Part X. The Inheritance of Gregory Clark

An extreme materialist hypothesis explaining the Industrial Revolution would be simply genetic. Its crudest form, as I have noted, would be sheer British racism. Few historical scientists nowadays believe such a notion straightforwardly (though it is worth noting that in 1910 a great many scientists, and some of the best, most assuredly did). But a pretty close approximation of crude British racism has been asserted recently by the economic historian Gregory Clark, an old friend of mine, in his modestly sub-entitled “Brief Economic History of the World,” A Farewell to Alms (2007). The argument goes like this:

For England . . . 1250-1800 . . . the richest men had twice as many surviving children as the poorest. . . . The superabundant children of the rich had to. . . move down. . . . Craftsmen’s sons became laborers, merchant’s sons petty traders, large landholder’s sons smallholders. . . . Patience, hard work, innovation, innovativeness, education . . . were thus spread biologically throughout the population. . . . The embedding of bourgeois values into the culture . . . . [in] China and Japan did not move as rapidly because . . . their upper social strata were only modestly more fecund. . . . Thus there was not the same cascade of children from the educated classes down the social scale.. . . England’s advantage law in the rapid cultural, and potentially also genetic, diffusion of the values of the economically successful through society.¹

The means of (re)production determine the superstructure. Social existence determines consciousness. Rich people proliferated, and by a social Darwinian struggle the poor and incompetent died out, leaving a master race of Englishmen with the consciousness to conquer the world.

Certainly it is a bold hypothesis, and was bold when first articulated by social Darwinists such as Charles Davenport and Francis Galton in the century before last. Clark defends it energetically, if narrowly. In fact, if the hypothesis were true it would fit smoothly with my own argument that a rhetorical change made the modern world. Clark says that “there must have been informal, self-reinforcing social norms in all preindustrial societies that discouraged innovation.” Precisely: the norms of anti-bourgeois aristocrats and clerics did discourage innovation, until the Venetians temporarily and on a local scale, the Dutch temporarily and on a wider scale, and at last the English and Scots permanently and on a world scale repealed the norms.

In one-and-a-half pages towards the middle of the book Clark deals briskly with the numerous alternatives to his own materialist hypothesis: “Social historians may invoke the Protestant Reformation, . . . intellectual historians the Scientific Revolution. . . or the Enlightenment. . . . But a problem with these invocations of movers from outside the economic realm is that they merely push the problem back one step.”² That’s a good point, always a good point. But it is symmetrical — a material and economic immediate cause (a high birth rate among the rich, for example; or the invention of a steam engine with separate condenser) can have an ideal and rhetorical ultimate cause (an ideology of glorifying the family line, for example; or imagined experiments with heating and cooling the cylinder). Clark’s own, and sole, case that he offers of pushing an ideal explanation back to the material is to ask why “after more than a thousand years of entrenched Catholic dogma” — set aside that such a view of Christian medieval theology might be a trifle lacking in nuance, and derivative in fact from crude anti-Catholic propaganda since Hume and Voltaire or indeed since Luther himself — “an obscure German preacher [was] able to effect such a profound change in the way ordinary people conceived religious beliefs?”

But Clark, like doubting Pilate, does not stay for an answer. He readily admits in the same passage that “ideologies may transform the economic attitudes of societies.” Yet he has no scientific interest in the causes of ideologies, unless they fit his notion of the material (that is, familial) inheritance of acquired characteristics (“and perhaps even the genes,” says Clark). He has not reflected on the history of the Reformation, or on the Scientific Revolution, or on the Enlightenment, or on the Bourgeois Revaluation. So to get rid of pesky rhetorical factors he reaches at once in the passage for a Materialist Lemma: “But ideologies are themselves the expression of fundamental attitudes in part derived from the economic sphere.”

