The Tide Came from a New Dignity and a New Liberty for the Ordinary Bourgeoisie and Its Innovations
Innovation depends, as the economist and rabbi Israel Kirzner has argued, on alertness.20 The big or small entrepreneur, encouraged by dignity and enabled by liberty, alertly notices an opportunity, and takes it. To have socially good effects the alertness cannot be of the monopolizing sort the ancient bourgeoisie admired, or of which the Tammany Hall politician George Washington Plunkett spoke of in 1905: “There’s an honest graft, and I’m an example of how it works. I might sum up the whole thing by sayin’: ‘I seen my opportunities and I took ‘em’.”21 Such “opportunities” to extract bribes out of a government-enforced monopoly at best shuffle the community’s income from the taxpayer to Plunkett. More likely in the process they reduce it. And modern protectionism, such as the sort Frédéric Bastiat spoofed in 1845 in his petition of the candle makers against the light of the sun, certainly does reduce the community’s income, by putting people in less productive jobs.22 Bastiat’s funniest example is the “negative railroad.” A railroad was proposed from Paris to Madrid. The city of Bordeaux demanded that the railroad break there, which would “create jobs” for porters and hotels and taxis (London, Chicago, and Paris itself have long had precisely such arrangements, extracted by politics and monopoly: in the United States in the railway age they always said “Change in Chicago”). Bastiat noted that by such “job-creating” logic every town along the route should see its opportunity and take it. “Change Ablon-sur-Seine, Evry, Ballancourt-sur-Essonne, La Ferté-Alais.” Every few kilometers, at every country village, the railroad would end at a Gare du Nord to be resumed after job-creating expenditure by travelers and freight handlers at a Gare du Sud. All the national income of France and Spain would come to be “generated” by the railroad, at the cost of all other forms of production. It would be a negative railroad, a triumph of protectionism and industrial planning achieved through what economists call “rent seeking.”
But if the opportunity is an actual improvement in how things are provided — rather than one of the rent-seeking opportunities for legalized theft in which the old aristocracy and priesthood had so long specialized, and in which the new democratic politicians also came to be skilled — then the society is made better off. Move the marketplace to a more convenient location. Buy Greek olive oil at a low price to sell high. Invent the container ship. Discover E = mc2.
Yet such inventive activities, especially in towns, had always been scorned by the elite. After all, the elite lived by the dignified collection of rents or taxes imposed on mere workers. A middleman improving life by purchasing a bolt of cloth or an idea for an invention at a low price and selling it at a higher price to people who valued it more seemed to them a mere trickster. In 44 B.C.E. Cicero declared that “commerce, if on a small scale, is to be regarded as vulgar; but if large and rich. . . it is not so very discreditable. . . . if the merchant, . . . contented with his profits, . . . betakes himself from the port itself to an estate in the country.”23 In 1516 the blast by Thomas More — or, rather, by his character Raphael Hythloday ["peddler of nonsense": More was for a long time canny in making his own position ambiguous] — can stand for the abuse directed for millennia at the vulgar traders and innovators of the towns: “They think up . . . all ways and means . . . of keeping what they have heaped up through underhanded deals, and then of taking advantage of the poor by buying their labor and toil as cheaply as possible. . . . These depraved creatures, in their insatiable greed, . . . are still very far from the happiness of the Utopian commonwealth [where] once the use of money was abolished, and together with it all greed for it, what a mass of troubles was cut away!”24 The Earl of Leicester, sent by Elizabeth in the 1580s to meddle in the politics of the already bourgeois Dutch, did not trouble to conceal his contempt for the “Sovereign Lords Miller and Cheeseman” with whom he had to deal.25 And even the commercial Dutch had a proverb, Een laugen is koopmans welvaart, “A lie is a merchant’s prosperity.”
