As the economist and rabbi Israel Kirzner has argued, innovation depends on alertness.[1] A big or small entrepreneur, encouraged by dignity and enabled by liberty, alertly notices an opportunity, and takes it. To have good effects in social terms, of course, the alertness cannot be of the monopolizing sort that the ancient and modern bourgeoisie has so persistently sought, or of which the Tammany Hall politician George Washington Plunkitt spoke in 1905: “There’s an honest graft, and I’m an example of how it works. I might sum up the whole thing by sayin’: ‘I seen my opportunities and I took em.’”[2] Such “opportunities” to extract bribes out of a government-enforced monopoly will at best shuffle the community’s income from the taxpayer to Plunkitt. More likely the shuffling will reduce the size of the pie. And modern protectionism, which the French journalist and liberal theorist Frédéric Bastiat spoofed in 1845 in his petition of the candle makers against the light of the sun, certainly does reduce the size of the pie, by keeping people in less productive jobs—such as making candles that could be extinguished if the day’s light were allowed in. What we produce is what we consume. Protection, retaining people in the wrong jobs making candles for light that could be provided free by the sun, means less for the average person to consume.[3]
Bastiat’s funniest example of what is wrong with ancient urban monopolies or modern protectionism is the “negative railroad.” A railroad was proposed in the early 1840s from Paris to Madrid. The city of Bordeaux, at a third of the distance, demanded that the railroad break there, on the argument that the break would “create jobs” for porters and hotels and cabs. (The cities of Paris, London, and Chicago have long had such arrangements, extracted by politics and monopoly. Passenger trains do not skirt principal cities. They go into them and end. During the railway age in the United States we said, “Change in Chicago.”) Bastiat noted that according to such “job-creating” logic every town along the route should see its opportunity and take it. “Change in Ablon-sur-Seine, Evry, Ballancourt-sur-Essonne, La Ferté-Alais.” Every few kilometers, at every country village, the railroad on the way to Madrid would end at a Gare du Nord to be resumed at a Gare du Sud, after job-creating expenditure for freight and travelers en route. All the national income of France and Spain would come to be “generated” by the Paris-to-Madrid railroad, at the cost of all other forms of production and consumption. Jobs would be “created.” The protected production, forced by politics, would replace better uses of labor and capital. It would be a negative railroad, a triumph of protectionism and industrial planning achieved through what economists would later call “rent seeking” by the politicians of Bordeaux or Ablon-sur-Seine.[4]
By contrast, the society is in fact made better off if the opportunity is an actual improvement in how things are provided—rather than a rent-seeking opportunity for legalized theft such as blocking the sun’s light entering houses, or building a negative railroad. Innovation is positive sum. Move the marketplace to a truly more convenient location. Produce Greek olive oil at a low cost to sell high. Invent the container ship. Discover E = mc2. Devise the personal computer.
Yet such alert activities, especially in towns, had always been scorned by the elite. After all, the elite of Brahmins and warriors lived by the dignified collection of rents or taxes imposed on the lower classes—the proletarian Shudra and the bourgeois Vaishya. The Shudra lived by physical work, by which they were polluted. And a middleman from the Vaishya, who improved life for all by purchasing a bolt of cloth or an idea for an invention at a low price and selling it at a higher price to people who valued it still more, seemed to the world’s elite before the Revaluation to be a mere lying trickster. In 44 BCE Cicero declared that “commerce, if on a small scale, is to be regarded as vulgar; but if large and rich. . . it is not so very discreditable. . . if the merchant, . . . contented with his profits, . . . betakes himself from the port itself to an estate in the country.”[5] A merchant, said Cicero, lived by making the worse product seem the better, which was shameful (though an orator like himself, who earned the price of his tenement houses in central Rome and his country estate by making the worse legal case seem the better, was of course one of nature’s noblemen). In 1516 the blast by Thomas More—or, rather, by his character Raphael Hythloday (“peddler of nonsense”: in most seasons Sir Thomas was canny in making his own position a little bit ambiguous)—can stand for the abuse directed for millennia at the vulgar traders and innovators of the towns: “They think up. . . all ways and means. . . of keeping what they have heaped up through underhanded deals, and then of taking advantage of the poor by buying their labor and toil as cheaply as possible. . . . These depraved creatures, in their insatiable greed,. . . are still very far from the happiness of the Utopian commonwealth. [Where] once the use of money was abolished, and together with it all greed for it, what a mass of troubles was cut away!”[6] The Earl of Leicester, sent by Elizabeth in the 1580s to meddle in the politics of the already bourgeois Dutch, did not trouble to conceal his contempt for the “Sovereign Lords Miller and Cheeseman” with whom he had to deal.[7] And even the commercial Dutch had a proverb, Een laugen is koopmans welvaart, “A lie is a merchant’s prosperity.”
