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

The book is the second of a half dozen planned, three written including this one, the first published in 2006, intended as a full-scale defense of our modern form of innovation (which is universally if misleadingly called “capitalism”). They are meant for people like you who think markets and innovations need such a defense. The implied readers of the books are at present rarities — a scientist who takes the humanities seriously, admitting that novels and philosophies are data, too; a humanist who enjoys calculation, admiring even economistic arguments; or a common reader who delights in listening patiently to evidence and reasoning that overturn most of his own left- or right-wing folklore about what happened in the economy 1600 to the present. ¹³

Together the books make one big argument. The argument is: Markets and innovation, which are ancient but recently have grown dignified and free, are consistent with an ethical life. An ethical and rhetorical change in favor of such formerly dishonorable activities of the bourgeoisie — innovating a fulling mill to improve woolens or innovating a bank to pay florins in England easily — happened after 1300 in isolated parts of the European south (Venice, Florence, Barcelona), and after 1400 or so in other towns of the south (such as Lisbon) and the Hansa towns of the north, and after 1600 in larger chunks of the north (Holland, England, Scotland), and after 1750 in northeastern America, southern Belgium, the Rhineland, northern France, and then the world. Such words or conversations or rhetoric mattered to the economy, and still do. The words enabled after 1800 a big fall in poverty and a big rise in spirit.

Yet in the late nineteenth century the artists and the intellectuals — the “clerisy,” as Samuel Coleridge and I call it — turned against liberal innovation. The treason of the clerisy led in the twentieth-century to nationalism and socialism and national socialism. The clerisy provided the “scientific” justifications for such schemes, as in scientific materialism or scientific imperialism or scientific racism or scientific Malthusianism or, lately, scientific neo-eugenics. The scientific schemes reasserted elite control over newly liberated poor people. Consider Mao’s little Red Book, say, or Hitler’s Mein Kampf, which extracted from the scientific dreams of left or right a plan for an ant-colony society governed by the Party. Or consider the more polite versions of elite control, such as the great statistician Karl A. Pearson in 1900 approving of a scientific racism in support of imperialism: “It is a false view of human solidarity, which regrets that a capable and stalwart tribe of white men should advocate replacing a dark-skinned tribe which can . . . [not] contribute its quota to the common stock of human knowledge.” ¹⁴ In 1925 he wrote against Eastern-European Jewish migration to Britain, on the grounds that “this alien Jewish population is somewhat inferior physically and mentally to the native population,” for example in “cleanliness of clothing.” ¹⁵ Or consider the great American jurist Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., sneering in 1895 in social Darwinist style that “from societies for the prevention of cruelty to animals up to socialism, we express . . . how hard it is to be wounded in the battle of life, how terrible, how unjust it is that any one should fail.” ¹⁶ In 1927 he approved of compulsory sterilization on grounds of scientific utilitarianism and eugenics: “It is better for all the world, if instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring or crime, or to let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind. The principle that sustains compulsory vaccination is broad enough to cover cutting the Fallopian tubes. Three generations of imbeciles are enough.” Sadly, such stuff wasn’t “pseudo-science” or “junk science.” It was regular, front-line, widely accepted science — which is not always the same thing as wise thinking.

The clerisy’s anti-innovation and anti-market and anti-liberty rhetoric in the years since 1848, though repeated down to yesterday, unwisely mistakes the scientific history. The clerisy says that lack of elite control of human breeding will cause the race to degenerate. Scientific genetics suggests that it does not. Human abilities flourish from diversity. The clerisy says that innovation impoverishes people. Scientific economics suggests that it does not. It enriches most of them. The clerisy says that state planning or nationalist mobilization is better than voluntary commercial peace. Scientific history suggests not. Socialism and nationalism have regularly disrupted the prosperity provided by commerce. The clerisy says that the modern urban world is alienated. Scientific sociology replies on the contrary that bourgeois life has strengthened numerous if weak ties and has freed people from village tyrannies. The clerisy says that markets and liberty are dangerous. Political science suggests that on the contrary they give ordinary people dignity and make them mild and tolerant by the standards of alternative arrangements.

