July 28, 2018 Dear Reader

Opinions of artillery. . . /

. . . the smell

Of poor opponents roasting, out

Of LUTHER’S faith and MONTAIGNE’S doubt,

. . .

Emerged a new Anthropos, an

Empiric, Economic Man,

The urban, prudent, and inventive,

Profit his rational incentive

And Work his whole exercitus,

The individual let loose

To guard himself, at liberty

To starve or be forgotten, free

To feel in splendid isolation

Or drive himself about creation

In the closed cab of Occupation.
W. H. Auden, “New Year Letter (January 1, 1940),”

Part Three, p. 184

In far Philadelphia Benjamin Franklin lived a bourgeois life on which Auden looked back with amusement, and which Smith would have praised. A century ago Max Weber made the point by using the Franklin of the Autobiography as the very type of secularized Calvinist, embodying the spirit of capitalism. About the same time D. H. Lawrence thought he recognized in Franklin what he hated most, the man of bourgeois society, “the sharp little man. . . . The pattern American, this dry, moral, utilitarian little democrat.” “Dry.” Well. It might be said that Lawrence, possessed of a worse sense of humor even than many others of his fellow modernists in literature, was not well equipped to read Franklin. Fifty years earlier Charles Baudelaire (who cannot be accused of lacking a sense of humor) had assailed Franklin as “the inventor of the ethics of the shop-counter, the hero of an age dedicated to materialism.” That’s wrong and right at the same time.

Franklin was to be sure a successful businessman. But Work was not his whole practice, and he did not in fact drive about creation/ In the closed cab of Occupation. Lawrence is only one of the numerous British mis-underestimators of Franklin: consider Auden as quoted; and surprisingly Alasdair MacIntyre, who has spent most of his career in the United States yet nonetheless relies on Lawrence’s anti-bourgeois and anti-American reading of the Autobiography. Baudelaire had asserted that “civilized man finds himself confined within the narrow limits of his specialty . . . . [and] has invented the doctrine of Progress to console himself for his surrender and decay; while primitive man, a feared and respected husband, a warrior obliged to personal valor, . . . comes closer to the fringes of the Ideal.” I think not, and neither did Benjamin Franklin.

Franklin was a great, indeed after age 42 a full-time, negotiator and projector for public purposes unrelated to business ambition, though learning early to “put myself as much as I could out of sight.” He explains the tactic prudentially, as men did in those first days of a Godless world: “The present little sacrifice of your vanity will afterwards be amply repaid.” That he uses such prudential rhetoric of cost and benefit does not mean he was in fact the monster of prudence-only that Baudelaire and Lawrence imagined. For projecting paving, street lighting, the lending library, the hospital, the university, the fire department, and a self-improving discussion group for Philadelphia, a private postal service, the American Philosophical Society, and the American Foreign Service for the colonies and the new nation, and bifocals, lightning rods, bourgeois virtues, and the theory of electricity for the world at large he says he was amply “repaid.” But in what coin? Honor; good repute; the good of his community—motives that a warrior obliged to personal honor would recognize.

The metaphor of being “repaid” for a present sacrifice as though a loan at interest typifies Franklin’s businesslike manner of theorizing, and has misled anti-business readers of his Autobiography. Character in his theory—but not, I am claiming, in his actual behavior—is a capital project, to be built at present sacrifice for future repayment. The theory was a commonplace. It suffered after 1848 from assaults by socialists and, later, Freudians who had other notions of what made character, such as ownership of the means of production or a grasp of the reality principle. Crusoe enlarged his spiritual capital stock. Franklin recommends building good character on personal prudential grounds, as Smith recommends the free disposition of capital and labor on social prudential grounds (though usually accompanied I have noted by a Scots rant on the dignity of freedom for its own sake, a rant less necessary in Pennsylvania). “I had therefore a tolerable character to begin the world with,” Franklin writes, “I valued it properly, and determined to preserve it” as he preserved the capital in his printing business.

