The Bourgeois Revaluation:
Items to be considered for insertion:
It needs some drama. Vol. 2 had it. It also needs pictures, to bring to life the frequent discussions of paintings, for example. Start collecting them.
Chapters need to be about 1/3 shorter each (now 4400 average: cut in half after adding new material would do it)
Lysias, “Against the Corn dealers,” q.v. Not all that revelatory, but does show what is obvious: that corn was dealt in, and that populists hated it.
See Wickberg, Daniel. 2007. “What is the History of Sensibilities? On Cultural Histories, Old and New.“ American Historical Review 112 (June): pages. http://www.historycooperative.org/journals/ahr/112.3/wickberg.html#REF19
Wickberg is at UT Dallas. My book is a study of a change in sensibilities in his (and Huizinga’s, Febvre’s, David Brion (?) Davis’, William James’, Eliot’s, Geertz’s, Reddy’s) sense.
Thus Wickberg: “Given its history, then, it is understandable why the concept of sensibility has proved to be a fruitful one for contemporary cultural historiography: by bringing together the elements of sense perception, cognition, emotion, aesthetic form, moral judgment, and cultural difference, it provides a way of talking about an object of historical study that is both ubiquitous and yet strangely invisible. Because so much historical study of cultural values is focused on the objects of representation, or the content of thought and writing, historians have frequently overlooked the terms of perception and the forms of expression, both of which embody the linkages between, say, ontological commitments and pre-cognitive dispositions, moral values and categories of sense perception, ideas and emotions. But sensibilities are not organized in archives and conveniently visible for research purposes; they are almost never the explicit topics of the primary documents we use. We need a concept that lets us dig beneath the social actions and apparent content of sources to the ground upon which those sources stand: the emotional, intellectual, aesthetic, and moral dispositions of the persons who created them. That concept is sensibility.” I would say rhetoric and hermeneutics, but no matter.
Wickberg quotes Susan Sontag: “”Notes on Camp”:
The sensibility of an era is not only its most decisive, but also its most perishable, aspect. One may capture the ideas (intellectual history) and the behavior (social history) of an epoch without ever touching upon the sensibility or taste which informed those ideas, that behavior. Rare are those historical studies — like Huizinga on the late Middle Ages, Febvre on 16th century France — which do tell us something about the sensibility of the period.16
Wickberg 2007 “Whatever the important intellectual gains and successes that have been achieved by the cultural historians of representation, and their view that historical analysis means explaining the ways in which culture both expresses and constitutes power relations, there is a world of meaning that falls by the wayside when this view predominates.”
Wickberg 2007: “A personal diary records aspects of a sensibility — those who choose to record only weather, births, and deaths obviously have different sensibilities than do those who record personal thoughts or the minutiae of social life. Account books reveal a sensibility, as do tax registers.31”
Brilliant article on Sweden under the Dutch model: English by no means the only Europeans startled by the economic success of the United Provinces : http://goliath.ecnext.com/coms2/gi_0199-5075136/Swedish-variations-on-Dutch-commercial.html; Thomson, Erik. 2005. “Swedish Variations on Dutch Commercial Institutions, 1605-1655.” Scandinavian Studies 77 (3, Sept.): 331-346. Do on Questia, and Susan Lewis Hammond
From Wiki on Simon Stevin: “His eye for the importance of having the scientific language be the same as the language of the craftsmen may show from the dedication of his book De Thiende (‘The Disme’ or ‘The Tenth’ [1585]): ‘Simon Stevin wishes the stargazers, surveyors, carpet measurers, body measurers in general, coin measurers and tradespeople good luck.’”
Mandeville’s later “The Origin of Honor” q.v.
Roman bourgeois, Le (1666). Satirical novel by Antoine Furetière, in same vein as Moliere. (Scarron’s City Romances was the title of the English trans. of 1671): “Antoine Furetière (1619-1688) is responsible for a longer comic novel which pokes fun at a bourgeois family: “Le Roman bourgeois” (1666). The choice of the bourgeois “arriviste” or “parvenu” (a “social climber” trying to ape the manners and style of the noble classes) as a source of mockery appears in a number of short stories and in theater of the period (such as Molière’s “Bourgeois Gentihomme”).”
Google “bourgeois tragedies”
Do studies of numerous words: capital, profit, thrift, etc.
Even then the Chinese junks were better ships, with such innovations (long adopted) as watertight compartments to prevent sinking, and in their heyday they were gigantically larger than European sailing ships — in the fifteenth century at least 200 feet in length (by some accounts bigger, a football field or longer), as against the pathetic 98 feet of Columbus’ flagship the Santa Maria. Yet the “Ming Ban” on ocean-going trade after 1433 effectively stopped the building and use of very big ships for the very long-distance trade in which the Europeans a little later came to delight, getting into the trade of the Indies in their silly little caravels. Had the Chinese Emperor and his successors continued the (unprofitable) state-sponsored exploration beyond southeast Asia and India, and had Europe not come to admire bourgeois life and innovation, by now all of North and South America, and much of Africa, would be speaking Chinese, and we would be wondering why the Europeans had been so slow to industrialize.
