This is not to say that Weber’s “ideal type” of capitalist could be found only among Calvinists and their later sectarian avatars. People of all faiths and no faith can grow up to be rational, diligent, orderly, productive, clean, and humorless. Nor do they have to be businessmen. One can show and profit by these qualities in all walks of life. Weber’s argument, as I see it, is that in that place and time (northern Europe, sixteenth to eighteenth centuries), religion encouraged the appearance in numbers of a personality type that had been exceptional and adventitious before; and that this type created a new economy (a new mode of production) that we know as (industrial) capitalism.
Add to this the growing need for fixed capital (equipment and plant) in the industrial sector. This made continuity crucial—for the sake of continued maintenance and improvement and the accumulation of knowledge and experience. These manufacturing enterprises were very different in this regard from mercantile ones, which often took the form of ad hoc mobilizations of capital and labor, brought together for a voyage or venture and subsequently dissolved. (Recall that the English East India Company operated in this way in the early years, although there too it was soon apparent that a continuing mobilization would be necessary.)
For these requirements of a new kind of economy, the Weberian entrepreneur was specially suited by temperament and habit; and here the Tawney emphasis on the link between self-respect and continuity is especially pertinent. It is no coincidence that the French crown, always ready and willing to honor socially ambitious bourgeois (typically men of law) with patents of nobility—for a price, of course—began in the seventeenth century to permit noblemen to engage in wholesale (as opposed to retail) trade; and in the eighteenth century to impose on aspirants from industry a condition of continuity. The newly ennobled négotiant or fabricant was required to remain “in trade”—a condition that would once have been perceived as inherently déshonorante, incompatible with such exalted status.21 The problem, as a good Calvinist would have seen it, was that honors and pretensions ill became men of the countinghouse and fabrique. They worked better and harder dressed in dark woolen cloth, without silk, lace, and wig.
However important this proliferation of a new business breed, it was only one aspect of shifting economic power and wealth from South to North. Not only money moved, but knowledge as well; and it was knowledge, specifically scientific knowledge, that dictated economic possibilities. In the centuries before the Reformation, southern Europe was a center of learning and intellectual inquiry: Spain and Portugal, because they were on the frontier of Christian and Islamic civilization and had the benefit of Jewish intermediaries; and Italy, which had its own contacts. Spain and Portugal lost out early, because religious passion and military crusade drove away the outsiders (Jews and then the conversos) and discouraged the pursuit of the strange and potentially heretical; but Italy continued to produce some of Europe’s leading mathematicians and scientists. It was not an accident that the first learned society (the Accadémia dei Lincei, Rome, 1603) was founded there.*
The Protestant Reformation, however, changed the rules. It gave a big boost to literacy, spawned dissents and heresies, and promoted the skepticism and refusal of authority that is at the heart of the scientific endeavor. The Catholic countries, instead of meeting the challenge, responded by closure and censure. The reaction in the Habsburg dominions, which included the Low Countries, followed hard on the heels of Luther’s denunciation. The presence there of Marrano refugees, feared and hated as enemies of the true Church and accused of deliberately propagating the new doctrines, aggravated the hysteria.
A rain of interdictions followed (from 1521 on), not only of publishing but of reading heresy, in any language. The Spanish authorities, both lay and clerical, viewed Lutherans (all Protestants were then seen as Lutherans), not as dissenters, but as non-Christians, like Jews and Muslims enemies of the faith.22 Any thoughts of ending the Inquisition were shelved, and Church and civil authorities joined to control thought, knowledge, and belief. In 1558, the death penalty was introduced for importing foreign books without permission and for unlicensed printing. Universities reduced to centers of indoctrination; unorthodox and dangerous books were placed on an Index Librorum Prohibitorum (1557 in Rome, 1559 in Spain), and safe books appeared with an official imprimatur (“let it be printed”). Among the books on the Spanish list: scientific works banned because their authors were Protestant. Despite smuggling, hazardous to the health, the diffusion of new ideas to society at large slowed to a trickle. (Recall the book review and purge at the beginning ofDon Quixote. The point is not only the role of whim, but the absurd reasons—the trivia that brought risk in a fantasy-ridden, knowledge-starved society.)
