Part XII. Science, Bourgeois Dignity, and the Industrial Revolution

One can agree with Goldstone, who in defending the new-old view of Margaret Jacob and Joel Mokyr that Science Did It, writes that “what transformed [European] production was a generalized belief in the possibility . . . of progress. . . . The longstanding traditional barriers between upper-class philosophers, market-driven entrepreneurs, large-scale industrialists, and skilled craftspeople and technicians dissolved, so that all of these groups came together to initiate a culture of innovation.”²⁴ But then it is not science but the “breakdown of traditional barriers” — precisely the coming of a business-respecting civilization — which is the crux. The widening belief that the physical and therefore the social world can be changed, and is not frozen in a Great Chain of Being, might be attributed in part to science, though the Reformation and the Revolutions and above all the Revaluation surely figure, too. And one could just as well believe that a Newtonian universe would be worshipped instead for its clocklike stability, with conservative social conclusions. Jacob has taught us that Newton himself drew such conclusions.²⁵ The success of business projectors, whether bourgeois or aristocratic, was surely more effective than science in showing people that they too, and not only God’s grace and miracles, could change things. By the middle of the eighteenth century the literary man Samuel Johnson, though a Tory in politics, could write in favor of innovation thus:

That the attempts of such men [projectors] will often miscarry, we may reasonably expect; yet from such men, and such only, are we to hope for the cultivation of those parts of nature which lie yet waste, and the invention of those arts which are yet wanting to the felicity of life. If they are, therefore, universally discouraged, art and discovery can make no advances. Whatever is attempted without previous certainty of success, may be considered as a project, and amongst narrow minds may, therefore, expose its author to censure and contempt; and if the liberty of laughing be once indulged, every man will laugh at what he does not understand, every project will be considered as madness, and every great or new design will be censured as a project.²⁶

There’s a declaration for bourgeois dignity and liberty, against their enemies.

Easterlin draws a striking comparison between the Industrial Revolution and the Mortality Revolution. He notes that the demographer Samuel H. Preston’s decomposition of falling mortality into the outcome of mere enrichment with given technology as against the outcome of technology with given enrichment is analogous to the economist Robert Solow’s decomposition of enrichment itself into mere capital accumulation as against technology. He concludes that “when the quest for the economic historian’s Holy Grail, the causes of the Industrial Revolution, is couched in terms of commonalities in the Industrial and Mortality Revolutions, economic explanations of the Industrial Revolution become less persuasive.”²⁷ So they do. “In seeking an explanation,” he continues, “. . . one must ask what is new on the scene.” For both Revolutions, he says, with Jacob, Mokyr, and Goldstone, that it was science.

But what was also “new on the scene,” and tracks the beginnings of economic growth and mortality reduction more precisely (considering that after the steam engines and water treatment plants are invented, they can be imitated), is the attribution of bourgeois virtue, such as from Johnson. It is seen in an early form around 1720 as a new dignity and liberty for traders and innovators (consider Robinson Crusoe, and all of Defoe’s works). And a century before Defoe the English were beginning to learn from the Dutch the improving spirit of active, stirring, laborious men, such as will put their hand to the plow, try experiments, and give all their attention to what they are about. Henry Robinson was very busy in the 1640s issuing pamphlets advocating improvements such as compulsory swimming lessons for the poor. Francis Bacon’s proposals during the 1620s for improving science look like those of a bourgeois projector (though my Lord Bacon was as far from bourgeois, and as far from an advocate for dignity and liberty, as one can imagine). Let us do thus-and-such, organized in this way, says the projector in Holland and then England, and — behold! — what great benefits will flow! It is a methodical and accounting rhetoric, foreign to an aristocratic society.

Much later the rhetoric appears in the public and bourgeois spirit of people like Nassau Senior around 1840 or John Snow around 1850 calling for urban renewal and the redirection of water intakes. The germ theory of disease, Mokyr has emphasize, was of course a late nineteenth-century discovery, before which and quite independent of science a cleanliness obsession had taken hold among bourgeois men and especially women, long anticipated in the Low Countries and finally spreading to France and England. Nobody took care of the water supply or public education in London in the eighteenth century. Benjamin Franklin stood out in Philadelphia for his bourgeois public spirit. A century later in both places a very great care indeed was being taken — again, proper theoretical science aside. The banker and writer Matt Ridley in 1996 looked back his home town of Newcastle-upon-Tyne in 1800, as “a hive of local enterprise and pride” with “great traditions of trust, mutuality and reciprocity on which such cities were based.”²⁸ Bourgeois dignity and liberty contains much more than isolated monads and an ethic of devil-take-the-hindmost. The Market of the economist’s imagining is in truth and in history embedded in ethics and society.

