A Discussion of Bourgeois Equality Chapter 23 “Ben Franklin was Bourgeois and He Embodied Betterment” and Chapter 24 “By 1848 A Bourgeois Ideology Had Triumphed”
Two more chapters to conclude this section of the book establishing the ideas that took root in the 1800s that allowed the Bourgeois Deal to flourish. As a reminder, McCloskey is showing us how this happened by starting at the end and working backwards through time. In the next section, she will jump to the evolution of these ideas in 1700s England.
Backward History Reveals Why the Bourgeoisie Rise
I’m going to try something different this time by discussing chapters 23 and 24 together — not because they are less important but because together they reinforce her final points in this section.
Ben Franklin Values Doing Good by Doing Well
McCloskey notes Ben Franklin is perceived as prudence only much like she has argued for several chapters that Adam Smith has been.
Adam Smith is not Responsible for Sociopath Max U
Much of this come from his writings, particularly Autobiography which he wrote as a young man. She notes,
…this is not entirely unjustified by the text of Autobiography. Franklin, for example, always gives a prudential excuse for good will, as though he expected his readers to be cynical about earnest claims of love: ‘These friends were afterwards of great use to me, as I was to some of them.’ (p. 214)
This could sound as if he is only showing good will because it will profit him. One point McCloskey is building to in her book is this system of trade-tested betterment that has caused our Great Enrichment is at risk from a critical group she calls the clerisy that arises after 1848.
She says the clerisy look at the business world as filled with selfish and greedy individuals looking to better their position at the expense of others. And with that viewpoint they can take Franklin’s words above as supporting evidence.
McCloskey says they have it all wrong.
An actual life in business, on the contrary, must be filled with honesty and humor, and especially with humility before the demands of customers, and must be highly selective with tricky dealing. Business life is not solitary, poor, nasty, and brutish — or else, Franklin would say…it will be short. (p. 219)
While much of what Franklin writes does value prudence as he is part of a cultural shift that is placing positive value on bourgeois activities like earning money in business, McCloskey notes above that he also values honesty, humility and amiability.
Another reason Ben Franklin is involved with the rising bourgeois virtues is geography. McCloskey notes that the “theorizing of a bourgeois life” shows in writings from America, Scotland and Naples, not from London or Paris.” (p. 219)
But it was on just such a margin as Scotland or Philadelphia that one could take seriously the ordinary business of life, undistracted by the lordly servitude of a court with its daily excitements of great decisions being made. (p. 221)
The rise of the bourgeois class is a cultural shift from a time when society was hierarchically ordered into classes such as kings and aristocracy (the court), warriors, craftsmen, and peasants. Life was not centered on a career to earn money but more on fulfilling the role you were born into.
Even though in Ben Franklin’s time the court had been replaced by representative democracies, the capital cities where laws were made still had the self-important air of the aristocratic court and continued enjoying the tradition of looking down on bourgeois lives focused on making a living.
Thus, McCloskey argues that we see the rise of bourgeois values occurring in the second cities like Philadelphia and Naples and the hinterlands of Scotland.
The Triumph of the Bourgeois Ideology
Essentially we are observing a time of transition in prevailing worldviews. A movement from the aristocratic values to the bourgeois values can be seen even in something like the act of dueling.
McCloskey notes dueling ended roughly 50 years earlier in England than the Continent showing its earlier conversion to bourgeois values. (p. 223)
Dueling was part of the aristocratic world with its “central virtue of battlefield or courtly courage” that died out as the virtues of the bourgeois arise with its emphasis on prudence. (p. 223)
Dueling was about protecting your honor and displaying your courage so even if you died, you died virtuously. However, looking at dueling with a prudent lens, the cost benefit analysis concludes it is not worth losing your life over an idea.
Another sign of the transition was the monarchy’s own values shifted in the direction of the bourgeois during these years.
The middle class was elevated to the degree that even royals such George III behaved so. Davidoff and Hall note that King George ‘in his later life…had embraced all those virtues increasingly adopted by the middling sort: piety, dignity, honesty, and the love of a proper domestic life.’ (p. 225)
This shift is mirrored in the middle class which looked to character as the source of honor, not being a member of the landed aristocracy. Character is to be developed by a “good Christian life.” (p. 225)
McCloskey shows this cultural shift in a discussion of the meaning of the word, gentleman. While its earlier usage during the aristocratic era meant a well born man with courtly courage, it shifted to mean a virtuous, well behaved man. No longer did you have to be born a gentleman; now you can develop into one. (p. 226)
She uses Donald Trump as another example of the shift towards bourgeois virtues.
The property developer, TV personality, and Republican politician Donald Trump, to take an extreme example, offends. But for all the criticism he has provoked… he is not a thief. He did not get his millions from aristocratic cattle raids, acclaimed in bardic glory. He artfully made, as he put it in his first book, deals, all of them voluntary…Trump made a suitably fat profit for seeing that a hotel in a low-value use could be moved into a high-value use…Even a Trump, in other words, does good by doing well.” (p. 230)
“Doing good by doing well” — that captures the value of the Bourgeois Deal — growth that comes from mutually advantageous deals.
Conclusion
Both in this section of the book and in these last two chapters of it, McCloskey wants us to understand society had to shift what it valued in order for the Great Enrichment to take root.
The world had to move from one where you were born to honor to one where you could develop your character to be honorable. It had to move to a world that valued the virtue of prudence, of doing good by doing well. Only then could people be unleashed to pursue their ideas resulting in unprecedented innovations and growth.
We have been examining this shift by a close look at the writings of Adam Smith, Jane Austin and Ben Franklin that wrote in the late 1700s and early 1800s. In the next section, McCloskey goes further back in time to see why this shift occurred in England around 1700.
Reference: McCloskey, Deirdre Nansen, 2016. “Ben Franklin Was Bourgeois and He Embodied Betterment,” Chapter 23 and “By 1848 A Bourgeois Ideology Had Triumphed,” Chapter 24 of Bourgeois Equality, The University of Chicago Press.
By Ellen Clardy, PhD on .
Exported from Medium on December 15, 2022.