After about 1700 in Britain, however, as earlier in Holland, the vulgarities of the economy and of money and of dealing, with their unsettling creativity, came gradually to be talked about as noncorrupting. They began to be seen in theory as worthy of a certain respect, as not being hopelessly vulgar or sinful or underhanded or lower-caste. In a word, they became dignified, in part because they were recognized as good for the nation, not a useless scam. The very idea of virtue and dignity in (of all places) the economy—even in small-scale commerce, in buying grain low to sell high, or making cheese—had been proposed tentatively by a few professors in Italy and Spain and France. In the middle of the thirteenth century Thomas Aquinas had written in the style of his ancient and antibourgeois authorities, especially of Origen and St. Augustine and the desert fathers, and of Aristotle the teacher of aristocrats, that “trading, considered in itself, has a certain debasement attaching thereto, in so far as, by its very nature, it does not imply a virtuous or necessary end.”[8] Yet Thomas and the other urban monks of his time wrestled against the inherited style, contradicting the world-denying ideology of stoic and stylite by emphasizing that working is like God’s creativity. (Laborare est orare, to work is to pray, the Benedictines had long said: the liberal Freemasons of the Bourgeois Revaluation adopted it as their motto). Even trading, Aquinas suggested, is worthy: “Nevertheless the gain which is the end of trading, though not implying, by its nature, anything virtuous or necessary, does not, in itself, connote anything sinful or contrary to virtue: wherefore nothing prevents gain from being directed to some necessary or even virtuous end, and thus trading becomes lawful. Thus, for instance, a man may intend the moderate gain which he seeks to acquire by trading for the upkeep of his household”—the “upkeep,” for example, of an establishment of fifteen rooms and twenty servants in a tower castle in Prato.
No one in charge in Prato or Florence or Barcelona after 1200 actually thought that buying low and selling high was immoral—they left such primitive notions to the folk of the interior North (the coastal northerners already had their own vigorous traditions of commerce). Yet eventually in the North Sea lands, during the seventeenth and especially during the eighteenth century, many of the clerisy of artists and intellectuals, and even a few churchmen and aristocrats, whether coastal or interior, came to tolerate and even to admire the bourgeoisie, in the way their coastal ancestors had admired, or feared, or joined, the merchant-vikings. Thus the Bourgeois Revaluation.
