Dear Reader: This is a crude draft as of August 15, 2018. The three asterisks or the bold

Here Addison, and then Steele as crushing blow

Addison was the fencing and dancing master, the teacher to the bourgeoisie, teaching them politesse. Part of the [socialogist’s] argument about manners:
Cato: A Tragedy

and selected essays

Joseph Addison

Edited by Christine Dunn Henderson

and Mark E. Yellin

With a Foreword by Forrest McDonald

libert y fund

Indianapolis, 2003
The play (1713) resonated in the 18^th C. Why exactly is now clear to me. I looked for signs of a change, a line or sentiment of approbation for the bourgeoisie that could not have come out of a 16^th and early 17^th-century play, but they were not there. The project of Cato in 1713 is identical to that of the Spectator (dates): namely, to tame the “barbarous” interests by sweet ethics. The Earl of Shaftesbury’s implied audience would seem to be his fellow aristocrats. But Addison and Steele were speaking to the middling sort {evidence].
The cry of “Liberty” in the eighteenth century was necessarily a cry for the benefit of the bourgeoisie. It is an old point, but true, that the aristocracy and gentry did not require liberation, and no one but a handful of radicals like Paine and Burns or the left wing of the French Assembly took very seriously the liberty of The People. The cry of “tyranny” was always against the old powers of aristocracy and gentry when allied with the King. In the hands of the American founding brothers it was, too, an appeal against imperial power, and was so used. Civic republicanism was remade into a bourgeois program by such plays as Cato. The character of Cato appeals to bourgeois notions of liberation from subordination to The Quality—though paradoxically Cato is himself a person of quality, an aristocrat like Caesar. The battle between aristocrats is reappropriated for its uses in dignifying the bourgeoisie. Note the contrast between Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar or Antony and Cleopatra, which like Cato are retellings of the fall of the Roman Republic. Caesar is the hero of Julius Caesar, and the public sin is rebellion against the constituted authority—as one would expect in anxious Elizabethan times. In Cato, however, Caesar’s courting of hoi polloi is damned. It is precisely the middle ground of liberty for the middling sort that made the play so useful to the bourgeoisie.

Teaching politesse to the bourgeoisie was the project of self-improvement books (q.v.). To understand its import one needs to understand the picture of the typical aristocrat. Into the nineteenth century the typical heir to an aristocratic title, and his imitators, was seen as a gambling, arrogant fool. The country gentleman was devoted to his dogs and hunting, in the manner of Squire Western in Tom Jones. And so a noble, abstemious patriot like Cato the Younger could be applauded by bourgeois audiences. The question is how the bourgeoisie, and lower gentry, used the rhetoric of honor. John Adams, a provincial lawyer, gloried in Cato. The values of an aristocratic society linger, and are reappropriated for lives of lawyering or merchanting.

Addison anticipated Smith’s Impartial Spectator (which by itself is an aristocratic principle of ethics). The play’s themes of theatricality, imagination, and idealized spectators are echoed in Spectator 231’s “in our solitudes, we should fancy that Cato stands before us, and sees every thing that we do” and in Addison’s Spectator 10 assertion that his work is addressed to “everyone who considers the world as theatre, and who desires to form a right judgment of those who act in it.”


Cato was a model for the American revolutionaries. Thus Cato (Act IV, sc. 4)

“what pity is it 81

That we can die but once to serve our country!”
It was a warning against civil war in Britain:
The last lines of Act V:

From hence, let fierce contending nations know

What dire effects from civil discord flow.

’Tis this that shakes our country with alarms,

And gives up Rome a prey to Roman arms, 110

Produces fraud, and cruelty, and strife,

And robs the guilty world of Cato’s life.

Act 1, sc. 4: Against martial virtues alone:

Juba

These all are virtues of a meaner rank,

Perfections that are placed in bones and nerves.

A Roman soul is bent on higher views: 30

To civilize the rude, unpolished world,

And lay it under the restraint of laws;

To make man mild, and sociable to man;

To cultivate the wild, licentious savage

With wisdom, discipline, and liberal arts— 35

The embellishments of life; virtues like these

Make human nature shine, reform the soul,

And break our fierce barbarians into men.

In same scene Juba characterizes a stoic Cato:
While good, and just, and anxious for his friends,

He’s still severely bent against himself;

Renouncing sleep, and rest, and food, and ease,
Act II, scene 1:

Cato’s prudent warning after Sepronius’ (false) eloquence in favor of resisting Caesar
Cato

Let not a torrent of impetuous zeal

Transport thee thus beyond the bounds of reason:

True fortitude is seen in great exploits, 45

That justice warrants, and that wisdom guides,

All else is towering phrensy

Such a remark is impossible in the mouth of a Shakespearean aristocrat.
Addison and Steele in The Spectator:
Usual sneering at trade, as encouraging Avarice:

Spectator, No. 55

Thursday, May 3, 1711:
Of Pepper, and Sabean Incense, take

With thy own Hands, from the tir’d Camel’s Back,

And with Post-haste thy running Markets make.

