We seem therefore to be studying ideology here, I repeat, the change from a supposedly anti-bourgeois ideology in England around 1600 to a supposedly pro-bourgeois ideology around 1848. A good first step would seem to be to get the word “ideology” under control. But it keeps leaping up and growling and changing its spots. There (more…)

Under the heading Part I. What Needs to be Explained: The Rhetoric of the Aristocratic and Bourgeois English Something happened to the standing of a bourgeois life in England between 1600 and 1848. With whom? How to prove? Where exactly? In what respects exactly? A sheer, material, Marxist “rise of the bourgeoisie” does not seem (more…)

One countable piece of evidence that bourgeois values were becoming dominate in England in the 17th and 18th centuries is the new, dominate role of counting in giving evidence. It is assuredly modern. The pre-modern attitude—which survives of course in many a non-quantitative modern—shows in a little business between Prince Hal and Sir John Falstaff. (more…)

…by 1848, or 1790, or 1710 Not the mechanical “class position determined ideas” of the “rise of the bourgeoisie” notion. Acknowledge its force, for what it’s worth. But rising in numbers or not, bourgeois values “rose.” The rhetoric change. Davidoff and Hall here. A chapter or two showing the B character even of aristocratic talk (more…)

Profit More in Request than Honor A chapter under the heading: Part II. How It Happened in Venice, Amsterdam, Glasgow, London, and Philadelphia What made such talk conceivable was the “rise” of the bourgeoisie in northwestern Europe. The rise was more than numbers: it was a rise in prestige. The rise happened, in the Netherlands (more…)

Bourgeois republics have usually been undermined by resurgent aristocracy or oligarchy: Dutch, Venetian stories, leaving Britain as unique by 1750. Britain was a freshly bourgeois society. But of course bourgeois life is ancient, and so the liberalism and other virtues that go along with it have traces earlier even than the Dutch Republic in its (more…)

Josiah Child arguing against guild regulation of cloth (quoted in Lipson, Hist., p., 118, q.v.): “if we intend to have the trade of the world we must imitate the Dutch.” And so they did, in many things: naval, financial, etc. British imitation of Dutch in late 17th C. Defeat in the Solent? Other reasons? Puritans. (more…)

Defoe and The Spectator and The London Merchant; the novel as bourgeois. English novels. But the holy ground for the bourgeoisie became, of course, 18th-century Britain. No one in the 16th century would have thought of England (and less so Scotland) as a bourgeois nation. Look at the portrayal of businesspeople in Shakespeare: mainly absent, (more…)