Bourgeois Deeds: How Capitalism Made Modernity 1700-1848

Polanyi’s categories Klamer’s spheres Fiske’s forms: The question The seven principal virtues
Provisioning oikos Communal sharing “Who is ‘us’?” Love, Temperance
Redistribution polis Authority ranking “Who’s in charge?” Courage, Faith

Reciprocity not a perfect correspondence Equality ranking “Who or what Justice, Faith

with Klamer’s Third Sphere counts as equal? Klamer: (humility); Hope
Modern market agora Market pricing “What are the Prudence

ratios of exchange?”

Source: Fiske, Structures (1991 [1993]), pp. 46-47; Polanyi 1944, DDDD; Klamer 2006; McCloskey 2006, p. PPP.
But anyway the categories of Klamer, Fiske, and what I am calling the seven principal virtues (they date in this form from Aquinas) firmly reject the Polanyan notion that the market is hostile to all human values, and is a merely modern pathology. They do so by embedding economic life in human life generally, as in fact Aquinas and the other urban monks of the 13^th century were busy doing, and Polanyi wanted to do, minus the bourgeois bits. All actual bourgeois people have non-market relations in their lives, and the market itself is embedded. Only stick-figure parodies like Marx’s Mister Moneybags or Dickens’ Paul Dombey (until the very end of the book, when he realizes his humanity) or Sinclair Lewis’ George Babbitt (ditto) do not see the embedding, together with actual bourgeois misled by the rhetoric of Greed is Good, and He Wins Who Dies With the Most Toys. Perhaps the better word for the embedding is “entangling,” because the different spheres talk to each other and parody each other in endlessly complicated ways. Such is Homo loquens. In The Purchase of Intimacy (date) and earlier books the sociologist Viviana Zelizer has detailed the entanglement of market matters with the Third and other spheres.

Anyway the bourgeois man belongs to a religion or tribe or clan, and always to a family and usually to the Third Sphere of his town. The non-market relations often radically alter the deals he makes. The novelist of the modern bourgeoisie, Thomas Mann, speaks of the protagonist of Buddenbrooks (1900) as entangling the sacred and the profane: “Sometimes, entirely by accident, perhaps on a walk with the family, [Tom] would go into a mill for a chat with the miller, who would feel himself much honored by the visit; and quite en passant, in the best of moods, he could conclude a good bargain.”¹⁵⁴ The community of believing Muslims, the umma, was for hundreds of years after the death of the Prophet a minority in the various Arab conquests outside the Arabian peninsula itself.¹⁵⁵ You dealt differently with a fellow resident of the House of Islam—he paid less taxes, he could not be your slave, he could not charge you interest.

True, the market tends to be prudent, and therefore tends to be radically neutral in whom it deals with. Such a feature of the market has recommended it to egalitarian libertarians in a long line from David Hume and Adam Smith to Milton Friedman and Robert Nozick. Prudence is indeed the central virtue of the agora, as courage is of the polis and love of the oikos. But I repeat the market can be influenced by motives other than prudence only. An elderly mother buys a house close to her children, but worries whether it is prudent, and quarrels with her beloved daughter over the mix of cash and affection in the matter. Love and prudence are entangled. There are, I repeat again, other, non-market realms of a bourgeois or any human life. That is what Polanyi got right. But markets play their entangled part, and in a great city the markets and the bourgeoisie running them have always played a great part. That is what Polanyi got wrong.

It is easy to confuse the commercial middle classes with the Bildungsbürgertum, that is, the state bureaucrats and lawyers and professors. The confusion has political dangers, as evinced in the catastrophes of a rent-seeking “middle class” in Africa composed mainly of state bureaucrats. Education is the path to bourgeois life, especially after the Second World War. As I’ve said, the bourgeois is becoming the universal class. Expand or drop

Chapter 9:

But the Early Bourgeoisies Were Precarious

The master words in our tale, “bourgeois” and “capitalist,” acquired their present meanings late, and largely from Marx. One could object in the style of some Polanyans that to apply the terms to medieval Europe, much less to second-millennium B.C.E. Mesopotamia, is absurdly anachronistic. I think not, not so long as the two are used colorlessly and scientifically and non-contextually.

The word “bourgeois” is merely a French version of the Germanic root of words like “borough” and “Edinburgh,” that is, townsman. A “Burger” in German is, like all similar words borrowed into even the Romance languages, such as borghese or bourgeois, a free citizen of a chartered city.¹⁵⁶ That is, he voted and mattered, as his wife and his apprentices did not. Charter by charter, slowly, the townsman in the Middle Ages became independent of the system of lord and peasant in the surrounding countryside. By the grace of the Emperor or the lord-bishop the townsman would remain independent of feudalism, and remain bourgeois—if he was not corrupted into pretending to feudal lordship himself. He had to resist the temptation of vanity to commission a noble genealogy from the heralds, as for example bourgeois Shakespeare did, or to take on wholesale the values of an aristocracy, as the bourgeois-origin nobility of Florence and Venice most spectacularly did.

