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

***check in NNN And in sweeter ways, too. As Gabriel Almond and Sidney Verba put it in their classic study of political attitudes, the good “civic culture” to which they attribute the success of Western liberalism is "based on communication and persuasion.”⁴⁶⁴ It is a bourgeois rhetoric. “Civic,” after all, is from Latin cives, citizen of a city state, and “bourgeois” means at root merely such a citizen, standing in the forum or agora to argue his case among the vegetables and jars of wine offered there for sale.

The stronger claim, harder to demonstrate, tells a story of origins, a sufficiency as against a merely long-run necessity assigned to bourgeois rhetoric in making and keeping the modern world. The rhetorical change c. 1700, admittedly, was in its origins not entirely autonomous. The story is not a Hegelian one of the Weltgeist and the Cunning of Reason. Consider again the guns, again, for which some people reach when they hear the word “culture.” Consider trade, internal and external. Consider sheer rising numbers of bourgeois.

But neither should one turn Hegel on his head in the style of Feuerbach or Marx. The rhetorical change was not a mere superstructure atop such material bases. Values are not only a reflection of material interests. Values change on their own, too. If they don’t, after all, the numerous materialists could save their breath. According to their own passionately held idea, their idea won’t express anything that material interest and the infrastructure have not already made inevitable. Sit it out.

But in fact the mere idea of a free press, if permitted politically and if accompanied by cheap printing borrowed from China, will lead eventually to independent newspapers, political pamphlets, Puritan courtesy books, epistolary novels, and guides to young men climbing the social ladder. The mere idea of a high-pressure steam engine with separate condenser, if permitted and if accompanied by skilled machinists trained in making precision scientific instruments, will lead eventually to the mere idea of a steamship and a steam locomotive, and then to the steam generation of factory power and electricity. The mere idea of the Galilean-Newtonian calculation of forces, if permitted and accompanied by mathematically educated people, will lead eventually to the mere idea of methodical calculations of flows of water for the improvement of Bristol’s port.⁴⁶⁵ Above all, as Albert Hirschman suggested in 1977, the mere idea that “commercial, banking, and similar money-making pursuits [were] honorable . . . after having stood condemned or despised as greed. . . for centuries past” will lead—and did lead, though at first, Hirschman observes, “nowhere [in Europe was it] associated with the advocacy of a new bourgeois ethos”—exactly to . . . a new bourgeois ethos.⁴⁶⁶

Si non, non. China invented paper and printing and clocks centuries before the dull Europeans caught up. For two-thousand years the Chinese system of examinations encouraged humanistic learning, as European universities did only later, and haltingly. The extremely rigorous examinations under the Xing (or “Ch’ing,” 1644-1911) yielded about 18,000 degree holders a year, a figure comparable to the universities in a Europe of very roughly the same population as China in, say, 1644—at any rate comparable until the late eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries, when the Humboldtische reforms in Europe after 1806 [***check: foundation of University of Berlin] and the explosion of population in China would have caused a great divergence in graduates proportionate to population. The 18,000 did not rise but the number of graduates in Europe did, and especially in chemistry and other physical sciences.⁴⁶⁷ But for all the learning of China—censored in somewhat the same style as the Index of Forbidden Books emanating from the Vatican, but in China with more effect because there were no equivalents of the Protestant presses—the government in the eighteenth century executed a lexicographer, arrested twenty-one of his family, and condemned his two sons and three grandsons to slavery for printing the full name of the Emperor.⁴⁶⁸ Islam carried the torch of classical learning to the West, knew much more than did Europe about Chinese technology, using paper for example hundreds of years before the Franks did (the Arabs kept the technique secret and exported paper to Europe until the thirteenth century). But the first printing press in Turkish was not operating until 1727, and in Arabic not until 1822, two-and-a-half or three-and-a-half centuries after Europe (the cursive Arabic script, used also for Turkish until Ataturk, was an obstacle to the character-by-character printing possible with Chinese or European writing), and were anyway closely censored—though printing under the Ottomans in Hebrew in places like Salonika was by then already centuries old. Islamic religious authorities objected to writing the Koran as against memorizing it.⁴⁶⁹

