Bourgeois Deeds: How Capitalism Made Modernity 1700-1848

Chapter 13:

And So the Modern English Bourgeoisie

Could Not “Rise”

The chapter is very raw and confused at present.
The elite continued to sneer at the bourgeoisie. It is by now widely realized that the 16^th-century in Europe, with its increasingly literate and even rhetorically cultivated elite, came to view the keeping and finding out of secrets as a suitable occupation for a nobility recently disemployed by the invention of peasant armies with guns. Compare the making over of the samurai in Japan a century later into a Confucian bureaucracy in support of the Tokugawa state—though the samurai remained a bureaucracy with the right to use their swords on commoners at will, the commoners themselves having in the meantime been disarmed. In Japan and especially in Europe not swords but talk became the chief weapon of class. The English gentleman by 1600 is eloquent, not a mere fighter. . NNN speaks of the "displacement of masculine agency from [military] prowess to [diplomatic and political] persuasion" in the 1560s and 1580s in England and France.²⁷⁴ Lord Essex’s last communication with Elizabeth before she had him executed for treason was a poem. No English lord during the Hundred Years War would have written poems to his ex-mistress and queen. Most of them left writing to clerks.

Jardine notes the suspicion generated if the intelligence is in the wrong hands: "The figure in the [Elizabethan] drama of the diabolical merchant-usurer-intelligencer is. . . a consolidated cultural manifestation of such an unease concerning mercantilism and deferred profit."²⁷⁵

Alan Stewart summarizes it as "there were in early modern England dramatic uncertainties about the power of information and those who possessed it. "²⁷⁶ Literally "dramatic": they were the impulses behind Elizabethan plays. The secrets of merchants in particular were detested. "The taint of usury constrained mercantile activities" (Jardine 1996, 107).

Lynne Magnussson 1999, p. 124:

Jean-Christophe Agnew has argued in the marxisant way usual in departments of literature that the Elizabethans were right to be suspicious of markets. From the late 16^th to the middle of the 18^th century “a volatile and placeless market” caused what he calls a “crisis of representation.” Agnew emphasizes how money—which he appears to think is a novelty in the England of 1600—eroded face-to-face transactions “into two mutually indifferent acts: exchange of commodities for money, exchange of money for commodities; purchase and sale. ” “Commodity exchange was gravitating during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries toward a set of operative rules that fostered a formal and instrumental indifference among buyers and sellers. ” A “logic of mutual indifference” kills reciprocity—shades of Karl Polanyi. as comes to define the exchange transaction.

This is quite mistaken, depending on a Polanyan account of the English economy before 1800 and a "competitive" reading of capitalism. Contrary to all this, the historian of the Bristol Merchant Venturers, David Sacks argues that “the new forms of commercial organization that emerged in Bristol during the sixteenth century depended … upon the existence … of close personal ties and the mutual trust they engendered among overseas merchants.'"²⁷⁷ Among gentlemen the "pleasuring style" of letters used a rhetoric of asked favors, granted instantly out of noble friendship. But merchants, too, used it most vigorously: there may have been a "logic" of mutual indifference, but like Hobbes' "logic" of the war of all against all it was a mere logic, not an actual practice of properly socialized merchants with complicated and risky deals in mind. As Sacks, puts it, “nothing could be further from the truth . . . [that] the mercantile profession . . . [was] composed of isolated individuals, each single-handedly confronting the pitfalls of the marketplace." [quoted in Magnusson 1999, p. 130] “Rather than plying their trades alone," Sacks continues, "Bristol's merchants habitually aided one another by dealing in partnership, by serving as factors and agents, by acting as intermediaries in the delivery and receipt of coin or goods, and by jointly transporting merchandise” (61). “Shakespeare,” writes Magnusson summarizes still another student of these matters, Michael Ferber, “brings together in Antonio's portrayal a number of ideological discourses incompatible with Elizabethan realities in order to invent and celebrate an idealized version of mercantile enterprise separated from finance capital and consonant with Christian and aristocratic values."²⁷⁸

Magnussson, however, disagrees that the fulsome and “aristocratic” rhetoric of friendship was foreign to merchants. To think otherwise is, as in Agnew, to let our desire to see merchants as "rational" get in the way of seeing them as humans. The merchant, especially abroad, was wise to use humility. John Browne's The Marchants Avizo (1590) advises the young merchant “in any case show your self lowly, courteous, and serviceable unto every person: for though you and many of us else may think, that too much lowliness bringeth contempt and disgrace unto us: yet … gentleness and humility … will both appease the anger and ill will of our enemies, and increase the good will of our friends.”²⁷⁹ This is not the advice that a young nobleman would get. Where is that amazing letter by a nobleman attacking a merchant?

Lisa Jardine notes the parallels between market deals and medieval fealty. In Marlowe's The Jew of Malta the Jew "Barabas's ability to generate wealth with apparent effortlessness, leading to a kind of intimacy based on dependency upon access to that wealth." Think of fair-weather friends clustering around your local millionaire. "Although ultimately this inevitably gives way to dislike and bad faith, it briefly simulates the kind of 'friendship' which was the basis for peer bonding and service of a more customary kind." That is, it looks liked feudal clientage, made sacred by oaths given and received. We can't help but feel that a business deal is a bond of trust. Humans are that way. We may know better in our more cynical moods, but "at the point of dissolution of such a bond, both parties experience the breakdown as betrayal," as though a purchase-and-sale agreement for a condominium were a blood bond of fealty.”²⁸⁰

* * * *
John Milton and commerce inserted here.

* * * *

Contempt in theatre. Susan Wells argues that a tension emerges in Jacobean “city comedies” between commerce—she views it in Marxist terms as being about “accumulation”—and celebration, which she views in Bakhtinian terms as solidarity in carnivalesque ceremonies (Wells 1981). Put a little pep into the Lord Mayor’s show. The tension, though, is that between prudence and faith, individual money-making and bourgeois solidarity, and characterizes every bourgeoisie in history. It’s nothing new, or old, no signal of a transition from traditional to bourgeois preoccupations. The occupation of every bourgeois is to be prudent and faithful, together.

Now as I said the contempt for trade is all impossible in practice. The city of London, by 1600 the **nth largest in Europe, on its way to being the largest by 1700, could not have lasted a week without the steady supply of vegetables from Kent and grain from Oxfordshire and coals from Northumberland, complements of the despised bourgeoisie. The story I am telling is easily mistaken for another old one, “the rise of the middle class.” That story says that the bourgeoisie always-already contains within itself modernity, and so by simply multiplying the number of such up-to-date folk we get the modern world. The story imparts a mechanical necessity to history, a sort of tipping point. Get bourgeois enough and you enter the modern world. Marxism talks like this, but so did an entire long generation of historians from the eve of World I until well after World War II.

Of course there’s something to it. Obviously a country like Russia, with a tiny middle class even in 1917, would not be able to modernize. . . except that it did. Obviously a country like Holland, replete with bourgeois from the 16^th century on, would lead the industrial revolution. . . except that it didn’t. Obviously a class like medieval lords wouldn’t show anything like a modern interest in profit. . . except that it did.

