Notes to be distributed for the draft of Bourgeois Towns

No. CX, Prudentia
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Pp. 224-5 from Charles Hoole’s English translation of Comenius’ Orbis Sensualium Pictus , published in 1659

The English-language gloss reads:
Prudence , 1. looketh upon all things as a Serpent , 2. and doeth, speaketh, or thinketh nothing in vain.
She looks backward , 3 as into a looking glass , 4. to things past ; and seeth before her, 5. as with a Perspective-glass , 7. things to come, or the end ; 6. and so she perceiveth what she hath done, and what remaineth to be done.
She proposeth an Honest, Profitable , and withal, if it may be done, a pleasant End to her actions.
Having foreseen the End , she looketh out Means, as a Way, 8. as leadeth to the end; but such as are certain and easie, and fewer rather than more, lest anything should hinder.
She watcheth Opporrtunity , 9. (which having a bushy forehead , 10. & being bald-pated , 11. and moreover having wings , 12. doth quickly slip away) and catcheth it.
She goeth on her way warily, for fear she should stumble or go amiss.

How to explain China’s backwardness? Kenneth Pomerantz argues for the accident in Europe, especially in Britain, of cheap coal close to industrial sites. China’s coal was far away from the Yangzi Valley, a place in other ways comparable to Britain in wealth until the 19th century, where the demanders of coal and in particular the skilled craftsmen were. China’s coal was inland, with no cheap water routes like London’s “sea coal” from Newcastle, heating the city from the 16th century on [check exact dates]. China also lacked, Pomerantz argues, easily colonized land to provide raw materials like cotton.

One might object that a more vigorous proto-capitalism would have moved the industry to, say, Manchuria, or at any rate to some other coal-bearing lands of the Central Kingdom, exporting the finished products instead of the raw coal. Eventually China did just this, as on a smaller scale the British did in the (newly) industrial northwest and northeast, or the Germans in Silesia [check], or on a larger scale the Europeans did in exporting finished products to the world. You do not have to move coal, even before the railway made moving it cheap. You can move people and move finished goods.

And though it is true that European colonization was easy in the Americas because the conquistadors and the Pilgrims brought measles and smallpox in their baggage, it was not easy, at least on account of the disease gradient, in, say, India, or Indonesia — which were of course much closer to China than to Portugal, France, Britain, or the United Netherlands. Spain conquered the Philippines, just south of Taiwan. And this same more vigorous protocapitalism would have found the land for the cotton, too: indeed, as Pomerantz points out, in 1750 Ghangzhou [?wrong: fix] province was probably the largest source of cotton in the world. He argues that there was in China no political alliance in favor of foreign trade. But this was in part a consequence of the hostile attitude towards all merchants — the foreigners confined to the port of Ghangzhou (modern Canton) in the south and Kyakhta in the northern inland, on the border with Russia, some 2500 miles away. It would be as though the inlets to European trade were confined to ….. [Cadiz?: Philip's big port for the Indies?] in the south and [some port 2500 miles away: Archangel? St. Petersburg?]

As a factor in China’s failure to converge on the Western standard in the 19th century Pomerantz explicitly rejects the low status in Confucian theory of merchants. But wait. Until China began seriously to honor and protect entrepreneurs — namely, under the neo-Communists of the 1980s — China’s growth was modest. Give statistics from Maddison. A hundred years earlier the Japanese began to honor and protect entrepreneurs, albeit with a heavy hand of government. As I have argued before, the Japanese were starting to make the adjustment to a pro-bourgeois social theory, at any rate in merchant circles, as early as the late 17th century. Japanese growth commenced in EXACT DATE to explode. A theory of convergence needs to explain why the coal-poor and colony-poor Japanese — at any rate coal- and colony-poor until they commenced conquering places like Manchuria on the grounds of just such a resources-theory of international relations — converged smartly in the late 19th century. When after World War II they were compelled to abandon their militaristic and resource-based dreams of glory they attained in short order European standards of living.

Smith admired honesty, sincerity, candor in a way quite foreign to Shakespearean England, and bordering on the wild enthusiasm for such Romantic qualities of faithfulness to the Self in Wordsworthian England. In the Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759, 1790) he writes:

Frankness and openness conciliate confidence. We trust the man who seems willing to trust us. . . . The great pleasure of conversation and society . . . arises from . . . a certain harmony of minds, which like so many musical instruments cannot be obtained unless there is a free communication of sentiments and opinions. . . . The man who indulges us in this natural passion, who invites us into his heart, who, as it were, sets open the gates of his breast to us, seems to exercise a species of hospitality more delightful than any other.
TMS , VII.iv.28, p. 337

An Othello or an Hamlet who opened the gates of his breast would invite a fatal wound, and even in the comedies it was prudent to dissimulate.

The native-Chinese search engine Baidu had by 2006 had more success in China than Google because it encouraged companies to buy rankings in the search. Americans, from a society that sharply separates the profane from the sacred, are scandalized by such a practice. Money corrupts, they say. Therefore Google will not accept payment for higher ranking. To do so in the United States would undermine belief in the usefulness of the rankings. But ordinary Chinese, with a stronger faith in prudence-only than the Americans, regard willingness-to-pay as itself a certification of excellence. Of course Americans sometimes follow the same reasoning, as when they call the company in the Yellow Pages with the largest advertisement.

