©Deirdre Nansen McCloskey | COPYRIGHTED MATERIAL


by Donald Beaudreaux, George Mason University
Forthcoming, The Independent ReviewJuly 2011
Filed under articles [Bourgeois Dignity] and bourgeois era



Donald Beaudreaux
In his exhaustive history of English-language economics prior to Adam Smith, Jacob Viner wrote that
A constant note in the writings of the merchants was the insistence upon the usefulness to the community of trade and the dignity and social value of the trader, and in the eighteenth century it appears to have become common for others than the traders themselves to accept them at their own valuation.1

Most economists reading the above sentence from Viner find in it nothing interesting. At best it reports a forgettable historical tidbit. A comment merely about how people wrote (and, presumably, spoke) about commerce and merchants is economically irrelevant sociology. Nothing there worthy of the attention of an economist.

I, too, would have reacted in this way to Viner's observation had I not read Deirdre McCloskey's Bourgeois Dignity. While Viner himself quickly sped past his own observation onto other matters, my attention was gripped. This fact about attitudes in the 18th century, I realized, is evidence for the revolutionary theory that McCloskey offers to explain the industrial revolution.

And if any fact about human history demands explanation, it's the industrial revolution - the "wealth explosion," as historian Steve Davies calls it, or "Great Fact" as McCloskey herself names it. Readers of this journal need not be persuaded that this Great Fact is both Factual and Great — "great" both in the sense of being enormous in scope and effect, and in the sense of being a huge blessing for humanity.

A Fact so Great doesn't long go without people trying to explain it. Attempted explanations are as old as the Great Fact itself. These explanations include exploitation of wage workers; slavery; colonialism; Protestantism; Catholicism; science; temperate climates; temperate citizens; glorious political revolutions; and lower transportation costs and the resulting expansion in trade.

None of these explanations works to explain when the Great Fact began (18th century) and where it began (northwestern Europe). Some of these explanations highlight important pre-conditions for the industrial revolution - for example, reasonably secure private property rights - without explaining why the industrial revolution started when and where it did. Others of these explanations fail to account for any of the unique facts of the Great Fact - for example, slavery is a millennia-old institution the changes in which are correlated negatively (both temporally and spatially) with the Great Fact.

One of the many rewards for reading Bourgeois Dignity is to get from a world-class historian as in-depth and eloquent a tour of commercial and industrial history as can possibly be fit within a single volume. Along with this tour the reader also is treated by a world-class economist to a masterful review of each of the major (and some not-so-major) contending explanations for the Great Fact.

Having convinced her audience (or at least this reviewer) of the inadequacies of each of the previously offered explanations of the Great Fact, McCloskey argues that what does explain it is a sea change in attitudes toward the bourgeoisie. The bourgeoisie of northwestern Europe in the 18th century came, for the first time history, to possess dignity. The bourgeoisie and their activities finally came to be regarded by a large-enough swath of society as dignified and respectable.

Being group animals, we care deeply what other people think about us. And what people think about us is typically conveyed, to us and to others, by talk. McCloskey insists that, first in Holland and soon after in England, the way people talked about profit-seeking merchants and commercial and industrial innovators changed. That talk became more admiring. What we might call the "dignity return" to bourgeois activities rose.

Simultaneously, at least the relative "dignity return" on non-bourgeois activities fell. Less were the relative amounts of dignity meted out to those who specialized in slaughtering people in battle or in idling about in manor houses counting the hectares on which peasants toil to produce sustenance for the nobility and the clergy.

Predictably, then, as the dignity return to bourgeois activity rose relative to that of other occupations, so, too, did the amount of bourgeois activity. People do respond to incentives! The industrial revolution was launched.

Of course, McCloskey's rhetoric-centered theory of the Great Fact does not deny the importance of secure property rights, the benefits of prudent and industrious behavior, the helpfulness of low-cost means of transportation, or the wonders of science. Even the most boundless glorification of the bourgeoisie would have done nothing to spark the industrial revolution if, say, private property rights in northwestern Europe were insecure or if the terrain there was so rugged and harsh that transportation over even short distances cost a prince's ransom.

But the pre-McCloskean explanations all fail because each one of the many phenomena that these various theories propose as The Cause is not unique to 18th century northwestern Europe. Secure property rights existed in England long before the Glorious Revolution of 1688. Nor did prudent, sober attitudes about saving first appear then and there. Nor did big cities (by 18th-century standards) and their potentially thick markets. Nor did science. Nor did reductions in transportation costs.

It's possible that 18th-century northwestern Europe was the site of a perfect storm of all or most of the above coming together for the first time in history — secure property rights and a respect for science comingling for the first time with falling transportation costs and saved surplus-values wrung by Calvinists from exploited peasants.

Possible. But this possibility is no more plausible — indeed, it seems less so — than McCloskey's explanation that, given a few rather historically common pre-conditions (e.g., secure private property rights), a happy and historically unique change in attitudes toward the bourgeoisie unleashed as never before humankinds' innovative zeal. And that zeal, once unleashed, is not easily tamed back into lethargy — thankfully so, given the battering that bourgeois activities and norms have taken over the past century or more from professors, pundits, and politicians whose impressive skills in rhetoric are exceeded only by their shameful ignorance of basic economic principles.

Bourgeois Dignity is the second in a projected six-volume work. So there's much more to come. One of the promised things to come is a fuller explanation of why rhetoric in 18-century northwestern Europe turned so pro-bourgeois. That would be nice to know. But note that even if no one, including McCloskey, is able to supply a compelling explanation for why pro-bourgeois rhetoric emerged where and when it did, the thesis of Bourgeois Dignity remains unscathed. The historically unique change in rhetoric can be the spark of the Great Fact even though nothing obvious sparked the change in rhetoric itself. Sometimes things happen for no reason reducible to analytic explanation. Maybe that rhetoric change "just happened."

I doubt, though, that this rhetoric change "just happened." If its cause or causes can be identified, Deirdre McCloskey is just the scholar for the task.

I close with a cavil. I dispute the truth of Bourgeois Dignity's subtitle "Why Economics Can't Explain the Modern World."

Economics can explain the modern world. Solid evidence is McCloskey's own work. Although appointed to faculties of English, History, and Communications in addition to Economics, she is above all an economist. And her contributions as an economist to our understanding of the modern world rank second to none among scholars from whichever fields you might name. McCloskey does economics correctly - as a systematic, open-minded, truth-seeking inquiry unburdened by dogmas about what does and doesn't count as a 'legitimate' explanation.

The economics that McCloskey rightly accuses of falling short in its efforts to explain the modern world — the economics that ignores human passions other than that for the prudential pursuit of observable material gain, and that bullyingly rejects as sissified any methods of inquiry other than those not grounded in formal mathematics — is, while dominant, not the only species of economics.

Economics properly done can indeed help to explain the world. Bourgeois Dignity is Exhibit A.

  1. [back] Jacob Viner, Studies in the Theory of International Trade (New York: Harper & Bros., 1937), p. 107.