July 28, 2018 Dear Reader

The speaking ability is quantitatively important in various bourgeois societies.

Commerce contains every sort of dealing in the purchase, sale, and exchange of domestic or foreign goods.  This art is beyond all doubt a peculiar sort of rhetoric—strictly of its own kind—for eloquence is in the highest degree necessary to it.  Thus the man who excels others in fluency of speech is called a Mercurius, or Mercury, as being a mercatorum kirrius (= kyrios)—a very lord among merchants

“Commerce” (thus half of the chapter),

Hugh of St. Victor (c. 1078-1141),

Didascalicon de Studio Legendi,

book 2, chapter 23 (trans. Jerome Taylor)

In some cases oratory and action are one. An offer to buy hamburger at $3.00 a pound is a “speech act” in the sense linguists and philosophers use the phrase, namely in that it produces results in the very act of speaking.⁴⁹⁷ Saying “I thee wed” is a mere form of words, which children can use in make-believe. But in the right circumstances the form of words does a deed. So does saying “I offer $3.00,” when followed by the reply, “Sold.” An unusually high price for beef “says” that more cattle should be raised. The eaters of beef converse with ranchers, telling them of their great hunger for steaks and hamburgers, backed by willingness to pay. The ranchers reply, “We shall be glad to give you more, but you must understand that we have expenses, too.” It is a passing of information.

But there is more to speech acts than passing information. An economist can understand a conversation as a game, in the technical sense. In Austin’s vocabulary, one must distinguish in such a game between the mere locution (“Let’s make a deal to fix prices” viewed merely linguistically) and the accompanying “illocution,” which is to say, the skillful social act that intends to persuade, say, some other oligopolists to form a monopoly. Illocutions are about intended persuasion. That is, they intend to change other people’s behavior or speech. An incompetent rhetor will say “I thee wed” on his first date or “Let’s make a deal” in the presence of lawyers from the Antitrust Division of the Department of Justice. Game theoretically speaking the illocutions are the moves of Mr. Column. The moves of Mr. Row are those of the audience for the illocutions. What the audience then does in response is called by Austin a “perlocution” (primary accent on the “per”). A linguist would want to go back to the locutions; an economist would like to rush on to the perlocutions. But, as Sandy Petrey explains, the key to bringing language and the economy together is to stick with the middle term, the illocutions, those skillful or clumsy, felicitous or infelicitous acts of sweet persuasion that take up one quarter of national income.⁴⁹⁸

Look for example at the vexed theory of the entrepreneur. As Metin Cosgel and Arjo Klamer have argued, the entrepreneur is above all a persuader, in the classical word a “rhetor,” exercising the characteristic faculty of human nature for pay.⁴⁹⁹ Take the egregious Donald Trump . . . please. Trump offends. But for all the jealous anger he has provoked he is not a thief. He did not get his billions from aristocratic cattle raids, acclaimed in bardic glory. He did not use a broadsword or a tommy gun to get people to agree. He made, as he puts it, deals, described from his point of view in his book, Trump: The Art of the Deal. He bought the Commodore Hotel in New York low and sold it high. Penn Central, Hyatt Hotels, and the New York Board of Estimates valued the old hotel low; the customers valued the new place, suitably trumped up, high. Trump earned his entrepreneurial profit for noticing that a hotel in a low-valued use could be moved into a high-valued use. An omniscient central planner would have ordered exactly the same reallocation.

Crucially, Trump had the power of persuasion to close the deals, the art of felicitous speech acts. As he puts it, “you have to convince the other guy it’s in his interest to make the deal.”⁵⁰⁰ Persuasion was the main way he transformed the Commodore Hotel into the Grand Hotel: “First, I had to keep [the owners of the hotel] believing [such and such]. . . . At the same time, I had to convince an experienced hotel operator to [do so and so). . . . I also had to persuade city officials [thus and such] . . . . That [persuasion] . . . would make it far easier to prove to the banks that [so and such].”⁵⁰¹

Though featured on the front page of the business section daily, the point is ancient. A Sanskrit poet complained of the skilled persuader, as people do: “I have not skill to place my lips / upon another’s ear / nor can deceive a master’s heart / by inventing false adventures. / Too stupid as I to have learned / to speak words false but sweet; / what have I then to recommend me / to be a rich man’s friend?”⁵⁰² Thomas Buddenbrooks did deals. His partner, Herr Marcus, the former confidential clerk, a hired manager, “was incapable of that sort of thing.”⁵⁰³ Shih-Yen Wu has pointed out that the entrepreneur is precisely the unhired, unroutine character in the story of capitalism, the last and never to enter the market. The very meaning of the entrepreneur, he argues, is his unmarketed residuality.⁵⁰⁴ What then is in the residual? The Austrian economist Israel Kirzner, I noted, has argued that entrepreneurial profits are a reward for “alertness.” Calculative rationality, however, cannot make much of entrepreneurs.⁵⁰⁵

Technological change can be viewed from this perspective. The systematic search for inventions can be expected in the end to earn only as much as its cost. It is hard work, merely. The routine inventor is an honest workman, but is worthy therefore only of his hireand ceases in Wu’s terms to be an entrepreneur at all. The costs of routine improvements in the steam engine of 1800 ate up the profit. They had better have, or else the improvements were not routine. Routine improvements are not free lunches. As the economic historian Joel Mokyr put it, “The cold and calculating minds of Research-and-Development engineers in white lab coats worn over three-piece suits” created some of the improvements.⁵⁰⁶ But only some.

Nor, on the other hand, is it reasonable to hand technological history over to mere chance, the other end of Kirzner’s spectrum. Mokyr shows this from the records of invention. What was required was something between dull effort and heedless luck, namely, a bird-like alertness, ready to get the worm. The alertness explains why entrepreneurs are worthy of their hire.

