July 28, 2018 Dear Reader

Chapter 5:

Yet Old England Disdained the Market and the Bourgeoisie

Yet in less progressive places the old calumnies against the bourgeoisie continued. In England especially.

England, with Scotland in attendance, to the intense irritation of French and German and Japanese people, has been since about 1700 the very fount of bourgeois values. British merchants, British investors, British inventors, British imperialists, British bankers, British economists have run capitalism, passing off to their American cousins only in the 20^th century. Even now, despite its long love affair with the Labour Party’s Clause IV, the United Kingdom is by historical and international standards a capitalist paradise. Despite its long “decline”---a misapprehension based on the happy fact that once-British inventions have proven rather easy to imitate--- it remains even today among the most inventive and innovative societies on earth.¹⁰⁷

One view is that Englishmen have always been good capitalists, eager to learn crossbows from Italians and gunpowder from Chinese. Maybe the people have been individualists, as Alan Macfarlane has persuasively argued, “as far back as we may conveniently….” In a famous book in 1979, The Origins of English Individualism, Treat Macfarlane, including his recent work as well

But the attitude towards …. was hostile

Consider the rhetoric for and against businesspeople in England around the time of Shakespeare and the Puritan saints, before the great alteration. Mainly of course it was harshly and at great length against. Robert Burton wrote in The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621):

What's the market? A place, according to Anacharsis, wherein they cozen one another, a trap; nay, what's the world itself? A vast chaos, a confusion of manners, as fickle as the air, domicilium insanorum [abode of madmen], a turbulent troop full of impurities, a mart of walking spirits, goblins, the theatre of hypocrisy, a shop of knavery, flattery, a nursery of villainy, the scene of babbling, the school of giddiness, the academy of vice; a warfare, ubi velis nolis pugnandum, aut vincas aut succumbas [where whether or not you wish to fight you either conquer or succumb], in which kill or be killed; wherein every man is for himself, his private ends, and stands upon his own guard. No charity, love, friendship, fear of God, alliance, affinity, consanguinity, Christianity, can contain them, but if they be any ways offended, or that string of commodity be touched, they fall foul. Old friends become bitter enemies on a sudden for toys and small offences. . . . Our summum bonum is commodity, and the goddess we adore Dea moneta, Queen money, to whom we daily offer sacrifice, which steers our hearts, hands, affections, all: that most powerful goddess, by whom we are reared, depressed, elevated, esteemed the sole commandress of our actions, for which we pray, run, ride, go, come, labor, and contend as fishes do for a crumb that falleth into the water. It's not worth, virtue, (that's bonum theatrale [a theatrical effect],) wisdom, valour, learning, honesty, religion, or any sufficiency for which we are respected, but money, greatness, office, honor, authority; honesty is accounted folly; knavery, policy; men admired out of opinion, not as they are, but as they seem to be: such shifting, lying, cogging, plotting, counterplotting, temporizing, nattering, cozening, dissembling.

Burton, pp. 352-361

Well. If many people believed this, and acted on it, a modern economy would be impossible. My claim is that such a view---the exceptions I have said came early among the Italians and Catalans and then the Hanseatic League and the Dutch---dominated the public rhetoric of England until the late 17^th century, of France until the middle of the 18^th, and of Germany until the early 19^th , of Japan until the late 19^th, of China and India until the late 20^th. The belief I say is ancient, and lasts: we find echoes of it down to the present, in environmentalist suspicious of market solutions to CO₂ problems or in populist calls to bring down the CEOs and the World Trade Organization.

If the market was in fact a “theatre of hypocrisy” ruled only by lying and plotting, no one of integrity would want to be part of it. The self-selection would drive out all faithful people, by a mechanism economists call the “lemons” effect. If the only automobiles that come to the market are those that are working badly and therefore to be sold off to suckers (having been in a serious crash, for example, though “repaired”), then everyone will come to realize that any automobile for sale is very likely to be a lemon. If only knaves and the men admired out of opinion, rather than who they really are, succeed in the secondhand market for horses, then everyone will come to realize that any horse sold by such marketeers is very likely to be impure and dissembling. Make sure you look in the horse’s mouth.

Of course, Burton could not actually have maintained such a view without self-contradiction. After all, he bought his ink and quills to scribble away at the Anatomy of Melancholy in a market, and sustained himself with bread and cheese purchased with Dea moneta. Moderns who hold such anti-market views face the same self-contradiction, buying paper and ink in the marketplace to produce The Socialist Worker, or driving their recently purchased Porches to their meetings to overthrow capitalism. In Burton’s book the other 18 instances of the word “market” (all coming after the first passage attacking the very idea) refer to market places, not this abstract concept, analogous here to Vanity Fair, and do not carry connotations of nattering by walking spirits. Indeed, such blasts against greed are standard turns in literary performances from the Iliad (I: 122, 149) and the prophet Amos (2:6-7; 5:10-12; 8:4-6) down to Sinclair Lewis and The Sopranos. In its very conventionality, though, Burton’s paragraph typifies the obstacle to modernity modern economy. The satisfying sneer by the aristocrat, the lofty damning by the priest, the corrosive envy by the peasant, all directed against markets and the bourgeoisie, conventional in every literature since Mesopotamia, long sufficed to kill economic growth.

This needs to be worked in: The Elizabethan world picture, and the Great Chain of Being, was an "ideology," a system of ideas supporting those in power. I prefer the word “rhetoric.” Elizabeth gave a short speech in Latin to the heads of Oxford University on September 28, 1592, ending with “Each and every person is to obey his superior in rank. . . . Be of one mind, for you know that unity is the stronger, disunity the weaker and quick to fall into ruin” (Elizabeth 1592, p. 328). It does not entirely disappear even in England—a point that the English historian David Cannadine makes—but by 1776 it does become much less prominent than it was in 1600, this obedience to superiors as the chief political principle. In the United States nowadays, for example, it is believed chiefly by certain restricted members of the country club.

As a result, in Shakespeare's England the economic virtues were not at all respectable. Sneered at, rather. The only one of Shakespeare’s plays that speaks largely of merchants offers no commendation of thrift. Shylock's "well-worn thrift" is nothing like an admired model for behavior. It is the lack of thrift in aristocratic Bessanio, the "disabling of his estate," itself viewed as amusing and blameless—since had he but the means he could hold a rival place with Portia's wealthy and aristocratic suitors—that motivates the blood bargain in the first place. No blame attaches, and all ends well, except for the Jew.

This does not mean that Shakespeare's contemporaries were not greedy. But their greed expressed itself in an aristocratic notion that Lord Bessanio simply deserved the income from his lands or borrowings or gifts from friends or marrying well or any other unearned income he could assemble, and then gloriously spend. Shylock was to be expropriated to enrich others---never mind such bourgeois notions as incentives to thrift or work. The gentry and especially the aristocracy in Shakespeare's England discounted bourgeois thrift, and scorned the bourgeois work that earned the income to be thrifty about. Gentlemen, and especially dukes, did not trouble to pay their tailoring bills. As late as 1695 the English economic writer Charles Davenant complained that "if these high [land] taxes long continue, in a country so little given to thrift as ours, the landed men must inevitably be driven into the hands of . . . usurers."¹⁰⁸ The unthrifty were the landed English gentlemen puttin' on the style. Francis Bacon had been in Shakespeare's time the very type of such a man, given to "ostentatious entrances, arrayed in all his finery, and surrounded by a glittering retinue," chronically unthrifty, always in debt, and tempted therefore to misuse the Lord Chancellor's mace when finally his ambition achieved it, by soliciting bribes from both parties in legal disputes.¹⁰⁹ About the same time as Bacon's disgrace, a prudent temperance had made Plymouth Colony and Massachusetts Bay succeed where Jamestown had failed. The adventurers of Jamestown were gentlemen, not thrifty Puritans.