Has business is fact become ethical? The propositions seems laughable in an economy of grotesquely high pay for CEOs. An obscure Norwegian-American professor of finance at the University of Iowa’s Tippie School of Business named Erik Lie (pronounced, it should be noted, “Lee”) in …… [his first paper?] looked into options on company stock. The option to buy at the $10-a-share price the stock was selling for on June 1, 1995 is of course quite valuable if a virtuous CEO by hard work and tacit knowledge can bring the company to profitability, and the share a year later to $20. That’s the justification for stock options. It’s a good one. Everyone is made better off if companies are run well. What Professor Lie discovered, however, is that management was sweetening the deal by routinely lying about when the option was dated. Suppose the CEO in fact from his incompetence has a year after June 1, 1995 driven down the price of the stock, to $9 a share. How to still make him rich when he leaves? Ah hah: backdate the option, that is, claim that he actually got the option on December 1, 1994, when the stock was languishing at $5 a share. By lying (with apologies to Professor Lie), the management assures its own enrichment. Lie found that thousands of companies were doing this, not just a few bad apples — in late 2006 even the sainted Apple computer company was caught doing it.

The argument for free rhetoric as cause of IR. By elimination of the alternatives. Athens. Florence. England after Shakespeare. Gouden Eeuw Nederland.

If you are going to talk about the ethics of business you are going to have to come to the virtues. To rely on contractarianism or Kantianism or utilitarianism or natural rights doesn’t answer the question you started with: How Good?

As perhaps a magical charm against criticism from the left, he says that “my assumption is not that the market elevates morality.” But then he takes it back: “the form of life fostered by the market may entail the heightened sense of agency.” Just so. Surely commerce, with 17th-century science, heightened the sense of agency. Earlier in the essay Haskell had attributed the “escalating” sense to So the market does elevate morality.

Be careful: I am used to claiming that the mkt always existed. If so, why not always sense of responsibility? So it’s not The Mkt tout court. People were involved in markets from the Dark Ages on. It was a new sense of . . . what? Adventure? Projectors? Maybe a new sense that it was all right to be a market person, or an acceptance of market outcomes as just. Some societies, and certainly big parts of many societies, were dominated by mercantile values: one thinks of the Phoenecians or their offshoot Carthage; the overseas Chinese, or indeed the overseas Japanese before they were forbidden to return; or Jews such as Jesus of Nazareth, with his parables of merchants and makers. There’s something new in Holland c. 1600 and especially in England c. 1700 and Scotland and British North America c. 1750 and Belgium c. 1800.

The engineers and physical scientists were commonly more optimistic about this-worldly progress than were the economists. In the words of the chemist and preacher Joseph Priestley (DATES), “Nature, including both its materials and its laws, will be more at our command; men will make their situation in this world abundantly more easy and comfortable, they will prolong their existence in it and grow daily more happy. . .Thus whatever the beginning of the world the end will be glorious and paradisiacal beyond that our imaginations can now conceive.” Quoted in Niebuhr, The Irony of American History (1952), Chap. 3, introduction. This is not the way the economists at the time were talking, not at all.

Christian asceticism : The Epistle of Clement, of the 2nd century, asserted that “this age and the future are two enemies . . we cannot therefore be friends of the two but must bid farewell to the one and hold companionship with the other.” (Niebuhr 1952, Chap. 3, introduction)

Niebuhr quotes Hegel (Friedrich von Hegel, Eternal Life , p. 255) that the goal of religion is

“a sufficient otherworldliness without fanaticism and a sufficient this-worldliness without Philistinism.” (Niebuhr 1952, Chp. 3, introduction)

Contrary to Weber, Reinhold Niebuhr wrote in 1952, “Prosperity was not, according to the Puritan creed, a primary proof or fruit of virtue. ‘When men do not see and own God,’ declared Urian Oakes (1631), ‘but attribute success to the sufficiency of instruments it is time for God to maintain his own right and to show that He gives and denies success according to His own good pleasure’” (Niebuhr 1952, Chap. 3, Sec. 1). But Niebuhr sees “the descent from Puritanism to Yankee in America . . . [as] a fairly rapid one. Prosperity which had been sought in the service of God was now sought for its own sake. The Yankees were very appreciative of the promise in Deuteronomy: ‘And thou shalt do that which is right and good in the sight of the Lord: that it may be well with thee, and that thou mayest go in and possess the good land which the lord sware unto thy fathers’” (6: 18). (Chap 3, sec. 1) “According to the Jeffersonians,” Niebuhr contnues, “prosperity and well-being should be sought as the basis of virtue. They believed that if each citizen found contentment in a justly and richly rewarded toil he would not be disposed to take advantage of his neighbor. The Puritans regarded virtue as the basis of prosperity, rather than prosperity as the basis of virtue. But in any case the fusion of these two forces created a preoccupation with the material circumstances of life which expressed a more consistent bourgeois ethos than that of even the most advanced nations of Europe.” Niebuhr 1952, Chap. 3, Sec. 1)