Chapter 17 of The Bourgeois Revaluation:
Its Roots Were Not All Material

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 change to the Reformation. The economist Deepak Lal, relying on the legal historian Harold Berman, and paralleling an old opinion of Henry Adams, sees it in the eleventh century, in Gregory VII’s assertion of Church supremacy.³⁹⁶ Perhaps. The trouble with such earlier and broader origins is that modernity came from Holland and England, not for example from thoroughly Protestant Sweden or East Prussia (except Kant), or from thoroughly Church-supremacist Spain or Naples (except Vico). As scene, yes, certainly; as action, no.

It is better to locate the beginnings of the politically relevant action later in European history, around 1700. Such a dating fits better with the new historical finding that until the eighteenth century places like China, say, did not look all that less rich or even in many respects less free than Europe.³⁹⁷ In Europe the scene was set by the affirmations of ordinary life, and ordinary death, in the upheavals of the Dutch Revolt and the French Huguenots and the two English Revolutions. The economically relevant action occurred in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries with the novel ruminations along the North Sea — embodied literally in the novel as against the romance — affirming as the transcendent telos of an economy an ordinary instead of an heroic or holy life.³⁹⁸

Theology mattered. These are Christians we are construing. When Francis Bacon called for modern science “for the glory of the Creator and the relief of man’s estate,” he was not kidding; nor was the Royal Society when in 1663 it dedicated itself to the glory of God the creator. As the historian Michael Lessnoff, who quotes these famous phrases, put it, “Bacon’s great influence began not in his lifetime [he died in 16DD] but during the Puritan ascendancy after 1640. Puritans . . . repeatedly [invoked] his authority and his millennial hopes for science and technology, . . . citing the prophet Daniel.”³⁹⁹ The post-millennial line that led to the modern liberal theology of people like Ernst Troeltsch, the Niebuhr brothers, and Paul Tillich began in the late seventeenth century. The kingdom of God can be encouraged on earth, it came now to be preached, and indeed after a thousand years of gradual perfection in a bourgeois, temperate, and responsible way, in contrast to medieval notions of a Land of Cockaigne suddenly bursting upon us, our savior Christ will come again. Christ has died, Christ is risen, and — if we work hard , on earth at being proper Israelites, or in a later version good to each other — Christ will come again.

The sharp change in the attitude towards Social Problems during the eighteenth century is a piece with post-millennialism and its gospel of progress. Almost no one in 1647 *** exact date of Putney debates or 17*date in Wills extreme Levellers like NNNN*** or Puritans like NNNN (***: Wills book), or even in DDDD except extreme Quakers like NNNN, thought that slavery was anything other than a misfortune applied by God to temper the slave’s soul. Robinson Crusoe sells into slavery a boy who had saved his life, and there is little doubt that Defoe had no anti-slavery irony in mind. After all, part of Crusoe’s subsequent prosperity comes from the slave trade.⁴⁰⁰ Similarly, no one at the time thought that poverty was somehow objectionable on theological grounds. A French official in the seventeenth century declared that “writing should not be taught to those whom Providence caused to be born peasants: such children should be taught only to read.”⁴⁰¹ Infinitely lived Christians have no justified complaint if their lot in this present life is a burden. Earthly life is, mathematically, speaking, an infinitesimal part of Life. Take up your cross.

But by 1800 in progressive circles in England and the United States such attitudes had fallen away, replaced by an aggressively Evangelical movement quite determined to be its brother’s keeper. The non-Evangelicals in, say, the Church of England came to similar view. The social gospel animated during the nineteenth century abolition, the missionary movement, imperialism, prohibition, and Christian versions of socialism. All of them are in one form or another still with us. Christian theology became worldly. Sometimes the worldly turn fit smoothly with bourgeois innovation — ***quote Episcopal bishop of MA. And sometimes it decried the new economy. ***Quote? Yes: Paul Tillich as socialist. But anyway it affirmed an ordinary life, or recommended missionary sainthood in aid of the ordinary life of Africans or Chinese.