Anyone who thinks that the idea of the rise of the bourgeoisie has more than something to it needs to examine a classic article by the historian Jack Hexter, “The Myth of the Middle Class in Tudor England,” first presented in 1948, appearing in an early form in the journal Explorations in Economic History in 1950, and revised and extended in 1961. The myth he refers to particular to the Tudors is that the monarchs of England 1485-1603 favored the middle class. He quotes with approval Lawrence Stone who wrote in 1947, contrary to the “bourgeois Tudors” myth, that “all Tudor governments were the most resolute theoretical opponents of . . . those new bourgeois classes from which they are supposed to have derived most support.”²⁸¹ Some bourgeois were benefited; most were taxed, monopolized, disdained. The “privileges of the London clique” favored by Elizabeth, Hexter writes, “hung like an anchor on other sectors of the middle class” (p. 104). In the so-called Golden Speech to the House of Commons two years before her death Elizabeth apologized: “That my grants should be grievous unto my people, and oppressions to be privileged under color of our patents, our kingly dignity shall not suffer it. Yea, when I heard it I could give no rest unto my thoughts until I had reformed it.”²⁸²

But Hexter hits, too, a larger target, the use of a “rising middle class” to explain everything from earliest times to the present, homines novi in Rome and the character of Iraqis after Saddam Husein. “A large group of historians ascribes every major historical change in the Tudor period—and a long time before and after—to the desires, aspirations, ideals, and intentions of the rising middle class” (p. 72). One of the odder performances in contemporary historiography,” writes Hexter, “takes place when the social historians of each European century from the twelfth to the eighteenth . . . seize the curtain cord and unveil the great secret. ‘Behold,’ they say, in my century the middle-class nobodies rising into the aristocracy’”(p. 80-81).

The character of the English countryside, for example, was supposed to have been changed by the coming of merchants buying into country estates. But Hexter explodes the claim that Tudor times saw a novel amount of such intrusion of bourgeois values into the relation of lord and peasant. For one thing, it has always been thus, from Horace buying up his Sabine valley to Robert Redford buying up Montana. “Merchant transplantation to the land was a very ancient habit”(p. 94). Further, “many country folk needed no nudging from transplanted merchants to persuade them ‘to drive the most for their profit’.” And the social advantage in Tudor times, and for a long time after, was on the other side. The merchants facing a “flexible, vigorous, self-confident landed aristocracy” adopted country habits, not the other way around. “The parvenu. . . was the captive, not the conquer, of the countryside”(p. 95).

Hexter is hard on R. H. Tawney, whose “conception of the middle class has all the rigor of a rubber band”(Hexter 1961, p. 74). The middle class in Tawney’s writings sometimes includes prosperous yeoman, and sometimes does not. It sometimes includes the gentry, and sometimes not. It would seem that Tawney ran into trouble, as many historians have when entranced by such statistical terms as “the middle class” or “the middling sort,” into thinking of the bourgeoisie statistically rather than rhetorically. Rising in numbers or not, bourgeois values "rose." The rhetoric changed, and especially in the late 17^th century in England.


Chapter 13:

Demography, Contrary to Gregory Clark,

Could Not Overcome Disdain
A wonderfully clever version of the Statistical Rise of the Bourgeoisie has been asserted recently by the economic historian Gregory Clark, in his modestly sub-entitled “Brief Economic History of the World,” A Farewell to Alms (2007). In one-and-a-half pages towards the middle of his book Clark deals briskly with the numerous alternatives to his own materialist hypothesis: “Social historians may invoke the Protestant Reformation, . . . intellectual historians the Scientific Revolution. . . or the Enlightenment. . . . But a problem with these invocations of movers from outside the economic realm is that they merely push the problem back one step.”²⁸³

That’s a very good point. Always a good point. Yes, indeed, one may properly ask why “after more than a thousand years of entrenched Catholic dogma”—set aside that such a view of Christian theology might be a trifle lacking in nuance, and derivative in fact from anti-Catholic propaganda since Voltaire —“was an obscure German preacher able to effect such a profound change in the way ordinary people conceived religious beliefs?”

Clark, however, like doubting Pilate, does not stay for an answer. He readily admits that “ideologies may transform the economic attitudes of societies.” But he has no scientific interest in the causes of ideologies, unless they fit his notion of the material if social inheritance of acquired characteristics (“and perhaps even the genes,” says he). He has not cracked a book on the history of the Reformation, or on the Scientific Revolution, or on the Enlightenment. So to get rid of pesky cultural arguments he reaches at once for a Materialist Lemma: “But ideologies are themselves the expression of fundamental attitudes in part derived from the economic sphere.” Ah. Only the phrase “in part,” a fleeting tribute to intellectual balance, keeps his sentence from being orthodox historical materialism. As a pair of historical materialists put it in 1848: “Man’s ideas, views and conceptions, in one word, man’s consciousness, changes with every change in the conditions of his material existence, in his social relations and in his social life. What else does the history of ideas prove, than that intellectual production changes its character in proportion as material production is changed?”²⁸⁴ Or as Marx himself wrote eleven years later, “It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but, on the contrary, their social existence determines their consciousness.”²⁸⁵

In this respect, says Clark, we social scientists are all Marxists. Ideas are merely “the expression of fundamental attitudes in part derived from the economic sphere.” But the intellectually temperate phrase “in part” in Clark’s sentence is not cashed in. Rather, the check is immediately and absentmindedly torn up before our eyes. “There is, however,” Clark declares in the next sentence, “no need to invoke such a deus ex machine” as a change in ideology, because his own Chapter 6 fully explains on materialist grounds, with its own unexplained deus (high breeding rates among the rich), “the forces leading to a more patient, less violent, harder-working, more literate, and more thoughtful society,” namely, the bourgeois society we all so admire. In Clark’s book, that’s the end of ideology. Compare Anne McCant’s claim on slender evidence that a compassionate motivation for transfers from the Dutch wealthy to the poor is “unlikely” and “can be neither modeled nor rationally explained,” or Hugh Trevor Roper’s axiom that “in politics [prudence-only political ambition] is naturally by far the most potent” cause or indeed Engel’s claim that “interests, requirements, and demands of the various classes were concealed behind a religious screen.”²⁸⁶

Such evidence-poor side-remarks evince a historical rhetoric prevalent 1910-1980 that man’s consciousness changes with every change in the conditions of his material existence, and only with such changes. Thus Durkheim in The Elementary Forms of Religious Life in 1912 argued that ritual, not doctrine, was the heart of religion, because ritual performed the latent function of unifying a society. After all, what else does the history of ideas prove? That ideas don’t matter. Look at the history of stoicism or Protestantism or the abolition of slavery. All of them, you see, were motivated by material causes. Surely.