Be sure to turn the Penny; Lye and Swear,

’Tis wholesome Sin: But Jove, thou say’st, will hear.

Swear, Fool, or Starve; for the Dilemma’s even:

A Tradesman thou! and hope to go to Heav’n?

“having no Fears to alarm them from abroad, indulge themselves in the Enjoyment of all

the Pleasures they can get into their Possession; which naturally produces

Avarice, and an immoderate Pursuit after Wealth and Riches.” The usual worry in the 18^th C, based on Roman examples. The curious admiration for Sparta, for example.

A rare commendation of economic matters, though under liberty (Spectator, No. 287

Tuesday, January 29, 1712): “Riches and Plenty are the natural Fruits of Liberty, and where

these abound, Learning and all the Liberal Arts will immediately lift

up their Heads and flourish.”
But Steele was more directly the propagandist for the bourgeoisie. His play (put it here). A lower class, and much more insistent version, was Defoe. Read more Defoe, but bring in Crusoe and Moll

* * * *

Wright’s old Middle-Class Culture in Elizabethan England (1935) is surely still correct in claiming that the education of the English bourgeoisie during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the scholarly and even scientific habits that Deborah Harkness (2007) has recently emphasized, made the “sudden” emergence of a literate and confident class late in the seventeenth and early in the eighteenth century less surprising.

“The gospel of work, one of the most significant articles of the bourgeois dogma,” Louis Wright declared long ago, “was promulgated with great earnestness during the period of Puritan supremacy and paved the way for the later apotheosis of business, which has colored the entire outlook of the modern world” (Wright 1935 p. 656). He offers little evidence of this himself, and what matters here is how the society in general felt about work. No doubt a merchant urged himself and his fellows to work at accounts and correspondence into the night. But as long as a gentleman is defined to have no avocation at all, except rattling swords and composing sonnets, the turn has not been reached.

* * * *

Loftis has argued that the eighteenth-century theatre testifies to a new admiration for the bourgeoisie. While commending Loftis for his energy in research the economist Jacob Viner offered "the simpler hypothesis. . . that as soon as merchants came to the theatre in sufficient numbers the dramatists would provide fare which would retain them as customers." Viner thus appeals to the Rise of the Bourgeoisie in its simplest economistic form—not as a rise in prestige originating in the superstructure but a rise in sheer numbers originating in the base. It is a cruder form of the Clark Hypothesis. Viner may be right about the eighteenth century. [***counter evidence in Loftis/] But in general the relation between actual and implied audience is not so simple. [***look into Wayne Booth's thinking on just this point.] Shakespeare flattered his aristocratic and especially his royal audiences, but his actual audience contained numerous merchants of London [check in Shake. literature; also % of population that was merchant; ask John Huntington]. The director of Wall Street (DDDD) assaulted financial capitalism, but many a financial capitalist gloried in the movie [check in Wall Street Journal; Financial Times]

The crux is bringing bourgeoisie into the full light of honor. It happens in Britain around 1700. (Remarkably, it happens in Japan, too, about the same time, at least in the merchant academies of Osaka).³²⁹ The comedy of the Restoration had still sneered as Shakespeare and his contemporaries had at the bourgeoisie. But matters changed in the early eighteenth century. In their book An Open Elite? England 1540-1880 DDDD) Lawrence Stone and Jeanne C. Fawtier Stone noted the change. The attempt during the seventeenth century to claim the honored aristocratic values for the bourgeoisie failed, dying “of its own. . . implausibility, and was crushed under the avalanche of satirical plays and pamphlets. . . in which the figure of the merchant continued to be portrayed in stereotypical terms that went back to antiquity.” Early in the eighteenth century, by contrast, “at the hands of men such as Addison and Steele. . . [the overseas merchant at least] was now portrayed as a responsible and sober citizen, . . . whose commercial activities were recognized as . . . the basis of the nation’s prosperity and greatness.”³³⁰

A “cit,” from “citizen,” is in Johnson’s Dictionary “a pert low townsman.” The word would have arisen in reaction to the seventeenth-century empowerment of the bourgeoisie. The newly defined “squirearchy” would have such a word frequently in its mouth, to sneer at the bourgeoisie. A merchant of Bristol, Mr. Sealand (“sea-land” which about covers it), replies in Steele’s play of 1723 {***? 1722], The Conscious Lovers, that