Only the phrase “in part,” a fleeting tribute to intellectual balance, keeps his sentence from being orthodox historical materialism. As a pair of historical materialists put it in 1848: “Man’s ideas, views and conceptions, in one word, man’s consciousness, changes with every change in the conditions of his material existence, in his social relations and in his social life. What else does the history of ideas prove, than that intellectual production changes its character in proportion as material production is changed?”³ Or as Marx by himself wrote eleven years later, “It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but, on the contrary, their social existence determines their consciousness.”⁴ Or as Engels wrote another eighteen years later, “the final causes of all social changes and political revolutions are to be sought, not in men’s brains, not in man’s better insight into eternal truth and justice, but in changes in the modes of production and exchange. They are to be sought, not in the philosophy, but in the economics of each particular epoch.”⁵

In this respect, Clark implies, we social scientists are all Marxists. Ideas are merely “the expression of fundamental attitudes in part derived from the economic sphere.” He’s right in his implied history of the social sciences: most social scientists 1890-1980 were indeed instinctive historical materialists. But the intellectually temperate phrase “in part” in Clark’s sentence is not cashed. Rather, the check is written out and then absentmindedly torn up before our eyes. “There is, however,” Clark declares in the next sentence, “no need to invoke such a deus ex machine” as a change in rhetoric. His own Chapter 6 fully explains on materialist grounds, with its own unexplained deus (high breeding rates among the rich, even in circumstances of periodic plague), “the forces leading to a more patient, less violent, harder-working, more literate, and more thoughtful society,” namely, the bourgeois society that he and I join in admiring. In Clark’s book, that’s the end of ideology. An historian of the Dutch Republic, Anne McCants, similarly claims on slender evidence that a compassionate motivation for transfers from the Dutch wealthy to the poor is “unlikely” and “can be neither modeled nor rationally explained.” Long before her Hugh Trevor Roper had advanced a similar axiom, that “in politics [prudence-only political ambition] is naturally by far the most potent” cause, as indeed Engel still earlier had claimed that “interests, requirements, and demands of the various classes were concealed behind a religious screen.”⁶

Such evidence-poor side-remarks evince the historical rhetoric prevalent 1890-1980 — what Michael Novak calls “the materialist assumptions and prejudices of the twentieth century” — that a human’s consciousness changes with every change in the conditions of her material existence, and only with such changes.⁷ Thus Durkheim in The Elementary Forms of Religious Life in 1912 argued that ritual, not doctrine, was the heart of religion, because ritual performed the latent function of unifying a society. After all, what else does the history of ideas prove? It proves that ideas don’t matter, and that unifying a society must be the point of religion — not all that nonsense about, say, a god who died. Look at the history of stoicism or Protestantism or the abolition of slavery, or the history of Christianity or mathematics or the liberations of the 1960s. All of them, you see, were motivated largely, probably exclusively, by material causes. Material interest. Money. Profit. The birthrate. Surely.

John Milton wrote truly to the contrary that books “are as lively, and as vigorously productive, as those fabulous dragon’s teeth; and being sown up and down, may chance to spring up armed men.”⁸ The Levellers of the 1640s, writes their historian David Wootton, “did not envisage a commercial society of the sort that was actually dominant in early Stuart England, a society of chartered companies and great capitalists; they hoped rather to establish a nation of shopkeepers.” All their other proposals took centuries to establish, in what Wootton calls an “extraordinary paradigm shift, which marks the birth of modern political theory” — manhood suffrage, a written constitution, non self-incrimination (freedom from waterboarding, one might say), right to counsel, liberty of religion, liberty of speech.⁹ But remarkably in England a definite if small move towards liberty of internal trade, for poor people as well as rich, a nation of shopkeepers, actually came to pass as early as in the old age of the last surviving Leveller of the 1640s.

Clark, who admits that such rhetoric may transform economic attitudes, would nonetheless wisely urge us to push the problem back one more step: why the rhetorical change? A very good point, I repeat, always a good point. It would imply, if we were committed to historical materialism, that some cause for the rhetoric must be sought in the means of production or reproduction. Under the Materialist Postulate a rhetoric never changes independent of economics or demography — certainly not by causes within rhetoric itself such as the invention of the novel or the logic of Pascal-Nicole-Bayle in theology; not even by such causes as the political settlement in England of 1689 or the obsession with Protestant egalitarianism of all believers in Holland and Scotland from the mid-sixteenth century or the ordinary man’s involvement in politics in Holland, England, and Scotland 1585 to 1660 or the chances of war, some of them mere effective words (“I had rather have a plain russet-coated captain that knows what he fights for, and loves what he knows,” wrote Cromwell in 1643, “than that which you call a gentleman and is nothing else”), that left the New Model Army in possession of the English king and his country in 1645. Any non-economic and merely rhetorical change, the materialists believe without thinking about it very much, is always to be derived from the economic/demographic sphere, where we have hard if dubious numbers and marxoid theories. Intellectual production changes its character in proportion as material production is changed.