The present book is the second in a set of six called The Bourgeois Era. The set offers an “apology” for the modern world — in the Greek sense of a defense at a trial, and in the theological sense, too, of a preachment to you-all, my best-beloved infidels or ultra-orthodox. My beloved friends on the political left have joined with my also-beloved, but also-misled, friends on the political right in asserting that capitalism, as Marx put it in 1867, is “solely the restless stirring for gain. This absolute desire for enrichment, this passionate hunt for value.” ¹⁸ Many on the left have been outraged by what they take to be the bad material results of the history — a history erroneously told, though, because the desire for enrichment is universal, and the material results of its modern bourgeois implementation have been startlingly good for the world’s poor. Many on the right have on the contrary been pleased by the same erroneously told history. But they join their enemies on the left in believing that Marx was right to define the modern world as the restless stirring for gain. Such greed, they affirm with a smirk, is good for three-car garages and time shares in Barbados.

But on both political wings many people are dismayed by the spiritual vulgarity they detect in the allegedly novel stirrings of greed. Therefore they look darkly into the future. A certain pessimism (embedded in a longer-run apocalyptic optimism) typifies the left, which sees in every business downturn the final crisis of global capitalism. But pessimism also typifies the right (embedded in a longer run Calvinist pessimism), which sees in every new cultural fashion a corruption arising from a vulgar global democracy.

Admittedly, pessimism (left or right) sells. Paul Ehrlich’s The Population Bomb (1968) sold 3 million copies. I bought a copy of Ravi Bahtra’s The Great Depression of 1990 (an event which also didn’t happen, though the book sold very well in 1987) at a pre-pulping sale in 1992 for $1.57, and show it to my students as an exhibit against economic pessimism. So I admit that my optimistic view of the modern world and especially of its prospects is less Profound than the Chicken-Little predictions of my good friends on the left and on the right. But the optimistic, anti-Chicken-Little view retailed here, when set beside best-selling catastrophe porn, has at least the merit of being scientifically correct.

The first volume, The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Commerce (2006), asked whether a bourgeois life can be ethical. It replied that it is, and could, and should. The present volume makes the case for an ethico-rhetorical Industrial Revolution, as I’ve said, by criticizing the materialist explanations on economic and historical grounds. I’m not happy to be so critical of a materialist economics I have loved and learned and taught since 1961. An economist like me loves the routine of trade or accumulation or property right or constraints released, which are things she understands pretty well, and can even calculate. Allow me to show you the blackboard proofs that protectionism is bad and that investment is good. Beautiful stuff. ¹⁹ By contrast, ideas and rhetoric stand at present outside her science. The economist does not admit that humans are speaking animals, and that the humans put more of meaning into their talk than “I bid $2.71828.” ²⁰ Yet in explaining the most important economic event since the invention of agriculture, or perhaps since the invention of language, the facts seem to demand, alas, a rejection of the materialist and anti-rhetorical ideology I long believed. A materialist economic science appears therefore to need a good deal of amending. I’m not an idealist by predilection, believe me. I’m a disappointed materialist. You should become one, too.