Sir, as much a cit as you take me for, I know the town, and the world. And give me leave to say that we merchants are a species of gentry that have grown into the world this last century, and are as honorable, and almost as useful, as you landed folks, that have always thought your selves so much above us. For your trading, forsooth, is extended no farther than a load of hay, or a fat ox. You are pleasant people, indeed, because you are generally bred up to be lazy. Therefore, I warrant you, industry is dishonorable [to you]. ³³¹

The cringe was still there—in the “cit” word, and in the absurd (though sarcastic) “almost as useful” in evaluating the merchant “species of gentry” against the country version Mr. Sealand duels verbally against the other and high-status gentry-father in the play, and the playwright allows him to win:

Sir John Bevil: Oh, Sir, . . . you are laughing at my laying any stress upon descent. But I must tell you, Sir, I never knew anyone but he that wanted [that is, lacked] that advantage turn it into ridicule.

Mr. Sealand: And I never knew anyone who had many better advantages put that into his account.

Even Mr. Sealand’s witticism is expressed in the bourgeois language of accounts.

Voltaire wrote with definite sarcasm ten years later, “I don’t know which is the more useful to the state, a well-powdered lord who knows precisely when the king gets up in the morning. . . or a great merchant who enriches his country, sends orders from his office to Surat or to Cairo, and contributes to the well-being of the world.” And still later, Johnson On how innocent the getting of money was. And later still, in 1844, on the eve of the Great Conversion against innovation among American and other scholars, Emerson: “There are geniuses in trade, as well as in war. . . . Nature seems to authorize trade, as soon as you see the natural merchant. . . . The habit of his mind is a reference to standards of natural equity and public advantage; and he inspires respect, and the wish to deal with him, both for the quiet spirit of honor which attends him, and for the intellectual pastime which the spectacle of so much ability affords.”

Early in that bright morning of bourgeois power, in 1731, George Lillo (1693-1739), a jeweler of London, wrote The London Merchant,: or, The History of George Barnwell, his second play and his first success. It inaugurated the bourgeois tragedy, and was imitated in France and Germany a quarter century later in the bürgerliches Trauerspiel. The history of the play eerily parallels Dekker’s The Shoemaker’s Holiday 132 years before, and the contrast between the two neatly exhibits the change in attitude. Like Dekker, Lillo was of Dutch origin (he was supposed to be the son of a Dutch jeweler). Like Dekker’s, Lillo’s play was after its initial success performed yearly for the benefit of the young bourgeois of the City, invariably at Christmas down to 1818, and often on the Lord Mayor’s Day in November. Like The Shoemaker’s Holiday, it was “judged a proper entertainment for the apprentices, etc., as being a more instructive, moral, and cautionary tale than many pieces,” as the original producer and star of it, Theophilus Cibber, put it. And like The Shoemaker’s Holiday it is clumsy, below the best standard of its age (Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus of 1588-89, for example, not to speak of Shakespeare; or John Gay’s The Beggars’ Opera of 1728), but was very successful indeed. From 1702 to 1776 it was the third most often produced English play.³³²

The plot was drawn from an old street ballad, set in the Armada time of 1588 (Britain in 1731 had recently again been at war with Spain). In the Child ballad version

“Nay, I an uncle have;
At Ludlow he doth dwell;
He is a grazier, which in wealth
Doth all the rest excel.
 
"Ere I will live in lack,
And have no coin for thee,
I'll rob his house and murder him."
"Why should you not," quoth she.

The tale was known well enough that the “fine, powdered sparks” (in the phrase from the poet laureate Colley Cibber’s “Epilogue”) who attended the first performance brought along copies of the broadsheet, which the playwright had hawked around the town by way of advertising on the day before the opening, intending to sneer at the play itself. But, Colley’s son Theophilus claims, they stayed to weep. The 18-year old George Barnwell, apprenticed to a good merchant of the City, is tempted by Mrs. Millwood the whore to steal from his master of the bourgeoisie and then murder his uncle of the gentry for money. Barnwell and Millwood both end on the gallows, but Barnwell is blessed by true repentance.