So let’s be colorless in the definition. The bourgeoisie is what’s left over when you have subtracted from all the men the rent-earning aristocrats (with the gentry) and the tithe-earning clerics (with the clerisy, that is, the intellectuals and bureaucrats) and the lower-wage-earning peasants and proletarians. Women in some cities could run businesses independently, especially if widowed, in which case they and the abbesses and the queens are to be accorded honorary maledom in the accounting. Notice that the other classes are defined here in a similarly colorless way, so that nothing is conveyed for example by the word “peasant” except “hard manual worker in agriculture”—not the more colorful, if often factually mistaken “member of a closed corporate community” or “carrier of Gemeinschaft from the glorious Germanic past.” B = Total Men – A – C – P – P’. The hard manual/lower clerical/lower service workers, nickel and dimed, are the Ps, the peasants if in the country or proletarians if in the town. We can include or not include the Clerisy depending on our purpose. The Clerisy has mainly come from the Bourgeoisie itself, like Thomas Cromwell in some accounts, and has always straddled. Antonio Gramsci noted in 1932 that “every social group. . . creates together with itself, organically, one or more strata of intellectuals.”¹⁵⁷

Another gigantic scholarly controversy looms. You can see that I don’t want to use “bourgeois” to mean “stupid, greedy, uncultivated,” as it has been commonly used by some scholars and a lot of journalists since Rousseau and especially since 1848. That is, I do not want to prejudge the main question at issue, which is whether the bourgeoisie and its markets and capitalism were good or bad for us. If one insists on using the word “bourgeois” as, say, Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir used it, to mean the worst and most inauthentic types of town life in France c. 1950, then of course it is not going to be a great intellectual feat to conclude that bourgeois life leads straight to, well, the worst and most inauthentic types of town life in France c. 1950. But I urge you to use the word not as a term of contempt, but scientifically and colorlessly, to mean “owners and managers, risk takers or word workers, large in wealth or small, in the town.”

J. G. A Pocock provides the key to why Rousseau was so vehement against the bourgeoisie and so insistent that it was not the body of citoyens. The word bourgeoisie meant in pre-Revolutionary France having special rights, rights for example to appear in a favorable court in case of disputes.¹⁵⁸ Not everybody had such rights. They were like the right the French aristocrats of Rousseau’s time enjoyed to be entirely free of taxes. That is, a "freeman of the City of London" is not just some barrow boy. No wonder Rousseau didn’t like the bourgeoisie.

The bourgeoisie can be haute or petite, large wealth or small, the international merchant financing hundreds of bales of China tea offloaded onto the East India Dock or the little shopkeeper in the High Street of Salisbury selling tea by the ounce. He can be a Robert Owen managing a big cotton textile mill in Lanarkshire in Scotland or a clothier named Simon Eyre managing a few apprentices and journeymen in 15^th-century London. The word “bourgeoisie” is sometimes used for the haute alone, commonly so in French, for example, and you are welcome if you wish to follow that usage. It’s a free country. God doesn’t supply human definitions. But the haute definition again tends to prejudge an open scientific issue, that is, whether capitalism is something entirely different from provisioning in local markets. Let’s leave the issue open until we have some evidence. That is, let’s not close it prematurely with our very rhetoric.

And I just used again, as I have freely so far, the magic word “capitalism.” I repeat: God won’t tell us how to use it. I propose, if God doesn’t mind, that we agree to use the word to mean simply “markets, very widespread in 1900 C.E. but not by any means unknown in 1900 B.C.E..” There are good reasons for this likewise colorless usage. For one thing, there’s nothing automatic about growth in capitalism so defined, though since 1776 or especially since 1848 many people have believed so. Big piles of capital, such as Spain’s from the New World, can be dissipated in aristocratic posturing, as Spain’s were, despite an early start in laissez faire philosophizing. Little piles, like Andrew Carnegie’s, can grow at rates far above normal, if in a time and place honoring a business civilization.

In particular there does not appear to be anything special about the use of “capital” in the so-called capitalist era. People used capital before capitalism, as for example in Mesopotamia. Profits were earned, as they were in the Athenian commercial empire. As I said, Polanyi to the contrary, markets flourished, as they did in medieval Europe. No automatic machinery of accumulation got turned on in 1760, no “take-off into self-sustained growth” happened as a result of higher saving rates making more capital, contrary to what Walt Rostow somewhat mysteriously claimed in 1960. High savings rates in Italy in the 19^th century did not result in economic growth until late. Cite Stefano Nor does the capitalist machinery automatically exploit and alienate the proletariat. It didn’t in the United States, which was and is notoriously non-socialist even in its working class. After all, your ancestors and mine were proletarians, and yet here we are, their descendants, well-to-do people still working for wages, big ones. Feeling alienated recently? Really? Have you noticed that you own your own human capital?

For another thing, again, we don’t want to prejudge everything about the mechanisms and morals of capitalism by defining it the way Marx did in Chapter 4 of Capital (according to the old standard, and inaccurate, English translation) as "the restless never-ending process of profit-making alone. . . , this boundless greed after riches, this passionate chase after exchange-value."¹⁵⁹ The original German actually says “solely the restless stirring for gain. This absolute desire for enrichment, this passionate hunt for value”: nur die rastlose Bewegung des Gewinnes. Dieser absolute Bereicherungstrieb, diese leidenschaftliche Jagd auf den Wert.¹⁶⁰ The words of the English translation, such as “never-ending” (endlos, ewig, unaufhörlich) and “boundless” (grenzenlos, schrankenlos), are not there in Marx’s German. The normal German word for “greed” (Gier) does not appear anywhere in the chapter. Indeed, Gier and its compounds (Raubgier, rapacity; Habgier, avarice; Goldgier) are rare in Marx, attesting to his attempt to shift away from conventional ethical terms in analyzing capitalism. Marx’s rationalist scientism, Allan Megill notes, prevents him from saying “here I am making a moral-ethical point,” even in the exceedingly numerous places in which he did.¹⁶¹ The first 25 chapters of Das Kapital, through page 802 of the German edition (page 670 in the Modern Library edition), contain “greed” and its compounds in Marx’s own words only seven times (mainly in Chapter 8, “Constant Capital and Variable Capital”), with a few more in quotations.

