July 28, 2018 Dear Reader

Peter Wardley has pioneered for the study of numeracy in England the use of probate inventories, statements of property at death available in practically limitless quantities from the 15^th century onward. He has discovered that as late as 1610 even in commercial Bristol the share of probates using Arabic as against Roman numerals was essential zero. By 1670, however, it was nearly 100%, a startlingly fast change. Robert Loder's farm accounts, in Berkshire 1610-1620, uses Roman numerals almost exclusively before 1616, even for dates of the month. In 1616 he starts to mix in Arabic, as though he had just learned to reckon in them—he continued to use Arabic for year numbers, probably because years, like regnal orders, Elizabeth II and James I, or Superbowl XVI, are not subjects of calculation.¹⁷⁰

Fra Luca Pacioli of Venice popularized double-entry book-keeping at the end of the 15^th century, and such sophistications in accounting rapidly spread in bourgeois circles. The metaphor of a set of accounts was nothing new, of course, as in God’s accounting of our sins; or the three servants in Jesus’ parable (Matt. 25: 14-30) rendering their account [the Greek original uses logon, the “word” being the usual term for “commercial accounts”] of their uses of the talents, “my soul more bent / To serve therewith my Maker, and present / My true account, lest he returning chide.” Bourgeois and especially bourgeois Protestant boys actually carried it out, as in Franklin’s score-keeping of his sins.

We must not be misled by the absence in Olden Tymes of modern arithmetical skills into thinking that our ancestors were merely stupid. Shepherds had every incentive to develop tricks in reckoning, as in the old Welsh system of counting, perhaps from how many sheep the eye can grasp at a glance. The myth is that all primitive folk count “one, two, many.” Well, not when it matters, though some do because it doesn’t. Carpenters must of course have systems of reckoning to build a set of stairs. The habit of counting and figuring is reflected in handbooks for craftsmen from the late Middle Ages on, the ancestors of the present-day ready reckoners for sale at the checkout counter at your Ace Hardware store. And you cannot build a great pyramid, or even probably a relatively little stone henge, without some way of multiplying and dividing, at least in effect, multiplying the materials and dividing the work. The first writing of any sort of course is counting, such as storage accounts in Mesopotamia or Crete and calendar dates in Meso-America and reckoning knots in Peru. In Greek and Latin the magicians of the East were called mathematici because calculation—as against the much more elegant method of proof invented by the Greeks—was characteristic of the Mesopotamian astrologers.

Large organizations counted perforce. Sheer counts had often a purpose of taxation—St. Luke’s story about a decree from Caesar Augustus that all the world should be taxed, for example; and in 1086 the better attested case of William the Conqueror’s Domesday Book. We owe our knowledge of medieval agriculture in Europe to the necessity in large estates to count, in order to discourage cheating by subordinates. The Bishop of Winchester’s N manors . . . .. cite Winchester Yields, and give example from it. We can see in such records the scribes making mistakes of calculation with their clumsy Roman numerals. We know less about agriculture a little later in Europe because the size of giant estates went down after the Black Death of 1348-50, and such accounting was therefore less worthwhile.

Sophisticated counting in modern times cuts through the Falstaffian fog of imprecision which any but a calculating genius starts with. Nearly universal before the common school outside the classes of specialized merchants or shepherds, the fog, I repeat, persists now in the non-numerate. Here is a strange recent example in which I have a personal interest. The standard estimate for the prevalence of male to female gender crossers in the United States is one in 30,000 born males. This is the figure in The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, 4^th edition, 1994. Let us put aside the issue of whether it is a “mental disorder,” or what purpose of gender policing would be served by claiming that the disorder is so very rare. An emerita professor of electrical engineering at the University of Michigan, Lynn Conway, a member of the National Academy of Engineering and one of the inventors of modern computer design (after IBM fired her for transitioning in 1968 from male to female), notes that the figure is impossibly low. It would imply by now in the United States a mere 800 completed gender crossers, such as Conway and me—when in fact all sorts of evidence suggests that there are at least 40,000.¹⁷¹

The showing of such a contradiction, like Prince Hal comments on Falstaff's boasting exaggeration, is the kind of point a numerate person makes. The sex doctors seem not to be modern in their quantitative habits of thought. A figure of 800 completed, Conway observes, would be accounted for (note the verb) by the flow of a mere two year’s worth of operations by one doctor. Conway reckons the incidence of the condition is in fact about one in every 500 born males—not one in 30,000. It is two orders of magnitude more common than believed by the psychiatrists and psychologists who in their innumeracy write the Manual. Conway suspects that among other sources of numerical fog the doctors are mixing up prevalence with incidence—stock with flow, as accountants and economists would put it. That is, they are mixing up the total number existing as a snapshot at a certain date with the number born per year. The wrong number justifies programs like that at the NNN at Johns Hopkins and the Clarke Institute in Toronto to Stop Them from changing gender---after all, the real ones are extremely rare, and the rest one supposes are vulgarly sex-driven.

