004 |doi=10.1111/j.1468-0289.2004.00279.x |s2cid=154328341 |url=https://www.cesifo-group.de/DocDL/cesifo_wp820.pdf |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20190427035630/http://www.cesifo-group.de/DocDL/cesifo_wp820.pdf |archive-date=2019-04-27 |url-status=live }}</ref>

[[File:Tinguild.jpg|thumb|right|An example of the last of the British Guilds meeting rooms {{circa|1820}}]]
The guild system became a target of much criticism towards the end of the 18th century and the beginning of the 19th century. Critics argued that they hindered [[free trade]] and [[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.

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 grew rapidly and made its way into the political and legal systems. Many people who participated in the French Revolution saw guilds as a last remnant of [[feudalism]]. The [[d'Allarde Law]] of 2 March 1791 suppressed the guilds in France.<ref>{{cite book |last1=Soboul |first1=Alfred |title=The French Revolution 1787-1799 |date=1989 |publisher=Unwin Hyman |location=London |page=190}}</ref> In 1803 the Napoleonic Code banned any coalition of workmen whatsoever.<ref name="Graves1939">{{cite book|author=Sally Graves|title=A History of Socialism|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=J9tGAAAAIAAJ|year=1939|publisher=Hogarth Press|page=35}}</ref> Smith wrote in ''[[The Wealth of Nations]]'' (Book I, Chapter X, paragraph 72):

{{blockquote|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.}}

[[Karl Marx]] in his ''[[The Communist Manifesto|Communist Manifesto]]'' also criticized the guild system for its rigid gradation of social rank and what he saw as the relation of oppressor and oppressed entailed by this system. It was the 18th and 19th centuries that saw the beginning of the low regard in which some people hold the guilds to this day. In part due to their own inability to control unruly [[corporation|corporate]] behavior, the tide of public opinion 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 &mdash; often revealing the [[trade secret]]s &mdash; the guilds' power faded. After the [[French Revolution]] they gradually fell in most European nations over the course of the 19th century, as the guild system was disbanded and replaced by laws that promoted free trade. As a consequence of the decline of guilds, many former handicraft workers were forced to seek employment in the emerging manufacturing industries, using not closely guarded techniques formerly protected by guilds, but rather the standardized methods controlled by [[corporation]]s.
Interest in the medieval guild system was revived during the late 19th century, among far-right circles. Fascism in Italy (among other countries) implemented [[Corporatism#Fascist corporatism|corporatism]], operating at the national rather than city level, to try to imitate the corporatism of the Middle Ages.