What Mill lacked, and Schumpeter and a handful of later economists such as the American Frank Knight possessed, was an understanding of how powerful ideology — rhetoric — was in propelling the engine. They supplemented their sociological analysis with psychology: Romantic motivations in a business-oriented civilization drove even the businessmen, and how creative such motivations were.516 Knight observed acutely in 1923 that “economic activity is at the same time a means of want-satisfaction, an agency for want- and character-formation, a field of creative self-expression, and a competitive sport. While men are `playing the game’ of business, they are also molding their own and other personalities.”517 Schumpeter gave in 1926 a similarly psychologized analysis of why capitalists played the game, a step beyond the naïve assumption in Marx and Veblen and many more recent critics of the bourgeoisie that “endless accumulation” is the game. Accumulation, Schumpeter said, was for social status, not only for itself. “For itself” businesspeople “delight in ventures,” “exercising one’s energy and ingenuity.” And the macho “will to conquer,” “akin to sport,” is motivating, too. Schumpeter and Knight were surely correct.
But the psychology of male competitiveness is not peculiarly modern, and only for the first, status-taking motive “is private property as the result of entrepreneurial activity an essential factor in making it operative.”518 At the funeral games of Hector, too, the men raced, exercising their energy and skill, and proudly won, and nobly lost. In 1922 Sinclair Lewis savagely spoofed in six pages the morning drive to his real estate office by George Babbitt, a manly head filled with knightly clichés, racing his motorized mount; or other boyish tales of Courage: “To George F. Babbitt, as to most prosperous [male] citizens of Zenith, his motor car was poetry and tragedy, love and heroism. . . . The office was his pirate ship but the car his perilous excursion ashore. . . . Babbitt . . . devoted himself to the game of beating trolley cars to the corner. . . a rare game, and valiant. . . . [Even parking his car] was a virile adventure masterfully executed.”519 It is a new respect for Babbitt-figures that characterizes modern times — and the clerisy’s sneering reaction, as for example Sinclair Lewis’. Odysseus-figures, anciently suspect for their bourgeois habits of trickiness and travel, came to be admired for the first time. What made civilization bourgeois was not its psychology but its sociology, and in particular a rhetoric of dignity and liberty. Deal with Dodsworth as pro-capitalist.
On calculation: I am indebted to John Berdell of DePaul University for this citation: Found in: David Hume, Enquiries Concerning the Human Understanding and Concerning the Principles of Morals > SECTION I.: of the different species of philosophy. paragraph 84
Besides, we may observe, in every art or profession, even those which most concern life or action, that a spirit of accuracy, however acquired, carries all of them nearer their perfection, and renders them more subservient to the interests of society. And though a philosopher may live remote from business, the genius of philosophy, if carefully cultivated by several, must gradually diffuse itself throughout the whole society, and bestow a similar correctness on every art and calling. The politician will acquire greater foresight and subtility, in the subdividing and balancing of power; the lawyer more method and finer principles in his reasonings; and the general more regularity in his discipline, and more caution in his plans and operations. The stability of modern governments above the ancient, and the accuracy of modern philosophy, have improved, and probably will still improve, by similar gradations.
Against Christian doctrine:
The individual emancipated himself from the tribe with the advent of Christianity, which presents itself as a personal religion rather than the religion of a tribe, a state or a nation, and furthermore introduces the notion of free will. You’re swallowing a Christo-centric view of history that doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. Islam is extremely individualistic, for example . . . but did not have the consequences you proceed to attribute to Christianity. For that matter, Buddhism is even more individualistic (I am thinking of Judaism or Roman civic religion or Confucianism [though not a religion] as examples of non-individualistic faiths This set the stage for the liberal political philosophies of the XVII and XVIII centuries, which are explicitly based upon the individual. It is instructive to note, in this context, how the political systems proposed by these philosophies are matched with a theory of the individual. To take the most prominent cases, both Locke and Hobbes consider the individual as conscious, self-aware, and rational, and base their political philosophies on these views. Correct: Hobbes is liberal in this sense, starting from the welfare of the individual instead of the glory of prince or the dignity of the aristocrat. However two individualists differ about the nature of Man for the last time I’ll note: not “man,” s.v.p. , and so do their favorite political systems. According to Hobbes, man is a predator and civil peace but for individualistic purposes, as you imply without saying can only be reached if he surrenders all his natural rights to the State. For that reason he advocates an absolute monarchy. For Locke, man is intrinsically good and the political system should be designed to allow people to fulfil their individual aspirations. He therefore advocates that the main role of government should be to arbitrate contractual disputes between individuals, and that governments should be organized along the principles of representative democracy and the separation of powers All this is strikingly new in 1700. It has little to do with Christian doctrine. Church governance, especially in congregational or Anabaptist or Quaker forms, had much more to do with it — though observe that Islam and Buddhism don’t have a pope, or much of a church hierarchy, either, at any rate by comparison with Catholicism or even Lutheranism/Anglicanism or Orthodoxy.
Check “onesto” in Machiavelli.
“Meine Ehre heißt Treue (“My Honor is Loyalty.”) — motto of SS.
Find social origins of general officers and admirals in US, British, French, Swedish, German, Austrian, and Russian armed forces c. 1900. Note gigantic preponderance of aristocracy and gentry in E. Europe.
