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What then?

A novel liberty and dignity for ordinary people, among them the innovating bourgeoisie, gave masses of such people, such as the chandler's apprentice Benjamin Franklin, or the boy telegrapher Thomas Edison, an opportunity to innovate. It was not capital or institutions, which were secondary and dependent. It was the idea of human equality. Egalitarian economic and social ideas, not in the first instance steam engines and universities, made the modern world.

“One history of Western politics,” writes the political philosopher Mika LaVaque-Manty, citing Charles Taylor and Peter Berger (he could have cited most European writers on the matter from Locke and Voltaire and Wollstonecraft through Tocqueville and Arendt and Rawls), “has it that under modernity, equal dignity has replaced positional honor as the ground on which individuals’ political status rests”:

Article 3 of the Italian Constitution adopted in 1948 (and later much revised, but not in this article) is typical: “All the citizens have equal social dignity and are equal before the law, without distinctions of sex, of race, of language, of religion, of political opinion, of personal and social position.”Footnote ¹

“But,” LaVaque-Manty continues, “there are important complications to it.” One important complication is that Europeans used their older and existing values to argue for new ones. Humans do. LaVaque-Manty observes that “aristocratic social practices and values themselves get used to ground and shape modernity”—he argues that the strange egalitarianism of early modern dueling by nonaristocrats was a case in point (ibid.). Likewise a wholesale merchant in Ibsen's Pillars of Society (1877) clinches a deal by reference to his (noble) Viking ancestors: “It's settled, Bernick! A Norseman's word stands firm as a rock, you know that!” (Ibsen [1877] Reference Ibsen and Fjelde1965: 30). An American businessman will use the myth of the cowboy for similar assurances. Likewise Christian social practices and values got used to ground and shape modernity, such as the amplification of Abrahamic individualism before God, then the social gospel and Catholic social teaching, then socialism out of religious doctrines of charity, and environmentalism out of religious doctrines of stewardship. And European intellectual practices and values—in the medieval universities (imitated from the Arab world) and in the royal societies of the seventeenth century, and again in the Humboldtian modern university, all founded on principles of intellectual hierarchy—get used later to raise the dignity of any arguer. Witness the blogosphere.

The for-a-while uniquely European ideas of individual liberty for all free men—and at length, startlingly (and to the continuing distress of some conservatives) for slaves and women and young people and sexual minorities and handicapped people and immigrants—was generalized from much older bourgeois liberties granted town by town. Tom Paine wrote in The Age of Reason, “Give to every other human being every right that you claim for yourself—that is my doctrine.” Such was not the doctrine of many other people when Paine articulated it in 1794 and 1807. Now it is universal, at any rate in declaration. Though Douglass North, Barry Weingast, and John Wallis, in their Violence and Social Orders (2009), are attached to what they regard as materialist explanations for it, they are wise to interpret the transition from what they call “limited access” to “open access” societies as a shift from personal power for the Duke of Norfolk to impersonal power for Tom, Dick, and Harriet: “The relations within the dominant coalition transform from person to particular to general”(North et al. Reference North, Wallis and Weingast2009: 26). Think of the Magna Carta for all barons and charters for all citizens of a city, and, finally, “all men are created equal.”