But the Trump story suggests that something is missing in the metaphor of “alertness,” needed to complete the theory. From an economic point of view, alertness by itself is academic, in both the good and the bad sense. It is both intellectual and ineffectual, the occupation of the spectator, as Addison put it, who is “very well versed in the theory of a husband or a father, and can discern the errors of the economy, business, and diversion of others better than those engaged in them.”

If his observation is to be effectual, however, the spectator has to persuade a banker. Even if he is himself the banker he has to persuade himself, in the councils of his own mind. What is missing, then, from the Austrian theory of entrepreneurship and technological change is persuasion. Between the conception and the creation, between the invention and the innovation, falls the shadow. Power runs between the two, and power is evoked with persuasive words. An idea without the persuasive words is just an idea. “A man may know the remedy, / But if he has not money, what’s the use? / He is like one sitting without a goad / on the head of must [lust intoxicated] elephant.”⁵⁰⁷ This is as true of literary or scientific opportunity as it is of technological invention. Until he won the Goncourt Prize in 1919, Proust was not much considered. The Prize persuaded the French public to take him seriously. Until Saul Bellow put his imprimatur on William Kennedy's books (Ironweed and other Albany novels), Kennedy worked unknown as a reporter on the local newspaper. Intellectual bankers need to be persuaded as much as financial ones. The same is true of science. Scientists pursue certification as much as they pursue knowledge, because knowledge without persuasion of an audience is useless, the curse of Cassandra, to know all but to be able to persuade nobody.

What makes alertness work, and gets it power, then, is persuasion. At the root of technological progress is a rhetorical environment that makes it possible for inventors to be heard. Or as Lawrence Berger has argued, the “attention” of the entrepreneurs may be alerted.⁵⁰⁸ The environment of persuasion or attention affected technological change, especially the great technological changes. The Industrial Revolution, one might venture as a hypothesis to be examined, was rhetorical (as Wu 1989 has argued, too). The division of labor, in short, is limited by the extent of the talk. The more specialized is the economy, the more divided is the airplane into special makers or the distribution of meat into special merchants, the more talk is necessary to establish trust among the cooperators. Trust is part of an economics of talk.

The observation that small communities talk to each other more easily than do large communities is of course a sociological cliché. Knowledge of a bad deal will fill a small town but is lost in the din of a metropolis. Plato said in the Laws (V, 737e) that the optimal city state had 5040 citizens, on the strange grounds that this number is evenly divisible by every number from 1 to 10, the better to form exactly equal-sized groups for political or military purposes. Aristotle on characteristically more sensible grounds said that “the citizens of a state must know one another’s characters” (Politics VII. iv, 13). The extreme case of a small town is a two-person society, in which Robinson Crusoe knows every defection by Friday, and vice versa. Furthermore, in this case Crusoe and Friday do all their business with each other. In a world of strangers, by contrast, a new sucker arrives every minute. It is good business to establish friendships with your suppliers and customers and even with your competitors (who may be employing you next year). The dealings of strangers are subject to defection from social norms. In a world of Hobbesian asocial monads the next stranger you meet would just as soon shoot you as shake your hand (Field). That is why the airlines are crowded with business travelers, on their way to making friends.

The economic point of friendship and other supergames is to establish rules of interpretation that cannot be broken cheaply. The literary critic Wayne Booth speaks of “stable irony,” which is to say irony in such a context that it can be reliably interpreted. A similar point was made by the philosopher Grice, noting “conversational implicatures,” the rules by which a conversation lives. One “maxim of conversation,” we have seen, is “the maxim of Quality,” that is, to state only what you believe to be true. A conversation of liars would end in paradox.

What is economically suggestive about the linguistic idea is that such maxims are implicated by the very act of conversation. Grice argues that they are not conventional, in the sense that different cultures could have different maxims, but are implied by the setting of any talk. In other words, they are dominant strategies of talk (Green 1989, p. 96 makes a good case that the anthropological evidence supports Grice). False, perverse, prolix, laconic, irrelevant, disordered, obscure talk does not serve the purposes of straight talk. As soon as it is recognized as aberrant it will be broken off, or else reinterpreted as crooked talk to some purpose. If a banker says falsely “Business is fine” in circumstances such as a bank examiner’s visit in which he is expected to be candid he will continue the conversation in jail. On the other hand, the examiner, seeing the books are $1,000,000 short, and knowing that the banker knows he knows, may take the remark as proper irony about the malfeasance of a former vice president, now a resident of Brazil.

And it is obvious, to give another example of the saliency of talk, that cooperation inside the firm depends on speech. Persuasion through speech is necessary for teamwork, from a coxswain pounding out the strokes per minute to Colonel Joshua L. Chamberlain (a professor of rhetoric in civilian life) persuading the 20^th Maine to make a bayonet charge down Little Round Top at the Battle of Gettysburg. David Lodge’s novel, Nice Work, shows an English professor, Robyn Penrose, realizing that the businessman she was assigned to watch was first a persuader:

[I]t did strike [her] that Vic Wilcox stood to his subordinates in the relation of teacher to pupils. . . . [S]he could see that he was trying to teach the other men, to coax and persuade them to look at the factory’s operations in a new way. He would have been surprised to be told it, but he used the Socratic method: he prompted the other directors and middle managers and even the foremen to identify the problems themselves and to reach by their own reasoning the solutions he had himself already determined upon. It was so deftly done that she had sometimes to temper her admiration by reminding herself that it was all directed by the profit-motive.

Lodge 1988 (1990), p. 219.