There ought to be very many such tests, if my argument is true.
Use Liberty Fund or other source to search over large literature for “merchant,” “economy,” profit, trade. Q-Methodology.
Michell 2003 is crucial vs. S. S. Stevens
I need to figure out for this book what I am opposing. Clearly, materialism, setting up the next book to make the positive argument for language in the economy. But whom exactly? The Marxists in all their forms, of course. But also the growth theorists, and indeed most social theorists outside of anthropology, and even some inside.
A good way to get started is to read a number of Great Books on the period, e.g. Sombart; Braudel again; Tocqueville; the Federalist Papers; and up-to-date items.
Maybe a good idea is to make the chapters into journal articles?
Hohenberg (1995), and Huppert After the Black death (1986): (at some date) Europe had 20,000 towns, but 160,000 villages, witht eh bulk of the population. Two cultures.
Juup Essers, Erasmus (leftish Dutch guy at Barcelona conference)
Sombart, Werner. The Jews and Modern Capitalism. http://mailstar.net/sombart-jews-capitalism.pdf READ THIS
Find Gilles
Khurana, From Higher Aims to Hired Hands, a good book on management education. I know what happened: the B schools started to attend to the “customer,” namely, the businesses, who want hired hands.
J. C. Spender speaks of Knightian uncertainty as the central, and untaught, problem of management. How do we manage when we do not know prudently how things will turn out, and in particular do not have even an idea of the probability distribution of the turnings out? We are steering in a fog. Spender notes that when Knightian uncertainty breaks in the employees must activate their agency and invent work-arounds on the spot.
Spender speaks of management as the shaping of the employee’s docility. “Shaping another person’s agency” is the heart of an organization — or “purposive agentic collaboration,” the “supercession of agency,” “harnessing individuality to the institution’s goals.” In an organization you surrenders your agency to the goals of the organization. Naturally: in rowing in a eight-woman boat you surrender your Romantic individual agency to the task at hand. Spender asks how it is achieved. Through rhetoric, he says — but then he worries that the Rhetorical Man is ethically empty. . .? See his e-mail to me. Herbert Simon said something similar: the employee is reshaped to the enterprise’s goals. “Rational” man is always already maximizing, and cannot explain a changing managerial culture.
J. C. Spender notes that the rhetor is conceived as superior to the audience, and indeed different in kind.
“Docility” worries one. But “suasiveness” would serve, or “open-mindedness.” “Amiability” was Jane Austen’s term for the same idea. Spender points out that what is involved is play-acting to the impartial spectator. Anyway, Spender is surely correct to claim that without docility we cannot achieve that “purposive agentic collaboration” which is the glory of humanity. Rational man is not docile, since he already knows what he needs to know. I would add the point that docility is undignified in an aristocratic society — “I choose never to stoop.” A society of alpha males accomplishes nothing but purposeless dueling. Elephant herds know it, and the matriarchy expels single males in late adolescence.
Weber’s PhD dissertation of 1889 on the medieval family firm said that Roman law did not have a concept of the firm (<firma: signature) independent of individuals. They were created in Italian law, he said.
Meaning arises from the uncertainty of talk, the evocation as in Jane Austen. It is a translation problem.
Must read Vico.
The “huge canvas” of which J. C. Spender speaks characterizes the modern world. With respect for innovation and liberty standing by — and of course the specialization permitted by earlier successes of innovation — a gigantic number of people are making new objects and services, whether for profit or amusement or whatever. Much is consciously designed, and people worry about the fascist or corporatist possibilities of the engineering thus exercised. But for one thing “design” for a market must test the object by talking to the customers, or else they will not be hired again. The great mistake of J. K. Galbraith and others who put such emphasis on, say, planned obsolescence in designing automobiles is to imagine that conscious design puts all the weapons in the hands of manufacturers. If that were so, the Edsel would have succeeded. If that were so then the 10,000 new products introduced every year into American supermarkets would all succeed. In fact a relatively handful do, despite all the focus groups. The same is evident in movie production. “Nobody knows anything,” say the producers. The power to manipulate movie goers is limited. If the 13-year olds want car chases and car crashes, then an industry in which they are the paying customers for summer blockbusters will give the little people what they want. And speaking of cars, if people were such dopes as this, then General Motors would still prosper.
Further, as anthropologists such as the late Mary Douglas never tired of informing us, people make themselves with objects and services, and maintain a creativity that frustrates the “designed” purpose. In the South-African film “The Gods Must Be Crazy” (1980) the Khoisan tribesmen who find a Coke bottle tossed out high above from an airplane turn it to their own purposes as totem or rolling pin. The midwifery metaphor which fascinated Socrates (his mother is said to have been a midwife herself) did not allow for real conversation. Socrates was too busy extracting the idea from the slave boy to listen creatively to what the boy had to say.520520 In the midwife metaphor the designer Knows, and then delivers the product. But a real conversation surprises. And then there is the longer conversation of use, often very surprising indeed. Society creates by spontaneous order. “Design” by contrast has the engineer’s attitude of problem solving, once and for all. Thus the politician talks about a law “designed” to help the poor, though alas it in fact makes the poor poorer. *Edison on recording cylinder; Wright brothers on use of airplane. The invention of Post-Its is a great case in point. And no designer realized that texting with would lead to teenage communication at the level it happened — the kids had to learn to use the technology with great fluency, inventing a non-designed shorthand which the linguist David Crystal has analyzed, before the continuous conversation emerged. As J. C. Spender points out, the designer idea is like the literary notion that the intention of the author dominates, when in fact a text is made also by readers.
