A Discussion of Bourgeois Equality Chapter 34 “Aristocratic England, For Example, Scorned Measurement”
Dr. McCloskey continues exploring the cultural mindset of the Elizabethan era of England in this chapter to demonstrate it did not embrace measurement, which is foundational to the launch of the Great Enrichment in the eighteenth century.
By measurement, she means counting accurately. Accounting, statistics, graphical displays of data — all things embedded in our world, our thoughts, and of course in my field, economics.
She addressed this move towards measurement in 1700’s England in an earlier chapter.
A Sociological Shift, Not a Psychological Change
She notes it is hard for us today to imagine a time without a careful counting of our business activities.
Such an idea of counting and accounting is obvious to us, in our bourgeois lives. It is part of our private and public rhetoric, and we laugh at quantitative exaggerations, though perhaps not as easily as Shakespeare did, so much do we honor counting. The point is that counting had to be invented, both as a technique and an attitude. (p. 320)
One piece of evidence she offers is the fact that Harvard College did not make arithmetic a requirement until 1803 although fluency in Latin and Greek had been a requirement since its founding over a 100 years before. (p. 320)
Before Numeracy
Prior to the rise of mercantilism that would give way to the industrialization of the Great Enrichment, there was not a need for numeracy as we think of it today. She adds though that their innumeracy does not mean they were stupid.
We must not, though, be misled by the absence in Olden Tymes of widespread arithmetical skills or formal accounts into thinking that our ancestors were merely stupid. Recent neuropsychology shows that a spatial sense of a large number of trees being fewer than a very large number is hardwired into pigeons and people, regardless of whether they can do their multiplication tables in their heads….People are not innumerate when they think it matters, though some do count in strange ways, because it doesn’t. (p. 323)
And that is the crux of her argument, there was not a need for careful accounting before the rise of the bourgeois merchant class.
She does note that there was some counting needed in larger organizations in the medieval period, or for taxation in empires through time. But most people lived in a smaller scale and had no need for exact accounting systems.
Also, she is focusing in this chapter more on England, acknowledging that many of these mathematical discoveries and innovations in Europe in the 1600s and 1700s had been used in China for centuries before. (p. 320)
Likewise, the abacus had been used across cultures for centuries for those who needed to keep accounts. (p. 321)
And yet in England prior to the 1700s, approximate numbers were sufficient for most who had no need for more accuracy.
One impediment was the cultural sneering at bourgeois calculation.
Calculation, in other words, is the skeleton of common prudence. But the aristocrat scorns calculation precisely because it embodies ignoble prudence and is so very bourgeois. (p. 323)
Another impediment was the use of Roman numerals instead of Arabic numerals. A historian, Peter Wardley, surveyed probate inventories in the 1600s that listed the property of the estates.
…as late as 1610 even in commercial Bristol the share of probates using Arabic as against Roman numerals was essentially zero. By 1670, however, it was nearly 100%, a startlingly fast change. (p. 322)
The Bourgeois Need Accurate Measurement
Essentially then McCloskey is showing us that across time and space there had been people keeping the books when needed, but it was not a common way of thinking or living your life for most.
Numeracy, then, was always advanced among the bourgeois, who had to calculate to live. The Dutch, I repeat, led the way, and ordinary Dutch folk around 1600 thought quantitatively. (p. 319)
She will turn her attention to the Dutch in the next 3 chapters and examine how they became bourgeois a century before England.
But for England, she is arguing that the esteem for calculation spread across society as the merchant class grew and the culture shifted towards valuing bourgeois virtues. This move towards numeracy is just one part of the cultural shift that will make the Great Enrichment possible.
Calculation, in other words, is the skeleton of common prudence. But the aristocrat scorns calculation precisely because it embodies ignoble prudence and is so very bourgeois. (p. 323)
Prudence is one of the 7 virtues she discussed in an earlier chapter where she described Adam Smith as one of the last virtue ethicists.
Adam Smith is not Responsible for Sociopath Max U
Here, she notes that some of the virtues work well with counting and accounting and calculating.
Prudence is a calculative virtue, as are, note, justice and temperance. They are cool. The warm virtues — love and courage, faith and hope — the virtues praised most often by Shakespeare, and not praised much by bourgeois Adam Smith a century and a half later, are specifically and essentially noncalculative. (p. 324)
Thus, as the bourgeois virtues rise so does the importance of calculation and measurement.
Reference: McCloskey, Deirdre Nansen, 2016. “Aristocratic England, For Example, Scorned Measurement” Chapter 34 of Bourgeois Equality, The University of Chicago Press.