Further, the political revolutions of the seventeenth century in England were surely more important to more people than the novelties of the Scientific Revolution — though the point can hardly be used against Jacob because she herself made it. She writes in the Preface to a new edition of her book of 1981 introducing the idea of a “radical Enlightenment” that “beginning in the 1680s northern and western Europe experienced a series of shock waves that in turn produced a new radicalism in thought both in matters political and religious. French bellicosity, the revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685, and the appearance on the English throne in the same year of a Catholic king threw Protestant Europe into turmoil.”²⁹ It is her origin story, and a good one. But she and Jonathan Israel (who later carried on the argument with what Jacob characterizes with a hint of distaste as “a very different and largely idealist methodology”) see the results through intellectual life, with the intellectual life then affecting the society and the economy. A more direct chain of causation would be revolutions (1642 as much as 1688, as Jacob also emphasizes; or for that matter 1568 in the Netherlands and 1517 in Germany) causing a new self-respecting by the bourgeoisie, and other-respecting for it, too — and at length the Bourgeois Revaluation. The ideas directly in support of economic change, as Jacob’s colleague Joyce Appleby shows, were fruits of social and intellectual change in England during the seventeenth century, coming to full ripeness much later in French physiocracy and Scottish political economy. Joyce argues, for example, using Barry Supple’s early work on the economic crisis of the early seventeenth century, that the disorders of the 1620s forced English people to think hard about a thing increasingly conceived as a separate “economy.”³⁰

Goldstone defends the Jacobian chain of Boyle-Newcomen-Watt in which revolutionary consequences follow from the scientific discovery in England in the seventeenth century of the weight of the atmosphere (by the way, actually discovered in China centuries before, with no such practical result): “Great Britain had what no other nation on earth had, or would for more than a generation: a cheap and reliable means of converting heat energy (mainly from coal) into uniform rotary motion” (italics mine).³¹ Note the italicized phrase, which Goldstone inserts with characteristic precision. That’s right: for a mere generation or so the English coal miners and coal burners had an advantage. But a business-respecting civilization would have adopted the steam engine pronto, with coal or not. Bourgeois dignity and liberty made for quick imitation as much as ingenious invention.

Jacob noted that the very “backlash against the Enlightenment testifies to the enormous change in Western values witnessed in the eighteenth century.”³² Surely. But the change was not mere enlightenment. What finished the job was a society-wide shift towards the admiring of bourgeois virtues, supplementing the Enlightened attitude among the elite towards the creative destruction from new knowledge. Mokyr writes that “The Enlightenment affected the economy through two mechanism. One of them is the attitude toward technology and the role it should play in human affairs. The other has to do with institutions and the degree to which rent-seeking and redistribution should be tolerated.”³³ But such an answer to the question Was ist Aufklärung?” comes very close to my alleged “dignity and liberty of the bourgeoisie.” An instrumental (and bourgeois) attitude towards technology gives ordinary affairs a dignity they did not formerly have. And resistance to the rent-seeking and redistribution that characterize an ageless mercantilism and, later, national economy is precisely the liberty from interference that the bourgeoisie sought — once it had been compelled to surrender its medieval attitude towards preserving the home market for itself. There’s not much in the difference. I readily admit that the issue is tangled. I only suggest that one strand, without which the rope of modernity would have broken, was bourgeois dignity and liberty. Jacob herself points out, for example, that the founding rhetoric of the New Science emphasized the dignified laboriousness of scientific inquiry. Insight was to be achieved not by heroic gesture or God’s grace but by thoroughly bourgeois works.³⁴ It is very Dutch, and then English and Scottish and American. And anyway bourgeois.

The Enlightenment, Jacob argues, was of Northern origin — “the beginning of the European Enlightenment can in many instances be traced to post-[Glorious] revolutionary England and the Dutch Republic,” then shifted to France: “by 1750, the Enlightenment had left its northern roots and become remarkably Parisian.”³⁵ But had it stayed Parisian it probably would not have stayed at all. The production of encyclopedias and the wit of salons, if it had not worked within an increasingly bourgeois civilization led by an astonishingly innovative Britain, would have resulted (as it did in France) in hot-air balloons and military signaling systems, not steam engines and railways. The heroic engineer/entrepreneur such as the builder of the Great Western railroad and the Great Eastern steamship Isambard Kingdom Brunel (British, but the son of an exile from France) would not have triumphed. Jacob notes that “the civil engineer [of docks and canals and roads] emerged in Britain by 1750; his French counterpart was a military man. . . . standing aloof from the entrepreneur.”³⁶ From 1747 the Frenchman graduated from the state school, École Nationale des Ponts en Chaussées. British engineers by contrast graduated from the private school of practice.

