July 28, 2018 Dear Reader
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- Chapter 24: Nor Was It Nationalism 224
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Dear Reader: Thank you for putting up with this, some draft chapters from a book manuscript---to be published, Deo volente, by the University of Chicago Press, perhaps in 2009. Any form of comment you find convenient has my thanks. It would be useful for example if you gave me your copy of the manuscript with your comments directly on it, in printed copy or in electronic form, whether explicit remarks or mere indignant exclamation marks and irritated circlings of errors. I’ll send it back, once I’ve stolen your good ideas, so that you may treasure it forever. The plan---in your own work you know the usual fate of such plans!---is to proffer an improved MS to the Press in the spring of ‘08. What you have here is the version of early October, 2007, as complete as I could make it by then, submitted to give you plenty of time to look at it. I’ve tried to make the draft cohere so that you can see the argument and judge at least some of the evidence, but it’s early days yet, and Final Coherence, you know, is often achieved late. . . if at all. You will note that the coherence diminishes towards the end of the book: I have not quite gotten my thinking clear there. I have included The Voice of the Author from time to time, identified by this same type face, to keep straight the big and little jobs I need to do, and when in bold to offer promissory notes of various kinds, and to ask you questions directly. I will continue after this submission working on the manuscript, discovering the many absurdities in it and trying to pay off a few of the numerous promissory notes. I suppose the basic argument of the book won’t change---you be the judge. I am open to persuasion. Really I am. Perhaps it is lunacy to argue that a rhetorical change was at the root of the industrial revolution, and of liberalism, and of all our joy, in which case you need to tell me, and just why. I know for sure that you will have many suggestions of books and articles I simply must read before I venture such a strange---yet hoary---argument. But I do live in hope of an Easter resurrection, so I can move to Volumes 3 and 4 and complete the task for which I now believe my Anglican God put me on earth! Laus Deo. Deirdre McCloskey 720 S. Dearborn, Unit 206, Chicago, IL 60605 312-435-1479
deirdremccloskey.org Bourgeois Towns: How Capitalism Became Virtuous, 1300-1776 [The Bourgeois Virtues, Vol. 2] Deirdre McCloskey University of Illinois at Chicago deirdre2@uic.edu deirdremccloskey.org Table of Contents The Argument: How a Change in Talk Made the Modern World Acknowledgements Part 1 The Shifting Rhetoric of the Aristocratic and then Bourgeois English Needs to Be Explained Chapter 1: Bourgeois Precursors Were Ancient 13 Chapter 2 But the Early Bourgeoisies Were Precarious 22 Chapter 3: The Dutch Bourgeoisie Preached Virtue 35 Chapter 4: And the Dutch Bourgeoisie Was Virtuous 43 Chapter 5: Yet Old England Disdained the Market and the Bourgeoisie 52 Chapter 6: And So the Bourgeoisie Could Not “Rise” 60 Chapter 7: But in the Late 17th Century the British Changed 71 Chapter 8: For Example, a Bourgeois England Measured 82 Chapter 9: The New Values Were Triumphant by 1848, or 1776, or even 1710 92
Chapter 11: Ben Franklin Was Bourgeois, But not Prudence-Only 113 Chapter 12: Bourgeois Theorizing Was in Fashion 120 Chapter 13: Smith Was the Last of the Former Virtue Ethicist 130 Chapter 14: Smith was No Reductionist, Economistic or Otherwise 138 Chapter 15: “Hobbesian” Prudence is not Sufficient 146 Chapter 16: Prudence-Only is Refuted by Experience and Experiment 154 Chapter 17: The Left Should Acknowledge the Virtues 162 Chapter 18: But So Should the Right 172
Chapter 20: It Was not Thrift 191 Chapter 21: Nor Was It Original Accumulation, or the Protestant Ethic 199 Chapter 22: Foreign Trade Was Not It , Nor the Slave Trade, Nor Imperialism 207 Chapter 23: “Material” Causes are thus Rebutted 216
Chapter 26: It Was Unexpected Technology, So We Need New Economic Models 240Chapter 27: Ideology is Rhetoric 251Chapter 28: Sweet Talk is How We Work 260Chapter 29: Sweet Talk is Virtuous 274Chapter 30: The Bourgeoisie Enacts Speech 289Chapter 31: Bourgeois Virtue is an Idealism of Ordinary Life 299 Chapter 32: How One Might See the Coming of a Bourgeois Rhetoric as Good 301 some notes that even this rough draft has not fitted in 312 Works cited 320 The Argument: How a Change in Talk Made the Modern World Once upon a time a change happened unique to Europe, especially after 1600 in the lands around the North Sea, and most especially in Holland and then in England and Scotland---though the change was foreshadowed in northern Italy and the Hansa towns, and tried out in 2nd century B.C. Carthage and 18th century A.D. Osaka. The change was the coming of a business-dominated civilization. A hard coming we had of it. But the hardness was ideological and rhetorical, not material. What made the modern world, as many economic historians are realizing, was not trade or empire or the exploitation of the periphery. These were exactly peripheral. Anyway imperialism was routine, in the Athenian Empire or the Abbasid Empire or the Moghul Empire. Nor was the modern-making a class struggle. Again