But after 1700 in Britain, as earlier in Holland, the vulgarities of the economy and of money and of dealing, with their disturbing creativity, came gradually to be talked about as non-corrupting. They began to be seen as worthy of a certain respect, as being not hopelessly vulgar or sinful or underhanded. In a word, they became dignified. The very idea of virtue and dignity in (of all places) the economy — even in small-scale commerce, or buying grain low to sell high, or making cheese — had been proposed tentatively by professors in Italy and Spain and France. In the mid-thirteenth century St. Thomas of Aquino himself had written in the style of his ancient and anti-bourgeois authorities, especially of the desert monks and of Aristotle the teacher of aristocrats, that “trading, considered in itself, has a certain debasement attaching thereto, in so far as, by its very nature, it does not imply a virtuous or necessary end.”26 But Thomas and the other urban monks of his time wrestled against the inherited style: “Nevertheless gain which is the end of trading, though not implying, by its nature, anything virtuous or necessary, does not, in itself, connote anything sinful or contrary to virtue: wherefore nothing prevents gain from being directed to some necessary or even virtuous end, and thus trading becomes lawful. Thus, for instance, a man may intend the moderate gain which he seeks to acquire by trading for the upkeep of his household.”
No one in charge in Florence or Barcelona after 1200 actually thought that commerce was immoral — they left such primitive notions to the country folk of the North. Yet eventually in the North-Sea lands during the seventeenth and especially during the eighteenth century many of the clerisy of artists and intellectuals, and even a few churchmen and aristocrats, came to tolerate and in a small way to admire the bourgeoisie. Towards 1800 many ordinary Europeans, and towards 1900 still more Europeans, and then towards 2000 many ordinary people elsewhere, came to accept the outcome of the market with more or less good grace. As Christine MacLeod puts it, by the standard of the “aristocratic cultural hegemony” of earlier times “the inventor was an improbable hero,” but by the middle of the nineteenth century in Britain the inventor had become just that.27 The Dutch, then the British, then the Americans, and then many other people for the first time on a big scale looked with favor on the market economy, and even on the creative destruction coming from its profitable innovations. American westerns praised bourgeois cattlemen.28 Japanese salarymen became heroes of novels. The world began to revalue the bourgeois towns. In 2005 the francophone English writer Alain de Botton spoke of his boring home town, Zurich, whose “distinctive lesson to the world lies in its ability to remind us of how truly imaginative and humane it can be to ask of a city that it be nothing other than boring and bourgeois.” He quotes Montaigne, writing in the last decades of the sixteenth century:
Storming a breech, conducting an embassy, ruling a nation are glittering deeds. [But] rebuking, laughing, buying, selling, loving, hating, and living together gently and justly with your household — and with yourself. . . — is something more difficult. Whatever people may say, such secluded lives sustain in that way duties which are at least as hard and tense as those of other lives.29
Note that the event in question is not a “rise of the middle class,” if by that is meant a coming of an enlarged bourgeoisie to political power. Outside the British North American colonies the step was long delayed. The middle class, as Jack Hexter pointed out long ago, is always “rising,” and yet only lately has gotten there in England — it hadn’t, really, even in the nineteenth century, and certainly hadn’t in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.30 The event in early modern times is rather a Revaluation of bourgeois behavior, an increased acceptance of bourgeois virtues, the rebuking, laughing, buying, selling far from glittering deeds. As the historian Joyce Oldham Appleby put it in 1978, speaking of the late seventeenth century aand after, the middle class in England “coalesced with, rather than displaced, the existing ruling class. . . . Social change. . . requires not a new class but a modern class, however formed.”31 In Holland, first, and then in England and then the rest, it happened.
The market and the bourgeoisie in the Revaluing countries repaid the compliment with a stunning enrichment. By their innovation and their competition for customers in markets, acting for the first time within a social drama in which they enjoyed dignity and liberty, they increased the welfare of the poor in Britain and then elsewhere at first by 100 percent and at length by 900 percent, then 1500 percent, then beyond, up to that $137 a day. It is happening now even in Egypt.
Some of the enrichment was win-win, a “creative accumulation,” as the economic historian Nick von Tunzelmann puts it. Think of the hula hoop or the skate board, new products with no close substitutes to be damaged by the novelty. Yet most changes do damage some people — from “creative destruction,” in the phrase of Werner Sombart’s (1863-1941) made famous by Joseph Schumpeter (1883-1950). Win-lose is usual. Think of the new fold-up-and-carry canvas lawn chairs, which once sold for $40 and now for $6, which have bankrupted companies making the older aluminum chairs. They in turn had bankrupted the old wooden folding deck chairs, which in turn had bankrupted the still older Adirondack non-folding wooden chairs. Chicago prospers mightily, and windily proclaims its might, and so St. Louis comparatively does not. Steam puts waterpower out of business, slowly. Buggy whips lose their appeal. WalMart cheapens goods to the poor but drives local monopolies in retailing out of business.