Nor were Spaniards allowed to study abroad, lest they ingest subversive doctrine. That same year (1559), the crown forbade attendance at foreign universities except for such safe centers as Rome, Bologna, and Naples. The effect was drastic. Spanish students had long gone to the University of Montpellier for medical training; they just about stopped going—248 students from 1510 to 1559; 12 from 1560 to 1599.23 (One wonders about those dozen mavericks.) Subversive scientists were silenced and forced to denounce themselves. Regimes that exercise thought control and enforce orthodoxy are never satisfied with prohibitions and punishments. The guilty must confess and repent—both for their own and for others’ salvation.
Persecution led to an interminable “witch hunt,” complete with paid snitches, prying neighbors, and a racist blood mania (limpieza de sangre). Judaizing conversos were caught by telltale vestiges of Mosaic practice: refusal of pork, fresh linen on Friday, an overheard prayer, irregular church attendance, a misplaced word. Cleanliness especially was cause for suspicion, and bathing was seen as evidence of apostasy, for Marranos and Moriscos alike. “The phrase ‘the accused was known to take baths…’ is a common one in the records of the Inquisition.”24 Inherited dirt: clean people don’t have to wash. In all this, the Spanish and Portuguese demeaned and diminished themselves. Intolerance can harm the persecutor more than the victim.
So Iberia and indeed Mediterranean Europe as a whole missed the train of the so-called scientific revolution. In the 1680s Juan de Cabriada, a Valencian physician, was conducting a running war with doctors in Madrid, trying vainly to persuade them to accept Harvey’s discovery of the circulation of the blood in the face of antique Galenist tradition. What, he asked, was wrong with Spain? It is “as if we were Indians, always the last” to learn of new knowledge.25
The British historian Hugh Trevor-Roper has argued that this reactionary, anti-Protestant backlash, more than Protestantism itself, sealed the fate of southern Europe for the next three hundred years.26 Such retreat was neither predestined nor required by doctrine. But this path once taken, the Church, repository and guardian of truth, found it hard to admit error and change course. How hard? One hears nowadays that Rome has finally, almost, rehabilitated Galileo after almost four hundred years. That’s how hard.
The Condemnation of Galileo
Galileo Galilei was not a saint, but he was a genius and a treasure—for Florence, Italy, Europe, and the world. He was a pioneer of experimental science, a keen observer (as befit a member of the Academy of Lynxes), a sharp thinker, and a powerful polemicist and debater. Yet in 1633 he was condemned by the Roman Church for contumacy and heresy: “The opinion that the Sun is at the center of the world and immobile is absurd, false in philosophy, and formally heretical, because it is expressly contrary to Holy Scripture.”
(Galileo was not the first; or the last. Equally momentous, if less remembered, was the burning in Rome in February 1600 of Giordano Bruno, ex-Dominican, a philosopher whose imaginary concept of the universe came far closer to what we now think than that of Copernicus or Galileo: infinite space, billions of burning stars, rotating earth revolving around the sun, matter composed of atoms, and so on. All heresies, linked to mysteries and magic. In effect, by burning Bruno, the Church proclaimed its intention of taking science and
imagination in hand and leashing them to Rome.27 But while Galileo worked and spoke, freedom still had room.)
That was the sentence. The confession of error by Galileo was some fourteen times as long. The point was not to pronounce dogma, but to denounce heresy and to display for all, in great detail, the admission of the sinner, his recognition and acceptance of the authority of the Holy Church, and his sincere promise of repentance. Never again. That is the nature of thought control in infallible systems: these aim not so much to convict as to convince—both the guilty one and all other members of the system.