A third volume, soon to appear (a draft is available at deirdremccloskey.org), The Bourgeois Revaluation: How Innovation Became Virtuous, 1600-1776, asks in detail how attitudes towards bourgeois life changed. A fourth, tentatively entitled Bourgeois Rhetoric: Conversation and Interest during the Industrial Revolution (again, a crude draft is available at the web site), develops an amended economic science acknowledging that humans indeed speak meanings, and shows how their speaking changed to make possible the bourgeois dignities and liberties and revaluations and rising boats. It cashes in the claim in 1935 by the economist and philosopher Frank Knight that “economics is a branch of aesthetics and ethics to a larger degree than of mechanics.” ²¹ A fifth, Bourgeois Enemies: The Treason of the Clerisy, 1848 to the Present, will ask how after the failed revolutions of 1848 we European artists and intellectuals became in our rhetoric so very scornful of the bourgeoisie, and how the gradual encroachment of such ideas motivated the disasters of the twentieth century — and how they can motivate fresh disasters if we neglect to contradict the left- or right-wing writers espousing them. And the last, Bourgeois Times: Defending the Defensible, will look into present-day anti-innovation and anti-market rhetoric, such as the alleged sins of globalization, the despoilment of the environment, the evil of commercial free speech known as advertising, the dependence of innovation on a reserve army of the unemployed.

The books lean on each other. If your worries about the ethical foundations of innovation and markets are not sufficiently met here, they perhaps are more fully met in The Bourgeois Virtues. If you feel that not enough attention is paid here to unemployment or global warming, more will be paid in Bourgeois Times. If you wonder how the present book can claim that words matter so much, consider Bourgeois Revaluation and Bourgeois Rhetoric. If you feel that the story here does not explain why such a successful bourgeois life came to be despised in deeply progressive and deeply conservative circles, some of your questions will be answered in Bourgeois Enemies.

The apology does seem to take six volumes. I apologize. A philosopher recently wrote, to explain why he crammed his opus on “warranted [Christian] belief” into three stout books rather than allowing himself four, that “a trilogy is perhaps unduly self-indulgent, but a tetralogy is unforgivable.” ²² Here you have in prospect, God help you, a sestet. ²³ Yet bourgeois life and innovation since 1848 have had a voluminously bad press, worse even than warranted Christian belief. The prosecution in the past century and a half has written out the indictment of the developing bourgeois and free and business-respecting civilization in many thousands of eloquent volumes, from the hands of Dickens (the critics of innovation were not all of the left), Carlyle (ditto), Alexander Herzen, Baudelaire, Marx, Engels, Mikhail Bukharin, Ruskin, William Morris, Nietzsche, Prince Kropotkin (my hero at age 14, when I fell in love with socialist anarchism down at the local Carnegie-built library), Tolstoy, Shaw, Ida Tarbell, Upton Sinclair, Rosa Luxemburg, Emma Goldman (another admired figure, when I later developed my anarchist convictions), D. H. Lawrence, Lenin, Trotsky (companion of a brief flirtation with communism), John Reid (ditto), Veblen, Ortega y Gasset, Sinclair Lewis, T. S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf, Mussolini, Giovanni Gentile, Hitler, Heidegger, Wittgenstein, F. R. Leavis, Karl Polanyi, Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Simone Weil, Dorothy Day, Woody Guthrie (whose singing made me for a while a Joan-Baez socialist: the leftish opponents of bourgeois dignity and liberty, alas, have all the best songs), Pete Seeger, (ditto), Lewis Mumford, Hannah Arendt, Herbert Marcuse, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, J. K. Galbraith, Louis Althusser, Allan Bloom, Frederic Jameson, Saul Bellow, Howard Zinn, Noam Chomsky, Paul Ehrlich, Stuart Hall, George Steiner, Jacques Lacan, Stanley Hauerwas, Terry Eagleton, Alain Badiou, Slavoj Žižek, Charles Sellers, Barbara Ehrenreich, Nancy Folbre, and Naomi Klein. Few people have defended commerce from this magnificent flood of eloquence from the pens of left progressives and right reactionaries — jeremiads which indeed stretch from the Hebrew prophets through Plato and the Analects of Confucius and down to the present — except on the economist’s prudence-only grounds that after all a great deal of money is made there. After such grand prolixity in the prosecution of innovation and markets, I admire my restraint in offering in defense merely six volumes. As Henry Fielding wrote towards the end of Tom Jones, a “prodigious” book, “when thou hast perused the many great events which this book will produce, thou wilt think the number of pages contained in it scarce sufficient to tell the story.” ²⁴

