Part II. The Anti-Materialist Project of “The Bourgeois Era”

Quite a few of my social-scientific or even many of my humanistic colleagues will strongly inclined to disagree. They have the idea — held with passionate idealism — that ideas about ideas are unscientific. For about a century, 1890 to 1980, the ideas of positivism and behaviorism and economism ran the social scientific show, and many of the older show — people still adhere to the script we learned together so idealistically as graduate students.¹ Economists and historians who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any philosophical influences are usually the slaves of some defunct philosopher of science a few years back — commonly a shakily logical positivist nearly a hundred years back. Their faith is impressive.

But in denying words and rhetoric and identity and creativity in favor of numbers and interest and matter and prudence-only they are standing against a good deal of the historical evidence, not to speak of science studies in the half century since Thomas Kuhn. The American constitution, for example, as the historian Bernard Bailyn argues, was a creative event in the realm of ideas — and its economic origins are easily exaggerated.² The abolition of slavery, a policy once advocated merely by a handful of radical churchmen (and the Baron de Montesquieu), played in the 1820s and 1830s a role in British politics, and later of course a much bigger role in American politics. As Lincoln famously said on being introduced to the author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, “So this is the little lady who wrote the book that made the big war.” Books can make wars. Nationalism spread in reaction to Napoleon’s conquests, in poetry and songs of risings and the screeds of exiles resident in London. Socialism spread after the disappointed revolutions of 1848 in congresses and party meetings and manifestos. Ideas matter. The opponents of ideas as historical factors are what the modern Marxists call with a sneer “vulgar” Marxists — wanting passionately to be behaviorists, positivists, materialists, every single time, regardless of the common sense or the historical facts.

To explain the new dignity of the middle class in northwestern Europe, and to explain the success it brought to the modern world, the social scientists need to moderate their fervent ideology of materialism — though of course without denying material forces. They need to collect the data on ideas and rhetoric and social distance — though without denying economics. The present book supports such a step indirectly, by looking at a representative sample of apparently promising materialist explanations of the Industrial Revolution — explanations like investment or exploitation or geography or foreign trade or imperialism or genetics or property rights. It finds them to be surprisingly weak in explanatory power. It concludes therefore (I admit the inferential gap) that the remaining explanations, such as ideas, must be strong. The two books to follow will offer more positive evidence for the change in rhetoric, and I hope will plug the gap.

The critical method of “remainders” or “residues” was recommended in his System of Logic (1843) as one of four methods of induction by J. S. Mill, that admirably learned and open-minded scholar. “Subducting from a given phenomenon,” wrote Mill in his high-flown but lucid style, “all the parts which, by virtue of preceding inductions, can be assigned to known causes, the remainder will be the effect of the antecedents which have been overlooked, or of which the effect was as yet an unknown quantity.”³ In simple language, take out what you can measure, and what’s left is the impact of what you can’t. If the economic and material causes usually proposed as explanations for the Industrial Revolution turn out to be weak, then the large remainder might well be the effect of a remaining antecedent — a rhetorical change, perhaps. If investment and trade can’t do it, maybe ways of talk can. The crucial remaining antecedent, I claim, was a rhetorical change around 1700 concerning markets and innovations and the bourgeoisie. It was merely a change in talk about dignity and liberty. But it was historically unique and economically powerful. It raised the tide.

The materialist accounts are many, from the “original accumulation” favored by early Marxist historians to the “new institutionalism” favored by late Samuelsonian economists.⁴ The criticism made here do not cast into the eighth circle of Hell every possible version of the theories suggested up to now; nor does it disparage their advocates, many of whom are my personal friends and admired colleagues. But the scientific evidence seems to be strong that the economistic theories, whether taken individually or together, can’t explain the startling rise of real incomes. Rhetoric can.

The negative case here, summarizing fifty years of research by economic and historical scientists, is:

Foreign trade was too small and too prevalent worldwide to explain the rising tide in northwestern Europe. Capital accumulation was not crucial, since it is pretty easily supplied. Coal can be and was moved. Empires did not enrich the imperial countries, despite what you may think, and anyway the chronology is wrong, and anyway imperialism was commonplace in earlier times. Likewise, the institutions of property rights were established many centuries before industrialization. Greed didn’t increase in the West. In bourgeois countries during the Industrial Revolution the Catholics did just as well as did the Protestants. The Muslims and the Hindus and the Buddhists, or for that matter the Confucians and most of the animists, thought as rationally about profit and loss as did the Christians. Populations had grown in earlier times and other places. Until the eighteenth century many parts of the Far and Near and Southern East were as rich, and appeared to be as ready for innovation, as parts of the West — except at length in the crucial matters of the dignity and liberty of the bourgeoisie. Until the seventeenth century the Chinese and the Arabs practiced a science more sophisticated than the one the Europeans practiced. The science of the Scientific Revolution was in any case mostly about prisms and planets, and before the late nineteenth century even its other branches did not much help in worldly pursuits (European science, though, was in its non-normal, revolutionary episodes an interesting parallel in the realm of ideas to the acceptance of creative destruction).