Toward 1800 many northwestern Europeans, and toward 1900 other Europeans, and then toward 2000 many ordinary people elsewhere, came to accept the outcome of the market with more or less good grace. As Christine MacLeod puts it, by the standard of the “aristocratic cultural hegemony” of earlier times “the inventor was an improbable hero,” buying ideas low and selling them high. Yet certainly in Britain by the middle of the nineteenth century the inventor had become just that, an acknowledged benefactor of the world.[9] The Dutch and the Americans, then the British, and then many other people for the first time on a big scale, such as the Swedes late in the nineteenth century, looked with favor on the market economy, and even on the creative destruction coming from its profitably alert innovations. Later the American westerns from The Virginian (novel 1902; films 1929, 1946) to Shane (novel 1949; film 1953) praised honest and nonviolent business.[10] In 1913 Willa Cather, without the antibourgeois sarcasm which her fellow members of the American clerisy were beginning to develop, has her heroine, Swedish-American Alexandra Bergson, exclaim, “There’s Fuller [the real estate man] again! I wish that man would take me for a [business] partner. He’s feathering his nest! If only poor people [such as Alexandra’s unenterprising brothers] could learn a little from rich people!”[11] Japanese salarymen became heroes of novels. Against resistance from many in the clerisy of avant-garde intellectuals and artists, the world began to revalue the bourgeois towns. In 2005 the English philosopher and writer from Switzerland, Alain de Botton, spoke of his boring and bourgeois hometown, Zurich, whose “distinctive lesson to the world lies in its ability to remind us of how truly imaginative and humane it can be to ask of a city that it be nothing other than boring and bourgeois.” He quoted Montaigne, writing in the last decades of the sixteenth century:
Storming a breech, conducting an embassy, ruling a nation are glittering deeds. [But] rebuking, laughing, buying, selling, loving, hating, and living together gently and justly with your household—and with yourself..—is something more difficult. Whatever people may say, such secluded lives sustain in that way duties which are at least as hard and tense as those of other lives.[12]
The Bourgeois Revaluation was not simply a “rise of the middle class,” if by that is meant a coming of an enlarged bourgeoisie to political power. Outside the scattered republics of Northern Italy, the Hansa, the Netherlands, Switzerland, and Geneva, and the British colonies in North America, such a step was long delayed. The middle class, as the historian Jack Hexter pointed out long ago, is always “rising”—and yet only lately even in bourgeois England has it found room at the top.[13] It hadn’t found it, really, even in the nineteenth century, and certainly hadn’t in the aristocratic sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Aristocrats ran Britain until very late—Winston Churchill, for instance, was born in Blenheim Palace, and showed it.[14] Until recently a plummy BBC or Oxbridge accent was compulsory among the English to advance to political power, and was helpful even to many politicians of the Celtic Fringe. And a wealthy merchant’s son from Bristol attending Eton and Christ Church acquired anyway his aristocratic airs, and a commission in a fashionable regiment.
The key economic event of early modern times is instead a Revaluation of bourgeois behavior, an increased if sometimes embarrassed acceptance by others and by themselves of the bourgeois’ virtues—the rebuking, laughing, buying, selling so far from glittering deeds. As the historian Joyce Appleby put it in 1978, speaking of the late seventeenth century and after, the middle class in England “coalesced with, rather than displaced, the existing ruling class. . . . Social change. . . requires not a new class but a modern class, however formed.”[15] Or rather, I would say, it requires a change in attitude toward an existing class. In Holland first, and then in the England-speaking lands and then elsewhere, attitudes changed.
The market and the bourgeoisie in the Revaluing countries repaid the compliment with a stunning enrichment of nearly all, and the piling up (the ruling class noted with approval) of materials of war. The bourgeoisie enacted for the first time at a large scale a social drama in which it enjoyed dignity and liberty, yet was forced out into the cold of innovation by withdrawal of mercantilist protection. (The bourgeoisie did not, by the way, need self-consciousness to play such a role—the belief that a social class must be self-conscious to constitute a social class has long been a red herring drawn across the historian’s trail.) The bourgeoisie, through its innovation and its competition for customers, made itself rich, and also—promoting an end which was no part of its intention—increased the welfare of the poor in Britain and then elsewhere, at first by 100 percent and at length by 900 percent, then 1,500 percent, then beyond, up to that $100 or so a day. It’s happening now even in Ghana and in Egypt.
In the event, by the new pro-bourgeois, egalitarian, talk (or “self-dependence,” as John Stuart Mill called it), a positive-sum game was freed to some extent from zero-sum politics. The idea of progress through bourgeois dignity and liberty took hold of the social imaginary of the West. Napoleon’s armies saw it as their first duty after a conquest to abolish the monopolizing guilds. In 1857 the Danish Sound tolls for getting into and out of the Baltic, which for centuries had been collected from Hamlet’s Helsingør (“Elsinore,” said Shakespeare), were eliminated by international treaty (with substantial monetary compensation to Denmark from the countries thus liberated). By the middle of the nineteenth century both Britain and France were free-trading nations.[16] And all were on their way to bourgeois enrichment.