Even in Franklin’s misleading rhetoric a successful bourgeois does not rely entirely on prudence. It shows in the tension between a short- and long-run prudence. Franklin speaks of his friend William Coleman, “then a merchant’s clerk, about my age, who had the coolest clearest head, the best heart, and the exactest morals, of almost any man I ever met with. He became afterwards a merchant of great note, and one of our provincial judges.” Do well by doing good. The tests Franklin here applies would be agreeable to Smith’s Impartial Spectator or his encomium to the Merchant of Glasgow: beyond mere short-run worldly success but not inconsistent with it, either.

His book of 1771 counsels his son, soon to be alienated by his father’s anti-monarchic politics. The book was not finished until much later and was first published only in 18NN. It has had since then fully 400 editions.²¹⁴ Franklin—like Smith in his book of 1776 counseling the nation—speaks of prudence more than he speaks of love, esteem, or solidarity. If you ignore Franklin’s actions, and his other writings, as economists have ignored The Theory of Moral Sentiments, you might infer that only prudence mattered. Certainly Lawrence drew such an inference.

The prudence-only reading is not of course entirely unjustified by the text. Franklin for example always gives a prudential excuse for goodwill, as though he expected his readers to be cynical about earnest claims of love. “These friends were afterwards of great use to me, as I occasionally was to some of them.” It took Romance and evangelicalism among the intelligentsia of Europe to bring love back into repute. But a manly self-regard in Franklin’s circle is in fact hedged by it. Franklin in his youth was much impressed by the cynicism of Mandeville’s claim that vice was just as good as virtue for keeping society prosperous. But he abandoned such views after a larger experience of life. The friends whom he claims in the Autobiography to be merely useful “continued their regard for me as long as they lived.” Such constancy bespeaks not a friendship of interest or amusement, which in Franklin’s rhetoric is easiest to justify, but Aristotle’s third and highest friendship, for the friend’s own sake, which plays no official part in his rhetoric. Of a spendthrift friend he says, “He owed me about 27 pounds, . . . a great sum out of my small earnings [above the average annual income at the time, to give an idea of the great size of the debt: think of $50,000 nowadays]. I loved him notwithstanding, for he had many amiable qualities.” Almost for his own sake. But Franklin cannot in 1771, standing a little to the side of an explicitly Christian framework for ethics, quite admit that he simply loved the rogue. He claims instead that after all his friend was amusing.

Again, in urging other printers (in Franklin’s day, of course, virtually publishers) to keep their presses clear of libel and personal abuse he ends as usual with an argument from narrow prudence: the printers “may see by my example, that such a course of conduct will not on the whole be injurious to their interests.” Yet Franklin’s discourse here as elsewhere is seldom wholly prudential, no more than Smith’s was. Like Smith thundering at violations of natural right when freedom of employment or of investment is blocked, Franklin thunders at printers filling their newspapers with private altercations, which “pollute their presses and disgrace their profession.” This is not the discourse of a consistent Benthamite, cool, without moralizing, intent on prudence without appeals to justice or love.

Still, as I have argued, Smith and Franklin do put their ethical talk in businesslike terms likely to appeal to eighteenth-century men before the Sentimental Revolution. Franklin like Smith claims to care more for the consequences of ethical behavior than for its purity of intention. A pure intention is secular grace, much valued by Kant and ethicists following in his train. Good will would, said Kant, “sparkle like a jewel in its own right, as something that has its full worth in itself. Usefulness or fruitlessness can neither diminish nor augment this worth.” A good will is unwarranted by works, a free gift of God, suited to religions of the messiah from Christianity to environmentalism and the animal rights movement. However bad the unintended consequences in this world, a pure soul and good intentions promise a reward in another world, if only an imagined world of Duty.

Franklin and Smith would agree with Kant only at the level of Sunday preaching (which they did not disdain, though not rigorous in attendance). What matters on Monday (as the Dutch economist Arjo Klamer puts it) is the Impartial Spectator shaping a good character for future use. Or indeed (to think prudentially but in the short run) what matters for business from Monday to Saturday is the Spectator, impartial or not. Franklin scandalizes a Christian of his own time, or a secular but ethically serious humanist of our own time, in making his famous little joke about his pride: “I added humility to my list [of virtues to be cultivated when he was a young man]. . . . I cannot boast of much success in acquiring the reality of this virtue; but I had a good deal with regard to the appearance of it” (Claude-Anne Lopez remarked once that Franklin will lack a full biography until someone with a sense of humor attempts it).

