Chapter 3 of The Bourgeois Revaluation:
But the Bourgeoisie Has Been Disdained
Dear Reader: This is a rough draft (Jan. 2010) of The Bourgeois Revaluation: How Innovation Became Virtuous, 1600-1848. Three asterisks *** or the bold or NNN (for a name) or DDDD (for a date) and the many pages with “items [perhaps] to be inserted” indicate only some of the numerous things to be done. I welcome comments.
The master words in our tale, “bourgeois” and “capitalist,” acquired their present meanings late, and largely from Marx and his followers.52 One could object in the style of some Polanyians that to apply the terms to medieval Europe, much less to second-millennium B.C.E. Mesopotamia, is anachronistic. I think not, not so long as the two are used colorlessly and scientifically and non-contextually. Most modern historians, such as Philip Curtin and Fernand Braudel, agree.
The word “bourgeois” is merely a French version of the Germanic root of words like “borough” and “Edinburgh,” that is, townsman. A “Burger” in German is, like all similar words borrowed into even the Romance languages, such as borghese or bourgeois, a free citizen of a chartered city.53 That is, he voted and mattered, as his wife and his apprentices, not to speak of the laborers hired by the day, did not. Charter by charter, slowly, the voting townsman in the Middle Ages became independent of the system of lord and peasant in the surrounding countryside. By the grace of the Emperor or the lord-bishop the townsman would remain independent of feudalism, and yet remain bourgeois — unless indeed he was corrupted into seeking feudal lordship for himself. He had to resist the temptation of vanity to commission a noble genealogy from the heralds, as for example bourgeois Shakespeare did, or to take on wholesale the values of an aristocracy, as the bourgeois-origin noblemen of Florence and Venice, and later even Switzerland, most spectacularly did.
So let’s be colorless in the definition. You may use if wish another word: free denizen, freeman, townsman, citizen (“a man of trade, not a gentleman,” said Johnson’s Dictionary), cit (the eighteenth-century term of contempt in England for a bourgeois), burgess, middling sort, privileged town-dweller (Elias 1939, p. 187), social classes I, II, and III (non-manual), National Readership Survey classes A, B, and C1, a member of the middle station, or of the middle class (the last a late coinage, entering the language in 1745 with “electrify” and “turnpike road”). If “bourgeois” bothers you I nonetheless wish you would accept the tactic here of re-valuing a despised class. But please feel free to use any of these alternatives in place of the shameful word throughout the book. “Class X” if you wish. I’ll supply you with a Microsoft Word version of the text in which you can find and replace “bourgeois” every time.
Nothing in historical science turns on the word. (I use it for its ethics and politics, to undermine the automatic sneering against the way most of us live.) The bourgeoisie in my usage for social science is merely what’s left over when you have subtracted from all the men the rent-earning aristocrats (with the gentry) and the tithe-earning clerics (with the clerisy, that is, the intellectuals and the bureaucrats) and the lower-wage-earning peasants and proletarians. Women in some cities could run businesses independently, especially if widowed, in which case they, like the abbesses and the queens in other spheres, are to be accorded in the accounting an honorary maledom, having the heart and stomach of a bourgeois, and a bourgeois of Holland, too. Notice that the other classes are defined here in a similarly colorless way, so that nothing is conveyed for example by the word “peasant” except “hard manual worker in agriculture” — not as the more colorful, if often factually mistaken “member of a closed corporate community” or “carrier of Gemeinschaft from the glorious Germanic past.” B = Total Men – A – C – P – P’. The hard manual/lower clerical/lower service workers, nickel and dimed, are the Ps, the peasants if in the country or proletarians if in the town. We can include or not include the Clerisy depending on our purpose. The Clerisy has mainly come from the Bourgeoisie itself, like Thomas Cromwell in some accounts, and has always straddled. Antonio Gramsci noted in 1932 that “every social group. . . creates together with itself, organically, one or more strata of intellectuals.”54
Another gigantic scholarly controversy looms. You can see that I don’t want to use “bourgeois” to mean “stupid, greedy, uncultivated,” as it has been commonly used by some scholars and many journalists since Rousseau and especially since 1848. That is, I do not want to prejudge the main question at issue, which is whether the bourgeoisie and its markets and innovation have been good or bad for us, and whether they deserve to be encouraged or to be restrained. If one insists on using the word “bourgeois” as, say, Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir used it, to mean the worst and most inauthentic types of town life in France c. 1950, then of course it is not going to be much of an intellectual feat to conclude that bourgeois life leads straight to, well, the worst and most inauthentic types of town life in France c. 1950. But I urge you to use the word not as a term of contempt, but scientifically and colorlessly, to mean “owners and managers, risk takers or word workers, large or small in wealth, in town.”
