A Discussion of Bourgeois Equality Chapter 25 “The Word ‘Honest’ Shows the Changing Attitude Toward the Aristocracy and the Bourgeois”
Dr. McCloskey is moving further back in time in this fourth part of the book to examine societal changes in 1700s England that will lead to the Great Enrichment.
There have been many times and places when a society has amassed capital, constructed infrastructure, and engaged in trade and yet we never saw explosive growth until the 1800s. Why?
In prior times, there was never a respect for business, for profits, or for the individual to follow his own path, at least not for the common man. In earlier times, there was one set of rules and expectations for the aristocracy and another for the rest of society.
McCloskey says we can see this shift in attitudes in this chapter by tracing how the meaning of words changed over the years, in particular, the word, “honesty.”
What else could honest mean?
Words shift in meaning over centuries so McCloskey is using the changing definition of “honest” to show us the underlying attitude shift. However, this change in attitudes as reflected in language is not necessarily a conscious process.
The evidence for rhetorical change toward a bourgeois civilization then, has to catch people talking unawares. If you simply ask them outright they are liable to affirm indignantly that they are decidedly against the vulgar bourgeois, and remain enthusiastic advocates for old-fashioned aristocratic or Christian virtues. (p. 236)
Thus, reading the fiction and non-fiction writings from the past can be good evidence of these shifts in attitude.
The shift is unconscious essentially and is revealed by analyzing changes in the way words are used. McCloskey chooses “honest” in this chapter because it had a certain meaning in the medieval and feudalistic years that was associated with aristocracy.
We see over the years though the definition shifts towards the bourgeois. While McCloskey says there are a lot of English words with this history, the word honest does a good job of illuminating this phenomena.
In English our bourgeois word “honest” once meant not mainly ‘committed to telling the truth’ or ‘paying one’s debts’ or even ‘upright in dealing,’ but mainly ‘noble,’ even ‘aristocratic,’ or ‘dignified,’ in a society in which only the nobles were truly dignified (p. 236)
One way to see this is to examine the Latin word, honestus, that it is derived from. She says the Roman empire used the word honestores to refer to the people that mattered, the rich and the leaders. The word sincerus was closer to our modern definition of honest. (p. 236)
The rest of the chapter is primarily her giving examples of the word usage and changes in dictionary listings to show the shift in meaning. I will give a few here.
Charles I on the scaffold, 1648, said he was ‘an honest man, and a good King, and a good Christian. He did not mean that he kept to his business bargains or told the truth, which chronically he did not. He meant that he was noble, aristocratic, worthy of honor. (p. 238)
Likewise she points out Shakespeare’s plays in the 1600s largely use honest in the sense of honorable or dignified.
She points out the beginning of the shift in the Putney debates in 1647 which was at the end of the English civil war with Oliver Cromwell beginning modern English democracy. It makes sense they are using words that align with dignity for the bourgeois at that point in time.
Moving forward to Adam Smith who she wrote about in the previous section,
Adam Smith admired honesty, sincerity, truth, candor in a fashion foreign to Shakespearean England. In Smith’s books of 1759 and 1776 ‘honest’ means ‘upright’ or ‘sincere’ or ‘truth-telling,’ never ‘aristocratic.’ (p. 240)
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McCloskey notes that this shift in attitudes revealed by the changing definition of “honest” away from applying to being born aristocratic to a virtue the common man could aspire to is seen also in “all the commercial languages of Europe.” (p. 243) She offers examples in German, Italian and French.
With all this evidence presented, she can rest her case.
Thus English and the commerce-drenched Romance languages from 1600 to the present embody they shift from ‘honor’ meaning ‘aristocratic’ to merely bourgeois ‘reliable.’ (p. 246)
Conclusion
This is an unusual approach to an economist — spending this time on historical linguistic information. Our normal process for examining what has caused the explosion in growth would be to statistically examine the significance of various hypothesized factors that could explain it.
Various factors that have been looked at include property rights, democracy, financial markets and many others. We use a word, institutions, to describe the systems of rules and governance that include such variables. Countries with good institutions thrive.
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What McCloskey is doing is providing us a deeper answer — where do these institutions come from? She is presenting evidence that it is the thoughts, the attitudes, as revealed by words, that shape the institutions.
Delving into history, performing a linguistic analysis — these are not the normal steps of economists. But after reading this chapter, I think they should be when we are trying to answer these larger questions.
Reference: McCloskey, Deirdre Nansen, 2016. “The Word ‘Honest’ Showds the Changing Attitude Toward the Aristocracy and the Bourgeois,” Chapter 25 of Bourgeois Equality, The University of Chicago Press.
By Ellen Clardy, PhD on .
Exported from Medium on December 15, 2022.