Sincerity, that virtue most admired by Romantics, does not figure much in Franklin, or in Smith. True, the seventh of Franklin’s thirteen virtues to guide daily life is exactly “Sincerity,” but he gives it a narrow and pre-Romantic range: “Use no hurtful deceit. Think innocently and justly; and, if you speak, speak accordingly.” This is not the sincerity of Goethe or Shelley, the hero unburdening his soul. It is not Lawrences’ “Sincerity,” written explicitly in parallel with Franklin’s by a late Romantic anti-bourgeois: “Remember that I am I, and that the other man is not me.” Franklin’s sincerity is “honesty,” again defended as prudential and social: “I grew convinced that truth, sincerity and integrity in dealings between man and man, were of the utmost importance to the felicity of life.”

Franklin’s list of virtues does not reflect all the bourgeois virtues he records in the rest of the Autobiography, or for which he was known to the world. Perhaps the list was trimmed in piety towards conventional Christianity. But for whatever reason it misses a good deal of Franklin the bourgeois---not all, for the virtues numbered 2 through 6 out of the 13 are those of an actor in the marketplace, and mainly irrelevant to virtue in a pagan or Christian mode: “Speak not but what may benefit others or yourself”; “Let each Part of your Business have its Time”; “Resolve to perform what you Ought”; “Waste nothing”; “Lose no time.” The bourgeois part of the list drives Lawrence, a maker of the new aristocracy of literary modernism, to angry distraction. At virtue number 7, that Sincerity, though, Franklin’s list loses its bourgeois cast, ending with “Humility: Imitate Jesus and Socrates,” which Franklin admits was a later addition. The list is deistic, not Christian. Nor is it stoic, though Franklin modeled himself on Cicero in some ways, excepting Cicero's unrestrained habit of making jokes at other people's expense. Nothing in it corresponds to the three theological virtues, and only justice and temperance of the four pagan virtues.

Among the missing in Franklin’s explicit list of virtues are the bourgeois versions of prudence and courage: commercial prudence and commercial enterprise. Franklin exhibited these to an unusual degree. It is the point of his book to recommend them to young men who wish to become like him “honest instruments for the management of . . . affairs.” As a boy, he said, “I was generally a leader” and had “an early projecting public spirit.” Defoe’s Essay on Projects, he writes, was an early influence. He became the best printer in the colonies (he modestly implies) and a man of wealth not by following Christian or aristocratic virtues but by following the bourgeois virtues recommended in---surprise---the Old Testament. He quotes Solomon on virtue’s reward in this world: “Length of days is in her right hand, and in her left hand riches and honors”; and quotes Solomon on the “calling,” the very passage that Weber most emphasized, “Seest thou a man diligent in his calling: he shall stand before kings.” Franklin the printer had in his life precisely the satisfaction of recalling days of riches and honors, an American businessman standing literally before kings.

Another bourgeois virtue which Franklin omits from his list, though he (and Smith) practiced it famously, was amiability. By his own account, he made friends-for-use-and-amusement with astonishing ease: “The Governor, seeming to like my company [though Franklin was at the time a mere teenager], had me frequently to his house”; “I had shown [to a Quaker woman on the boat to Philadelphia as a boy] an obliging readiness to do some little services which impressed her I suppose with a degree of good-will towards me.” Again he is spinning the events as prudent, but obviously he was more than that. Franklin’s is not a Hobbesian world of defectors in a Prisoner’s Dilemma, as intellectuals in ignorance of business practices have imagined the world of business to be, but a world that presumes until supplied definite evidence to the contrary that we are willing to cooperate. (The economist and historian Alexander Field has written a fine book on the theme, arguing that such a premise of cooperation is in fact hard-wired into humans.)

Franklin marshaled cooperation all his life, and was in this an ideal bourgeois. Cooperation, not competition, is the life of capitalism. The intellectuals of course take amiability, especially in its American version, simply as a false rhetoric, the little con. They believe, and often practice in their own lives, a rule of harshness in business, their own business as scholars and teachers and book reviewers, but also their economic business, when they venture into the agora. It’s just business: that’s why I, the professor, happily free from the corruptions of the marketplace, feel justified in my own business in being cruel and ruthless and lacking in good humor. The highest value is being tough---again, the quasi-aristocratic turn is especially an obsession of American men and their female imitators, and especially American academic men in the train of early-20^th-century gender anxieties. An actual life in business must on the contrary be filled with humor, and must be highly selective with cruelty. Business life is not solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short. Or else, Franklin would say when bowing to the new religion of prudence, it’s not good business.

