Chapter 11 of The Bourgeois Revaluation:
But in the Late Seventeenth Century the English Changed
What changed 1600-1848, and dramatically, was the high- and low-cultural attitude towards thrift, capitalism, innovation, and the bourgeoisie. Weber is here correct, though not in thinking that the Puritans had much to do with it. Thriftiness and other specifically economic virtues, such as prudent calculation of costs and benefits or an admiring attitude towards industrial novelties or an acceptance of ethically acquired profits, came first in Holland and then in England, and even a bit earlier in England’s remote American colonies and in England’s impoverished neighbor, Scotland, to be fully respectable, honorable, admired, permitted, encouraged — not obstructed and disdained. It was not the induced thriftiness that mattered, but the admiration for a bourgeois life of creating economic value. And on that point Weber was mistaken: it was the rhetoric, not the behavior of accumulate, accumulate, that enriched the modern world. As the sociologists Victor Nee and Richard Swedberg wisely put it, “The enduring legacy of Weber’s scholarship is perhaps not so much the Protestant-ethic thesis, but the view that the mechanisms motivating and facilitating today’s [and the seventeenth-century's] capitalism are rooted not in the materialist domain of incremental capital accumulation, but in the realm of ideas and institutional structures.”255 The change of ideas had stupendous economic consequences. A change in the superstructure determined a change in the base.
Contrary to Weber, Reinhold Niebuhr wrote in 1952, “Prosperity was not, according to the Puritan creed, a primary proof or fruit of virtue. ‘When men do not see and own God,’ declared Urian Oakes (1631), ‘but attribute success to the sufficiency of instruments it is time for God to maintain his own right and to show that He gives and denies success according to His own good pleasure’.”256 But Niebuhr sees “the descent from Puritanism to Yankee in America . . . [as] a fairly rapid one. Prosperity which had been sought in the service of God was now sought for its own sake. The Yankees were very appreciative of the promise in Deuteronomy: ‘And thou shalt do that which is right and good in the sight of the Lord: that it may be well with thee, and that thou mayest go in and possess the good land which the lord swear unto thy fathers’” (6: 18). (Chap 3, sec. 1) “According to the Jeffersonians,” Niebuhr continues, “prosperity and well-being should be sought as the basis of virtue. They believed that if each citizen found contentment in a justly and richly rewarded toil he would not be disposed to take advantage of his neighbor. The Puritans regarded virtue as the basis of prosperity, rather than prosperity as the basis of virtue. But in any case the fusion of these two forces created a preoccupation with the material circumstances of life which expressed a more consistent bourgeois ethos than that of even the most advanced nations of Europe.” Niebuhr 1952, Chap. 3, Sec. 1)
Away from northwestern Europe and its offshoots by c. 1848 the economic virtues were still not respectable, at any rate in the opinion of the dominant classes. Right up to the Meiji Restoration of 1867, after which the rhetoric in Japan changed with lightning speed, leading opinion scorned the merchant. In Confucian cultures more widely the merchant was ranked often as the lowest of the classes: in Japan, the daimyo, the samurai, the peasant, the craftsman, the merchant, the night-soil man, Koreans. A merchant in Japan and China and Korea was not a “gentleman,” to use the European word, and had no honor.
But likewise, we have seen, c. 1600 in England.
Georg Simmel claimed mistakenly in The Philosophy of Money (1900, 1907) to detect a “psychological feature of our times which stands in such a decisive contrast to the more impulsive, emotionally determined character of earlier epochs . . . . Gauging values in terms of money has taught us to determine and specify values down to the last farthing.”257 In a word, thriftiness reigns now, as against the warm non-calculativeness of earlier folk. This is false as actual behavior, and is a piece with Weber’s claim around the same time that a rise of rationality characterizes the modern world.
The Great War was soon to make such optimistic Euro-centrism look strange indeed. Some “rationality.” Ernest Renan, professor of Hebrew at the Collège de France from 1862, most famous for his claim that Jesus was a good chap if a trifle primitive and oriental, had declared that “we must make a marked distinction between societies like our own, where everything takes place in the full light of reflection, and simple and credulous communities,” such as those that Jesus preached in.258 After the events of the twentieth century in Europe, which exhibited irrationality, impulse, credulousness, and shockingly little of the full light of reflection, one stands amazed that anyone can still believe in the unusual rationality or prudence or thriftiness of behavior in the modern European world.