recent historians have come to see the class struggle as exactly not the history of all hitherto existing societies. Nor did a business-dominated civilization come from any of the splendid engines of conventional economics, limited in horsepower, such as the division of labor or increasing returns or the downward march of transaction costs or the Malthusian pressures on behavior and the chances of selection. What made the modern world was, proximally, innovation in machines and organizations, such as the spinning jenny and the insurance company, and innovation in politics and society, such as the American constitution and the British middle class. And such innovations of the 18th and 19th centuries in Europe and its offshoots ultimately came out of a change in what the blessed Adam Smith called "moral sentiments." That is, it came out of a change, ultimately, in the rhetoric of the economy. Honest invention and hopeful revolution came to be spoken of as honorable, as they had not been before, and the seven principal virtues of pagan and Christian Europe were recycled as bourgeois. The wave of gadgets, material and political, in short, came out of an ethical and rhetorical tsunami c. 1700 in the North Sea. That’s the argument. To say it in a little more detail: In Dante’s time a market was said to be an occasion for sin. Holiness in 1321 was earned by prayers and charitable works, not by buying low and selling high. And still in Shakespeare's time a claim of "virtue" for working in a market was spoken of as flatly ridiculous. Virtue was earned by nobility, not by bargaining. The very name of “gentleman” in 1600 meant someone who attended the Cadiz Raid or attended Hampden Court, engaging in nothing so demeaning as actual work. But from 1321 to 1600 in northern Italy and in Holland, and then more broadly down to 1776 and still more broadly to 1848, something changed in the talk of Europe. In England the change in the rhetoric of the economy happened during a concentrated and startling period 1600 to 1776. The change? Capitalism and bourgeois work came to be spoken of as virtuous. In some ways, though not all, they became in fact virtuous. And by the end, by 1848, notoriously, in Holland and England and America and other offshoots and imitators of the northwestern Europeans a businessperson was routinely said to be good, and good for us. Capitalism, from the precursors in the Italian states around 1300 to the first modern bourgeois society in Holland around 1600 to a world-making rhetoric around 1848, grew for the first time in history on a big scale to be acceptable. The rise of a business-dominated civilization, which came before the material changes resulting from it, was historically unique. It was a change in ethics, that is, a change in earnest talk about how to be good. The book moves from the seen-to-be, the "rhetoric" of capitalism, as I put it, to the actual. Most controversially, to speak of material actualities, it claims that the rhetorical and ethical change caused modern economic growth, which at length freed us from poverty. People came to accept the creative destruction of the old ways of doing things, and the economy paid them back with interest. The change was the cause, too, of a liberalism which at length abolished slavery and freed women. People came to expect to have a say in their governments as in their markets, and the polity, too, paid them back with interest. The industrial revolution and the modern world, I am claiming, arose from a change in the way people talked about business—not from an original accumulation of capital or from an exploitation of the periphery or from imperialistic exploitation or from a rise in the savings rate or from improvement of property rights or from the birth-rate of the capitalistically gifted or from a manufacturing capitalism taking over from commercial capitalism or from any other of the materialist machinery beloved of economists and calculators left and right. The calculations don’t work. Rhetoric does. And neither did the modern world arise from the sort of psycho-social changes that people often think Max Weber posited in 1905. It was not a Protestant ethic or a change in acquisitive desires or a rise of national feeling or a “industrious revolution” or any other change in how people behaved as individuals that initiated the new life of capitalism. These were not trivial, and are surely some flourishing branches of a business-dominated civilization. But they were not the root. People have always been hard working and acquisitive and proud, when circumstances warranted it. Thrift begins with the expulsion from the Garden of Eden. Greed was a sin and prudent self-interest a virtue from the beginning. And as for nationalism, Italian cities in the 13th century, or for that matter Italian parishes anywhere, evinced a nationalism---the Italians still call the local version campanilismo, from campanile, the church bell tower from the which the neighborhood took its time---that would do the average Frenchman of 1914 proud. After all, many of the differences in “culture” to which we attribute so much can disappear in a generation or two. The grandchildren of Hmong immigrants to the United States differ in many of their values only a little from the grandchildren of British immigrants. If you’re not persuaded, add a “great” to “grandchildren,” or another “great.” What persists, by repetition at a mother’s knee or through stories told in literature high and low, are ethical valuations. Consider the high valuation of prudence and hope and courage in American civilization, and a persistent faith in an identity of unrootedness, what the Dutch economist Arjo Klamer has called the American “caravan” society as against the “citadel” society of Europe, the American frontier myth or the Hollywood road movie, the American folk religion that “you can be anything you want to be.” It wipes out in a couple of generations a Northern-European ethic of temperance and justice or an East Asian ethic of prudence and love.1 Many people, for example, said in the 1950s and 1960s that India would never develop economically, that Hindu culture was otherworldly and would always be hostile to capitalism. For thirty years after Independence such a rhetoric of a Gandhian-cum-London-School-of-Economics socialism held the “Hindu rate of growth” to 3.2 percent per year, a sad 1 percent a year per capita as the population grew. But at last it faded. A capitalist rhetoric arose in India, supporting the partial overthrow of the “License Raj.” And so the place commenced, after Ravi Gandhi (no relation) in 1980 and especially after Manmohan Singh in 1991, to increase the production of goods and services to rates shockingly higher, now at fully 9 percent per year. Birth rates are falling, as they do when people get better off. At 9 percent the worst of Indian poverty will disappear in a generation or two, because income per head will have increased then by a factor of as much as 8. Eight. Even at the more moderate rates of 7.3 percent per year assumed in 2007 by Oxford Economics it will have tripled.2 Tripled. The wider culture didn’t change 1980-2009, and won’t. People still give offerings to Lakshmi and the son of Gauri as they did in 1947 and 1991. They still play cricket. In the year 2034, one supposes, the Indians will persist in these bizarre cultural practices. Yet they will have entered the modern world, and the modern word, of a business-dominated civilization. They will be the better for it. What changed in Europe, and then the world, I am claiming, was the rhetoric of capitalism, that is, the way influential people talked about earning a living. The talk mattered because it affected how people valued economic activity and how governments behaved towards it. Max Weber in fact had just such a change in mind, and his instinct to take religious doctrine seriously in accounting for the change deserves respect. The change in talk about economic life provided warrants for certain changes in behavior. But the talk was essential. The trade to the East and the New World was not essential, though it got the most press. It was small relative to trade among the Europeans themselves. The character of the European bourgeoisie did not change. Protestantism and nationalism changed, but were side shows. What did change was the attitude towards the bourgeois life and the capitalist economy, by the bourgeoisie themselves and by their traditional enemies. That was no side show, and did change, a lot. Without a new acceptance of markets and businesspeople and the bourgeoisie the society of Europe would have continued to bump along in a zero-sum mode, as had every society with fleeting exceptions since the cavemen. Aristocrats and priests would have continued to live off highhanded extractions from peasants, and no one would have thought to turn a profit by inventing a seed drill for the field or an atmospheric engine for the mine. Why bother, if the Sultan would throw you off a cliff for your trouble, or if the Emperor’s noblemen would swoop down to seize your profits? Without a business-dominated civilization the profit from invention would have continued to be seen as ignoble. Buying low and selling high would have been continued to be seen as unethical. Institutionalized theft would have continued to be seen as aristocratic. Alms and tithes would have continued to be seen as holy. Not that aristocrats, or for that matter priests, hesitated to engage in trade when profit was in the offing. The Cistercian monks were for centuries the cleverest merchant farmers in Europe. It is not desire for gain that changed. The Middle Ages are not to be viewed as a contentedly poor Merrie Englande starring Errol Flynn. This much we know from a century of revision of the Romantic German theory of medieval virtue. Capitalism is not about the rise of greed. What did change were the articulated ideas about the economy, ideas about the sources of wealth, ideas about a positive sum vs. a zero-sum economy, ideas about progress and invention, above all ideas about what sort of calling was admirable. And so a new world was born. A wise economist once said that “the ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong, are more powerful than is commonly understood. . . . I am sure the power of vested interests is vastly exaggerated compared with the gradual encroachment of ideas.”3 So here. * * * * The book is the second of four planned of a full-scale defense of capitalism, aimed at people like you who think it needs one. The project is an “apology” in the Greek sense of a defense at a trial, and in the theological sense of an open-handed preachment to you-all, the