What Clark does pay out in hard cash is his materialist explanation of the change in English behavior. The argument goes like this:

For England. . . . 1250-1800. . . . the richest men had twice as many surviving children as the poorest. . . . The superabundant children of the rich had to. . . move down. . . . Craftsmen’s sons became laborers, merchant’s sons petty traders, large landholder’s sons smallholders. . . . Patience, hard work, ingenuity, innovativeness, education . . . were thus spread biologically throughout the population. . . . The embedding of bourgeois values into the culture . . . . [in] China and Japan did not move as rapidly because . . . their upper social strata were only modestly more fecund. . . . Thus there was not the same cascade of children from the educated classes down the social scale.. . . England’s advantage law in the rapid cultural, and potentially also genetic, diffusion of the values of the economically successful through society.²⁸⁷

The means of (re)production determine the superstructure. Social existence determines consciousness. Rich people proliferated, and by a social Darwinian struggle the poor and incompetent died out, leaving a master race of Englishmen with the consciousness to conquer the world.

Certainly it’s a bold hypothesis, and was bold when first articulated by social Darwinists in the century before last. Clark defends it energetically, if narrowly. In fact, if the hypothesis were true it would fit smoothly with my own argument that a rhetorical change made the modern world. Clark says that “there must have been informal, self-reinforcing social norms in all preindustrial societies that discouraged innovation.”²⁸⁸ Precisely: the norms of anti-bourgeois aristocrats and clerics did discourage capitalism, until the Venetians temporarily, the Dutch temporarily, and at last the English and Scots permanently repealed the norms.

Wrote John Milton, books and ideas “are as lively, and as vigorously productive, as those fabulous dragon's teeth; and being sown up and down, may chance to spring up armed men,” or wealthy merchants. The Levellers of the 1640s, writes David Wootton, “did not envisage a commercial society of the sort that was actually dominant in early Stuart England, a society of chartered companies and great capitalists; they hoped rather to establish a nation of shopkeepers.” All their other proposals, what Wootton calls an “extraordinary paradigm shift, which marks the birth of modern political theory”--manhood suffrage, a written constitution, non self-incrimination (freedom from waterboarding, we would say), right to counsel, freedom of religion, freedom of speech—took centuries to establish.²⁸⁹ But a definite move towards freedom of internal trade, for poor people as well as rich, a national of shopkeepers, actually came to pass in the lifetime of the last Leveller.

Clark, admitting though he does that such rhetoric may transform economic attitudes, would nonetheless wisely urge us to push the problem back one more step: why the rhetorical change? A very good point, I repeat, always a good point. It would imply, if we were committed to historical materialism, that some cause in the means of reproduction must be sought for the rhetoric. Under the Materialist Postulate a rhetoric never changes independent of economics—certainly not by causes within rhetoric itself such as the invention of the novel or the logic of Pascal-Nicole-Bayle in theology; not even by such causes as the political settlement in England of 1689 or the obsession with Protestant egalitarianism of all believers in Holland and Scotland from the mid-16^th century or the ordinary man’s involvement in politics in Holland, England, and Scotland 1585 to 1660 or the chances of war that left the New Model Army in possession of the English king and his country in 1645. Any non-economic and merely rhetorical change is always to be derived from the economic sphere. Intellectual production changes its character in proportion as material production is changed.

It’s been a long time, though, since even the Marxists depended on such a Postulate. The Italian Communist theorist Antonio Gramsci, for example, spoke of such “economism” as an error. While in prison in fascist Italy during the 1930s he wrote that “the claim (presented as an essential postulate of historical materialism) that every fluctuation of politics and ideology can be presented and expounded as an immediate expression of the structure, must be contested in theory as primitive infantilism.” Marxism, he contended, “is itself a superstructure, . . . the terrain on which determinate social groups [e.g. the proletariat] become conscious of their own social being.” The base and superstructure form a “historical bloc,” quite different from the imaginings of bourgeois theorists of economism in that the bloc is not mere theorizing but fulfills the dialectic of history. He claimed plausibly that in detailed political writings, such as The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon, Marx himself was cautious in using the Materialist Postulate, and gave room for accident, “internal necessities of an organizational character,” and the difficulty of identifying just what is at a particular moment the base or structure that is supposed to be limiting thought.²⁹⁰ Gramsci himself is chiefly important in the history of European socialism in denying that materialism works. And certainly Lenin, who established in 1902 the Bolshevik line against “economism,” believed that ideas inflamed the working class to action. He asked, What is to be done, and answered: do not wait for the material conditions of the workers to cause them to attain spontaneously the idea of revolution. On the contrary, “Class political consciousness can be brought to the workers only from without, that is only from outside the economic struggle. . . . the social democrats [by which he meant at the time revolutionary socialists] must go among all classes of the population; they must dispatch units of their army [of ideas, observe] in all directions.”²⁹¹

Clark is a very fine economic scientist, and produces much numerical evidence with which other scientists agree. But it is crucial to distinguished the good arguments from the bad in his book, lest anyone think that the good arguments do much to support the bad. They don’t. Much of the book is uncontroversially good, a review for outsiders of the quantitative side of what economic historians have learned since, say, Karl Polanyi.²⁹² We all, we economic historians nowadays, agree that down to the 17^th or 18^th century England was trapped as the world has been since the caves in a Malthusian logic: no rapid innovation, so that more mouths always meant, soon, less bread per mouth, and the life of man was brutish and short. We all agree that the escape from the Malthusian trap is the most important event in world history, and we agree on the magnitude of the escape: in the teeth of gigantic increases in population “the richest modern economies are now ten to twenty times wealthier than the 1800 average.”²⁹³ We agree that innovation, not capital accumulation, was its cause. We agree that it happened first in Holland and England and Scotland. We agree that in China and especially in Japan there were some signs c. 1600 that it might happen there, and some of us think that it was Qing and Tokugawa lack of freedom and egalitarianism and the honoring of merchants that stopped it. We agree that since then the rewards to labor have increased and the rewards to capital and land have fallen, contrary to the predictions of the classical economists, including Marx. We agree that the poor of the world have been the largest beneficiaries of the escape from the Malthusian trap. We agree, in other words, on a great many findings from 1944 to the present that will strike the average devotee of Karl Polanyi or Louis Althusser or Barbara Ehrenreich as bizarre and counterintuitive. Geoffrey Sampson makes a similar point in his devastating rebuttal of the linguistic theories of “nativism” in Stephen Pinker: “I should say to start with that I am far from wanting to contradict every point that Pinker makes in his book. Quite a lot . . . has little or nothing to do with the nativism issue and is not at all controversial, at least not among people versed in the findings. . . . It is possible to read The Language Instinct [and A Farewell to Alms] as a general survey.”²⁹⁴ Just so, a general survey, at any rate, of what the numbers if not the texts might be viewed as saying.

What other historical scientists do not agree with, however, is Clark’s only distinctive argument, that English people became by virtue of their rate of breeding a race of Übermenchen living in an Übergemeinschaft. One of the few historical scientists with whom Clark agrees on the matter is David Landes, whom he commends briefly for being “correct in observing that the Europeans had a culture more conducive to economic growth”—though Landes thinks the superior culture had more ancient sources than the breeding rates of late medieval families.²⁹⁵

There are a lot of criticisms to be made of this distinctive part of Clark’s book, so many that it is going have to be abandoned.