Frédéric Bastiat, Economic Sophisms:
You no longer have the right to invoke the interests of the consumer. You have sacrificed him whenever you have found his interests opposed to those of the producer. You have done so in order to encourage industry and to increase employment. For the same reason you ought to do so this time too. .7.20
Will you say that the light of the sun is a gratuitous gift of Nature, and that to reject such gifts would be to reject wealth itself under the pretext of encouraging the means of acquiring it? I.7.23
But if you take this position, you strike a mortal blow at your own policy; remember that up to now you have always excluded foreign goods because and in proportion as they approximate gratuitous gifts. I.7.24
And suppose someone replies: “Industry in general loses what you might have spent for artificial illumination.” II.15.32
Parry with: “No; for what I save by paying nothing to the sun, I use for buying clothing, furniture, and candles.” II.15.33
The left protests inequality, which of course is an admirable “critical” stance. But the left believes that protesting inequality constitutes a social analysis. It does not. It is a weak theory of social change that “badness causes our woe,” even if one claims unpersuasively that that it’s not so much badness as “systemic failures.” The left also believe that a “critical” stance is the same thing as efficacious policy actually helpful to the poor. Again and again the left exposes inequality, advocates speaking truth to power, and then orders another espresso and turns to the film reviews in Le Monde.
One can do better. Americans are paid more than South Asians. The left believes that the economy, the IMF, the multinational corporation make inequality. It is mistaken. The inequality — which certainly offends the pre-analytic Christian-socialist sensibility that all of us start with at age sixteen — can be explained by supply and demand. Supply and demand as an engine of analysis is a more fruitful and sensible theory of inequality than is “the powerful want people to stay poor,” say, or “international corporations requires sweated labor of the Third World poor to make profits.”
Further, supply and demand as a fact in the world has in the past and will in the future eliminate the inequality. It takes time, but it happens, and in no great stretch of time. The very institutions that the left demonizes, such as trade or Western NGOs or the international corporation, enable the poor to escape poverty. In the short run they offer deals that make the poor woman in Mumbai better off by working in a sweatshop making clothes for the French market than she was as a street vendor. She gets dinner tonight. If the left’s anti-market policies rule, however, she does not, because the sweatshops have been closed, and the street vendors are regulated by corrupt officials. An extreme case is Cuba, with a permanent poverty enforced by leftist ideology, though there are worse cases, such as North Korea or, a non-Marxist example, Burma. More significantly, in the long run the institutions of supply and demand, and the respect for innovation signified by them, encourage innovations that make the pie larger, and will give the woman’s grandchildren a French standard of living. The anti-institutional policies of the left, such as labor laws and minimum wages and raising employment standards and subsidizing failing industries, perpetuate poverty. In their eagerness to immediately divide the pie more fairly, the policies shrink the pie. Not always; but usually.
The management theorist Slawomir Magala notes that the leftish Bauhaus movement when it moved to the United States became the official architecture of corporate America.521 Yet their leftish roots showed: Le Corbusier and his allies inspired high-rise housing for Algerians and then Moroccans [check] ringing Paris. The housing was disastrous for the poor. Slum clearance, from the nineteenth century to the latest project of urban embourgeoisfication, has been disastrous for the same reasons: it denies supply and demand, substituting The Designer’s Plan, or the Adolescent’s Passion, for spontaneous order.
The management theorist J. C. Spender has argued that the Dutch pursued innovation with passion in the 17th century. “Absorbing non-family employees” (as Weber claimed was possible in Japan, but not in China) was the problem that the Dutch solved. The Dutch outlawed slavery and indenture, implying that managers were forced to rely on persuasion. He very cleverly suggests that we can find such means in the Chambers of Rhetoric and in other labor practices of the Golden Age. [People like NNN claim that compulsion was essential in Nederland.]
The VOC was a outsourced empire, J. C. Spender argues,not much of a firm. It was based on an oath (cf. priesthood or military; cf. South Africa), that is, on the old system of labor service that the flexible labor market at home in Rotterdam was making obsolete. (check all this by contrast to English servants in husbandry; Israel and especially de Vries on labor arrangements)]
The Polanyists will object, as Marx did in 1846 to Proudhon, that “man develops certain inter-relations, and that the nature of these relations necessarily changes with the modification and the growth of the said productive faculties. [Proudhon] fails to see that economic categories are but abstractions of those real relations, that they are truths only in so far as those relations continue to exist. Thus he falls into the error of bourgeois economists who regard those economic categories as eternal laws and not as historical laws which are laws only for a given historical development, a specific development of the productive forces.”522
VOC 1602 [check[; Bank of Amsterdam 1609; Bourse 1611
Sumptuary laws exploded from 1300 until largely abandoned — or shifted to regulation of the body in laws against alcohol and prostitution — in the eighteenth century. Recent scholarship sees the laws as expressing the state as mother. At any rate, along with regulations of quality and place of consumption, they show the state taking on its mercantilist character that we nowadays take for granted.523
Howell, Martha. 2003. “Sumptuary Legislation.” In Mokyr, ed. Oxford Encyclopedia of Economic History.