One must take factual care. Down to the eighteenth century, after all, some Europeans were burning witches and heretics, and still in the sixteenth century all of them were, against a long tradition in much of Islam of toleration—though a tradition that the Ottomans overturned in response to political disorders.⁴⁷⁰ The French state was very vigorous in the seventeenth century in censoring books (it went on doing it under Church auspices into the nineteenth century), and therefore Pierre Bayle (1647-1706) lived and published in Rotterdam. Right down to 1848 the cruel caricatures of the pear-shaped visage of King Louis-Philippe had to be printed in Holland and smuggled into France. London published the Scottish Enlightenment, Amsterdam the French. In England the censorship of the theater—easy to do until electronic reproduction, because it was after all public and in one place—waxed and waned from Elizabethan times, depending on epidemics and the fortunes of Puritanism. The morality plays of late medieval times, such as the York Cycle, were suppressed under Elizabeth, as papist in tone.⁴⁷¹ Censorship of the English theatre, entire under Cromwell, was brought back in 1737 by Walpole indignant at a Fielding play, and held sway in the land of our first liberties, astonishingly, until 1968. Or consider, in the land of our second liberties, the Motion Picture Code, constraining Hollywood from DDDD ***on to portraying married couples as sleeping in twin beds, and if sleeping, gingerly. The clichés of Orientalism—which claim that the East was a region of utter (if rather sexily Romantic) slavery whereas the West was gloriously free from the time of the Greeks or at the latest from the time of the Germanic tribes of the Black Forest (with the inconsequential exception, in both Greece or the Black Forest, of the 90 percent of the population who were women and foreigners and unfree men)—are imperfect guides to the true facts of East and West. When we Westerners incline to swelling pride about our westernity it is time to beware.

Yet the quasi-free habits of Holland and England and Scotland around 1700 granted the permission to entertain mere ideas. They were new. Political ideas that would have given their speaker an appointment with a Rhineland witch-burner or an Elizabethan drawer-and-quarterer circulated reasonably freely in the North-Sea lands in the early eighteenth century, at any rate by the standards of the nervous autocracies in contemporary France or China or Russia (though France like Sweden opened up in the turbulent 1780s, as did China and Russia finally in the turbulent 1890s). “There is a mighty light,” wrote the Earl of Shaftesbury (who had been tutored as a boy by John Locke) to a Dutch friend in 1706, “which spreads itself over the world especially in those two free nations of England and Holland, on whom the affairs of Europe now turn.”⁴⁷² What made the light unceasing, and made Europe wake up, was the unique change in language, a new way of talking about profit and business and invention, about calculation and the bourgeoisie, the affirmation of ordinary as against noble or holy lives. The bourgeoisie gradually disentangled itself from the literary and theological ideologies that had defined honor for thousands of years. When permitted, that is, the mere idea of honor to be had in the middle station—in trade, in profit, and in devising machines and commercial proposals—led eventually to the modern world.

The alarming Bernard Mandeville argued the case in The Fable of the Bees, first published as verse in 1705, but later made into a defense of commercial life by the addition of lengthy remarks and dialogues, especially in its notorious edition of 1723. Admiring the enterprising man, he sneers at a cloistered virtue, such as the “indolent man” exhibits—“indolent” defined as one who does not venture into the marketplace, though very willing to “work in a garret. . . with patience and assiduity.” 116 (His two characters, note, are drawn in his mental experiment from what was called then in England the bourgeoisie, “the middling people. . . of low circumstances tolerably well educated.⁴⁷³” A retiring man of letters would “run with joy to a rich nobleman that he is sure will receive him with kindness and humanity,” but will not try his mettle against real opposition.⁴⁷⁴ Thus a member of the modern clerisy will apply to a foundation he is confident will admire his politics, NNN on the far left and Olin on the far right, but such a one “will never serve his friend or his country at the expense of his quiet” by venturing into the despised world of business, and so lives quietly at public or foundation expense.⁴⁷⁵ Mandeville emphasized that the person with the opposite, enterprising temper, the striving, or at least stirring, man, the man of action, faces “a multitude of strong temptations to deviate from the rules of strict virtue, which hardly ever come in the other’s way.”⁴⁷⁶ “A very little avarice will egg him on to pursue his aim with eagerness and assiduity: small scruples are no opposition to him—where sincerity will not serve, he uses artifice.”⁴⁷⁷ But Mandeville’s point, one starting to be heard more often in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, is that such assiduity enriches and ennobles the nation. “Wealth and power, glory and worldly greatness. . . [are] not to be attained to without avarice, profuseness, pride, envy, ambition, and other vices.”⁴⁷⁸ You admit you want wealth and power. So stop criticizing its sources: “Thus vice nursed ingenuity,/ Which joined with time and industry/ Had carried life’s conveniences,/ Its real pleasure, comforts, ease,/ To such a height, the very poor/ Lived better than the rich before.”⁴⁷⁹ Mandeville was trying to give honor to a commercial civilization by putting forward his paradox that what aristocratic and Christian civilizations called “vice” was what now made them rich. “Thus every part was full of vice,/ Yet the whole mass a paradise.”⁴⁸⁰