All of Shakespeare’s works record an aristocratic refusal to calculate. Think of Hamlet's indecision, Lear's proud impulsiveness, King Leontes' irrationalities in A Winter's Tale. Such behavior is quite unlike the prudent examining of ethical account books even in late and worldly Puritans like Daniel Defoe, or in their even more late and even more worldly descendants like Benjamin Franklin. What is correct in Weber's emphasis on worldly asceticism is that the Puritans wrote a good many fictions such as autobiographies stressing it.

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It’s not just in Shakespeare that a modern bourgeoisie and his market activities are sneered at around 1600 in soon-to-be-bourgeois England. Of Thomas Dekker’s play The Shoemaker’s Holiday (1599) the literary critic David Bevington recently declared that “no play better celebrates bourgeois London.”¹¹⁰ But consider. Its hero, Simon Eyre (c.1395–1458), was historically a draper who rose to be mayor of London, though in the comedy, which was very successful (it was played before the Queen and its acclaim is said to have provoked Shakespeare to write The Merry Wives of Windsor), Eyre is a “professor of the gentle craft” of shoemaking. The absurdity of calling such an humble job as shoemaking “gentle” is drawn on again and again in the play (1:30, 1:134; 1.219; 3.4, 3.24; 4:47; 7:48). Eyre’s curious catch-phrase, “Prince am I none, yet am nobly born,” taken in form from Orlando Furioso and in the idea’s application to Eyre and the “gentle craft” from a contemporary novel, underlines the extent of Eyre’s rise in the social hierarchy.¹¹¹ His very name, Eyre, is a homonym of Dutch eer and German Ehre, “honor.”

But the focus then is honorable hierarchy and its stability, not the widespread bourgeois upheavals, “creative destruction,” to be commended in the 18^th and especially the 19^th centuries. We are in a world of zero sum. Eyre starts in The Shoemaker’s Holiday as a jolly and indulgent master, who deals sharply only once (7.74, 77-78), and this in a minor matter involving how much beer he is going to buy in order to over-reward his workers. He stays that way. Though he rises quickly to alderman, sheriff, and Lord Mayor, right to the end of the play he speaks in prose, the convention of Elizabethan drama being that the comic figures below the gentry and nobility spoke thus, and noblemen and noblewomen or otherwise elevated figures spoke in blank verse. His journeyman Ralph Damport, for example, is bound for military duty in France, which ennobles a man: as Henry V says before Agincourt, “For he today that sheds his blood with me / Shall be my brother; be he ne’er so vile, / This day shall gentle his condition.” Ralph’s wife Jane, nobly resisting the courting by a gentleman while her husband is at the wars, also rises above the commonality of prose. Ralph, who has lines in the play only after his mission in the army is decided, speaks in blank verse---until he returns from the wars a sad and comical cripple: then it’s back to prose for poor demobbed and denobled Ralph (18.15).

The reinforcement of the great chain of being appears all over Elizabethan and early Jacobite drama, and shows even in its rare exceptions. The bizarre feature of both Barabas in Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta and Shylock in The Merchant of Venice is their eloquence before their social superiors. As Lynne Magnusson points out, comic effect in Shakespeare is often achieved by the middling sort trying to speak posh, and disastrously failing.¹¹² And lower commoners stumble even more amusingly in speaking to social superiors—like Dogberry in Much Ado About Nothing, and always, always in prose.¹¹³ Barabas and Shylock have no such problem, and always speak in blank verse check. The very limited experience of Englishmen with the despised Jews—they were not readmitted until DDDD, having been expelled from England in DDDD—must have made the contrast with the low comic figures doubly impressive.

In the Shoemaker’s Holiday (date) Rowland Lacy, nephew of the very grand Earl of Lincoln, disguises himself as Dutch “Hans” in order to court Rose Oatley, daughter of Sir Roger Oatley, Lord Mayor at the beginning of all this. (The “Lord” Mayor is so called because he becomes a knight; perhaps in keeping with the historical facts about Simon Eyre, the playwright never raises him to Sir Simon, and so never lets him speak blank verse.) “Hans” speaks in comical Anglo-Dutch, again in prose (the playwright’s name, “Dekker,” is Dutch, meaning “Thatcher,” and the Dekker shows accurate knowledge of the language of that merchant republic). But when “Hans” is revealed as Rowland Lacy the cousin of an earl, to be knighted at the end by the king, it’s back to verse again. And so throughout, every character carefully slotted into the Great Chain of Being. Eyre and his sharp-witted wife Margery for example use the familiar “thou” (like tu in French) to address the journeyman shoemakers, but the formal “you” with their superiors (and “you” for plurals at both registers: vous).

Payment pops up all over the play. The stage direction “giving money” is second only to “enter” in frequency. Bourgeois, yes? No. In keeping with the emphasis on social hierarchy in the play and in the times it was written, the money transfers are almost always payment by a superior to an inferior, expressing hierarchy, in the nature of a tip. So again we do not have a celebration of “bourgeois” in a capitalist sense, but a celebration of traditional hierarchy. Eyre gives tips to Ralph on his way to war, as the foreman Hodge and another journeyman immediately also do (1.218, 225, 229). When Eyre becomes sheriff, the cheeky journeyman Firk bringing the news gets tipped by Mrs. Eyre (10.132). The lordly Lincoln in the opening scene describes with irritation how he supplied his ne’er-do-well nephew (the romantic lead, Rowland Lacy/”Hans”): “I furnished him with coin, bills of exchange,/ Letters of credit, men to wait on him.” Forty lines later the Lord Mayor Sir Roger Oatley promises to get the aldermen to shower £20 on Rowland the noble if he will but take up his commission and fight in France (Oatley wants the wastrel safely away from daughter Rose, the usual comic material of thwarted lovers getting around their rich fathers). That’s a considerable sum, well over a skilled workman’s yearly wages: think of $50,000 nowadays. The £20 gets circulated another forty lines later by Rowland himself to undermine the elders who gave it. Likewise the gentleman Hammon offers the same sum, £20, to Ralph back from the wars if he’ll give up his loyal wife Jane to Hammon. It’s no go, of course, and Hammon then immediately proves his nobility by giving the couple the £20 anyway (18.97). The Earl of Lincoln and Sir Oatley keep trying to make cash work against love (8.49, 9.97: these both to the same “noble,” that is, blank-verse chap; again at 16.97 cash payment tries to work against love and fails).

So the middle class is held in its subordinate realm of prose, and accepts it with good grace. Money transactions have nothing to do with business, much less the financing of creative destruction, but rather with reinforcing status differentials, such as the two lordly types reaching down to bribe their lower status subjects. Or to put it another way, money is bullion in the style of mercantilists such as the economic thinker Thomas Mun, who was a contemporary (as Peter Mortenson observes). “One man’s loss becomes another man’s gain,” said Mun, Holland rising while England declines.¹¹⁴ Money circulates in aid of hierarchy but does not lead to specialization and innovation. It’s not capitalism in its outcome of modern economic growth that’s being celebrated here.