J. G. A. Pocock provides the key to why Rousseau was so vehement against the bourgeoisie and so insistent that it was not the body of citoyens. The word bourgeoisie meant in pre-Revolutionary France, and indeed in traditional Europe generally, a class having special rights, rights for example to appear in a favorable court in case of disputes.55 Not everybody had such rights, because not everyone belonged to the corporation under the charter of the free Imperial city of Worms, say. The rights, Rousseau reckoned, were like the rights enjoyed by the French aristocrats of Rousseau’s time to be entirely free of taxes. The very words “freedoms” or “liberties,” especially in those plural forms, connoted special rights granted by charter. That is, a “freeman of the City of London” is not just some barrow boy. He was better than you. No wonder Rousseau, that early enemy of privilege, didn’t like the bourgeoisie.
But for scientific purposes the bourgeoisie can be haute or petite, the international merchant financing hundreds of bales of China tea offloaded onto the East India Dock or the little shopkeeper in the High Street of Salisbury selling tea by the ounce. He can be a Robert Owen managing a big cotton textile mill in Lanarkshire in Scotland or a clothier named Simon Eyre (common Germanic: “aristocratic, honorable”) managing a few apprentices and journeymen in fifteenth-century London. The word “bourgeoisie” is sometimes used for the haute alone, commonly so in French, for example, and you are welcome if you wish to follow that usage. God doesn’t supply human definitions. But the haute definition, again, prejudges an open scientific issue, that is, whether “capitalism” is something entirely different from provisioning in local markets. Let’s leave the issue open until we have some evidence. That is, let’s not close it with our choice of words.
And I just used again, as I have freely so far, the magic word “capitalism.” I repeat: God won’t tell us how to use it. I propose, if God doesn’t mind, that we agree to use the word to mean simply “markets, very widespread in 1800 C.E. — but not by any means unknown in 1800 B.C.E.” “Modern capitalism” is that unusually innovative form that capitalism at last took — the technical and organizational innovations, not the markets, or the class relations, or the size of enterprises, being what was historically unique about it. My proposed substitute, merely “innovation,” I admit, does rather slant the case, though not in a way that violates the evidence. Innovation in a uniquely modern and frenetic scale is the new form of capitalism that started to take hold in seventeenth century Holland and eighteenth century England and early nineteenth century Belgium, France, and the United States. I’ll try to use “the Age of Innovation” to describe the modern world, not “the Age of Capital (-ism),” but if I use Marx’s word I’ll use it to mean just the same thing as Innovation.
There are good reasons for this likewise colorless usage. For one thing, there’s nothing automatic about growth in capitalism so defined, though since 1776 and especially since 1848 many people have believed so. In particular scale has little to do with it. Big piles of capital, such as Spain’s from the New World, can be dissipated in aristocratic posturing financed by the center and by local elitism protected by high transport costs, as Spain’s were, despite an early start in laissez faire philosophizing.56 Little or non-existent piles, like young Andrew Carnegie’s, can grow at rates far above normal, if in a time and place of innovation that permits and honors the bourgeoisie, a business civilization.