The doctrinal change might have happened earlier, and in other parts of the world. But it didn't. In their modestly subtitled book (A Conceptual Framework for Interpreting Recorded Human History) North, Wallis, and Weingast treat only England, France, and the United States, which obscures the ubiquity of what they call “doorstep conditions”—the rule of law applied even to elites, perpetually lived institutions, and consolidation of the state's monopoly of violence. Such conditions characterize scores of societies, from ancient Israel to the Roman Republic, Song China, and Tokugawa Japan, none of which experienced a Great Enrichment (ibid.).Footnote ² Alfred Reckendrees has pointed out that just such conditions characterized Weimar Germany, which failed for lack of ethics (Reckendrees Reference Reckendrees2014).Footnote ³ In a recent history with a wider scope than England, France, and the United States, the volume's editor Larry Neal nonetheless offers a definition of “capitalism” as (1) private property rights, (2) contracts enforceable by third parties, (3) markets with responsive prices, and (4) supportive governments (Neal and Williamson Reference Neal and Williamson2014). He does not appear to realize that the first three conditions have applied to almost every human society. They can be found in pre-Columbian Mayan marketplaces and Aboriginal trade gatherings. “Capitalism” in this sense did not “rise.” The fourth condition, “supportive governments,” is precisely the doctrinal change to laissez faire unique to northwestern Europe. What did “rise” as a result was not trade but trade-tested betterment. The idea of equality of liberty and dignity for all humans caused, and then protected, a startling material and then spiritual progress. What was crucial in Europe and its offshoots was the new economic liberty and social dignity for the swelling bourgeois segment of commoners, encouraged after 1700 in England and especially after 1800 on a wider scale to perform massive betterments, the discovery of new ways of doing things tested by increasingly free trade.

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The second element, universal dignity—the social honoring of all people—was necessary in the long run, to encourage people to enter new trades and to protect their economic liberty to do so. The testing countercase is European Jewry down to 1945, gradually liberated to have a go in Holland in the seventeenth century and Britain in the eighteenth century and Germany and the rest later. Legally speaking, from Ireland to the Austrian Empire by 1900 any Jew could enter any profession, take up any innovative idea. But in many parts of Europe he was never granted the other, sociological half of the encouragement to betterment, the dignity that protects the liberty. “Society, confronted with political, economic, and legal equality for Jews,” wrote Hannah Arendt, “made it quite clear that none of its classes was prepared to grant them social equality. . . . Social pariahs the Jews did become wherever they had ceased to be political and civil outcasts” (Arendt Reference Arendt1985 [1951]: 56, 62). True, Benjamin Disraeli became prime minister of the United Kingdom in 1868, Lewis Wormeer Harris was elected lord mayor of Dublin in 1876, and Louis Brandeis became an associate justice of the US Supreme Court in 1916. Yet in Germany after 1933 few gentile doctors or professors resisted the expulsion of Jews from their ranks. The Jews were undignified. In much of Christendom—with partial exceptions in the United States and the United Kingdom, and in Denmark and Bulgaria—they were political and social outcasts.

Liberty and dignity for all commoners, to be sure, was a double-sided political and social ideal, and did not work without flaw. History has many cunning passages, contrived corridors. The liberty of the bourgeoisie to venture was matched by the liberty of the workers, when they got the vote, to adopt growth-killing regulations, with a socialist clerisy cheering them on. And the dignity of workers was overmatched by an arrogance among successful entrepreneurs and wealthy rentiers, with a fascist clerisy cheering them on. Such are the usual tensions of liberal democracy. And such are the often mischievous dogmas of the clerisy.

But for the first time, thank God—and thank the Levellers and then Locke in the seventeenth century, and Voltaire and Smith and Franklin and Paine and Wollstonecraft among other of the advanced thinkers in the eighteenth century—the ordinary people, the commoners, both workers and bosses, began to be released from the ancient notion of hierarchy, the naturalization of the noble gentleman's rule over hoi polloi. Aristotle had said that most people were born to be slaves. “From the hour of their birth, some are marked out for subjection, others for rule” (Aristotle, Politics, Bk. 1, 1254a). Bishop (and Saint) Isidore of Seville said in the early seventh century that “to those unsuitable for liberty, [God] has mercifully accorded servitude” (Moynahan Reference Moynahan2002). So it had been from the first times of settled agriculture and the ownership of land. Inherited wealth was long thought blameless compared with earned wealth, about which suspicion hung.Footnote ⁴ Consider South Asia with its ancient castes, the hardest workers at the bottom. And further east consider the Confucian tradition (if not in every detail the ideas of Kung the Teacher), which stressed the Five Relationships of ruler to subject, father to son, husband to wife, elder brother to younger, and—the only one of the five without hierarchy—friend to friend. The analogy of the king as father of the nation, and therefore “naturally” superior, ruled political thought in the West (and the East and North and South) right through Hobbes. King Charles I of England, of whom Hobbes approved, was articulating nothing but a universal and ancient notion when he declared in his speech from the scaffold in 1649 that “a King and a Subject are plain different things.”Footnote ⁵