In 1500 only one of the ten largest cities in the world, Paris, was in Europe. In 1800 still only Paris, London, and Naples ranked so. But after a century of divergence only one city outside of Europe or the United States was in the top ten (namely, Tokyo, and this after Japanese industrialization had taken hold).⁵ Yet by 2015 it is estimated that only two cities of Europe and its offshoots, and they only partially of European origin, Mexico City and Sao Paulo, will be in the top ten.⁶ The wheel turns. In short, the Europeans were not economically special until about 1700. They showed most plainly their special ingenuity, along with their special brutality, only briefly in the two centuries after 1800. By the early twenty-first century they had reverted to not being special at all, even in brutality. The episode of their innovative specialness, and the rising tide, came from a change in their economic rhetoric. It made the difference.

“Teach the conflicts,” says my colleague in English at the University of Illinois at Chicago, a past president of the Modern Language Association, Gerald Graff. With Cathy Birkenstein he has brought the idea to fruition in a rhetoric for students called They Say/I Say: The Moves That Matter in Academic Writing (2005).⁷ Their little book notes that a student — or a scientist — can’t see what’s distinctive even in her own position if she can’t summarize reasonably fairly what others think. I test here reasonably fairly the numerous (sadly mistaken) alternatives to the (correct) theory that a change in rhetoric caused the Industrial Revolution. To use the piece of argumentative rhetoric in Graff and Birkenstein’s title, “my honored if misled friends in economics, history, and economic history say that the modern world came from trade or exploitation or legal change. They say that. I say, no, it didn’t. It came from a change in the rhetoric about the common economic life, which led to the Franklin stove and the Bessemer process and the peaceful transitions of political power and all our joy.”

Such a rejection-of-alternatives is I admit a little irritating — one gets tired of being told what did not happen. But such nay-saying is after all the conventional ideal in the philosophy of science — if commonly overlooked in practice (the practice is more usually what sociologists of science call the Empiricist Monologue, that is, My Wonderful Theory And Only My Wonderful Theory). A recent rejection-of-alternatives article in Science, for example, describes the “solar model problem”: namely, the problem that elements heavier than hydrogen and helium in the Sun are more common than implied by models of convection. The author politely rejects four “straightforward” hypotheses “receiving some initial support.” “Perhaps the only proposal left still standing,” he concludes, “is internal gravity waves.”⁸ Similarly, in 1965 Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson discovered the background radiation from the Big Bang by ruling out alternative explanations for the static noise in their new microwave detector pointed at the sky, including for example the activities of certain local pigeons. Ideally we “encompass” other people’s theories in our theory and show triumphantly that our theory explains the facts while theirs do not. The pigeons didn’t do it. Therefore surely the Big Bang must have.

In the ancient world, Plato’s dialogues used the same method of rejecting alternatives and teaching the conflicts, as in Republic, Book 1 (for example, Steph. 335), with Socrates as the encompasser. Talmudic Judaism used another; St. Thomas Aquinas, influenced to some degree it appears by Maimonides, still another. In early modern science the classic case was Galileo’s Dialogo of 1632, where the sun-as-center “Simplicio” had rings — or orbits — run around him by the Copernican master. (By naming the anti-Copernican “Simplicio,” supposedly in honor of a sixth-century Neo-Platonist named Simplicius [classical Latin "of one nature"[ simplex; in modern Italian, simplice, "straightforward"; but medieval Latin "naïve"], Galileo may not have endeared himself to the Inquisition.)

In medicine the classic case was the demonstration in 1855 by John Snow (1813-1858), following on his earlier inquiry in 1849, that cholera was caused, as he put it, by people being “supplied with water containing the sewage of London.”⁹ He examined various named alternatives to the water-borne theory, such as miasma or person-to-person contagion. He gradually accumulated evidence that the alternative theories were untenable — devising for example clever maps of London based on house-to-house surveys during the 1854 epidemic. In particular he concluded that “If the cholera had no other means of communication than those [claimed in the older theories] which we have been considering, it would be constrained to confine itself chiefly to the crowded dwellings of the poor, and would be continually liable to die out accidentally in a place, for want of the opportunity to reach fresh victims; but there is often a way open for it to extend itself more widely, and to reach the well-to-do classes of the community; I allude to the mixture of the cholera evacuations with the water used for drinking and culinary purposes.” Likewise here: The idea of dignified merchants and free manufacturers can spread more widely and quickly than trade or empire or British racial superiority, and can explain more easily how others mastered the trick. The United States, Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Spain, Thailand, Botswana, China, India, and their imitators grew because they did.

In modern economics the classic use of remainders was the productivity calculations made in the 1950s by John Kendrick, Moses Abramowitz, and Robert Solow (anticipated in 1933 by the economic historian G. T. Jones).¹⁰ Using “marginal productivity theory,” the economists took out the impact of sheer capital accumulation on output per head. Take out what you can measure directly, and what’s left is what you can’t — namely, the not-directly-measurable impact of innovation. The present book takes out what one can measure directly in the materialist and economistic explanations of the Industrial Revolution. What’s still left standing is — let us pray — the not-directly-measurable innovation released by the rhetorical change.