In particular there does not appear to be anything special about the use of “capital” in the so-called capitalist era. People used financial and real capital before capitalism, as for example in Mesopotamia. Profits were earned, as they were in the Athenian commercial empire. As I said, Polanyi to the contrary, markets flourished, as they did in medieval Europe. Fernand Braudel concluded his three-volume study of the matter in 1979 by noting that even in his own special sense of the linking of local markets by international and high-profit trade “capitalism” was ancient:
Throughout this book, I have argued that capitalism has been potentially visible since the dawn of history, and that it has developed and perpetuated itself down the ages. . . . It would however be a mistake to imagine capitalism as something that developed in a series of stages or leaps–from mercantile capitalism to industrial capitalism to finance capitalism, with some kind of regular progression from one phase to the next, with “true” capitalism appearing only at the late stage when it took over production, and the only permissible term for the early period being mercantile capitalism or even “pre-capitalism.” In fact as we have seen, the great “merchants” of the past never specialized: they went in indiscriminately, simultaneously or successively, for trade, banking, finance, speculation on the Stock Exchange, “industrial” production, whether under the putting-out system or more rarely in manufactories. The whole panoply of forms of capitalism–commercial, industrial, banking–was already employed in thirteenth century Florence, in seventeenth-century Amsterdam, in London before the eighteenth century.57
Or, one could add, in Athens before the third century B.C.E. or in Ur before the twentieth century B.C.E.58
And certainly no automatic machinery of accumulation got turned on in 1760, no “take-off into self-sustained growth” happened as a result of higher saving rates making more capital, contrary to what Walt Rostow somewhat mysteriously claimed in 1960, and now modern devisers of “growth theory” claim, too. High savings rates in Italy in the nineteenth century did not result in economic growth, until late. Cite Stefano Nor does the capitalist machinery automatically exploit and alienate the proletariat. It didn’t in the United States, which was and is notoriously non-socialist even in its working class. After all, your ancestors and mine were impoverished and ignorant peasants and proletarians. And yet here we are, their descendants, well-to-do people spending a pleasant evening together discussing the virtues and vices of capitalism, though still working for wages, big ones, or at any rate a nice pension. Feeling alienated recently? Really? A wage slave? Some “slave.” Have you noticed that you, not the bosses, own your human capital?
For another thing, again, we don’t want to prejudge everything about the mechanisms and morals of capitalism by defining it the way Marx did in Chapter 4 of Capital (at any rate according to the old standard, and inaccurate, English translation) as “the restless never-ending process of profit-making alone. . . , this boundless greed after riches, this passionate chase after exchange-value.59 The original German actually says “solely the restless stirring for gain. This absolute desire for enrichment, this passionate hunt for value”: nur die rastlose Bewegung des Gewinnes. Dieser absolute Bereicherungstrieb, diese leidenschaftliche Jagd auf den Wert. .60 The words of the English translation, such as “never-ending” (endlos, ewig, unaufhörlich) and “boundless” (grenzenlos, schrankenlos), are nowhere in Marx’s German. The normal German word for “greed” (Gier) does not appear anywhere in the chapter. Indeed, Gier and its compounds (Raubgier, rapacity; Habgier, avarice; Goldgier) are rare in Marx, attesting to his attempt to shift away from conventional ethical terms in analyzing capitalism. Marx’s rationalist scientism, the historian Allan Megill notes, prevents him from saying “here I am making a moral-ethical point,” even in the exceedingly numerous places in which he was.61 The first 25 chapters of Das Kapital, through page 802 of the German edition (page 670 in the Modern Library edition), contain “greed” and its compounds in Marx’s own words only seven times (mainly in Chapter 8, “Constant Capital and Variable Capital”), with a few more in quotations.
Yet the sneer at the bourgeoisie’s endless/boundless greed is common enough, and Engels after all approved the English translation. But in any case we do not want disdain for commerce to be preordained by the rhetoric.
Such disdain for commerce is ancient and usual. It is a trifle strange, of course, since commerce itself is also ancient and usual, and we all get our livings or our food from it. Yet we do always suspect that the other person in our penny capitalism is cheating us. If “cheating” means “leaving us with less profit that we would have had if the other was idiotically imprudent or wonderfully charitable,” then every single exchange involves it.
Anxiety and irritation have always flowed from the gap between what we are willing to pay and what the seller is willing to accept. Marshallian economists and their heirs the Samuelsonian economists call the gap “the sum of consumer’s and producer’s surplus.” Marxists call it, more vividly, “exploitation” or “surplus value.” It is the social gain from trade — the value created by trade — to be divided somehow into our profit from the transaction and his. The “somehow” is the source of the irritation. The amount that makes trade good for both parties also leaves both parties thinking they could have done better. In fact, either could have.
