Chapter 4 of The Bourgeois Revaluation:
There Were Precursors of a Self-Respecting Bourgeoisie

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.

In other words, the attitude of medieval Europe and its church towards the bourgeoisie was nothing like entirely hostile, especially in northern Italy and in some of the ports of Iberia, even if it did not result in the business-dominated civilization of the southern Low Countries after 1400, and Holland after 1568, and England after 1689. Barcelona for example was from medieval times an exception to the anti-bourgeois character of the rest of Spain, as in some ways it still is, and as in the nineteenth century Basque Bilbao became. And in Portugal the merchants were respected in the fourteenth- and fifteenth-century. The Portuguese had reconquered their territories from the Moslems with much less effort, and much earlier, than the Spaniards had, and one could argue therefore that they were less militarized. Albert Hirschman quotes, and applies to the anti-bourgeois Castillians, who had achieved their Reconquista with much more trouble than the Portuguese, the backward-looking opinion of the Marquis de Vauvenargues (1715-1747) that “a man of quality, by fighting, acquires wealth more honorably and quickly than a meaner man by work.”⁸⁷ It was an antique sentiment of the nobility: according to Tacitus the ancient German warrior thought it “tame and spiritless to accumulate slowly by the sweat of his brow what can be gotten quickly by the loss of a little blood.”⁸⁸ By contrast the Portuguese merchant and the “knight merchant” (cavaleiro-mercador) encouraged by Henry the Navigator and others in its vigorous line of kings gave little Portugal the first European empire of trade. Though they were very willing to lose a little blood in getting it, quickly.

In Christian theory from the twelfth century certain high theorists admitted trading and profit as ethical goals. Thomas Aquinas and Duns Scotus, among others, such as Sinibaldus de Fieschi (later Pope Innocent IV, who perhaps earned a law degree at Bologna), worked out in the high Middle Ages an ethical life for merchants. We moderns are inclined on the contrary to imagine with Hume and Voltaire and anti-Papist Protestants nowadays that the Middle Ages were dark in their elevation of “monkish virtues” over the trade that Hume and Voltaire found so very civilizing. The monks in fact emphasized the dignity of work (“to work is to pray,” said Benedict) in a proto-bourgeois fashion that sat poorly with the aristocratic values of the Roman Empire. But the anti-market theme in radical monkishness, seen in the desert fathers from the third to fifth century, culminating in St. Augustine’s (qualified) disdain for the City of Man, and echoing down the centuries to follow, did not fit so well in a Europe reviving commercially from the late eighth century on. The second Avignon pope, John XXII (reigned 1316-1334 , and who had studied law, in Paris), was highly suspicious of the poverty-glorifying friars. One of them, the German mystic Meister Eckhart, was condemned for claiming (according to John XXII’s bull In the Lord’s field, 1329, item 8) that “God is honored in those who do not pursue anything, neither honor nor advantage, neither inner revelation nor saintliness, nor reward, nor the Kingdom of Heaven itself, but who distance themselves from all these things, as well as from all that is theirs.”⁸⁹ John burned a number of such anti-thing-pursuing communists and declared heretical the belief that Christ and the Apostles did not have possessions. In 1329 he argued that man’s possession of property was parallel to God’s possession of the universe, an instance, you see, of man being made in the image of God. Altogether, with many of the popes, John XXII was satisfied with private property, if it was used for Christian or at any rate Church purposes.⁹⁰

Nor was disdain for work in God’s world consistent, as Giacamo Todeschini has recently observed in an important essay, with the task that popes and abbots faced, “the pragmatic need to manage the system of Church properties.”⁹¹ The economic theorizing of the Church, however, was not solely a self-interested trick — though a church taxed by, say, Philip the Fair of France did need some interested arguments if it was to survive in law courts and in courtly opinion. The medieval doctors of the church devised a justification for trade — and this against their heritage from old Aristotle the teacher of aristocrats or, as I say, their more spiritual heritage from work-and-world-disdaining Augustine — that emphasized the work involved in trade. (If you think buying low and selling high is not work, you need to read the anxious correspondence of the Tuscan merchant Francesco Datini [1335-1410]).⁹²

Thus, what everyone thinks she knows about the medieval economy, that interest was forbidden, was made false in practice. Work allowed the charging of interest, even if in veiled forms, such as by foreign exchange transactions and false sales. Said the theologians: as God had worked to make the universe, so the Italian merchants worked to earn their just rewards. Both rested on the seventh day. Admiration of work is the central characteristic of a modern bourgeoisie. Here it fits easily with Abrahamic theology, which after all from its beginnings in Abram’s property deal with the Lord has admired a hard-working engagement with God’s creation. And a little dealing on the side.