Calculation is the skeleton of prudence. But precisely because it embodies ignoble prudence the aristocrat scorns calculation. Courage, his defining virtue, is non-calculating, or else it is not courage. Henry V prays to the god of battles: “steel my soldiers’ hearts;/ Possess them not with fear; take from them now the sense of reckoning, if the opposed numbers/ Pluck their hearts from them.” And indeed his “ruined band” before Agincourt, as he had noted to the French messenger, was “with sickness much enfeebled, / My numbers lessened, and those few I have / Almost no better than so many French.” Yet his numbers of five or six thousand did not prudently flee from an enemy of 25,000 on the Feast Day of Crispian.

One reason, Shakespeare avers, was faith, as Henry says to Gloucester: “We are in God’s hand, brother, not in theirs.” The other was courage: “’tis true that we are in great danger; / The greater therefore should our courage be.” Shakespeare of course emphasizes in 1599 these two Christian/aristocratic virtues, those of the Christian knight, and not for example the prudence of the warhorse-impaling stakes that on Henry’s orders the archers had been lugging through the French countryside for a week.¹⁷² Prudence is a calculative virtue, as are, note, justice and temperance. They are cool. The warm virtues, love and courage, faith and hope, the virtues praised most often by Shakespeare, and praised little by bourgeois Adam Smith two centuries on, are specifically and essentially non-calculative.

The play does not tell what the real King Henry V was doing in the weeks leading up to Sunday, October 25, 1415, of course. It tells what was expected to be mouthed by stage noblemen in the last years of Elizabeth’s England, a place in which only rank ennobled, and honor to the low-born came only through loyalty to the nobles. Before the taking of Harfleur (“Once more unto the breach, dear friends”), Henry declares “there’s none of you so mean and base, / That hath not noble luster in your eyes”; and 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.”

Out of earshot of Henry, the king’s uncle grimly notes the disadvantage in numbers: “There’s five to one; besides they all are fresh”; at which the Earl of Salisbury exclaims, “God’s arm strike with us! ‘tis a fearful odds.” The King comes onto the scene, while the Earl of Westmoreland is continuing the calculative talk: “O that we now had here / But one ten thousand of those men in England / That do no work today!” To which Henry replies, scorning such bourgeois considerations, “If we are marked to die, we are enow [enough] / To do our country loss; and if to live, / The fewer men, the greater share of honor.”

And gentlemen in England now a-bed

Shall think themselves accursed they were not here,

And hold their manhoods cheap whiles any speaks

That fought with us upon St. Crispin’s Day.

This is not bourgeois, prudential rhetoric, and counts not the cost.

Public calculation is highly characteristic of the bourgeois world, such as the political arithmeticians of the 17^th century, first in Holland and then in England and then in France. The first person in Europe to suggest that accounting could be applied to the affairs of an entire nation, as though the nation were a business firm, appears to have been the inventor of the decimal point, the Dutch mathematician and statesman Simon Stevin(us) (1548-1620), who persuaded the City of Amsterdam and the King of Sweden to adopt double-entry bookkeeping.¹⁷³ Find out more about Stevinus

As late as 1673 Sir William Temple was observing, astonished, of the Dutch that “the order in casting up [i.e. accounting for] their expenses, is so great and general, that no man offers at [i.e. attempts] any undertaking which he is not prepared for, and [is not] master of his design before he begins; so as I have neither observed nor heard of any building public or private that has not been finished in the time designed for it.”¹⁷⁴ The English were then not slow to adopt such rationality, or at least to claim it. Pepys again, and naval accounts. Sir William Petty announced in 1690: “The method I take to do this is not yet very usual. For instead of using only comparative and superlative words and intellectual arguments I have taken the course (as a specimen of the political arithmetic I have long aimed at) to express myself in terms of number, weight, or measure; to use only arguments of sense.”¹⁷⁵ It is a manifesto of a bourgeois age.

