Genius Unbound: Capitalism, Culture, and the Dialectic

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Genius Unbound: Capitalism, Culture, and the Dialectic

Carl Mosk *

December, 2020

Professor Emeritus, University of Victoria, Department of Economics [email protected] www.carlmosk.com

This is a draft for a book. If you have comments or criticisms of this manuscript please send them to me at the e-mail address given above. Please do not quote or cite without the consent of the author.

Abstract

Why have the cultural wars become so divisive? Why are science, religion, and even the fine arts becoming so politicized? Why are dialectic swings in approaches to political economy becoming so dramatic - exemplified by dramatic swings between internationalism and xenophobic nationalism - occurring? Why is national consensus, civil unity, so hard to achieve?

This book argues that the answer lies in the growing complexity of societies globally. On the one hand this growing complexity has husbanded a golden era in which the standard of living is improving throughout most of the world; on the other hand it has laid the groundwork for the total destruction of the human race. At the heart of the problem is the tension, the often bitter conflict, between the two forces unleashing modern complexity and its global outreach: creativity enhanced by and impeded by efforts to instill cooperation facing the turmoil creativity has wrought. That reliance on competitive markets, a hallmark of mainstream economics, may offer a panacea is an unfortunate delusion based on a failure to take into account the law of unintended consequences particularly those undergirding ideology and power. Using examples from European history – emphasizing disputes in philosophy, science, art, politics, and political economy – this book offers a framework for understanding conflict in the modern world. There is no shelter from the storm, here, there, or everywhere.

Table of Contents

Part I: Cooperation, Creativity, Complexity, and Conflict

Chapter I Prophets, Geniuses, and the Law of Unintended Consequences

Footprints on the Sands of Historical Time: Complexity and Spread

Is Humanity Bounding along the Golden Road of Perpetual Progress?

Or is Humanity Rushing along the Dreaded Road to Apocalypse?

Exit and the Law of Unintended Consequences

Espousing Unifying Virtue: Ideologies Religious and Materialist Confront the Law of Unintended Consequences

Why Corruption and Conflict Undermine Unifying Ideologies: Unchanging Human Nature

Prophets as Disruptive Visionaries and Purifiers

Geniuses as Inspired Innovators

Prelude to the Enlightenment: Genius in the Dutch Golden Age

The Enduring Appeal of Unifying Transcendental Beliefs and the Unending Struggle between Religious Doctrines and Enlightenment Age Doctrines

Chapter 2 Genius and the Dialectic: Why Conflict Accompanies Innovation The More Intense the Dialectic, the More Vigorous is Change Genius Thrives When the Exit Option is the Most Attractive: Europe Between 1450 and 1650

Genius Thrives When the Exit Option is the Most Attractive: Japan Between 1850 and 1920

Genius Thrives When the Exit Option is the Most Attractive: Russia Between 1910 and 1950

Geniuses Vie with One Another Enhancing the Dialectic

Market Equilibrium is Not Compatible with Rapid Economic Growth

Plan for Part II of the Book

Part II: Conflict, Capitalism, and Culture in the West

Chapter 3 Conflict, Commerce, and Culture in Medieval Europe

Conflict and Competitive Cooperation

Military Diversion Shapes Core and Periphery on the Eurasian Land Mass, 300 CE – 1300 CE

Eurasian Technological Diffusion is a Cup Half-Full/Half-Empty

The Three Faces of European Medievalism: Militarism, Christianity, and Manorial Economy

European Battles and Sieges, 400 – 1500 CE

Commercial Cities and Sieges, 1000 – 1500 CE

Limits to Growth? State Formation, Urbanization, and Social Leveling in the High and Late Medieval Period Open Feudalism versus Closed Feudalism: Medieval Europe in the Japanese Mirror A Tale of Two Parallel Hierarchies

Icons and Plainchant

Paris and Rome: The International Gothic Movement

Scholasticism versus Alchemy

Giotto and His Workshop

Entertainment and Symbolism in Music: Gregorian Plainchant

Chapter 4 Capitalism at War with Itself

Capitalisms: It is the Ideologies that Matter, not the Ownership of Capital

A Crucial Dichotomy: Merchant Capitalism versus Technological Capitalism

The Cult of Capitalist Genius during the Renaissance: Medici and Fugger

Fragmented Capitalism versus Concentrated Capitalism: Mercantilism and the Industrial Revolution

American Capitalism Confronts Miracle Growth Japanese Capitalism: Was the Opponent Industrial Policy or Unfettered Capitalist Genius?