Todeschini argues that to understand the cultural identity of late medieval businessmen it won’t do to adopt “a forced and timeless separation of the lay and religious rationalities or of the opposition between economics and moral codes.”⁹³ I would only add to his formulation that to understand the cultural identity of modern businesspeople it won’t do to adopt a forced and timeless separation of the lay and religious rationalities or of the opposition between economics and moral codes.

The medieval Italian manufacturers and merchants that Todeschini describes were not merely Easter-duty Christians. They worked at their faith as they worked at their trading. (But I repeat: they do so now, too, unless some professor or novelist has persuaded them that economic activity is inconsistent with moral codes.) “The conceptual grammar utilized in medieval economic treatises. . . were strictly connected with the theological language of election, salvation, and spiritual profit.”⁹⁴ In thirteenth and fourteenth century Italy the “body” of merchants (il corpo de la compagni; condordia ***spelling “Concordia”?? ) is imagined as “the mystic Body of the city as the double of Christ’s Body.”⁹⁵

Really, it was. In a secular age we sophisticated and agnostic and even anti-clerical intellectuals can’t quite believe such talk, and suppose with a smirk that we are witnessing hypocrisy. “Aha, Senior Datini: caught again use this figure only once in the book pretending to be motivated by love of God!” But read the ample writings and confidential notebooks of Italian merchants of the time, Todeschini argues, and you have to abandon the materialist hypothesis. The Fourth Lateran Council of 1215 figures with his Italian businessmen as much or more than the merely present bottom line, as the Council of Trent in 1562-63 figured in their descendents, as later did Pope Leo NNN’s “NNNN” of DDDD and Vatican II. In the thirteenth century even in bourgeois Italy “the notion of ‘good reputation’ (fama) . . . is deeply related to the theological and juridical discourse about the importance of Christians to carefully protect the purity of their civic and religious ‘name’” (p. 8). As Fr. Augustine Thompson argues in an important recent book on “the lost holiness of the Italian republics,” the communes of northern and central Italy in their democratic heydays 1125-1328 “were simultaneously religious and political entities. . . . Even the most evocative appreciations of communal political theory obscure its Christian character. Ecclesiastical and civic institutions formed a single communal organism.” He instances the construction of baptisteries ***sp? , such as the Florentine one with Lorenzo Ghiberti’s Gates of Paradise, used for the characteristic rite of popular religion in the Italian cities then, “the civic rite of the Easter vigil, with its mass baptism of infants, a ritual innovation distinctive of the communes. Baptism made the children citizens of both the commune and of heaven. At Easter the commune renewed itself and reaffirmed its identity as a sacred society. These rites came to be so closely associated with republican identity that they were among the first things to go as princes established seigniorial rule in the early 1300s,” and at last even in Genoa and Florence, the eldest children of liberty.⁹⁶

Todeschini agrees: the commune was a “sacred society,” even among its merchants. “It would be easy,” Todeschini writes, “to underestimate this attention . . . to the reputation of the merchant and define it as the obvious result of an increasing market society, duly concerned about the economic trustworthiness of its members: but it would be an error, . . . a . . . very reductive point of view.⁹⁷ Licentiousness or commercial unreliability was a sin against the Body of Christ. The proverb on men’s lips was “Gain at the cost of a bad reputation ought rather to be called a loss.”⁹⁸ Says Death to Everyman, “He that loveth riches I will strike with my dart,/ His sight to blind, and from heaven to depart — / Except that alms be his good friend — / In hell for to dwell, world without end.”⁹⁹ Again, “hell” was no figure of speech among these men. They trembled in lively terror of it. The merchants of Siena and Prato and Milan “had the duty to be rich and at the same time honorable men” (p. 15). It is rather like the merchants of New York and Tokyo and Mumbai today. Donato Ferrario founded a divinity school in fifteenth-century Milan, the way the property billionaires the Pritzkers of Chicago have financed hospitals and libraries and architectural prizes, and it would be “improper and anachronistic” to decode “this choice as [a] simple and clever social expedient” for Denato Ferrario — or James N. Pritzker.¹⁰⁰ The gospel of wealth of a medieval merchant was based on the literal gospels, and on the interpretation of the gospels by doctors of the church. The problem in modern life is the undermining of a gospel of wealth, an undermining powered by a forced and timeless separation of the lay and religious rationalities.