Yet the sneer at the bourgeoisie’s endless/boundless greed is ancient, and Engels after all approved the English translation. In any case, we do not want disdain for commerce to be preordained by the rhetoric.

* * * *

Such disdain for commerce is ancient and usual. The commercial Chinese have long been burdened by a Confucian disdain for the class of merchants, ranked in the hierarchy since 600 B.C.E. even below peasants. Recently the mainland Chinese seem to have gotten over their disdain, as their cousins overseas have managed to do for centuries. We shall see. The Christians in their beginnings were the most anti-commercial people of faith, more so than Jews or Muslims or Hindus. By late in the first millennium of Christianity the dominant theorizers about the economy were monks and mystics and desert fathers, all of them deniers of this world in the style of St. Augustine—and they were a great influence on Muslim mysticism, too.¹⁶² The main factual point of the present book is that, startlingly, it was a Christian Europe after 1300 that redeemed the bourgeois life.

Yet the disdain for people who are neither aristocratic nor clerical nor even simply peasant-like, “honest” but poor, started early, and was prominent for a very long time, even in Europe. Georg Simmel put it well: “the masses—from the Middle Ages right up to the nineteenth century—thought that there was something wrong with the origin of great fortunes. . . . Tales of horror spread about the origin of the Grinaldi, the Medici and the Rothschild fortunes. . . as if a demonic spirit was at work.”¹⁶³ A jailer in the 13^th century scorned a rich man’s pleas for mercy: “Come, Master Arnaud Teisseire, you have wallowed in such opulence! . . . . How could you be without sin?”¹⁶⁴ Echoing Jesus of Nazareth, another of Le Roy Ladurie’s Albigensians declared that “those who have possessions in the present life can have only evil in the other world. Conversely, those who have evil in the present life will have only good in the future life.”¹⁶⁵

Such disdain for possessions in the present life, and the matched disdain by landed aristocrats for the vulgarity of trade, is still hard to ignore, because it is built into European literary and religious traditions, providing the foundations for novels like Gain and movies like Wall Street. The peasant envied profit makers, though she took profit on her sales of grain. The proletariat grumbled about his boss, though changed his tune when he became one. The aristocrat disdained traders, though he engaged in trade when he could. Michael McCormick notes that the “late Roman legacy of contempt for commerce,” reinforced by the rhetoric of the modern clerisy scornful of its own bourgeois origins, has occluded the evidence for a revival of European trade in the 8^th and especially the 9^th centuries. “Christian dislike of commerce—if not for its proceeds—allied with the new aristocratic ethos of a warrior life to produce a ruling class” (and therefore surviving evidence written by or in praise of them) “that was often indifferent and sometimes even hostile to the trading life. The result contrast strikingly with the zest for both trading and warfare one finds in the pagan, Germanic north and which still permeates the later saga literature” of the Christian 13^th century.¹⁶⁶ Vikings were traders. The words in Irish for “market,” “penny,” and “shilling” all come from Norse.

Which makes one contrast between the cultures of the Mediterranean and of the German Ocean look strange.¹⁶⁷ Germanic law codes of early times encourage cash compensation for dishonor. (At least for free men. The laws we have are about them, using the words “free” and “man” precisely, and therefore were about aristocrats and other high-status men relative to a dishonor-able if majority class of slaves and women.) An eye for an eye is always possible and honorable in the German laws, but so is thus-and-such quantity of silver for the eye, which ends the blood feud. Tacitus says that minor crimes are punished by a fine in cattle or horses (in keeping with his claim that the Germani knew not the use of money); the major and capital crimes he instances are not mere assault (on that eye, for example) but cowardice or treason: “even homicide can be atoned for by a fixed number of cattle or sheep,” and therefore “feuds do not continue for ever unreconciled.”¹⁶⁸ Notice that Tacitus (probably himself of Gaulish origin but of course thoroughly Mediterraneanized) is amazed by letting profane cash into sacred honor. The prudent answer to a crime, you see, is to demand wergelt, dissolving blood feuds in the solvent of the cash. The hero Gunnar in Njal’s Saga does so, as did every honorable Icelander in those days, at any rate according to the sagas written three centuries later.