In an economics course recently I assigned my undergraduate students, whom I try to teach to think prudently like the Dutch of the Golden Age, the task of calculating the costs and benefits of the automobiles that three-quarters of them operated. I suspected that American college students work many hours in non-studying jobs, skimping their learning, to pay for cars and pizzas—though come to think of it, so do their parents. My suspicion was confirmed. Shame on them.

But it seemed only fair for the professor herself to take the test. It turned out that the indignant professor was the most irrational owner of an automobile in the class. My beloved seven-year old Toyota Avalon was costing me $4000 a year more than the same services would cost to get in other ways where I live in downtown Chicago. Taxis stream by my front door on South Dearborn Street day and night. On the other side of the accounts a parking place off-street is $160 a month and the city’s meter maids on-street are cruelly efficient. So I sold the car. And likewise, probably, should you. I suggest you do the calculation, and certainly for that third car that sits outside your house to be used, if that, once a week.

But a rhetoric of calculation since the 17^th century does not mean that Europeans actually were rational. Many social scientists following Max Weber have mistakenly supposed they were, that a new skill with numbers and with accounts meant that Europeans had discovered true rationality. No. They discovered how to talk rationality, which they then applied with enthusiasm to counting the number of bird seeds you could fit into a Negroid skull and the number of Jews and Gypsies you could murder in an afternoon. The numbers and calculation and accounts appeal to a rhetoric of rationality—terms of number, weight, or measure; only arguments of sense. But they do not guarantee its substance.

The numbers, for one thing, have to be correct. So does the accounting framework in which they are calculated. So does the evaluative job they are supposed to do. So does the ethical purpose of the whole. These are heavy, heavy requirements, and any quantitative scientist knows that most people, even other scientists, commonly get them wrong.

For example, the technique of "statistical significance" used in certain quantitative fields such as medicine and economics—though not much at all in physics or chemistry, say—turns out to be on inspection comically mistaken. Tens of thousands of earnest researchers into medicines and minimum wages persuade themselves that they are doing a properly bourgeois calculation when in fact the calculation is very largely irrelevant to what they want to know. Like businesspeople priding themselves on economically erroneous allocating of fixed costs to various branches of their business, the medical and social scientists who use so-called t or p or R “tests” are doing more than fooling themselves. They are killing people and ruining economies. The suspicion that "you can prove anything with statistics" is primitive. But in field after field of the intellect, from politicized census-taking up to double blind experiments sponsored by Merck the primitive gibe seems approximately true, at the 5% level of significance.¹⁷⁶

In 1713, John Nye explains in his recent history of British-French commercial relations, the British makers of drink had long benefited from the prohibition of imports of French wine into Britain. Britain and France had just concluded their long and bloody quarrel over the Spanish succession, and a bill in Parliament proposed therefore to drop the wartime preferences for Spanish and Portuguese wines, to which unsurprisingly the existing importers of Spanish and Portuguese wines—there were of course no legal importers of French ones to speak up for that trade—objected strenuously. A frantic river of pamphlets spilled out a rhetoric of accounting and quantities. It was the first time, Nye notes, following G. N. Clark, “that the newly collected statistics on British trade entered the political debate in a substantial way,” serving “as a basis for the mercantilists’ published statements of economic doctrine.” Note the date: in now Dutch-imitating England in 1713 was the first time that policy depended on numbers, this a century after the first such debate in Holland. True?

The wine trades with Portugal, wrote one defender of the status quo, “have as constantly increased every year as we have increased the demand for their wines, by which means the navigation and seamen of this kingdom have been greatly encouraged.” If French wines are allowed back into Britain the navigation and seamen will be ruined, because “small ships and an easy charge of men can fetch wines from France.” And so “the greatest part of those ships must lie and rot, or come home dead freighted,” resulting in a rise in freight rates on British exports, to the detriment of the country’s treasure by foreign trade. Another British pamphleteer reckoned that “the advantage to the French nation by having such a vent for their wines” was very great. “The French king . . . would give a million of money to procure” it.¹⁷⁷ Another that

formerly the king of Portugal prohibited the importation of cloth into his kingdom. . . . [The] prohibition was taken off on consideration that Portugal wine should pay [in Britain] one third less duty than French. . . . Should the duty on French wines be lowered . . . . we very much fear that the French king will take the opportunity of introducing his subjects’ cloth into Portugal, which being of a thinner manufacture than the cloth of this nation, may be fitter for that country and their Brazils. . . . We may forever lose the cloth trade in that kingdom¹⁷⁸

In June of 1713 the bill to relax the duties on French wine was rejected, though the quantitative arguments were all specious. The social accounting was mistaken, sometimes positively wacko. But anyway a rhetoric of quantitative prudence ruled.¹⁷⁹ Such bourgeois, quantitative reasoning was in Britain rare a century before, though among the Dutch it was already commonplace in 1613. "Constantly increased." "The greatest part of those ships." "A million of money." "One third less duty."