Joel Mokyr has called the commercial turn, more admiringly, the “industrial Enlightenment,” a third project of the French philosophes and the Scottish improvers.⁴⁸¹ I would rather say that it is the Bourgeois Revaluation, but Mokyr and I do not much disagree on its importance, and certainly do not think it needs be construed as “full of vice.” The historian Roy Porter speaks of the old question “How can I be saved?” (to which one could add, “How can I be ennobled?”) yielding to the new question, “How can I be happy here below?”⁴⁸² The questions changed, and so did the rhetoric of the replies. ”The displacement of Calvinism,” writes Porter about the intolerant and world-denying “reformed” Christianity that still in 1706 had within living memory held supreme power among the Dutch, Swiss, Scots, English, and New Englanders, “by a confidence in cosmic benevolism blessed the pursuit of happiness, and to this end Britons set about exploiting a commercial society. . . . Human nature was not flawed by the Fall; desire was desirable.”⁴⁸³ Remember the broad-church preachers in England in the 1690s.

In Fielding’s Tom Jones (1749) the absurd characters the philosopher Square and the clergyman Thwackum embody the debate between Nature and Revelation: “Square held human nature to be the perfection of all virtue, and that vice was a deviation from our nature, in the same manner as deformity of body is. Thwackum, on the contrary, maintained that the human mind, since the fall, was nothing but a sink of iniquity, till purified and redeemed by grace.”⁴⁸⁴ The same debate was rehearsed in more heavily censored France, as in Diderot’s private Supplement to the Bougainville Voyage (1772; published only in safely revolutionary 1796). The imagined Tahitian wise man, Oirou, who has offered his wife and his daughters to the pleasures of a French priest, replies to the priest’s refusal: “I don’t know what this thing is that you call ‘religion,’ but I can only have a low opinion of it because it forbids you to partake of an innocent pleasure to which Nature, the sovereign mistress of us all, invites everybody.”⁴⁸⁵ Compare King Charles’ philosophy of pleasure.

Some decades earlier than Diderot during the bourgeois shift of ethical rhetoric, Benjamin Franklin, that wandering child of Puritans, had exclaimed, “’tis surprising to me that men who call themselves Christians . . . should say that a God of infinite perfections would make anything our duty that has not a natural tendency to our happiness; and if to our happiness, then it is agreeable to our Nature, since a Desire of Happiness is a natural principle which all mankind are endured [endowed] with.”⁴⁸⁶ Samuel Johnson used to say in the 1770s, “There are few ways in which a man can be more innocently employed than in getting money.”⁴⁸⁷ By 1776, a few days before Jefferson’s draft of the Declaration of Independence (which Franklin helped revise), George Mason wrote in the Virginia Declaration of Rights, of May 15, “that all men are by nature equally free and independent and have certain inherent rights, ... namely the enjoyment of life and liberty, with the means of acquiring and possessing property, and pursuing and obtaining happiness and safety." God’s law was replaced by natural rights (the rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, to spiff up George Mason’s phrase—the idea itself was a century old by then).⁴⁸⁸ Negotiated rights—deal-making and at length voting—replaced the God-given laws of social position, at first in stirring declarations and at long last in fact.

To employ an old-fashioned but still useful vocabulary, devised in 1861 by Henry Maine, the northwest of Europe, and Britain in particular, changed from a society of status to a society of contract, at any rate in its theory about itself.⁴⁸⁹ As Johnson had written of the Western Islands of Scotland, “Money confounds subordination, by overpowering the distinctions of rank and birth.”⁴⁹⁰ Christopher Bayly has made a similar point about the confounding power of the cash nexus in the Islamic world at the time Johnson wrote.⁴⁹¹ In northwestern Europe inheritance gave way to self-creation—again, at least in theory. Honest invention and hopeful revolution came to be spoken of as honorable, as they had seldom been spoken of before. And the seven principal virtues of pagan and Christian Europe were recycled as bourgeois.  The wave of gadgets, material and political, in short, came out of a bourgeois ethical and rhetorical tsunami around 1700 in the North Sea.

That’s the claim.