Jacob writes that “the Enlightenment returned to England, the land of its [1680s] birth, largely as a result of the American Revolution.”³⁷ She means a political Enlightenment, since England and then Scotland never let go of the scientific and practical side. By 1750 in fact the other, British Enlightenment, of a much more practical nature, was being practiced in Edinburgh, and in 1765 in Birmingham, and earlier even in far Philadelphia. The coal mines of Northumberland were filled with Newcomen engines by the 1740s, pumping out the water and permitting the deepest coal mines in Europe, but it was well into the nineteenth century before such wonders affected much else in the economy. Jacob asks of the engineers and inventors, “can we imagine an industrial revolution without Thomas Newcomen, Desaguliers, John Smeaton or James Watt?”³⁸ True, we can’t. But the Bourgeois Revaluation, not high theory in Science, made the engineers. Or rather, high theory in science — and innovation in literature, in Birmingham toys, in painting, in steam, in journalism, in theology, in music, in port design, in philosophy, in constitutions — was as David Landes puts it various “manifestations of a common approach. . . . The response to new knowledge . . . is of a piece, and the society that closes its eyes to novelty from one source has already been closing them to novelty from the other.”³⁹ The economic historian Peter Mathias wrote that “both science and technology [in the British eighteenth century] give evidence of a society increasingly curious, increasingly questing, increasingly on the move, on the make, having a go, increasingly seeking to experiment, wanting to improve.”⁴⁰ The originality of Japanese color prints in the eighteenth century representing the “floating world” of prostitutes and kabuki actors betokens an openness to novelty that one sees also in the Osaka merchant academies of the late seventeenth century.⁴¹ But until 1868, alas, in the face of Tokugawa conservatism, these were swallows without a spring. It is not Science that was the key to the door to modernity but the wider agreement to permit and honor innovation, opening ones eyes to novelty, having a go.

Had the Ottoman or the Qing empires so admired trade and innovation, then, they, not the Europeans, would have come first to apply science where one could, here and there — and anyway would have been the first to embark on the feverish pursuit of practical innovation in all fields from poetry to pottery that characterizes Britain and then Europe after 1700 and especially after 1800. But instead of taking advantage of their own highly developed cultures and sciences, the Eastern empires of China, India, and the Middle East, and plenty of European régimes, too (one thinks of the Counterreformation in Poland and Spain), turned in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, as Goldstone argues persuasively, to an intellectual conformity quite foreign to their earlier openness to ideas — just at the time the northwestern Europeans, and a few in East Prussia, awakened from their dogmatic slumbers. Yet without a radical change in attitudes towards innovation for optimistically hoped-for glory in a society newly admiring the bourgeois virtues, with a little money profit on the side, the sheer intellectual awakening in Europe would not have enriched the world. The rediscovery of analytic geometry three centuries after an Arab had invented it, the rediscovery of chemical principles known for hundreds of years in China, the questioning of religion centuries after sophisticated scholars in Baghdad and Delhi and Beijing, or for that matter Athens and Jerusalem, had been doing so would have yielded no industrial fruit.

Orthodox Christianity differed from Catholic Christianity in only a few minor doctrines (filioque; clerical celibacy), and yet a corner of the Catholic West initiated growth while the Orthodox world stagnated. The case (which is that of the historian Lynn White) shows the drag from a rhetoric hostile to commercial values, and by contraries the importance of the Bourgeois Revaluation. The sociologist of comparative religion Michael Lessnoff summarizes with approval White’s remarks on the matter: “In Greek Christianity, the influence of classical Greek culture was considerably greater [than in the West], including the philosophers’ depreciation of technology, economic activity, and the active life generally. . . . Mechanical clocks, which proliferated in Western churches, were banned from Orthodox ones.”⁴² In the West, by contrast, Newtonian Anglicans took the clock as their central theological metaphor, and the pocket watch discovered in a field as their main argument for God’s existence.

The new bourgeois society was pragmatic and non-utopian, but also a little mad — the madness that overcame European men and women once they came to believe that they were free and dignified and should have a go. Joel Mokyr cites the madness of the Montgolfier brothers and their floating of a sheep, a rooster, and a duck in a hot-air balloon in 1783 at Versailles. (Ben Franklin watched many such ascents, and at one powered by hydrogen replied to a skeptic about its usefulness: “Sir, of what use is a new born baby?”). The lurching progress of innovation has never been seriously in doubt since around 1800. For a time during the Great Depression many doubted (though the economic historian Alexander Field has shown that the 1930s in the United States was in fact a technologically progressive time⁴³ ). But the doubt was followed after the War by the greatest innovative boom since then. And world income has since further accelerated.