Creative destruction is not only economic. If innovating in the production of sugar or the organization of corporations creates some losers as well as a lot of winners, so do most artistic or intellectual innovations. Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie put out of business many a jazzman of the Age of Swing, as Swing had put out of business Dixieland, and Dixieland had put out of business Ragtime. Coco Chanel bankrupted many a dressmaker of the older sort. Albert Einstein made obsolete the many physicists who believed that the universe in the large was Euclidian and Newtonian (and shortly afterwards Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg and their quantum mechanics made Einstein’s mature thinking obsolete). It is not true that free trade in goods or art or ideas helps every single person.
But the fact of destruction somewhere does not make free trade in goods or ideas a bad thing. The accounting is commonly: win-win-win-win-win-lose. Or so the new bourgeois liberalism claimed, contrary to the zero-sum notions that had governed the world up to then, in which every gain to Europe was supposed to have arisen from a comparable loss to the rest. Win minus lose equals zero. No, said the liberals like John Stuart Mill, not usually.
The win-win-win-win-win-lose calculation is known in philosophy as “act” (or direct) utilitarianism: the balance of social gain to some innovation is claimed to be positive, taking winners with losers and adding them up (somehow). At the same time, however, an alternative argument was developed, by Mill: rule (or indirect) utilitarianism.32 Each act of buying or innovating may have losers. Indeed, unless the item has no alternative buyer or employment, it must: if I buy a Picasso I am literally taking it away from someone. The price he faces for substitutes for “Man with a Blue Guitar” rises. If he has a veto on my purchase, he will surely exercise it. A society in which literally everyone has to agree to such a change in how things are allocated among him and me will not be progressive technologically (or artistically or intellectually or spiritually or in any other way).
What Mill and Sidgwick and other sophisticated utilitarians saw is that if we instead make our ethical and political decisions not at the level of acts but at the level of rule-making about acts we can avoid the win-lose logic of allocation, and avoid, too, certain other and more dramatic paradoxes in act utilitarianism. We choose to abide by the market’s equilibrium, for example, or we choose to abide by democratic rule, or we choose to abide by the amiable political fiction that all people are equal — and the outcome will be good (Mill was still a consequentialist in ethics). Mill’s ploy undergirds what the economist James Buchanan calls “constitutional political economy.” “If politics is conceptualized as a two-stage or two-level process (the constitutional [or rule] and the post-constitutional [or act]). . . the agreement criterion . . . [has] more acceptable implications.”33 It is what Buchanan and Gordon Tullock were about when they posited in The Calculus of Consent (1962) a veil of uncertainty concerning which side of the market or the vote one will end up on, behind which one makes constitutional rules. It is also what John Rawls was about in his later A Theory of Justice (1971) when he imagined a pre-natal veil of ignorance behind which we decide whether our society will have slavery or not.
To the economist, the lower level, act utilitarianism has its charms. She points out that if the price of lumber is higher in England than in Sweden then shipping Swedish lumber from Norrland to London creates value, by the amount of the price difference less the transaction costs. An innovation in lumber manufacturing or organization can be seen as the same sort of alert arbitrage, buying an idea for lumber ships or steel saws low and selling it high. Again the gain in value is the price difference. Sven Svenson the Swedish lumber king is made better off, as is Jones the lumber merchant in London — and his employees and customers are made better off, too. True, if Sweden exports lumber some people are hurt. The price of lumber from Sussex in southern England, which is a substitute for Swedish lumber, goes down, and the fall in price will measure the loss to Wrightman, the owner of a big stand of timber in Sussex. And back in Sweden Jon Jonson, the competing lumber duke, is certainly made worse off by King Svenson’s success. He is very unhappy about it, and would veto it if he could.