But I said there can be a sort of madness in the counting, and counting is no guarantee of actual rationality. As a calculating modern person, even an economist, before I sold my car I first went on a big shopping expedition, as my mother prudently advised, and stocked up with $1500-worth of Barilla Thin Spaghetti and Manischewitz Thin Tea Matzos. As an aid to such prudence I worked out little tables of equivalences, like the builder’s ready reference book: If you use ½ a package of Quaker Instant Oats a week, and want two-years’ worth, that’s . . . let’s see, ½ x 52 x 2 = 52 boxes. Calculation embodies a modern sort of prudence, even when as here it is slightly mad. I still had by actual count, three years now after the shopping spree, 11 cans of Pillar Rock Pink Salmon, but can't find the sell-by date on them. Auden writes in 1940: "The measurable taking charge/ Of him who measures, set at large/ By his own actions, useful facts/ Become the user of his acts.”¹⁸⁰

What the modern fascination with charts, graphs, figures, and calculations shows is that moderns admire prudence. It does not show that they practice it. What changed from Shakespeare's time to Dickens' time was the rhetoric, and the social prestige of people like merchants and engineers and economists who specialized in it. Now the world is ruled by little else. Dickens was arguing about and against the spirit of the age in Chapter XV of Hard Times, her father trying to persuade Louisa to marry Mr. Bounderby by the batty citation of facts, only facts:

You are, we will say in round numbers, twenty years of age; Mr. Bounderby is, we will say in round numbers, fifty. There is some disparity in your respective years, but in your means and positions there is none; on the contrary, there is a great suitability. Then the question arises, Is this one disparity sufficient to operate as a bar to such a marriage? In considering this question, it is not unimportant to take into account the statistics of marriage, so far as they have yet been obtained, in England and Wales. I find, on reference to the figures, that a large proportion of these marriages are contracted between parties of very unequal ages, and that the elder of these contracting parties is, in rather more than three-fourths of these instances, the bridegroom. It is remarkable as showing the wide prevalence of this law, that among the natives of the British possessions in India, also in a considerable part of China, and among the Calmucks of Tartary, the best means of computation yet furnished us by travelers, yield similar results.


Chapter 9:

The New Values Were Triumphant

by 1848, or 1776, or Even 1710
My friend the economist Mark Blaug once said to me, in effect, "Isn't it remarkable that much of moral conduct doesn't need explicit ideology, because much of the socialization of people is tacit. Isn't it the tacit socialization at your mother's knees—and perhaps even the biological imperative in your father's genes—that must be explained?" Blaug's objection is similar to Geertz', though Blaug is resisting the textual study that Geertz and I like to do. "Do we need to drone on and on about theories of ethics and their historical change?" His remarks are anti-verbal: look for interest, he says, and instinct. Set aside the mere words.

And I answer to Blaug: I understand your scientific impatience, and agree that some of the socialization is tacit and hardwired in humans. It seems to be hardwired at any rate in the broad method of, say, social shaming, if not in the detailed rules about what exactly is shameful. We are hardwired, for example, as another economist friend of mine, Alexander Field, argues in a recent book, not to kill each other on meeting Field **date).

But of course even in this case we can rather easily be socialized by words, even at our mothers' knees, to kill the enemies of Rome on meeting, or at any rate at a convenient distance. The particular enemies are highly specific to a culture and time, demonized in an ideology, often explicit. An ideology of German superiority socialized Germans to kill Poles. An ideology of British imperialism socialized Englishmen to kill Zulus. An ideology of American manifest destiny socialized Americans to kill Sauk and Sioux. I repeat: of course. Humans are both hard-wired and soft-wared. We can read at least part of the software's code, because it is expressed in the lines and especially between the lines in Molière's plays and Jane Austen's novels, in Paine's Common Sense and in Johnson's colloquies, in Candide and in The Sorrows of Young Werther.