The preaching had changed much earlier than the nineteenth century, and so after a while the way people talked about self-interest and pleasure changed. Every Sunday in the late seventeenth century English people listened to sermons by liberal Anglicans and liberal non-conformists to the effect that Christ died precisely so that you can pursue your self-interest. The Anglican preacher Thomas Taylor said, in line with the new natural theology just emerging from Newtonian and other revelations of God’s infinite wisdom, “where an appetite is universally rooted in the nature of any kind of beings we can attribute so general an effect to nothing but the Maker of those beings.”⁴⁰² The historian Joyce Appleby has shown that in seventeenth century England the conviction grew among formerly self-denying Protestants that capitalist innovation and consuming delight was “rooted in the nature” of humans, and was therefore excused — nay, encouraged — by the Maker.⁴⁰³ In 1634 John Milton had the seducing Comus making such a worldly argument in theological form:

Milton the Puritan detested the commercial claim that Nature was God’s plan for worldly happiness. On the contrary, said he: “Who best bear his mild yoke,/ They serve him best.” But later in the seventeenth century Charles II, who was conventionally pious though very far from Puritan — he who fathered seventeen admitted illegitimate children — inadvertently anticipated the new theological point (known as eudaimonism, “this-world happiness-ism”): God would not damn a man, said he, for taking a little pleasure along the way.⁴⁰⁵

In truth the Papists were always more relaxed about such matters. Indeed a natural-law philosophy dating back to Aquinas affirmed that commerce itself was God’s natural instrument, as was desire, too, for Nature’s bounty poured forth. Spanish philosophers of the sixteenth century and French and Italian philosophers of the eighteenth century anticipated most elements of Scottish political economy.⁴⁰⁶ The outbreak of eudaimonism among Anglican and even English non-conformist preachers may be viewed as a return to Catholic orthodoxy after a century and a half of experiments with the asceticism of mild or not-so-mild yokes. Eudaimonism is still Catholic orthodoxy.⁴⁰⁷ The Second Vatican Council declared in 1965 that “earthly goods and human institutions according to the plan of God the Creator are also disposed for man’s salvation and therefore can contribute much to the building up of the body of Christ.”⁴⁰⁸ There was nothing novel about the declaration — modern popes have repeatedly articulated it against the evil of socialism — and it is therefore not surprising that liberal notions of economics arose first in scholastic Spain. “Glory be to God for dappled things” is a persistent theme in Catholic Christianity, against the budge doctors of the stoic fur. In 1329 John XXII condemned the German mystic Meister Eckhart for claiming (according to John XXII’s bull In the Lord’s field, 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.”⁴⁰⁹ John burned a number of such communists and declared heretical the belief that Christ and the Apostles did not have possessions.

In any case, whether eudaimonism in Protestant circles around 1700 was quite as original as it sounded to its proponents, the consequence for economic rhetoric in England, as the intellectual historian Margaret Jacob has argued, was large. “The most historically significant contribution of the [Anglican] latitudinarians,” she writes, “lies in their ability to synthesize the operations of a market society and the workings of nature in which a way as the render the market society natural.”⁴¹⁰ Anglicans, note: the place for such ideas, at least in the opinion of the English, was England around 1700, with a later branch in the Middle Colonies. Anglicans insist that they, too, are of the holy, catholic, and apostolic church, and have always tried to take a third way between rigorist Calvinists and relaxed Catholics. Little wonder they found it easy to slip back into a world-admiring orthodoxy, especially under the properly Protestant auspices of Newton. Goldstone, following Jacob, argues that “only in England was the new science actively preached from the pulpit (where Anglican ministers found the orderly, law-ordained universe of Newton both a model for the order they wished for their country and a convenient club with which to beat the benighted Catholic Church), sponsored in the Royal Society, and spread through popular demonstrations of mechanical devices for craftsmen and industrialists.”⁴¹¹ In Spain and Italy the clergy, as against a tiny group of philosophers, held back their praise for a natural life in trade.

Of course the resulting notions of “natural” economic liberty of the French Physiocrats and Adam Smith (anticipated, as noted, in Spain, and invented independently by Smith’s contemporary in Naples, Antonio Genovesi) took a very long time to become the default logic of even the elite. The recent upwelling of protectionism and anti-immigrant passion in Europe and the United States shows that it has still not become so entirely. The economist and Anglican priest Anthony Waterman has argued that until well into the nineteenth century even the policy wonks did not think in Smithian ways, even in “free-trade” Britain. And up to the present, he notes, Christians and socialists and especially Christian socialists, rather than admiring what we economists think lovely, that delightful “spontaneous order,” hold onto an older and organic view of society — embodied for example in a book that Waterman and I hold dear, the Anglican Book of Common Prayer.⁴¹² “Take away all hatred and prejudice, and whatever else may hinder us from godly union,” the 1662 version pleads in a Prayer for Unity, “as there is but one Body, and one Spirit. . . one God and Father of us all; so we may henceforth be all of one heart. . . and may with one mind and one mouth glorify thee.”⁴¹³