The modestly positioned Simon Eyre does become Lord Mayor. How? By sheer luck, as though a shoemaker had won the Illinois State lottery. As the playwright of course knew, to be an alderman, sheriff, and especially mayor of London required considerable wealth already accumulated. One had to put on a good show, and exhibit liberality, an aristocratic virtue praised then at all levels of English society. Eyre reflects on good luck: “By the Lord of Ludgate, it’s a mad life to be a lord mayor. It’s a stirring life, a fine life, a velvet life. . . . This day my fellow prentices of London come to dine with me too; they shall have fine cheer, gentlemanly cheer. I promised . . . that if ever I came to be mayor of London, I would feast them all; and I’ll do’t, I’ll do’t, by the life of Pharaoh. By this beard, Sim Eyre shall be no flincher” (17: 38-49, italics supplied). He promises “gentlemanly” cheer, such as idle gentlemen give and get.

Eyre gets rich in the traditional story by chancing on a wrecked Dutch ship, whose contents he buys cheaply and sells dearly. This is mercantilist zero-sum: one man’s misfortune is another’s enrichment. In the version told in Thomas Deloney’s contemporary novel, The Gentle Craft, Part I (1597, two years before Decker’s play, and a source for him; for example it was the source of the “Prince am I none” tagline mentioned above), it is Eyre’s wife who sees the entrepreneurial opportunity and urges him on. She “was inflamed with the desire thereof, as women are (for the most part) very covetous. . . . She could scant find in her heart to spare him time to go to supper for very eagerness to animate him on to take that bargain.”¹¹⁵ As Laura Stevenson O’Connell put it in a path-breaking article on these matters in 1976, “by attributing all the ingenuity to Mistress Eyre, Deloney can celebrate Eyre’s later achievements as a wise, just, and charitable rich man without having to portray him at first as an entrepreneur who has sullied himself by conjuring up a questionably honest business deal.”¹¹⁶

In Puritan England, O’Connell explains, “The godly rich man was not a man who was engaged in the pursuit of wealth; he was a man already wealthy.” “The calling of the rich man was the calling of the public servant, preacher, or teacher,” as it had always been.¹¹⁷ The English clerisy in the 19^th century, portrayed by George Eliot in 1871-72 as seeking a calling in a commercial land, reverted to the earlier and Puritan model. O’Connell criticizes the great Marxist historian Christopher Hill, “who does not realize that once a man reached a certain point of affluence, the Puritans” [and the other English people of the time, and the Israelites and the Romans and the medieval Christians and the 19^th-century clerisy and the Carnegies and the Warren Buffetts and the Bill Gates’s] “insisted that he be diligent in a calling which involved not making money, but spending it.”¹¹⁸ William Perkins, a Puritan preacher at the University of Cambridge whose numerous works were published in 1616-1618, declared that “if God gives abundance, when we neither desire it nor seek it, we may take it, hold it, and use it. . . . But [the businessman] may not desire goods. . . more than necessary, for if he doth, he sinneth.”¹¹⁹

And so in the plays and novels of the time. In fact, so also always in plays and novels, by tendency. Deloney, who died around 1600, speaks in his last bourgeois novel of a Thomas of Reading, a good rich clothier, but tells nothing of the entrepreneurial activities leading to his wealth, only of his acts of charity and good citizenship after acquiring it. “Far from using the preacher’s approval of abundant wealth and diligent work as a doctrine which encourages poor boys to make good,” writes O’Connell, “Deloney uses Puritan morality as a retreat from the spirit of capitalism.”¹²⁰ Contrast the encouragement to poor boys to make good in Horatio Alger’s novels, such as Struggling Upward, or Luke Larkin’s Luck (1868). The title contains both the struggle and the luck. But a good start in business life does not descend upon Luke, “the son of a carpenter’s widow, living on narrow means, and so compelled to exercise the strictest economy” (p. 1), without tremendous struggling upward, fully 144 pages of it, in which he is industrious, polite, resourceful, and on and on---though not, again, entrepreneurial in the larger sense that made the modern world. Alger, the son of a minister, a graduate of Harvard, and a minister briefly himself until he embarked on his writing career in 1867, knew little of the business world. His boys get their start by impressing an older man---in Struggling Upward Luke impresses a Mr. Armstrong, named a “capitalist.”

The imaginers of capitalism, or the ministers critiquing it, or the writers of 135 novels for boys, didn’t ordinarily know capitalism from practicing it. Unlike love or even war, activity in business stops the telling. In Multatuli’s Max Havelaar (1860; it was so to speak a Dutch Uncle Tom’s Cabin) the first narrator, a comically self-absorbed dealer in coffee (the most famous opening line in Dutch literature is “I am a dealer in coffee, and live at 37 Lauiergracht”), explains with some warmth why he had previously not engaged in such an unbusinesslike business as writing novels. “For years I asked myself what the use of such things was, and I stand amazed at the insolence with which a writer of novels fools you with things that never happened and indeed could never happen. If in my own business. . . I put out anything of which the smallest part was an untruth---which is the chief business in poetry and romance--- [my competitor] would instantly get wind of it. So I make sure that I write no novels or put out any other falsehoods.”¹²¹ Then the merchant-narrator proceeds to write just such a novel---though ironically again, no “falsehoods” in truth, but an exposé of the horrors of Dutch colonialism in Indonesia.

In The Shoemaker’s Holiday luck elevates Eyre in the Great Chain of Being. Numerous people above him in the chain just happen to die, and his wife and his foreman put the shipwreck deal in front of his nose. Mortenson notes that Dekker’s play is a version of the pastoral, shifted to London; yet that off stage throughout the play there occur highly unpastoral wars (which cripple Ralph; and to which Lacy honorably adjourns at the end), deaths (aldermen especially), and the losses of the Dutch merchant that enrich Eyre. As Mortenson puts it, “Dekker creates a grim world and encourages us to pretend that it is a green one” (Mortenson 1976, p. 252).

In a world after Eden, God gave Eyre abundance, and he of course gives it back. Bevington notes that “his ship literally comes in.”¹²² Mortenson and Bevington would agree that such proletarian ideas of enrichment---the novelist Deloney was a silk weaver by trade, no haut bourgeois---have little to do with the entrepreneurial bourgeois praised in the 18^th and especially in the 19^th century. The playwright Dekker praises the middling sort, but praises in 1599 nothing like its remote descendents, the Manchester manufacturers, or even the projectors and inventors of contemporary Holland---soon too, in England, to be the admired bourgeois. As to the rhetoric of the economy, Dekker’s play is conservative. The machinery differs entirely from that in a pro-bourgeois production in English after about 1690.

Chapter 6:

And So the English Bourgeoisie

Could Not “Rise”

The chapter is very raw and confused at present.
The elite continued to sneer at the bourgeoisie. It is by now widely realized that the 16^th-century in Europe, with its increasingly literate and even rhetorically cultivated elite, came to view the keeping and finding out of secrets as a suitable occupation for a nobility recently disemployed by the invention of peasant armies with guns. Compare the making over of the samurai in Japan a century later into a Confucian bureaucracy in support of the Tokugawa state—though the samurai remained a bureaucracy with the right to use their swords on commoners at will, the commoners themselves having in the meantime been disarmed. In Japan and especially in Europe not swords but talk became the chief weapon of class. The English gentleman by 1600 is eloquent, not a mere fighter. . NNN speaks of the "displacement of masculine agency from [military] prowess to [diplomatic and political] persuasion" in the 1560s and 1580s in England and France.¹²³ Lord Essex’s last communication with Elizabeth before she had him executed for treason was a poem. No English lord during the Hundred Years War would have written poems to his ex-mistress and queen. Most of them left writing to clerks. check

Jardine notes the suspicion generated if the intelligence is in the wrong hands: "The figure in the [Elizabethan] drama of the diabolical merchant-usurer-intelligencer is. . . a consolidated cultural manifestation of such an unease concerning mercantilism and deferred profit."¹²⁴

Alan Stewart summarizes it as "there were in early modern England dramatic uncertainties about the power of information and those who possessed it. "¹²⁵ Literally "dramatic": they were the impulses behind Elizabethan plays. The secrets of merchants in particular were detested. "The taint of usury constrained mercantile activities" (Jardine 1996, 107).