The play praises the bourgeoisie throughout—as some modern critics put it, “almost militant in its pride in the middle class.”³³³ “Honest merchants,” declares the elder Thorowgood at the beginning of the play, at all times contribute to the happiness of their country (I, I, p. 293; compare Voltaire).³³⁴ Thorowgood then asserts what was contested in the 1730s, that “as the name of merchant never degrades the gentleman, so by no means does it exclude him.”³³⁵ Lillo lays it on thick. Thorowgood instructs his other, virtuous apprentice Trueman “if . . . you should be tempted to any action that has [even] the appearance of vice or meanness in it, upon reflecting upon the dignity of our profession you may with honest scorn reject whatever is unworthy of it.” The big merchants dealing in foreign goods came to stand at the height of bourgeois dignity. Forty years later, in Richard Cumberland’s sentimental comedy, The West Indian, a character addresses the elderly merchant, Stockwell (epithets as names were conventional at the time): “a merchant of your eminence, and a member of the British parliament, might sure aspire, without offense, to [marry] the daughter of a [rich gentry, West Indian] planter.”³³⁶ In 1731 such a hierarchy-offending proposal had been more controversial, and Lillo had therefore to claim virtue for his merchant more insistently. In the same opening scene Thorowgood, on exiting, instructs his assistant to “look carefully over the files to see whether there are any tradesmen’s bills unpaid.” Like the death of Little Nell, it would require a heart of stone to read the set-up scenes of The London Merchant without laughing. But in seriousness, is it not a matter of virtue to pay one’s tailor? What kind of person accepts the wares of tradesmen and then refuses to give something in return? No merchant he.

Thorowgood’s eligible daughter Maria continues the aggressively pro-bourgeois propaganda, refusing to appear before “men of quality.” “The man of quality who chooses to converse with a gentleman and merchant [note the mixing] of your worth and character,” she says, “may confer honor by doing so, but he loses none” (I, i, p. 295). And later the master merchant Thorowgood instructed the good apprentice Trueman against Max U: “I would not have you only learn the method of merchandise . . . merely as a means of getting wealth.” On the contrary, the bourgeois life “is founded in reason and the nature of things.” “It promotes humanity,” he continues, in a line of reasoning used often to defend merchants, “as it has opened and yet keeps up an intercourse between nations far remote from one another in situation, customs and religion; promoting arts, industry, peace and plenty; by mutual benefit diffusing mutual love from pole to pole” (III, I, pp. 311-312). Trueman answers as though he were John Bright or Richard Cobden defending free trade in the nineteenth century: “I have observed those countries where trade is promoted and encouraged do not make discoveries to destroy, but to improve, mankind” (III, I, p. 312). (In DDDD The Shoemaker’s Holiday took no such wide view of political economy. The nation’s benefit was not in view, as increasingly it was later, from mercantilism to free trade.) Trueman and Thorowgood then launch on mutual assurances on the desirability of European imperialism: “it is the industrious merchant’s business to collect the various blessings of each soil and climate,” with a little help from soldiers and ships, “and, with the product of the whole, to enrich his native country” (III, I, p. 312).

The good apprentice Trueman is praised by his master in bourgeois style: “I have examined your accounts. They are not only just, as I have always found them, but regularly kept and fairly entered. I commend your diligence” (III, I, p. 312). In this the bad apprentice Barnwell is found at once to be disastrously deficient, though he was promising in bourgeois virtues: “never was life more regular than his: an understanding uncommon at his [18] years; and open, generous manliness of temper; his manners easy, unaffected, and engaging” (III, I, p. 313). Says Trueman of his wayward friend, “few men recover reputation lost—a merchant, never” (III, I, pp. 313-314). The propaganda has a tacked-on air. The play uses the word “interest” always opposed to virtue: the condemned Barnwell in his cell declares that is “not my interest only, but my duty, to believe and to rejoice in that hope” of heavenly forgiveness (V, ii, p. 331). Lillo was attempting to shift tragedy from “princes distressed and scenes of royal woe” to “the circumstances of the generality of mankind," but was not quite up to the standard of Ibsen or O’Neill in such stuff.³³⁷ His play was admired in Germany especially, serving as a model for a middle-class drama. G. E. Lessing declared in 1756, “I would infinitely prefer to be the creator of The London Merchant than the creator of [Gottsched’s 1732 conventional tragedy based on French models and Addison’s Cato] Der sterbende Cato.”³³⁸

Laura Brown finds in The London Merchant a celebration of bourgeois values, such as "indulgent treatment of children, voluntary choice in marriage, wedded love, the intermarriage of merchant and aristocratic families, the appropriateness of bourgeois marriage at court, the prompt payment of tradesmen, and a general anti-Spanish nationalism and imperialism in keeping with contemporary political concerns." (Brown 1985, p. 185). Polly Stevens Fields offers a feminist reading, noting that Mrs. Millwood, the whore, is the active agent in the play: “Millwood is hardly the ‘girl who can't say no’ from the male fund of fantasy; rather, she knows that her only commodity is her body. . . . We may meaningfully regard Millwood, not Barnwell, as ‘The London Merchant’ of the title” (Fields 1999, p.2). Mrs. Millwood could be speaking of merchants relative to “men of quality” as well as women relative to men when she says, “We are no otherwise esteemed or regarded by them but as we contribute to their satisfaction” (Act I, Scene II, p. 296). In a ferocious scene in which she is apprehended she declares the revenge of women on men: “To right their sex’s wrong devote their mind,/ And future Millwoods prove, to plague mankind!” (IV, ii, p. 329).