By contrast in the South from Homer to El Cid to The Godfather honor is absolute. What is strange is that the implacable Southerners had long lived by a monetized and commercial Mediterranean, heirs to a classical civilization based since the early first millennium B.C.E. on seagoing trade. The savages of the Northern forests were making delicate calculations of monetary equivalences in a less commercial society. True, the honorable—that is, the aristocratic—part of the civilization of the classical Mediterranean had always been suspicious of getting money. By contrast the Icelandic sagas (written well after their events, I’ve noted, and admittedly therefore perhaps anachronistic) are about men unashamedly at the margin between commerce and piracy. Arriving at a new coast they had to decide whether to steal what they wanted or to trade for it. Great hoards of Byzantine coins are found in Norse settlements around the North Sea, evidence that the piratical and commercial ventures of the Vikings were not narrow in scope [Sawyer]. But all this merely enlarges the paradox, that the apparently advanced part of the Western world had from the beginning to the present a more primitive code of honor—or at any rate a less bourgeois one.

The pagan Viking attitude towards merchants did not win out. Mediterranean values did. In late 14^th-century England, for example, Chaucer characterizes the three most admired classes, “A KNIGHT there was, and that a worthy man. . . . A poor PARSON of a town/ But rich he was of holy thought and work. . . . With him there was a PLOUGHMAN who was his brother/ . . . Living in peace and perfect charity.”¹⁶⁹ He characterizes the twenty-seven other pilgrims in The Canterbury Tales in notably less flattering terms. The four solidly middle-class figures of the Merchant, the Sergeant of the Law, the Reeve, and the Doctor of Physik are described, unsurprisingly, as sharp profit-makers, “proclaiming always the increase of his winning,” “or “so great a purchaser was nowhere known,” “full rich he had a-storèd privily,” or “gold in physik is a cordiàl./ Therefore he lovèd gold in speciàl.” But a religious figure, the avaricious seller of papal pardons, is also characterized as greedy “to win silver as he full well could.” And throughout the Tales one class repeatedly accuses another of greed and hypocrisy, supplemented by lust. That, after all, is the running joke.

One must not get carried away with literary examples like this. As a leading student of early Italian capitalism points out, Chaucer or Boccaccio or other imaginative “portrayals” of merchants are “organized by a complex system of stereotypes and rhetorical images often resulting from ancient cultural models.”¹⁷⁰ They are literary works, with as the English professors say an “intertextual” relation to Horace or Virgil complaining about the pursuit of riches (while sitting on riches, it should be noted), not somehow “objective” reports from the cultural frontier. And yet.

The economist and intellectual historian Jacob Viner asserted in 1939 that "the Renaissance, especially in its Italian manifestations, brought new attitudes with respect to the dignity of the merchant, his usefulness to society, and the general legitimacy of the moderate pursuit of wealth through commerce, provided the merchant who thus attained riches used it with taste, with liberality, and with concern for the welfare and the magnificence of his city."¹⁷¹ The attitude in bourgeois towns has not in truth changed much since the Renaissance of which Viner wrote, at the height of the scholarly conviction that a chasm divides we moderns from those Dark Ages of medieval times. Nowadays, at least outside of the corrupting theories of the economists or the prejudices of the aristocratic rump, it is still judged blameworthy in a merchant to pursue wealth immoderately, tastelessly, illiberally, and without concern for the welfare and magnificence of the city.

But Viner was mistaken in not seeing the medieval precedents for an ethical bourgeoisie. His history was off by a couple of hundred years. At the time he wrote, the Renaissance (the very word is a modern coinage) was still seen as utterly novel, the beginning of modernity. Since then historians such as Quentin Skinner and Jacques Le Goff and Lynn White have looked back into the scholastic and medieval sources, finding even a natural right of revolution in the writings of Dominicans and a justification for market work in the writings of Franciscans and widespread technical innovation in a Europe allegedly uninterested in this-worldly success.

In other words, the attitude of medieval Europe and its church towards the bourgeoisie was nothing like entirely hostile, especially in northern Italy and in some of the ports of the Mediterranean. Barcelona was from medieval times an exception to the anti-bourgeois character of the rest of Spain, as in some ways it still is, and as in the 19^th century Basque Bilbao became. Merchants were respected in 14^th-century Portugal, and under its vigorous line of kings the merchants gave Portugal a trading empire. In Christian theory from the 12^th century certain high theorists admitted trading and profit as ethical goals. Thomas Aquinas and Duns Scotus, among others, such as Sinibaldus de Fieschi (later Pope Innocent IV), who perhaps earned a law degree at Bologna, worked out in the high Middle Ages an ethical life for merchants.

We moderns are inclined on the contrary to imagine with Hume and Voltaire that the Middle Ages were dark in their elevation of “monkish virtues” over the trade that Hume and Voltaire found so very civilizing. But in fact the radical monkishness of the desert fathers from the third to fifth century, culminating in St. Augustine’s disdain for the City of Man and echoing down the centuries to follow, was hardly possible in a Europe reviving commercially from the late 8^th century on.

Nor was disdain for work in God’s world consistent, as Giacamo Todeschini has recently observed in an important essay, with the task that popes and abbots faced, “the pragmatic need to manage the system of Church properties.”¹⁷² The economic theorizing of the church, however, was not merely a self-interested trick. The medieval doctors of the church invented a justification for trade—and this against their heritage from old Aristotle the teacher of aristocrats or, as I say, their more lively heritage from work-and-world-disdaining Augustine—that emphasized the work involved in trade. If you think buying low and selling high is not work, you need to read the anxious correspondence of Francesco Datini (1335-1410). What everyone knows about the medieval economy, that interest was forbidden, was false in practice. Work made possible the charging of interest, even if in veiled forms. Said the theologians: as God had worked to make the universe, so the Italian merchants worked to earn their just rewards. Both rested on the seventh day. Admiration of work is the central characteristic of a modern bourgeoisie, and here it arises from Abrahamic theology, which after all from its beginnings in Abram’s property deal with the Lord has admired a hard-working engagement with God’s creation. And a little dealing on the side.