Lynne Magnussson 1999, p. 124:

Jean-Christophe Agnew has argued in the marxisant way usual in departments of literature that the Elizabethans were right to be suspicious of markets. From the late 16^th to the middle of the 18^th century “a volatile and placeless market” caused what he calls a “crisis of representation.” Agnew emphasizes how money---which he appears to think is a novelty in the England of 1600---eroded face-to-face transactions “into two mutually indifferent acts: exchange of commodities for money, exchange of money for commodities; purchase and sale. ” “Commodity exchange was gravitating during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries toward a set of operative rules that fostered a formal and instrumental indifference among buyers and sellers. ” A “logic of mutual indifference” kills reciprocity---shades of Karl Polanyi. as comes to define the exchange transaction.

This is quite mistaken, depending on a Polanyan account of the English economy before 1800 and a "competitive" reading of capitalism. Contrary to all this, the historian of the Bristol Merchant Venturers, David Sacks argues that “the new forms of commercial organization that emerged in Bristol during the sixteenth century depended … upon the existence … of close personal ties and the mutual trust they engendered among overseas merchants.'"¹²⁶ Among gentlemen the "pleasuring style" of letters used a rhetoric of asked favors, granted instantly out of noble friendship. But merchants, too, used it most vigorously: there may have been a "logic" of mutual indifference, but like Hobbes' "logic" of the war of all against all it was a mere logic, not an actual practice of properly socialized merchants with complicated and risky deals in mind. As Sacks, puts it, “nothing could be further from the truth . . . [that] the mercantile profession . . . [was] composed of isolated individuals, each single-handedly confronting the pitfalls of the marketplace." [quoted in Magnusson 1999, p. 130] “Rather than plying their trades alone," Sacks continues, "Bristol's merchants habitually aided one another by dealing in partnership, by serving as factors and agents, by acting as intermediaries in the delivery and receipt of coin or goods, and by jointly transporting merchandise” (61). “Shakespeare,” writes Magnusson summarizes still another student of these matters, Michael Ferber, “brings together in Antonio's portrayal a number of ideological discourses incompatible with Elizabethan realities in order to invent and celebrate an idealized version of mercantile enterprise separated from finance capital and consonant with Christian and aristocratic values."¹²⁷

Magnussson, however, disagrees that the fulsome and “aristocratic” rhetoric of friendship was foreign to merchants. To think otherwise is, as in Agnew, to let our desire to see merchants as "rational" get in the way of seeing them as humans. The merchant, especially abroad, was wise to use humility. John Browne's The Marchants Avizo (1590) advises the young merchant “in any case show your self lowly, courteous, and serviceable unto every person: for though you and many of us else may think, that too much lowliness bringeth contempt and disgrace unto us: yet … gentleness and humility … will both appease the anger and ill will of our enemies, and increase the good will of our friends.”¹²⁸ This is not the advice that a young nobleman would get. Where is that amazing letter by a nobleman attacking a merchant?

Lisa Jardine notes the parallels between market deals and medieval fealty. In Marlowe's The Jew of Malta the Jew "Barabas's ability to generate wealth with apparent effortlessness, leading to a kind of intimacy based on dependency upon access to that wealth." Think of fair-weather friends clustering around your local millionaire. "Although ultimately this inevitably gives way to dislike and bad faith, it briefly simulates the kind of 'friendship' which was the basis for peer bonding and service of a more customary kind." That is, it looks liked feudal clientage, made sacred by oaths given and received. We can't help but feel that a business deal is a bond of trust. Humans are that way. We may know better in our more cynical moods, but "at the point of dissolution of such a bond, both parties experience the breakdown as betrayal," as though a purchase-and-sale agreement for a condominium were a blood bond of fealty.”¹²⁹

* * * *
John Milton and commerce inserted here.

* * * *

Contempt in theatre. Susan Wells argues that a tension emerges in Jacobean “city comedies” between commerce---she views it in Marxist terms as being about “accumulation”---and celebration, which she views in Bakhtinian terms as solidarity in carnivalesque ceremonies (Wells 1981). Put a little pep into the Lord Mayor’s show. The tension, though, is that between prudence and faith, individual money-making and bourgeois solidarity, and characterizes every bourgeoisie in history. It’s nothing new, or old, no signal of a transition from traditional to bourgeois preoccupations. The occupation of every bourgeois is to be prudent and faithful, together.

Now as I said this contempt for trade is all impossible in practice. The city of London, by 1600 the **nth largest in Europe, on its way to being the largest by 1700, could not have lasted a week without the steady supply of vegetables from Kent and grain from Oxfordshire and coals from Northumberland, complements of the despised bourgeoisie. The story I am telling is easily mistaken for another old one, “the rise of the middle class.” That story says that the bourgeoisie always-already contains within itself modernity, and so by simply multiplying the number of such up-to-date folk we get the modern world. The story imparts a mechanical necessity to history, a sort of tipping point. Get bourgeois enough and you enter the modern world. Marxism talks like this, but so did an entire long generation of historians from the eve of World I until well after World War II.

Of course there’s something to it. Obviously a country like Russia, with a tiny middle class even in 1917, would not be able to modernize. . . except that it did. Obviously a country like Holland, replete with bourgeois from the 16^th century on, would lead the industrial revolution. . . except that it didn’t. Obviously a class like medieval lords wouldn’t show anything like a modern interest in profit. . . except that it did.

Anyone who thinks that the idea of the rise of the bourgeoisie has more than something to it needs to examine a classic article by the historian Jack Hexter, “The Myth of the Middle Class in Tudor England,” first presented in 1948, appearing in an early form in the journal Explorations in Economic History in 1950, and revised and extended in 1961. The myth he refers to particular to the Tudors is that the monarchs of England 1485-1603 favored the middle class. He quotes Lawrence Stone who wrote in 1947, contrary to the “bourgeois Tudors” myth, that “all Tudor governments were the most resolute theoretical opponents of . . . those new bourgeois classes from which they are supposed to have derived most support.”¹³⁰ Some bourgeois were benefited; most were taxed, monopolized, disdained. The “privileges of the London clique” favored by Elizabeth, Hexter writes, “hung like an anchor on other sectors of the middle class” (p. 104). In the so-called Golden Speech to the House of Commons two years before her death she apologized: “That my grants should be grievous unto my people, and oppressions to be privileged under color of our patents, our kingly dignity shall not suffer it. Yea, when I heard it I could give no rest unto my thoughts until I had reformed it.” ¹³¹But Hexter hits, too, a larger target, the use of a “rising middle class” to explain everything from earliest times to the present, homines novi in Rome and the character of Iraqis. “A large group of historians ascribes every major historical change in the Tudor period---and a long time before and after---to the desires, aspirations, ideals, and intentions of the rising middle class” (p. 72). The character of the countryside, for example, was supposed to have been changed by the coming of merchants buying into country estates. Hexter explodes the claim that Tudor times saw a novel amount of such intrusion of bourgeois values into the relation of lord and peasant. For one thing, it has always been thus, from Horace buying up his Sabine valley to Robert Redford buying up Montana. “Merchant transplantation to the land was a very ancient habit” (p. 94). Further, “many country folk needed no nudging from transplanted merchants to persuade them ‘to drive the most for their profit’.” And the social advantage in Tudor times, and for a long time after, was on the other side. The merchants facing a “flexible, vigorous, self-confident landed aristocracy” adopted country habits, not the other way around. “The parvenu. . . was the captive, not the conquer, of the countryside” (p. 95).