The rhetorical change was a necessity, a not-to-be-done-without, of the first Industrial Revolution, and especially of its astounding continuation in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The goldsmith John Tuite’s patent of 1742 modifying Newcomen’s steam engine was, according to Margaret Jacob, the first patent to be granted that says boldly in the application that it will put people out of work, saving labor. Before that time all patents needed to claim in a medieval and then a mercantilist rhetoric that employment would be increased. In 1744 the British Newtonian, Freemason, and Chaplain to the Prince of Wales, Jean Desaguliers, of Huguenot origin, was the first person to emphasize in print, Jacob continues, the labor-saving character of steam engines.⁴¹⁴ Ideas and rhetoric had changed in favor of innovation.

Material circumstances mattered, too, of course. The Little Ice Age beginning in the fourteenth century put pressure on regimes from Ming China to the Spanish Netherlands.⁴¹⁵ The rising population worldwide in the sixteenth century set one elite against another.⁴¹⁶ The perfection by the West of a gunpowder technology invented in the East put the final nail in the coffin — or rather the final hole in the armor — of the mounted knight, although it had been anticipated in the development of the long bow and especially the crossbow, and the mounted knight (or for that matter the illiterate Spanish commoner similarly equipped) could still prevail as late as the sixteenth century when faced with Aztecs and Incas lacking steel and horses. The voyages of discovery and the resulting empires were useful contexts, as were inside-Europe trade and the long-established security of property, but only contexts, not big causes. Margaret Jacob argues plausibly for an ideal cause working through a very material one. The steam engine, itself a material consequence of seventeenth-century ideas about the “weight of air,” inspired new ideas in the 1740s about machinery generally. But without the change in ideas about the economy and the bourgeoisie around 1700, the economic society of Europe, regardless of atmospheric engines and enclosure bills and trade in sugar, would have settled into stasis, as it did in fact settle during the same period in the parallel and vigorously commercial worlds of Japan and China and the Ottoman Empire.

The bourgeois turn was a probing, as the loyalty to rank broke down, as the holy, catholic, and apostolic church fragmented, and indeed as the loyalty to sex altered in character, of what people believed they ought to believe about ordinary life. It changed the way influential people offered warrantable beliefs to each other about exports of cotton textiles or the dignity of inventors or the basis of legitimate power, or for that matter about sophisters, economists, and calculators. In the metaphor of the linguist George Lakoff, it altered the frames that people used to speak of the economy, by laying down new neural pathways in their brains.⁴¹⁷ The alteration was completed by 1776 in the brains of elite intellectuals such as Smith, Hume, Turgot, Franklin, or Kant. The Sentimental Revolution of the 1780s and after was an aspect of its spread. The Separation of Spheres between bourgeois men and women was another.⁴¹⁸ The historian Dror Wahrman has argued that the reaction against the French Revolution was crucial to the formation of the idea of the middle class in Britain.⁴¹⁹ It was not aristocrats but middle-class people, especially educated ones such as William Wilberforce, descended from a long line of merchants at Hull, who led the radical and evangelical agitations, especially in Britain — though actual cabinet posts in Britain, understand, were for a long time reserved mainly for dukes and their cousins, with a sprinkling of Celtic commoners to keep up the standard of eloquence. By 1848 the idealism of ordinary life (though incomplete and always under challenge from older rhetorics of king, country, and God) was the rhetoric of the times in which we still live, the Bourgeois Era.

In a France without the nearby and spectacular examples of bourgeois economic and political successes in Holland and then in England and Scotland, modern economic growth probably would have been so throttled — even in a France blessed with clever advocates of free trade such as Voltaire and Turgot and Condillac. Consider how very anti-bourgeois and anti-libertarian most of France’s elite was until late in the eighteenth century. Among the French a number of reactionary parties have prospered for two centuries after the Unfinished Revolution. Even nowadays the charmed students of the École Polytechnique in France march under a banner that would strike graduates of such bourgeois institutions as MIT or Imperial College as absurdly antique and unbusinesslike: Pour la Patrie, les Sciences et la Gloire. Indeed, that they march at all would give the same impression. In Spain for different reasons (though again reasons that continue to trouble the country) economic growth was in fact throttled until very recently, despite the Dutch and British and then even the French examples.⁴²⁰ But in the bourgeois countries, which eventually included France and even in the very long run Spain, the circumstances made a new rhetoric, which made new circumstances, which then again made new rhetoric.