&Chapter 23:

Ethical Ideas and Their Rhetoric Mattered
To say it in a little more detail:

In Dante’s time a market was viewed as an occasion for sin. Holiness in 1300 was earned by prayers and charitable works, whereas buying low and selling high was deemed a great danger to the soul. As the holier-than-thou Albigensians in southern France put it a century before Dante, the truly holy people were the “poor of the faith,” that is, rich people like St. Francis of Assisi who chose ”lady poverty, a fairer bride than any of you have seen.”⁴⁹² Still in Shakespeare's time a claim of "virtue" for working in a market was flatly ridiculous. “Let me have no lying,” says the rogue Autolycus in The Winter’s Tale, “It becomes none but a merchant.”⁴⁹³ Ulysses says in Troilus and Cressida, “Let us like merchants show our foulest wares /And think perchance, they'll sell.”⁴⁹⁴

A secular gentleman, who was allowed to wear a sword, earned his virtue by nobility not by bargaining. He was a soldier,/ Full of strange oaths and bearded like the pard,/Jealous in honor, sudden and quick in quarrel,/ Seeking the bubble reputation/ Even in the cannon's mouth. The very title of “gentleman” in Elizabeth I’s time meant someone who attended the Cadiz Raid or Hampton Court, engaging in nothing so demeaning as actual work. Among the Dutch, too, as late as 1743 a report on the conditions in the tiny colony around Cape Town noted of the denizens that “having imported slaves, every common or ordinary European becomes a gentleman [meneer from mijn heer, my lord, would be the word: De Heer in Dutch is The Lord God] and prefers to be served rather than to serve.”⁴⁹⁵ The distinction haunted Afrikaner society down to the twentieth century, and kept it for a long time non-bourgeois, and poor.⁴⁹⁶

The mid-Victorian moralist Samuel Smiles, much scorned by people who have never read him (he praises the bourgeoisie; and after all he has a funny name), held up in the final chapter of Self Help (1859) “The True Gentleman” as his ideal. But the way Smiles mixes aristocratic and Christian/democratic and bourgeois notions of gentlemanliness is not the main line of the word until very late.  Admittedly, sense 2a in the Oxford English Dictionary is “a man in whom gentle birth is accompanied by appropriate qualities and behavior; hence, in general, a man of chivalrous instincts and fine feelings,” with an instance as early as 1386, in Chaucer. The lexicographers of Oxford note further that “in this sense the term is frequently defined by reference to the later derived senses of ‘gentle’,” that is, “mild mannered,” an early and unusual use being 1552. Yet much more usually until modern times the word “gentle” continued to mean “well-born.” In their book Shakespeare’s Words: A Glossary and Language Companion (2002) David and Ben Chrystal put “gentle” among their selection of the 100 most frequently encountered words that would mislead a modern reader of the Bard. They define “gentle” simply as “well-born.”⁴⁹⁷ (The alternative spelling and pronunciation, “genteel,” means much the same as “gentle” in seventeenth-century English, “appropriate to persons of quality,” as in Pepys writing in 1665 that “we had the genteelist dinner.” But in its various shades of meaning recorded in the OED “genteel” becomes in the eighteenth century a bit of a joke, and is used “now chiefly with sarcastic implication.” Thus Jane Austen in 1815 says of an unfortunate family that “they were of low origin, in trade, and only moderately genteel.”⁴⁹⁸ Note Austen’s gentle, and genteel, amusement at the distinction.)

Smiles' modern assertion on the last page of his book that "Gentleness is indeed the best test of gentlemanliness" may serve well enough now in our egalitarian times, originating in the crazy notions of Levelers in the 1640s or Wat Tyler’s mad talk in 1381 that rank and birth should not matter: “When Adam delved, and Eve span/ Who then was the gentleman?” But it has nothing to do with the self-confident society of sneering rank and birth that Shakespeare praised.  Until the rhetoric started changing in earnest around 1700 English people thought it was quite absurd to claim, as Smiles did, that gentlemanliness "may exhibit itself under the hodden grey of the peasant as well as under the lace coat of the noble."⁴⁹⁹ Smiles’ "hodden grey" [that is, undyed homespun cloth mixed of white and black wool] is an unmarked quotation from Burns' leveling poem of 1795, "A Man's a Man for a' That": “What though on hamely [homely] fare we dine,/ Wear hoddin grey, an' a that; /Gie [give] fools their silks, and knaves their wine; /A Man's a Man for a' that.” But Burns’ is modern, democratic, revolutionary talk, the talk of the Scottish kirk meeting, where any devout man could speak up, or the Scottish marketplace, where a poor man’s penny was as good as that of yon birkie ca’d a lord. The very word “noble” was transformed by Calvinists in the seventeenth century into a spiritual condition, “true nobility.”⁵⁰⁰ The change in the rhetoric, the honoring of people who claimed no privilege of robe or sword and merely worked at the business of ordinary life, serving rather than being served, yet finding honor in such a task, the shift to a bourgeois civilization—which came (as causes do) before the material and political changes it gave rise to—was historically unique. “The pith o' sense an' pride o' worth/ Are higher rank that a' that./ Then let us pray that come it may,/ (As come it will for a' that,)/ That sense and worth, o'er a' the earth, /Shall bear the gree [be thoroughly superior], an' a' that.” It was a change in ethics, a change in earnest talk about the good life, spreading at length to poets and plowmen.