Chapter 5 States Embracing or Rejecting the Ideology of Unity A Kind of Unity: Decentralized Soft Power, Centralized Military Power Great Britain Embraces the Pendulum Swing

Elusive Unity Roils the French Revolution

Soviet Union Communism: Unity through Terror

Chapter 6 Two Poles of Artistic Genius: Progressive Renaissance versus Gothic

Artistic Geniuses and Renaissance Capitalism The Gothic in the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Century Lowlands

The Progressive Renaissance in Fourteenth Century Italy and Southern Germany

The British Gothic: From Romanticism to Arts and Crafts

The Progressive Renaissance in Nineteenth Century France: Photography and Impressionism

Post-Impressionism in France: The Swing toward the Gothic

The Gothic Triumph in Habsburg Vienna

Chapter 7 Scientific Struggles

Light versus Sound: Waves versus Particles

Mechanics versus Fields

Evasive Unity: The Early Phase of Relativity Theory and Quantum Mechanics

Chapter 8 Elusive Unity, Perpetual Conflict: Tragedy or Comedy?

Appendix Economics: A Critical Note

Market Equilibrium and Optimizing Behavior are Not Useful Concepts for Analyzing Dynamic Change in an Economy

Dialectic Movement Not Movement Lurching from Equilibrium to Equilibrium along Steady Growth Paths

Conflicted Decision Making Trumps Utilitarian Theory

Power, Hard and Soft Should Play a Prominent Role in Political Economy

Ideology Tempers Economic Growth

Growth Accounting is a Proper Mechanism for Capturing Quantitative Aspects of Long-run Economic Change

Appendix Tables

Tables

1.1 Energy, Knowledge, Settlement, and Organized Violence: Social Development in the Western and Eastern Cores (Morris Estimates)

1.2 Population, Income per Capita, Life Expectancy, and the Human Development Index Estimated Over the Long-run

1.3 Concert Halls and Opera Houses for Regions of the World and Selected Countries, Constructed Before and After 1800, by Period

1.4 Symphony Orchestras, Opera Companies, and Ballet Companies for Regions of the World and Selected Countries, Before and After 1800, by Period

1.5 Art Museums for Regions of the World and Selected Countries, Constructed Before and After 1800, by Period

1.6 Recorded Histories Worst Human Devised Disasters: The Top Twenty Adjusted for Population Size by Calibrating the Estimates as if They Occurred in 1950

2.1 The United States and the Soviet Union Compared: Population, Gross Domestic Product, and Gross Domestic Product per Capita, 1820 - 2003

3.1 Three Waves of Peripheral Population Penetrations Remake the Great Core Regions of Eurasia, 300-1300 CE 3.2 Battles and Sieges in the Western Medieval Period Organized by Region and by Period, 378 to 1499 CE 3.3 Population and Per Capita Income in Sub-Regions of Western European Core and Periphery: Circa 14 CE, Circa 1000 CE, Circa 1500 CE, and Circa 1600 CE 3.4 Commercial Cities and Towns Subject to Siege between 1000 CE and 1300 CE, and Estimates of Urbanization for Regions of Western Europe, Circa 1300 and 1500 CE 3.5 Key Features of Closed and Open Feudalism: Japan 1600-1868 and Western Europe 1000-1300

5.1 Palaces and Castles, Constructed Before and After 1500, for Regions of the World and Selected Countries A.1 Improvements and Innovations: Mechanical Instruments and Chemical Processes Used in Science, the Visual Arts, and Music, 1400 - 1900 A.2 Estimates of Major City Populations for Europe and Russia, 1400 – 1900 (Figures in 1.000s)

Part I Cooperation, Creativity, Complexity, and Conflict

Chapter I Prophets, Geniuses, and the Law of Unintended Consequences

Summary of the chapter: Long run social evolution – growing complexity spreading globally - is driven by a dialectic struggle between forces promoting cooperation and those disruptive forces encouraging innovation. Conflict is unavoidable because human nature undermines unifying regimes based upon prophetic ideologies espousing virtue; conflict is unavoidable because reliance on markets as unifiers is undercut by conflicts over their legal and moral regulation; conflict is unavoidable because geniuses as the principal drivers of innovation vie with one another. While prophets and geniuses are radically different, they share one common feature: they defy the law of unintended consequences that render most people risk averse.