“One of the odder performances in contemporary historiography,” writes Hexter, “takes place when the social historians of each European century from the twelfth to the eighteenth . . . seize the curtain cord and unveil the great secret. ‘Behold,’ they say, in my century the middle-class nobodies rising into the aristocracy” (p. 80-81).

But rising in numbers or not, bourgeois values "rose." The rhetoric changed, and especially in the late 17^th century in England. Hexter is hard on R. H. Tawney, whose “conception of the middle class has all the rigor of a rubber band” (Hexter 1961, p. 74). The middle class in Tawney’s writings sometimes includes prosperous yeoman, and sometimes does not. It sometimes includes the gentry, and sometimes not. It would seem that Tawney ran into trouble, as many historians have when entranced by such statistical terms as “the middle class” or “the middling sort,” in thinking of the bourgeoisie statistically rather than rhetorically.

* * * *
A wonderfully clever version of the Statistical Rise of the Bourgeoisie has been asserted recently by the economic historian Gregory Clark, in his modestly sub-entitled “Brief Economic History of the World,” A Farewell to Alms (2007). In one-and-a-half pages towards the middle of the book Clark deals briskly with the numerous alternatives to his hypothesis: “Social historians may invoke the Protestant Reformation, . . . intellectual historians the Scientific Revolution. . . or the Enlightenment. . . . But a problem with these invocations of movers from outside the economic realm is that they merely push the problem back one step.”¹³²

That’s a very good point, always a good point. Yes, indeed, one may properly ask why “after more than a thousand years of entrenched Catholic dogma”---such a view of Christian theology is a trifle lacking in nuance, but set that aside---“was an obscure German preacher able to effect such a profound change in the way ordinary people conceived religious beliefs?”

Clark, however, like doubting Pilate, does not stay for an answer. He readily admits that “ideologies may transform the economic attitudes of societies.” But he has no scientific interest in the causes of ideologies, unless they fit his notion of the material inheritance of acquired characteristics (“and perhaps even the genes,” he says). So to get rid of pesky cultural arguments he reaches immediately for a Materialist Lemma: “But ideologies are themselves the expression of fundamental attitudes in part derived from the economic sphere.” Only the phrase “in part,” a fleeting tribute to intellectual balance, keeps his sentence from being orthodox historical materialism. As a pair of historical materialists put it in 1848:

Man’s ideas, views and conceptions, in one word, man’s consciousness, changes with every change in the conditions of his material existence, in his social relations and in his social life. What else does the history of ideas prove, than that intellectual production changes its character in proportion as material production is changed?¹³³

The intellectually temperate phrase “in part” in Clark’s sentence is not cashed in. Rather, the check is immediately torn up. “There is, however,” Clark declares in the next sentence, “no need to invoke such a deus ex machine” as a change in ideology, because his own Chapter 6 fully explains on materialist grounds, with its own deus ex machina (high breeding rates among the rich), “the forces leading to a more patient, less violent, harder-working, more literate, and more thoughtful society,” namely, the bourgeois society we all so admire. In Clark’s book, that’s the end of ideology.

What he does pay out in cold cash is a materialist explanation of the change in English behavior. The argument goes like this:

For England. . . . 1250-1800. . . . the richest men had twice as many surviving children as the poorest. . . . The superabundant children of the rich had to. . . move down. . . . Craftsmen’s sons became laborers, merchant’s sons petty traders, large landholder’s sons smallholders. . . . Patience, hard work, ingenuity, innovativeness, education . . . were thus spread biologically throughout the population. . . . The embedding of bourgeois values into the culture . . . . [in] China and Japan did not move as rapidly because . . . their upper social strata were only modestly more fecund. . . . Thus there was not the same cascade of children from the educated classes down the social scale.. . . England’s advantage law in the rapid cultural, and potentially also genetic, diffusion of the values of the economically successful through society.¹³⁴

The means of (re)production determine the superstructure. Rich people proliferated, and by a social Darwinian struggle the poor and incompetent died out, leaving a master race of Englishmen to conquer the world.

Certainly it is a bold hypothesis, and is intelligently and energetically defended. In fact, if it were true, it would fit smoothly with my own argument that a rhetorical change made for the modern world. Clark says that “there must have been informal, self-reinforcing social norms in all preindustrial societies that discouraged innovation.”¹³⁵ Precisely: the norms of anti-bourgeois aristocrats and clerics did discourage capitalism, until the Venetians, the Dutch, and at last the English and Scots repealed the norms.

Clark, admitting though he does that rhetoric may transform economic attitudes, would nonetheless wisely urge us to push the problem back one more step: why the rhetorical change? A very good point, always a good point. It would imply, if we were committed to historical materialism, that some cause in the means of reproduction must be sought for the rhetoric. Under the Materialist Lemma a rhetoric never changes independent of economics---certainly not by causes within rhetoric itself such as the invention of the novel or the logic of Pascal-Nicole-Bayle in theology; not even by such causes as the political settlement in England of 1688 or the obsession with Protestant egalitarianism of all believers in Holland and Scotland from the mid-16^th century or the ordinary man’s involvement in politics in Holland, England, and Scotland 1585 to 1660. Any non-economic, merely rhetorical change is always to be derived from the economic sphere. Intellectual production changes its character in proportion as material production is changed.

Clark is a highly competent scientist, and produces much evidence with which other scientists agree. It is important to distinguished the good arguments from the bad in his book, lest anyone think that the good arguments do much to support the bad. They don’t. Much of the book is uncontroversially good, a review for outsiders what economic historians have learned since, say, Karl Polanyi. ¹³⁶ We all, we economic historians nowadays, agree that down to the 17^th or 18^th century England was trapped as the world has been since the caves in a Malthusian logic: no innovation, so that more mouths always meant, soon, less bread per mouth, and the life of man was brutish and short. We all agree that the escape from the Malthusian trap is the most important event in world history: “the richest modern economies are now ten to twenty times wealthier than the 1800 average.”¹³⁷ We agree that innovation, not capital accumulation, was its cause. We agree that it happened in England. We agree that in China and especially in Japan there were some signs c. 1600 that it might happen there, and some of us think that it was Qing and Tokugawa lack of freedom and egalitarianism that stopped it. We agree that since then the rewards to labor have increased and the rewards to capital and land have fallen, contrary to the predictions of the classical economists, including Marx. We agree that the poor of the world have been the largest beneficiaries of the escape from the Malthusian trap. We agree, in other words, on a great many findings from 1944 to the present that will strike the average devotee of Karl Polanyi or Louis Althusser as bizarre and counterintuitive.