By the very end, by 1848, notoriously, in Holland and England and America and their imitators in northwestern Europe, a busy businessperson was routinely said to be good, and good for us, except by an angry and as yet tiny clerisy of anti-capitalists, gathering especially in France. The new form of innovation, dating from its precursors in the northern Italian city states around 1300 to the first modern bourgeois society on a large scale in Holland around 1600 to a pro-bourgeois ethical and political rhetoric in Britain around 1776 to a world-making rhetoric around 1848, grew for the first time in history at the level of big states and empires to be acceptable, even honorable, even virtuous.

The former aristocratic or Christian or Muslim or Confucian elites had contempt for business, and taxed it or regulated it at every opportunity, keeping it within proper bounds. That was the chief constraint on the march to the modern—withholding honor from innovation, and dignity from ordinary life. But indeed a small society dominated by business could itself rather easily set constraints, by arranging for a local monopoly. If the dominate classes of merchants worked at it long enough, as the Venetians did, they could reproduce a society of strict rank and birth. The killing of innovation by the bourgeoisie itself was made possible by economic localism, Europe being riven until the nineteenth century by toll gates within countries and at frontiers—this in sharp contrast to contemporary China, which constituted one enormous free trade area. By contrast, beginning in 1738 the Prussian tax collectors, having torn down the old defensive city walls (no longer effective against modern guns) , erected a twenty-foot tall customs wall (Akzisemauer), which itself was torn down only in 1866—a fitting symbol of the rise and fall of European’s self-defeating mercantilism.⁵⁰¹ The third act of Puccini’s La Bohème (1896, from a novel of 1849 referring to the 1830s) takes place at a toll gate into Paris. It would not have seemed odd even in post-War Europe, at any rate before the full blooming of the Common Market. In 1968 we waited in our car for hours with hundreds of lorries to cross from Austria to Italy.

Thus Deventer, a Hansa town in the Netherlands, was in 1500 strictly bounded by tariffs and protections for existing trades. Constraints on trade were the illiberal equilibrium of Europe before the Industrial Revolution. You could not innovate in producing cloth without permission from the guild. In Germany during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries even the urban poets of each little town were organized into guilds, that of Wagner’s Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg, for example, with their tunes and meters laid out in rule books in a most unRomantic way.

In the style of central planning and regulation now—as against the wild, self-organizing free market now—people expected their economy to be predictable. Stanislav du Plessis speaks of his Afrikaner great grandparents, and of their parents, and theirs, and theirs: “for these couples, as for humankind generally for almost all of history, parents lived the same lives as their children.” The children “grew rich, if at all, and rarely, by accumulating more land and more cattle, more labor. . . . It is the same model we read about in the Old Testament (Genesis 13:1-30; Genesis 30: 25-43).”⁵⁰² The model was zero sum. In 1600 England, even though a big society, at any rate by Deventer or Nürnberg standards, still affixed chains on enterprise, under a theory that a trade was zero sum. Many believed that “to add more persons to be Merchant Adventurers is to put more sheep into one and the same pasture which is to serve them all.”⁵⁰³ Let us have predictable lives. It is what is behind modern revivals of mercantilism, as in Lew ***check spelling Dobbs on U. S. television or the French vintners demanding still more protection or the anti-globalization rioters at the meetings of the Group of Seven.

But a free-trade area as large as Britain in the eighteenth century, after the change in rhetoric around 1700, could develop sufficient material and intellectual interests in free trade to unbind Prometheus.⁵⁰⁴ A balance of interests against passions, in other words, is not merely a modern liberal fancy. Interests grew up in the British eighteenth century that had a stake in free markets. When the new rhetoric gave license for new businesses, the businesses could enrich enough people to create their own vested interests for carrying on, creating a toleration for creative destruction, and for unpredictable lives. Ideas and conditions intertwined into a uniquely modern rope. The first task of Napoleon’s conquering armies was to abolish restrictions by guilds, and the abolition was lasting. The result was the unprecedentedly rich societies of Europe and the world. The interests of a bourgeois civilization overbalanced the accumulated interests of traditional clergy, peasants, aristocrats, and local bourgeois monopolists, sufficiently.

From 1300 to 1600 in northern Italy and the southern and then the northern Low Countries, and the Hansa towns, and then more broadly and decisively down to 1776 in Britain, and still more broadly and still more decisively down to 1848 all over northwestern Europe and its offshoots, something changed in elite talk. In England the change in the rhetoric about the economy happened during a concentrated and startling period 1600 to 1776, and especially during an even more concentrated and even more startling period from 1689 to 1719. The heralds in England gave up trying to enforce the rule that only a gentleman could wear a sword.⁵⁰⁵ Innovation, a “system of property rights coordinated by prices,” as the economist P. J. Hill puts it, and the bourgeois work in support of it came to be spoken of as virtuous. In some ways—though not all—innovation and other bourgeois work came to be virtuous in fact.

It was a close call, because rhetoric matters. The material and legal constraints of the economy and society of Europe did not change vastly from 1689 to 1789, at any rate not on the scale of the material change from 1789 to 1914, or still more the change from 1914 to 1989. People traveled in carriages and sailing ships in 1789 as they had in 1689; they ate grain raised mainly locally and spices raised entirely in the Indies as they had in 1689; they lived for the most part in small towns or the country as before; they worked for masters with whom they were personally acquainted; they were routinely beaten by their masters or their husbands if they misbehaved; they died at high rates from water-borne diseases; they could not vote; the laws under which they lived were ferociously slanted towards the rich. Not a great deal of a narrowly economic or political or legal sort changed in the eighteenth century. Therefore narrowly economic or political or legal changes cannot be the cause of that Industrial Revolution stirring in the late eighteenth century. The economist’s instinctive materialism, in short, looks inadequate to the task of explaining the modern world.

What did change astoundingly, and at the right time to explain subsequent enrichment, were ideas and their rhetoric. The ideas and the rhetoric depended on the close call going a particular way. Imagine the denouement of eighteenth-century politics without Freemasonry—Franklin, Washington, Lafayette were masons, continuing a movement begun in Britain (and spread by Desaguliers), becoming in Holland the home of the early “radical Enlightenment,” and spreading throughout Europe. Fully 300 lodges were scattered across even princely Germany, elevating discussion and encouraging fraternal equality (and even some sororal pseudo-equality) right down to the Austrian Mozart’s Magic Flute (1791). ⁵⁰⁶

Or imagine the Enlightenment without Diderot and his Encylopédie (from 1751 on), by 1772 in 17 folio volumes of text and 11 volumes of 2,885 illustrations, with 140 contributors (for example, Rousseau on music), with 71,818 entries, and as early as 1754 having 4,255 subscribers, and in its cheap octavo editions in the late 1770s “reproduced and distributed on a mass scale throughout Europe,” 25,000 copies between 1751 and 1782, and many more translations and cheap editions later.⁵⁰⁷ A half a century earlier, as Joel Mokyr has noted, the Chinese encyclopedia Gujin Tushu Jicheng, fully 100 million characters (the Encyclopédie had only one fifth as many words), was printed, but was devoted to declaring an anti-enlightened orthodoxy in Confucianism (contrary to an ancient and vigorous spirit of dispute in Confucian thought) and was printed in a mere sixty copies—enough for enlightenment in traditional wisdom of only the very top of the Chinese mandarinate.⁵⁰⁸ This in a country in which literally hundreds of thousands of copies of books published a thousand years ago have survived to the present (the fact stuns European students of texts as important as, say, the New Testament, which have survived from so long ago in handfuls, when they have at all). Printing was not the constraint. Liberty was. China in the eighteenth century wanted to play its intellectual cards very close to the Emperor’s chest. By contrast every moderately enlightened town in Europe had access to Diderot’s Encylopédie, breaking theological custom and showing how machines were made (though beware again of Orientalism: the Chinese and Japanese at the time were also prolific in practical handbooks).

For that matter imagine how the close call might have gone the other way without certain individual callers—Locke, Newton, Bayle, Vico, Voltaire, Diderot, Rousseau, Smith. The speakers were not determined by the material base. The base was changing only sluggishly by later standards, or indeed by some earlier standards.