I am claiming, in other words, that the historically unique economic growth on the order of a factor of ten or thirty or one hundred, and its political and spiritual correlates, depended on ideas more than on economics. The idea of a dignified and free bourgeoisie led to the ideas of the steam engine and mass marketing and democracy. “During its rule of scarce one hundred years,” wrote Marx and Engels in The Communist Manifesto of 1848, “the bourgeoisie has created more massive and colossal productive forces than have all preceding generations.”[17] True, and in the next hundred years it created many more, with a consequent betterment of the formerly impoverished, quite contrary to what Marx and Engels expected in 1848, and contrary to what the well-meaning people of the left down to the present, such as the American filmmaker Michael Moore, keep saying. And it raised the human spirit, contrary to what Thomas Carlyle expected in 1829, and contrary to what the well-meaning people of the right down to the present, such as the American journalist Pat Buchanan, keep saying. A young American critic of Carlyle’s moral pessimism, Timothy Walker, a host to Tocqueville in Cincinnati during his American tour, noted in 1831 that we are not speaking of Athenian aristocrats supported by the labor of women and slaves, but Democratic Humanity in the mass. “Our doctrine is that men must be released from the bondage of perpetual bodily toil before they can make great spiritual attainments.”[18] And so the Americans did, compliments of their bourgeois people such as Walker.
But ideas, not mere trade or investment or exploitation, did the creating and the releasing. The leading ideas were two: that the liberty to hope was a good idea and that a faithful economic life should give dignity and even honor to ordinary people, to My Sovereign Lord Cheeseman as much as to Your Grace the Duke of Leicester. The very concept of justice shifted, away from the justice of giving His Grace his due and toward the justice of honoring contracts. The vocabulary (dating from the Latin inspired by Aristotle) was an old “distributive” justice as against a new “commutative” justice, the old justice of status as against the new justice of contract. (The modern left has returned to distributive justice, another of many instances of the modern left resembling in doctrine the old, pre-liberal right.) Aquinas had said, as if in preparation for the “democratic” shift (though seventeenth-century Holland, not to speak of eighteenth-century England, was hardly democratic): “In distributive justice a person receives all the more of the common goods, according as he holds a more prominent position in the community. This prominence in an aristocratic community is gauged according to virtue, in an oligarchy according to wealth, in a democracy according to liberty, and in various ways according to various forms of community.”[19] John Locke replaced such justice by a commutative justice that honored everyone, and not merely the privileged by inheritance, under which the duke was expected to pay his tailoring bills, and property was justified by labor. Adam Smith likewise introduced a democratic redefinition of the old notion of distributive justice, which had favored an elite, by one according honored status to everyone, including the poor.[20] The disruptive outcome of such a bizarre egalitarianism, many Europeans came to believe, should be encouraged.
To use the word Marx taught us, the modern world arose out of an entirely new “ideology.” Or, equivalently, it arose out of an entirely new social “rhetoric”—an older term meaning about the same thing. For example, the word “honest” in Shakespeare’s time, as you can see in dictionaries of Shakespearean English or by searching the texts of the plays, was understood mainly as “noble” (that is, honorable in an aristocratic way, achieved in battle or at court: “Honest, honest Iago”). Its rhetoric changed radically in the eighteenth century, coming to mean mainly “dignified as an ordinary person” and “truth-telling” (that is, reliable in a bourgeois way, for making deals). 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 including her last, unfinished Sanditon), “honest” occurs thirty-one times.[21] In six of these thirty-one occasions it means “upright,” dominantly in the old phrase an “honest man.” Never is it used in Shakespeare’s old sense “of high social rank, heroic in battle, 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 it occurs again a third of the time in the meaning “sincere,” and in four out of the thirty-one total occurrences in the restricted sense of “truth-telling.” The 1934 Webster’s New International Dictionary labels as archaic “honest” in sense 1, “held in honor,” with the example of “honest” (chaste), as in the old phrase an “honest woman” (applied repeatedly to Desdemona in Othello). It labels as obsolete “honesty” in sense 1a, “honor.” “Honest” in the now-dominant sense 2 means, the dictionary declares, fair, upright, truthful “as, an honest judge or merchant, [or an honest] statement” (italics supplied). No talk of aristocrats and honorable war. What is astonishing, and revealing of the Bourgeois Revaluation, is that an identical shift of meaning from an aristocratic to a bourgeois meaning of “honesty” took place at the same time during the Revaluation in other Germanic and Romance languages of commerce, such as in Dutch eerlich and Italian onesto.[22]