The point is this: the Prudence-only search for a selfish models of efficiency wages, agency costs, insider-outsider deals, and the like will be half successful. Motivating people by deals will work only if the deals convey to them the right story of their own lives. The earning of profit, for example, can be justified on moral and on utilitarian grounds. But it can also be justified as something we bourgeois Westerners (or Easterners) do, a practice of ours, a habit that makes us what we are. The score-keeping in business is otherwise hard to understand. People rich beyond the dreams of avarice continue to play a game of entrepreneurship.
* * * *
And so it is unsurprising to find experts in talk as theorists of bourgeois virtues virtue in the 19^th century. The experts were common-law lawyers. The Man of Contracts and Torts, the “reasonable man,” imagined most systematically in the 19^th century was the ideal bourgeois character. Is in fact of contract law a bourgeois as against aristocratic or peasant character? Perhaps the common law has always been a stalking horse for bourgeois virtues.

Patrick Atiyah outlines the mid-19^th-century contract law, “suited to the free market,” in terms that are on every point hostile to aristocratic or peasant/proletarian values). The parties deal with each other “at arm’s length. . . . Neither owes any fiduciary obligation to another,” which is to say that only equals unbound by loyalty, not master and man in a feudal society, could make a contract. “Neither party owes an duty to the other until a deal is struck.” No solidarity in an imagined village or neighborhood intervenes. “[N]either party is . . . entitled to rely on the other except within the narrowest possible limits.” These are independent actors. “Only abnormal pressures, wholly exceptional pressures, which can be said to affect a party’s free consent or free will . . . [can] relieve him of his obligations.” A man of the market in bound by his word, but a word given in contract, not assumed in status. “Finally, this bindingness is . . . a matter of pecuniary calculation. . . . [H]e must therefore perform, or pay damages.” He who lives by the coin dies by the coin.⁵⁰⁹

Now of course this is not a portrait of actual bourgeois societies. Contract theory was abstractions the way classical economics was, and in the same spirit: prudence only mattered. Real bourgeois societies cannot function with skeletal rules based on the notion that no one cares for anyone else for one thing, no bourgeois child would survive childhood under such a dispensation (see David Copperfield, Oliver Twist, Hard Times, and indeed every novel by Dickens ).

As Lawrence Friedman (quoted with approval in Atiyah) expressed the situation in America: “’Pure‘ contract is blind to details of subject matter and person. . . . In the law of contract it does not matter if either party is a woman, a man, an Armenian-American, a corporation . . . . [A]s soon as it does matter—if the party is a minor, or if . . . a small auto company sells out to General Motors . . .—we are no longer talking pure contract.”⁵¹⁰ Thus before the 19^th century a common carrier (a taxicab, say) or an hotelier was bound by who he was, not by a presumed contract. During the 19^th century, Atiyah explains, the English courts (as in Boorman v. Brown 1844 and especially Morgan v. Ravey 1861) “blurred the line, drawn by [David] Hume a century before, between two parties doing an act in agreement with each other [as a serf would with respect to his lord], and their making an agreement.”⁵¹¹ If you step into a cab you and the driver, the courts held, are entering into a sort of contract. You are not lord and serf but free people bargaining.

The Great Conversion against such economistic reasoning took place after 1870 in the law of contract as elsewhere in bourgeois societies. Atiyah notes that relations between citizens and a vastly larger state will naturally follow not contract law but administrative law with such leading principles as that a state is reckoned an idiot at law, unable to bind itself by its promises.⁵¹² Tort law, growing as Lawrence Friedman notes with the railway, was at first chiefly concerned to protect corporations, and therefore economic growth, though it, too, fell under the Great Conversion late in the 19^th century.⁵¹³ Tort law is of course about victims, and does not therefore comport well with the bourgeois notion that we are all free, independent, contract-making, and unattached men. The point of tort is that we are all pieces of the continent, part of the main, most particularly in an industrial society.

Another miscellaneous chapter, mere notes. I intend to use Ibsen’s vision of an idealism of ordinary life.

Chapter 31:

Bourgeois Virtue is an Idealism of Ordinary Life

Said Machiavelli, “it is easy to understand the affection people have for living in liberty, for experience shows that no cities have ever grown in power or wealth except those that have been established as free states.”⁵¹⁴ The Episcopal Bishop of Massachusetts, William Lawrence, asked in 1901 whether the rise of income in the previous decade “favorable or unfavorable to the morality of the people.”⁵¹⁵ He answered, yes, on the whole. The rich man is led to “the privilege of grateful service.” And the poor “discovers one bond which is essential to the social unity in this commercial age—the bond of faith in other men. . . . And when a man has reached this point, he has indeed reached one of the high plateaus of character: from this rise the higher mountain of Christian grace, but here he is on the standing-ground of the higher civilization.”⁵¹⁶ Those two summarize it: power and wealth depends on the virtues of a free state; and rising income can---not always---lead to virtue.

Capitalism made people free, for one thing by spreading ownership, as Jefferson and others argued (but this is the lesser reason, for it also corrupts, as in Jefferson’s ownership of slaves, for example, or as in the selfishness of manufacturers for their own interests, as Smith noted). The greater reason is the substitution of contract for status, and the spread of radical egalitarianism of a Protestant sort.
M

Rewrite when the book is finished drafting: come back at end. It’s about the right size now, 4800 words. Maybe smaller?
Chapter 32: How One Might See

the Coming of a Bourgeois Rhetoric as Good

Two things happened 1600-1848, and the more so 1848-the present. For one thing, the material methods of production were transformed. For another, the social position of the bourgeoisie was raised. (What would Shakespeare find bizarre had he returned to London in 1760 on the ascension of George III or 1848 or 1910 or 2010? The list in rough chronological order: BV, nationalism (tho this early, and after all he articulated it: “This realm”), technology, religious toleration, free speech, scientific revolution, limited monarchy, population growth, income growth (< technology), British empire, votes for B (1832) and P (1867), rights for women).