Did I get the best deal I could? Has he made a fool of me? Gullible Jack in the English folk tale sells his mother’s cow for a silly handful of beans, and the mother is outraged by the cheating, and by her son’s gullibility. The beans prove to be magical, of course, resolving the tension aroused in the listeners (imagine the story of Jack and the Beanstalk ending abruptly with the first cheating), and Jack proceeds to himself cheat the giant and thereby amass his own profit. It is a peasant view of exchange, always cheating, cheating, cheating, taking every advantage however small. A market transaction is viewed as zero sum, your loss being my gain. “Country life,” reflects the academic narrator in a J. M. Coetzee novel about rural South Africa, “has always been a matter of neighbors scheming against each other.” The narrator’s early impression of his neighbor Petrus, who tries to cheat him in every deal, is that the man though admirably hard working was “a plotter and a schemer and no doubt a liar too, like peasants everywhere. Honest toil and honest cunning.”62
All this cheating magic of markets has long angered people (though not when they themselves practice it on others: from that point of view it a bargain, een goedkoop, a “good buy.” I won and he lost. Hurrah.). Only briefly in recent European centuries did a coherent rhetoric arise to assuage such anger against the other side of a market transaction, and to half-persuade people that markets are positive sum. I’ve called it the Bourgeois Deal: let me make profits off the transaction and I’ll make us both rich. Modern people, though subject to outbreaks of populist reversion to peasant type, act as though they pretty much accepted the Deal.
The acceptance is historically rare. The commercial Chinese, for example, have long been burdened by a Confucian disdain for the class of merchants, ranked in the hierarchy since 600 B.C.E. even below peasants. Recently the mainland Chinese seem to have gotten over their disdain, as their cousins overseas have managed to do for centuries. We shall see. The Christians in their beginnings were among the most anti-commercial people of faith, more so than Jews or Muslims or Hindus or even Buddhists. By late in the first millennium of Christianity the dominant theorizers about the economy were monks and mystics and desert fathers, deniers of this world in the style of St. Augustine — and they were a large influence on Muslim mysticism, too.63 The main factual paradox of the present book is that, startlingly, it was a Christian Europe after 1300 that redeemed the bourgeois life.
Yet the disdain for people who buy low and sell high, people who are neither aristocratic nor clerical nor even simply peasant-like, “honest” in a recent sense but poor, started early, I repeat, and was prominent for a very long time, even in Europe. Fernand Braudel wrote in 1979 that “when Europe came to life again in the eleventh century, the market economy and monetary sophistication were ‘scandalous’ novelties. Civilization, standing for ancient tradition, was by definition hostile to innovation. So it said no to the market, no to profit making, no to capital. At best it was suspicious and reticent.”64 The German sociologist Georg Simmel had put it well in 1907: “the masses — from the Middle Ages right up to the nineteenth century — thought that there was something wrong with the origin of great fortunes. . . . Tales of horror spread about the origin of the Grinaldi, the Medici and the Rothschild fortunes. . . as if a demonic spirit was at work.”65 But Simmel is being precise here, as he usually is. It is the masses, the populists, hoi polloi, who hold such views most vividly. A jailer in the thirteenth century scorned a rich man’s pleas for mercy: “Come, Master Arnaud Teisseire, you have wallowed in such opulence! . . . . How could you be without sin?”66 Echoing Jesus of Nazareth when he speaks of rich men and camels and needles, another of Le Roy Ladurie’s Albigensians declared that “those who have possessions in the present life can have only evil in the other world. Conversely, those who have evil in the present life will have only good in the future life.”67
Such disdain for possessions in the present life, and the matched disdain by landed aristocrats for the vulgarity of trade, is still hard to ignore even among the elite, because it is built into European literary and religious traditions, providing the foundations for novels like Babbitt or Gain and movies like Wall Street or There Will Be Blood (from Upton Sinclair’s novel, Oil). The peasant envied profit makers — though she took profit on her sales of barley. The proletariat grumbled about his boss — though he changed his tune when he became one. The aristocrat disdained traders — though he engaged in profitable trade when he could. Michael McCormick notes that the “late Roman legacy of contempt for commerce,” reinforced by the rhetoric of the modern clerisy ashamed of its own bourgeois origins, has occluded the evidence for a revival of European trade in the eighth and especially the ninth centuries (note: two or three centuries earlier than the Belgian economic historian NNNN had put it in DDDD, or Braudel following him). “Christian dislike of commerce — if not for its proceeds — allied with the new aristocratic ethos of a warrior life to produce a ruling class” (and therefore surviving evidence written by or in praise of them) “that was often indifferent and sometimes even hostile to the trading life.”68 It continued in another version the scorn for the bourgeoisie that aristocratic Greeks and senatorial Romans displayed.
