Quite a few of my social-scientific and even many of my humanistic colleagues will be strongly inclined to disagree, and not merely about my praise for the bourgeoisie. They have the idea, held with passionate idealism, that ideas about ideas are unscientific. For about a century, 1890 to 1980, the ideas of positivism and behaviorism and economism ran the social-scientific show, and many of the older show people still adhere to the script we learned together so idealistically as graduate students.[1] Economists and historians who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any philosophical influences are usually the slaves of some defunct philosopher of science a few years back—commonly a shakily logical positivist nearly a hundred years back.
Their faith is admirable. Yet in denying (before the scientific conversation begins) the relevance of words and rhetoric and identity and creativity, in favor of numbers and interest and matter and Prudence Only, they are standing against a good deal of the historical evidence, not to speak of science studies in the half century since Thomas Kuhn. The opponents of ideas as causal are what the modern Marxists call with a sneer “vulgar” Marxists—wanting passionately to be seen as tough-minded behaviorists, positivists, materialists, quantitative, “evidence based,” every single time, regardless of the common sense or the historical evidence. Their methodology, they are quite sure, yields the only scientific truth. It is their identity, which is why they become upset and abusive when some unScientific fool claims that something was caused by ideas. They even feel (I seem to recall) that it is masculine to deny ideas.
The trouble is that such a methodological preconception is often historically wrong. The American constitution, for example, as the historian Bernard Bailyn argues, was a creative event in the realm of ideas—and its economic origins are easily exaggerated.[2] “The Atlantic democratic revolutions of the later eighteenth century,” writes Jonathan Israel, “stemmed chiefly from a general shift in perceptions, ideas, and attitudes,” a “revolution of the mind.”[3] The abolition of slavery, a policy once advocated merely by a handful of radical churchmen (and the Baron de Montesquieu), played in the 1820s and 1830s a role in British politics, and later of course a much bigger role in American politics. It had less to do with the North’s material interests than with cheap printing interacting with evangelical Christianity. As Lincoln famously said on being introduced to the author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852), “So this is the little lady who wrote the book that made the big war.” Books can indeed make wars—Erskine Childers’s spy novel, The Riddle of the Sands: A Record of Secret Service (1903), was no minor influence on the Anglo-German naval rivalry. Socialist ideas and at length socialist reality spread after the disappointed revolutions of 1848 in congresses and party meetings and manifestos. Various nationalisms had spread across Europe in reaction to Napoleon’s conquests, but then were matured in poetry and songs of risings and in the screeds of exiles resident in London. Talk, talk, talk. Ideas matter.
To explain the new dignity of the middle class in northwestern Europe, and to explain the success it brought to the modern world, the social scientists need to moderate their fervent ideology of materialism—though of course without denying material forces. They need to collect the facts on ideas and rhetoric and social distance—though still collecting facts on the price of iron and the size of bribes to congressmen, too. It is not a rule of scientific method that an economic subject, such as revolutionary economic growth, must entail a narrowly economic explanation. Marshall Sahlins put it this way:
It is not that the material forces and constraints are left out of account, or that they have no real effects on [the] cultural order. It is that the nature of the effects cannot be read from the nature of the forces, for the material effects depend on their cultural encompassment. . . . The practical interest of men in production is symbolically constituted. . . . Nothing in the way of their capacity to satisfy a material (biological) requirement can explain why. . . dogs [in the West] are inedible but the hindquarters of the steer are supremely satisfying of the need to eat.[4]
In his recent history of the American business school and its role in legitimizing and then corrupting professional managers, the sociologist Rakesh Khurana declared that “I take it that ideational interests can be important factors in a professionalization project, and that statements of them must sometimes be taken at face value,. . . along with social roles and private (material or power) interests.”[5] Likewise the sociologist of religion Rodney Stark, without by any means neglecting material forces, urges us to take sometimes at face value, or at any rate some value, the actual content of religious doctrine.[6] Sometimes people mean what they say, or at least they say by accident their meaning. Words are facts for a social science, too.