Todeschini argues that to understand the cultural identity of late medieval businessmen it won’t do to adopt “a forced and timeless separation of the lay and religious rationalities or of the opposition between economics and moral codes.”¹⁷³ I would only add to his formulation that to understand the cultural identity of modern businesspeople it won’t do to adopt a forced and timeless separation of the lay and religious rationalities or of the opposition between economics and moral codes.

The medieval Italian manufacturers and merchants that Todeschini describes were not merely Easter-duty Christians. They worked at their faith as they worked at their trading. (But I repeat: they do so now, unless some professor or novelist has persuaded them that economics is opposed to moral codes.) “The conceptual grammar utilized in medieval economic treatises. . . were strictly connected with the theological language of election, salvation, and spiritual profit.”¹⁷⁴ In 13^th and 14^th century Italy the “body” of merchants (il corpo de la compagni; condordia) is imagined as “the mystic Body of the city as the double of Christ’s Body.”¹⁷⁵

Really, it was. In a secular age we sophisticated and agnostic intellectuals can’t quite believe such talk, and suppose with a smirk that we are witnessing hypocrisy. “Aha, Senior Datini: caught again pretending to be motivated by love of God!” But read the ample writings and confidential notebooks of Italian merchants of the time, Todeschini argues, and you have to abandon the materialist hypothesis. The Fourth Lateran Council of 1215 figures with his Italian businessmen as much or more than the merely present bottom line, as the Council of Trent in 1562-63 figured in their descendents, as later did Pope Leo NNN’s “NNNN” and Vatican II. In the 13^th century even in bourgeois Italy “the notion of ‘good reputation’ (fama) . . . is deeply related to the theological and juridical discourse about the importance of Christians to carefully protect the purity of their civic and religious ‘name’” (p. 8). As Fr. Augustine Thompson argues in an important recent book on “the lost holiness of the Italian republics,” the communes of northern and central Italy in their democratic heydays 1125-1328 “were simultaneously religious and political entities. . . . Even the most evocative appreciations of communal political theory obscure its Christian character. Ecclesiastical and civic institutions formed a single communal organism.” He instances the construction of bapisteries, such as the Florentine one with Lorenzo Ghiberti’s Gates of Paradise, used for the characteristic rite of popular religion then, “the civic rite of the Easter vigil, with its mass baptism of infants, a ritual innovation distinctive of the communes. Baptism made the children citizens of both the commune and of heaven. At Easter the commune renewed itself and reaffirmed its identity as a sacred society. These rites came to be so closely associated with republican identity that they were among the first things to go as princes established seignorial rule in the early 1300s,” and at last even in Florence and Genoa. ¹⁷⁶

Todeschini agrees: the commune was a “sacred society,” even among its merchants. “It would be easy,” Todeschini writes, “to underestimate this attention . . . to the reputation of the merchant and define it as the obvious result of an increasing market society, duly concerned about the economic trustworthiness of its members: but it would be an error, . . . a . . . very reductive point of view.”¹⁷⁷ Licentiousness or commercial unreliability was a sin against the Body of Christ. The proverb on men’s lips was “Gain at the cost of a bad reputation ought rather to be called a loss.”¹⁷⁸ The merchants of Siena and Prato and Milan “had the duty to be rich and at the same time honorable men” (p. 15). It is rather like the merchants of New York and Tokyo and Mumbai today. Donato Ferrario founded a divinity school in 15^th-century Milan, the way the property billionaires the Pritzkers in Chicago have financed hospitals and libraries and concert halls, and it would be “improper and anachronistic” to decode “this choice as [a] simple and clever social expedient,” whether for Denato Ferrario or James N. Pritzker.¹⁷⁹ The gospel of wealth of a medieval merchant was based on the literal gospels, and on their interpretation by doctors of the church. The problem in modern life is the undermining of a gospel of wealth, an undermining powered by a forced and timeless separation of the lay and religious rationalities.

And greed in northern Italy was constrained by secular virtues, too, dating back to classical times and to aristocracy-admiring Aristotle. The manuals for Italian businessmen in the 15^th century appropriated the qualities that civic humanism assigned to the leaders of the polis.¹⁸⁰ Benedetto Cotrugli advises the captain of a merchant ship to be sober, vigorous, temperate, eloquent, and well-renowned (de extimatione predito). The Northern Italian bourgeoisie of the 14^th and 15^th centuries exercised the virtue of profit-seeking prudence, to be sure, but it balanced prudence with holy faith and love, and pagan courage and justice, too.

Admittedly, Todeschini himself explicitly asserts that “the caution and vigilance concerning moral, civic, . . . [and] economic behaviors” in 14^th and 15^th century. . . cannot be reduced to an early manifestation of [a] ‘bourgeois’ spirit.”¹⁸¹ ume that “ (p. 6). They aren’t reportsa But Todeschini appears to mean by “bourgeois” the modern notion after Rousseau and Marx and Sartre of single-minded pursuit of the largest bottom line, the restless stirring for gain, the absolute desire for enrichment, the passionate hunt for value. He too is trapped in the modern prejudice against the very world “bourgeois.”