Even in commercial Italy the line between aristocrat and borgehese was sharp — and even when the aristocrats were, like the Medici, descended from the middle class. Giovanni Boccaccio (1313-1375) was the son of an employee of the Bardi bank of Florence (the bank was soon to be brought down by the refusal of proud Edward III of England to honor his debts), and was raised up to be a banker. In his collection of tales, The Decameron (composed 1349-1351), Boccaccio treats merchants respectfully — at any rate by the standard of his Florentine countryman Dante fifty years before, in The Divine Comedy, who finds them on his voyage to Hell down at the Nth level. Yet Boaccaccio’s story about Saladin disguised as a traveling merchant of Cyprus (in order to discover and outwit the European preparations for the Third Crusade) depends on the irony of noblemen unable to conceal their nobility — though allegedly mere mercanti. The Italian host, Torello, a “gentleman” (gentile uomo) or “knight” (cavaliere), a member of the Lombard gentry and not of the aristocracy (“he was a private citizen and not a lord”: era cittadino e non signore) exclaims of the three noble Saracens, before he had quite penetrated their merchantly disguise, “May it please God for our part of the world to produce gentlemen [gentili uomini] of the same quality I now find in Cypriot merchants!”69 Nobility shines through. Torello “thought they were men of eminence [magnifichi uomini], of much higher rank than he had imagined at first.” He gives them silk- and fur-lined robes, and the Saracens, “seeing the nobility [nobilità] of the robes, non-merchant-like [non mercatantesche],” fear he has sniffed them out. Though Torello does not entirely realize the great eminence of his guests (in European literature after the Crusades, Saladin is treated routinely as the most noble of opponents), he exclaims on parting — one last insult for the borghese compared with magnifichi uomini — “whoever you are, you can’t make me believe for the present that you are merchants!”70
The result in most of Europe contrasts strikingly with the zest for both trading and warfare one finds in the elite of the pagan, Germanic north, and which continued to characterize, McCormick notes, the later saga literature of the Christian thirteenth century.71 Vikings were traders. The words in Irish for “market,” “penny,” and “shilling” all come from the Norse traders and enslavers. The facts make one of the contrasts between the cultures of the Mediterranean and of the German Ocean look very strange.72 Germanic law codes of early times encourage cash compensation for dishonor. (At least for free men. The laws we have are only about them, using the words “free” and “man” precisely, and therefore were about aristocrats and other high-status men relative to a dishonorable if large majority class of slaves and women.) An eye for an eye is always possible and honorable in the German laws. But so is thus-and-such quantity of silver for the eye, which payment abruptly ends the blood feud. Tacitus is a little surprised that minor crimes are punished simply by a fine in cattle or horses (in keeping with his claim that the Germani knew not the use of coined money). The major and capital crimes he instances with stunned amazement are not mere assault (on that eye, for example) but large matters like cowardice or treason. Among the Germans, Tacitus writes, “even homicide can be atoned for by a fixed number of cattle or sheep,” and therefore “feuds do not continue forever unreconciled.”73 Tacitus (probably of Gaulish origin but of course thoroughly Mediterraneanized) is astonished that the Germans let profane cash into matters of sacred honor. The prudent answer to a crime, you see, is to demand wergelt, dissolving endless blood feuds in the solvent of the cash. The hero the Icelander Gunnar in Njáls Saga does so, as did every honorable Icelander in those heroic days, at any rate according to the sagas written three centuries later.