It is been a long time since even the Marxists depended on such a Materialist Postulate. The Italian Communist theorist Antonio Gramsci, for example — whom Michael Walzer describes as “a rare bird in the twentieth century, an innocent communist” — spoke of such “economism” as an error.¹⁰ While in prison in Fascist Italy during the 1930s he wrote that “the claim (presented as an essential postulate of historical materialism) that every fluctuation of politics and ideology can be presented and expounded as an immediate expression of the structure, must be contested in theory as primitive infantilism.” Marxism, he contended, “is itself a superstructure, . . . the terrain on which determinate social groups [for example, the proletariat] become conscious of their own social being.” The base and superstructure form a “historical bloc,” quite different from the imaginings of bourgeois theorists of economism, in that the bloc is not mere theorizing but fulfills the dialectic of history. He claimed plausibly that in detailed political writings, such as The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, Marx himself was cautious in using the Materialist Postulate, and gave room for accident and “internal necessities of an organizational character” and the difficulty of identifying just what is at a particular moment the base or the structure that is supposed to be limiting thought.¹¹ Gramsci himself is chiefly important in the history of European socialism for denying that materialism does all the work. The bourgeoisie survived, he said, because its intellectuals had done their job, and made capitalism seem ordinary. Gramsci’s very career, and especially the career or his writings after his death — the forebears of the anti-Stalinist Euro-Communism, as Walzer notes — illustrates the importance of ideas.¹²

And certainly Lenin, who established in 1902 the Bolshevik line against an “economism” such as that of Karl Kautsky, believed that ideas inflamed the working class to action. He asked, What is to Be Done, and answered: do not wait for the material conditions of the workers to cause the workers to attain spontaneously the idea of revolution. On the contrary, “Class political consciousness can be brought to the workers only from without, that is only from outside the economic struggle. . . . the social democrats [by which he meant at the time the revolutionary socialists like himself] must go among all classes of the population; they must dispatch units of their army [of ideas, observe,] in all directions.”¹³ “A social-democrat must concern himself . . . with an organization of revolutionaries capable of guiding the entire proletarian struggle for emancipation.”¹⁴ Guide, not follow. Likewise Gramsci (says Walzer) was “a Leninist of the cultural struggle,” urging the clerisy to teach the proletariat.¹⁵

Clark is a fine economic and historical scientist, and in his book produces much numerical evidence about various assertions with which other economic and historical scientists agree. But it is crucial to distinguish the good arguments from the bad, in case some outsider to historical science should think that the good economic/quantitative arguments in the book do anything much to support the bad vulgar-Marxist/eugenic arguments. They don’t. The linguist Geoffrey Sampson makes a point similar to mine about Clark’s book in his devastating rebuttal of Stephen Pinker’s theories of linguistic “nativism”: “I should say to start with that I am far from wanting to contradict every point that Pinker [or in our case Clark] makes in his book. Quite a lot . . . has little or nothing to do with the nativism issue [or the eugenic theory of bourgeois virtues] and is not at all controversial, at least not among people versed in the findings. . . . It is possible to read The Language Instinct [or A Farewell to Alms] as a general survey.”¹⁶ Just so in Clark’s case — a survey, at any rate, of what the numbers, if not the social and literary texts, might be viewed as saying. It is a narrow but exceptionally well done survey.