And greed in northern Italy was constrained by secular virtues, too, dating in their theorizing back to classical times and to aristocracy-admiring Aristotle. The manuals for Italian businessmen in the fifteenth century appropriated the qualities that civic humanism assigned to the leaders of the polis.¹⁰¹ Benedetto Cotrugli advises the captain of a merchant ship to be sober, vigorous, temperate, eloquent, and well-renowned (de extimatione predito). The Northern Italian bourgeoisie of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries exercised the virtue of profit-seeking prudence, to be sure, but it balanced prudence with holy faith and love, and pagan courage and justice, too.

Admittedly, Todeschini himself explicitly asserts that “the caution and vigilance concerning moral, civic, . . . [and] economic behaviors” in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries “cannot be reduced to an early manifestation of [a] ‘bourgeois’ spirit.”¹⁰² In his complaint about coding honorable and charitable behavior of the Florentines as “anachronistic” he implies that such decoding is all right for nowadays. Todeschini appears to mean by “bourgeois” the modern notion after Rousseau and Marx and Sartre of single-minded pursuit of the largest possible bottom line, the restless stirring for gain, the absolute desire for enrichment, the passionate hunt for value. And he appears to think that it is characteristic of the modern world. He too is trapped in the modern prejudice against the very world “bourgeois,” and in its recent use as a term of contempt.

I would reply that early and late, nowadays as in the fourteenth century, the member of la borghesia believes that “the social Corpus only . . . can sanctify his economic activities and identify him as a trustworthy merchant” (Todeschini, p. 13). Businesspeople want to be good, no less than politicians or priests or professors do, and indeed the businesspeople have the moral luck to be in situations daily where good and bad are obvious, and the results clear. They often fail, as fallen humans do. Yet so do the politicians, priests, and professors. But anyway, contrary to the notion that medieval people were very different from you and me, the medieval church allowed the merchants to do their good work — but held them to a high standard, with the tortures of the Inferno awaiting those who failed their duty.

Leon Battista Alberti (1404-1472) is best known for his pioneering of art criticism, but he wrote also a dialogue about the family, in which the character “Giannozzo” declares that “it is, perhaps, a kind of slavery to be forced to plead and beg with other men in order to satisfy our necessity [instead of working and trading to do so]. That is why we do not scorn riches.” In quoting the passage, Richard Pipes notes that “this positive view of property and wealth came to dominate Western thought in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.”¹⁰³ True, and it is the theme here. But such views did not flower even in commercial Florence into a fully bourgeois civilization. Perhaps it is because they took root in an anti-bourgeois Italy dominated by princes of the land and princes of the church.

At the other end of the five centuries of the momentous turn from an anti-business to a pro-business civilization, Dante to Adam Smith, stands a pious dyer of wool cloth in Leeds, Joseph Ryder. The historian Matthew Kadane has recently described Ryder’s diary, kept from 1733 to 1768 in forty-odd volumes, amounting to 2,000,000 words (this book contains a mere 170,000 ***adjust to final count). Dissenters were known for such spiritual exercises, a genre out of which Robinson Crusoe grew. His diary is probably not an exception, though in the nature of the case we do not have a random sample of a hundred such works to scrutinize — merely the long tradition of Puritan scrupulosity and its literary effusions from men and women accustomed to keeping accounts.

The job was, as Kadane puts it, “to watch oneself for the smallest sign of deviation from the godly course.”¹⁰⁴ Ryder watched himself with the intensity of a Woody-Allen character under psychoanalysis, and for the same reason: his modern life in trade, he believed, might corrupt his soul. He wrote — Ryder could have been a writer of hymns, it seems: “The dangers numerous are which every saint surround/ Each worldly pleasure has its snare if riches do abound.”¹⁰⁵ It is an ancient theme, that one cannot serve God and mammon (“mammon” is Aramaic for “wealth”). The sin of pride in possessions or in success leads away from God, as does pride in anything here below (said Augustine). As Ryder put the matter in another of his hymn lines: “If I’m concerned too much with things below/ It makes my progress heavenward but slow.”¹⁰⁶ “By daily striving for worldly achievements undertaken to honor God,” Kadane writes, “Ryder risked transforming his successes into excesses and his achievements into vanity.” The last temptation is such spiritual pride: I am proud that I am not proud, and Satan swoops in at the last moment to claim my soul.

Kadane finds no evidence for the materialist claim that appropriate consumption was merely a demonstration of creditworthiness, the outward and visible sign of inward and economic grace. His man Ryder does not resemble the credit-obsessed man that Craig Muldrew, Alexandra Shepard, and Liz Bellamy (following Marx in this) find in England then and earlier, keeping up appearances to keep up his credit score.¹⁰⁷ In Ryder’s diary any “social implications of failure to meet credit obligations were subordinate to his worry about God’s perception of him” (p. 12). Kadane concludes, “What is the first instance gave shape to Ryder’s economic outlook, self-image, and the image he projected to others was a spiritual struggle he wages daily in the privacy of his journal to stay poised between damning extremes,” that is, the extreme of denying the use of God’s gifts in the world and the other extreme of worldly pride.¹⁰⁸ Kadane argues that Adam Smith’s amiable view of vanity tried to free exactly such people from their own worries. I’m all right, you’re all right, capitalism’s all right. But only someone who like Smith was free of serious engagement with his spiritual life could take such a relaxed and pop-psychological view. Right down to the present many businesspeople have insisted that God’s work comes first.¹⁰⁹ They are not always lying.

In modern times a strictly materialist hypothesis, the “hermeneutics of suspicion” à la Marx or Freud or Samuelson that dominates modern social science, strips away any ethics except prudence only. “Oh, Mr. Moneybags: You think I don’t see through your phony sermonizing to your nefarious plot to accumulate, accumulate!” But such a stripping of ethics originates from the rhetorical habits of our social sciences, not from the facts. The economists Peter Boettke and Virgil Storr, again, complain that “economists discuss actors as if they have no families, are citizens of no countries, are members of no communities.” In the language of sociology, “individuals, in the hands of economists, are typically undersocialized, isolated creatures.”¹¹⁰ By erroneously depicting businesspeople only as creatures of the restless stirring for gain we paradoxically take away the ethical limits on their greed. Go for it; greed is good, because after all you are merely a disgusting capitalist. A proud disgusting capitalist. The modern clerisy, left and right, scornful of the virtue of prudence, and attributing the corresponding sin of greed to anyone who watches his costs and considers his benefits, has thus returned to the anti-economic ethic of the desert fathers.

87. [back] Hirschman 1977, p. 58.
88. [back] Tacitus, Germania, 98 AD, 14, p. 114.
89. [back] In agro dominico, translated from Meister Eckehart Deutsche Predigten und Traktate, Diogenes Verlag AG Zürich, 1979, p. 449 ff. At geocities.com/hugovanwoerkom/bullxxii_0.html.
90. [back] The modern papacy's attitude towards capitalism is discussed a little in McCloskey 2006, pp. NNN.
91. [back] Todeschini 2008, p. 2.
92. [back] Origo 1986, ***give some pages for his anxiety.
93. [back] Todeschini 2008, p. 1.
94. [back] Todeschini 2008, p. 2.
95. [back] Todeschini 2008, p. 6.
96. [back] ***Thompson DATE, "Introduction" at http://www.psupress.psu.edu/Justataste/samplechapters/justatasteThompson.html
97. [back] Todeschini 2008, p. 8.
98. [back] Todeschini 2008, p. 9.
99. [back] Everyman c. 1480, ll. 76-79.
100. [back] Todeschini 2008, p. 14.
101. [back] Todeschini 2008, p. 16.
102. [back] Todeschini 2008, p. 11.
103. [back] Pipes 1999, p. 27.
104. [back] Kadane 2008, p. 7. Adjust to book pages.
105. [back] Kadane 2008, p. 7.
106. [back] Kadane 2008, p. 10; well, not so gifted a hymn writer
107. [back] ***Cite Muldrew at al. Cite Marx as in Dignity.
108. [back] Kadane 2008, p. 14.
109. [back] ***Faithful Finances guy