Why the Church chose to make an issue of geocentrism remains a puzzle. Nothing in holy scripture seems to require such belief. To be sure, the Bible does use images of the sun crossing the sky or stopping in its course, but it is not hard to treat those as expressions, sometimes metaphorical, of what the eye on earth perceives. The Roman Curia could have ignored the matter without rending the tissue of faith and obedience. Yet any church is tempted to rest its authority on doctrine and dogma, for these are the sign and instrument of rule, especially in troublous times.
Meanwhile Galileo, for reasons as much of temperament as of intellectual integrity, enjoyed doing battle. A redoubtable debater, he would not suffer fools and found them aplenty in clerical circles. This was a dangerous game in a Roman world of virtually unlimited authority, intrigue and ambition, slander and treachery. Byzantium on the Tiber: nothing in Rome made contenders happier than the early demise of the Holy Father, for every change of pope entailed a reshuffling of power and place. Here today, gone tomorrow; friend now, foe later. Galileo could count on no one.
Even worse, perhaps, Galileo’s response to hints and warnings of disapproval was to “go public”—to publish in Italian rather than in Latin—and thereby go over the head of the insiders and appeal to a larger audience. In effect he was popularizing (vulgarizing) heresy, and that was intolerable.*
So Galileo confessed; and although he is said to have made one last, stubborn demurrer (“Eppure si muove” [Say what you will, it moves]), he went into a stultifying house arrest that ended his career as an effective, innovating scientist. And that was a catastrophic loss to Italian science, which, so long as the great man worked and thrived, had stood up to the growing constraint implicit in the Counter-Reformation.
And what about science in other lands? In the Protestant countries, the condemnation meant little. If anything, it confirmed these rebels against Church authority in their scorn for the superstitions of Rome. Father Gassendi, professor at Aix-en-Provence and excellent observer of astronomical phenomena, went to Holland in 1632 and wrote back to a French colleague about attitudes toward the Copernican paradigm: “All those people there are for it.”28 That may have been an exaggeration, but it captures the contrast with what he had known at home. Holland, England, and the Protestant countries in general were a different state of mind.
In France, the savants swung between sense and sensibility, integrity and obedience. The same Gassendi, writing to Galileo, pleaded with him to make peace with Rome and his conscience—and both at the same time: “I am in the greatest anxiety about the fate that awaits you, O you, the great glory of the century! If the Holy See has decided something against your opinion, bear with it as suits a wise man. Let it suffice you to live with the conviction that you have sought only the truth.”29
Only the truth. But what was truth? Within the knowledge available at that time, Copernicus alone left much to be desired. The Copernican-Keplerian paradigm fitted the observations better, but did that prove that the earth went around the sun? Better and safer to stick to experiment and not ask why. Here lay a way of continuing observation while denying consequences, and this evasion found a welcome with some of the leading French scientists of the day.* Thus Mersenne, prime communicator among European savants, wrote in 1634 that everything anyone had said about the movement of the earth did not prove the point; and he dropped plans to do a book on heliocentrism. Gassendi, the same. Descartes, the same. The great Descartes came up with his own twist: the heavenly bodies were not governed in their movements by some kind of pull, an invisible, magical attraction, but by whirling pools of force that bore them along. Attraction smacked of superstition, whereas whirlpools were somehow scientific. In the event, said Descartes, the earth was carried in its field of force like a passenger on a boat. The boat moved, but the passenger did not. So the earth did not move. Q.E.D.
Even with such cleverness, Descartes found it hard to live in a France of Jesuitical subtleties. He moved to Holland and left no forwarding address, except with Mersenne. Meanwhile the French slowly, reluctantly, came around to his cosmology, and once there, clung to the Cartesian system by way of refusing Newtonian theories of motion and gravity. Better push than pull. For Newton was English, and the French, then as now, found it hard to learn from others (nous n’avons pas de leçons à recevoir…), especially from their traditional enemy of Agincourt and Crécy. An outrageous instance of this intellectual chauvinism came in the 1980s, when French health authorities insisted on distributing contaminated blood rather than purchase American tests and decontaminating equipment. (The United States has replaced Britain as the Gallic bête noire, the worse for having helped in two world wars.) French authorities thereby condemned hundreds, maybe thousands, to AIDS and death.