By contrast in the South from Homer to El Cid to The Godfather honor is absolute. What is strange is that the implacable Southerners had long lived by a monetized and commercialized Mediterranean, heirs to a classical civilization based since the early first millennium B.C.E. on seagoing trade. The savages of the Northern forests were making delicate calculations of monetary equivalences in a supposedly less commercial society. The honorable — that is, the aristocratic — part of the civilization of the classical Mediterranean had always been suspicious of getting money, though of course very eager to have and spend it. By contrast the Icelandic sagas (written well after their events, I’ve noted, and admittedly therefore perhaps anachronistic) are about men unashamedly at the margin between commerce and piracy. Arriving at a new coast they had to decide whether to steal what they wanted or to trade for it. Great hoards of Byzantine coins are found in Norse settlements around the Baltic and North and Irish seas, evidence that the piratical and commercial ventures of the Vikings were not narrow in scope.74 But all this merely enlarges the paradox, that the apparently advanced part of the Western world had from the beginning to the present a more primitive code of honor — or at any rate a less bourgeois one.
The pagan Viking attitude towards merchants did not win out. Mediterranean values did. In late fourteenth-century England, for example, Chaucer favorably characterizes the three most admired classes, “A KNIGHT there was, and that a worthy man. . . . A poor PARSON of a town/ But rich he was of holy thought and work. . . . With him there was a PLOUGHMAN who was his brother/ . . . Living in peace and perfect charity.”75 He characterizes the two-dozen other pilgrims mentioned in “The General Prologue” (1387) of The Canterbury Tales in notably less flattering terms. True, the owner of the Tabard, Our Host is described throughout in genial terms (“a fairer burgher is there none at Cheapside”). The five urban craftsmen mentioned together as dressed in fraternal livery (haberdasher, carpenter, weaver, dyer, and tapestry maker) are described as “fair burghers,” worthy to “sit in a guildhall on a dais,” or to be aldermen, for property they had enough and rent, but are not further characterized in the extant Tales — except that the Miller’s Tale makes merry of a carpenter.76 The Sergeant of the Law was “cautious and prudent,” of “high renown.”77 But four of the five solidly middle-class figures of the Merchant, the Reeve, the Miller, and the Doctor of Physik are described in the “General Prologue,” unsurprisingly in medieval literature, as sharp dealers, the Merchant “proclaiming always the increase of his winning”; or “full rich [the Reeve] had a-storèd privily,” cheating his master; or “well could [the Miller] steal corn, and charge its toll thrice”; or the Doctor “kept the gold he won in pestilence/ For gold in physik is a cordiàl [that is, in medicine is a cure]./ Therefore he lovèd gold in speciàl.” Yet with the exception of the three honored classes and a few hearty, harmless, or holy others, all degrees are greedy in Chaucer. A non-bourgeois religious figure, the avaricious seller of papal pardons, is also characterized as eager “to win silver as he full well could.” And the begging Friar deals only with rich people, and gladly hears confessions of men hard of heart who cannot truly feel sorrow for their sins, and “therefore instead of weeping and prayers/ Men must give silver to the poor friars.”78 And so forth. Throughout the Tales one class accuses another of greed and hypocrisy, supplemented by lust. That, after all, is the running joke.
Right down to the Reformation, and in anti-clericalism down to the present, the merchant has replied to the charge of worldly corruption that the priest, too, in his splendid robes and rich life indulges in the world’s pleasures as he should not. Chaucer’s Monk, who loved hunting, regards the rule of St. Benedict as “old and somewhat strict”: “he was a lord full fat and in good point.”79 The Merchant character in NNNN Lindsay’s Satire of 1542-1544 does not defend his own social usefulness directly, as a couple of centuries later in Scotland he would have most vigorously done, but spends most of his stage time complaining about the clerical characters and their multiple benefices (that is, holding many parishes simultaneously without preaching at any of them) and simony (that is, selling time off in Purgatory for money).80
One must not get carried away with literary examples like this. As a leading student of early Italian capitalism points out, Chaucer or Boccaccio or other imaginative “portrayals” of merchants are “organized by a complex system of stereotypes and rhetorical images often resulting from ancient cultural models.”81 For example, Merchant’s obsession in Lindsay’s Satire with the sins of the clergy is a standard turn in medieval literature, one estate complaining about the other instead of answering the (presumably true) charges just mentioned against itself. These are literary works, with, as the professors of literature after Julia Kristeva say, an “intertextual” relation to Horace or Virgil complaining about the pursuit of riches (while sitting pretty, it should be noted of both, on riches earned by their poetry and their politics). Literary and other texts are not somehow “objective” reports from the cultural frontier.