And more, driving towards a conclusion. . . .
&Chapter 17:

Bourgeois England Loved Measurement

Public calculation is highly characteristic of the Thorowgoodian bourgeois world, such as the political arithmeticians of the seventeenth century, first in Holland and then in England and then in France. The theory of probability might be thought to develop from an aristocratic concern for games of chance, but the concern becomes plebian, too, and anyway the theory is immediately applied to thoroughly bourgeois projects such as life insurance.

The Dutch led. The first person in Europe to suggest that accounting could be applied to the affairs of an entire nation, as though the nation were a business firm, appears to have been the inventor of the decimal point and was the discoverer of equal temperament in musical scales (both of which again were earlier Chinese discoveries), the Dutch mathematician and statesman Simon Stevin(us) (1548-1620). Among other bourgeois schemes, Stevin persuaded the City of Amsterdam and the King of Sweden to adopt double-entry bookkeeping.³³⁹ ***Find out more about Stevinus; read his book in Dutch Simon Stevin: De Thiende ('The Disme' or 'The Tenth' [1585 As late as 1673 Sir William Temple, astonished, was observing of the Dutch that “the order in casting up [that is, accounting for] their expenses, is so great and general, that no man offers at [that is, attempts] any undertaking which he is not prepared for, and [is not] master of his design before he begins; so as I have neither observed nor heard of any building public or private that has not been finished in the time designed for it.”³⁴⁰

The English were then not slow to adopt such rationality, or at least to claim it. ***Pepys again, and naval accounts. When in 1688 the stadholder William invaded England to stop a Catholic and pro-French king from surrounding the Netherlands, and to affirm the right of his wife Mary to the throne, the job was done with Dutch bourgeois efficiency, and stunned the world. Sir William Petty announced his method of political arithmetic in 1690: “The method I take to do this is not yet very usual. For instead of using only comparative and superlative words and intellectual arguments I have taken the course (as a specimen of the political arithmetic I have long aimed at) to express myself in terms of number, weight, or measure; to use only arguments of sense.”³⁴¹ It was a manifesto for a bourgeois age.

The coming of bourgeois statistics changed the rhetoric of politics. By 1713, as the economic historian John Nye explains in his recent history of British-French commercial relations, the British makers of drink had long benefited from the prohibition of imports of French wine into Britain. Britain and France had lately concluded their long and bloody quarrel over the Spanish succession. A bill in Parliament proposed therefore to drop the wartime preferences for Spanish and Portuguese as against the usual French wines. Unsurprisingly the existing importers of Spanish and Portuguese wines—there were of course no legal importers of French ones to speak up for the profits of that trade—objected strenuously. A frantic river of pamphlets spilled out a rhetoric of accounting and quantities. It was the first time, Nye notes, following G. N. Clark, “that the newly collected statistics on British trade entered the political debate in a substantial way,” serving “as a basis for the mercantilists’ published statements of economic doctrine.” Note the date: in now Dutch-imitating England, 1713 was the first time that policy depended on numbers, this a century after the first such debate in Holland. ***True?

The wine trades with Portugal, wrote one defender of the status quo, “have as constantly increased every year as we have increased the demand for their wines, by which means the navigation and seamen of this kingdom have been greatly encouraged.” If French wines are allowed back into Britain the navigation and seamen will be ruined, because “small ships and an easy charge of men can fetch wines from France.” And so “the greatest part of those ships must lie and rot, or come home dead freighted,” resulting in a rise in freight rates on British exports, to the detriment of the country’s treasure by foreign trade. Another British pamphleteer reckoned that “the advantage to the French nation by having such a vent for their wines” was very great. “The French king . . . would give a million of money to procure” it.³⁴² Another that

formerly the king of Portugal prohibited the importation of cloth into his kingdom. . . . [The] prohibition was taken off on consideration that Portugal wine should pay [in Britain] one third less duty than French. . . . Should the duty on French wines be lowered . . . . we very much fear that the French king will take the opportunity of introducing his subjects’ cloth into Portugal, which being of a thinner manufacture than the cloth of this nation, may be fitter for that country and their Brazils. . . . We may forever lose the cloth trade in that kingdom³⁴³

