A Discussion of Bourgeois Equality Chapter 44 “The Rhetorical Change was Necessary, and May be Sufficient
Dr. McCloskey is wrapping up Part VI of her book with this chapter focusing on the importance of the shift in rhetoric and playing with the concepts of necessary and sufficient.
If the shift in rhetoric towards bourgeois liberty was only necessary for the Great Enrichment to occur, the fact the rhetorical shift happened does not guarantee the Great Enrichment would begin.
But if it was sufficient, then the rhetorical shift guarantees the Great Enrichment would happen.
She acknowledges sufficiency is “harder to demonstrate” so really it serves more as an assertion of hers. (p. 418) But whether it is necessity or sufficiency, seeing a shift in the rhetoric towards favoring bourgeois values and activities did precede and support the Great Enrichment.
Likewise, she observes that antibourgeois rhetoric has been seen in different times and places and resulted in the opposite of a Great Enrichment.
…the claim is that an antibourgeois rhetoric, especially if combined with the logic of vested interests, has on many occasions damaged societies. Rhetoric against a bourgeois liberty, especially when backed by governmental violence, prevented betterment in Silver Age Rome and Tokugawa, Japan. It stopped growth in twentieth-century Argentina and Mao’s China. It suppressed speech in present-day North Korea and Saudi Arabia. (p. 417)
In later chapters, she will delve further into modern-day forces that are a threat to the Great Enrichment continuing because of their antibourgeois nature. But for now, she alludes to that threat.
Nationalism and socialism can to this day reverse the riches of modernity, with the help of other rhetorics such as populism or environmentalism or religious fundamentalism. (p. 418)
Why did rhetoric matter?
In many ways, this is the point of her book. It is a change in ideas which are reflected in the rhetoric that is the true source of the Great Enrichment
Sure, there were changes in culture and religion and lucky happenstances that reduced or challenged political power for a time here and there.
But ultimately it is the idea that the common man should be granted the liberty and dignity to pursue his ideas and business ventures that allowed the Great Enrichment to take root.
It is the “quasi-free habits” in 1700s Holland and Scotland that made them open to these new ideas.
By the early eighteenth century certain political ideas that a century before would have given their speaker an appointment with a Rhineland witch-burner or an English drawer-and-quarterer circulated reasonably freely in in the North Sea lands…(p. 420)
Free sharing of ideas then is not just an issue of individual freedom as enshrined in the US Constitution’s first amendment.
It underlies the functioning of our economic system. A culture of fear and conformity will shut down the trade-tested system of betterment even if political control was all that was intended.
Honest invention and hopeful revolutions came to be spoken of as honorable, as they had seldom been spoken of before. And the seven principle virtues of pagan and Christian Europe were recycled as bourgeois. (p. 423)
To put it bluntly, ideas matter. If we disparage the idea that the common man should be granted liberty and dignity, then we lose the trade-tested system of betterment that has brought immense wealth to so many on the planet.
Reference: McCloskey, Deirdre Nansen, 2016. “The Rhetorical Change was Necessary, and Maybe Sufficient,” Chapter 44 of Bourgeois Equality, The University of Chicago Press.