beloved infidel or the misled orthodox. My beloved infidel friends on the left and my also beloved but also misled ultra-orthodox friends on the right have long joined in believing that capitalism is as Marx put it in 1867, “solely the restless stirring for gain. This absolute desire for enrichment, this passionate hunt for value.”4 Many on the left have been appalled, many on the right have been pleased. But both of you, I am saying in the four volumes, are mistaken. On the one side we should stop at once excusing Enron thieves, and stop accepting their self-interested argument that unjust prudence, organized by Enron thieves, you see, is all the ethics a businessperson requires. But on the other side we should also stop at once encouraging Sierra Club radicals, and stop accepting their self-interested argument that imprudent justice, organized by the Sierra Club, you see, is all the ethics a society requires. Capitalism has an ethic beyond Greed is Good. It has to have such an ethic to work. And its working makes people ethically better, not just better off. The first volume, The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Commerce (2006), asked whether a bourgeois life can be ethical. A third volume, The Treason of the Clerisy, soon to appear, co-authored with John McCloskey, will ask how after 1848 we European artists and intellectuals came to be so very scornful of the bourgeoisie, and how the gradual encroachment of such ideas led to the disasters of the 20th century. The fourth, still in draft, Defending the Defensible, will look into the economic arguments against capitalism, such as its alleged dependence on a reserve army of unemployed and its alleged destruction of the environment. The four books lean against each other. If your worries about the ethical foundations of capitalism are not sufficiently met here, they perhaps are more fully met in The Bourgeois Virtues. If you feel that insufficient attention is paid here to imperialism or the environment, more will be paid in Defending the Defensible. If you feel that the story here doesn’t explain why such a successful bourgeois life is now so despised in deeply progressive and conservative circles, put in your early orders for The Treason of the Clerisy. The four are one big argument. The argument is: Markets are not inconsistent with an ethical life, and indeed an ethical change in favor of markets characterizes Europe after 1300 in isolated parts of the European south (Venice, Florence, Barcelona) and after 1600 in larger parts of the north (Holland, England, Scotland, America, Belgium, France), and then the world. But the artists and the intellectuals—the clerisy---turned against liberal capitalism after 1789 and especially after 1848, leading in the 20th-century to the catastrophes of socialism and nationalism and national socialism. The clerisy’s arguments in the century and a half since 1848, voluble though they have been, have been on the whole mistaken, a return to pre-capitalist ethics. The bourgeois life has been on the whole a material and a spiritual success. But if capitalism continues to be scorned as it has been by many of our opinion makers, we can repeat if we wish the nationalist and socialist horrors of the century past. We can even add for good measure an anti-bourgeois religiosity, as new as 9/11 and as old as the Sermon on the Mount. The apology seems to take four volumes. A philosopher wrote recently, to explain why he felt he had to cram his opus on "warranted Christian belief" into three stout volumes rather than allowing himself four, "a trilogy is perhaps unduly self-indulgent, but a tetralogy is unforgivable."5 Yet bourgeois life and capitalism since 1848 have had a bad press, worse even than warranted Christian belief. The prosecution has written out the indictment of a business-dominated civilization in many thousands of volumes, from the hands of Rousseau, Dickens, Marx, Lenin, Veblen, Sartre, Galbraith, Ehrenreich. Few attempts have been made to defend a life in commerce, except on the economist’s grounds that after all a great deal of money is made here. After such prolixity in the indictment of capitalism, I suppose, my merely four volumes of defense, and themselves merely an adumbration of the many arguments that could be made in the case, seem restrained. Maybe it's time to begin a full scale defense that goes beyond prudence-only. Maybe it’s time to offer the outlines of an ethical rhetoric for our globalized souls, an idealism of ordinary life, recouping the virtues. If you are on the left, and believe that on the contrary capitalism and the bourgeois life were born in sin, and that they continue to impoverish and to corrupt the world, I hope to plant at least some seeds of doubt. But likewise I hope to plant some seeds of doubt if you are on the right, and believe that (admittedly) capitalism is “solely the restless stirring for gain, this absolute desire for enrichment,” but efficacious desire for enrichment, though (alas) it has corrupted our holiness and demeaned our nobility. I want to persuade both of you that your beliefs that capitalism is especially greedy, and the bourgeoisie sadly ignoble and unspiritual, might---just might---be mistaken. And I want to persuade you both that to go on bad-mouthing a life of commerce is bad for our souls, and is death to our politics.