When the French finally did reconcile themselves to Newtonian mathematics and physics, they did very well. They had talent and genius in abundance. But they lost several generations to pride.
The Tenacity of Intolerance and Prejudice30
Fifteenth-century Sicily had the misfortune to owe allegiance to the crown of Castile; so when Ferdinand and Isabella in 1492 ordered the expulsion or conversion of the Jews of Spain, Sicily had to go along. Not that the island lacked anti-Jewish sentiment, as a number of earlier pogroms showed. But Jews had lived there for centuries and played a disproportionate role in Sicily’s trade, to say nothing of their place as doctors and apothecaries. The Sicilian viceroy dithered, reluctant to issue the fateful decree; but a series of orders prepared the way by prohibiting Jews from selling their assets, compelling them to pay all debts outstanding, and—most ominous—barring them from bearing arms.
One need not go into detail. The Jews of the island won a short delay; they were also granted benevolent permission to take with them the clothes on their back, a mattress, a wool or serge blanket, a pair of sheets, and some small change, plus some food for the way. We are told that many Sicilians were sorry to see them go. With reason. What was left of trade shrank almost to nothing; houses and even neighborhoods were left desolate; and we must assume that some people had the decency to feel ashamed.
Much later, toward the end of the seventeenth century, some Sicilians urged the king to do something to promote trade. Charles II granted Messina the privilege of a free port and gave Jews the right to trade there—on condition that they sleep outside the city and wear a distinctive sign on their clothing. Such ambiguous hospitality did not encourage Jews to come, so in 1728 the Jews were granted the right to trade anywhere on the island, to reside in Messina, to have a synagogue and cemetery, to own and dispose of property. Even this did not help, so in 1740 the king explicitly invited the Jews to return. A number of families accepted, but found themselves mistreated by a prejudiced populace. Then it happened that the queen had not succeeded in bearing a male heir to the throne, and the royal couple were persuaded by clerics that they would not have a son so long as they allowed the Jews to stay. So, after seven years, another expulsion.
Intolerance, superstition, ignorance—these are easier to acquire and cultivate than to uproot. The same iniquities and vices, perpetrated long ago by foreign (Spanish) rulers, have contributed to this day to Sicily’s persistent backwardness.
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The Nature of Industrial Revolution
In the eighteenth century, a series of inventions transformed the British cotton manufacture and gave birth to a new mode of production—the factor
y system.* At the same time, other branches of industry made comparable and often related advances, and all of these together, mutually reinforcing, drove further gains on an ever-widening front. The abundance and variety of these innovations almost defy compilation, but they fall under three principles: (1) the substitution of machines—rapid, regular, precise, tireless—for human skill and effort; (2) the substitution of inanimate for animate sources of power, in particular, the invention of engines for converting heat into work, thereby opening an almost unlimited supply of energy; and (3) the use of new and far more abundant raw materials, in particular, the substitution of mineral, and eventually artificial, materials for vegetable or animal substances.
These substitutions made the Industrial Revolution. They yielded a rapid rise in productivity and, with it, in income per head. This growth, moreover, was self-sustaining. In ages past, better living standards had always been followed by a rise in population that eventually consumed the gains. Now, for the first time in history, both the economy and knowledge were growing fast enough to generate a continuing flow of improvements. Gone, Malthus’s positive checks and the stagnationist predictions of the “dismal science” instead, one had an age of promise and great expectations. The Industrial Revolution also transformed the balance of political power—within nations, between nations, and between civilizations; revolutionized the social order; and as much changed ways of thinking as ways of doing.
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