Articulated ideology and subliminal ideology, too, as Blaug implies, rides perhaps as a little wave of talk upon deeper currents of biology or interest or the means of production. But the little wave, too, has its own logic and its own consequences. I think—this is no astonishing discovery, but it is where this book begins—that in northwestern Europe and especially in England the ruling ideology changed a great deal from 1600 to 1710 and then from 1710 to 1848, from Shakespeare's time to Addison's time, and then further to Macaulay's, with a very significant mile mark at Adam Smith and 1776. The characteristic European site moved from an French aristocrat's estate to an English bourgeois' town. And, I claim, the change had big consequences.

Contrary to Weber, Reinhold Niebuhr wrote in 1952, "Prosperity was not, according to the Puritan creed, a primary proof or fruit of virtue. 'When men do not see and own God,' declared Urian Oakes (1631), 'but attribute success to the sufficiency of instruments it is time for God to maintain his own right and to show that He gives and denies success according to His own good pleasure'" (Niebuhr 1952, Chap. 3, Sec. 1). But Niebuhr sees "the descent from Puritanism to Yankee in America . . . [as] a fairly rapid one. Prosperity which had been sought in the service of God was now sought for its own sake. The Yankees were very appreciative of the promise in Deuteronomy: 'And thou shalt do that which is right and good in the sight of the Lord: that it may be well with thee, and that thou mayest go in and possess the good land which the lord sware unto thy fathers'" (6: 18). (Chap 3, sec. 1) "According to the Jeffersonians," Niebuhr contnues, "prosperity and well-being should be sought as the basis of virtue. They believed that if each citizen found contentment in a justly and richly rewarded toil he would not be disposed to take advantage of his neighbor. The Puritans regarded virtue as the basis of prosperity, rather than prosperity as the basis of virtue. But in any case the fusion of these two forces created a preoccupation with the material circumstances of life which expressed a more consistent bourgeois ethos than that of even the most advanced nations of Europe." Niebuhr 1952, Chap. 3, Sec. 1)

Jane Austen’s characters in her six mature and finished novels, published between 1811 and 1817, are of course smallish landholders and their pastors, the lesser gentry, with the Army and the Navy off stage. She never portrays, or even mentions, the real heights of the aristocracy, and her dedication of Emma to the Prince Regent was famously forced. "3 or 4 families in a country village," she writes to her niece Anna in 1814, "are the very thing to work on."¹⁸¹ We hear nothing of dukes and duchesses. Her people bring along with their rise into the lesser gentry an attitude of disapproval for the gaming tables and dueling grounds of the real aristocracy. Part of the embourgeoisfication of England 1700 to 1848 consisted of tempering the aristocracy with bourgeois values, until dukes took to walking about in sober business suits and serving as board chairs for corporations.

In the other direction, her servants and children are entirely silent---barely mentioned. We hear of Mrs. Charles nursery-maid, but we do not hear her speak, or hear of the children who thronged these households---remember that Jane's mother had eight children, six sons and two daughters. You wouldn't know that England was an astonishingly stratified society from Austen's novels---except that even within the tiny class she examines a snobbery reigns, at least among the minor characters. This needn't matter much to a modern reader. The narrow spectrum of the English class system which Austen examines can be refracted into whatever class arrangement we want for our own purposes, or, still better, de-historicized entirely and left as Literature about Humanity.

Yet none of Austen's characters are conventionally bourgeois. It is notable that not a single merchant or manufacturer is so much as mentioned. The most ordinarily bourgeois figure is Robert Martin, the farmer-suitor of Harriet Smith. Emma persuades Harriet not to accept his offer—until the very end of the novel.

So Austen wrote in a bourgeois genre, but did not bother with tradesmen.

And yet I would say---there is nothing terribly new or shocking about this---that our Jane is highly economistic, and in this way bourgeois. She is an advocate for both sense and sensibility, that is, for both prudence and love among the traditional principal virtues. In this I would say she is strikingly bourgeois. The bourgeoisie above all calculates. But the good bourgeois has sensibility, too.