But the analogy of natural fathers to natural kings and aristocracies commenced about then, gradually, to seem to some of the bolder thinkers less obvious. The Leveller Richard Rumbold on his own scaffold in 1685 declared, “I am sure there was no man born marked of God above another; for none comes into the world with a saddle on his back, neither any booted and spurred to ride him.”Footnote ⁶ Few in the crowd gathered to mock him would have agreed. A century later, many would have. By 1985 virtually everyone did. True, outpourings of egalitarian sentiment, such as that by Jesus of Nazareth around 30 CE (“Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me”), had shaken all agricultural societies from time to time. But from the seventeenth century onward the shaking became continuous, and then down to the present a rolling earthquake of equality for all humans.

In the nineteenth century in Europe (if not yet in Bollywood) the ancient comic plot of young lovers amusingly fooling the Old Man, or being tragically stymied by him, died out, because human capital embodied in and owned by young people replaced in economic dominance the landed capital owned by the old. Even patriarchy, therefore, the kingliness of fathers, began to tremble, until nowadays most American children defy their fathers with impunity. Four verses before the verse in Leviticus routinely hauled out to damn homosexuals, their putative author Moses commands that “every one that curseth his father or his mother shall surely be put to death” (20:9). The verse would condemn most American teenagers to stoning, along with the homosexuals and those who mix wool cloth with linen or fail to take a ceremonial bath after their periods.

In its long, laborious development, the loony notion of dignity for anyone coming into the world without a saddle on his back was taken up by radical Anabaptists and Quakers, abolitionists and spiritualists, revolutionaries and suffragettes, and American drag queens battling the police at Stonewall. By now in civilized countries the burden of proof has shifted decisively onto conservatives and party hacks and Catholic bishops and country-club Colonel Blimps and anti-1960s reactionaries to defend hierarchy, the generous loyalty to rank and sex, as a thing lovely and in accord with natural law.

The Rumboldian idea of coming into the world without a saddle on one's back had expressed, too, a notion struggling for legitimacy, of a contract between king and people. As Rumbold put it in his speech: “[T]he king having, as I conceive, power enough to make him great; the people also as much property as to make them happy; they being, as it were, contracted to one another.” Note the “as it were, contracted,” a bourgeois deal akin to Abram's land deal with the Lord, a rhetoric of “covenant” popular among Protestants after Zwingli (MacCulloch Reference MacCulloch2004: 174). The terms of such a monarchical deal became a routine trope in the seventeenth century, as in Hobbes and Locke, and then still more routinely in the eighteenth century. Louis XIV declared that he was tied to his subjects “only by an exchange of reciprocal obligations. The deference. . . we receive. . . [is] but payment for the justice [the subjects] expect to receive” (Taylor Reference Taylor2007: 178). Frederick the Great claimed to view himself as governed by a similar deal with his subjects, calling himself merely “the first servant of the state” (though not refraining from exercising autocracy when he felt like it).

Even in autocratic France and Prussia (if not in Russia), that is, the sovereign had to honor property rights. From Newgate Prison Richard Overton declared that “by natural birth all men are equally and alike born to like propriety [that is, equal rights to acquire and hold property], liberty and freedom” (quoted in Palmer Reference Palmer2009: 74). The deal by which the people as a group had as much property as to make them “happy” (a new concern I've observed in the late seventeenth century) was thought crucial among a handful of such progressives and then by more and more Europeans from the eighteenth century on. In the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen in 1793 the last article (number 17), speaks of property in notably warm terms: “property is an inviolable and sacred right.” Article 2 in the Declaration had placed property among four rights, “natural and imprescribable” (imprescriptibles, i.e., by law immovable): “liberty, property, security, and resistance to oppression.”

An article in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights adopted by the United Nations in 1948 (by God's little joke also numbered 17) declares (though with rather less warmth in a socialist-leaning age), “(1) Everyone has the right to own property alone as well as in association with others; and (2) No one shall be arbitrarily deprived of his property.” Article 42 in the new Italian Constitution, in force in the same year, is still less warm:

The socialist tilt toward “social function,” “accessib[ility] to all,” and a “general interest” that could justify expropriation continued for a while down the twentieth century. In 1986 the Labor prime minister of Australia, Bob Hawke, proposed for his country a bill of rights. It made no mention of the right to property (Blainey Reference Blainey2009: 272).

In the twentieth century the rhetorical presumption of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness for all was echoed even in the rhetoric of its most determined enemies (as in the Democratic Peoples’ Republic of North Korea and other communist or fascist countries). The collectivist counterdeal by which such régimes actually worked, born with Rousseau, was that the general will would be discerned by the party or the führer. No need for private property, then. We in government will take care of all that, thanks.

Democratic pluralism was doubled-sided. Progressive redistributions, under the theories of Rousseau and Proudhon that property is anyway theft, could kill betterment. Consider Argentina, joined recently by Venezuela. Such cases bring to mind H. L. Mencken's grim witticism in 1916 that democracy is “the theory that the common people know what they want and deserve to get it, good and hard” (Mencken Reference Mencken1916: 19). He also said, “Democracy is the art and science of running the circus from the monkey cage” (Mencken Reference Mencken1949: 622). (Yet on the other side of the balance, a populist commitment to modest redistribution—though understand that most benefits, such as free higher education, go to the voting middle class, just as minimum wages protect middle-class trade unionists, and are paid in substantial part to the children of the middle class working at the local bar—saved social-democratic countries from the chaos of revolution. Think of postwar Germany, or for that matter the American New Deal.Footnote ⁸)

What came under question in the world 1517 to 1848 and beyond, slowly, on account of the religious radicals of the sixteenth century and then the political radicals of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and then the abolitionist and black and feminist and gay and untouchable radicals of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, was illiberty and indignity, the one political, the other social. The questioning had, I claim, dramatic consequences in encouraging trade-tested betterment. The English Levellers, who were not modern property-hating socialists, had demanded free trade. They were in this, by the standards of the time, terrifying innovators, as in manhood suffrage and annual parliaments.

What made us free and rich was the questioning of the notion that “a liberty” was a special privilege accorded to a guildsman of the town or to a nobleman of the robe, and the supporting notion that the only “dignity” was privilege inherited from such men and their charter-granting feudal lords, or graciously subgranted by them to you, their humble servant in the Great Chain of Being. Philip the Good, Duke of the Burgundian Netherlands, forced in 1438 the proud city of Bruges to accede to his rising power. His tyranny took the form of taking away its “privileges.” His granddaughter, Mary, Duchess of Burgundy, though, was forced to sign the Groot Privilege, the bourgeois Magna Carta of the Low Countries, giving such liberties back to all of the cities.

It was not only dukes and duchesses who took, or granted, privileges denied to most people. Hierarchy was reworked by the bourgeoisie into commercial forms, even in the first northern home of bourgeois glory. A famous radical poem of Holland in the 1930s, written on a slow news day by Jan Gresshof (he was fired for printing the poem in the newspaper he edited), speaks of the conservative wing of his colleagues of the bourgeois clerisy, “de dominee, de dokter, de notaris,” the minister, the doctor, the lawyer-notary, who together strolled complacently on Arnhem's town square of an evening. “There is nothing left on earth for them to learn, / They are perfect and complete, / Old liberals [in the European sense], distrustful and healthy.”Footnote ⁹ The hierarchy to be broken down was not only of dukes and duchesses, kings and knights, but of the members of the bourgeoisie remade as pseudo-neo-kings and -knights, when they could get away with it. Thus a trophy wife in Florida clinging to the arm of her rich husband declared to the TV cameras, on the subject of poor people, “We don't bother with losers.” Thus the Medici started as doctors by way of routinely learned skills (as their name implies), then became bankers by entrepreneurship, and then grand dukes by violence, and at last kept their dukedom by the settled hierarchy of inheritance and the legitimate monopoly of violence.

The economic historian Joel Mokyr has noted that the Dutch became conservative in the eighteenth century and “played third fiddle in the Industrial Revolution,” from which he concludes that there must be something amiss in McCloskey's emphasis on the new ideology of bourgeois liberty and dignity (pers. comm., 2014). After all, the Dutch had them both, early. But I just said that the bourgeoisie is capable of reversing its betterment by making itself into an honorable hierarchy, which is what the Dutch regents did. And Mokyr is adopting the mistaken convention that the Dutch in the eighteenth century “failed.” They did not. Like Londoners, and according to comparative advantage, they gave up some of their own industrial project in favor of becoming bankers and routine merchants. I am claiming only that the new ideology came to Britain from Holland, which remains true whether or not the Dutch did much with it later. In their Golden Age the Dutch certainly did a great deal of bettering with the ideology. I agree that Dutch society later froze up, ruled by de dominee, de dokter, de notaris. But national borders do not always compute. If we are to blame the Dutch in the eighteenth century for conservatism we will also have to blame the Southern English, who also turned to specializing in mere trading and financing, giving up their industrial might, clipping coupons in the funds, and sitting in great houses surrounded by parkland, and like the Dutch adhering to distinctions of rank that were less important in the industrial north of England or in the industrial south of Belgium.

And Mokyr's inertial lemma—that once initiated, a social change must be permanent or else it did not exist in the first place—raises graver problems for his own emphasis on science as the initiating event than for mine on a new appreciation for bourgeois liberty and dignity. After all, the Dutch in the seventeenth century had invented the telescope and the microscope among numerous other scientific devices, such as the pendulum in clocks. Why didn't inertia propel them, if science does it, into the Industrial Revolution and the Great Enrichment? The Dutch case argues better for bourgeois dignity, which has sustained Holland ever since as one of the richest countries in the world, but argues poorly for science, in which it faltered.

The ethical and rhetorical change that around 1700 began to break the ancient restraints on betterment, whether from the old knights or the new monopolists, was liberating and it was enlightened and it was liberal in the Scottish sense of putting first an equal liberty, not an equal outcome. And it was successful. As one of its more charming conservative enemies put it:

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It is merely a materialist-economistic prejudice to insist that such a rhetorical change from aristocratic-religious values to bourgeois values must have had economic or biological roots. John Mueller, a political scientist and historian at Ohio State, argues that war, like slavery or the subordination of women, has become slowly less respectable in the past few centuries (Mueller Reference Mueller2011: pt. 1). Important habits of the heart and of the lip change. In the seventeenth century a master could routinely beat his servant. Not now. Such changes are not always caused by interest or by considerations of efficiency or by the logic of class conflict. The Bourgeois Revaluation had also legal, political, personal, gender, religious, philosophical, historical, linguistic, journalistic, literary, artistic, and accidental causes.

The economist Deepak Lal, relying on the legal historian Harold Berman and echoing an old opinion of Henry Adams, sees a big change in the eleventh century, in Gregory VII's assertion of church supremacy (Lal Reference Lal1998; summarized in Lal 2006: 5, 155). Perhaps. The trouble with such earlier and broader origins is that modernity came from Holland and England, not, for example, from thoroughly Protestant Sweden or East Prussia (except Kant), or from thoroughly church-supremacist Spain or Naples (except Vico). It is better to locate the widespread taking up of the politically relevant attitudes later in European history—around 1700. Such a dating fits better with the historical finding that until the eighteenth century places like China, say, did not look markedly less rich or even, in many respects, less free than Europe (Needham Reference Needham1954–Reference Needham2008; Pomeranz Reference Pomeranz2000; and others). In Europe the scene was set by the affirmations of ordinary life, and ordinary death, in the upheavals of the Reformation of the sixteenth century, the long Dutch Revolt and the longer civil war between French Catholics and Huguenots, and the two English revolutions of the seventeenth century. The economically relevant change in attitude that resulted occurred in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries with the novel ruminations around the North Sea—embodied literally in the novel as against the romance—affirming as the transcendent telos of an economy an ordinary instead of a heroic or holy life. It was, in one of the philosopher Charles Taylor's labels for it, “the sanctification of ordinary life”(Taylor Reference Taylor1989: 23; Reference Taylor2007: 179).

Margaret Jacob, the historian of technology and of the radical Enlightenment (her coinage), argues that the 1680s was the hinge. The Anglo-Dutch reaction to absolutism was the catalyst for what we call Enlightenment (Jacob Reference Jacob2001). Enlightenment comes, she is saying, from the reaction to Catholic absolutism in England under late Charles II and his brother James II, and in France under Louis XIV with the Revocation and his secret negotiations with Charles and James. Jack Goldstone observes that in England in the 1680s even the common law was under attack. It was the politics, not the economics. Absolutist and Catholic France and antiabsolutist and Protestant England were both mercantilist. And the Dutch, French, and English, not to speak of the Portuguese and Spanish, had long been imperialists. What changed were ideas, mainly, not economic interests.

The common set of ideas in the Enlightenment were ethical and political. One must settle matters by making open arguments, it came to be said (if by no means always done), not by applying political force. It is Erasmian humanism, the ancient tradition of rhetoric. The Reformation finally evolved in an Erasmian direction, though only after a good deal of killing in the name of “whose reign it is, his religion holds,” and became democratic, after more killing. The ideas were Western European, from Scotland to Poland. Without such ideas the modern world might have happened, after a while, but in a different way—a centralized, French version, perhaps. It would not have worked well economically (though the food would have been better).

The old bourgeoisie and the aristocracy had said that they disdained the dishonor of merely economic trade and betterment. The Medici bank lasted only about a century because its later governors were more interested in hobnobbing with the aristocracy than in making sensible loans to merchants (Parks Reference Parks2005: 180). The scholastic intellectuals, for all their admirable rhetorical seriousness, did not get their hands dirty in experimentation, with rare exceptions such as Roger Bacon. It was sixteenth-century Dutch and English merchants, following on their earlier merchant cousins in the Mediterranean, who developed the notion of an experimental and observing life. Enlightenment was a change in the attitude toward such ordinary life. The rare honor of kings and dukes and bishops was to be devalued. And such honor was to be extended to merchant bankers of London and American experimenters with electricity. The comparative devaluation of courts and politics followed, slowly.

The debate by the middle of the eighteenth century, the political theorist and intellectual historian John Danford notes, was “whether a free society is possible if commercial activities flourish” (Danford Reference Danford and Womersley2006: 319).Footnote ¹⁰ The admired models on the anticommercial side of the debate, as J. G. A. Pocock and others have shown, were Republican Rome and especially, of all places, Greek Sparta. The commerce favored by Athens or Carthage or now Britain would introduce “luxury and voluptuousness,” in Lord Kames's conventional phrase, as the debate reached its climax, which would “eradicate patriotism,” and extinguish at least ancient freedom, the freedom to participate (ibid.). As the Spartans vanquished Athens, so too some more vigorous nation would rise up and vanquish Britain, or at any rate stop a “progress so flourishing. . . when patriotism is the ruling passion of every member” (ibid.). One hears such arguments still, in nostalgic praise in the United States for the Greatest Generation (lynching, and income in today's dollars, c. 1945, $33 a head) as against the diminished glory of our latter days (civil rights, and income, c. 2016, $130 a head). The nationalist, sacrificial, antiluxury, classical republican view with its Spartan ideal persists in in the pages of the Nation and the National Review.

On the contrary, said Hume, in reply to arguments such as Kames's, commerce is good for us. Georgian mercantilism and overseas imperialism in aid of the political, he said, was not good for us. Hume opposed, writes Danford, “the primacy of the political.” “In this denigration of political life. Hume [is] thoroughly modern and [seems] to agree in important respects with [the individualism of] Hobbes and Locke” (Danford Reference Danford and Womersley2006: 324). Hobbes, Danford argues, believed that the tranquility notably lacking in the Europe of his time could best be achieved “if the political order [is] understood as merely a means to security and prosperity rather than virtue (or salvation or empire)” (ibid.: 331). “This amounts,” Danford notes, “to an enormous demotion of politics, now to be seen as merely instrumental,” as against seeing it as an arena for the exercise of the highest virtues of a tiny group of The Best. We nowadays can't easily see how novel such a demotion was, because we now suppose without a sense of its historical oddness that to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. Politics has stopped being exclusively the plaything of the aristocracy.

Hume spoke of the “opposition between the greatness of the state and the happiness of the subjects” (Hume Reference Hume and Miller1987 [1741–42]: II.I.4).Footnote ¹¹ In an earlier time Machiavelli could easily adopt the greatness of the prince as the purpose of a polity, at any rate when he was angling for a job with the Medici. The purpose of Sparta was not the “happiness” of the Spartan women, helots, allies, or even in any material sense the Spartanate. The entire point of Henry VIII's England was Henry's glory as by the Grace of God, King of England, France and Ireland, Defender of the Faith and of the Church of England, and in Earth Supreme Head. What was original about Hobbes is that he adopts the premise, in Danford's words, that “all legitimate [note the word] governments are trying to do precisely the same things: to provide security and tranquility so that individuals can pursue their own private ends” (Danford Reference Danford and Womersley2006: 332). Danford argues that “perhaps it would be better to describe the change as the devaluation of politics and the political rather than the elevation of trade” (ibid.: 330). To devalue royal or aristocratic values is to leave the bourgeoisie in charge. Romantic people attached on the right to king and country and on the left to revolution sneered at the Enlightenment (see Palmer Reference Palmer and Palmer2014). What was unique about the Enlightenment was precisely the elevation of ordinary peaceful people in ordinary peaceful life, an elevation of trade over the monopoly of violence.

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The economic historian Erik Ringmar's answer to the question “why was Europe first?” begins from the simple and true triad of points that all change involves an initial reflection (namely, that change is possible), an entrepreneurial moment (putting the change into practice), and “pluralism” or “toleration” (I would call the toleration the ideology of the Bourgeois Era, namely, some way of counteracting the annoyance with which the naturally conservative majority of humans will view any moving of their cheese). “Contemporary Britain, the United States or Japan,” Ringmar writes, “are not modern because they contain individuals who are uniquely reflective, entrepreneurial or tolerant” (Ringmar Reference Ringmar2007: 31). That's correct: The psychological hypothesis one finds in Weber or in the psychologist David McClelland or in the historian David Landes does not stand up to the evidence, as for example the success of the overseas Chinese, or indeed the astonishingly quick turn from Maoist starvation in mainland China to 9 or 10 percent rates of growth per year per person, or from the Hindu rate of growth and the License Raj in India after independence to growth rates per person since 1991 more than 6 percent. Why would psychology change so quickly? And now could a rise of an entrepreneurial spirit from, say, 5 percent of the population to 10 percent, which could have also characterized earlier efflorescences such as fifth-century Athens, cause after 1800 a uniquely Great Enrichment of a factor of 30?

But then unhappily Ringmar contends in Douglass Northian style, “A modern society is a society in which change happens automatically and effortlessly because it is institutionalized” (Ringmar Reference Ringmar2007: 32). The trouble with the claim of “institutions” is, as Ringmar noted earlier in another connection, that “it begs the question of the origin” (ibid.: 24). It also begs the question of enforcement, which depends on ethics and opinion absent from the neo-institutional tale. “The joker in the pack,” writes the economic historian Eric Jones in speaking of the decline of guild restrictions in England, “was the national shift in elite opinion, which the courts partly shared”:

Ringmar devotes 150 lucid and learned and literate pages to exploring the origins of European science, humanism, newspapers, universities, academies, theater, novels, corporations, property rights, insurance, Dutch finance, diversity, states, politeness, civil rights, political parties, and economics. But he is a true comparativist (he taught for some years in China)—this in sharp contrast to some of the other Northians, and especially the good North. So Ringmar does not suppose that the European facts speak for themselves. In the following 100 pages he takes back much of the implicit claim that Europe was anciently special, whether “institutionalized” or not, by going through for China the same triad of reflection, entrepreneurship, and pluralism/toleration, and finding them pretty good. “The Chinese were at least as intrepid [in the seas] as the Europeans”; “The [Chinese] imperial state constituted next to no threat to the property rights of merchants and investors”; “already by 400 BCE China produced as much cast iron as Europe would in 1750”; Confucianism was “a wonderfully flexible doctrine”; “China was far more thoroughly commercialized”; European “salons and coffee shops [were]. . . in some ways strikingly Chinese” (Ringmar Reference Ringmar2007: 250, 254, 274, 279–82). He knows, as the Northians appear not to, that China had banks and canals and large firms and private property many centuries before the Northian date for the acquisition of such modernities in England, the end of the seventeenth century. (So too on many counts did England, for that matter.)

The economists and historian Sheilagh Ogilvie criticizes the neo-institutionalists and their claims that efficiency ruled, arguing on the contrary for a “conflictual” point of view, in which power is taken seriously:

The same can be said for the new political and social ideas that at length broke down an ideology that had been highly effective at justifying in ethical terms the distribution of large slices to overlords.

Why, then, a change in a system so profitable for the elite? Ringmar gets it right when he speaks of public opinion, which was a late and contingent development in Europe, and to which he recurs frequently (Ringmar Reference Ringmar2007: 72, 178, 286). The oldest newspaper still publishing in Europe is a Swedish one of 1645, Post- och Inrikes Tidningar (Foreign and Domestic Times), and the first daily one in England dates to 1702. Benjamin Franklin's older brother James quickly imitated in Boston in 1721 the idea of a newspaper and became, with the active help of adolescent Ben, a thorn in the side of the authorities. That is, the institutions that mattered the most were not the “incentives” beloved of the economists, such as patents (which have been shown to be insignificant, and anyway have been universal, as state-granted monopolies, from the first formation of states) or property rights (which were established in China and India and the Ottoman Empire, often much earlier than in Europe; and after all the Roman law was clear on property). The important “institutions” were ideas, words, rhetoric, ideology. And these did change on the eve of the Great Enrichment. What changed circa 1700 was a climate of persuasion, which led promptly to the amazing reflection, entrepreneurship, and pluralism called the modern world.

It is not always true, as Ringmar claims at one point, that “institutions are best explained in terms of the path through which they developed” (ibid.: 37). He contradicts himself on the page previous and there speaks truth: often “the institutions develop first and the needs come only later.” It is not the case, for example, that the origins of English betterment, if not of individualism, are usefully traced to early medieval times. It is not the case that, say, English common law was essential for modernity. The historian David Le Bris has shown that within France before the Revolution the French north was a common-law area, while the south was a civil-law area, but with little or no discernible differences in economic outcome during the next century (Le Bris Reference Le Bris2013). Places without such law, further, promptly developed alternatives, when the ideology turned, as it often did turn suddenly, in favor of betterment.

Ideas, not capital or institutions, made the modern world.