“The great chain of being”(scala naturae: the staircase of nature, though a staircase no one was meant to ascend: “chain” is better), dominated the Elizabethan world picture as it had dominated all our worlds since Plato and before. It was the endlessly refreshed hierarchy of dignities, which had ruled since the first large-scale agricultural societies in Iraq and Egypt and north China or for that matter Hawaii.[23] Yet in the seventeenth century in northwestern Europe it began to break down, and by the nineteenth century the great chain was viewed by many as
reactionary—though for all that still having practical force. Probably because of the successful revolts from above and below 1568 to 1689, Holland and England and Scotland experienced a shrinkage in what sociologists call “social distance” (to use the terminology of the sociologist Georg Simmel, its originator, and of the Americans Robert Park and Emory Bogardus, its first systematic users, early in the twentieth century).[24] The eighteenth-century French progressives had theorized the shrinkage, in Voltaire and Rousseau and the other bogeymen of the reactionary powers—powers decidedly opposed to the shrinkage of social distance. To apply a modern analogy, northwestern European society by 1800 was lurching away from, say, old South Asian or Korean levels of deference, and starting toward new American or Israeli levels. They did not, to put it mildly, get all the way. Yet around the North Sea the barons and bishops reluctantly moved over a little for townspeople, and at length even for plowmen. Ordinary northwestern Europeans acquired a dignity and liberty, first in Holland and then elsewhere, that the proud man’s contumely had long been devoted to suppressing.
In a striking remark in 1908 Simmel brought into focus the old image of the bourgeois man: “In the whole history of economic activity the stranger makes his appearance everywhere as a trader, and the trader makes his as a stranger.”[25] An instance from the fourteenth century is Boccaccio’s tale of Saladin disguised as a merchant (in forma di mercatante). Around 1600, though, a new rhetoric of nonstrangeness arose in Holland, and later in England, and still later in other places down to the present. In the revolutionary year of 1795 the poet and plowman Robert Burns declared that “The pith o’ sense, an’ pride o’ worth,/ Are higher rank than a’ that. . . . / A man’s a man for a’ that.” In fictional 1820 in a fictional and reactionary Kingdom of Parma, Stendhal’s character the Conte Mosca della Rovere notes with characteristic insight that “it is doubtful whether the mania of reverence [for us aristocrats] will last out our time.”[26] In Europe, the times they were a-changin’.
For their part the northwest European townspeople lost their grip on cozy medieval monopolies. They got in exchange a new dignity as innovators, and a smaller social distance from the revered elite. (Nonetheless in fictional Parma in 1820 the bourgeois were still disdained by the aristocracy and gentry, and in 1839 when he wrote the novel still by Stendhal himself.)[27] The bourgeois became at last the new heroes of the first thoroughly bourgeois-respecting societies on a big scale, first Holland, then Britain, and then yet more so, with anticipations, the United States. Walt Whitman wrote in 1855 that what was astonishing about American citizens (the word “citizen,” of course, would have left out at the time women, blacks, Indians, immigrants, and many of the poor native white men) was “the air they have of persons who never knew how it felt to stand in the presence of superiors.”[28]
The new dignity for trading and innovating in ordinary life had, it goes without saying, causes itself. Some of the causes were economic and material, surely. Yet some, equally surely, were rhetorical and ideal. For example: the immense payoff from positive-sum politics in Holland could inspire direct imitation in England, as it has in present-day India. Matter then could be said to have moved other matter, interests to have spawned new interests. The elite interest in funding for ships and armies certainly did move policy and attitudes: look at Peter the Great’s attempts to modernize Russia for purposes of national glory (and not to make his people better off). But you could just as well call it an ideal cause—after India had stagnated during the License Raj of the four decades after Independence it was the irritating idea of the enemy China growing fast after 1978 that at last stimulated a rhetorical Revaluation, especially after 1991. Likewise, during the seventeenth century the success of commercial Holland stuck in the craw of English people, the way the recent success of innovative Hong Kong and Taiwan stuck in the craw of mainland Chinese people, and inspired them to imitate.[29] The chain-like causation of successive Bourgeois Revaluations is similar to the causation of nationalism in reaction to conquering nationalisms, English to French, or English to Indian. That, too, you could call either material or ideal.
But Marx erred in claiming (as he and Engels ordinarily did claim) that ideological or rhetorical change always reflects the material economy of interests. It was no material, merely prudential, interest that drove Hitler’s or Stalin’s or Mao’s regime to murder tens of millions merely of its own people, or Pol Pot’s to murder a third of the Cambodian population.[30] It was ideology, during the century of warring ideologies. Doubtless the ideas themselves had some partial dependence on interests. But not always. People do not become conservatives or liberals, fascists or Communists, always because of self-interest. Their willingness to die for such causes shows their commitment, as the economist and philosopher Amartya Sen would say, or it shows their ethical complexity for good or evil, as I would say.[31]
In the crucial early case from 1600 to 1800 in northwestern Europe the
words and ideas led the way. Wrote Joel Mokyr in 1990: “Economists have traditionally been leery of mentalités as a factor in long-term economic development. In the [then] budding literature on the economic rise of the West, such factors have been ignored or curtly dismissed,” as in works down to 1986 by John R. Hicks, Douglass North, Robert Paul Thomas, Eric Jones, Nathan Rosenberg, and L. E. Birdzell.[32] Economists, and even some of these, have grown wiser since then. European revolutions, reformations, renaissances, and especially revaluations made townspeople bold and raised them in the estimation of their fellows. As the economist Deepak Lal put it recently, “Capitalism as an economic system [I would call it ‘innovation’] came about when the merchant and the entrepreneur finally were given social acceptance [‘dignity’] and protection from the predation of the state [‘liberty’].”[33] As Lal’s colleague in History at UCLA, Joyce Appleby, put it recently, “the riddle of capitalism’s ascendancy isn’t just economic but political and moral as well: How did entrepreneur’s get out of the straitjacket of custom [‘liberty’] and acquire the force [‘liberty’] and respect [‘dignity’] that enabled them to transform, rather than conform to [more ‘liberty’ and a new standard for ‘dignity’], the dictates of their society?”[34] The North Sea lands arrived at the “bourgeois dignity” of my title, with the liberty to venture. The material economy followed.
The text above is an excerpt from Bourgeois Dignity: Why Economics Can’t Explain the Modern World, the second volume of Deirdre McCloskey’s trilogy on the ethical and historical origins of modern prosperity.
[1]. For example, Kirzner 1976, p. 83, as elsewhere in his writings, and especially Kirzner 1973. I have criticized his very fruitful approach as not going quite far enough: as not recognizing
the importance of the social aspect of entrepreneurship, and especially the role of persuasion (McCloskey 2008d; compare Storr 2008).
[2]. W. L. Riordon, Plunkitt of Tammany Hall (1905), pp. 3–10, reproduced in Leland D. Baldwin, The Flavor of The Past: Readings in American Social and Political Portrait Life, vol. 2 (New York: Van Nostrand, 1968), pp. 57–60, and then at http://www.uhb. fr/faulkner/ ny/plunkitt.htm. Plunkett’s use of “honest,” by the way, is a late use in the sense of “honorable.”
[3]. Bastiat 1845, I.7.
[4]. In case you imagine that cases like Bastiat’s are mere fictions, consider the officials nowadays of Hanchuan, China, anxious to create jobs for making the local liquor, baijiu. And so they required that state workers buy in total $300,000 worth of it in a year. Because such a figure worked out to three bottles per state worker per day of the “sinus-clearing” liquor, the requirement was canceled. Even in China people sometimes recognize a mercantilist absurdity when they see it (Sharon LaFraniere, “Chinese Mock Bewildering Rules,” International Herald Tribune, Oct. 20, 2009, p. 2).
[5]. Cicero 44 BCE, I:42. Compare Finley 1973, pp. 60, 23.
[6]. More 1516, p. 132.
[7]. Israel 1995, p. 222. Yet by 1702 the Duke of Marlborough is addressing the states-general of cheesemen in the Hague as “your High and Mighty Lordships,” with no irony.
[8]. Aquinas 1267–1273, Second Part of the Second Part, Q. 77, art. 4, “I answer that.”
And not all the Desert Fathers: “A brother said to Pistamon, ‘I am anxious [for my soul] when I sell what I make.’ Pistamon replied, ‘There is no harm in this. . . . Set straight away the price [that is, don’t bargain for advantage]. . . . However much you have, do not stop making things, do as much as you can, provided that your soul is at peace’” (The Desert Fathers: Sayings of the Early Christian Monks, translated by Benedicta Ward [London: Penguin, 2003, p. 56).
[9]. MacLeod 2007, pp. 1, 13. MacLeod detects a decline in the prestige of inventors by the early twentieth century, but I would argue that by then the heroism had been routinized. In A. G. Macdonnell’s comic novel England, Their England (1933) the engineer character, William Rhodes, a northerner, is still to be admired, though a trifle suspect from a southern English and upper-class point of view (Macdonnell was a Scot). MacLeod’s argument, admittedly, is about inventors in the strict sense, not the users of inventions. Yet as Edgerton (1991, 1996, 2005) argues, Britain remains, for all the post-Victorian lament, one of the most inventive economies on earth.
[10]. For a discussion of the bourgeois tendency of the cowboy novel and film, and its tensions, see McCloskey 2006a, pp. 212–230. Hollywood soon became strangely hostile to commerce, as in Giant or Wall Street.
[11]. Cather 1913, p. 58.
[12]. Montaigne, Essays, book 3.2, , “Of Repentance,” quoted in Botton 2005, p. 46; alternatively translated in Montaigne, trans. D. Frame, Essays, p. 614.
[13]. Hexter 1961.
[14]. Cannadine 1994 (2005).
[15]. Appleby 1978, pp. 11–12.
[16]. Nye 2007.
[17]. Marx and Engels 1848 (1988), sec. 1, p. 59.
[18]. Quoted in Leo Marx 1964, p. 190.
[19]. Aquinas 1267–1273, Second Part of the Second Part, Q. 61, art. 2, “I answer that.”
[20]. I owe these ideas to my friends Paul Turpin, as in Turpin (2005), and Samuel Fleischacker, as in Fleischacker (2004).
[21]. http://www.pemberley.com/janeinfo/novlsrch.html.
[22]. A fuller discussion of the illuminating vagaries of the word “honest” is given in McCloskey, forthcoming, The Bourgeois Revaluation.
[23]. On the great chain of being, see Tillyard 1943. Members of the school of literary critics known as the New Historicists, for whom somewhat unreasonably Tillyard is a whipping boy, point out that the great chain acquired its meaning from the challenges to it, Caliban challenging Ariel so to speak. Orthodoxy implies a heterodoxy to be worried about, and suppressed.
[24]. See Ethington 1997; an economist’s use of such ideas is Akerlof 1997.
[25]. Quoted in Ethington 1997.
[26]. Stendhal 1839, p. 147, italics his.
[27]. Stendhal 1839, among many places expressing his contempt for the bourgeoisie (none of them is in style indirect, which would make them possibly contrary to Stendhal’s own views): pp. 90 (“with his mind on nothing but money”), 103 (“Fabrizio. . . thought the middle class ridiculous”), 119 (in the France of Louis-Philippe “the sole passion that has outlived all the rest is lust for money”), 254 (“in the eyes of the middle class exaggeration passes for beauty”), 427 (“in a republic such as America, one is forced to bore oneself the whole day by paying serious court to the shopkeepers in the street, and become as dull and stupid as they are”). But I have not checked the French, and may be wrong.
[28]. Whitman 1855, p. 6.
[29]. The evidence for how much it stuck in the craw of English people in the seventeenth century is reviewed in Appleby 1978, chapter 4, “The Dutch as a Source of Evidence.”
[30]. Otteson 2006, p. 178.
[31]. Sen 1985.
[32]. Mokyr 1990, p. 171.
[33]. Lal 2006, p. 2. Lal here perhaps falls in with Douglass North’s ideas that literal “predation” was common as late as 1688 in England. Lal’s own ideas about the High Medieval origins of property rights are better.
[34]. Appleby 2010, p. 7.