The two were connected, as mutual cause an effect. If the social position of the bourgeoisie had not been raised, aristocrats and their governments would have crushed innovation, by regulation or by tax, as they had always done. And the bourgeois gentilhomme himself would not have turned inventor. If the material methods of production had not therefore been transformed, the social position of the bourgeoisie would not have continued to rise. Without honor to the bourgeoisie, no modern economic growth. (This last is in essence Milton Friedman's Thesis). Without modern economic growth, no honor to the bourgeoisie. (This last is in essence Benjamin Friedman's Thesis.) The two Friedmans capture the essence of freed men, and women and slaves and queers and colonial people and all the others freed by the development of bourgeois virtues. The causes were freedom, the scientific revolution (not of course in its direct technological effects, which were postponed largely until the 20^th century), and bourgeois virtue. What we can show is that the usual suspects do not work. Material causes do not work. And so we must recur—as other economic historians like Mokyr are recurring—to spiritual causes. The only alternative is the Feinstein Hypothesis, a conjuncture of material causes that came together like Hardy's Hap ("twain"). The word “spiritual” is a worry in English. It would be better to use the German, Geist, which has not such sell of incense about it.
An earlier book, The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Capitalism (2006), argued that a businessperson can be ethical without abandoning her business. The seven primary virtues of any human life—prudence, temperance, justice, courage, faith, hope, and love—also run a business life. Businesspeople are people, too. "Bourgeois virtues" is therefore not a contradiction in terms. On the contrary, capitalism works badly without the virtues. And the virtues can be nourished in a market, and often have been.

The peasant of olden times in Europe emphasized love among the virtues. She admired most the medieval saint. By contrast, her lord and master, the aristocrat, emphasized courage, admiring the Homeric or knightly hero. And nowadays the bourgeoisie worldwide emphasizes prudence. We are all nowadays bourgeois, though exactly whom we admire—Ben Franklin or Bill Gates, Jane Austen or Ayn Rand—has not been entirely worked out. We keep being drawn back in our stories and our philosophies into a Christian or an aristocratic ethic, or into the corresponding pre-bourgeois ethic in other societies, such as merchant-despising Confucianism or heroic tales from the Mahabharata. In Europe the old Christian or aristocratic stories, the Sermon on the Mount or the wrath of Achilles, good as they are for elevating the virtues of love or courage, interfere with the bourgeois stories we might properly be telling about the seven virtues in a commercial society.

"Elevating" one virtue among the seven is the problem. A fully human life in a castle, nunnery, or marketplace can't flourish with one virtue alone. In fact, one Christian definition of sin is the exercise of a single virtue without corresponding balance of the others, justice without mercy, faith with out hope. A hero who only ventures courageously, without justice or temperance, will damage himself and his companions. Witness your reckless uncle. A saint who only intervenes lovingly, without courage or prudence, will damage herself and her loved ones. Witness your absorbing aunt. And so likewise a businessperson who deals in the marketplace prudently, yes, but without justice, temperance, courage, faith, hope, and love, damages herself and her fellows. A false bourgeois ethic of prudence only, "Greed Is Good," such as modern economics came to recommend in the late 20^th century, doesn't work.

The sociologist Peter Berger argues that globalization makes people aware of alternatives, perforce. A globalization going on in Europe since the 15^th century challenged the old "taken-for-grantedness" of, say, a Catholic farmer in a 16^th-century Swiss village, who never once in his life encountered a Protestant or a Jew. Some people in reaction, Berger observes, try to form closed communities of belief, despite the ocean of pluralism around them. We are Amish, they say. Leave us alone. We are fundamentalist Southern Baptists. Shut up. Or—my point here—we are Wall-Street-Journal-reading conservatives or New-York-Times-reading liberals, forming separate and strictly closed communities of belief. We won't read that. You can't tell us that capitalism is anything but greed, for good (says The Wall Street Journal) or ill (says The New York Times).

The better response, Berger argues, is the engaged toleration—not indifference, but conversation—that he sees in parts of Indonesian Islam or in parts of American Christianity. Likewise, I say, for politics and economics. The modern, secular clerisy, left or right, in other words, should try listening. If it does, it will hear that religion is not dead (Berger's point), that faith and hope always need dignified expression in human lives, that capitalism is not in true fact or in sensible theory a system of greed.

So the first book.

The present book asks how an explicitly bourgeois ideology emerged 1600-1848 from a highly aristocratic and Christian Europe, a Europe entirely hostile—as some of our clerisy, I note, still are—to the very idea of bourgeois virtues. In 1946 the great student of capitalism, Joseph Schumpeter, declared that "a society is called capitalist if it entrusts its economic process to the guidance of the private businessman" (Encyc. Brit. 1946). It's the best short definition of that essentially contested concept, "capitalism." "Entrusting" the economy to businesspeople, Schumpeter explained, entails private property, private profit, and private credit. In such terms you can see the rockiness of the transition to capitalism in Russia, say, where agricultural land is still not private, and where private profit is still subject to prosecution by the state, the jailing of millionaires, the cutting down of tall poppies. And what Schumpeter leaves aside in the definition, though his life's work embodied it, is that the society—or at any rate the people who run it—must admire businesspeople. That is, they must think the bourgeoisie capable of virtue. It's this admiring of the bourgeois virtues that Russia lacks, and always has, whether ruled by boyars or tsars or commissars or, as now, by secret police.