What other historical scientists do not agree with, though, is Clark’s most distinctive argument, that Englishmen became by virtue of their breeding rates a race of Übermenchen living in an Übergemeinschaft. One of the few historical scientists with whom he agrees on the matter is David Landes, whom he commends briefly for being “correct in observing that the Europeans had a culture more conducive to economic growth,” though Landes thinks the superior culture had more ancient sources than the breeding rates of late medieval families. ¹³⁸

There are a lot of criticisms to be made of the argument. For one thing, non-European places have grown, after the example of Holland and England. For another, non-Europeans, those Untermenschen, become astoundingly rich when they moved into places in which bourgeois values are honored. Clark shows little interest in American economic history, which is the main instance. He also shows little interest in his native Scotland, which did have an Industrial Revolution, and had nothing like England’s “extraordinary stability,” partly indeed because of repeated invasions by the stability-enjoying English. Nor does he show interest in the Irish, who when they crossed the Irish Sea to staff the cotton and wool mills he investigates with such empirical imagination became instantly the good workers who couldn’t of course ever arise from such a turbulent place as Ireland, which did not have an Industrial Revolution.

But the main failure of his hypothesis is, oddly, that a book filled with ingenious calculations, hundreds upon hundreds of them exhibiting at a high level Clark’s historical imagination---the quality of asking questions and seeing your way to answering them---does not calculate enough. It doesn’t ask or answer the crucial historical questions. The argument can be diagrammed like this, as four states 1, 2, 3, 4 linked by three causal and transforming causal arrows A, B. C:

The Clark Hypothesis

1. 
   A. 2. B. 3. C. 4.
   

Rich breed  Rich-people’s  More patience,  Enrichment

more values spread work, ingenuity of all
The two bolded states at the ends get satisfying amounts of empirical attention. Clark, who believes that when you cannot measure your knowledge is meager and unsatisfactory, is not comfortable with literary and other “ego-document” sources, as the historians call them nowadays. And so he does not realize that written sources can themselves be counted, and in any case that how people speak is part of the empirical evidence. In consequence he does not have much to say about how one would know that “informal, self-reinforcing social norms” of rich people had spread. Therefore he is thin on State 2. State 3 gets more attention, sometimes of a quantitative sort---Indian workers work less, for example; and as Jan de Vries has put it there was an “industrious revolution” of more application to work in first the Dutch and then the English lands during the 17^th and 18^th centuries. Clark follows Mokyr and others, as I do, in emphasizing the ingenuity of inventors in cotton and iron and so forth, and uses a table which I devised in 1981 to show that the ingenuity in England 1780-1860 was spread beyond such heroic industries.¹³⁹

What is missing are calculations justifying the little links A, B, C between the states. Clark notes for example that in countries with ill-disciplined labor forces, such as India, the employer doesn’t get as much output as in England, because the non-bourgeois values of the Indian workers and the employers leaves not enough “work” in the diagram. But the “as much” and “not enough” are nothing like the 20 to 30 times gap between poor India and rich England that he claims to be explaining. That is, Clark has failed to show how much Enrichment depends on Work, state 4 on state 3. He hasn’t done a calculation on the size of C. He hasn’t asked about its oomph, and so he naturally has no answer.

Nor does he do a calculation on link B, to show that state 3 depended mightily on state 2, that, say, that ingenuity depended on the spread of bourgeois values. It’s deucedly hard to do: I myself agree the link was very important yet I can’t think of ways to quantify it, and have had to rely instead on the meager and unsatisfactory but enormously rich and ubiquitous qualitative evidence that Clark spurns and the other students of ingenuity such as Mokyr have exploited. So Clark is not to blame that even his admirable if strictly quantitative historical imagination is stymied by the question of how much bourgeois values acted to increase ingenuity. Still, his methodological stridency about measurement does make it embarrassing that he doesn’t even mention that he can’t actually measure link B. We fools like Jack Goldstone or Deirdre McCloskey, who merely listen to what people at the time were saying about B, get a certain satisfaction that Clark is thus hoist by his own methodological petard.

In light of Clark’s methodological convictions, though, the most embarrassing broken link is A, between “Rich breed more” and “Rich people’s values spread.” Nowhere in the book does Clark calculate what higher breeding rates could have accomplished by way of rhetorical change. It could easily be done, at any rate under his mechanical assumption about how the social construction of values works. Clark assumes that the children of rich people are by that fact carriers of the sort of bourgeois values that make for an Industrial Revolution. To be sure, this is an odd characterization of the medieval or early modern relatively rich. A rich bourgeois of London in 1400 devoted most of his effort to arranging special protection for his wool-trading monopoly. His younger sons might well take away the lesson, repeated again and again down to Elizabethan England and your local modern protectionists, that it’s a good idea to regulate everything you can, and quite a bad thing to let people make the deals they wish to. And a Brave Sir Botany who had stolen his riches, say, or as a successful courtier who had received them from Henry VIII, via the dissolved monasteries, would not automatically, one would think, transmit sober bourgeois values to younger sons. A society that extravagantly admired aristocratic or Christian virtues could corrupt even a Medici banker into thinking of himself as quite the lord. In a similar way nowadays an extravagant admiration for the neo-aristocratic values of the clerisy corrupts the bourgeois child into scorning her father’s bourgeois occupation.

But leave aside the actual stories of how values are made. Clark’s lack of curiosity about the exact content of the bourgeois values he and I agree in admiring leave him, I say, with a mechanical, if dubious, model of how values get transmitted. But suppose the mechanical model is correct. Then a scientist of Clark’s quantitative ingenuity would have found it trivial to calculate what the higher rates of breeding would yield in bourgeois-minded but lower class people in the next generation. Clark doesn’t do it.

The underlying problem is that Clark wants his story to be a very long-run story, because he has ambitions for its endogeneity, which is to say its historical materialism. He wants bourgeois values and the modern world to arise with slow-chapped pow’r out of a thousand years of English history. No dei ex machina, thank you very much: by which he means sort-run events like the birth of English freedom or the Protestant Reformation or the Scientific Revolution.

Why is it a problem for his story? Because his mechanical model of the transmission of values works too quickly, on a scale of a century or so---not ten centuries. That puts paid to his long-run story. He describes his central Chapter 6 as identifying “strong selective processes.”¹⁴⁰ That’s right: they are too strong for a slow story, and so his own argument turns out to be one of despised dei ex machine that work on a scale of decades or a few generations or a century or so. If he had tried to calculate the oomph of link A he would have caught the disastrous scientific oversight before announcing to the world that he had solved the leading scientific question in economics. Unhappily, he did not.

Consider for example one of the bourgeois values we can measure, and Clark does, again with his usual quantitative insight thoroughness, literacy. Male literacy in England, Clark reports, rose from the share of the clergy in the male population in, say, 1300 (though illiterate monks were by no means unknown) to perhaps 30 percent in 1580 and to 60 percent by the time national statistics start to be possible in the 1750s. Think about it. If you are the parent of four children, and can read, what is the transition probability that all four of your children will read? It is extremely high, at any rate in a society that for some reason values literacy. Thus in families today “going to college” is extremely inheritable, but in one generation. Unlike my Irish ancestors, my Norwegian ancestors in Hardanger were reading by the late 16^th century, and never stopped. Why? Clearly, because of that Protestant Reformation, a literal Deus, to which Clark in his book explaining modern Europe allots eight words. No religion, please: we’re demographic historical materialists.

Why? Clearly, because of the spread of books and printing? Why? Clearly because of the withdrawn hand of the censor in Holland and later England.