And still another and central bourgeois virtue of Franklin was address rhetoric. Franklin was a great persuader in private business or in the salons and coffee houses of Paris and London, though he was not an aristocratic orator (he and Washington were well known for their taciturnity in public assemblies, and for the corresponding weight of their words when they did speak). Here too his life followed Smithian lines, the Smith who placed the faculty of speech along with that of reason at the origins of the propensity to truck and barter.

The theorizing of a bourgeois life was taking place in America and Scotland, even Naples, rather than in Paris or London (where the Best Theorists more usually held court). It would otherwise seem strange that sociology, economics, jurisprudence (and while we’re at it, geology, among the physical science—not the aristocratic physics or astronomy) were first expressed in English by Scots. Hutcheson, Hume, Smith, Ferguson, the law Lord Kames (Henry Home) were hardly country bumpkins unaware of preference and privilege. Smith, the son of a revenue officer, was himself from 1778 a royal appointee collecting the import taxes he had lately deprecated. He had spent six years, though not happily, at Oxford. He was tutor for many years to the Duke of Buccleugh’s son on the young man’s long Grand Tour. He was fluent in the rhetoric of Your Lordship’s most obliging and most humble servant, Adam Smith. Yet Smith and his teachers and friends were not of the Court party and were not surrounded by a world of grandees. Their daily acquaintances were businessmen and lawyers, and very few territorial lords. They were not fashionable people. One could hardly be so in Edinburgh, not to speak of Glasgow or Philadelphia. Smith writes: “Are you in earnest resolved never to barter your liberty for the lordly servitude of a court, but to live free, fearless, and independent? There seems to be one way. . . and perhaps but one. Never enter the place.” It was of course ancient advice. Juvenal spoofed the “aged, genial Crispius” ---compare Shakespeare’s Polonius---as the perfect courtier, “not a citizen able / to speak his mind freely, and stake his life upon the truth./ Therefore Crispius saw many summers, and his eightieth / Solstice, by such weapons safe even in that lofty hall.”

Bourgeois, Lowland Scotland or bourgeois, tiny Philadelphia, not the great cosmopolis, was the place of these anti-Crispiuses of the eighteenth century, despite flirtations abroad: “Tho I am happy here,” wrote Smith to Andrew Millar from Paris in 1766, “I long passionately to rejoin my old friends. . . . Recommend the same sober way of thinking to Hume. He is light-headed, tell him, when he talks of coming to spend the remainder of his days here [in Paris].” From London a few years before Hume had claimed that “Scotland suits my fortune best, and is the seat of my principal friendships; but it is too narrow a place for me.” Perhaps it was too narrow for Hume, but not for a man who was actually carrying out a theory of the Middle Station, ethical and economic.

Smith was of course just as aware as Hume was of the inconsequence of Scotland beside England and France: “For though learning is cultivated in some degree in almost every part of Europe,” he wrote in the first and failed attempt at an Edinburgh Review (1755-56), “it is in France and England only that it is cultivated with such success or reputation as to excite the attention of foreign nations.” But is was on just such a margin that one could take seriously the ordinary business of life. As Arthur Herman puts it, “Scottish merchants and capitalists, like their American counterparts, recognized the advantages of a laissez-faire private sector far earlier than the English or the other Europeans” (though I think Herman does not realize that Holland was the pioneer; he should write a book about it). It was never at the court of the Great King that bourgeois theory could develop: it could develop at commercial Athens not Persepolis; at commercial Florence and Venice, not at Rome or Constantinople; at commercial Amsterdam and Edinburgh, not at Versailles or Westminster or even at The Hague.