Notice how impossible a carelessly aristocratic sentiment is in an Austen novel. Responsibility, honor in the sense of keeping your word, and above all amiability play their part, but edgy heroism of a boy's sort does not. Doubtless her brothers Frank and Charles were gloriously heroic, and urged their sailors once more unto the breach. You didn’t rise in His Majesty's navy of Lord Nelson and Jack Aubrey, as they both did to the rank of admiral, without physical courage. But in Austen's world, as in the Navy, the bourgeois virtue of prudence is an elevated virtue. It is no accident that the novel and the science of economics, called then "political economy," grew up at the same time and share the same atmosphere. Alessandro Manzoni, the Italian Tolstoy, devoted an entire chapter of his masterpiece The Betrothed (1825-26, 1840; Chapter 12) to explaining the dire consequences of interfering with the grain market. You could reprint it for your class in Economics 101.

In Austen the admiration of prudence is undercut, of course, when it shows as prudence only. The minor characters are often insanely prudent, mothers pushing their daughters up the marital tree, for example, with a single-mindedness that would delight a modern economist. Lucy in Pride and Prejudice, of whom the author {who is she channeling here?} Get it. remarks:

The whole of Lucy's behavior in the affair, and the prosperity which crowned it, therefore, may be held forth as a most encouraging instance of what an earnest, an unceasing attention to self-interest, however its progress may be apparently obstructed, will do in securing every advantage of fortune, with no other sacrifice than of time and conscience.¹⁸²

Or more famously, consider Mr. Collin's proposal to Elizabeth in Pride and Prejudice, an anticipation of Mr. Gradgrind’s argument to Louisa in Hard Times:

My reasons for marrying are, first, that I think it a right thing for every clergyman in easy circumstances (like myself) to set the example of matrimony in his parish. Secondly, that I am very convinced it will add very greatly to my happiness; and thirdly---which perhaps I ought to have mentioned earlier, that it is the particular advice of the very noble lady whom I have the honor of calling patroness.¹⁸³

But the major characters never talk in this prudence-only way. Their behavior, and their talk about their behavior, are always mixes of prudence with love and justice and temperance and moral courage. The two virtues of the classical and Christian seven that are missing from Austen are the same ones missing also from Adam Smith---transcendent hope and faith and love of God. That is, Jane is not a Romantic novelist, even though she concerned herself exclusively with romance, in its very recent sense of “affairs of the heart.” She is does not take art as a model for life, and does not elevate the artist to a lonely pinnacle of heroism, or worship the Middle Ages, or have any of the other obsessions of Sir Walter Scott and later Romantics.

What is especially odd is that she is not, either, a Christian novelist, and her characters, whether major or minor, make little of their Christianity. Hope and faith and love of God are Christian virtues, or so the Christians had claimed from the earliest times. Romanticism revives hope and faith and a love for Art or Nature or the Revolution as a necessary transcendent in people's lives. But Austen never deals in the transcendent. This daughter of a clergyman, courted by clergymen, and a sister to a clergyman, and the aunt-or-great-aunt-in-law to clergymen, never once mentions God. A friend puts it to me, “In an Austen novel you can’t spit without hitting an Anglican clergyman.” She writes to her niece Fanny Knight, advising her on a suitor: "and as to there being any objection from his Goodness, from the danger of his becoming even Evangelical, I cannot admit that. I am by no means convinced that we ought not all to be Evangelicals, and am at least persuaded that they who are so from Reason and Feeling, must be happiest and safest."¹⁸⁴ Note the mix of Reason and Feeling, sense and sensibility, an entire lack of understanding of the Evangelical temper. Austen was no Enthusiast. She is a 18^th-century, broad-church Anglican, bordering on deist.

It has often been remarked that Austen is bourgeois in the precise concern she has for money. Oliver McDonagh observes that she "was accustomed from childhood to hear money matters discussed in informed and detailed fashion; and the lessons she learned were driven home by her own comparative poverty."¹⁸⁵ My undergraduate students who come from small businesses have the same grasp of the value of money. In the same letter just quoted Jane tells the heiress Fanny that Mansfield Park has sold out its first edition. "I am very greedy & want to make the most of it; but you are much above caring about money," adds Aunt Jane with a sharp turn, "I shall not plague you with any particulars."¹⁸⁶

Samuel Johnson said that no one but a blockhead wrote except for money, and Jane is no exception. She writes to Cassandra and Martha expressing her pleasure in making so much as £400 from writing, twenty times the average annual income of a working family at the time---think in modern terms of royalties accumulating to $600,000. As Marilyn Butler explains, she felt in her last six years that she was an Author, because she was making money at it.¹⁸⁷ It was her independence, and bespoke a competence similar to that of her sailor brothers.