But the economic logic is that the act of taking advantage of a price difference, moving stuff from low-valued uses to high-valued uses, creates a net and national gain in value-in-use (which appears as an uptick in national income). People benefitting from the original low-valued use are hurt, but more people (weighted by purchasing power) are helped — the price they pay falls. Other suppliers of lumber or any substitute for lumber are hurt. The demanders of any complement such as houses made with wood are helped. It looks complicated. But on a blackboard the economist can show you that under certain assumptions the net gain to national income is always positive. As Bastiat said at the dawn of confidence in laissez faire arguments, “what I save by paying nothing to the sun [for indoor illumination in the day time], I use for buying clothing, furniture, and [even] candles.”34 It is all quite simple, the economist says — unless, she concedes with a certain embarrassment, “second-best” considerations or “non-convexities” intervene, or unless you do not approve ethically of weighting people by purchasing power.35
Blackboard proofs and their uneasy assumption of first-best and amoral income distribution aside, though, the historical facts speak loudly enough. Clearly, some people are hurt by economic change, every time, just as some people are hurt by intellectual change or fashion change or climate change. But equally clearly the gain since 1800 from economic change has massively outweighed the loss to English woodmen disemployed by Swedish timber, or American blacksmiths disemployed by automobiles, or Indian bullock-drivers disemployed by motor trucks. The Win-Win-Win-Win-Wins far outnumber the Lose. To put it in terms of constitutional political economy, what sort of society would you rather be born into: one that forbad every innovation that resulted in any loss whatever to someone, and rested at $3 a day, or one that allowed innovation, perhaps with a social safety net like Norway’s, and resulted in $137 a day?
That’s why it is scientifically important to grasp the great magnitude of modern economic growth. When the value created is merely the modest efficiency gains noted in the nineteenth century by the classical British economists one might reasonably stand in doubt, and slip into conservative, protectionist measures (though the blackboard, I say, still provides the uneasy proof of net gain from free trade). But when the value created is a factor of 10 — a movement from $3 to $30, not to speak of $3 to $137 — it becomes impossible to argue that the loss to the substitutes (other suppliers of lumber, say) does in historical fact overwhelm the gain (to buyers of wood, say, or people who live in wooden houses). Or, to speak from behind the veil of ignorance, it becomes impossible to argue that one would prefer to enforce rules leading to the $3 society rather than to the $137 one.
Some intellectuals look with suspicion on globalization, and focus on its losers such as Jonson the Swedish competitor of Svenson, or Wrightman the English competitor of Swedish timber, and especially focus on the impoverished employees in the activities that lose. They conclude that economic growth has had unconscionable costs. The historical sociologist Immanuel Wallerstein, a man of the left, declared in 1983 that “It is simply not true that capitalism as a historical system has represented progress over the various previous historical systems that it destroyed or transformed.”36 Such is the theme of the historians Kenneth Pomeranz and Steven Topik in their brilliant economic-historical collage, The World That Trade Created (2006; a new edition of a 1999 book). In the book they warmly commend, among numerous other opponents of innovation, “village elders [in twentieth-century China] who had banned a more efficient sickle on the grounds that its benefits were not worth the new struggles it would touch off between farmers, hired harvesters, and thieves.”37 That sounds nice.
But it’s not. If envy and local interest and keeping the peace between users of old and new technologies are allowed to call the shots, innovation and the modern world is blocked. If bourgeois dignity and liberty are not on the whole embraced by public opinion, the enrichment of the poor doesn’t happen. The older suppliers win. Everyone else loses. You work at your grandfather’s job in the field or factory instead of going to university. We remain contentedly — or not so contentedly — at $3 a day. The poor remain unspeakably poor.
By 1800 in northwestern Europe, for the first time in economic history, an important part of public opinion, especially elite opinion, came to accept creative accumulation and destruction in the economy, in the same way as it was doing in the parallel world of non-economic ideas. The resulting change certainly did represent progress over the various previous historical systems that it destroyed or transformed, because it introduced rule utilitarianism or constitutional political economy into the affairs of ordinary life. People were willing to change jobs and allow technology to progress. People stopped attributing this man’s riches or that woman’s poverty to politics or witchcraft. They came to what the novelist Philip Roth calls “a civilized person’s tolerant understanding of the puzzle of inequality and misfortune.”38 Or at least they shifted away from a belief in highly personal politics and witchcraft, such as in the early seventeenth century provoked the burning of thousands of witches along the German borderlands with France, towards a disenchanted belief in the impersonal, such as Them or the Government or the Invisible Hand or That’s Just How It Is.