Attributing great historical events to ideas was not popular in professional history for a long time. A hardnosed calculation of interest was supposed to explain all. Men and women of the left were supposed to believe in historical materialism, and many on the right were embarrassed to claim otherwise. The “dream of objectivity,” as Peter Novick called it, hasn’t work very well. Actual interest---as against imagined and often enough fantasized interest---did not cause World War I. The Pals Brigades did not go over the top at the Somme because it was in their prudent interest to do so. Non-slave-holding whites did not constitute most of the Confederate armies for economic reasons. Nor did abolition became a motivating cause because it was good for capitalism. And on and on, back to Achilles and Abraham. Daniel Jonah Goldhagen famously claimed about “Hitler’s willing executioners”---who were he argued the German people as a whole, not just a few bad apples---that “not economic hardship, not the coercive means of a totalitarian state, not psychological pressure, not invariable psychological propensities, but ideas about Jews that were pervasive in Germany, and had been for decades, induced ordinary Germans to kill” (Goldhagen 1996, p. 9). His book “reverses the Marxian dictum, in holding that consciousness determined being” (p. 455). Hitler’s Revolution (cite Iowa guy) “was, above all, a cognitive-moral revolution” (p. 456). We do well to watch for cognitive-moral revolutions, and not simply assume that Matter Rules, every time.

In 1600 English society, or at any rate the people who ran it, scorned the bourgeoisie and market considerations as much as Russia did in 1988. For example, because of their association with interest-taking and buying low to sell high, not to speak of Christ killing and the drinking of the blood of gentile children during Passover, it scorned Jews, such as the Shylock of fiction and Rodrigo Lopez, the Jewish physician to the queen of England in 1594 of actual fact. Yet by the 1650s some Jews of Amsterdam were readmitted (Jews had been expelled from England entirely in 1290), as Puritans and commercial boosters wished. In 1817 England began to be persuaded by a Jewish-origin political economist and member of Parliament, David Ricardo, to take market considerations very seriously indeed. By 1868 it was even willing to elect a Jewish-origin prime minister—who, by the way, in keeping with the new times after 1848 on the right and left advised against market considerations, and looked back nostalgically in his politics and his novels to the anti-market ethical world of 1600.

The claim of virtue for merchants and manufacturers was irritating to some people even by 1848. It still is in many circles. People see capitalism through Dickens’ later novels, Thomas Naste’s cartoons of the Robber Barons, and Jacob Riis’ photographs of sweatshops on the Lower East Side and NNN Booth’s accounts of London…….. and Sinclair Lewis’ account of George Babbitt. But to go on and on and on attacking market society on Marxist or Christian socialist or nostalgic conservative or haughty aristocratic grounds damages our bodies and our souls.

I ask how the startling change in ideology after 1600 happened. Part of the answer is, I find, is England's imitation in the late 17^th century of the Netherlands, already bourgeois. Part, surely, is the emptying out of Christianity, at any rate in the view of some advanced intellects, and anyway its redirection to this sublunary world in the view of many others. Another and related part is a new philosophical and anti-providential theme of prudence-only from Machiavelli through Hobbes to Bentham, and with it the breakdown of a society of status, the great chain of being from king to slave. The Enlightenment after Spinoza and Newton figures. So perhaps does Protestantism and the priesthood of all believers, reducing the prestige of priests. The absolute monarchs, allied with merchants against the troublesome but now gunpowder-vulnerable dukes, turned their aristocrats in France and Japan and Russia into what the Russians called a "service class," reducing the prestige of secular lords. The new national states play a role, if mainly merely the role of dangerously violent guardians of the merchants—or often enough instead the guardians of the absolute monarchs and their secret police.

And I ask why. The why, I'm afraid, the Lord only knows, and we will do well to remain humble in imagining that we can see into His reasons. Does the conflagration come from the match or the gasoline or the oxygen or the absence of a convenient fire alarm or the lack of alertness on the part of the night watchman? The epidemiologist Kenneth Rothman reports on a useful way of visualizing causes.⁵¹⁷ Instead of a linear model of Causes to Effects like Hume's billiard balls crashing, he notes that "causes" are sometimes better thought of as a pie chart, all the mutually necessary causes of the fire present:

presence of match

presence of oxygen presence of gasoline

absence of extinguisher

absence of firefighter

presence of irresponsible boy

etc., etc., etc.

If your human interest, Rothman notes, wants to draw attention to the absence of a handy fire-extinguisher, that absence too, can be added to the pie chart, and numerous other such hypothetical causes waiting in the wings. It's our call. It’s that way with "causes." Their selection is more like a story than a syllogism. It’s our, human word. The world beyond human speech, of course, puts limits on how big the slices can be—most empty buildings have plenty of oxygen lying around, for example, and so it would often not be of human interest to emphasize the presence of oxygen to explain the burnt building—though the oxygen is a cause, and professional fire-fighters ruminate a good deal on sources of more or less of it to feed fires, speaking for example of internal ventilating shafts as oxygen-supplying "chimneys." But the world by itself doesn't tell us what is humanly interesting to name as "a major cause" of a fire.

The economist Joseph Schumpeter, discussing this very issue of the allocation of causes between material and human, noted that: “every investigator will distribute emphasis as he pleases. . . . People will always differ as to whether the battle of Austerlitz was won by Napoleon, or by a social system, or by the French nation, or by a military apparatus and a technique inherited from the Revolution.”⁵¹⁸ The same point is called in Freud and I. A. Richards and Louis Althusser "over-determination." There is more than one narrative cause, more than one slice of the Rothmanian pie, that you can assign to answering why you married your wife, or indeed why you murdered her.