I would reply that early and late, nowadays as in the 14^th century, the member of la borghesia believes that “the social Corpus only . . . can sanctify his economic activities and identify him as a trustworthy merchant” (Todeschini, p. 13). Businesspeople want to be good, no less than politicians or priests do. They often fail, as fallen humans do. But anyway, contrary to the modernizing notions that medieval people were very different from you and me, the medieval church allowed the merchants to do their good work—but held them to a high standard, with the tortures of the Inferno awaiting those who did fail.

At the other end of the five centuries of the momentous turn from an anti-business to a pro-business civilization, Dante to Adam Smith, stands a pious dyer of wool cloth in Leeds, Joseph Ryder. The historian Matthew Kadane has recently described Ryder’s diary, kept from 1733 to 1768 in forty-odd volumes, amounting to 2,000,000 words (this book contains a mere 170,000 adjust to final count). Dissenters were known for such spiritual exercises, a genre out of which Robinson Crusoe drew. The job was, as Kadane puts it, “to watch oneself for the smallest sign of deviation from the godly course.”¹⁸² Ryder watched himself with the intensity of a Woody-Allen character under psychoanalysis, and for the same reason: his modern life in trade, he believed, might corrupt his soul. He wrote—Ryder could have been a writer of hymns, it seems: “The dangers numerous are which every saint surround/ Each worldly pleasure has its snare if riches do abound.”¹⁸³ It is an ancient theme, that one cannot serve God and mammon (“mammon” is Aramaic for “wealth”). The sin of pride in possessions or in success leads away from God, as does pride in anything here below (said Augustine). As Ryder put the matter in another of his hymn lines: “If I’m concerned too much with things below/ It makes my progress heavenward but slow.”¹⁸⁴ “By daily striving for worldly achievements undertaken to honor God,” Kadane writes, “Ryder risked transforming his successes into excesses and his achievements into vanity.” The last temptation is such spiritual pride: I am proud that I am not proud, and Satan swoops in at the last moment to claim my soul.

Kadane finds no evidence for the materialist claim that appropriate consumption was merely a demonstration of creditworthiness, the outward and visible sign of inward and economic grace. His man Ryder does not resemble the credit-obsessed man that Craig Muldrew, Alexandra Shepard, and Liz Bellamy find in England then and earlier, keeping up appearances to keep up his credit score.¹⁸⁵ In Ryder’s diary any “social implications of failure to meet credit obligations were subordinate to his worry about God’s perception of him” (p. 12). Kadane concludes, “What is the first instance gave shape to Ryder’s economic outlook, self-image, and the image he projected to others was a spiritual struggle he wages daily in the privacy of his journal to stay poised between damning extremes,” that is, the extreme of denying the use of God’s gifts in the world and the other extreme of worldly pride.¹⁸⁶ Kadane argues that Adam Smith’s amiable view of vanity tried to free exactly such people from their own worries. I’m all right, you’re all right, capitalism’s all right. But only someone who like Smith was free of serious engagement with his spiritual life could take such a relaxed and pop-psychological view. Right down to the present many businesspeople have insisted that God’s work comes first.¹⁸⁷

In modern times a strictly materialist hypothesis, the “hermeneutics of suspicion” à la Marx or Freud or Samuelson that dominates modern social science, strips away any ethics except prudence only. “Aha, Mr. Moneybags: caught again operating from a motive of prudence-only!” But the stripping originates from the rhetorical habits of our social sciences, not from the facts. And by erroneously depicting businesspeople only as creatures of the restless stirring for gain we paradoxically take away the ethical limits on greed. Go for it; greed is good, because after all you are merely a disgusting capitalist. The modern clerisy, left and right, scornful of the virtue of prudence, and attributing the corresponding sin of greed to anyone who watches his costs and considers his benefits, has thus returned to the anti-economic ethic of the desert fathers.

* * * *

So the bourgeoisie is always with us. Yet bourgeoisies have usually been precarious. Even during the momentous turn 1300-1776 in Europe there were de-bourgeoisfications. The bourgeoisie of venturing Portugal lost their influence at court, and did not create a business-dominated nation, though the nation was allied from 1386 on with an eventually more bourgeois England against a royal and anti-bourgeois Spain. Venice came to be ruled by a quasi-aristocracy out of a total population of 100,000, the 500 men of the leading families who were permitted political careers. The historian William McNeill observes that "by 1600, if not before, the [Venetian] republic came to be governed by a small clique of rentiers, who drew their income mainly from land, and to a lesser degree from office-holding itself. Active management of industry and commerce passed into the hands of domiciled foreigners. . . . The kind of commercial calculations that had governed Venetian state policy for centuries tended to lose persuasiveness. . . . The men who ruled Venice were no longer active in business, but devoted a large part of their official attention to regulating business behavior."¹⁸⁸ It certainly happened in Florence in the 16^th century, though the Florentines continued to be manufacturers with markets worldwide down to the present. It happened, too, in the Netherlands in the 18^th century. In the Dutch Republic before 1795 a tiny oligarchy—some 2000 men, perhaps a smaller group in proportion even than the 1¼ percent of the Venetian adult men —ran the country.¹⁸⁹ Yet it left Amsterdam a leading center for finance well into the 19^th century, and Holland to this day a great entrêpot. It is even claimed—though this time on no good evidence—that a loss of the bourgeois spirit of entrepreneurship happened in Britain itself (of all unlikely places) in the late 19^th century (of all unlikely periods).¹⁹⁰