What was not routinely available in the eighteenth century was the great stock of inventions yet to be imagined, including the institutional inventions allowing cooperation among masses of people without the application of knout and sword. This is why China and India can now grow at rates inconceivable in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries before the inventions were well launched. Goldstone observes that human innovation until the eighteenth and especially the nineteenth centuries was “sporadic and isolated.”⁴⁴ The Chinese invented the blast furnace, yes, and the Europeans much later got hold of it. Then the technology of the furnace stagnated until the British started charging furnaces with coke in the eighteenth century and then the Americans started hard driving with forced air in the late nineteenth century and then the Austrians and the Japanese reformulated the charge with the new chemistry in the twentieth. As I have said, it is a sort of madness, which now much of world outside the Bottom Billion has caught. Make your fortune with another invention. An Indian recently invented wide and light paddle-like shoes for walking about on the water in rice paddies. Bravo.

What did happen in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to prepare for all this, you might think, is an original accumulation of inventive people, such as Richard Arkwright and Benjamin Franklin. But such a Great Inventor account is not quite right, either. Notions of social or spiritual capital, alleged to give rise automatically to Arkwrights and Franklins, force the evidence to lie down on the economist’s bed of accumulate, accumulate. The crucial change was rather about habits of the mind and lip. Accumulated physical, human, and spiritual capital help the talk and thought, surely. If you are illiterate you are probably superstitious and conservative. But talk and thought possess a creativity that mere piling up of capital of whatever sort does not. One speaks of a “well-stocked mind,” and the economist obsesses on getting “good training in the tools” of the currently fashionable formalities of his trade. Yet both of these likely as not create a mind unable to think, mechanically marshalling her knowledge of the classical languages or his tool of an econometrics over-accumulated. Thorough knowledge of Latin and Greek produced sometimes a Matthew Arnold, who could think. But sheer accumulation of learning also produced Oxford dons who almost never had an original idea and didn’t publish on the rare occasions they did. The poet and Latin scholar A. E. Housman wrote in 1921 an essay against the non-thinkers in his field, “The Application of Thought to Textual Criticism.” He recommended that his colleagues try thinking. Likewise in economics. Taking three of the standard graduate courses in econometrics (as I for example did) produces usually not an economist thinking but an idiot savant good at following rules. A new dignity for innovators and a new liberty to try things out mattered more than such accumulation — although of course one needs minds minimally prepared, too. English literacy and technical apprenticeship did the job. But Japan at the time had similar levels of literacy and technical apprenticeship, without yielding an Industrial Revolution.

The other problem with the Procrustean move of forcing creativity to lie down on models of accumulate, accumulate is that people too depreciate over time. What had to happen was a change in the social rhetoric to make generation upon generation of people, educated in masses every year, want to innovate, and to innovate, and to innovate. There’s the social or spiritual capital — but it’s located in conversations. As suggested by the work of Christine MacLeod and Antonio Gramsci (an odd pairing!) the new rhetoric has to be renewed and strengthened with each new generation. Otherwise is returns to dust. The change of mind and lip was not once-for-all. What Gramsci called a “historical block” needed to be constantly renewed, as though it were a machine subject to rapid depreciation — my own book here is an example of such rhetorical investment in renewal. MacLeod argues that the “commemorative statuary [for James Watt erected in 1834] and the fundraising efforts [1824-1834] surrounding it both raised awareness of new technology and helped shape attitudes more positively towards it.”⁴⁵

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Notes

24. [back] Goldstone 2009, p. 134.
25. [back] Jacob 1997, p. 65.
26. [back] Johnson 1753.
27. [back] Easterlin 1995 (2004), p. 99.
28. [back] Ridley 1996, p. 263. Compare Prince Kropotkin 1901, giving a very similar view of an ideal town from a very different political perspective.
29. [back] Jacob 1981 (2006), p. vi.
30. [back] Appleby 1978, Chaps. 1 and 2. Supple 1959.
31. [back] Goldstone 2002a.
32. [back] Jacob 2001, p. 68.
33. [back] Mokyr 2007a, p. 1.
34. [back] Jacob 1997, p. 59.
35. [back] Jacob 1981 (2006), p. x; Jacob 2001, p. 50.
36. [back] Jacob 1998, p. 71.
37. [back] Jacob 2001, p. 63.
38. [back] Personal correspondence 2008.
39. [back] Landes 1998, p. 35.
40. [back] Mathias 1972 (1979), p. 66.
41. [back] Najita 1987.
42. [back] Lessnoff 2003, p. 361.
43. [back] Field 2003, 2006; confirmed by Alexopoulos and Cohen 2009.
44. [back] Goldstone 2009, p. 29.
45. [back] MacLeod 1998, p. 98.

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