The present book supports such a balancing step indirectly, by looking at a representative sample of apparently promising materialist and anti-rhetorical explanations of the Industrial Revolution and the modern world—explanations such as investment or exploitation or geography or foreign trade or imperialism or genetics or property rights. It finds them to be surprisingly weak. It concludes therefore (I admit the inferential gap) that the remaining explanations, such as ideas and rhetoric, must be strong. (The two books to follow will offer more positive evidence for the change in rhetoric.)
The critical method of “remainders” or “residues” was recommended in his System of Logic (1843) as one of four methods of induction by J. S. Mill, that admirably learned and open-minded scholar. “Subducting from a given phenomenon,” wrote Mill in his high-flown but lucid style, “all the parts which, by virtue of preceding inductions, can be assigned to known causes, the remainder will be the effect of the antecedents which have been overlooked, or of which the effect was as yet an unknown quantity.”[7] In simple language, take out what you can measure, and what’s left is the impact of what you can’t. If the economic and material causes usually proposed as explanations for the Industrial Revolution turn out to be weak, then the large remainder might well be the effect of a remaining antecedent—a rhetorical change, perhaps. If the new/old investment and trade can’t do it, maybe the new ways of talking and thinking can. The crucial remaining antecedent, I claim, was a rhetorical change around 1700 concerning markets and innovations and the bourgeoisie, a rhetoric spreading after 1800. It was merely a change in talking and thinking about dignity and liberty. But it was historically unique and economically powerful. It raised the tide (though on the time scale of all human history, by the way, the tide was more like a tsunami; the implied suddenness of the Japanese word better fits the case).
The materialist accounts are many, from the “original accumulation” favored by early Marxist historians to the “new institutionalism” favored by late Samuelsonian economists.[8] The criticism made here does not hurl into the eighth circle of Hell every possible version of the theories suggested up to now; nor does it damn their advocates, many of whom are my personal friends and admired colleagues, whether Marxist or Samuelsonian. Their arguments may well be true that posit a surplus value staying with capitalists for a long time, or that explain with reallocations some increases of efficiency here or there of 2 or 3 percent of national income. The scientific evidence, however, seems to be strong that the economistic, Prudence Only theories, whether taken individually or together, can’t explain the startling rise of real incomes from 1700 to the present, thousands of percents. Rhetoric perhaps can.
The negative case made here, summarizing fifty years of research by economic and historical scientists, is:
Foreign trade was too small and too anciently common to explain the rising tide after 1700 in northwestern Europe. Capital accumulation was not crucial, since it is pretty easily supplied. Literacy, for example, is a form of investment in human capital, but responds to demand. Coal can be and was moved. Despite what you may think, European empires did not enrich the imperial countries, and anyway the chronology is wrong, and anyway imperialism was commonplace in earlier times. Likewise, the institutions of property rights were established many centuries before industrialization, in China more even than in Europe. The European marriage pattern was not only European. Greed didn’t increase in the West. In bourgeois countries during the Industrial Revolution the Catholics did just as well as the Protestants, at least when in similar circumstances, as they were in Amsterdam. The Muslims and the Hindus and the Buddhists, or for that matter the Confucians and most of the animists, could think as rationally about profit and loss as did the Christians. Populations had grown, even explosively, in earlier times and other places. The Black Death hit all of Eurasia. Genetic variation and evolution work too slowly and irrelevantly to explain European success. Until the eighteenth century many parts of the Far and Near and Southern East were as rich, and appeared to be as ready for innovation, as parts of the West—except at length in the crucial matters of the dignity and liberty of the bourgeoisie. Until the seventeenth century the Chinese and the Arabs practiced a science more sophisticated than the European one. The science of the Scientific Revolution was in any case mostly about prisms and planets, and before the twentieth century even its other branches did not much help in worldly pursuits. True, European science was in its non-normal, revolutionary episodes an important parallel in the realm of ideas to the acceptance of creative destruction. But the new dignity and liberty for innovators was a rhetorical event outside of science, and it influenced science itself by elevating bourgeois stick-to-itiveness (such as Charles Darwin’s) over aristocratic gestures (such as Lord Bacon’s).
In 1500 only one of the ten largest cities in the world, Paris, was in Europe. In 1800 still only Paris, London, and Naples ranked so.[9] After a century of shocking divergence, however, only one city outside Europe or the United States was in the top ten (namely, Tokyo, and this after Japanese industrialization had taken hold).[10] Yet in our own times, it is estimated that by 2015 only two cities with only partial European origin, Mexico City and São Paulo, will be in the top ten. Jack Goody calls it “alternation,” and economists call it “convergence.” “No one wishes to deny Europe (or America) its recent advantage,” writes Goody, “only to dispute the reasons given which all too often relate to imaginary long-term superiority. . . . The advantages. . . are of much more recent and specific origin.”[11] The wheel turns. In short, the Europeans were not economically special until about 1700. They showed most plainly their special ingenuity only briefly in the two centuries after 1800 (as they had by then been showing for some centuries their special brutality). By the early twenty-first century they had reverted to not being special at all, even in brutality. The episode of their innovative specialness, and the rising tide, came from a change in their economic rhetoric. It made the difference.
“Teach the conflicts,” says my colleague in English at the University of Illinois at Chicago, a past president of the Modern Language Association, Gerald Graff. With Cathy Birkenstein he has brought the idea to fruition in a rhetoric for students called They Say/I Say: The Moves That Matter in Academic Writing (2005).[12] Their brilliant little handbook notes that a student—or a scientist—can’t see what’s distinctive even in her own position if she can’t summarize reasonably fairly what others think. I test here reasonably fairly the numerous (sadly mistaken) alternatives to the (correct) theory that a change in rhetoric caused the Industrial Revolution and the modern world. To use the piece of argumentative rhetoric in Graff and Birkenstein’s title, “My honored if misled friends in economics, history, and economic history say that the modern world came from trade or exploitation or legal change. They say that. I say, no, it didn’t. It came from a change in the rhetoric about the common economic life, which led to the Franklin stove and the Bessemer process and peaceful transitions of political power and all our joy.”
Such a methodical rejection-of-alternatives, I admit, is a little irritating—one tires of being told what did not happen. And there is always the embarrassing danger that Montaigne noted: “Our reasons and arguments in controversial matters can ordinarily be turned against ourselves; and we run ourselves through with our own weapons.”[13] Yet such hazardous naysaying is after all the conventional ideal in the philosophy of science—if commonly overlooked in practice (the practice is more usually what sociologists of science call the Empiricist Monologue, that is, My Wonderful Theory And Only My Wonderful Theory). A recent rejection-of-alternatives article in Science, for example, describes the “solar model problem,” namely, the problem that elements heavier than hydrogen and helium in the sun are more common than is implied by models of convection. The author politely rejects four “straightforward” hypotheses “receiving some initial support.” “Perhaps the only proposal left still standing,” he concludes, “is internal gravity waves.”[14] Similarly, in 1965 Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson discovered the background radiation of 3 degrees kelvin from the Big Bang by ruling out alternative explanations for the static noise in their new microwave detector pointed at the night sky, including for example the activities of certain local pigeons. Ideally we “encompass” other people’s theories in our own and show triumphantly that our theory explains the facts while theirs do not. The pigeons didn’t do it. Surely, therefore, the Big Bang must have.
In the ancient world, Plato’s dialogues used the same method of rejecting alternatives and teaching the conflicts, as in Republic, book 1 (for example, Steph. 335), with Socrates as the encompasser. Talmudic Judaism used another. St. Thomas Aquinas used still another, influenced to some degree it appears by Maimonides, as well as by a budding university tradition of disputation after Peter Abelard, intensifying the centuries-old spirit of Christian theological dispute after Irenaeus and Origen. In early modern science the classic case was Galileo’s Dialogo of 1632, where the sun-as-center “Simplicio” had rings—or orbits—run around him by the Copernican master. (Galileo may not have endeared himself to the Inquisition by naming the anti-Copernican “Simplicio,” supposedly in honor of a sixth-century Neoplatonist named Simplicius [classical Latin “of one nature,” from sim-plex; in modern Italian, simplice, “straightforward”; but in medieval Latin “naïve.”])
In medicine the classic case was the demonstration in 1855 by John Snow (1813–1858), following on his earlier inquiry in 1849, that cholera was caused, as he put it, by people being “supplied with water containing the sewage of London.”[15] He examined various named alternatives to the water-borne theory, such as miasma or person-to-person contagion. He gradually accumulated evidence that the alternative theories were untenable—devising for example clever maps of London based on house-to-house surveys during the 1854 epidemic. In particular he concluded that “if the cholera had no other means of communication than those [claimed in the older theories] which we have been considering, it would be constrained to confine itself chiefly to the crowded dwellings of the poor, and would be continually liable to die out accidentally in a place, for want of the opportunity to reach fresh victims; but there is often a way open for it to extend itself more widely, and to reach the well-to-do classes of the community; I allude to the mixture of the cholera evacuations with the water used for drinking and culinary purposes.” Likewise here: The idea of dignified merchants and free manufacturers can spread more widely and quickly than trade or empire or investment or an asserted British racial superiority, and can explain more easily how others came finally to master the trick. The United States, Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Spain, Thailand, Botswana, China, Ireland, India, and their imitators grew because they did.
In modern economics the classic use of remainders was the productivity calculations made in the 1950s by John Kendrick, Moses Abramovitz, and Robert Solow (anticipated in 1933 by the economic historian G. T. Jones).[16] Using “marginal productivity theory,” the economists took out the impact on output per head of sheer capital accumulation, piling brick on brick. Take out what you can measure directly, and what’s left is what you can’t—namely, the not-directly-measurable impact of innovation. The present book takes out what one can measure directly in the materialist and economistic explanations of the sharp rise of incomes after 1800, and finds their measure to be small. What’s still left standing is—let us pray—the not-directly-measurable innovation released by the rhetorical change.
I assemble here a catholic sample of the scientific and philosophic work bearing on the hypothesis. I myself have done since the 1960s some research on economic history, especially British, and since the 1980s I’ve done some philosophical and literary-critical writing as well. But most of the evidence and reasoning I use here was discovered or invented by others. The book is an essay, not a monograph. Specialists will spot the old pieces of news.
We economic historians, for example, have known since the 1960s that capital accumulation can’t explain the Industrial Revolution or its follow-on, the blade of the hockey stick. The news hasn’t gotten around much to our academic colleagues. It is resisted even by a few sadly misled economic historians. Our economist colleagues in growth theory and economic development resist it fiercely. They want very much to go on believing that the quantity of output depends not on ideas independent of material causes but mainly on the labor applied and most especially on the masses of physical and human capital present, Q = F(L, K)—so lovely is the equation, so tough and masculine and endlessly mathematizable. And a left-leaning Department of French would simply be stunned to hear that innovation does not depend on accumulated capital ripped from the proletariat. The scientific finding, though, is elderly, and secure.
Likewise the literary critics know that the bourgeoisie read, and wrote, the European realist novel, from Robinson Crusoe to Rabbit Is Rich, celebrating and attacking the bourgeois virtues, though the critics differ on exactly how.[17] The related notion that novels and plays therefore teach a good deal about the history of bourgeois ideology and innovation, which will strike the average economist as scandalously unscientific, will provoke yawns in the Department of English. Yet that scientific finding, too, is elderly and secure.
(I use throughout the word “science,” by the way, in the wide sense of “serious and systematic inquiry,” which is what it means in every language except the English of the past 150 years: thus in Dutch wetenschap, as in kunstwetenschap [“art science,” an English impossibility], in German Wissenschaft as in die Geisteswissenschaften [the humanities¸ literally a very spooky sounding “spirit sciences”], or in French science as in les sciences humaines [serious and systematic inquiries concerning the human condition, such as studies of literature or philosophy or anthropology, literally “the human sciences,” another impossible contradiction in modern English], or plain “science” in English before 1850 or so. Thus Alexander Pope in 1711: “While from the bounded level of our mind / Short views we take, nor see the lengths behind: / But more advanced, behold with strange surprise / New distant scenes of endless science rise!”[18] He did not mean physics and chemistry. John Stuart Mill used the science word in its older sense in all his works.[19] Confining the word to “physical and biological science,” sense 5b in the Oxford English Dictionary—which was an accident of English academic politics in the mid-nineteenth century—has tempted recent speakers of English to labor at the pointless task of demarcating one kind of serious and systematic inquiry from another.)
Likewise, no one in a department of philosophy, whether or not they agree with it, will be startled by “virtue ethics,” explained in The Bourgeois Virtues (2006) and used here from time to time to talk about the ethical change in the Bourgeois Revaluation. (For example, I used it a while ago to speak of the virtues of hope and faith redirected by the Revaluation.) She might be more comfortable with Kantian and utilitarian arguments—in philosophical lingo, “deontological” and “consequentialist” ethics—which arose in the eighteenth century and which have since then dominated academic philosophy. The academic hegemony of utilitarianism 1789 to the present, for example, reappears in vulgar form in the business school’s supposition that adding up “stakeholders” is the only ethical argument, or in the economics department’s supposition that U = U(X,Y) is the only way to think about human choice. But the philosopher will at least have heard of the more ancient theory, and of its recent and feminist revival. No surprise.
What is surprising in the book, and therefore less scientifically secure, is the claim that in the eighteenth century the ideal and the material connected, and powered the modern world. Even that hypothesis, however, has ancestors.
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]. In the field of history the fullest telling of the story of objectivism is Peter Novick’s brilliant book, That Noble Dream (1988). My own The Rhetoric of Economics (1985a; 1998) tells a similar tale about economics.
[2]. Bailyn 2003, especially chapter 1, “Politics and the Creative Imagination.”
[3]. Israel 2010, pp. 37, 39; see also pp. 87, 91.
[4]. Sahlins 1976, pp. 206–207.
[5]. Khurana 2007, p. 11.
[6]. Stark 2003, p. 2: “Ideas about God have. . . consequences”; p. 11: “Monotheism has immense capacities to mobilize human action.”
[7]. Mill 1843, p. 464.
[8]. “Samuelsonian” is an adjective for modern, American-style economics, which was originated by the late, great, and amiable Paul A. Samuelson (1915-2009) and by his brother-in-law (also great and amiable) Kenneth Arrow (b. 1921), and announced in Samuelson’s modestly entitled PhD dissertation of 1947, The Foundations of Economic Analysis. It insists that every economic issue must be treated as a problem of constrained maximization by utility-seeking individuals. To this, Arrow added the use of proof in the style of the department of mathematics (as against departments of physics or engineering, which care not a fig about such existence-theorem proofs). Samuelsonian economics, especially in its recent form melded with Milton Friedman’s conclusions, is commonly called “neoclassical.” But the term perpetuates an anachronism, since neoclassical economics names the much earlier new economics during and after the 1870s (Menger, Walras, Jevons, Marshall, Clark, Wicksell), which was wider than Samuelsonian in method, or wider than Friedmanite in conclusion
[9]. Hohenberg 2003, p. 179.
[10]. The word “divergence” and the idea that it happened after 1800 is from Pomeranz (2000) and others of the “California School.”
[11]. Goody 2010, p.122.
[12]. Graff and Birkenstein (2005) and Graff (1992). Another of my friends, Jack Goldstone, has practiced the same method of teaching the conflicts and using the remainders in his elegant textbook Why Europe? The Rise of the West in World History, 1500–1850 (2009), from which I have learned so much. I have not seen his forthcoming A Peculiar Path, but expect to learn from it even more.
[13]. Montaigne 1588, book 3.8, ”Of the Art of Discussion,” p. 709.
[14]. Asplund 2008, p. 51.
[15]. Snow 1855, p. 75.
[16]. Abramovitz 1956, Kendrick 1956 and 1961, and Solow 1957. Jones’s Increasing Returns (1933) should be better known among economists. A student of Alfred Marshall, he anticipated the mathematics of the what came later to be called the “price dual of the residual.” He died young, and his work was forgotten except by economic historians. The notion that an input price (such as of coal, labor, lumber) divided by an output price (such as of iron, wheat, furniture) is a measure of productivity was a commonplace in the nineteenth century, rather obscured in the twentieth by fascination with the “quantity primal.”
[17]. For example, dialectic or not, Michael McKeon 1987 (2002).
[18]. Pope 1711, Essay on Criticism, lines 221–224, italics supplied.
[19]. You may persuade yourself of this by getting hold of a searchable text of any item by Mill and searching for “science,” finding for example that he speaks of “a science of morals.”