Much of the Clark’s book, in other words, is uncontroversially excellent, a review for outsiders of the quantitative side of what economic historians have learned since, say, Karl Polanyi in 1944. We all, we economic historians nowadays, agree that down to the seventeenth or eighteenth century England was trapped in a Malthusian logic, as the world has been since the caves. There was no rapid innovation, though China for example had slowly acquired quite an impressive panoply. Lacking an ongoing explosion of innovations, if you got more mouths to feed, then sooner rather than later you would get less bread per mouth. In consequence the life of man was nasty, poor, brutish, and short.¹⁷ We all, we economic historians whom Clark is summarizing and illustrating with handsome numbers, agree that the escape from the Malthusian trap is the most important event in world history. And we agree on the magnitude of the escape: in the teeth of gigantic increases in population “the richest modern economies are now [very conservatively measured, not taking account of better quality] ten to twenty times wealthier than the 1800 average.”¹⁸ We agree that innovation, not capital accumulation, was the cause of The Great Fact — and have to keep reminding our colleagues in economics of this. We agree that the Fact happened first in Holland and then in England and Scotland. We agree that in China and especially in Japan there were some signs around 1600 that it might happen there, and some of us think that Qing and Tokugawa tyranny and inegalitarianism and scorning of merchants stopped it. We agree that since 1848 the rewards to labor have increased, and the rewards to capital and land have fallen, contrary to the predictions of the classical economists, whether bourgeois or Marxist. We agree that so sudden was the innovation that it permitted high income that led to a fall in birth rates, as for example in a once-impoverished and once-over-populated Italy. We agree that the poor of the world have been the largest beneficiaries of the escape from the Malthusian trap. We agree that trade unions and protectionism had nothing to do with the escape. We agree, in other words, on a great many historical findings from 1944 to the present that will strike the average enthusiast for Karl Polanyi or Louis Althusser or Naomi Klein, not to speak of Malthus and Marx, as bizarre and counterintuitive.

What other historical scientists do not agree with, however, is Clark’s only distinctive argument, picked up by him recently from the writings of certain economic theorists, reviving in the style of Stephen Pinker a eugenic hypothesis — that English people became by virtue of the rate of breeding of their rich folk a race of Übermenchen living in an Übergemeinschaft. (Clark attempts to distance himself from the cruder and still-popular sorts of twentieth-century eugenics, but the attempt fails: it’s eugenics all right, the sort that has haunted right-wing politics from Francis Galton in the late nineteenth century to the search for the Gay Gene in the early twenty-first.) One of the few historical scientists with whom Clark agrees on the matter is David Landes, whom he commends briefly for being “correct in observing that the Europeans had a culture more conducive to economic growth” — though Landes thinks the superior culture had more ancient genetic sources than the breeding rates of late medieval families.¹⁹ But they are both cultural chauvinists, Clark of England and Landes of Western and especially Northern Europe.

There are a lot of criticisms to be made of this distinctive part of Clark’s book. The century-old eugenic hypothesis of Karl Pearson and Charles Davenport is that civic virtue is inherited, which is Clark’s theme. The hypothesis has so many points against it — some made long ago about Pearson’s and Davenport’s work, some particular to Clark — that it is going have to be abandoned.²⁰

For one thing, non-European places have grown and exhibited civic virtue, after the example of Holland and England and Scotland. As the Nobel economist Robert Solow wrote in one of the flood of scathing reviews of Clark’s book by economists and economic historians:

Clark’s pessimism about closing the gap between the successful and less successful economies may derive from the belief that nothing much can change unless and until the mercantile and industrial virtues seep down into a large part of the population, as he thinks they did in preindustrial England. That could be a long wait. If that is his basic belief, it would seem to be roundly contradicted by the extraordinary sustained growth of China and, a bit more recently, India. Embarrassingly for Clark, both of those success stories seem to have been set off by institutional changes, in particular moves away from centralized control and toward an open-market economy.²¹

Not the commercial virtues inherited by people but the virtues praised by people is what’s required. China repealed its laws against making money and India started admiring entrepreneurs, and both were off to the races.²² And of course similar races started off in the rest of Europe very quickly after England led the way. How did economic growth come so rapidly to the Rhineland and Wallonia, a few decades after England? The west of Germany and the south of the Lowlands were nothing like the tranquil lands that Clark thinks make for a bourgeois Volk. On the contrary, the strip from Flanders south to Lombardy was the cockpit of Europe for a millennium, the Western Front in the Great War, the “Habsburg Road,” the tiny and continually warring states and sub-states of the “Lotharian axis” (as the military historian Geoffrey Parker calls it, after Charlemagne’s grandson, who briefly governed it). Yet within a century of England’s stirring, and despite the disturbances of the Napoleonic Wars, whose climactic battle was again fought in Wallonia, the Lotharian axis from Mons to Milan was an industrial hive.