For one thing, non-European places have grown, after the example of Holland and England and Scotland. As the Nobel economist Robert Solow wrote in his scathing review of the book:

Clark's pessimism about closing the gap between the successful and less successful economies may derive from the belief that nothing much can change unless and until the mercantile and industrial virtues seep down into a large part of the population, as he thinks they did in preindustrial England. That could be a long wait. If that is his basic belief, it would seem to be roundly contradicted by the extraordinary sustained growth of China and, a bit more recently, India. Embarrassingly for Clark, both of those success stories seem to have been set off by institutional changes, in particular moves away from centralized control and toward an open-market economy.

Solow 2007

Not the commercial virtues inherited by people but the virtues praised by people is what’s required. China repealed its law against millionaires and Indian started admiring entrepreneurs, and both were off to the races. And of course the races started off in Europe very quickly indeed after England led the way. How did economic growth come so rapidly to the Rhineland and Wallonia, which were very far from the tranquil lands that Clark thinks make for a bourgeois Volk? On the contrary, the land from Flanders south to Lombardy was the cockpit of Europe for a millennium, the “Habsburg Road,” the tiny and continually warring states of the “Lotharian axis” (as Geoffrey Parker calls it, after Charlemagne’s grandson, who briefly governed it). Yet within a century of England’s stirring, the Lotharian axis from Mons to Milan was an industrial hive.

For another, non-Europeans, those Untermenschen, become astoundingly rich when they moved into places in which bourgeois values are honored. Their success seemed to have little to do with inherited values. Clark shows no interest in American economic history, which is the main instance of success in a bourgeois land, or the numerous diasporas of Chinese or Armenians or whomever who enriched themselves away from the kingly oppression and aristocratic chaos of their homelands. He also shows no interest in his native Scotland, which did have an Industrial Revolution, but had as recently as the century before its revolution nothing like England’s “extraordinary stability,” partly indeed because of repeated invasions and other fishing in troubled waters by the stability-enjoying English. Nor does he show interest in my ancestors, the Irish, who when they crossed the Irish Sea to staff the cotton and wool mills he investigates with such empirical imagination became rapidly the good workers who couldn’t of course ever arise from such a turbulent and demographically unsound place as Ireland, which in most parts did not have an Industrial Revolution.

But the main failure of his hypothesis is, oddly, that a book filled with ingenious calculations, hundreds upon hundreds of them exhibiting Clark’s historical imagination—the quality of asking questions and seeing your way to answering them—does not calculate enough. It doesn’t ask or answer the crucial quantitative historical questions. The argument can be diagrammed like this, as four states 1, 2, 3, 4 linked by three causal and transforming causal arrows A, B. C. Notice the bold entries:
The Clark Hypothesis:

Rich People are Better and Drive Out the Poor
1. A. 2. B. 3. C. 4.

Rich breed  Rich-people’s  More patience,  Enrichment

more values spread work, ingenuity of all
The two large and bolded states at the ends, 1 and especially 4, get satisfying amounts of empirical attention. Clark’s arguments about state 1 have quite a few problems. For example, the rich he is talking about lived in cities, which were death traps until the 19^th century, casting doubt on his supposition that the heirs of rich burghers would cascade down the social hierarchy. The heirs were mostly dead, and their place made up with symbolic heirs adopted. On state 4 his quantitative evidence is better, if as I said conventional. The numbers concerning state 4, about which we economic historians all agree and on which all of us have worked and of which it is most important that we persuade non-economic intellectuals, is nailed.

Yet Clark insists throughout on hammering on exclusively quantitative nails. So he skimps on state 3 and especially on state 2. Clark, who believes that when you cannot measure, your knowledge is meager and unsatisfactory, is not comfortable with literary and other “ego-document” sources, as German historians call them nowadays. And so he does not realize that written sources can themselves be counted, and in any case that how people speak is part of the empirical evidence. That Jesus said “render unto Caesar” is part of the empirical evidence about early Christianity’s relationship to the state. That Luther said “one prince, one faith” is similar evidence in the Reformation. In consequence of Clark’s aversion to words, he does not have much to say about how one would know that “informal, self-reinforcing social norms” of rich people had spread. Therefore about State 2 his work is thin.

State 3 gets more attention, sometimes of a quantitative sort—South Asian wemployees work less, for example; and as Jan de Vries has put it there was an “industrious revolution” of more application to work in first the Dutch and then the English lands during the 17^th and 18^th centuries. Clark follows Mokyr and others, as I do, in emphasizing the applied ingenuity of inventors in cotton and iron and so forth, and uses a table which I devised in 1981 to show that the applied ingenuity in England 1780-1860 was in fact evident beyond such heroic industries.²⁹⁶

What is entirely missing, however, are calculations justifying the links A, B, C between the states. That’s the big problem. Clark notes for example that in countries with ill-disciplined labor forces, such as India, the employer doesn’t get as much output as in England, because the non-bourgeois values of the Indian workers and the employers leaves not enough “work” in the diagram. But the “as much” and “not enough” are nothing like the 20 to 30 times gap between poor India and rich England that he claims to be explaining. That is, Clark has failed to show how much Enrichment depends on Work, state 4 on state 3. He hasn’t done a calculation on the size of link C. He hasn’t asked about its oomph. And so he naturally has no answer.

Nor does he do a calculation on link B, to show that state 3 depended mightily on state 2, that, say, that applied ingenuity depended on the spread of bourgeois values. It’s deucedly hard to do. I myself agree the link was important yet I can’t think of ways to quantify it with the usual economic and demographic statistics, and have had to rely instead on the metaphysically unsatisfactory but enormously rich and ubiquitous qualitative evidence which the other students of applied ingenuity such as Mokyr have exploited and which Clark spurns. Given his methodological rule of number, Clark is not to blame that even his admirable if strictly quantitative historical imagination is stymied by the question of how much bourgeois values acted to increase applied ingenuity. Still, his methodological stridency about number—having been strident myself in my youth in a similar fashion, I know the temptation—does make it a little embarrassing he doesn’t even mention that for link B he can’t provide any numbers. We fools like Jack Goldstone or Deirdre McCloskey—who listen to what people at the time were saying about B—get a certain satisfaction that Clark is thus hoist by his own methodological petard.

In light of Clark’s methodological convictions, though, the most embarrassing broken link is A, between “Rich breed more” and “Rich people’s values spread.” Nowhere in the book does Clark calculate what higher breeding rates could have accomplished by way of rhetorical change. It could easily be done, at any rate under his mechanical assumption about how the social construction of values works. Clark assumes that the children of rich people are by that fact carriers of the sort of bourgeois values that make for an Industrial Revolution.

To be sure, this is an odd characterization of the medieval or early modern relatively rich. A rich bourgeois of London in 1400 devoted most of his effort to arranging special protection for his wool-trading monopoly. His younger sons might well have taken away the lesson, repeated again and again down to Elizabethan England and modern regulators and protectionists, that it’s a good idea for the state to control everything it can, and quite a bad thing to let people freely make the deals they wish to make. And a Brave Sir Botany who had stolen his riches, say, or was a successful courtier who had received them from Henry VIII dissolved monasteries, say, would not automatically, one would think, transmit sober bourgeois values to younger sons. A society that extravagantly admired aristocratic or Christian virtues could corrupt even a Medici banker into thinking of himself as quite the lord and yet also a godly son of the Church. In a similar way nowadays an extravagant admiration for the neo-aristocratic values of the clerisy corrupts a bourgeois daughter into scorning her father’s bourgeois occupation.