A century later the Flemish-English play Everyman turns on a repeated metaphor of life’s account book, from which one might mistakenly infer that commerce and the middle class were uncritically admired. Everyman says to Death, “all unready is my book of reckoning”, and later when he believes that Kindred will save him, “I must give a reckoning strait.”82 His deeds on the credit side do not suffice, as the character named Good Deeds himself says: “If ye had perfectly cheered me,/ Your book of count full ready had be.” As Everyman goes to his grave he says, “I must be gone/ To make my reckoning and my debts pay.” But the inference to an admiration of trade is of course mistaken. The metaphor of life’s balance sheet before God is routine in all religions, whether well disposed towards bourgeois profit or not. Christianity in particular, though hostile from the beginning to commerce, is based on a metaphor of redemption of debt through Christ’s sacrifice (the Greek word for redemption [apo]lutrosis used in the New Testament was a commercial one). At the end of the play Everyman appeals to Jesus: “As thou me boughtest, so me defend.” And the third of his earthly companions to betray him, after Fellowship and Kindred, is a much-beloved character, Goods. Everyman laments “Alas, I have thee loved, and had great pleasure/ All my life-days on goods and treasure.” To which Goods replies, as in olden times did the prophet Joel and the messiah (we Christians claim) Jesus, and anti-consumerist clerisy still do, “That is to thy damnation, without leasing/ For my love is contrary to the love everlasting.” “My condition is man’s soul to kill.” And this too is, anciently, routine literary stuff.
And yet. Elsa Strietman, in discussing the Dutch version of Everyman, sees in this pre-Reformation text a focus “on the individual’s responsibility to live a just life,” and quotes the theologian Alisdair McGrath [*** the theologian Alisdair?? Reformation Thought 1988] on its similarity to Luther’s doctrine of the priesthood of all believers.83 The Dutch version was a product of the “chambers of rhetoric” in the little cities of the Low Counties 1450-1550, described by another writer in the same volume as Streitman’s essay as being institutions where “the self-confidence of the wealthy citizens manifested itself” against the prestige of courtly literature at Brussels or the Hague. “At a social level the rederijkers [the rhetoricians] formed a [haut bourgeois] liberation movement.”84 “The material side of life,” Streitman remarks, “is not condemned or belittled as unworthy per se, which would fit in well if the intended audience of the play were not a world-forsaking monastic audience, but [as was the case] an urban community actively engaged in trading and banking. . . . The complaint against Elckerlijc [the Dutch name for Everyman] is that he has amassed possessions and loved them extravagantly. . . . It is . . . the immoderate use of God’s creation which invokes the Creator’s terrible wrath.”
A rich man may enter the kingdom of heaven, if he is temperate in his pursuit and use of wealth. The economist and intellectual historian Jacob Viner asserted in 1939 that “the Renaissance, especially in its Italian manifestations, brought new attitudes with respect to the dignity of the merchant, his usefulness to society, and the general legitimacy of the moderate pursuit of wealth through commerce, provided the merchant who thus attained riches used it with taste, with liberality, and with concern for the welfare and the magnificence of his city.”85 The attitude in bourgeois towns has not in truth changed much since the Renaissance. Nowadays, at least outside of the corrupting theories of the economists, it is still judged blameworthy in a merchant to pursue wealth immoderately, extravagantly, tastelessly, illiberally, and without concern for the welfare and magnificence of the city.
But Viner was mistaken in not seeing the medieval precedents for an ethical bourgeoisie — though he was correct that the precedents did not become large enough to be the thing itself, a large-scale bourgeois civilization mainly free from aristocratic or clerical interference. Viner’s history was off by a couple of hundred years, so far as some high theory and a lot of low practice was concerned. The Renaissance was still seen by scholars at the time he wrote as utterly novel, a sharp beginning for the modern world. Viner wrote at the height of the scholarly conviction that a chasm divides we moderns from those Dark Ages of medieval times. Since then historians such as Quentin Skinner and Jacques Le Goff and Lynn White and Ambrose Raftis have looked back into the scholastic and medieval sources, finding even a natural right of revolution in the writings of Dominicans and a justification for market work in the writings of Franciscans and widespread technical innovation in a Europe allegedly uninterested in this-worldly success. Yet the words mattered. That merchants were not honored, and that the taking of interest was officially banned, put hooks and chairs in the way of innovation. As Timur Kuran puts it in discussing the parallel “ban” on paying interest among Moslems, “by blocking honest public discussion of commercial, financial, and monetary matters, it hindered the development of the capitalist mentality.”86 There’s the problem, to such the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in Northwestern Europe provided the solution.