Perhaps some insight into the most humanly useful pie chart will emerge from answering how. Let us so pray. The sheer statistical "rise of the bourgeoisie" in numbers seems part of the cause, a popular one. But it's not all-powerful, or else earlier, local concentrations of bourgeois in 5^th-century Athens or 10^th-century Chinese cities would have caused the modern world before the modern world. The bourgeoisie, as the economic historian Jack Fisher pointed out long ago, is always rising. And the connection between bourgeois numbers and bourgeois ideology was not inevitable. Confucian ideology, for example, until it began to be challenged in the late 17^th century by Japanese bourgeois theorists, viewed merchants as very nearly the lowest of the classes—above tanners, butchers, and night soil collectors, but not much. It is certainly not the case that the “why” can be answered as, say, R. H. Tawney did in Religion and the Rise of Capitalism (date), the sudden appearance in the 16^th century of a new greediness [cite exact page]. Marx himself would agree with me, and with Max Weber, that [Weber quote from BV]. People have always been greedy. Witness the theme of greed, or at the least a persistent desire to improve ones material circumstances, in every folk literature from the Coyote tales of the Native Americans to the Thousand and One Nights, {Irish folk tales and the Book of Samuel Gifts guy specifically down to tales; pick one of the Nights; Synge book; look for greed stories in Samuel}. Greed is like oxygen in a well-ventilated building. It’s always there, and therefore not worth mentioning as causing the greatest change in the human condition since the invention of agriculture.

What seems simpler to answer than the why and its distressingly expandable causes is: with what consequence? Bluntly, the coming of a bourgeois rhetoric made possible the modern world. Unless society admires businesspeople, as English society certainly did by 1848, and with less rhetorical clarity did even by 1748, in sharp contrast to France in 1748, or England in 1600, it will not entrusts its economic process to the guidance of the private businessperson. No entrusting, no capitalism. No capitalism, no enriching of the world's poor. No enriching of the world's poor, no elevation of the world's spirit. Bourgeois rhetoric was a necessary cause, the match or the gasoline as you wish. Without it, no liberty, no literacy, no liberation of women, no breakdown of taken-for-grantedness, no relief from the poverty and ignorance of our ancestors, yours and mine, who were slaves, all of them, living on less than a dollar a day for tens of millennia. For the first time in the early 19^th century, uniquely, and a little earlier in Britain and much earlier in Holland, businesspeople even outside their own ranks, over a large area of a globalized market, came to be a little bit admired. Or at least not crushingly scorned. And European governments were briefly reined in by the same ideology, and later at least by a balance of interests, from scooping out the bourgeois profits for the greater honor of the state.

The bourgeois rhetoric, I am claiming, was a necessary condition, and maybe even a sufficient one, for the industrial revolution and for democracy. That is, it was necessary and maybe sufficient for the modern world. Certainly it is hard to see how an economy can flourish if autocrats, aristocrats, bureaucrats, patrocrats scorn the bourgeoisie, and are able to implement their scorn ("-crat" < kratos, "might, force") by putting hooks and chairs in the path of enterprise. Though one must be on the alert, as Adam Smith warned, of plutocrats, too, and what they can do via the country club in corrupting politics, the other crats have been uniformly worse for ordinary people. Killing a bourgeois-friendly rhetoric caused otherwise flourishing societies in the past to stagnate, at any rate by comparison with the rising world real income per head by a factor of eight in the face of population growth by a factor of six that bourgeois Europe has led since 1800. Thus Greece in its prime, Rome under the good emperors, China in the Ming dynasty, Japan under the Tokugawa shogunate. Such economies produced lovely vases for the ruling class but scant wheat or rice for the poor, and for the masses no cheap housing, transport, education. In our times an anti-bourgeois ideology has caused the economies of Venezuela under Chavez, Cuba under Castro, China under Mao, and leading them all Russia under Lenin and Stalin and Brezhnev to fail. If under a strictly anti-bourgeois ideology you close down vegetable markets and make home restaurants illegal, as the Cuban government did in the 1990s, you don't get many vegetables or restaurants. You can counterclaim if you wish that socialist economies failed because of imperialist intervention. I suggest that you are mistaken in your claim. They have failed regularly in the various experiments from New Harmony and the Paris Commune to the Bolsheviks and the British Labour Party not from their stars but from themselves. They would have failed if they had taken place on the nether moon. No bourgeois virtues, no modern world.

Smith’s assertion that freedom required exchange, not beggary, like Thomas Jefferson’s land-owning in aid of independence Self-Help, as Samuel Smiles put it revives an ancient, and even conservative, program of dignity. The great popularizer of classical political economy, Harriet Martineau, wrote of financial independence that it made possible an attitude of “Here I stand, and I defy anyone to despise me.”⁵¹⁹ Luther’s faith or the businessman’s treasure or the freeholder’s farm made independence possible.

Reproduce here the odd Dutch painting

of a bourgeois and his daughter in the presence of paupers.

And it is not very controversial to claim that the bourgeoisie stands against certain kinds of tyranny. Not all of them so stand, alas. A plutocratic, country-club tyranny of big oil and little property development has long been the power elite of the United States. But after all it is not the worst kind of elite—if you want to experience the worst kind of elite try a politburo or an aristocracy or a Robert Mugabe absolutely corrupted by absolute power. Perhaps if we keep whining the country club will graciously relent. And perhaps we can from time to time vote it out of office. And after all it is not perpetual: Sam Walton comes, the Adams family goes, and in the meantime the economy thrives and not too many people are killed.

The old liberal claim is that from the representation of the third estate in Parliament and the legal decisions of the parlements came the Western model of liberty. Admittedly, this naively optimistic, Whiggish history, the standard line in the 19^th century, especially in Britain and its offshoots, has been heavily challenged by more cynical historians in the 20^th century. But the optimistic story has at least one merit over competitors, such as the economic origins of the American constitution or the cultural logic of late capitalism. It's merit is that it is true. Without a bourgeoisie—Cuba's, for example, removed to Miami, leaving Cubans defenseless—no one stands against a tyrant. In an age of literal aristocrats one can depend on the Catos and the Hampdens to stand up. But lacking aristocrats nowadays we must fashion bourgeois protesters out of lawyers and ministers and the occasional outraged businessman.

My beginning point here is something I have reluctantly concluded after decades of thinking the exact opposite. It is: The alleged materialist causes of the modern world don't work. Or to put it more precisely, they work much too easily, and must therefore at best be enabling conditions, that oxygen, relevant but unhelpfully labeled “causes.” Many other countries at many other times have had the material circumstances of Birmingham or Philadelphia or Glasgow. If comparative prosperity and a fully marketized economy sufficed, then parts of India would have industrialized before Britain did. If foreign trade was an engine of growth, then Portugal, a great trading power from the 15^th century on, not England, would have manufactured textiles, to be traded within Portugal for port wine, in accord with principles of regional comparative advantage that would have been articulated in, say, 1617 by a Portuguese converso, rather than in 1817 by a Church-of-England-professing English descendent of Portuguese Jews named David Ricardo. If the decline of feudalism and the rise in numbers of a bourgeoisie sufficed, then Japan would have led the modern world, or Athens and greater Greece would have made the modern world in the 5^th century, as it made most other things. If coal were it, China would have made Manchuria into a Rhineland. If an accumulation of surplus value provided an original accumulation of capital for full-blown capitalism, then pharaohs would have erected linen factories rather than pyramids.

And so, I am beginning to conclude, in a struggle against all my thinking and economic training since I began studying the dismal science so long ago, that attitudes, beliefs, the circumstances of conversation, in a word, "ideology," or, in a better word, "rhetoric," or “speech,” must be it, the "it" that briefly distinguished northwestern Europe and its offshoots from the rest, and now stands ready to save the poor of the planet.

* * * *

A formal way of putting all this is the Rube-Goldberg diagram below. {still under construction; I may have it by January} If you have patience with tangled arrows and bold type you will grasp the arguments to be made here—not the evidence, of course, since a diagram is not evidence. But at least you will know the claims I am making, plausible or crazy, about the causes of the modern world. Some of the claims are entirely uncontroversial, and will need no evidence—for example, that the coming of gunpowder in the 15^th century reduced worldwide the prestige of the aristocracy, those proudly armored knights and samurai. Others are accepted widely by, say, specialist economic historians, but are not known by outsiders—for example, that contrary to Adam Smith and Karl Marx the accumulation of capital had little to do with early industrialization. And some are peculiar to my own argument—for example, that changes in freedom of speech allowed the honoring of bourgeois virtues such as hopeful invention and prudent projecting.

Variables in diagram: imperialism, periphery, exploited working class, prestige of A, prestige of B, free speech, absolute monarchs, nationalism, Adam Smith trinkets to aristocrats, gunpowder, age of discoveries, foreign trade, rich trades, thrift, Protestant ethic, priesthood of all believers (vs. hierarchy of Roman church), scientific discovery, skills of instrument makers, wave of gadgets, prestige of inventors, property rights enforced, taxation moderate, taxation not arbitrary (or class based), evangelical religion, responsibility, printing press, literacy

* * * *

The American historian Thomas Haskell wrote in 1999 a characteristically luminous essay pointing to an "escalating sense of human agency" in the 17^th and especially the 18^th centuries. He finds an index in the very word "responsibility." The word, he notes, is a surprisingly recent import from French. He finds it first in Federalist Papers, Number 63. Though "responsible" itself was available much earlier in French, only by about 1600 does English take it up, in an obsolete meaning of "responding to something." It had an American legal use dating from 1650 of "required to appear in court to respond to a charge." The word bumped along in such homely usages for two centuries. It only acquired its magnificence as a concept in liberal theory, Haskell observes, in the middle of the 19^th century. The OED finds a use of "responsible" as "morally accountable for ones actions; capable of rational conduct" (sense 2b) only as early as 1836 ("The great God has treated us as responsible beings"). Haskell himself, relying on Richard McKeon, credits Alexander Bain in 1859 as the "earliest philosophical treatment," of "responsibility." Mill agreed in 1865 with Bain that it was better thought of as "punishability."

Haskell, like me, thinks there was an ethical change in the West in the decades around 1800, with roots back in the turbulent 17^th century, that made us modern. He and I suspect it had to do with the increasing scope of markets. (Though as an economic historian I have perhaps a sharper sense that ancient Mesopotamia and medieval England had plenty of markets, too: the change is a matter of scale, as Fernand Braudel has argued at length.)

Yes, to be sure, the wider market can corrupt morality, and sometimes it does.  No one is denying that the Enron scandal was scandalous. But Haskell's claim is that commerce also enhances responsibility. After all, Jeffrey Skilling and even Kenneth Rice, who turned state’s evidence, went to jail. Haskell emphasizes that an enhanced sense of agency does not always work for good, and one has to agree. The 20^th century developed an altogether grotesque sense of agency---as Isaiah Berlin put, it ……….. The outcome in the 20^th century was, to put it mildly, not all good news.

But it can work for good sometimes, this new sense of agency and responsibility. An important historical example is the very commerce that made black slavery a New World institution (instead of as formerly only an African and a Moslem and in a minor way a European institution). The commerce, and associated technical changes, provided the shocking "expansion of causal horizons . . . for good or evil" (p. 22) that at length killed slavery. An institution that had existed with scant criticism from the earliest records of humankind was killed in a century of anti-slavery agitation 1787-1887 by Christian and especially Protestant and especially Quaker and commercial Europeans.  Note: commercial.