Accepting creative accumulation and destruction, it turned out, provided a near-guarantee that almost all the boats rose on its tide. You didn’t even need a boat. Pomeranz and Topik are not wrong to note the exploitation when, say, rising demand for binding twine to bale American wheat straw led to Mayans and Yaqui Indians being bound in the Yucatán to harvest cactus to make the twine.39 But they are often wrong in assigning (without argument) the exploitation to the innovation itself rather than to the pre-capitalist structures of power that allowed the tyrants to exploit the opportunity to trade in twine or coffee or sugar or rubber. Such pre-existing evils, exploited in other ways before the evil market appeared, were often enough eroded by capitalism itself — if by nothing else than by the sheer rise of world incomes per head and the political power to ordinary folk that it brought in its train. And the liberal bourgeoisie, after all, supported early and uniquely the ending of slavery, as in the British Empire in 1833, and the protections for free speech, in the American First Amendment in 1789, and the various other liberties overturning the ancien régime in the French Revolution of that same fruitful year.
In other words, anti-globalization writers such as Pomeranz and Topik (among many of my left-wing friends) have less interest than they should in the gigantic gains from bourgeois dignity and liberty. Nowhere in a long book do they acknowledge the leap from $3 to $137, or even the more widespread leap from $3 to $30. The historians of the world that trade created do not acknowledge the largest economic event in world history since the domestication of plants and animals, happening in the middle of their story. An elephant sits in the middle of the room, yet Pomeranz and Topik speak only of the disturbances to the surrounding glassware. Nowhere in their book do they note that we were once all poor and now many of us are rich, and the Top 5 ½ Billion are on the way to riches, with some hope even for the Bottom Billion. Pomeranz’ and Topik’s own ancestors were $3-a-day folk, like yours and mine. The detested capitalism permitted the descendents — Pomeranz and Topik and McCloskey, for example — to specialize in the arcania of Chinese or Latin American or British economic history instead of cooking potatoes or mending shoes. Someone who imbibed their world history from Pomeranz and Topik neat would have no idea that such a shrinkage of world poverty had happened.
We all — my left- and my right-wing friends and I together — want the poor to do well. No one of sense cares for example how splendidly the good folk of Fisher Island, Florida are doing in their mansions. True, the right wing is often reluctant to admit that the conservative institutions it admires with such affecting piety are often instruments of class or racial or gender domination, such as a Harvard discriminating against Jews from the 1920s on, or the hospitals segregating their wards and leaving the jazz singer Bessie Smith to die in 1937 on the way to a remote Negroes-only hospital.40 But the left wing in turn, ably represented here by Pomeranz and Topik, is often reluctant to admit that bourgeois innovation, not government protection or union organization, made most poor people 1800 to the present massively better off. It has.
Or, to look at it the other way, the anti-globalization, anti-modernization writers have less interest than they should in the misery of traditional, $3-a-day societies, in which village elders decide on the design of sickles, and of marriages, and of laws. Wallerstein claimed in 1983 that he did not “seek to paint [an] idyll of the worlds before historical capitalism,” but went on to deny (in an argument he admitted was “audacious”) the evident progress in the material and spiritual condition of ordinary people worldwide since 1800.41 We must not allow such a grim threnody for the world we have lost to deafen us to the cheerful epithalamia for the world we have gained. Mill complained in 1848 about the reactionary version of the threnody then forming in the writings of Benjamin Disraeli and Mill’s friend Thomas Carlyle (in this as in many other respects the recent far left rehearses the arguments of the old far right): in “the theory of dependence and protection . . . the lot of the poor . . . should be regulated for them, not by them. . . . This is the ideal of the future, in the minds of those whose dissatisfaction with the present assumes the form of affection and regret towards the past.”42 Or as Bastiat put it about the same time, against the notion that “the government should know everything and foresee everything in order to manage the lives of the people, and the people need only let themselves be taken care of. . . . Nothing is more senseless than to base so many expectations on the state, that is, to assume the existence of collective wisdom and foresight after taking for granted the existence of individual imbecility and improvidence.”43 Conservatives and progressives alike suppose that village elders or members of the French Assembly are better suited to deciding on innovation than are mere peasants noting the advantages of a better sickle.
But in the event, by the new, egalitarian, anti-expert, pro-bourgeois talk (or “self-dependence,” as Mill called it), a positive-sum game was freed to some extent from zero-sum politics. The idea of progress through bourgeois dignity and liberty took hold of the social imaginary of the West. Napoleon’s armies saw it as their first duty after a conquest to abolish the monopolizing guilds. In 1857 the Danish Sound Tolls, which for centuries had been collected from Hamlet’s Helsingør (“Elsinore,” said Shakespeare), were eliminated by international treaty. By the middle of the nineteenth century both Britain and France were free-trade nations.44 And all were on their way to bourgeois enrichment.