ANU conference 1996 Part 1 The Shifting Rhetoric of the Aristocratic and then Bourgeois English Needs to Be Explained I want to have little summaries of every Part and Chapter, to avoid the claim that my argument is hard to follow. I therefore also want to make every Part of Chapter title a declarative and summarizing sentence. Few of the summaries in this version are adequate. I’ll rewrite all of them at the very end of the project, when each chapter says what it says. Something happened to the standing of a bourgeois life in England between 1600 and 1776. With whom? How to prove? Where exactly? In what respects exactly? A sheer, material, Marxist "rise of the bourgeoisie" does not seem to explain it. Chapter 1: Bourgeois Precursors Were Ancient Markets and exchange appear to have existed always, or at any rate from the invention of language. Long-distance trade is the most glamorous, Marco Polo, Kubla Khan and all that. From the earliest times the obsidian for knife blades from the Valley of Mexico and from central Turkey turns up hundreds of miles away from its source. Lapis lazuli, a blue gemstone (it was for a long time the sole source of blue paint), comes only from Afghanistan, yet litters archaeological sites far away in the Mideast and South Asia. Amber from the shores of the Baltic Sea ends up in Egyptian grave goods. People tend to imagine therefore that long distance trade matters the most. We still believe it---witness the recent obsession with the U.S. trade balance with China. But “penny capitalism,” as the anthropologist Sol Tax once called it, occurs in every society, and matters more to the life of people.6 My big piece of cloth for ten of your bone needles. Most American competition and cooperation---for trade involved both---is with other Americans, even the ones down the street. Local markets and exchange, always, dominate the trade in exotic goods, quantitatively speaking. You spend more dollars on plumbing repair and police work and school teaching and dry cleaning earned by people in your own town than on hammers and answering machines from people in China. And therefore most of us nowadays are traders, many even in hunter-gatherer societies, and certainly always in conditions of settled agriculture. You can defame this oldest profession, of being a kind of merchant, as “greedy” if you want, though naming ordinary exchange that we all participate in after a terrible, prideful, idolatrous sin seems prejudicial. You are being merely prudent to specialize and trade. We do it. So did some of the cave men, after language. The running of markets and exchange in towns, and therefore what I am calling the bourgeois life, is of course not so ancient. But from the earliest strata at Jericho in 8000 B.C. the towns have traded, because---to speak of sheer human geography---no town above a couple of thousand in population can live entirely on cultivating the land without trading its services for food. With large numbers crammed into a town not everyone could live by trudging out to the local grain field each morning. The fields get too far away. In well-watered Europe in the Middle Ages the area of two football fields in grain could support a person for a year, and perhaps could likewise in irrigated Mesopotamia. The average round trip per day would then be one mile for a town of 1000, two miles for a town of 2000, and so on in proportion. It gets onerous fast, though to this day many peasants worldwide in fact do it. The economic logic of course runs the same way, and more powerfully. As Adam Smith said in 1776, “the division of labor is limited by the extent of the market.” The bigger the place, the higher the proportion of people who find it prudent to specialize in pottery or weaving or keeping accounts. Even in an unspecialized hunter-gatherer band the women specialize in hearth-linked activities, the men in venturing forth, or smoking. The crippled man among the Ilongot who specializes in being a little factory for scrapers and arrow points, or the gifted woman in being a shaman, get their food from a trade in manufactures or services. Such a nascent middle class grows larger as the town does. You may be 30% faster at throwing pots relative to your own plowing rate than other people, but the comparative advantage does you little good in a village of 100 souls, because after all there are too few people to buy your great output. In a big town of 10,000, however, it will be worth your while to hang out a shingle and specialize. And in a metropolis of 100,000 you will hire apprentice potters, make each year 70,000 big pots with your own characteristic design, and become well and truly bourgeois. And so if the archaeologist’s spade uncovers a big town, it’s a sure thing that many non-peasants lived in it. No surprise, of course: our image of towns from ancient and not-so-ancient writings such as the Hebrew Bible or The Thousand and One Nights, or from historical accounts of life in Athens, or, truth be told, from movies by Cecil B. DeMille, are not populated by field-bound peasants. Towns such as Ur, Kish, and Nippur dotting Mesopotamia south of modern Baghdad began around 5000 B.C. as agricultural villages with peasants clustered to protect their stored grain and to honor their local gods. By 3000 B.C. the typical substantial town would be two to four thousand, as Eresh was.7 In Eresh there would still be quite a few peasants, if not only them. But a great city like Uruk, with a wall Gilgamesh himself claimed to