See: Weber, Max. 1921. The City. D. Martindale and G. Neuwirth, trans. London and New York: NNNN, 1958. ***Is this part of Economy and Society? I think so.
Nietzsche, “Umwertung der Werte,” an overturning of values
David Mitch notes that “both the Goldsmith’s and Kress libraries and these collections have now entered electronically searchable cyberspace as the Making of the Modern World_ database qv
In “honesty” section: “The honest man, tho' e'er sae poor,/ Is king o' men for a' that.”
Mercantilism as town-law writ larger: As Gustav Schmoller wrote in 1884 (he had in mind in particular the lands of the Hohenzollern, later Prussia), “From all this confusion arising from local economic policy there was only one way out: the transference of authority in the most important of these matters from the towns to the territorial government, and the creation of a system of compromise which should pay regard to the opposed interests, bring about an adjustment on the basis of existing conditions, and yet, while necessarily and naturally striving after a certain self-sufficiency of the land in relation to the outside world, should also strive after a greater freedom of economic movement within it. In the Prussian lands of the Teutonic Order it was recognized as a fundamental principle as early as 1433-34, that in future no Prussian town should obstruct another in the export of corn.” (Schmoller 1884)
Use for conclusion: Many people, and the most educated — the most advanced carriers of the Enlightenment — sharply disagree. ***doesn’t connect to next para. True, some neoliberal ideas, both the good ones and the bad ones, both the freeing of people from a tyrannical and corrupt License Raj and the setting of economic policy by irresponsible young bankers in Washington, have had a well publicized run since the fall of communism. But in the media and the educational systems of the West the anti-liberal ideas as old as the Code of Hammurabi have resurged, in the Seattle-type protests, the strikes of French civil servants, the left wing of environmentalism, the populist hostility towards the North American Free Trade Agreement, panicked reactions to the crash of 2008, conservative declarations about the closing of the American mind, nativist hostilities to immigrants, and all.
But all these good people are mistaken. Innovation does have an ethic beyond Greed is Good. It has to have it to work, and certainly has to have such an ethic to be worth the candle. And innovation makes people ethically and culturally better, not just economically better off.524 We are in the Bourgeois Era, and are of it. We should understand it, and we should in the art-critical sense “appreciate” it — that is, not always approve, but see it clearly in comparison with alternatives, grasping its mechanisms. True, we should criticize it, too, on the many occasions when it does deserve the criticism. Golden parachutes for CEOs in failing companies. Corporate welfare. The military-industrial complex. The prison-industrial complex. The more unsavory parts of Bush II. The replacement of God’s grace with material valuations of people. Mandarin contempt for a commercial culture. Greed-is-good contempt for the natural world. Country-club contempt for ordinary folk: “Only the little people pay taxes,” said the rich hotelier Leona Helmsley before her conviction for tax evasion. Said the trophy wife in a fur coat clinging to her husband in Florida when asked by a TV reporter about poor people, “We’re not losers, like them.” But bourgeois practice on the whole has been a material and spiritual success, an idealism and affirmation of ordinary life, and ordinary good people.
But we should criticize the Bourgeois Era from a position of knowledge instead of from a desire to appear in our own politics saintly or aristocratic, disregarding serious reflection on whether the poor are in fact elevated by what we propose. The economist Thomas Sowell calls the desire to appear appropriately charitable “self-congratulation as a basis for social policy.” 525 The economist Russell Roberts has an imaginary club called the Society of Real Economists [SORE]. “You can be a member of SORE and be in favor of the minimum wage because you think the benefits of helping some people get a higher wage outweigh the costs of some people losing their jobs [because at the higher wage enforced by Greek law the employers will not want to hire as many people, especially non-university youths, who then riot in Athens and Salonika]. . . . [But] if you support the minimum wage because it is important as a symbol of our desire to help people [thought the poor lose their jobs]. . . you can’t be a member of SORE.”526 Surely. Imprudent symbolizing of how very good we the anointed are, in the style of medieval notions of the virtue of charitable acts for saving our souls, should not be the point of a policy. Not in the prudence-oriented, businesslike Bourgeois Era.
We should stop lamenting that we do not still live in a sweet hierarchical era, which never was in fact sweet. It was on the whole a monstrous tyranny, rural idiocy in aid of patriarchy, from medieval Ireland to Shaka’s Zulu kingdom. Nor should we yearn for a sweet utopian era, which never will be in fact. The anti-bourgeois utopias have on the whole devolved into dystopias from Mao’s China to Mengistu’s Ethiopia. The sweetness, and the sweet talk, is now — in our bourgeois towns. The bitter criticism of innovation by the clerisy since 1848, mainly a re-inscription of aristocratic and Christian sneering since Plato, or Confucius, or the prophet Joel, has been bad tempered and ill informed. Time to think again.