So Jane was an economist before the name. Economics is the science of prudence, and prudence is the chief virtue of the bourgeoisie. It is not the only virtue, say Jane and I. A successful capitalism, I would argue, must have the virtues that Jane praises on the other accounts.

For Austen is above all an ethical writer. Remove ethical evaluation, education, experience from her novels and you have nothing at all. Nothing much happens, of course. The happenings are internal. If Austen is bourgeois---and I think she is---she is a model for a good bourgeoisness. Not sense alone, but combined with sensibility. Not amiability alone, but also a prudent marriage. It seems impossible: as I say, she doesn't so much as mention stockbrokers or mill owners. But so long after her death she has assumed a special place in the ethical education of the English-speaking world ---I am thinking of her apotheosis at the hands of the English critic F. R. Leavis in the 1930s. It would alarm many of her readers to say so, but her kind of people are the kind we want in our capitalist society---her major people, that is, who do not follow the modern economists, as her minor people often do, in relying on prudence only.
Two projects after Austen to be completed here:
* * * *

Wright’s old Middle-Class Culture in Elizabethan England (1935) is surely still correct in claiming that the education of the English bourgeoisie during the 16^th and 17^th centuries, the scholarly and even scientific habits that Deborah Harkness (2007) has recently emphasized, made the “sudden” emergence of a literate and confident class late in the 17^th and early in the 18^th century less surprising.

The B character even of aristocratic talk in Britain in the age of the man’s modern suit (use Hollander). A good case, if not the hardest, would be the Navy. “How I made money on her,” says an Austen character, an admiral speaking of a frigate he once captained.

(Hold the anti-bourgeois themes of Disraeli, Dickens, Flaubert, et alii until Vol 3.)

“The gospel of work, one of the most significant articles of the bourgeois dogma,” Louis Wright declared long ago, “was promulgated with great earnestness during the period of Puritan supremacy and paved the way for the later apotheosis of business, which has colored the entire outlook of the modern world” (Wright 1935 p. 656). He offers little evidence of this himself, and what matters here is how the society in general felt about work. No doubt a merchant urged himself and his fellows to work at accounts and correspondence into the night. But as long as a gentleman is defined to have no avocation at all, except rattling swords and composing sonnets, the turn has not been reached.

* * * *

The elevation of the middle class---to the degree that Victoria herself behaved so:
Davidoff and Hall here, Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English Middle Class, 1780-1850 (1987)

Dror Wahrman, Imagining the Middle Class: The Political Representation of Class in Britain. C. 1780-1840

And Perkin et alii.

* * * *

A good thing or bad, this triumph of bourgeois virtues?

“The postclassical world,” as Berry understand Smith, “is irretrievably a world of strangers” (Berry 1992, p. 84). Berry’s reply to communitarians such as Alasdair, MacIntyre, Charles Taylor, and Michael Walzer, with their nostalgia for civic humanism, is essentially, “Too bad.” “We must look to the public realm for rules . . . and to the private for virtue.” One can sympathize with Berry’s position, noting the horrors that modern “moral communities of citizens” such as under fascism or communism or nationalism have perpetrated. Berry (and old Adam Smith) have a lively appreciation of the corruptions possible, ranging from such mild misuses of public activism as imperial preferences and protection all the way up to the aestheticization of the public sphere in the fascist state.

But I have another reply: that we do in a commercial world bump regularly against strangers, but the strangers become friends. To my friends (as indeed they are) the communitarians I say: your ends are achieved precisely by commerce.

Henry Maine a century and a half ago made the still-sound argument that cases of fraud imply the existence of a general trust: “if colossal examples of dishonesty occur, there is no surer conclusion than that scrupulous honesty is displayed in the average of the transactions.”¹⁸⁸ The muckrakers are liable to draw the opposite, and erroneous, conclusion: that a fraud is typical of the whole barrel. Arthur Miller remarked on his play, All My Sons (1947, two years before Death of a Salesman),

If the . . . play was Marxist, it was Marxism of a strange hue. Joe Keller is arraigned by his son for a willfully unethical use of his economic position; and this, as the Russians said when they removed the play from their stages, bespeaks an assumption that the norm of capitalist behavior is ethical.

Miller, 1957, p. 170.