Such bourgeois, quantitative reasoning was in Britain rare a century before, though I repeat among the Dutch it was already commonplace in 1613. "Constantly increased." "The greatest part of those ships." "A million of money." "One third less duty." In June of 1713 the bill to relax the duties on French wine was rejected, but not for the numerical reasoning on rational grounds. The quantitative arguments on both sides were nonsensical. The social accounting used was mistaken, sometimes positively wacko. But an official rhetoric of quantitative prudence ruled.³⁴⁴

As any teacher of economics does, I try to teach my undergraduate students to think prudently like the Dutch of the Golden Age. In a recent course I assigned the students to calculate the costs and benefits of the automobiles that three-quarters of them operated. I suspected that American college students were working many hours in non-studying jobs, skimping their educations, to pay for cars and pizza (though come to think of it, so do their parents. My suspicion was of course confirmed. Shame on them.

But it seemed only fair for the professor herself to take the test. It turned out that of all the owners of automobiles in the class the indignant professor was the most irrational. My beloved seven-year old Toyota Avalon was costing me $4000 a year more than the same services would cost to get in other ways where I live in downtown Chicago. Taxis stream by my front door on South Dearborn Street day and night. On the other side of the accounts a parking place off-street was $160 a month, and the city’s meter maids on-street were cruelly efficient and parking, the car free on a secluded side street had resulted in three smashed windows in so many months. So I sold the car. And likewise, probably, so should you if you live in a city with public transport and taxis. I suggest you do the calculation, and certainly do it for that third car that sits outside your house to be used if ever once a week.

But a rhetoric of calculation since the seventeenth century does not mean that Europeans actually were rational. Many social scientists following Max Weber have mistakenly supposed they were, that a new skill with numbers and with accounts meant that Europeans even outside the counting houses had discovered true rationality. “Instrumental rationality” is said to characterize the modern world. No it doesn’t. It characterized the rhetoric of the modern world, but by no means did it always make the Europeans actually more sensible than their ancestors, or their imperial victims. The Europeans discovered how to talk rationality, which they then applied with enthusiasm to counting the weight of bird seeds one could fit into a Negroid skull and the number of Jews and Gypsies one could murder before lunch. The numbers and calculation and accounts appeal to a rhetoric of rationality—terms of number, weight, or measure; only arguments of sense. But they do not guarantee its substance.

The numbers, for one thing, have to be good, or good enough for the purpose. So does the accounting framework in which they are calculated. So does the evaluative job they are supposed to do. So does the ethical purpose of the whole. These are heavy, heavy requirements, and any quantitative scientist knows that most people, including other scientists, commonly get them wrong. They are major points of dispute and improvement in science. For example, the technique of "statistical significance" used in certain quantitative fields such as medicine and economics—though not much at all in physics or geology or chemistry—turns out on inspection to be comically mistaken. Hundreds of thousands of earnest researchers into cancer treatments and minimum wages have persuaded themselves that they are doing a properly bourgeois calculation when in fact the calculation is largely irrelevant to what they want to know. Like businesspeople who thereby lose profits, yet pride themselves, when they allocate fixed costs to various branches of their business, the medical and social scientists who use so-called t or p or R “tests” are doing more than fooling themselves. They are killing people and ruining economies. The suspicion that "you can prove anything with statistics" is primitive, and is precisely wrong. But in field after field of the intellect, from politicized census-taking to double blind experiments sponsored by Merck, the primitive gibe turns out to be approximately correct, at the 5% level of significance.³⁴⁵

In other words, that numbers have proliferated in the Bourgeois Era does not, as Max Weber and many others have believed, indicate that modern life is actually more “rational” than the life of ancient Greece or Shakespearean England. It sometimes is, but it quite often is not, and in numerous cases in which numbers are mentioned it surely is not. Tour guides observe that American men want to know how tall every tower is, how many bricks there are in every notable wall, how many died here, how many lived. They can then go home and report the numbers knowingly to their buddies at the coffee shop. Samuel Johnson was in 1775 typical of his age and his gender in reporting the size of everything he encountered in his tour of the West of Scotland. He used as a measuring device his walking stick (which he finally lost on the Isle of Mull). By the 1850s the conservative critics of innovation, such as Charles Dickens, were becoming very cross indeed about statistics, introducing such counting characters as “Thomas Gradgrind, sir—peremptorily Thomas—Thomas Gradgrind. With a rule and a pair of scales, and the multiplication table always in his pocket, sir, ready to weigh and measure any parcel of human nature, and tell you exactly what it comes to. It is a mere question of figures, a case of simple arithmetic.”