The trouble lies with the bourgeoisie in the mass, says Cowper, The Task, Book IV:
Hence charter’d burghs are such public plagues;
And burghers, men immaculate perhaps
In all their private functions, once combined,
Become a loathsome body, only fit
For dissolution, hurtful to the main.
Hence merchants, unimpeachable of sin
Against the charities of domestic life,
Incorporated, seem at once to lose
Their nature; and, disclaiming all regard
For mercy and the common rights of man,
Build factories with blood, conducting trade
At the sword’s point, and dyeing the white robe
Of innocent commercial Justice red.
**Project: 1 hour: print out and INSERT THESE:
Constantine Huygens is, according to Huizinga (“Dutch Civ,” p. 43), “an excellent illustration . . . of the predominately bourgeois tone of . . . the Dutch elite.”
Painters not thought of highly in seventeenth: “Most painters were of petty-bourgeois origin and their social prestige rarely exceeded that of their class” (Huizinga, “Dutch Civ.,” 44).
The broad-church attitudes of Erasmus arose before Calvinism in Holland; in Scotland, Huizinga notes, the Calvinism descended as a 150-year night of orthodoxy before, the dawn broke, in the early eighteenth century (“Dutch Civ.,” p. 53). The Dutch case was not until the seventeenth century properly described as “toleration”: but at least the Dutch stopped in the 1590s burning witches and heretics, something the rest of Europe (and Massachusetts) couldn’t overcome until a century later (1595 in Utrecht). H. mentions France, Switzerland, Scotland; when last English trial of witches? Probably same: note correlation with last killing famines.
Find and check the exact wording in Dutch of the Prince of Orange’s famous letter of 2eighth December 1574 to the States urging the founding of the University of Leiden, “all the honest arts and sciences” “Support of freedom and honest government”: what word for “honest” and what were its connotations — I imagine like “honest” in Shakespeare, “honorable” not (only) sincere. Quoted in Huizinga, “Dutch Civ,” p. 58.
Put this earlier in discussion of “bourgeois” : Writing in 1935 the Dutch historian Johan Huizinga noted that “in the nineteenth century, ‘bourgeois’ became the most pejorative term of all, particularly in the mouths of socialists and artists, and later even of fascists.” As Jules Renard put it, “The bourgeois man is someone who does not have my ideas. And what a devilish sound the word ‘capitalistic’ has assumed! So repulsive, in fact, that even those who are firmly convinced that personal and inherited property is the basis of all culture and that it is not within human power to replace the existing system of production with a better one, no longer dare to call themselves ‘capitalists’.” Or as the great liberal historian Johan Huizinga put it, “How useful it would be from time to time to set up all the most common political and cultural terms in a row for reappraisal and disinfection. . . . For instance, liberal would be restored to its original significance and freed of all the emotional overtones that a century of party conflict has attached to it, to stand once again for ‘worthy of a free man.’ And if bourgeois could be rid of all the negative associations with which envy and pride for that is what they were [as peasant and aristocrat] have endowed it, could it not once more refer to all the attributes of urban life?” Huizinga, Johan H. 1935. “The Spirit of the Netherlands.” p. 112
Of nationalism: “The most recent trend in Europe, that of extreme nationalism, bears ‘heroism’ as the brightest pearl in its crown. But, sad to say, artificial pearls can be mass produced” (Huizinga 1935, “The Spirit,” p. 111).
For Beth: “How useful it would be from time to time to set up all the most common political and cultural terms in a row for reappraisal and disinfection. . . . For instance, liberal would be restored to its original significance and freed of all the emotional overtones that a century of party conflict has attached to it, to stand once again for ‘worthy of a free man’.” Huizinga, Johan H. 1935. “The Spirit of the Netherlands.” Pp. 105-137 in Dutch Civilization in the seventeenth century and Other Essays. Pieter Geyl and F. W. N. Hugenholtz, eds.; A. J. Pomerans, trans. London: Collins, 1968, p. 112. And see p. 127f.
“A historian who cannot control his sense of humor is in the wrong job” (Huizinga, “Two Wrestlers with the Angel,” pp. 158-218 in Huizenga, Dutch Civil., p. 192.
The division of Prudence off from Virtue, and the loss of a notion of goodness as a balance of virtues completed by 1864[Well, he didn’t say “others”]. “Right, the sacrifice of self to good; wrong, the sacrifice of good to self” is how J. A. Froude put it in 1864 (“The Science of History,” delivered 1864, pp. 7-36 in Short Studies on Great Subjects (NY: Scribner, Armstrong: 1872), p. 25. This is a result of utilitarianism. Though Froude on the previous page rejects the utilitarian idea “that, when a man prefers doing what is right, it is only because to do right gives him a higher satisfaction” (p. 24), his discussion accepts the utilitarian framing of the matter: “Let the thought of self pass in, and the beauty of a great action is gone, like the bloom from a soiled [sic] flower” (24).
Further, he claims that selfish and noble are “wide asunder as pole to pole” (25), implying (in a non sequitur) that a predictive science is impossible. “If men were consistently selfish, you might analyze their motives; if they were consistently noble, they would express in their conduct the laws of the highest perfection.” One can make out what he means here. But it does not follow that a science is impossible (he explicitly confines the word “science” [this in 1864] to a model of astronomy.
He is right that “moral” elements add to the difficulty of making sense of people, that it would be easier if people were wind-up mice of self-interest. My notion of language as the source of freedom is similar to Froude’s conventional doubts that selfishness rules (pp. 24-27).
In the late medieval cities of the south Netherlands “a highly original and adequate set of burgerlijk] virtues was compiled from the classical, biblical, and medieval traditions. . . . It is in the literature of the late Middle Ages that this set of virtues is assembled.”527
Le Goff, Jacques. 1973. “The Town as an Agent of Civilization.” Pp. 77-106 in C. M. Cipolla, ed., The Fontana Economic History of Europe. London: Collins.
But townspeople such as the bourgeoisie had long been despised, seen by the priest and the aristocrat as vulgar. “I hate the uninitiated mob” (Odi profanum vulgus), sang Horace in priestly style long ago, and scorned to take in exchange for his Sabine valley any fashionable riches more burdensome. Still today, as always, markets and innovation are threatened by the scorn of priest or knight or gentleman or poet, from Green to neo-Nazi. And now they are threatened, too, from within the bourgeoisie itself, by a new and foolish pride elevating market prudence to the exclusion of other virtues — the “greed-is-good” theory of behavior, encouraged by economists and inside traders. It is the modern descendent of eighteenth-century ideas that Prudence Only — reason, utility, Enlightened self-interest — suffices. We need instead to balance the virtues of courage and love and faith and prudence in an ethical business life. But as a matter of fact most businesspeople are already ethical, contrary to the populist line that they are price-gougers and the Marxist line that they are carriers of an evil system or the conservative line that they are simply vulgar.
Alienation: read Simmel “the Metropolis and NNN: 1903
Keith Thomas on numeracy
Read some books on Song and Abbasid cities
Something happened to the standing of a bourgeois life in England between 1600 and 1776. With whom? How to prove it? Where exactly in the society? In what respects exactly? A sheer, material, Marxist “rise of the bourgeoisie” or …… do not seem to explain it.
I have thanked in The Bourgeois Virtues and in Bourgeois Deeds some of the people who have helped. Parts of Chapter 14 on Polanyi originated in a paper that Santhi Hejeebu and I wrote in 2000 (Hejeebu and McCloskey 2000; and the little reply, 2003). The April, 2004 meetings of the Illinois/Indiana Region of the Jane Austen Society of North America, 24th annual gala at the Drake Hotel heard some of my early ruminations in Chapter 27 on Our Jane as une bourgeoise. A leading student of medieval science, and an old friend, Edith Sylla, tried to educate me on the early history of quantification (Chapters 21 and 26), but I proved a poor student, as she will see.
No. CX, Prudentia
she-philosopher.com: a Web-based research project for science & technology studies (name to be supplied!)
http://www.she-philosopher.com/gallery/atheniansociety.html
Pp. 224–5 from Charles Hoole’s English translation of Comenius’ Orbis Sensualium Pictus, published in 1659
The English-language gloss reads:
Prudence, 1. looketh upon all things as a Serpent, 2. and doeth, speaketh, or thinketh nothing in vain.
She looks backward, 3 as into a looking glass, 4. to things past; and seeth before her, 5. as with a Perspective-glass, 7. things to come, or the end; 6. and so she perceiveth what she hath done, and what remaineth to be done.
She proposeth an Honest, Profitable, and withal, if it may be done, a pleasant End to her actions.
Having foreseen the End, she looketh out Means, as a Way, 8. as leadeth to the end; but such as are certain and easie, and fewer rather than more, lest anything should hinder.
She watcheth Opportunity, 9. (which having a bushy forehead, 10. & being bald-pated, 11. and moreover having wings, 12. doth quickly slip away) and catcheth it.
She goeth on her way warily, for fear she should stumble or go amiss.
Look into Puritans. Cf. New England: internal colonization by non-conformists. Compare to old England. When “capitalist”? Tie to Milton section in last chapter.
**Project: 2 days: Here: long section on Lillo’s, The London Merchant. Exact parallel with Simon Eyre in its annual performance. Use that fact as parallel, and index of change.
The idea of honest dealing comes from merchants and tradesmen, such as Quakers insisting on fixed prices instead of bargaining, not ever from the gentry and the aristocrats.
Adam Smith admired honesty, sincerity, candor in a way quite foreign to Shakespearean England, and bordering on the wild enthusiasm for such Romantic qualities of faithfulness to the Self in Wordsworthian England. In the Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759, 1790) Smith writes:
Frankness and openness conciliate confidence. We trust the man who seems willing to trust us. . . . The great pleasure of conversation and society . . . arises from. . . a certain harmony of minds, which like so many musical instruments cannot be obtained unless there is a free communication of sentiments and opinions. . . . The man who indulges us in this natural passion, who invites us into his heart, who, as it were, sets open the gates of his breast to us, seems to exercise a species of hospitality more delightful than any other.
Smith 1789 (1790) VII.iv.28, p. 337
An Othello or an Hamlet who opened the gates of his breast would invite a fatal wound, and even in the comedies it was prudent to dissimulate.
Thus began what Charles Taylor, appropriating a phrase from a very different political tradition, call “the long march” (p2005, p. 143).