But that’s precisely what is strange about northwestern Europe. The decisive, irreversible turn to a business-dominated civilization didn’t happen elsewhere. The making of the German Ocean into a bourgeois lake c. 1453-1700, to be followed by the making of the North Atlantic into a larger one in the 18^th century, and the world’s seas into the largest one of all in the 19^th century, constitutes only the most recent case of urban trade. But it was strangely decisive, even in places like Holland that slipped back into a proud oligarchy. Aristocratic elites even in northwestern Europe held power into the 20^th century, and the haute bourgeoisie kept remaking themselves into gentry or, if especially lucky, aristocracy—Baron Rothschild, of all things (as an anti-Semitic aristocrat would have put it in 1885); or, still more bizarre, Sir James Paul McCartney (MBE 1965, KBE 1997), as an anti-democratic elitist would have put it in 1965. Yet a bourgeois, business-dominated civilization kept a-building, in some places not much retarded even by experiments in incentive-damaging socialism and by adventures in treasure-exhausting nationalism.

Why irreversible? It’s not absolutely, as the experiment in reversing it in the Soviet Union 1917-correct date shows. If the state is powerful and anti-bourgeois, as under Mao or Castro, it can kill the goose. The reversal need not even be tyrannical. Populist sentiment against the corporations or the market or careers in business can return us to the conditions of 1600, if we work hard enough at it. But the history of northwestern Europe shows a mechanism of irreversibility that has in the liberal polities on the whole prevailed. In 1720 the wool, silk, and linen manufacturers constituted an interest against the importing of Indian cotton goods. But the importing and then the European manufacturing of cotton evaded the fierce prohibitions of law, and eventually created an interest in cotton manufacturing that could itself demand its own laws. We call it “vested interest,” but the term is not quite right, since a vested interest is absolute and guaranteed in law, such as a vested inheritance to a property. The word “vested” comes from a metaphor of putting on the clothes of, say, a priest. It’s permanent and unconditional. The wool manufacturers, though holding on for a long time to the exclusive right to make winding sheets for clothing the dead, could not prevent the erosion of their profits on other counts. Innovation overwhelmed the existing profits pro tempore, as the lawyers might say, creating new ones fierce in their own defense. There developed in Europe a party of progress, so to speak.

Why northwestern Europe? It’s not racial or eugenic, a hardy tradition of scientific racism after 1870 or so to the contrary.¹⁹¹ Nor is it the traditions of the Germanic tribes in the Black Forest, as the Romantic Europeans have been claiming for two centuries.¹⁹² That much is obvious—if it was not already obvious from the recent explosive economic successes of India and China, and before them of Korea and Japan, and in centuries past the overseas versions of all kinds of ethnic groups, from Parsees in England to West Africans in Italy. Yet it’s still an open question, a mystery, why China, for example, did not originate modern economic growth (which I claim is one of the chief outcomes of a business-dominated civilization). It had enormous cities and millions of merchants when bourgeois Europeans were still hiding out in clusters of a very few thousand behind their city walls. Chinese junks much larger than anything the Europeans could build were making frequent trips to the east coast of Africa before the Portuguese managed to get there in their own pathetic caravels. Yet the Portuguese persisted, at least for a while, as the Chinese did not, and inspired other Europeans to a scramble for empire and trade. “We must sail,” sang Luis Camões, the Portuguese Virgil. And so they did.

Perhaps the problem was precisely China’s unity, as against the mad ruck of Europe at the time, Genoa against Venice, Portugal against Spain, England against Holland. For example, China was rhetorically unified, the way any large, one-boss organization tends to be, such as a modern university. A “memorandum culture,” such as Confucian China (or the modern university) has no chance of rational discussion, because the monarch does not have to pay attention.¹⁹³ Look at your local dean or provost, immune to reason in an institution devoted to reason. “Rational discussion is likely to flourish most,” Barrington Moore has noted, “where it is least needed: where political [and religious] passions are minimal” (which would not describe the modern university).¹⁹⁴

Jack Goldstone has noted that:

China and India had great concentrations of capital in the hands of merchants; both had substantial accomplishments in science and technology; both had extensive markets. Eighteenth century China and Japan had agricultural productivity and standards of living equal or greater than that of contemporary European nations. . . . Government regulation and interference in the economy was modest in Asia, for the simple reason that most economic activity took place in free markets run by merchants and local communities, and was beyond the reach of the limited government bureaucracies of advanced organic societies to regulate in detail. Cultural conservatism did keep economic activities in these societies on familiar paths, but those paths allowed of considerable incremental innovation and long-term economic growth.¹⁹⁵

Kenneth Pomerantz argues for the accident in Europe, especially in Britain, of cheap coal close to industrial sites. China's coal was far away from the Yangzi Valley, the Valley being until the 19^th century a place in other ways comparable to Britain in wealth. It was where the demanders of coal and in particular the skilled craftsmen were. China's coal was inland, with no cheap water routes like London's "sea coal" from Newcastle, heating the city from the 16^th century on [check exact dates]. China also lacked, Pomerantz argues, easily colonized land to provide raw materials like cotton.¹⁹⁶