In fact people always and everywhere have been more or less rational and more or less impulsive, both. They exhibit the seven virtues, and the numerous corresponding vices, all. In medieval Europe one can see in Walter and the Seneschaucy, among by now thousands of other sources, the pervasiveness of a money economy. In 1900 Simmel had little way of knowing how mistaken his notions of the “rise of the money economy” were to prove in actual as against philosophical history. At that time only a few lone geniuses like Frederic William Maitland had it right. It has subsequently been discovered that in olden times everything was for sale for money, as for instance husbands and eternal salvation. Poor and rich people in 1300 thought of money values down to the last farthing.
Where Simmel is correct, however, is again that attitudes and commonplace rhetoric about prudence and temperance did change, 1600-1800. As the Russian historian Richard Pipes put it, “Sometime during the period in European history vaguely labeled ‘early modern,’ there occurred a major break in the attitude toward property.”259 The Low Countries were in their greatest time the point of contrast to older rhetoric of disdain for commerce. Well into the eighteenth century Holland served as a model for the English and Scots of how to be thrifty and bourgeois, and certainly how to talk it.
Joel Mokyr has written that the Enlightenment was obsessed with useful information. That is certainly true. In France and England and their provinces …… Quote Joel to this effect.
But wait. The economist Peter Boettke observes in this connection that prices registered what people thought useful. In a commercial society they do, at any rate for the goods that enter commerce. Demand has therefore a role in the Industrial Revolution by a back door, the one marked “Values Registered Here.” Maxine Berg among others has pointed out the great extension of small luxuries coming from foreign trade, emblematically coffee. Jan de Vries likewise argues that what he wittily calls the “industrious ” revolution arose out of the lust in Holland and England and New England for new goods, such as porcelain and Windsor chairs. Both of these distinguished students of the demand side in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, however, would readily admit that the demand for coffee or chairs does not itself an Industrial Revolution make. The economist points out, as I have earlier at length, that shuffling from one use of the society’s inputs of labor and capital and land to another use does not change the efficiency of the inputs, at least not much.
Being obsessed with useful information is not new in the eighteenth century. What changed was what exactly was deemed useful. In this deeper sense the pattern of demand, the values in the heads of consumers — that is to say, as economists strangely put it, changes in “taste” — was the cause of the Industrial Revolution. When war horses and cathedrals were valued, that is what was useful, and knowledge about them was useful knowledge, and much sought. The knowledge of how to breed big Belgian horses [check type] able to carry an armored knight was useful, and valued in a market. In 1400 a stonemason with skill in carving gargoyles had useful and therefore profitable knowledge. When immortal salvation was valued, people bought it, and fought for it, and smote those with alternative theories of it. A church in possession of a piece of the true cross was a useful place of pilgrimage, and people sought it obsessively. English people continued in the eighteenth century to value eternal salvation. What changed is that preachers like NNNN Bentley and later NNNN Priestley commenced telling them from the pulpit that God intended us to flourish on earth, and to enjoy its fruits. The ascetic strain [get Milton quote if clothing] of Il Penseroso, if it ever had amounted to much in the economy, was bleached out with chlorine.
The rising class in the English sixteenth and seventeenth century was not only the bourgeoisie, but the gentry, viewed as one of two classes of land-rich “gentlemen” — the leading characters in novels by Fielding and Austen standing just below England’s exceptionally tiny aristocracy. Yet a mere hundred years after Shakespeare the English, surprisingly, were very busy transforming themselves away from admirers of the gentry and aristocracy and into admirers of the bourgeoisie. In the 1690s, with a Dutch king, the William of William and Mary, the British proceeded in a rush to adopt Dutch institutions such as excise taxes, a central bank, a national debt, a stock market, a free press. And they undertook to cease being inconstant, rash, vainglorious, light, and deceiving (they retained “suspicious and despising of foreigners”), make sure this is anticipated, or cease talking about it. Evidently something changed during the late seventeenth century in the evaluation of prudent temperance as against courageous hope, and so the evaluation of thrift. Even the gentry and aristocracy, who for centuries had had in fact a sharper eye for profit than their lordly rhetoric would officially allow. They became more and more frankly businesslike about their land holdings, culminating in the figure of Farmer George III.
During the decades up to 1700 the effective rulers of Britain became in theory and practice more and more mercantilist, and then by the end of the eighteenth century even a little bit free trading — anyway more and more after the late seventeenth century concerned with national profit and loss, instead of ensuring this man’s monopoly profit and that woman’s church attendance. Sir William Temple noted in 1672 that before 1648 in the great nations of Europe “their trade was war.” But “since the Peace of Munster, which restored the quiet of Christendom in 1648, not only Sweden and Denmark but France and England have more particularly than ever before busied the thoughts and counsels of their several governments. . . about the matters of trade.”260 The English were first in this Dutchlike subordination of politics to trade. As Montesquieu put it in 1748, “other nations have made the interests of commerce yield to those of politics; the English, on the contrary, have ever made their political interests give way to those of commerce.”261 Well. . . not “ever,” but by 1748 often. The Chinese nowadays say that before 1978 the communist cadres talked only of class war, but after 1978 they talked only of economic success. Northwestern Europe changed around 1700 in the same way, from talking only about God and hierarchy to talking only about the economy and national strength. In both cases the change was made possible by political competition, the xian (townships) of China competing for the latest computer factory or the cities of the Netherlands or England competing for the latest textile factory. What they said in aid of mercantilist strength was often wrong, and contained holdovers from an earlier rhetoric — the same would hold for Chinese theorists of “socialist market economy.” But anyway the European topic was now national income, not godly or aristocratic glory.
Such an ordering of ideas was second nature to the Dutch by 1600. It had to be learned in the century to follow by the British. The British became known at last as unusually calculating, instead of as before unusually careless in calculating. The actual change in individual behavior was not great. The rest of the world continued to be shocked by the aristocratic/peasant brutality of British soldiers into the nineteenth century and after. Consider the bold Black and Tans suppressing Irish rebellion in 1920, or the massacre at Amritsar in British India in 1919. A little if rich island did not paint a quarter of the world red, nor did it win, with a little help, two world wars, by sweet bourgeois persuasion. But the change in rhetoric towards bourgeois cooperation was great and permanent and finally softening.
A long-evolving orthodoxy in English history claims that on the contrary England long espoused a “gentlemanly capitalism” hostile to bourgeois values.262 Right through late Victorian times and beyond, it is said, innovation was undermined by polo-loving and estate-yearning. It seems a dubious claim. True, always in Britain the aristocracy and gentry have had a prestige that is amusing or puzzling or dazzling to the Scots or the Americans or the Dutch or other more plebeian advocates of the bourgeois virtues. As Hume noted in 1741 “while these notions prevail, all the considerable traders will be tempted to throw up their commerce, in order to purchase . . . privileges and honor.”263 But from 1741 to the present the quantitative judgment in Hume’s “all” has proven to be mistaken. Not anything like “all” the middling sort have lusted after noble privilege — this in contrast to France of the ancien régime, for example — and in any case people translated to the honor of “Sir Roderick” or “Baron Desai” have been replaced from below by hordes of new bourgeois.
And not everyone has been impressed by British gentility. In 1726 a young Voltaire visited an elderly William Congreve out on his country estate, long after Congreve had been enriched by his plays, which Voltaire, a playwright himself, greatly admired. The old man said modestly to Voltaire that he preferred to be thought not as a literary artist but merely a retiring gentleman. Voltaire replied sharply: had Congreve had the misfortune to be merely an idle, rent-earning gentleman, with no occupation and no accomplishments, Voltaire would not have troubled to seek him out.264
It has always seemed a trifle strange to lament the economic “failure” of the first industrial nation, which has remained from 1700 to the present one of the richest countries on earth.265 In 2005, allowing for the actual purchasing power of local currencies, the U.K. had a gross domestic product per capita of $31,580, ranking twentieth in the world (the rankings include the little oil countries with very high incomes but very few citizens). It was in this respect a little ahead of France, Germany, Italy; a little behind Denmark, Switzerland, and especially the United States. All such countries were roughly four times richer than the world average in 2005 of $8971.266 The U. K. is 2.6 times richer than the African success of Botswana, in southern Africa, and 59 times richer than the African catastrophe of Zimbabwe, next door to Botswana. From the time of atmospheric steam engines to the present, England and Scotland together have been world centers for invention: modern steel, radar, penicillin, magnetic resonance imaging, lead-floated plate glass, and the world wide web, to name a few.267 A surprisingly high percentage of world inventions still come out of tiny Britain. And as the great leftwing historian E. P. Thompson pointed out early in the debate about gentlemanly capitalism, the landed aristocrats themselves, and their protective belt of gentry, became at least partly bourgeois in values. The point is a cliché of early modern English history. The nobility and gentry labored at high farming, I repeat, the way their financiers in London labored at making deals and their manufacturing countrymen in Lancashire labored at spinning cotton. The classes socially superior to the bourgeoisie sent their younger sons into trade and opened coal mines on their properties. No lofty anti-economic sentiments for them, at least when their own sons and their own estates were at stake.