have had built 9 km round, would have held 40,000 to 160,000 people, most of them not walking to any field.8 Around 2000 B.C. the ur-city of Ur seems to have had a population of about 200,000.9 And so to Changan (X’ian), China in 195 B.C. at 400,000 and Rome in 25 B.C. at 450,000, down to Beijing in 1500 A.D. at 672,000 and Istanbul in 1500 at 900,000. Such city people were mainly neither peasants nor aristocrats. Almost all were traders in an extended sense---not growing anything and not taxing anything. The bought low and sold high, made finished goods from purchased raw materials, serviced the rest of economic activity in jobs as scribes, lawyers, surveyors, teamsters, manufacturing workers. Take the proletarians and slaves out of the big-town total and what’s left is a bourgeoisie, the minority in the town who made their livings managing by sweet words the markets for goods and labor and land. * * * *
Immediately, though, one runs into a gigantic scholarly controversy fueled by politics. It’s that way with all writing about the bourgeoisie since Rousseau and especially since Marx. You can’t mention the word “bourgeoisie” without raising blood pressures all around. This is a good place to deal with the controversy: immediately. During the late 1930s Karl Polanyi, a refugee in London from the chaos of interwar Central Europe, researched what he believed was the history of markets, publishing the results in 1944 while financed by the Rockefeller Foundation at Bennington College in Vermont, as The Great Transformation. The book is still read eagerly, and has never gone out of print. Googling it in 2007 yielded fully 123,000 entries, to be compared with smaller numbers for similar and similarly long-lived books from the time: 97,200 for Joseph Schumpeter’s Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy (1942), 64,700 for Friedrich Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom (1944), and 19,000 for Eric Williams’ Capitalism and Slavery (1944)---though we academic scribblers need to be humbled by learning that Ayn Rand’s, The Fountainhead (1943) gets 351,000 hits, and still sells 100,000 copies a year. Polanyi was a lifelong socialist---his beloved wife Elena was one of the founders of the Hungarian Communist Party---and believed that markets, the bourgeoisie, and capitalism were mere vulgar novelties, mere interruptions in more civilized ways of making our daily bread. He wrote for example that the labor market in England did not exist until the 19th century. Until then English people, he claimed, did not work under the discipline of supply and demand. Wages, he said, were conventional, decided in a social contract of reciprocity, as it were. He said the same of land sales, and indeed he did not think that so-called “markets” in grain and the like before recent times were anything other than administrative methods for provisioning the people. The bourgeoisie was recent, the market was a parvenu, capitalism was an ethical catastrophe of recent origin. The Polanyi history of England is utterly, completely, even embarrassingly mistaken. Half of southern Englishmen were laborers as early as the 13th century, and land in large and small plots was vigorously traded by all levels of society. We have the documents, and have gotten more and more and more of them as the intellectual haze surrounding the Middle Ages has lifted.10 Markets pervaded all of Europe from the earliest times, as they pervaded much of the world. Kingdoms, wives, and immortal salvation could be bought and sold. Contrary to what most educated people believe, Europe and certainly England was from the earliest times thoroughly “monetized” and nothing like a “subsistence” economy depending on barter. It would be difficult otherwise to explain the English danegelt of 991 and later, assessed in silver, or coin hoards found at every chronological level from Gaulish time, or the ubiquity of money measures in the earliest records, such as the Domesday Book of 1086. Such facts have been known for a long time, and recently their meaning has become still clearer. As the leading scholar of trade in the “Dark Ages” wrote in 2001, “economic historians are moving increasingly to the view that the advanced regions of the Frankish economy [i.e. of Charlemagne and his son Louis the Pious, ruling over all of France, most of Germany, the north of Italy 771-840] were more monetized than almost anyone dreamed three decades ago.”11 Really, most of what you think you know about how things worked in the Middle Ages---a hazy theory that Polanyi and you and I acquired from schoolbooks and journalism reflecting the earliest generations of historical scholars, especially 19th-century German scholars---has proven to be wrong. Peasants were in fact, it has been discovered, profiteering and rational, as people are in Grimms’ fairy tales. They used money, ditto. They were individualists, ditto. They could move house and job, ditto. Unlike “peasants” viewed through the Romantic lens in modern times, they were not in a sense “peasants” at all. One would have thought that the Romantic historians would have listened to the Grimms. In 1979 the historical anthropologist Alan Macfarlane summarized the long-exploded theory as “a progression from small, isolated communities inhabited by ‘peasants’ . . . towards the market, monetized, ‘open’ structure of the eighteenth century,” and showed it for England to be entirely mistaken.12 Macfarlane has done ample work himself on the primary documents exposing the mistakes, but in 1979 he was building also on 70 years of revisionism in medieval economic and social history. One could go on and on about the gross errors in Polanyi’s economic history.13 It’s as I say embarrassingly bad stuff---though less embarrassing in Polanyi himself, who wrote in understandable ignorance of the frontiers of medieval scholarship since 1900 and especially since 1945, than it is in his numerous followers nowadays. They have less excuse.14 In later work down to his death in 1964 Polanyi and his associates tried to demonstrate that the ancient world followed his anti-market model, and in particular that ancient Mesopotamia did. As socialists they wanted the market and the bourgeois life to be a mere recent stage, now thankfully to be superseded by the re-establishment of the communism that most intellectuals in the 1940s believed the remote past saw and the future would hold. True, Polanyi conceded, local markets are ubiquitous. But such “markets” are embedded in local culture, an outgrowth of his first master category of anti-marketism, householding, the women’s realm. “Local markets are, essentially, neighborhood markets,” where women flock to gather provisions for the nest (Polanyi, Great Transformation, p. 62). Local markets, Polanyi said, are not a big part of commerce. (He was again, as I said, mistaken in his history and his anthropology: penny capitalism is big.) No real capitalist market could be expected to emerge from that, he said. (He was mistaken again, though the belief persists that only big capitalists are real capitalists; thus Braudel DATE, pp. . In truth a great merchant is a trader in the village market writ large. That the one is male and the other female, we have since learned to keep in mind, does not automatically make the one serious and the other trivial.) Polanyi’s second and emphatically non-market category, reciprocal exchange, involves ritualized gift giving and receiving. The relations are highly personal: “the right person at the right occasion should return the right kind of object” (Polanyi, The Livelihood of Man, p. 39). The model is politeness among friends. Like Malinowski’s Trobriand Islanders, a whole society in which reciprocity is prominent usually has low population and little division of labor. (Polanyi apparently did not realize that in the hands of Marcel Mauss the realm of gift-giving had in the 1920s been brought under the species of markets.15) Redistribution, on the other hand, occurs sometimes even in large economies. “Redistribution obtains within a group to the extent that in the allocation of goods (including land and natural resources) they are collected in one hand and distributed by virtue of custom, law, or ad hoc central decision.”16 The model is kingship and socialism, but the deeper model is the family, in which the mother redistributes food. The point here is that Polanyi asserted that ancient Greece, China, and India, the empire of the Incas, the New Kingdom of Egypt, the Dahomey Kingdom of West Africa, and in particular Hammurabi’s Babylonia, were all organized on the principle of redistribution. He rejected the economistic vision of trade and markets. Polanyi wrote in 1944 that “broadly, the proposition holds that all economic systems known to us up to the end of feudalism in Western Europe were organized either on the principles of reciprocity or redistribution, or householding, or some combination of the three.”17 He claimed that so-called “market” prices are nothing of the sort, but merely “equivalences” determined by, say, the code of Hammurabi, not by supply and demand. And he claimed that so-called “merchants” in such societies, in particular in the ancient Near East, were in fact governmental or temple officials, not anything like the bourgeois merchants of modern capitalism. This tale of ancient anti-economism, as I and many other students of the matter say, also appears to be mistaken. The evidence is less embarrassingly overwhelming than it is for the importance of markets in England before 1800. Still, we have a lot of evidence, much of it collected after Polanyi’s ideas were innocently formed, and sometimes indeed in response to his eloquent advocacy. And sometimes it even works in favor of a redistributive model. Michael McCormick has argued that shipments of wheat in payment of taxes (the annona, the annual distribution to the populace of Rome or, later, Constantinople, ending there in 618 A.D.) came to dominate trade in the western Mediterranean just as more commercial trade declined. “On the eve of its destruction, more and more of the eggs of [very] late Roman [i.e. eastern Empire, Constantinople] shipping had come to rest in the basket of the annona. So it was that, comparatively speaking, commercial shipping lessened to its lowest point in centuries in the second half of the seventh century.”18 But this way of putting it emphasizes his greater theme: that before and after the “destruction,” as late as the sixth century and as early as the late eighth century, the merchants were rushing around western Europe in search of private profit. Mostly the evidence works against redistribution or lack of real markets. We now know for example a great deal about daily life in ancient Mesopotamians, because the folk of that region wrote on cheap and permanent clay instead of stone or papyrus, the one expensive, the other transient. In 1920, unhappily, early in the history of Assyriology, Anna Schneider wrote an influential book