Clark, you see, is intrigued by neo-Darwinian theories applied to society. He believes that the bourgeois-behaving unit of meaning, a “meme” as some of the theorists call it, spreads strictly from parents to children, like eye color. But the biological analogy here is strange. From the 16^th-century it gets stranger and stranger. European publishing becomes cheap and less censored. The grammar schools spread (thus Shakespeare, son of a glover). So do the universities (thus Kant, son of a saddler). High schools for young merchants proliferate. If solidly bourgeois behavior makes people rich you would think it would spread by imitation, across families, as from Defoe’s Essay Upon Projects (1697), which Benjamin Franklin cited as an influence, or from the hundreds of handbooks for youths in business from the 16^th century on. The research biologist and professor of theology Alistair McGrath notes that recent work on genome sequencing has shown that the simplest forms of life trade genes contemporaneously. And so of course do the most complex and cultural forms of life, such as 17^th century Europe. “If Darwinism is about copying the instructions, . . . Lamarckism is about copying the product. . . . It would seem that Lamarck, rather than Darwin, offers the better account of cultural evolution.”²⁹⁷ To put it another way, the metaphor of the tree of life that Clark unconsciously assumes must also apply to human culture should give way in such cases to a network of life. Good products like wealth-producing behavior would spread in a greatly widened network of culture after the invention of printing, the Protestant Reformation, the fall of tyrants. As some biologist recently put it in a survey of the experimental transfer of 246,045 genes to E. coli, “the phylogeny of [primitive but extremely widespread] life seems better represented by a network than a tree.”²⁹⁸ If this is true of prokaryotes and eukaryotes, all the more is it true of Parisians and Chicagoans. People could move, steadily easier in the 18^th and 19^th centuries; and more importantly, they could read, steadily better. And so the memes moved more and more freely, down to our own world echo-chamber of ideas.

But leave aside the actual, empirical stories of how values are made. Clark’s lack of curiosity about the exact content of bourgeois values (values which I repeat he and I join in admiring) leaves him, I say, with a mechanical, neoDarwinian, and dubious model of how values get transmitted. But suppose his dubious model is correct. Then a scientist of Clark’s quantitative ingenuity would have found it trivial to calculate, mechanically, what the higher rates of breeding would yield in bourgeois-minded but lower class people in the next generation. He didn’t.

The underlying problem is that Clark wants his story to be a very long-run story, because he has ambitions for its endogeneity, which is to say its historical materialism. He wants bourgeois values and the modern world to arise with slow-chapped pow’r out of a thousand years of English history. No dei ex machina, thank you very much—by which he means short-run and therefore contemptible events in the realm of mere ideas like the birth of English political freedom or the Protestant Reformation or the Scientific Revolution.

Why is his long-run ambition a problem for his story? Because his mechanical model of the transmission of values works too quickly, on a scale of a century or so—not ten centuries. Then it dissipates. Regression to the mean alone would strictly limit the effect to a few generations. After all, we say “clogs to clogs” in merely three. As Francis Galton put it in making a similar calculation—Galton in 1901 got a good deal further in calculation than Clark in 2007—very high inherited height or intelligence or bourgeois virtue dissipates strongly in children and more in grandchildren, “owning to the combination of ancestral influences—which are generally mediocre—with the purely parental ones.”²⁹⁹ Galton was part of Darwin’s family, first notable in Erasmus, Charles’ and Francis’ grandfather. The family has continued to prosper, by careful selection of marriage partners. But how many such amazing families are there—one thinks of the Bachs and the Polanyis—as against hundreds of families that yield one genius and then regress to the mean? The evolutionary logic puts paid to Clark’s long-run story. As the economist Samuel Bowles put it in a review of the book in Science:

if h² = 0.26 the correlation across 4 generations (great grandfather-great grandson) is 0.032. If we estimate h² from the observed intergenerational correlation of traits (r) as above, then the correlation of a genetically transmitted trait across n generations is just r/2^{n -2}. Thus the statistical association across generations becomes vanishingly small over the course of a single century, whether the trait is culturally or genetically transmitted.

Bowles 2007

Clark describes his central Chapter 6 as identifying “strong selective processes.”³⁰⁰ That’s the problem: they are too strong for a slow story, as Bowles points out. So Clark’s own argument, were it true, would turn out to be one of the despised dei ex machine that work on a scale of decades or a few generations or a century at most. If he had followed his rule of number and had tried to calculate the oomph of link A he would have caught the scientific oversight before announcing to the world, against the logic and the evidence followed by everyone else in his field, that he had solved the leading scientific question in economics. Embarrassingly, he did not do the calculation.

Consider for example one of the bourgeois values we can measure, and Clark does, again with his usual quantitative insight, literacy. Male literacy in England, Clark reports, rose from the share of monks in the male population in, say, 1300 (illiterate monks were by not unknown; but among the secular clergy illiteracy was commonplace) to perhaps 30 percent in 1580 and to 60 percent by the time national statistics start to be possible in the 1750s.

But think about it. If you are the parent of four children, and can read, what is the transition probability that all four of your children will read? It is extremely high, at any rate in a society that for some reason values literacy. **give evidence from literacy volume: it takes about a century to go from low to high literacies. Thus in families today “going to college” is extremely inheritable, but in one generation. Unlike my Irish ancestors, my Norwegian ancestors on the Hardanger Fjord according to records collected by the literate Norwegians were reading by the late 16^th century, and never stopped. Why? Clearly, because of that Protestant Reformation, a literal Deus, to which Clark in his book explaining modern Europe allots eight words. No religion, please: we’re demographic historical materialists. The impoverished Norwegians of rural Dimelsvik (no bourgeois virtues there, eh?) learned to read quickly. The habit spread across families. And once in a family it stayed there. The inheritance within families is too quick and the “inheritance” across families too strong for his intended story of a stately development over centuries of an English genetic Überlegenheid.

Clark becomes very cross when challenged on his materialism. He replied to my claim that he shows, as he put it, an “aversion to literary sources”:

absolutely, because they are highly unreliable. What people say, what their explicit ideology is, often differs dramatically from how they behave. Doing economic history through analysis of written materials such as laws, political tracts, etc. is an invitation to error. Deirdre’s invitation to us to come wallow in the cultural mud is the guarantee that we will continue to go round in circles in economic history forever. Better to say something and be wrong than to say things that are just not subject to empirical test.

Clark 2007b

He has said something and he is wrong, that much is clear. But he is also wrong to dismiss the lived life, the analyzed text, the salient image. That’s to throw away half the evidence, much of it more decisive than a dubious sample of birth rates from Essex. A historian cannot do his science on numbers alone. Indeed, as econometricians like Charles Manski point out, the identification of what is salient in the numbers does not inhere in the numbers themselves: “Identification problems cannot be solved by gathering more of the same kind of data. . . . [they] can be alleviated only by invoking stronger assumption [based, say, on the lived life] or by initiating new sampling processes that yield different kinds of data [in, say, the analyzed text and the salient image].”³⁰¹ Or as an economic historian named Ashton said long ago, surely we will make more progress if we walk on both legs, numerical and verbal. Clark is so hostile to the literary and philosophical side of his culture that he insists on hopping along, underidentified, on one leg.

So Clark’s socio-neoDarwinianism, which he appears to have acquired from a recent article by some economic theorists, has nothing to recommend it as history.

An early version of Clark’s hypothesis may be examined in Galton’s Huxley Lecture to the Anthropological Institute in 1901:

The number and variety aptitudes, especially in dogs, is truly remarkable. . . . So it is with the various natural qualities that go towards the making of civic worth in man (p. 3). . . . The brains of the nation lie in the higher of our classes (p. 11). . . . Dr. Farr, the eminent statistician, endeavored to estimate the money worth of an average baby born to the wife of an Essex laborer. . . . Dr. Farr, with accomplished actuarial skill, capitalized the value at the child’s birth . . . [It] was found to be £5. On a similar principle the worth of an X-class baby would be reckoned in thousands of pounds. . . . They found great industries, establish vast undertakings, and amass large fortunes for themselves. Others, whether they be rich or poor, are the guides and light of the nation (11-12). . . . Many who are familiar with the habits of [the lowest class] do not hesitate to say that it would be an economy and a great benefit if all habitual criminals were . . . peremptorily denied opportunities for producing offspring (20). . . . The possibility of improving the race of a national depends on the power of increasing its best stock (24).

This sort of reasoning was all fresh and new in 1901, and was still influential after the Great War, resulting in places like Norway, Sweden, and the United States in sterilization programs, brought to an end only during the 1970s. It even survived its application in Germany. It still attracts the quantitative and mechanical mind. It introduces into the debate between status and contract a third possibility, genes. People are not what the society said they are or what they were able to arrange by way of agreements but what they were born as. Uncritical worshippers of Science find the genetic argument decisive. It’s neat. It’s formalizable. It’s calculable (though, I repeat, Clark has not done the calculations that Galton pioneered).

But it doesn’t make any sense. Beyond the difficulties already mentioned, it depends on measures of aptitudes that are, like height, influenced by more than inheritance and, unlike height, have no natural units invariant to society. What made for riches in 1600 had little to do with what made for riches in 2000. A graceful way with sonnets and a good leg for bowing are not similar to a Harvard MBA and a knack for computers. What mattered in modern economic growth was not a doubtfully measured change in the abilities of English people but a radical change 1600-1776, “measurable” in every play and pamphlet, in what England wanted, what England paid for, what England valued.

Chapter 15:

But in the Late 17^th Century the British Changed

The chapter is even more scrappy than usual!
So the claim is that the British and some of their neighbors changed in their rhetoric of markets and the commercial life.

Proving rhetorical causes is not easy. “Rhetoric” means anciently the available means of unforced persuasion. It includes among its tools logic and story, metaphor and fact, vocabulary and statistics. It is what we do when we try to persuade people that a life in business is good or is bad, a practice either of “mutually advantageous exchange” or of “exploitation and alienation.” There’s nothing wrong in itself, one needs to emphasize in this anti-rhetorical age of rhetoric, with trying to persuade people of something. And so the newspaper sense of “rhetoric” as one of the dozens of synonyms for “lying speech” is to be set aside. In a free society we need rhetoric, that unforced persuasion.

But rhetorical causes are harder to make persuasive or unpersuasive than material causes. When a Londoner in England’s last killing famine, in 1596, offered 6 ½ pence per four-pound loaf of bread (two times the usual price in the 1590s) there was no gap between her words and her actions. We say that she put her money where her mouth was. Her offer of pence for bread as she physically handed the coins to the baker and he handed her the loaf was a “material cause” of the deal in a straightforward sense. To express the act in fancier language, her talk to the baker (“Yes, I want to buy that damned shrunken loaf, you bloody thief!”) was performative, a “speech act”: in saying something she did something in the world, evoked the movement of the bread. If you want to know what she meant, merely look at the price she paid. So if you want to know that the profits from foreign trade did not cause the industrial revolution you have a very good start on a persuasive argument if you know the prices of tobacco and slaves and sugar, and the physical movements the offer of the prices evoked.

The trouble with word evidence is that people—and chimpanzees and camouflaging plants—can be dishonest. That is, they can fashion a gap between what they say and what they mean, if no material payment or other physical act is involved. “I just love that outfit!” can mean in the right circumstances “Thank God you got rid of that hideous orange dress!” Words—and my claim is that the initiating change was words—can be “cheap talk,” that is, merely words.

The evidence for the rhetorical change to a business-dominated civilization, then, has to catch people talking unawares. Otherwise, if you simply ask them outright, the people are liable to deny indignantly that they are no longer aristocratic or Christian. We need verbal thermometers of the change in civilization that made the modern world.

So start with a word once redolent of an aristocratic civilization.

Our bourgeois word “honest” once meant not mainly “committed to telling the truth” but mainly “noble, aristocratic—after all, what true aristocrat would bother to care about truth, when style, gesture, heroism, and social position are the life of man?” To be sure, the modern and secondary meaning of “truth telling, whether or not of high social rank” occurs in English as early as 1400. Yet nonetheless in good old Will Shakespeare’s time a phrase like "honest, honest Iago" mainly meant, with a certain coy ambiguity, that the lying Iago in Othello was "honorable, noble, warlike, aristocratic."³⁰² The famous definition by Sir Henry Wotton (1568-1639) of a diplomat plays on the ambiguity: “ an honest man sent to lie abroad for good of his country.” “Honest” here means “noble, distinguished,” but dances prettily with “lie.” The old phrase in men’s mouths, “an honest woman”—thus Desdemona in the play, repeatedly, an ironic commentary also on her fate--preserves the original meaning of the word “honest,” with adjustments for a woman’s place in a system of manly honor. Thus too Milton, in 1674. The one occurrence of “honest” in the second edition of Paradise Lost, commenting on Eve’s nakedness before her disobedience, is: “Then was not guilty shame, dishonest shame/ Of nature’s works, honor dishonorable” (IV: 313f). And so to the Duke of Shaftesbury in 1713, a late occurrence in the aristocratic sense, unsurprisingly by an aristocrat looking into what “honesty or virtue is, considered by itself.”³⁰³

In most Romance languages at the same time—English, though Germanic in structure, is in its elevated vocabulary merely French or Latin spoken with a strange accent—the same honesty-word meant the same honorable thing—not mere truth telling. In English, French, Italian, Spanish, and so forth the word is derived from Latin honestus from honos, “honor, high rank.” Honestus in classical Latin never meant truth telling. For that concept, an uninteresting one in a society obsessed with honor and nobility, the Romans used the word sincerus (“pure”). ³⁰⁴ Thus in the first book of Castiglione’s The Book of the Courtier, written after 1508 and published in 1528 words or compounds of onesto occur eight times, always mean “honorable” or, in the case of women, “chaste.”³⁰⁵ Never “truth-telling.”