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[back] It is often remarked, correctly, and I have done so, that Marx himself does not use Kapitalismus in Das Kapital. But he does use kapitalische(n) freely, so let's not quibble.
[back] You may find more such impressive learning about the word "bourgeois" in The Bourgeois Virtues, pp. 68-69. "Bourgeois," by the way, is the adjective, pronounced "bour-zwaw." People sometimes get confused about this, and use the noun, meaning "the middle class," la bourgeoisie, pronounced "bour-zwah-zee," as an adjective. We're dealing here, as Hudie Ledbetter memorably put it, with "bourgeois towns," not *"bourgeoisie towns."
[back] Gramsci in Forgacs, ed., p. 301.
[back] Pocock 1981, pp. 356, 361, 364. ***Note the book by a woman historian saying their courts survived the Revol.
[back] See Grafe DATES
[back] Braudel, III, pp. 620-621.
[back] On Athens, see NNN on banking
[back] Cite: Mod Lib, pp. 170-171;
[back] Karl Marx - Friedrich Engels - Werke, Band 23, S. 11-802, Dietz Verlag, Berlin/DDR 1962, p. 168, online at http://www.mlwerke.de/me/me23/me23_161.htm#Kap_4_1.
[back] Megill 2002, p. 262.
[back] Coetzee 1999, p. 117.
[back] Hourani 1991 2005, pp. 72-73
[back] Braudel, Wheels 1979, p. late in volume: find.
[back] Simmel 1907 (1990), p. 245.
[back] Le Roy Ladurie 1978 (1980), p. 332.
[back] Le Roy Ladurie 1978 (1980), p. 336.
[back] ***McCormick 2001, get page.
[back] Boccaccio 1349-1351, Tenth Day, Tale 9, p. 213; "he was a private citizen . . . ," p. 217.
[back] Boccaccio 1349-51, p. 219.
[back] McCormick, 2001, p. 13.
[back] I thank my colleague in Hispanic Studies at the University of California at Riverside, James Parr, for conversations on this point.
[back] 21, p. 119, 12, p. 111.
[back] ***Cite Sawyer
[back] Chaucer 1387, Prologue, beginning lines 43, 478, 529.
[back] ll. 361-373.
[back] "General Prologue," ll. 309-316.
[back] "General Prologue," ll. 231-232; 245-248.
[back] "General Prologue," ll. 173-174; 200.
[back] Lindsay (1542-1544), lines 2892-2893, 2852-2863, 2941-2949, 3047-3061, and 3753-3756, as against merely 2810-2849 recommending a predictable tax system, and 2542-2549 of puzzling blather.
[back] Todeschini 2008, p. 6. ***Correct all citations to the MS version here and below to correspond with the published book.
[back] Everyman c. 1480, lines 134, 333; subsequent quotations are lines 501-502, 232, 882, 428-430, 442.
[back] Strietman 1996, p. 107.
[back] Dijk 1996, p. 113.
[back] Viner 1939, p. 43.
[back] Kuran 2003, p. 310.
“Nowadays, at least outside of the corrupting theories of the economists, it is still judged blameworthy in a merchant to pursue wealth immoderately, extravagantly, tastelessly, illiberally, and without concern for the welfare and magnificence of the city.”
– does that still hold in today’s corporate world?
Written by onno on February 2nd, 2010.Dear “Onno”:
Yes, it is still true in the corporate world. We tend to take an amused, or angry, view of the Organization Person. See the cartoon strip “Dilbert.” Or the movie “Wall Street.” But real corporate life—though not an ethical paradise—is not like such quips from the clerisy. One problem is that the “corrupting theories of the economists” are especially prevalent in MBA-staffed businesses, which tend to be corporate rather than partnerships or sole proprietorships.
Regards,
Deirdre
Written by Deirdre McCloskey on February 27th, 2010.