I assemble here a catholic sample of the scientific and philosophic work bearing on the hypothesis. I’ve done myself since the 1960s a good deal of research on economic history, especially British, and since the 1980s some philosophical writing as well. But most of the evidence I use here was collected by others. The book is an essay, not a monograph. Specialists will spot the old pieces of news. We economic historians, for example, have known since the 1960s that capital accumulation can’t explain the Industrial Revolution. The news hasn’t gotten around much to our academic colleagues. Even some economic historians resist it. Our colleagues in growth theory and economic development resist it fiercely. They want very much to go on believing that the quantity of output depends not on ideas but on the labor applied and most especially on the masses of physical and human capital present, Q = F(L,K) — so lovely is the equation, so tough and masculine and endlessly mathematizable. And a left-leaning Department of French would simply be stunned to hear that innovation does not depend on accumulated capital ripped from the proletariat. The scientific finding, however, is elderly, and secure.

Likewise the literary critics know that the bourgeoisie read, and wrote, the European realist novel, from Robinson Crusoe to Run, Rabbit, Run celebrating and criticizing the bourgeois virtues, though the critics differ on exactly how.¹¹ That scientific finding, too, is elderly and secure. (I use throughout the word “science,” by the way, in the wide sense of “serious and systematic inquiry,” which is what it means in every language except the English of the past 150 years: thus Wissenschaft in German as in die Geisteswissenschaften [the humanities], or science in French as in les sciences humaines [serious and systematic inquiries concerning the human condition], or plain “science” in English before 1850. John Stuart Mill, for example, used the science word in its older sense in all his works.¹² Confining the word to “physical and biological science,” sense 5b in the Oxford English Dictionary — which was an accident of English academic politics in the mid-nineteenth century — has tempted recent speakers of English to labor at the pointless task of demarcating one kind of serious and systematic inquiry from another.) The related notion that novels and plays teach a good deal about the history of economic ideology and innovation, which will strike the average economist as scandalously unscientific, will provoke yawns in the Department of English. Likewise, no one in a Department of Philosophy, whether or not they agree with it, will be startled by the “virtue ethics,” explained in The Bourgeois Virtues (2006) and used here from time to time (for example, I used it a while ago to speak of the virtues of hope and faith redirected by the Revaluation). She might be more comfortable with Kantian and utilitarian arguments (in philosophical lingo, “deontological” and “consequentialist” ethics), which arose in the eighteenth century and which since then have dominated academic philosophy. But she will at least have heard of the more ancient theory, and of its recent and feminist revival. No surprise. What is surprising in the book, and therefore less scientifically secure, is the claim that in the eighteenth century the ideal and the material crossed wires, and powered the modern world. Even that hypothesis, however, has ancestors.

1. [back] In the field of history the fullest telling the story of objectivism is Peter Novick's brilliant That Nobel Dream (1988). My own Rhetoric of Economics (1985a; 1998) tells a similar tale about economics.
2. [back] Bailyn 2005, especially Chapter 1, "Politics and the Creative Imagination."
3. [back] Mill 1843, p. 464.
4. [back] "Samuelsonian" is an adjective for modern, American-style economics, which was originated by Paul A. Samuelson (b. 1915) and by his brother-in-law Kenneth Arrow (b. 1921), and announced in Samuelson's modestly entitled Ph.D. dissertation of 1947, The Foundations of Economic Analysis. It insists that every economic issue must be treated as a problem of constrained maximization by utility-seeking individuals. Samuelsonian economics is commonly called "neoclassical." But the term perpetuates an anachronism, since neoclassical economics names the much earlier new economics of the 1870s (Menger, Walras, Jevons), which was wider than Samuelsonian in method.
5. [back] The word "divergence" and the idea that it happened after 1800 is Pomeranz' 2000, and others of the "California School."
6. [back] Hohenberg 2003, p. 179.
7. [back] Graff and Birkenstein-Graff (2005) and Graff (1992). Another of my friends, Jack Goldstone, has practiced the same method of teaching the conflicts and using the remainders in his elegant textbook Why Europe: The Rise of the West in World History, 1500-1850 (2009), from which I have learned so much. I have not seen his forthcoming A Peculiar Path, but expect to learn from it even more.
8. [back] Asplund 2008, p. 51.
9. [back] Snow 1855, p. 75.
10. [back] Abramovitz 1956, Kendrick 1956 and 1961, and Solow 1957. Jones, Increasing Returns, 1933 should be better known among economists. A student of Alfred Marshall, he anticipated the mathematics of the "price dual of the residual." He died young, and his work was forgotten except by economic historians.
11. [back] For example, Michael McKeon 1987 (2002).
12. [back] You may persuade yourself of this by getting hold of a searchable text of any item by Mill and searching for "science," finding for example that he speaks of "a science of morals."

2 responses

1. 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.

2. 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.