For another, the non-Europeans, those non-English Untermenschen such as Bengalis or Jamaicans, became well-to-do when they decamped to places in which bourgeois values were accorded dignity and liberty. Their success seems to have had little to do with inherited values, rather in the way that the younger sons of English gentry in the eighteenth century prospered when apprenticed as merchants in Bristol and London. Clark shows no interest in American economic history, which is the main instance of success of people with peasant genes in a bourgeois-honoring land. Italian Americans whose ancestors with fifth-grade educations followi9ng the plow in Calabria become in a generation among the best-educated national sub-groups of their new country. Nor to look at it from the other side is he interested in the numerous diasporas of Chinese or Armenians or whomever who enriched themselves away from the imperial oppression or aristocratic chaos of their homelands. Cypriots move to London and in a generation become successful businesspeople. Parsis move from Pakistan and in a generation become doctors and professors. And Clark shows no interest in his native Scotland (though he is in fact of Irish descent), which did have a very early Industrial Revolution, yet as recently as the century before it had nothing like England’s “extraordinary stability” from which bourgeois values are supposed to flow. (Partly of course the instability of Scotland resulted from centuries of invasions and other fishing in troubled waters by the stability-enjoying English.) And like the overseas Chinese or the immigrants to America, the Scots after 1707 journeyed south to become the economists and engineers and farm managers for England and its Empire. Nor does Clark show interest in my own cousins in Ireland, who when they crossed the Irish Sea to staff the cotton and wool mills he has investigated in past decades with such empirical imagination became rapidly the good workers who couldn’t of course ever arise from such a turbulent and non-bourgeois and demographically unsound place as John Bull’s troublesome Other Island, which in most parts did not have an Industrial Revolution.

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1. [back] Clark 2007, p. 165.
2. [back] Clark 2007, p. 183-184, from which subsequent quotations come.
3. [back] Marx and Engels 1848 (1988), p. 73.
4. [back] Marx 1859, p. 43.
5. [back] Engels 1877-1878, Part III, Chp. 2, "Socialism: Theoretical."
6. [back] Quoted in Stark 2003, p. 61.
7. [back] Novak 2007, p. 232.
8. [back] Milton 1644 (1985), p. *** in Patrides collect upstairs
9. [back] Wootton 1992, p. 183. ***This has to be wrong, unless it's in his Penguin anthology: "83" correct? It's available on Questia.
10. [back] Walzer 1988, p. 81. I would add Eric Hobsbawm, which then makes two.
11. [back] Forgacs, ed. 2000, pp. 196-198 (Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 407-409; Selections from Cultural Writings, Q10, II para. 41.xii).
12. [back] Walzer 1988, p. 81.
13. [back] Lenin1902 (1988), pp. 143-144, his italics.
14. [back] Lenin 1902 (1988), p. 179.
15. [back] Walzer 1988, p. 83.
16. [back] Sampson 2005, p.110.
17. [back] The agricultural historian George Grantham, however, has some telling criticisms of Clark's simple Malthusian model on which Clark bets so much-see the discussion in Grantham 2007 for example of the problem with using wages in threshing, whose apparently straightforwardness conceals variation in other conditions of work.
18. [back] Clark 2007, p. 2.
19. [back] Clark 2007, p. 11.
20. [back] On Davenport, the American leader of the eugenics movement, see for example Witkowski and Inglis, eds. 2008.
21. [back] Solow 2007
22. [back] See Adhia 2009.

1 response

1. [...] McCloskey says Clark is way wrong, and I’m basically persuaded by McCloskey’s argument. Clark’s Farewell to Alms [...]

   Written by The Cause of the Industrial Revolution: Not Genes « William’s Continued Adventures on June 2nd, 2010.

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