Thus honnête still in 16^th-century French meant what Shakespeare and Castiglione meant by “honest.” In Molière’s Bourgeois Gentilhomme, sixty-five years after Othello and about the time of Paradise Lost, the romantic lead, Cléonte, uses honnête in the ambiguous way that Shakespeare and Milton do, with much talk of honneur associated with it. The idiotic bourgeois pretender to nobility, M. Jourdain, asks Cléonte if he is a gentilhomme, which meant “of gentle birth, an aristocrat” in the wide and purchasable sense of French society at the time, having nothing to do with the democratic and bourgeois meaning it has since acquired in English. The Oxford-Hachette labels the French gentilhomme “historical,” with only the meaning of “gentry” or “aristocracy.” And of course the usual French word for what we call “mister” (from old “master”), or a “gentleman” as in democratic phrases like “ladies and gentlemen,” is another piece of hierarchical talk brought down to earth, “my senior, my superior,” monsieur.

Cléonte replies at length to My Superior Jourdain:

No one scruples to take the name [of gentilhomme], and usage nowadays seems to authorize the theft. For my part, . . . I find that all imposture is unworthy of an honest=honorable man [honnête homme], and that there is bit of cowardice in disguising what Heaven has born us into. . . and to give the impression of that which we are not. I was born, certainly, of parents who held honorable [honorable] position. I achieved honor [l’honneur] in the armed forces through six years of service. . . . But . . . I say to you frankly [franchement, not honnêtement, as still often in French and English, though “honestly” is taking over] that I am not at all an aristocrat [gentilhomme].

Bourgeois Gentilhomme, 1670, act 3, sc. 12.

A few lines later Madame Jourdain advises her fool of a husband, who wishes “to have an aristocrat as son-in-law,” that “your daughter would do better to have an honest [i.e. honorable] man, rich and well-favored [un honnête homme riche et bien fait] than a beggarly and poorly built aristocrat.”

The same is true of Germanic languages. In Shakespeare’s or Molière’s time the same honor-code meaning of “honest” is attached to an honesty=honor-word, arising from an entirely different root than the Latin. It has, however, almost the same modern history. Thus Dutch eer still nowadays means “noble, aristocratic,” like English “honorable” when used among aristocrats on the dueling grounds, and figures in many phrases remembering a society of noble hierarchy: de eer aandoen om, “do [me] the honor of.” Or in German mit wem habe ich die Ehre zu spreken?—“with whom do I have the honor to speak?” But in Dutch and in German the addition of –lijk/-lich (-like) yielded an eerlijk/ehrlich that comes to mean simply “honest,“ like the modern English commendation of the truth-telling necessary for a society of merchants. Thus Danish and Norwegian aer, honor, parallels aerlig, honest. Evidence from Vondel , contrasted with Ibsen

In other words, the really surprising fact is that both the Germanic languages and the commercial daughters of Latin developed from their respective root words meaning “aristocratic, worthy of honor” a word appropriate to a bourgeois society meaning instead “truth telling, worthy of trust.” In the late 17^th and early 18^th centuries in all these languages the primary and older and Iago-ite meaning of “noble, aristocratic, worthy of being honored,” fades, leaving mainly our modern notion of “that deals uprightly in speech and act. . . that will not lie cheat or steal.”³⁰⁶ The title of the poem of 1705 by Shaftesbury’s opponent, Bernard Mandeville, is The Grumbling Hive: or, Knaves Turn'd Honest. Mandeville—who not incidentally was a Dutchman writing in English—meant by “honest” nothing like “partaking of nobility,” but instead “not cheating,” in the modern sense. He cynically condemned this not cheating as naïve and profitless: “Then leave complaints: fools only strive/ To make a great an honest hive.”³⁰⁷

By 1800 at the latest many Romance and all Germanic languages use the honesty word to mean pretty much exclusively "sincere, upright, truth-telling, reliable for a business deal."³⁰⁸  In Adam Smith’s two published books, in their first editions of 1759 and 1776, “honest” means “upright” or “sincere” or “truth-telling,” never “aristocratic.” Even a poor man, he argues in The Theory of Moral Sentiments, is constrained not to steal by “the man within”: “there is no commonly honest man who does not more dread the inward disgrace.”³⁰⁹ In the eight works of Jane Austen, written from 1793 to 1816 (including The Watsons, 1804, unfinished, and her early and unpublished Lady Susan, but not her last, unfinished Sanditon), “honest” occurs 31 times.³¹⁰ It means “upright” in six of these 31 occasions, dominantly in the old phrase an “honest man,” but never “of high social rank, aristocratic.” Another third of the time it means “genuine,” as in “a real, honest, old-fashioned boarding-school” (Emma), very far indeed from “honest” as “aristocratic.” In its dominant modern sense of “truth-telling” it occurs again a third of the time in the meaning “sincere,” and literally “truth-telling” four out of the 31 total occurrences in any meaning.

The 1934 Webster’s New International Dictionary labels “honesty” in sense 1, “held in honor,” as archaic, with “honest” (chaste) as in an “honest woman.” It labels “honesty” in sense 1a, “honor,” as obsolete. “Honest” in the dominant sense 2 means fair, upright, truthful “as, an honest judge or merchant, [or an honest] statement” (italics supplied). A big 1987 dictionary of Italian notes that the root of onesto is Latin honestus, but does not mention its obsolete Latin and olden Italian meaning, “noble.”³¹¹ {Do compendious German or Dutch dictionary} Honesty now means honesty.

Translations of the New Testament register the change, though unevenly. In many recent translations of the Parable of the Dishonest Manager into English the word “honest” is used in the sense of “upright, plain dealing.” Thus the New Revised Standard Version (1989) of Luke 16:8 is “And his master commended the dishonest manager.” The New English Bible (1961) is “And the master applauded the dishonest steward.” The New International Version (1973-1984): “The master commended the dishonest manager.” Thus also the Weymouth NT and the World English Bible. But the New American Standard (1960-1995), the Darby Version, and Young’s [old] Literal Translation use “unrighteous” and Douay-Rheims and Webster’s use the more Greek-justified “unjust.” The Basic English Bible makes do with “false.”

In the earlier context in which English “honest” meant “aristocratic” the word is never used in its modern sense of “fair-dealing.” Thus the King James (1611) version of Luke 16:8 speaks of the “unjust,” not the “dishonest” steward, which is a literal translation of the original Greek, adikias. On the other hand, the merely seven occurrences of “honest” in the King James, all in the New Testament, appear to mean “righteous” (in Greek dikos, just) in the sense of following the law, of Moses or of Jesus.