I am claiming, in other words, that the historically unique economic growth on the order of a factor of ten or sixteen or higher, and its political and spiritual correlates, depended on ideas more than on economics. “During its rule of scarce one hundred years,” wrote Marx and Engels in The Communist Manifesto of 1848, “the bourgeoisie has created more massive and colossal productive forces than have all preceding generations.” True, and in the next hundred years it created much more, with a consequent improvement of the formerly poor — quite contrary to what Marx and Engels anticipated. But ideas, not mere trade or investment or exploitation, did the creating. The leading ideas of the bourgeoisie itself and especially the new idea of its fellow citizens to resolve to speak kindly of the bourgeoisie were two: that the liberty to hope was a good idea and that a faithful economic life accords dignity and even honor to ordinary people, to My Lord Cheeseman as much as to Your Grace the Duke of Leicester. The disturbing outcomes of such a bizarre egalitarianism, many Europeans came to believe, should be encouraged. To use the word Marx taught us, the modern world arose out of an entirely new “ideology.” Or, equivalently, it arose out of an entirely new “rhetoric,” which is an older word meaning about the same thing. For example, the word “honest,” which in Shakespeare’s time meant mainly noble (that is, honorable in an aristocratic way, achieved in battle or at court), changed its rhetoric in the eighteenth century to mean mainly truth-telling (that is, reliable in a bourgeois way, achieved by innovation and marketing). The same shift took place at the same time in other Germanic and Romance languages of commerce, such as Dutch or Italian.45
In the human realm “the great chain of being” (scala naturae: the staircase of nature), dominating the Elizabethan world picture, was the inherited yet endlessly refreshed hierarchy of dignities ruling since the first large-scale agricultural societies in Iraq and Egypt and north China or for that matter Hawaii.46 It began to break down. For reasons that are not completely clear, there was a shrinkage in what sociologists call “social distance” (to use the terminology of Georg Simmel, its originator, and the Americans Robert Park and Emory Bogardus early in the twentieth century).47 To apply a modern analogy, European society lurched away from, say, old Korean or South Asian levels of deference towards rank and started down the road to new American or Israeli levels. They did not, to put it mildly, get all the way. But European barons and bishops reluctantly moved over a little for townspeople, and at length even for plowmen. Ordinary Europeans got a dignity and liberty that the proud man’s contumely had long been devoted to suppressing. In the revolutionary year of 1795 the poet and plowman Robert Burns declared that “The pith o’ sense, an’ pride o’ worth,/ Are higher rank than a’ that. . . ./ A man’s a man for a’ that.” The townspeople lost their grip on cozy medieval monopolies, but got in exchange a new dignity as innovators, and a lower social distance from the elite. They became the new heroes of a more and more bourgeois-respecting society.
In a striking remark in 1908 Simmel focused on the old image of the bourgeois: “In the whole history of economic activity the stranger makes his appearance everywhere as a trader, and the trader makes his as a stranger.”48 An instance from the fourteenth century is Boccaccio’s tale of Saladin disguised as a merchant (in forma di mercatante). But a new rhetoric of non-strangeness, a dignity for trading and innovating in ordinary life, arose around 1600 in Holland, later in England, and still later in other places down to the present. It had of course causes itself. Some of the causes were economic and material, surely; but some were rhetorical and ideal. Certainly the immense payoff from positive-sum politics could inspire direct imitation, as it has in present-day India. Matter then could be said to have moved other matter, interests to have spawned new interests. The success of commercial Holland stuck in the craw of English people the way that the success of innovative Hong Kong and Taiwan stuck in the craw of mainland Chinese people, and inspired them to imitate.49 By contrast, “conservation of the old modes of production in unaltered form” (as Marx and Engels wrote in 1848) “was . . . the first condition of existence for all earlier industrial classes.”50 “Sticking in the craw” is not quite “the modes of production,” but you could call it if you want a case of material interests implying material interests.
Yet Marx erred in claiming (as he sometimes did) that ideological or rhetorical change always reflects the material economy of interests. It was no material interest that drove Hitler’s or Stalin’s or Mao’s regime to murder tens of millions of its own people, or Pol Pot’s to murder about a third of the Cambodian population.51 It was ideology, during the century of conflicting ideologies. Doubtless the ideas themselves had some partial dependence on interests. But not always. In the crucial early case from 1600 to 1800 in northwestern Europe the words and ideas led the way. European revolutions, reformations, renaissances, and especially revaluations made townspeople bold and raised them in the estimation of their fellows. They arrived at the “bourgeois dignity and liberty” of my title. The material economy followed.