The growth of the market, I would argue, promotes virtue, not vice. Most intellectuals think the opposite: that it erodes virtue. And yet we all take happily what the market gives---polite, accommodating, energetic, enterprising, risk-taking, trustworthy people; not bad people. Sir William Temple attributed the honesty of Dutch merchants in the 17^th century “not so much [to] . . . a principle of conscience or morality, as from a custom or habit introduced by the necessity of trade among them, which depends as much upon common-honesty, as war does upon discipline.”¹⁸⁹ In the Bulgaria of socialism the department stores had a policeman on every floor—not to prevent theft but to stop the customers from attacking the arrogant and incompetent staff charged with selling goods that at once fell apart. The way a salesperson in an American store greets customers makes the point: “How can I help you?” The phrase startles foreigners. It is an instance in miniature of the bourgeois virtues.

Even taking the calumnies of the clerks against the bourgeoisie at face value, an ethics of greed for the almighty dollar is not the worst. It is better, for example, than an ethics of slaughter with patrician swords or plebeian pikes. Dr. Johnson said, “There are few ways in which a man can be more innocently employed than in getting money.” Commenting on Johnson’s remark, Hirschman notes that “The very contempt in which economic activities were held led to the conviction, in spite of much evidence to the contrary, that they could not possibly have much potential in any area of human endeavor and were incapable of causing either good or evil.¹⁹⁰” The “evidence to the contrary” was not so great in 1775. Adam Smith at the time saw only a modest growth arising from peaceful specialization.

Donald Trump offends. But for all the jealous criticism he has provoked he is not a thief. He did not get his billions from aristocratic cattle raids, acclaimed in bardic glory. He made, as he put it in his first book, deals, all of them voluntary. He did not use a .38 or a broadsword to get people to agree. He bought the Commodore Hotel low and sold it high because Penn Central, Hyatt Hotels, and the New York City Board of Estimate—and behind them the voters and hotel guests (and, let it be admitted, the powers and potentates)—put the old place at a low value and the new place, trumped up, at a high value. Trump earned a suitably fat profit for seeing that a hotel in a low-value use could be moved into a high-value use. An omniscient central planner would have ordered the same move. Market capitalism can be seen as the most altruistic of systems, each capitalist working to help a customer, for pay. Trump does well by doing good.

Thomas Buddenbrook becomes the head of the family and “The thirst for action, for power and success, the longing to force fortune to her knees, sprang up quick and passionate in his eyes.”¹⁹¹ But success at bourgeois occupations is success in mutually advantageous deals, deals in which Thomas delights, not the successful slaughter or double dealing recounted in the literature of aristocrats or peasants. Greece even in Homer’s time was a commercial society, and one sees a trace of the merchant in the emplotment of Odysseus’ wanderings, “. . . and unbent sails/ There, where down cloudy cliffs, through sheets of foam,/ Shy traffickers, the dark Iberians come;/ And on the beach undid his corded bales.” But the character shows few townly virtues.

And even from a strictly individual point of view the bourgeois virtues, though not those of Achilles or Jesus, are not ethical zeroes. The honesty of a society of merchants in fact goes beyond what would be strictly self-interested in a society of rats, as one can see in that much-maligned model of the mercantile society, the small Midwestern city. A reputation for fair dealing is necessary for a roofer whose trade is limited to a city of 50,000. One bad roof and he is ruined. A professor at the University of Iowa refused to tell at a cocktail party the name of a roofer in Iowa City who had at first done a bad job (he redid the job free, at his own instigation) because the roofer would be ruined in town if his name got out in this connection. The professor’s behavior itself shows that ethical habits of selfish origin can harden into ethical convictions, the way a child grows from fear of punishment towards servicing an internal master. A rat would have told the name of the roofer, to improve the story. After all, the professor’s own reputation in business was not at stake.

The motto of the Buddenbrook family was “My son, attend with zeal to thy business by day; but do none that hinders thee from thy sleep at night.”¹⁹² It is the bourgeois’ pride to be “a fair-dealing merchant,” with “quiet, tenacious industry,” to “make concessions and show consideration.” to have “assured and elegant bearing, . . . tact and winning manners,” a “liberal, tolerant strain,” with “sociability and ease, and . . . remarkable power of decision at a division” in the town Assembly, “a man of action,” making “quick decision upon the advantageous course,” “a strong and practical-minded man, with definite impulses after power and conquest,” but by no evil means.¹⁹³ “Men walked the streets proud of their irreproachable reputation as business men.”¹⁹⁴ Is it evil to hope that “one can be a great man, even in a small place; a Caesar even in a little commercial town on the Baltic”? What is wrong with “the dream of preserving an ancient name, an old family, an old business”?¹⁹⁵