The theme is that also of the Cambridge School of historians of English political thought (such as Laslett, Pocock, Skinner, Dunn, Tuck, Goldie), that ideas and circumstances are intertwined. The Cambridge/Johns Hopkins methodological point is that you may not omit the ideas — as historians in many countries were very inclined to do during the historiographic reign of Marx and materialism, 1890-1980. The monotheistic, universalist religions of the Axial Age, 600 B.C.E. to 630 C.E., arose it seems from the conversation of ideas between different civilizations, made possible by the material condition of improved trade.⁴²¹ But monotheism after all is an idea, spreading for example from Temple Judaism to Christianity to Islam, with remoter contacts in Zoroastrianism and Hinduism and Buddhism. When given a chance by trading contacts, or even by one holy man speaking to another (pre-Socratic philosophers for example mulling Persian ideas), the intellectual prestige of a search for The One turns out to compete rather well in people’s minds with the vulgar particularism of tree worship and witchcraft. That a material base can of course have an influence does not at all require that we reduce mind to matter. Mill wrote later in the same essay mentioned, speaking of the sources of sympathy for the working class in the 1840s, that “ideas, unless outward circumstances conspire with them, have in general no very rapid or immediate efficacy in human affairs; and the most favorable outward circumstances may pass by, or remain inoperative, for want of ideas suitable to the conjuncture. But when the right circumstances and the right ideas meet, the effect is seldom slow in manifesting itself.”⁴²² The Industrial Revolution and the rhetoric of respect for ordinary life, for example, made possible the rise of mass democracies — Mill speaks especially of the British Reform Bill of 1832, which was an extension if not exactly a democratization of the franchise. But if the specificallyrhetorical change had not happened, modern economic growth and therefore modern democracy would have been throttled in its cradle, or at any rate starved well before its maturity — as it had been routinely throttled or starved in earlier times. Our liberties and our central heating would have been denied.

396. [backl Lal 1998; summarized in Lal 2006, pp. 5, 155.
397. [backl Pomerantz DDDD***, ***and others.
398. [backl Taylor 1989, p. 23.
399. [backl Lessnoff 2003, p. 361.
400. [backl See for the analysis Watt 1957, p. 209.
401. [backl Quoted by Huppert (1999), p. 101.
402. [backl Taylor, "A Sermon Preached," quoted in McKeon 1987 (2002), p. 203.
403. [backl Appleby *** find and cit pages
404. [backl Milton 1634, ll. 710-711, 715, 737-741.
405. [backl Morrill 2001, p. 380. The source is an acquaintance of King Charles, Bishop Gilbert Burnet, in the form "God would not damn a man for a little irregular pleasure" (Burnet, A History of His Own Times. Ed. of 1850, p. 236).
406. [backl On the Spaniards, Schumpter 195DD, pp. ; on the Italians, Bellamy 1987; on the French, Melon, Essai politique sur le commerce, 1734, *** q.v., cited in Bellamy 1987, p. 279.
407. [backl Greeley, The Catholic Imagination, 2000, p. 7; and Chp. Two, "Sacred Desire."
408. [backl Second Vatican Council, "Decree Concerning the Pastoral Office of Bishops in the Church," Rome, October 28, 1965, quoted in United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, Readings on Catholics in Political Life (Washington, DC: 2006), p. x.
409. [backl 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.
410. [backl Jacob Newtonians, p. 51 ***Get and cite
411. [backl Goldstone 2002, citing Jacob 1988, p.112 and following.
412. [backl Waterman 2004, Chp. 3; and Waterman 2008.
413. [backl Book of Common Prayer 1662 (1999), p. 539.
414. [backl Personal correspondence in September and October 2008 with Margaret Jacob, who is writing a book treating coal and innovation in the eighteenth century.
415. [backl DeVries cite ***
416. [backl Goldstone 1991.
417. [backl Lakoff 2008, ***and earlier political book. For present uses the neurological hypothesis is literally untestable, because we can't as Lakoff and his associates do scan the relevant brains. Close reading is the humanistic version of brain scanning.
418. [backl Hall and ***NNN***N***, DDDD***, p. DO THEM FOR LAST CHAPTER ON FRIDAY AND THEN FILL THIS IN
419. [backl Dror Wahrman 1995, p. ***
420. [backl See the book of the economic historian of Spain, Regina Grafe, ***name it and cite forthcoming, which argue that Spain's problem was regional power, not the sort of centralism that France has practiced from the 16th century to the present.
421. [backl Goldstone 2009, p. 36.
422. [backl Mill DDDD*** "Labour"

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