As a calculating modern person, even an economist, before I sold my Toyota I first went on a big shopping expedition, as my mother prudently advised, and stocked up with $1500-worth of Barilla Thin Spaghetti and Manischewitz Thin Tea Matzos and other supposedly non-perishable necessities. As an aid to such prudence I worked out little tables of equivalences, like the builder’s ready reference book: If you use ½ a carton of Quaker Instant Oats a week, and want two-years’ worth, that’s . . . let’s see, ½ x 52 x 2 = 52 boxes. Calculation embodies a modern sort of prudence, even when it is as here slightly mad. Three years after the shopping spree I still had by actual count, 11 cans of Pillar Rock Pink Salmon, but couldn't find the sell-by date on them. Thus calculative rationality. Auden wrote in 1940: "The measurable taking charge/ Of him who measures, set at large/ By his own actions, useful facts/ Become the user of his acts.”³⁴⁶

In the stock market the so-called “chartists” or “technical analysts” promise to predict on the basis of elaborate calculations that have been shown repeatedly to predict no better than astrology. Yet moderns rely on them, and news programs report them. They are demonstrably absurd. “The average of 20 analysts’ estimates,” it was soberly reported in the Chicago Tribune newspaper of August 4, 2008 (Business, p. 3, “BlackBerry Shooting to Score”) indicated that [the maker of BlackBerry] “In Motions’ stock will rise to more than $170 within a year.” The stock sold on the day Bloomberg News issued the story at $120.15 a share, and so the wise, number-driven analysts were in effect predicting that an investor who bought In Motion today would earn for taking the free advice of the analysts [($170 - $120.15) / $120.15] = 1.415, or 41.5 percent in a year. Good work if you can get it. But if this were true what would be the price today have to be? It would have to already be close to $170, or else one could earn, absurdly, 41.5 percent when investments elsewhere are earning 5 to 10 percent per year. Likewise, if the “analysts” (one wonders why they are analysts if they possess such knowledge of the future: why aren’t they billionaires instead?) predict that house prices in Chicago will rise at 41.5 percent in the next year, then the prices must have already so increased, leaving no such extraordinary gain. If a $20 bill lies on the sidewalk it will not lie for long.³⁴⁷ The modern “rationality” of consulting “analysts” is not rational at all, though impressively quantitative.

By now the bourgeois world claims to be ruled by little else than quantity. Dickens was arguing about and against the spirit of the age. In Chapter XV of Hard Times Louisa’s father is trying to persuade her to marry Mr. Bounderby by the mere batty citation of facts, only facts:

You are, we will say in round numbers, twenty years of age; Mr. Bounderby is, we will say in round numbers, fifty. There is some disparity in your respective years, but in your means and positions there is none; on the contrary, there is a great suitability. Then the question arises, Is this one disparity sufficient to operate as a bar to such a marriage? In considering this question, it is not unimportant to take into account the statistics of marriage, so far as they have yet been obtained, in England and Wales. I find, on reference to the figures, that a large proportion of these marriages are contracted between parties of very unequal ages, and that the elder of these contracting parties is, in rather more than three-fourths of these instances, the bridegroom. It is remarkable as showing the wide prevalence of this law, that among the natives of the British possessions in India, also in a considerable part of China, and among the Calmucks of Tartary, the best means of computation yet furnished us by travelers, yield similar results.

Counting can surely be a nitwit’s, or the Devil's, tool. Among the more unnerving exhibits in the extermination camp at Auschwitz are the books laid out for inspection in which Hitler's willing executioners kept neat records on every person whom they murdered.

The formal and mathematical theory of statistics was largely invented in the 1880s by eugenicists, those clever racists at the origin of so much in the social sciences. It was perfected in the twentieth century by agronomists--yes, unfashionable agronomists, at unfashionable places like the Rothamsted agricultural experiment station in England or at Iowa State University. The newly mathematized statistics then became a cult in wannabe sciences. During the 1920s, when sociology was a young science, quantification was a way of claiming status, as it became also in economics, fresh from putting aside its old name of political economy, and in psychology, fresh from a separation from philosophy. In the 1920s and 1930s even the social anthropologists, those men and women of the fanciful, fantastic, or (I am using synonymous terms) sentimental, counted coconuts.

And the economists, oh, the economists, how they counted, from the seventeenth century on, and still count. Take up any copy of The American Economic Review to hand (surely you subscribe?) and open it at random. To perhaps Joel Waldfogel, "The Deadweight Loss of Christmas" (no kidding: December 1993). On p. 1331 you will find the following Table 1:

Average Amounts Paid and Values of Gifts
		Survey 1		Survey 2
Amount paid ($)		438.2		508.9
Value ($)		313.4		462.1
Percentage ratio of average value to average price paid		71.5		90.8
Number of recipients	86		58

Waldfogel is arguing that since a gift is not chosen by the recipient it is not worth what the giver spent, which leads to a loss compared with merely sending cash. National income would be higher if we just gave money at Christmas. (Who could not love such a loony science of Prudence? It is a mere question of figures, a case of simple arithmetic.)