claiming that the economy of the town of Lagash in southern Iraq was run on the basis of redistribution by the priests of the local temple. Since Lagash was the only town then excavated, her book had an impact. The problem was that she relied on evidence collected from the very temple, which as another Assyriologist, Daniel Snell, remarked recently, “quite reasonably showed the concerns of the temple leaders and staff members.”19 “Traces of the temple theory persist in textbooks,” Snell notes, and influenced Polanyi. But in 1969 Ignace Gelb and in 1972 Klaas Veenhof eradicated even the traces.20 They showed that Mesopotamian merchants were mostly independent of state or temple, that is, that they were bourgeois traders. In view of other evidence on the presence of hired workers, plainly, from the earliest times, and commonplace after 2100 B.C., and transactions in land from the earliest times, plainly, Polanyi’s notion that ancient Sumer or the central and northern Mesopotamian states were entirely non-market societies has not paid off. So it was with every one of his searches for marketless societies. Late in his life he himself admitted so.21 * * * * And yet the failure of the Polanyi search for an earlier society entirely free of the damned economists’ and capitalists’ markets does not imply that his more fundamental point was wrong. His point was that markets are, as the modern sociologists express it, “embedded,” which is merely to say that marketeers are people, too. It was a point that Adam Smith devoted his life to making. Across cultures and for most of human history, Polanyi argued, material exchange had meaning far beyond than individual want-satisfaction. That’s right. Think of your taste in furniture. Trade affirmed and strengthened the social values of the larger community. Yes. Think of your gas grill for neighborhood cookouts or your plasma TV for the Superbowl party. Trade occurs right down to your last trade with a meaning and in a manner that a mere economist who has never read Smith will not fully understand. To be sure. In other words, Polanyi was in this---I say as an economist who was for decades hostile to such views, and hadn’t read Smith seriously---on to something. I am still justified in my lofty disdain for the anti-market burden of his work, and especially the work of his followers like the great classicist Moses Finley or the great political scientist James C. Scott or the great economist Douglass North. Yet Polanyi’s extra “something” humbles even the proud economist. It is for example the main point of this present book. The economist Arjo Klamer has developed a context for markets rather similar to Polanyi’s, but free of Polanyi’s passionate and evidence-skirting distaste for the market.22 The agora, the marketplace, as Klamer puts it, is prominent in all societies, but flanked of course by the private oikos, the household, and the polis, the government. Klamer points also to what he calls the Third Sphere---that is, a third public sphere additional to the agora and polis, a sphere for a cultural commons in which “people realize social values like community, a sense of identity, solidarity, neighborhood, country, security, conviviality, friendship and so on.”23 Those barbeques, those Superbowl parties. You could also call it, and Klamer does, the conversation of the culture. The Third Sphere, in other words, depends as the others do on Klamer’s master concept, the “conversation”---the conversation about being an American male or a Dutch merchant or a person who values modern art or an executive developing trust in a business relationship. Thus Akira Okazaki of Japan Airlines played cards endlessly with fisherman from Prince Edward Island in Canada during the 1970s to develop a backhaul business in bluefin-tuna-on-ice for the sushi market back home.24 Talk, talk, talk. Realize social values. And do a little business on the side. The anthropologist Alan Page Fiske has developed still another balanced version of embeddedness, which can be partially matched to Polanyi’s and Klamer’s categories and to the much older tradition in Europe of the seven virtues. In his Structures of Social Life Fiske speaks of "market pricing" as one of his four "elementary forms." The other three---communal sharing [you get meat because you belong to Our Crowd], authority ranking [I am the chief, so I get more meat], equality matching [we're all in this together, so let's make the amounts of meat exactly the same for everyone]---do not involve prices, that is, exchange rates between two different things, meat for milk, arrow points for cave paintings. The society must somehow decide on the prices, “the ratios of exchange,” and Fiske accepts, contrary to Polanyi, that in any society with markets---and I say most societies have them, and Fiske and Klamer agree---the “market decides, governed by supply and demand.”25 Fiske cleverly points out that the succession of four communal-authority-equality-market correspond to stages of human maturity up to about age 8, when kids finally accept exchange as against item-by-item equality.26 And even more cleverly he points out that the succession also correspond in the theory of scaling: categorical scales (in/out), ordinal (higher/lower), interval (same amounts), and ratio (“Archimedean ordered fields”). Here is how the various groupings lie down together: Fiske, Polanyi, Klamer, and the Virtues Yüklə 2,83 Mb. Dostları ilə paylaş:
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