how_values_made_innnovation

1 Test 5/18/2019 11:44:10 下午下午 Bourgeois Deeds: How Values Made Innovation and the Modern World The Bourgeois Era, Vol. 2 Deirdre McCloskey University of Illinois at Chicago Academia Vitae, Deventer, The Netherlands University of the Free State, Bloemfontein, South Africa Table of Contents Preface and Acknowledgements The Argument in Brief: How a Change in Talk Made the Modern World A Preliminary Showing that Ethical Ideas and Their Rhetoric Mattered The Outcome was the Bourgeois Era Part 1: Material Explanations of the Worlds Enrichment Do Not Work 1:Modern Growth is a Factor of at the Very Least Fifteen 2 2: Britain Led 3: It Was Not from Thrift 4: Nor Was It from Original Accumulation, or the Protestant Ethic 5: Foreign Trade Was Not It 6: Nor the Slave Trade, Nor Imperialism 7: Eugenic Materialism Doesnt Work 8: And Neo-Darwinian Arguments Dont Figure 9: Strictly “Material” Causes are thus Rebutted 10: Nor Was It Nationalism 11: Nor Institutions Viewed as Constraints 12: Nor Routine Institutional Investments 13: Nor the Sheer Quickening of Commerce Part 2 The Rhetoric of the Christian and Aristocratic and then Bourgeois English Changed 14: The Bourgeoisie is Always With Us 15: But the Bourgeoisie Has Been Disdained 16: There Were Precursors of a Self-Respecting Bourgeoisie 17: Yet on the Whole theBourgeoisies Have Been Precarious 18: The Dutch Preached Bourgeois Virtue 19: And the Dutch Bourgeoisie Was Virtuous 20: YetStill Old England Disdained the Market and the Bourgeoisie 21: Aristocratic England Scorned Measurement 22: And So the English Bourgeoisie Could Not “Rise” 23: But in the Late seventeenth Century the English Changed 24: The Words Show the Change 25: NEW CHAPTER UNTITLED YET 26: Bourgeois England Loved Measurement 27: The New Values Triumphed Works cited Apologia Our modern world of computers, tolerance, antibiotics, frozen peas, liberty, higher education, and central heating was caused by a change in ideas about the middle class. The ideas of the elite changed, not the actual behavior of the middle- class. Public opinion in England rather suddenly around 1700 stopped sneering at profit and invention and other virtues exercised beyond the temple or battlefield. That is, the modern world arose in the first instance from a change in words and ideas. It changed from “ideology,” to use the word Marx taught us, or from “rhetoric,” as I would prefer. Marx was mistakento believethat ideological change always reflects economic change. The change in words and ideas led off, and the change in the 3 economy followed. Holland started it, in the seventeenth century, and Britainbroadened it, in the eighteenth. “Capitalism developed,” we say. Actually it is wiser to call what developed in early modern times and enriched us beyond all expectations in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries by another word, without the misleading connotations of “capitalism”perhaps simply“innovation.”Using as a synonym for “Modern Capitalism” something like “The Age of Innovation” will point in the right direction. Capitalism,which was another coin struck around 1800 whose exact meaning in our thinking is due mainly to Marx, points in the wrong direction, to money and saving and accumulation. Itbrings to mind Scrooge McDuck in the Donald Duck comic books and his piles of money. Or in a slightly more sophisticated version it brings to mind Charles Montgomery Burns in The Simpsons and his piles of factories. Economists since the 18th century have liked the idea of piled capital as the maker of modernity,partly because it emphasizes cost and partly because it is easy to describe mathematically. The master equation Q = F(K,L) has since the late nineteenth century delighted the economist, and has satisfied her deeply Calvinist beliefs. But the cartoonists are wrong, and so have been the economists. Piling up isnt it. Let us gently retire the fraught and misleading word. The path to the modern was not through rich people piling upmore riches. They had always done so. Nor was it through bosses being nasty to workers, or through powerful countries being nasty to weak countries. They had always done that, too. It was instead through innovating in machinery and in business practices. And thenit was through innovating in politics,so that life, liberty, and the pursuit of innovation were protected. Innovating became respectable, slowly, in the way people talked about it. For example, merchants and machine makers and manufacturersin the eighteenth century became for the first time “gentlemen” in the talk of others, applyingto the middling sort a word that had been used previously only for the idle and well-born. For that mattersome of the idle and well-born, in Hollandand England and Scotlandand the British colonies, and even in France,took also to innovating. Young gentlemen embarked on bourgeois careers in Rotterdam, Bristol, Glasgow,B