I have claimed, what is historically correct, that the market always existed. If so, why was there not always the sense of responsibility? Evidently, then, the sense of responsibility came from more than the pervasiveness of markets. It was a new sense that it was all right to be a market person, an acceptance of market outcomes as just. Some societies, and certainly big parts of many societies, were dominated by mercantile values: one thinks of the Phoenicians or their offshoot Carthage; the overseas Chinese, or indeed the overseas Japanese before they were forbidden to return; or Jews such as Jesus of Nazareth, with his parables of merchants and makers. But there’s something new in Holland c. 1600 and especially in England c. 1700 and Scotland and British North America c. 1750 and Belgium c. 1800.
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[back] Bronk 2009, p. 55.
[back] Knight 1923, p. 39, his italics.
[back] Schumpeter 1926, p. 93f.
[back] Lewis 1922, pp. 24-30.
[back] Presentation by NNN at
[back] Magala 2009. Presentation to the ESADE conference on Management and Rhetoric, Barcelona, March.
[back] Marx 1846.
[back] Howell 2003, p. 40.
[back] A point argued at length in McCloskey 2006.
[back] Sowell 1995.
[back] Roberts 2006.
[back] Pleij 1994, p. 75.
Hi Deidre,
Have been out of touch for a while – sailing in Maine. Now easing back into the writer’s saddle.
Thanks for these great comments! I’m still flogging away at getting my bunch of concepts together.
Now much absorbed with the methodological implications and complications of ‘human agency’ – and find them dealt with remarkably well by von Clausewitz. He has a neat take on the relationship between theorizing and agentic practice.
Have several times thought to ask you if you have read:
Woodruff, P. (2001). Reverence: Renewing a Forgotten Virtue. Oxford: Oxford University Press. I presumed yes, of course, but I suppose there’s a chance you missed it – so many books (few good), and so little time!
Warmest regards, JC
Written by JC on August 23rd, 2010.Dear JC, Well: I’m no sailor, but I envy you. I’ll look at the Woodruff. I’m in the market for virtues, especially theological ones!
Written by Deirdre McCloskey on August 28th, 2010.Regards, Deirdre
Indeed – and who amongst us is not?
There’s much to be said for sitting in silence and contemplating the universe and what we are doing in it and to it, whether from the deck of a lone boat in a isolated Maine anchorage with the stars reflected in the still water or from the back of a quiet reading room in a Mid-Western library surrounded by dead friends’ thoughts.
Regards, JC
Written by JC on August 29th, 2010.Dear JC,
You have a poet’s heart, and pen.
Regards,
Deirdre
Written by Deirdre McCloskey on September 2nd, 2010.Hi Deirdre,
Found your post as Barbara and I came back from a wonderful lecture on Matisse at MoMA by John Elderfield – a lovely man.
http://www.artinfo.com/news/story/27061/john-elderfield/
In his lecture Elderfield suggested Matisse and Picasso could be compared in many ways but interestingly in the degree to which their paintings are ‘open’, inviting the viewer in, or ‘closed’ which he likened to ‘the painting was looking at you’. Matisse, of course, being generally open while Picasso is often closed. He likened closed-ness to being dogmatic, versus open-ness as life-affirming, respectful and expanding.
The dichotomy reminded me of:
Romanyshyn, R. D. 1989. Technology as Symptom and Dream. London: Routledge.
Among the many things Romanyshyn discusses – if I remember it right – is the transformation of painting with the ‘invention’ of perspective in the 14th century. Clearly this pushed the person looking at the painting into an ‘observer’ role – the origin of Enlightenment ‘objective’ thought and the notion of ‘representation’. Painters began to worry about getting it ‘right’.
The puzzle, then, is what did the previous generations of painters think they were doing? Were they simply not proficient enough to get it right?
I have forgotten what Romanyshyn says about this – and cannot lay my hands on the book at this moment. But I thought about it quite a lot and began to look again at pre-14th century paintings. (And now you may begin to sense why I mention this to you in the light of your previous posts.)
Eventually I began to feel the pre-perspective paintings were not ‘mistakes’ at all. Rather they were VERY carefully designed to draw the viewer in – especially relevant to the religious paintings of the time. These painters knew precisely what they were up to.
The earlier paintings would draw in, especially, those in distress and looking for comfort. Instead of being ‘representations’ of, for instance, Mary and Child Jesus, they would be essentially rhetorical in offering moral and spiritual comfort and direction – a sort of visual persuasion to the viewer to step into the painting and join the Holy Family.
By comparison contemporary religious paintings seem (at least to me) to be weirdly tacky representations that offer no such invitation.
As we know, of course, visual persuasion shades over into propaganda. Soviet constructivism, for instance.
PIcasso’s oeuvre is so rich, vast and various that it is clearly incorrect to label it ‘closed’. But many of his paintings are less than playful and inviting and more dogmatic presentations of his remarkable view of the world. But his period of dialogue with Braque, as they ‘invented’ their language of cubism, or his ‘blue’ paintings, show him in more open mood.
Written by JC on September 19th, 2010.Oh, and this is fun too:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AC7ANGMy0yo
Regards, JC
Written by JC on September 19th, 2010.