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[back] For example, Kirzner 1976, p. 83, as elsewhere in his writings, and especially Kirzner 1973. I have criticized his very fruitful approach, though, as not going quite far enough: as not recognizing the importance of the social aspect of entrepreneurship, and especially the role of conversation (McCloskey 2008e; compare Storr 2008).
[back] W. L. Riordon, Plunkitt of Tammany Hall (1905), pp. 3-10, reproduced in Leland D. Baldwin," The Flavor Of The Past Readings in American Social and Political Portrait Life", Vol.II (New York: Van Nostrand, 1968), pp.57-60, and then at http://www.uhb.fr/faulkner/ ny/plunkitt.htm
[back] Bastiat 1845, I.7.
[back] Cicero 44 B.C.E., I:42. Compare Finley 1973, pp. 60, 23.
[back] More 1516, p. 132.
[back] Israel 1995, p. 222.
[back] Aquinas 1251-1273, Second Part of the Second Part, Question 77, Art. 4, "I answer that."
[back] MacLeod 2007, pp. 1, 13. MacLeod detects a decline in the prestige of inventors by the early twentieth century, but I would argue that by then the heroism had been routinized. In A. G. Macdonnell's comic novel England, Their England (1933) the engineer character, William Rhodes, is still to be admired, though suspect from an English upper class point of view (Macdonnell was a Scot). MacLeod's argument, admittedly, is about inventors in the strict sense, not the users of inventions. Yet as Edgerton (1996 and 2005) argues, Britain remains, for all the post-Victorian lament, one of the most inventive economies on earth.
[back] For a discussion of the bourgeois tendency of the cowboy novel and film, and its tensions, see McCloskey 2006a, pp. 212-230.
[back] Montaigne 1588, Bk. III, 2, "Of Repentance," quoted Botton 2005, p. 46; alternatively translated at p. 614 of D. Frame, ed. and trans. (Stanford University Press 1958).
[back] Hexter 1961.
[back] Appleby 1978, pp. 11-12.
[back] Mill 1843: "There are many virtuous actions, and even virtuous modes of action (though the cases are, I think, less frequent than is often supposed) by which happiness in the particular instance is sacrificed, more pain being produced than pleasure. But conduct of which this can be truly asserted, admits of justification only because it can be shown that on the whole more happiness will exist in the world, if feelings are cultivated which will make people, in certain cases, regardless of happiness" [VI.xii.7]. Twenty years later, in Utilitarianism, he had much more to say along the same lines.
[back] Buchanan 2006, p. 991.
[back] Bastiat 1845, II.15.33.
[back] E .g. McCloskey 1985b, sections 9.2, 10.2, 10.3, 24.1.
[back] Wallerstein 1983 (1995), p. 98.
[back] Pomeranz and Topik 2006, pp. 134-135.
[back] Roth 2006, p. 101.
[back] Pomeranz and Topik 2006, pp. 131-132.
[back] Karabel 2005, Chp. 3, "Harvard and the Battle over Restriction."
[back] Wallerstein 1983 (1995), p. 100.
[back] Mill 1871, Bk. IV, Chp. vii, sec. 1. It is the same in the first, 1848 edition, and was much influenced then (Mill says in his Autobiography) by the thought of Harriet Taylor.
[back] Bastiat 1845, II.15.58-59.
[back] Nye 2007.
[back] A fuller discussion of the illuminating vagaries of the word "honest" is given in McCloskey, forthcoming, The Bourgeois Revaluation.
[back] Tillyard 1943. Members of the school of literary critics known as the New Historicists, for whom Tillyard is a whipping boy, point out that the Great Chain acquired its meaning from the challenges to it, Caliban challenging Ariel so to speak. Orthodoxy implies a heterodoxy to be worried about, and suppressed.
[back] See Ethington 1997; an economist's use of such ideas is Akerlof 1997. Quoted in Ethington 1997.
[back] Quoted in Ethington 1997.
[back] The evidence for how much it stuck for the English in the seventeenth century is reviewed in Appleby 1978, Chapter 4, "The Dutch as a Source of Evidence."
[back] ***Marx and Engels 1848, p. NN.
[back] Otteson 2006, p. 178.