The Bourgeois Era, in other words, tries to initiate a defense of our bourgeois lives that goes beyond economic balance sheets, without ignoring them. It offers the outlines of an ethical rhetoric for our globalized souls, an idealism of ordinary life. It recoups the virtues for the lives that most of us in fact live, neither heroes nor saints. If you were raised on the left or the left-middle and were taught to believe that innovation and the bourgeois life were born in sin, and that they impoverish and corrupt the world, such as in globalization and financial melt-downs, perhaps one or two of the books can plant a seed of doubt. Try them. But likewise, perhaps, the books can plant the skeptical seed of insight if you were raised on the right or the right-middle and were taught to believe that (admittedly) capitalism is “solely the restless stirring for gain, this absolute desire for enrichment,” and a materially efficacious desire for enrichment to boot — yet that the economists and calculators have corrupted our holiness and demeaned our nobility, as in rock music and feminism and deconstruction since the 1960s, and the glory of Europe is extinguished forever. ²⁵

What the philosopher Charles Taylor said about “authenticity” my books say about “innovation”: “The picture I am offering is rather that of an ideal that has degraded but that is very worthwhile in itself, and indeed, I would like to say, unrepudiable by moderns. . . . What we need is a work of retrieval, through which this ideal can help us restore our practice.” ²⁶ The sestet of the Bourgeois Era can perhaps persuade you, whether progressive or conservative, that a belief that innovation is especially greedy, and the bourgeoisie sadly ignoble and unspiritual, might — just might — be mistaken. And as a work of retrieval perhaps it will persuade you that to continue attacking a virtuous life in commerce, or for that matter to continue defending a greedy life in commerce, corrupts our souls, and our politics.

13. [back] In modern literary criticism in the English-speaking world the term "humanist" is a fighting word, but the fight is sidestepped here. Here all it means is "a teacher or student in an academic department such as English, French, music, art, philosophy, theology, parts of history, that is, a person interested in die Geisteswissenschaften or les sciences humaines." It does not mean partisans of the approach to literary criticism following Matthew Arnold, T. S. Eliot, or Harold or Allan Bloom, or my own teacher, Howard Mumford Jones.
14. [back] Pearson 1900, pp. 26-28.
15. [back] Pearson and Moul 1925. Peart and Levy 2005 give a full and penetrating treatment of the Pearson and Moul paper (Chp. 5, pp. 87-103) in the context of the new eugenic social sciences of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
16. [back] Holmes 1895, p. 264.
17. [back] Holmes, Buck v. Bell, 274 U.S. 200 (1927). See Alschuler's (2000) devastating critique of Holmes.
18. [back] Das Kapital 1867, German edition, p. 168 (Part II, Chapter IV, "The General Formula for Capital"). The usual English translation, though approved by Engels, errs in many important details. Thus the Moore and Aveling translation (in, say, the Modern Library edition): "this boundless greed after riches" (p. 171). The word "greed" is not in the German (Gier, or Geltgier), and is in fact a word eschewed by Marx throughout the book, as moralistic and unscientific.
19. [back] You may admire its beauty in McCloskey 1985b, available on line at deirdremccloskey.org.
20. [back] McCloskey 2008e.
21. [back] Knight 1935, p. 97.
22. [back] Plantinga 2000, p. xiv.
23. [back] I won't call it a "hexology," the proper Greek corresponding to a tetralogy; and certainly I won't, despite the temptations of higher book sales, call it by the vulgar Latin-Greek mix "sexology."
24. [back] Fielding 1749, Book 18, Chp. 1 (vol. 2, p. 409).
25. [back] The point that both left and right complain about the bourgeoisie is made also by Immanuel Wallerstein in 1983 (1995), p. 115.
26. [back] Taylor 1992 (quoted from Massey Lecture version, 1991, p. 23).

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.