2 responses to “Chapter 4 of The Bourgeois Revaluation:
There Were Precursors of a Self-Respecting Bourgeoisie”

1. After reading the previous three chapters, I have to say this one is somewhat disappointing. In part, I think, this is because it argues the rather pedestrian point that “medieaval Europe” was “nothing like entirely hostile” towards the bourgeoisie. maybe my English fails me, but “nothing like entirely” does not sound like a very strong statement to me. Perhaps one could argue that Alabama whites in 1950 were “nothing like entirely” racist or that winters in Chicago are “nothing like entirely” cold. But they are and were enough so to exert an overwhelming influence on the lives of Alabama blacks in 1950, and Chicagians (or whatever you lot may be called) in 2010.

   Even the low bar thus set, to my mind, is not quite reached. When talking about medieval European attitudes, a series of examples from 14th century Italy are not convincing evidence. The Middle Ages lasted a lot longer than that, and Europe is quite a lot bigger. (Whether you need or want to deal with medieval attitudes is a different matter, of course, but your first sentence sure suggests that you do. And if you are going to describe the wonders of renaissance Europe further on, I fear that you’ll have to.)

   I would agree that devotion to work is antithetical to classical aristocratic values, but to call it proto-bourgeois seems far fetched. All the more so because monks were not working for private gain, or held any property at all, which to my mind makes them distinctly unbourgeois. Indeed, if work ethic is all it takes, North Korea is pretty bourgeois too.

   Of course work, at the very, very end of the middle ages is used to justify merchants’ existence, but methinks the crucial changes in attitude are those towards towards merchants, but towards interest, banking, private property, non-landowning rich people, and the like. These issues are pretty thin on the ground in this chapter, as are references to relevant literature. (I am sure mr Todeschini will be flattered, though.) To be honest, I get the feeling you are not very comfortable writing about medieval culture and thought.

   If this is the case (and the ample space devoted to an 18th century (!) author at the end further suggests it is), I think it would be wise to refrain from sweeping statements like:

   “The gospel of wealth of a medieval merchant was based on the literal gospels, and on the interpretation of the gospels by doctors of the church. The problem in modern life is the undermining of a gospel of wealth, an undermining powered by a forced and timeless separation of the lay and religious rationalities.”

   This is rather a wild conclusion to arrive at after a cursory discussion of some 14th century Italian merchants, isn’t it? And if you desire, as I suspect, in the second sentence, to irritate pesky atheists such as myself in a grand style, shouldn’t the word “lay” be replaced by “secular”? Or are you actually suggesting that we need more clergy (as in “the religious”?). You are an episcopalian, so maybe yes, but I am not sure.

   So there. You give your work away for free, and before you know it Dutch people come complaining that it is no good. Stank voor dank! Nevertheless, as always, looking forward to the next chapter.

   regards,

   Ralf

   Written by Ralf on February 1st, 2010.

2. Beste Ralf,

   Bedankt voor je skepticism. I’m pretty comfortable discussing medieval times, having done scientific work on it myself long ago, but I agree with you that I’ve not conclusively demonstrated my case. . . yet. A scientific argument hangs together, though. See what you think as the evidence and argument piles up. You may be missing in your last comments the quotation I am making of “forced and timeless . . . .” They’re not my words but his. I agree with you that I need more evidence, and need to sharpen my hypotheses. Again, thanks.

   It’s beside the scientific point, and I do not want to provoke you, since you seem a sensible and thoughtful person, but perhaps I can venture the remark that I don’t regard most atheists as “pesky” (though I know they like to think of themselves this way, as courageous opponents of dominant opinion. . . in Nederland?!). I regard them as ill-informed. I’ve seldom encountered an atheist who knew much about religion—for example,Daniel Dennett, whom I know slightly, doesn’t know of what he speaks, and neither do Christopher Hitchens or Richard Dawkins. You will not find any works of theology in their bibliographies. They content themselves with attacking folks like the Black People in the Netherlands, or the most simpleminded of American fundamentalists. Let me put it in a provocative form: if you haven’t read books like David Bentley Hart, Atheist Delusions, you don’t have the standing to have opinions about religion, and certainly not a position as confident as “atheist”!

   Groetjes,

   Deirdre

   Written by Deirdre McCloskey on February 27th, 2010.

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