More generally, his hypothesis in intrinsically comparative, which is a great merit, since what we wish to know is precisely why England woke up and China slept. He is more comparative than most economic historians, and yet the comparisons he makes

the very richest Englishmen at death had twice as many surviving sons

like Pilate does not stay to hear the answer. He cuts off the discussion with a Materialist Lemma, namely,

Chapter 7:

But in the Late 17^th Century the British Changed

The chapter is even more scrappy than Chapter 6!
So the claim is that the British and some of their neighbors changed in their rhetoric of markets and the commercial life.

Proving rhetorical causes is not easy. “Rhetoric” means anciently the available means of unforced persuasion. It includes among its tools logic and story, metaphor and fact, vocabulary and statistics. It is what we do when we try to persuade people that a life in business is good or is bad, a practice either of “mutually advantageous exchange” or of “exploitation and alienation.” There’s nothing wrong in itself, one needs to emphasize in this anti-rhetorical age of rhetoric, with trying to persuade people of something. And so the newspaper sense of “rhetoric” as one of the dozens of synonyms for “lying speech” is to be set aside. In a free society we need rhetoric, that unforced persuasion.

But rhetorical causes are harder to make persuasive or unpersuasive than material causes. When a Londoner in England’s last killing famine, in 1596, offered 6 ½ pence per four-pound loaf of bread (two times the usual price in the 1590s) there was no gap between her words and her actions. We say that she put her money where her mouth was. Her offer of pence for bread as she physically handed the coins to the baker and he handed her the loaf was a “material cause” of the deal in a straightforward sense. To express the act in fancier language, her talk to the baker (“Yes, I want to buy that damned loaf, you bloody thief!”) was performative, a “speech act”: in saying something she did something in the world, evoked the movement of the bread. If you want to know what she meant, merely look at the price she paid. So if you want to know that the profits from foreign trade did not cause the industrial revolution you have a very good start on a persuasive argument if you know the prices of tobacco and slaves and sugar, and the physical movements the offer of the prices evoked.

The trouble with word evidence is that people---and chimpanzees and camouflaging plants---can be dishonest. That is, they can fashion a gap between what they say and what they mean, if no material payment or other physical act is involved. “I just love that outfit!” can mean in the right circumstances “Thank God you got rid of that hideous orange dress!” Words---and my claim is that the initiating change was words---can be “cheap talk,” that is, merely words.

The evidence for the rhetorical change to a business-dominated civilization, then, has to catch people talking unawares. Otherwise, if you simply ask them outright, the people are liable to deny indignantly that they are no longer aristocratic or Christian. We need verbal thermometers of the change in civilization that made the modern world.

So start with a word once redolent of an aristocratic civilization.

Our bourgeois word “honest” once meant not mainly “committed to telling the truth” but mainly “noble, aristocratic---after all, what true aristocrat would bother to care about truth, when style, gesture, heroism, and social position are the life of man?” To be sure, the modern and secondary meaning of “truth telling, whether or not of high social rank” occurs in English as early as 1400. Yet nonetheless in good old Will Shakespeare’s time a phrase like "honest, honest Iago" mainly meant, with a certain coy ambiguity, that the lying Iago in Othello was "honorable, noble, warlike, aristocratic." The famous definition by Sir Henry Wotton (1568-1639) of a diplomat plays on the ambiguity: “ an honest man sent to lie abroad for good of his country.” “Honest” here means “noble, distinguished,” but dances prettily with “lie.” The old phrase in men’s mouths, “an honest woman”---thus Desdemona in the play, repeatedly, an ironic commentary also on her fate--preserves the original meaning of the word “honest,” with adjustments for a woman’s place in a system of manly honor. Thus too Milton, in 1674. The one occurrence of “honest” in the second edition of Paradise Lost, commenting on Eve’s nakedness before her disobedience, is: “Then was not guilty shame, dishonest shame/ Of nature’s works, honor dishonorable” (IV: 313f). And so to the Duke of Shaftesbury in 1713, a late occurrence in the aristocratic sense, unsurprisingly by an aristocrat looking into what “honesty or virtue is, considered by itself.”¹⁴¹

In most Romance languages at the same time---English, though Germanic in structure, is in its elevated vocabulary merely French or Latin spoken with a strange accent---the same honesty-word meant the same honorable thing---not mere truth telling. In English, French, Italian, Spanish, and so forth the word is derived from Latin honestus from honos, “honor, high rank.” Honestus in classical Latin never meant truth telling. For that concept, an uninteresting one in a society obsessed with honor and nobility, the Romans used the word sincerus (“pure”). ¹⁴²

Thus honnête in 16^th-century French meant what Shakespeare meant by “honest.” In Molière’s Bourgeois Gentilhomme, sixty-five years after Othello and about the time of Paradise Lost, the romantic lead, Cléonte, uses honnête in the ambiguous way that Shakespeare and Milton do, with much talk of honneur associated with it. The idiotic bourgeois pretender to nobility, M. Jourdain, asks Cléonte if he is a gentilhomme, which meant “of gentle birth, an aristocrat” in the wide and purchasable sense of French society at the time, having nothing to do with the democratic and bourgeois meaning it has since acquired in English. The Oxford-Hachette labels the French gentilhomme “historical,” with only the meaning of “gentry” or “aristocracy.” And of course the usual French word for what we call “mister” (from old “master”), or a “gentleman” as in democratic phrases like “ladies and gentlemen,” is another piece of hierarchical talk brought down to earth, “my senior, my superior,” monsieur.

Cléonte replies at length to My Superior Jourdain:

No one scruples to take the name [of gentilhomme], and usage nowadays seems to authorize the theft. For my part, . . . I find that all imposture is unworthy of an honest=honorable man [honnête homme], and that there is bit of cowardice in disguising what Heaven has born us into. . . and to give the impression of that which we are not. I was born, certainly, of parents who held honorable [honorable] position. I achieved honor [l’honneur] in the armed forces through six years of service. . . . But . . . I say to you frankly [franchement, not honnêtement, as still often in French and English, though “honestly” is taking over] that I am not at all an aristocrat [gentilhomme].

Bourgeois Gentilhomme, 1670, act 3, sc. 12.

A few lines later Madame Jourdain advises her fool of a husband, who wishes “to have an aristocrat as son-in-law,” that “your daughter would do better to have an honest [i.e. honorable] man, rich and well-favored [un honnête homme riche et bien fait] than a beggarly and poorly built aristocrat.”