Economists are selected for their great love of numbers. The joke is "I'm an economist because I didn't have enough personality to become an accountant." A statistical argument is always honored in the Department of Economics. Many non-economists on the contrary fear numbers, dislike them, dishonor them, are confused and irritated by them, to the point of parody:

Patient: So, I’m thinking of ending.

Therapist: Ending what?

Patient: Therapy.

Therapist: Why? I think we’re making progress.

Patient: I don’t know. It is been twenty years and . . . .

Therapist: Let’s not get caught up in “numbers.”³⁴⁸

But some important questions can only be answered with “numbers,” which the modern world has acknowledged, without always practicing it with sense or sensibility. Twenty year is a long time in ordinary human terms to do pointless therapy. Likewise, your age number is not the only important fact about you, and is certainly nothing like your Full Meaning ("You are, we will say in round numbers, twenty years of age; Mr. Bounderby is, we will say in round numbers, fifty"). But it is a number helpful for some purposes—ordinary conversation, for one thing; medical examination for another; yes, even marriage. It is humanly useful to know that you grew up in the 1950s and came of age in the liberating 1960s: age 59 on September 11, 2001 (happy birthday). Temperature is not the only measure of a good day. Wind, sunshine, human events, and human-assigned significance matter. That this is the month and this the happy morn of Christ's nativity has meaning beyond 30 degrees F. But it is worth knowing, because humanly relevant, that the temperature on the blessed day was not -459.67 degrees F or 212 degrees F.

Many of the things we wish to know come in quantitative form. It matters—not absolutely, in God's eyes, but for particular human purposes—how much it will rain tomorrow and how much it rained yesterday. For sound practical and spiritual reasons we wish sometimes to know How Much. How many slaves were driven from Africa? Perhaps 29 million (the population of Britain at the height of the slave trade was about 8 million, to give one relevant scale), more than half going east, not west, across the Sahara or the Indian Ocean, not the Atlantic. How has Cuba fared under Communism? Income per head in Cuba has fallen by a third since 1959, while in the Dominican Republic, Chile, Mexico, Brazil, and indeed in Latin America and the Caribbean generally it has more than doubled. Over one million Cubans left the country. How big is immigration to the United States now? Smaller in proportion to population than it was in 1910. And on and on and on.

(You can see from the examples that no claim is being made here that numbers are by nature peculiarly "objective," whatever that pop-philosophical term might exactly mean, or "non-political," or "scientific." Numbers are rhetoric, which is to say humanly persuasive. In the three cases I freely admit that I am trying to persuade you to not take the Atlantic slave trade as the whole story, to dislike what Fidel did to Cuba, to welcome immigration. We agree in a particular persuasive culture to assign meaning to this or that number, and then can be persuaded to this or that view of the matter, sometimes by the number, sometimes by the very prestige of numbering in our culture, sometimes in irritated reaction to the prestige. Pebbles lie around, as the late Richard Rorty put it; facts of the matter do not. It is our human decision to count or weigh or mix the pebbles in constituting the pebbly facts.)

So counting is not in itself a sin of modern life. It is an expression rather of the high modern prestige of the characteristically bourgeois virtue of prudence. Counting is only a sin, as other pieces of prudence are, too, when practiced without the other virtues in attendance—as admittedly it often is. In any case bourgeois Europe showed its love of profit and loss in its love of numbers, and by invented the statistical chart, and the decadal census of population, and by 1930 all the imposing if often silly rhetoric of t tests and R-squares. In few cases were the numbers relevant to instrumental rationality. Napoleon was until 1812 a genius of calculation in war, but the generals at Verdun and the Somme, deeply educated in military statistics, chose not stand on his rational shoulders. Élan was supposed in 1916 to overcome barbed wire and machine guns ("Courage! On les aura!").³⁴⁹ Bureaucracies in railroading and steel making and insurance collected masses of numbers. But most of the numbers were beside the point in deciding to expand, contract, build, or close.

What the modern fascination with charts, graphs, figures, and calculations does show, in other words, is that moderns admire prudence. It does not show that they practice it. Supposing mistakenly that admiring calculation is the same thing as practicing rationality might be called the Weber Error. Body counts in Vietnam did not show that American policy there was in fact prudent. What changed from Shakespeare's time to Dickens' time was the rhetoric of quantification, and the social prestige of people like merchants and engineers and economists who specialized in it. The change in quantification announced the modern world, the change in prestige made it .

&Chapter 18

The New Values Triumphed down to 1848