[fragmentary] Chapter 6
Precursors Were Ancient, But Impermanent

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 Golden Age. Florence and Genoa had liberal hours. Venice was liberal in all matters except politics, being for centuries a European and indeed Greek center for publishing, by no means all of it approved by the Roman censors — the Serene Republic was famous for pornography. The economist and intellectual historian Jacob Viner noted 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.” The attitude in bourgeois towns has not in truth changed much since then. 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.

Barcelona was from medieval times an exception to the anti-bourgeois character of the rest of Spain, as in the 19th century Basque Bilbao became. 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 18th century, and the world’s seas into the largest one of all in the 19th century, constitutes only the most recent and decisive case. It is mistaken to think of the last few centuries’ “rise” of the bourgeoisie as utterly sociologically unique, at least in micro versions.

Bourgeois values, and therefore virtues, flourish by definition in cities, and so one could expect to hear of them in places of trade from the present back to the earliest strata at Jericho (8000 B.C.). But I do not want to turn the proposition into a tautology. One can imagine city life without virtues. Even within Europe there is material for a test. Cities in which kings and priests are firmly in charge, for example, would find their bourgeois virtues questioned. A study of world bourgeoisies would be a good idea, to understand why the ultimately successful one has a genealogy something like this:

The humanist lawyer, Konrad Peutinger (1465-1547), son of a distinguished family of Augsburg merchants, defended in 1530 the family of Fuggers (one was known simply as “Jacob the Rich”) against the regulatory fervor of the Nurenberg town council. In Viner’s paraphrase of his long brief Peutinger argued that:

Every man, be he priest or laic, prince, gentleman, or burgher, wholesale or retail merchant, peasant or whatever else, has the right to seek his enrichment in an honorable way, to manage his estate so to make it yield income, and in general to pursue his own self-interest, especially as it serves also the common good that a land should have rich inhabitants.

But this was a legal brief, an argument for the time and place, not a declaration of laissez faire on a philosophical level. “The common good” turned out to be the good of the Holy Roman Emperor in Vienna, to whom the brief was addressed. As Mary Catherine Welborn noted in 1939, “In his appeal to the emperor on behalf of these merchants, Peutinger cleverly pointed out how generous those capitalists could and would be to the ruler who protected them.” It was precisely the mobility of the Fuggers within a Middle Europe fragmented into hundreds of political pieces that protected them. Less so their descendants in 1939, after Peutinger’s steady advocacy of the large nation state in Germany and Italy had succeeded. Many historians have argued that the fragmentation of early modern Europe made for liberty — as against the medieval notion of a “freedom” consisting of special rights for special people, e.g. the guilds and town council of Nurenberg.

It is very much a question, for example, why China did not originate modern economic growth. It had enormous cities and millions of merchants when the bourgeois of Europeans were still hiding out in clusters of a very few thousand behind their city walls.

A “memorandum culture,” such as Confucian China (or the modern university) has no chance of rational discussion: the monarch does not need to pay attention. “Rational discussion is likely to flourish most where it is least needed: where political [and religious] passions are minimal” (which would not describe the modern university). Thus the stable polities of Holland and Britain; even Scotland after the upheavals of The Forty-Five; and France before the Revolution; and America.

Japan presents a similar, perhaps even sharper question, for in the 18th century it looked similar to England in literacy, city life, bourgeois traditions, lively internal trade. True, it had isolated itself from foreigners, and was hostile to innovation — guns, for example, which were successfully controlled after an initial adoption, resulting in the persistence of sword-fighting display into the 19th century, providing later opportunities for movies and militaristic propaganda.

Donald Keene: “Saikaku ( 1642-93), 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.” His heroes are all merchants.

Early Islam was by no means hostile to innovation or trade, though it appears to have settled early on 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. 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, ideology was notably hostile to commerce even though the place was soaked in it. The ancient Near East, with ample commercial records written on clay, would be a place to start testing whether bourgeois values such as we now understand them had precedents even four or five millennia ago.

But in any event by 1648 the bourgeois die was cast in Europe. By 1764, when the English satirist Charles Churchill wrote a long blast against everything he didn’t like — against “catamites,” for example, and French luxury and Spanish dogmatism and Italian “souls without vigour, bodies without force” — he pauses to accord rare praise:

To Holland, where Politeness ever reigns,

Where primitive Sincerity remains,

And makes a stand, where Freedom in her course

Hath left her name, though she hath lost her force

In that, as other lands, where simple trade

Was never in the garb of fraud arrayed

Where Avarice never dared to show his head,

Where, like a smiling cherub, Mercy, led

By Reason, blesses the sweet-blooded race,

And Cruelty could never find a place,

To Holland for that Charity we roam,

Which happily begins, and ends at home.

Charles Churchill, “The Times,” 1764
ll. 185-196.

In this period there is a de-bourgeoisment that takes place, too. McNeill (1974, p. 147) 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.” This happened in the Netherlands in the 18th century, maybe. It certainly happened in Florence in the 16th century. It is claimed [by whom?] on no good evidence that it happened in Britain in the 19th century.