The same is true of Germanic languages. In Shakespeare’s or Molière’s time the same honor-code meaning of “honest” is attached to an honesty=honor-word, arising from an entirely different root than the Latin. It has, however, almost the same modern history. Thus Dutch eer still nowadays means “noble, aristocratic,” like English “honorable” when used among aristocrats on the dueling grounds, and figures in many phrases remembering a society of noble hierarchy: de eer aandoen om, “do [me] the honor of.” Or in German mit wem habe ich die Ehre zu spreken?---“with whom do I have the honor to speak?” But in Dutch and in German the addition of –lijk/-lich (-like) yielded an eerlijk/ehrlich that comes to mean simply “honest,“ like the modern English commendation of the truth-telling necessary for a society of merchants. Thus Danish and Norwegian aer, honor, parallels aerlig, honest. Evidence from Vondel , contrasted with Ibsen

In other words, the really surprising fact is that both the Germanic languages and the commercial daughters of Latin developed from their respective root words meaning “aristocratic, worthy of honor” a word appropriate to a bourgeois society meaning instead “truth telling, worthy of trust.” In the late 17^th and early 18^th centuries in all these languages the primary and older and Iago-ite meaning of “noble, aristocratic, worthy of being honored,” fades, leaving mainly our modern notion of “that deals uprightly in speech and act. . . that will not lie cheat or steal.”¹⁴³ The title of the poem of 1705 by Shaftesbury’s opponent, Bernard Mandeville, is The Grumbling Hive: or, Knaves Turn'd Honest. Mandeville---who not incidentally was a Dutchman writing in English---meant by “honest” nothing like “partaking of nobility,” but instead “not cheating,” in the modern sense. He cynically condemned this not cheating as naïve and profitless: “Then leave complaints: fools only strive/ To make a great an honest hive.”¹⁴⁴

By 1800 at the latest many Romance and all Germanic languages use the honesty word to mean pretty much exclusively "sincere, upright, truth-telling, reliable for a business deal."¹⁴⁵  In Adam Smith’s two published books, in their first editions of 1759 and 1776, “honest” means “upright” or “sincere” or “truth-telling,” never “aristocratic.” Even a poor man, he argues in The Theory of Moral Sentiments, is constrained not to steal by “the man within”: “there is no commonly honest man who does not more dread the inward disgrace.”¹⁴⁶ In the eight works of Jane Austen, written from 1793 to 1816 (including The Watsons, 1804, unfinished, and her early and unpublished Lady Susan, but not her last, unfinished Sanditon), “honest” occurs 31 times.¹⁴⁷ It means “upright” in six of these 31 occasions, dominantly in the old phrase an “honest man,” but never “of high social rank, aristocratic.” Another third of the time it means “genuine,” as in “a real, honest, old-fashioned boarding-school” (Emma), very far indeed from “honest” as “aristocratic.” In its dominant modern sense of “truth-telling” it occurs again a third of the time in the meaning “sincere,” and literally “truth-telling” four out of the 31 total occurrences in any meaning.

The 1934 Webster’s New International Dictionary labels “honesty” in sense 1, “held in honor,” as archaic, with “honest” (chaste) as in an “honest woman.” It labels “honesty” in sense 1a, “honor,” as obsolete. “Honest” in the dominant sense 2 means fair, upright, truthful “as, an honest judge or merchant, [or an honest] statement” (italics supplied). A big 1987 dictionary of Italian notes that the root of onesto is Latin honestus, but does not mention its obsolete Latin and olden Italian meaning, “noble.”¹⁴⁸ {Do compendious German or Dutch dictionary} Honesty now means honesty.

Translations of the New Testament register the change, though unevenly. In many recent translations of the Parable of the Dishonest Manager into English the word “honest” is used in the sense of “upright, plain dealing.” Thus the New Revised Standard Version (1989) of Luke 16:8 is “And his master commended the dishonest manager.” The New English Bible (1961) is “And the master applauded the dishonest steward.” The New International Version (1973-1984): “The master commended the dishonest manager.” Thus also the Weymouth NT and the World English Bible. But the New American Standard (1960-1995), the Darby Version, and Young’s [old] Literal Translation use “unrighteous” and Douay-Rheims and Webster’s use the more Greek-justified “unjust.” The Basic English Bible makes do with “false.”

In the earlier context in which English “honest” meant “aristocratic” the word is never used in its modern sense of “fair-dealing.” Thus the King James (1611) version of Luke 16:8 speaks of the “unjust,” not the “dishonest” steward, which is a literal translation of the original Greek, adikias. On the other hand, the merely seven occurrences of “honest” in the King James, all in the New Testament, appear to mean “righteous” (in Greek dikos, just) in the sense of following the law, of Moses or of Jesus.

In other languages with the same problem with the older meaning of “honest” it is similar. The States’ Bible of the Dutch (1618-19) calls the steward onrechtvaardigen, “unrighteous.” Some versions of Luther’s Bible calls him den ungetreuen Verwalter, the unfaithful manager, a mistranslation in context (since pistos, “faithful,” occurs two verses down in contrasting parallel to dikos), but anyway not unehrlich, modern “dishonest,” which in 1545 would have suggested “un-aristocratic.” The modern (1912) Luther and the Schlachter (1951) give like Dutch ungerechten, “unrighteous.” A recent translation into Afrikaans calls the manager oneerlike, that is, “dishonest” in the modern sense, as in modern Dutch.¹⁴⁹ But a 1953 Afrikaans version was using the more accurate onregverdige, “unrighteous,” as do Norwegian (1930) and Swedish translations (1917).¹⁵⁰

In French the old (1744) Martin and Ostervald (though in a 1996 revision) use “unfaithful” and the Darby uses “unjust.” The French Jerusalem uses the modern malhonnête. In Italian the steward is in the Giovanni Diodati Bible (1649) l’ingiusto fattore and in the Riveduta (1927) il fattore infedele. No disonesto about him. The modern Catholic Vulgate uses “unfairness,” following the Greek, not the Latin for “dishonest” in the modern sense, which would be sincerus, probus, simplex, antiques, frugii depending on the shade of meaning. Spanish translations simply call him malo and leave it at that: the honest/honor split is not sharp in Spanish, as one might expect in a society obsessed with honor. Honesto in Spanish does not mean “honest=truth-telling” but “chaste, modest, decent.”

The old civilization that ours replaced, which was dominated by warriors and latterly by courtiers, needed above all a word for rank. Our civilization dominated by merchants and latterly by manufacturers and recently by risk capitalists needs rather a word for reliable truth telling. Nowadays we call it “transparency.” And so from 1600 to 1776 this new civilization in northwestern Europe came into being, in its words.
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The English, I say, were notorious in the age of Sir Francis Drake and Elizabeth herself for a proud, decidedly unbourgeois behavior. Elizabeth professed no doubt, as the Spanish Armada sailed up the English Channel, that “we shall shortly have a famous victory over those enemies of my God, of my kingdom, and of my people.” A Dutch businessman in 16… declared that “the people are bold, courageous, ardent and cruel in war, but very inconstant, rash, vainglorious, light and deceiving, and very suspicious, especially of foreigners, whom they despise.”¹⁵¹ Of these qualities only courage and the suspicion of foreigners survived the embourgeoisfication of England, 1689 to the present. Jeremy Paxman, who is among the numerous tellers of the tale to use the Dutchman’s quotation, remarks that in the late 19^th century the English came to be viewed, as having on the contrary “honesty, prudence, patriotism, self-control, fair play and courage.”¹⁵² Evidently something had changed.

"Credit" is from creditus, "believed." Each of the hundred-odd quotations in the Oxford English Dictionary illustrating the noun and the verb date from after 1541, and most of the commercial quotations from the 16^th century are suspicious of it. An act of 34-35 Henry VIII (that is, 1542) noted that “sundry persons consume the substance obtained by credit of other men.” Shame on them. But contrast the neutral language of Locke in 1691: credit is merely “the expectation of money within some limited time.” A shift in talk had taken place, 1542-1691, and a shift in the ideological support for capitalism (McCloskey, forthcoming). How did this take place?

The historian Matthew Kadane explains the shift towards bourgeois virtues with: “various interactions with the Dutch; the slow cool-down in religious temperature (which helps to permit the mere possibility of the demoralization of wealth) starting after the end of the civil wars and running through 1688-89; the commercialization of London, where there is so much more to be a spectator of, and so on.”