Part II. The Anti-Materialist Project of “The Bourgeois Era”
It is a materialist prejudice common in scholarship from 1890 to 1980 that economic results must have economic causes. But ideas caused the modern world. The point can be made by looking through each of the materialist explanations, from the “original accumulation” favored by early Marxist historians to the “new institutionalism” favored by late Samuelsonian economists. The book present does so, and finds them surprisingly weak. The residual is ideas, in particular the Bourgeois Revaluation of the 17th and 18th centuries in northwest Europe. The argument takes six books, constituting a full-scale defense of capitalism. One is already published (The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Commerce 2006), and this is volume 2. Volume 3 will explore exactly how the Revaluation occurred, first in Holland and then by imitation in England, Scotland, Pennsylvania, and the world. Volume 4 explores the balance of interest (Max U) and language in explaining the Industrial Revolution and its longer-term consequences; volume 5 explains why the clerisy of elite artists and intellectuals turned against innovation after 1848; and volume 6 asks which of the present-day complaints about free-market economies has merit. Since the sestet (“The Bourgeois Era”) is a defense, one can expect not to find arguments that globalization is bad for the poor, or that innovation has destroyed the environment. Both left and right are suspicious of the modern world, often for the same reasons. “The Bourgeois Era” argues that both are mistaken: that innovation has elevated people, in more than goods alone.
Dr. McCloskey,
I am deeply sympathethic to your attempt at a meaningful retrieval of the practices of innovation and bourgeois values that form the basis of the Modern world. You are also right to wish a pox on both the houses of the left and right.
I think though that you may have misinterpreted Holmes’ remarks on eugenics. Holmes, at least in my readings appears to be an allyto your cause. A stauch defender of the “marketplace of ideas” as well as against all tawdry moralizing about Truth with a capital “T”.
Holmes is often a controversial figure precisely becasue the comments tend to be taken out of context. His views are much closer to Sir Isaiah Berlin’s than to any eugenicist.
He is of particular interest because he was a supporter of freedom of contract and disliked intensely the attempts by judges to assume that a robe was equal to the mantle of Truth.
Even so, this is a minor quibble. I very much look forward to such a worthwhile project. Anything that would bring back a Knightian sense of humanistic activity to economics and a reinvigoration of the rehtorical world-view is to be lauded. It is a return to the Chicago School but a generation earlier than commonly thought.
Written by Ujjval Vyas on August 8th, 2009.Dear Mr. Vyas,
Thanks for your support. We Knightians need to stick together!
As to Holmes and eugenics. Well, have a look at Al Alschuler’s intellectual biography of the great man.
Sincerely,
Deirdre McCloskey
Written by Deirdre McCloskey on August 9th, 2009.