The least aristocratic places, more admiring of the middle station, are the Second Cities. They’re not always many miles from the cosmopoloi, but they feel it. Think of the aristocratic air among the clerisies of New York or Washington compared to the big shoulders of Chicago, or among the artists of modern Amsterdam compared to the rolled-up sleeves of Rotterdam, among the proud bureaucrats of Rome and Madrid against the business people full of saggezza/seny in Milan and Barcelona. The claim is that in such places, away from every pretense of firstness, aristeia, by traditional standards, away from Court or private gallery, the bourgeoisie could theorize in confidence about itself.

The theory thus birthed was one of practical improvement short of utopia, by contrast to the mischievous religious-socialist/apocalyptic-revolutionary view and all our woe. Militant utopian Christianity was the catastrophe of seventeenth-century Europe as militant utopian post-Christianity has been the catastrophe of our times. The bourgeois wants neither—merely improvement, cultivating ones own garden in accord with Dr. Pangloss’ chastening precept and Dr. Johnson’s Tory pragmatism and Dr. Smith’s theory and Dr. Franklin’s life.

Chapter 12:

Bourgeois Theorizing was in Fashion
Another scrappy chapter. Its problem is that I do not understand why bourgeois virtues came to dominate. I offer here some early and disconnected thoughts:

What was odd was precisely the philosophizing of bourgeois virtues, including its representation in literature, such as in the novel---with its focus on individual ethical development as against picaresque adventures in a haunted world of an unchanging hero, Odysseus to Quixote. Bourgeois virtues were becoming the ideology of the age. True, Romanticism reversed it, elevating heroic and saintly virtues in imagination just as they were disappearing in fact. But that is another story.

What is special about the German Ocean is the development there of bourgeois rhetoric. When exactly did the turn happen? The philosophizing of a bourgeois-dominated economy was essential to its protection, and anyway indicated how deeply embourgeoisfication had penetrated. If even the scribblers find merit in markets, you can be sure that a good swathe of other people do. I’ve mentioned the protection of urban trade that some medieval theologians began to offer. But an articulated defense of capitalism awaited the 18^th century in Europe.

There were earlier straws in the wind. Here the Spanish theorists: use Schumpeter The humanist lawyer, Konrad Peutinger (1465-1547), son of a distinguished family of Augsburg merchants, defended in 1530 the family of Fuggers—one was so rich that he was known simply as "Jacob the Rich"—against the regulatory fervor of the Nurenberg town council. In Jacob Viner's paraphrase of his long brief Peutinger argued that:

Every man, be he priest or laic, prince, gentleman, or burgher, wholesale or retail merchant, peasant or whatever else, has the right to seek his enrichment in an honorable way, to manage his estate so to make it yield income, and in general to pursue his own self-interest, especially as it serves also the common good that a land should have rich inhabitants.

Viner 1959, p. 60

Sounds good. But this was a legal brief, an argument for the time and place, not a declaration of laissez faire on a philosophical level. "The common good" turned out to be the good of the Holy Roman Emperor in Vienna, to whom the brief was addressed. As Mary Catherine Welborn noted in 1939, "In his appeal to the emperor on behalf of these merchants, Peutinger cleverly pointed out how generous those capitalists could and would be to the ruler who protected them."²¹⁵ It was precisely the mobility of the Fuggers within a Middle Europe fragmented into hundreds of political pieces that protected them. Less so their descendants in 1939, after Peutinger's steady advocacy of the large nation state in Germany and Italy had succeeded. Many historians have argued that the fragmentation of early modern Europe, what Robert Dahl called “polyarchy,” made for liberty—as against the medieval notion of a "freedom" consisting of special rights for special people, e.g. the wandering merchants with their own courts of law, the subjects of this or that lord wherever they may be, or the guilds and town council of Nurenberg.

The theorizing I say is crucial. Markets and capitalism could flourish without any resulting change in the governing theory. A privileged Communist Party still runs China. That businesspeople are making cloth and profits does not automatically lead to an honoring of their lives, or a shift of political power. You can watch a long, long lag of honor behind accomplishment in Europe, as in the very the gradual shift of the word "gentleman" in English from "a properly idle landowner entitled to carry and use a sword" to "a polite and sweet-tempered fellow, probably a businessman." By the 1760s it is “him, who merits this denomination: the Man elevated above the vulgar and distinguished either by his superior accomplishments or by his high birth and dignity of station.”²¹⁶ The OED does not even in the Supplement of 1933 admit the democratic use except as "contemptuous or humorous." The difference between England and America then is seen in sense 2 in the second Merriam-Webster's unabridged (1934), "a man of refined manners" or at the limit, sense 4, "a man, irrespective of condition;—used esp. in pl., in addressing men in popular assemblies." Robert Bellah notes that the lag was especially long in Japan, which in the 18^th century, I have noted, had an economy as developed as England's in many respects:

Late Tokogawa Japan was already capitalist in the sense that it had a well-developed market economy. . . . Merchants and later large-scale capitalists wielded significant influence in both Tokugawa and Meiji Japan, yet I would argue that the dominant value system gave them little legitimacy as independent claimants to power. . . . [During the 1880s] if one manufactured toothpicks it was "for the sake of the emperor," hardly the basis of a self-respecting claim to independence on the part of the capitalist class.²¹⁷

Again it began as all this does in the Netherlands, followed by England. In his brilliant analysis of the ground prepared in the late 17^th century for the rise of the English novel in the early 18^th century, J. Paul Hunter writes that in England in the late 17^th century “the cultural moment for journalism had come”---the very word “journalist,” he notes, is first recorded by the OED in the 1690s.²¹⁸ The coffee house made room for newspapers and especially the flood of pamphlets and broadsheets, and the obsessive discussion about them, and not only for the bourgeoisie.²¹⁹ A French visitor observed in 1726 that in London even “workmen habitually begin the day by going to coffee-rooms to read the latest news. I have often seen shoeblacks . . . club together to purchase a farthing paper.”²²⁰ Hunter concludes that “nowhere else does there seem to be, so early, the obsession with contemporaneity that characterizes English culture in the beginning of the eighteenth century.”

But Hunter is overlooking Holland, as people tend to do when writing about England or France. What Hunter calls “the culture of now” was thriving in Amsterdam decades before it became the rage in London. And the Dutch Republic developed a theory of bourgeois rule decades before it had occurred to, say, English people that they could behead an anointed king. The numerous portraits of shooters and civic guards and boards of alms-houses (though only P percent of a late 17^th-century collection: most Golden-Age paintings were landscapes and still-lives to decorate the walls in a gray climate) celebrate The Rulers, and the rulers were bourgeois.

Hunter instances for the English case “a tense sense of contrast with the tight controls during Puritan rule.”²²¹ Conservatives lamented, but the controls relaxed. As Albert Hirschman argued, discussion and trade seemed sweet after a century and a half of religiously-motivated orthodoxy and executions. Willey notes, “The distaste of the eighteenth century for all violent forms of religious emotion was profound and lasting. The lesson of the seventeenth century has burnt deeply into its soul. ‘There is not,’ says Addison, ‘a more melancholy object than a man who has his head turned with religious enthusiasm’.”²²² It is hard to resist a pendulum, or dialectic, notion here, in which a reaction to the excesses of faith and hope yields at last c. 1700 to an age of equipoise and prudence.

The counterbalance to religious enthusiasm was doux commerce, brought sharply to the attention of recent writers by Hirschman in The Passions and the Interests. ²²³ The image of mutual polishing in society like grains of sand was conventional: the Earl of Shaftesbury had written famously in 1713:

All politeness [his master word] is owing to liberty. We polish one another, and rub off our corners and rough sides by a sort of amicable collision. To restrain this is inevitably to bring a rust upon men’s understanding. ‘Tis a destroying of civility, good breeding, and even charity itself.²²⁴

Shaftesbury was here speaking merely of the polishing of wit, but was aware of the wider significance of an open market in ideas and in commodities. In the paragraph preceding, he wrote:

By freedom of conversation this illiberal kind of wit [the gross sort of raillery] will lose its credit. For wit is its own remedy. Liberty and commerce bring it to its true standard. The only danger is the laying of an embargo. The same thing happens here, as in the case of trade. Impositions and restrictions reduce it to a low ebb: nothing is so advantageous to it as a free port.

Such arguments became 18^th-century commonplaces. William Robertson sixty years after Shaftesbury: “Commerce tends to wear off those prejudices which maintain distinctions and animosity between nations. It softens and polishes the manners of men.”²²⁵ And a French observer: