It is merely a materialist-economistic prejudice to insist that such a rhetorical change from aristocratic-religious values to bourgeois values must have had economic or biological roots. It can of course have had instead, or also, legal, political, personal, social, class, gender, religious, philosophical, historical, linguistic, journalistic, literary, artistic, accidental roots. Charles Taylor attributes the rhetorical (more…)

It had never happened before. In 1798 Robert Malthus (1766-1834), an Anglican clergyman irritated by the extravagant and anti-clerical claims of the French revolutionaries and their British friends that a new day had dawned, explained for the first time why the enrichment of the poor had not yet happened. He said in his great book (more…)

We live, that is, by words as much as by bread. Such a claim is “weak” in the sense of not requiring much demonstration. It asserts merely what few would deny when reminded, though many forget — in the present case that an anti-bourgeois rhetoric, especially if combined with the logic of vested interests, has (more…)

To say it in a little more detail: In Dante’s time a market was viewed as an occasion for sin. Holiness in 1300 was earned by prayers and charitable works, whereas buying low and selling high was deemed a great danger to the soul. As the holier-than-thou Albigensians in southern France put it a century (more…)

The Industrial Revolution and the modern world did not arise in the first instance from a quickening of the capitalist spirit or the Scientific Revolution or an original accumulation of capital or an exploitation of the periphery or imperialistic exploitation or a rise in the savings rate or a better enforcement of property rights or (more…)