Here the notion of a “idealism of ordinary life” in the style of Ibsen. Niebuhr quotes Hegel (Friedrich von Hegel, Eternal Life, p. 255) that the goal of religion is "a sufficient otherworldliness without fanaticism and a sufficient this-worldliness without Philistinism."⁵²⁰
And, following his same logic—à la Marx: capitalism raises up its own gravediggers—the expansion of causal horizons contributed to the rise of European socialism. If social problems—the very phrase was coined in the 19^th century—are not God's will, Allah be praised, but the responsibility of someone, or of a whole social class, then they can be solved: knock off the person or the class, the slaveholder or the bourgeoisie. Such an argument would help explain the paradox that the first world-scale bourgeois society came in its clerisy after 1848 to detest the bourgeoisie.
But—and here is my own main point—Haskell's word "convention" would better be replaced by "rhetoric," not in the cheap sense we have from that anti-democrat Plato but in the glorious sense forming European education since Protagoras and Aristotle: the means of unforced persuasion.  My friends would expect me to say that.  But consider that if the R-word is used we get access to the machinery of rhetorical analysis built up since 5^th-century Sicily.  The machinery is formidable, though Plato did such a good job of casting doubt on democratic methods of persuasion that it has had to be re-invented with much fanfare in every intellectual generation since 1625. Reckoning backwards from the present to the anti-rhetorical 17^th century in Europe, it has been reinvented with more or less—usually less—realization that it is a reinvention dozens of times. by cultural studies and subaltern studies folk, Derridian deconstructionists, ordinary language philosophers, rhetorical revivalists, Kenneth Burke, general semanticists, …..

Anyway, rhetoric alerts us to how language works. We are alerted, for example, to the role of the metaphor of father-child in the defense of slavery, very prominent among the boers of the Cape Colony, for example, or, again, to the role of the new vocabulary of "social problems" in generalizing the experience of the anti-slavery agitation to the liberation of women and then the underclass of London and Chicfago.  That is, if we focus on the very words we get to use word lore, just as Haskell did.  Many of Haskell’s and my colleagues in history are uncomfortable, as Haskell observes acidly, in the presence of "ideas," which we might as well call "philosophy."  But they are also uncomfortable in the presence of "words," which we might as well call "rhetoric."  No literary criticism, please.  We're historians.

Another historian of ideas and of words, J. G. A. Pocock, put my substantive rhetorical claim about 1600-1848 very well, decades before it had occurred to me: “In every phase of Western tradition, there is a concept of virtue—Aristotelian, Thomist, neo-Machiavellian or Marxian—to which the spread of exchange relations is seen as presenting a threat. In this perspective those thinkers of the seventeenth through nineteenth centuries who argued on individualist, capitalist or liberal premises that the market economy might benefit and transform human existence appear to be the great creative heretics and dissenters.”⁵²¹

The heretical triumph came about crudely as follows. In the classical Mediterranean world the annoyed rhetorical question was, "Who cares about the economy? That's for slaves and women and metics to deal with, or those awful merchants. What matters is transcendent honor, timê, fama." Thus the honor-driven expedition to Syracuse in 415-413 BC or the honor-driven rivalries destroying the Roman Republic. A later and Christian version of the classical Mediterranean world declared, "Who cares about the economy? What matters is transcendent soul, psychê, animus." Thus Christian asceticism and the first monasteries in the wilderness. In the 13^th century the urban monks like St. Thomas of Aquino and St. Francis of Assisi modified the declaration a little: "What does matter, to be sure, is animus aeternus. But honest trade in an economy is not wholly corrupting, and can serve transcendent purposes." Two centuries later some of the followers of Luther and Calvin recurred to the earlier themes: "On the contrary: trade can be a terrible corruption. Let us build a communal city of God."

The greater modification, spreading in the 17^th century in places like the Netherlands or, later, in England and, still later, in Japan, said "No, no: we should care about the economy—if only, you see, for the transcendent honor of king and country." Attention came to be paid, and in the 18^th century mercantilism reigned from Paris to Edo.

But the final modification was the greatest, and decisive in that making of the modern world: "Yes," said Locke, Montesquieu, Voltaire, Hume, Smith, Paine, Wollstonecraft, Jefferson, Austen, Macaulay, Manzoni, "we should care about the economy, but not for mercantilist reasons of state. We should care because ordinary people in such a regime"—the egalitarianism of the thought is its most heretical feature—"will by it flourish in this world, benefiting and transforming human existence."

As indeed it did.

I gather here some notes that even this rough draft has not fitted in, perhaps for the good reason that they do not fit:

It’s an old-fashioned analysis but correct that bourgeois concerns prepared for freedom as much as for economic growth. Tacitus observed somewhere (find), "rare is the felicity of the times when you can think what you like and speak what you think." Rare indeed. Why did Japan not grow? Why did Rome not? An absence of free speech. Abolition is an example. The first religious body to speak against slavery in the New World was the Germantown meeting of Quakers in 1688, themselves precarious in many parts of Europe. Quakers were early against it, and they early were for the strictest spiritual equality between men and women, and very willing to say all these things, being careful to use “thee” and “thou” in doing so. The first place to outlaw slavery was the state of Vermont, in 1777. David Brian Davis wrote that “the spontaneous upsurge of antislavery movements that began in Britain in the late 1780s was truly unique. . . . It drew on . . . religious developments that went back to the civil wars of the mid-seventeenth century.”⁵²²

.

But I am not suggesting a reduction to electoral determinism: the particular forms of “bourgeois” policies were unpredictable. In Britain and parts of Germany the survivals were plainly because there had been no French Revolution. Thus freedoms of Austro-Hungarian Empire, or for that matter a Britain in which literal born-aristocrats served in cabinets. Politics that retained aristocratic/peasant elements survived late in Europe.

Peace and justice have always been claimed as essential for bourgeois society.

“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’.”⁵²³