One might object that a more vigorous proto-capitalism would have moved the industry to, say, Manchuria, or at any rate to some other coal-bearing lands of the Central Kingdom, exporting the finished products instead of the raw coal. Eventually China did just this, as on a smaller scale the British did in the (newly) industrial northwest and northeast, or the Germans in Silesia [check], or on a larger scale the Europeans did in exporting finished products to the world. You do not have to move coal, even before the railway made moving it cheap. You can move people and move finished goods. And in any case, and Clark and Jacks have recently argued, substitutes for coal meant that an upper bound on the loss from a coal-less Britain would have been a mere 2% of national income---when what is to be explained is a 100% increase down to the mid-19^th century and much larger increases afterwards.¹⁹⁷

And though it is true that European colonization was easy in the Americas because the conquistadors and the Pilgrims brought measles and smallpox in their baggage, it was not so easy, at least on account of the disease gradient, in, say, India, or Indonesia—which were of course much closer to China than to Portugal, France, Britain, or the United Netherlands. Spain conquered the Philippines, just south of China’s Taiwan. And this same more vigorous proto-capitalism would have found the land for the cotton, too: indeed, as Pomerantz points out, in 1750 Ghangzhou [wrong: fix] province was probably the largest source of cotton in the world. He argues that there was in China no political alliance in favor of foreign trade. But this was in part a consequence of the hostile attitude towards all merchants—the foreigners confined to the port of Ghangzhou (modern Canton) in the south and Kyakhta in the northern inland, on the border with Russia, some 2500 miles away. It would be as though the inlets to European trade were confined to Cadiz in the south St. Petersburg in the north. Again the political unity of China figures. The Spaniards wanted to make Cadiz the sole port for the trade from the New World, but the pesky French and British and others would have none of it, make Le Havre and Glasgow into New-World entrepôts, and even going so far in their presumption as to seize Cadiz from time to time.

As a factor in China's failure to converge on the Western standard in the 19^th century Pomerantz explicitly rejects the low status in Confucian theory of merchants. But wait. Until China began seriously to honor and protect entrepreneurs—namely, under the neo-pseudo-Communists of the 1980s—China's growth was very modest. Cite

The contrast of northwestern Europe with Japan presents an even deeper mystery. In the 18^th century Japan looked similar to England in literacy, city life, bourgeois intellectual traditions, lively internal trade. Donald Keene notes that from the hand of Saikaku ( 1642-93) came “a Treasury of Japan, a collection of stories on the theme of how to make (or lose) a fortune. The heroes of these stories are men who permit themselves no extravagance, realizing that the way to wealth lies in meticulous care of the smallest details."¹⁹⁸ Saikaku’s heroes are all merchants, every one. Daniel Defoe a little later couldn’t have done better. As I have argued elsewhere, the Japanese were starting to make the adjustment even to a pro-bourgeois social theory, at any rate in merchant circles, as early as the late 17^th century.¹⁹⁹

True, Tokugawa Japan had isolated itself from foreigners, and was hostile to innovation—guns, for example, which were successfully controlled by the Tokugawa, which had come to power through their skillful use. The retreat from the gun kept sword-fighting display going strong into the 19^th century, providing later opportunities for samurai movies and militaristic propaganda. More startlingly, the Tokygawa outlawed wheels, and enforced the law.

At length under the Meiji restoration the Japanese, a hundred years before the Chinese finally did, began to honor and protect entrepreneurs, albeit with a heavy hand of government. Japanese growth in the late 19^th century exploded. A theory of convergence needs to explain why the coal-poor and colony-poor Japanese—at any rate coal- and colony-poor until they commenced conquering places like Manchuria on the grounds of just such a resources-theory of international relations as Pomerantz seems to be using—converged smartly in the late 19^th century, as coal-poor Holland and Italy did then, too. When after World War II the Japanese were compelled to abandon their militaristic and resource-based dreams of glory, they attained in short order European standards of living.

So elsewhere, mysteries. Early Islam was by no means hostile to innovation or trade, and was certainly a site for great cities (Baghdad, Cairo, Cordoba were all green-field creations). It appears to have chosen early a mixed religious-commercial law which made the taking of interest difficult (a difficulty shared of course with Europe) and which made the corporation inconceivable.²⁰⁰ On the other hand, corporations were late flowers in Western capitalism, not really used for much of anything important to the economy except a few exotic trading companies and then railways until the very late 19^th century.²⁰¹

One would like to know about South Asian cities. Again, like China, they were large and busy when Europe was somnolent. Perhaps caste mattered. In South Asia it usually does. In the ancient Mediterranean, I have noted, the economic rhetoric was notably hostile to commerce even though the place was soaked in it. And the ancient Near East around 1500 B.C.E., with ample commercial records, would be a place to start testing whether bourgeois values such as we now understand them had precedents even four millennia ago. But precedents that die out in ascensions of the bourgeoisie to the aristocracy or that are killed by kingly extractions do not a successful bourgeois world make.

A study of world bourgeoisies would be a good idea, to understand why the ultimately successful one has a genealogy something like this: