I asked this of the eminent author and economist Deirdre
McCloskey at a recent public forum in London, and somewhat to my surprise she
admitted she could not answer the question.
And yet McCloskey is perhaps better prepared to do so than
any living economist that I’ve encountered, now that Milton Friedman and
Friedrich Hayek are no longer with us.
She prominently established the foundation for a
satisfactory answer to this important question in the first two books of her
soon-to-be-completed Bourgeois Era
trilogy. Particularly in the second
book, Bourgeois Dignity, she
demolishes every theory of the right and the left about the factors that
created this massive shift in the trajectory of human political economy, and
points out that it occurred because of a singular change in the collective inner consciousness of human
beings in Holland and England during the seventeenth century.
Now, McCloskey doesn’t actually say “singular shift in the collective
inner consciousness”; what she does assert is that there was a discernible and
decisive shift in the rhetoric of social
value.
. . . three centuries ago in places
like Holland and England the talk and thought about the middle class began to
alter. Ordinary conversation about
innovation and markets became more approving.
The high theorists were emboldened to rethink their prejudice against
the bourgeoisie, a prejudice by then millennia old. . . . The North Sea talk at length radically
altered the local economy and politics and rhetoric. In northwestern Europe around 1700 the
general opinion shifted in favor of the bourgeoisie, and especially in favor of
its marketing and innovating. The shift
was sudden as these things go. In the
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries a great shift occurred in what Alexis de
Tocqueville called “habits of the mind”—or more exactly, habits of the
lip. People stopped sneering at market
innovativeness and other bourgeois virtues exercised far from the traditional
places of honor in the Basilica of St. Peter or the Palace of Versailles or the
gory ground of the First Battle of Breitenfeld.[1]
It’s a shame that, in the very beginning of her insightful
argument, she pulls back from examining the habits of the mind whose transformation
resulted in those “habits of the lip.”
Rhetoric, after all, is a product of inner consciousness and
perspective. Talk is the crystallization
of thought seeking social viability.
That people “stopped sneering” happened for a reason, and McCloskey’s
argument would be more deeply served by examining and applying that reason.