Why? For one thing, the change in British rhetoric about the economy came out of the irritating success of the thoroughly bourgeois Dutch. The success of the Dutch Republic was startling to Europe. The Navigation Acts and the three Anglo-Dutch Wars by which England attempted to appropriate some Dutch success to itself in the middle of the seventeenth century were the beginning of a larger project of emulating the burghers of Delft and Leiden. “The evidence for this widespread envy of Dutch enterprise,” wrote NNN Kennedy in DDDD, “is overwhelming,” and is no less now.268 In 1663 the English put it in doggerel: “Make wars with Dutchmen, peace with Spain./ Then we shall have money and trade again.” It was not in fact stealing from the Dutch that made England rich — wars were expensive, and the Dutch admiraals Tromp and De Ruyter were not pushovers. It was imitating them that did the trick.
The historian Matthew Kadane explains the shift towards bourgeois virtues ; “the slow cool-down in religious temperature (which helps to permit the mere possibility of the demoralization of wealth) starting after the end of the civil wars and running through 1688-89; the commercialization of London, where there is so much more to be a spectator of, and so on.” with “various interactions with the Dutch.” Just so. Thomas Sprat, in his History of the Royal Society of 1667, early in the English project of becoming Dutch, writes against the very idea. He views it as commendable that “the merchants of England live honorably in foreign parts” [my italics], while “those of Holland meanly, minding their gain alone.” Shameful. “Ours . . . [have] in their behavior very much the gentility of the families from which so many of them are descended. The others when they are abroad show that they are only a race of plain citizens.” Appallingly plain bourgeois, those Dutch, mere “cits” (from “citizens”) in the contemptuous slang of the day. Perhaps, Sprat notes, that is “one of the reasons they can so easily undersell us.”269 It may be. John Dryden in 1672 takes up Sprat’s complaint in almost identical words. In Amboyna, or, The Cruelties of the Dutch to the English Merchants the English merchant Beamont addresses the Dutch: “For frugality in trading, we confess we cannot compare with you; for our merchants live like noblemen: your gentlemen, if you have any, live like boers.”270 Josiah Child, arguing against guild regulation of cloth, on the contrary admired the Dutch on non-aristocratic, prudential grounds: “if we intend to have the trade of the world we must imitate the Dutch.”271 Better boers we.
British imitation of Dutch in late seventeenth C. Bring in Appleby. England was just acquiring an admiration for a bourgeois version of the virtues as Holland came to its height. ….. And so they did, in many things: naval, financial, etc. Defeat in the Solent? Other reasons? Use Pepys.
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[back] Nee and Swedberg 2007, pp. 4-5.
[back] Niebuhr 1952, Chap. 3, Sec. 1.
[back] Simmel, Philosophy of Money, 1900 1907, p. 444.
[back] Quoted in Wood, Broken Estate, 1999, p. 262.
[back] Pipes 1999 (2000), p. 25.
[back] Temple 1672, Chp. VI
[back] Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws 1748, I, p. 321, Book XX sec. 7, quoted in Innes 1994, p. 96.
[back] Pat Hudson gives a brief but penetrating introduction to the issue in pp. 218-225 of her lucid classic, The Industrial Revolution 1992.
[back] Hume 1741, "Of Civil Liberty," p. 93.
[back] ***Some citation here to Voltaire/Congreve meeting.
[back] See the doubts concerning "failure" expressed in McCloskey 1973 and Edgerton 1996.
[back] http://siteresources.worldbank.org/ICPINT/Resources/ICP_final-results.pdf
[back] As has been argued in detail by David Edgerton 1996 and 2005. http://siteresources.worldbank.org/ICPINT/Resources/ICP_final-results.pdf
[back] Kennedy 1976 (2006), p. 59, which is the source for the popular verse quoted as well.
[back] Sprat 1667, p. 88.
[back] Dryden 1672, Act II, scene i, ll. 391-393 (The Works of John Dryden, vol. XII, ed. Vinton A. Dearing ; Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994). Cf. Jojakim Adriaan Van der Welle, Dryden and Holland, Groningen, 1962, p. 140. I am indebted for the Dryden scholarship here to Kevin Vanden Daelen.
[back] quoted in Lipson, Hist., p. 118.