In other languages with the same problem with the older meaning of “honest” it is similar. The States’ Bible of the Dutch (1618-19) calls the steward onrechtvaardigen, “unrighteous.” Some versions of Luther’s Bible calls him den ungetreuen Verwalter, the unfaithful manager, a mistranslation in context (since pistos, “faithful,” occurs two verses down in contrasting parallel to dikos), but anyway not unehrlich, modern “dishonest,” which in 1545 would have suggested “un-aristocratic.” The modern (1912) Luther and the Schlachter (1951) give like Dutch ungerechten, “unrighteous.” A recent translation into Afrikaans calls the manager oneerlike, that is, “dishonest” in the modern sense, as in modern Dutch.³¹² But a 1953 Afrikaans version was using the more accurate onregverdige, “unrighteous,” as do Norwegian (1930) and Swedish translations (1917).³¹³

In French the old (1744) Martin and Ostervald (though in a 1996 revision) use “unfaithful” and the Darby uses “unjust.” The French Jerusalem uses the modern malhonnête. In Italian the steward is in the Giovanni Diodati Bible (1649) l’ingiusto fattore and in the Riveduta (1927) il fattore infedele. No disonesto about him. The modern Catholic Vulgate uses “unfairness,” following the Greek, not the Latin for “dishonest” in the modern sense, which would be sincerus, probus, simplex, antiques, frugii depending on the shade of meaning. Spanish translations simply call him malo and leave it at that: the honest/honor split is not sharp in Spanish, as one might expect in a society obsessed with honor. Honesto in Spanish to this day does not mean “honest=truth-telling” but “chaste, modest, decent.”

The old civilization that ours replaced, which was dominated by warriors and latterly by courtiers, needed above all a word for rank. Our civilization dominated by merchants and latterly by manufacturers and recently by risk capitalists needs instead a word for reliable truth telling. Nowadays we call it “transparency.” And so from 1600 to 1776 this new civilization in northwestern Europe came into being, in its words.
* * * *

The English, I say, were notorious in the age of Sir Francis Drake and Elizabeth herself for a proud, decidedly unbourgeois behavior. Elizabeth professed no doubt, as the Spanish Armada sailed up the English Channel, that “we shall shortly have a famous victory over those enemies of my God, of my kingdom, and of my people.” A Dutch businessman in 16… declared that “the people are bold, courageous, ardent and cruel in war, but very inconstant, rash, vainglorious, light and deceiving, and very suspicious, especially of foreigners, whom they despise.”³¹⁴ Of these qualities only courage and the suspicion of foreigners survived the embourgeoisfication of England, 1689 to the present. Jeremy Paxman, who is among the numerous tellers of the tale to use the Dutchman’s quotation, remarks that in the late 19^th century the English came to be viewed, as having on the contrary “honesty [in our modern and bourgeois sense], prudence, patriotism, self-control, fair play and courage.”³¹⁵ Evidently something had changed.

"Credit" comes from creditus, "believed." Each of the hundred-odd quotations in the Oxford English Dictionary illustrating the noun and the verb date from after 1541, and most of the commercial quotations from the 16^th century are suspicious of it. An act of 34-35 Henry VIII (that is, 1542) noted that “sundry persons consume the substance obtained by credit of other men.” Shame on them. But contrast the neutral language of Locke in 1691: credit is merely “the expectation of money within some limited time.” A shift in talk had taken place, 1542-1691, and a shift in the ideological support for capitalism. How did this take place?

The historian Matthew Kadane explains the shift towards bourgeois virtues with “various interactions with the Dutch; the slow cool-down in religious temperature (which helps to permit the mere possibility of the demoralization of wealth) starting after the end of the civil wars and running through 1688-89; the commercialization of London, where there is so much more to be a spectator of, and so on.”

British imitation of Dutch in late 17^th C. England was just acquiring an admiration for a bourgeois version of the virtues as Holland came to its height. ….. Sprat writes of how commendable it is that “The merchants of England live honorably in foreign parts” (my italics), while “those of Holland meanly, minding their gain alone.” Shameful. “Ours [have] in their behavior very much the gentility of the families from which so many of them are descended. The others when they are abroad show that they are only a race of plain citizens.” Appallingly plain bourgeois, those Dutch. Perhaps, Sprat notes, that is “one of the reasons they can so easily undersell us.”³¹⁶ It may be. Josiah Child arguing against guild regulation of cloth (quoted in Lipson, Hist., p., 118, q.v.): “if we intend to have the trade of the world we must imitate the Dutch.”

And so they did, in many things: naval, financial, etc. Defeat in the Solent? Other reasons? Use Pepys.

No. CX, Prudentia
she-philosopher.com: a Web-based research project for science & technology studies (name to be supplied!)

http://www.she-philosopher.com/gallery/atheniansociety.html
Pp. 224–5 from Charles Hoole’s English translation of Comenius’ Orbis Sensualium Pictus, published in 1659

The English-language gloss reads:

   Prudence, 1. looketh upon all things as a Serpent, 2. and doeth, speaketh, or thinketh nothing in vain.
   She looks backward, 3 as into a looking glass, 4. to things past; and seeth before her, 5. as with a Perspective-glass, 7. things to come, or the end; 6. and so she perceiveth what she hath done, and what remaineth to be done.
   She proposeth an Honest, Profitable, and withal, if it may be done, a pleasant End to her actions.
   Having foreseen the End, she looketh out Means, as a Way, 8. as leadeth to the end; but such as are certain and easie, and fewer rather than more, lest anything should hinder.
   She watcheth Opporrtunity, 9. (which having a bushy forehead, 10. & being bald-pated, 11. and moreover having wings, 12. doth quickly slip away) and catcheth it.
   She goeth on her way warily, for fear she should stumble or go amiss.

Look into Puritans. Cf. New England: internal colonization by non-conformists. Compare to old England. When “capitalist”? Tie to Milton section in last chapter.

Defoe and The Spectator; the novel as bourgeois.

The voice of the novelists, beginning with Defoe, who perfected the genre in English, is clearly bourgeois. The 18^th and especially the 19^th-century roman eventually comes to be focused indeed on the bourgeois home, in sharp contrast to adventure yarns, long called “romances,” whence the French word. A "romance" was since the middle ages a tale of knights or shepherds idealized. The Greeks and Romans had novels on more mundane matters, such as dinner parties. So from the 12^th century did the Japanese, focusing on love and courtly life, and these written famously by women. But the modern European novel is invented by Defoe, arising out of broadsheets and pamphlets giving the news of prodigious storms and terrible murders , and a rich devotional literature.³¹⁷ It is associated in every way with the middle classes, an old point in literary criticism, and made most enthusiastically by left-wing critics from the 1930s on. A novel was a novelity, about the middling sort.

In his recent survey of its history 1727 to 1783 Paul Langford characterizes England as by then thoroughly bourgeois, “a polite and commercial people” (in the phrase from Blackstone that Langford uses as his title). He quarrels repeatedly with the more usual notion that aristocratic values ruled in the age of the Whig grandees.³¹⁸ The “seeming passion for aristocratic values,” for example, evinced in the vogue for spas (such as Bath) and seaside reports (such as Brighton), ”depended on a middle class clientele, the upper middling sorts described in Jane Austen’s novels. Britain in the eighteenth century was a plutocracy if anything, and even as a plutocracy one in which power was widely diffused, constantly contested, and ever adjusting to new incursions of wealth, often modest wealth.” As early as 1733, Langford claims, “the shopkeepers and tradesmen of England were immensely powerful as a class.” “Bath owed its name to the great but its fortune to the mass of middling.”³¹⁹