Footprints on the Sands of Historical Time: Complexity and Spread

“And there is nothing new under the sun. Is there a thing whereof it is said: See, this is new? It hath already been in the ages which were before us.” With this bold statement the author – or rather conclave of authors and rewriters – of Ecclesiastes advanced a dictum that inevitably invites debate and dissent. Does this assertion fly in the face of common sense?

Consider hunting and gathering peoples. Anthropology and archeology tells us enough about foraging populations convincing even the most casual consumer of the literature a

7 truism: mobile tribes slaughtering wild animals and gathering fruits and vegetables operate with a complex worldview. They speak a language bristling with colloquialisms, symbolic allusions, and innuendoes. Not only do they communicate with each other through a combination of body language and speech, they possess a body of knowledge passed down from one generation to the next. Their lists of names for the flora and fauna are remarkably detailed, putting literate peoples to shame. More to the point they possess a rudimentary encyclopedia, a compendium of teachings stretching far back in the past. Call them shamans, wise patriarchs, witch doctors. Elites exist within their ranks who possess and disseminate eternal truths. Truths about rudimentary physics (exerting teamwork generating force sufficient to move heavy boulders, preventing fires from destroying their ecosystems); truths of chemistry (how to cook, how to use plants for salves) and medicine (surgeries for extracting toxic materials from injured parties). Individually and collectivity, they are a depository of information, teaching strategies for carrying on warfare against invading enemy tribes, planning the selection of terrain and the layout of future settlements however temporary, directing the construction of tools fashioned from animal bones and stones. In sum so-called primitive peoples master the making of settlements, the rudiments of energy capture, the basics of information storage, and the capacity to carry on warfare.

Characterizing the peoples in these tribes – whether we are generalizing from archeological digs revealing the decayed garbage buried by tribes, or basing our accounts on reports from observers residing with Australian pigmies, or forest dwellers in the Amazon, or inhabitants of remote mountains in Vietnam or northeastern India – we tend to describe their lifestyles as similar to ours in some very basic ways, yet at the same time profoundly differing

8 from ours. Why? Simply because their complexity, rich as it is, is demonstrably overshadowed by the levels of complexity with which we moderns are accustomed. What leads us to this conclusion?

Consider transportation. The typical member of a forager community moves by foot, or whenever possible by harnessing the energy flowing along rivers or across beaches stretching along the ocean side. Before humans domesticated plants and animals, initiating the process known as the Neolithic Revolution, the menu of options was decidedly short. By the twentieth century the proliferation of means for moving peoples and goods had grown by leaps and bounds. Horses and carriages, sailing fleets, bicycles, automobiles, buses, trucks, airplanes propeller and jet engine driven, steamships, nuclear power driven submarines: the list goes on and on. Today we are accustomed to driving gasoline or electric powered vehicles along paved roads, taking rapid transit light rail to airports, crossing turbulent seas in massive ocean liners and cruise ships guided and positioned by satellites hovering far above. Greater speed; greater pulling power and cargo carrying capacity; more applications, including those devoted to the burgeoning explosion of tourism. Admittedly foragers were not adverse to tourism, seeking out vantages where they could enjoy glorious sunsets, provided they were prepared to fend off tigers, lions, boa constrictors, and alligators.

Again consider war making. Beginning with rocks and bows and arrows, humanity moved on to harnessing horses for chariot warfare and the advent of the fully armored

Medieval Era knight experienced in jousting and slashing enemies with forty pound swords.

With the advent of gun powder infantry marshalling cannons and flintlock muskets began to displace the mighty cavalry that dominated European warfare during the High Middle Ages,

9 only to be displaced by breach loading rifles and the predecessors to the machine gun and the automatic rifle. Dreadnoughts plying the oceans, submarines, tanks, ushered in the carnage of

World War I, only to give way to long-range bombers and thermonuclear warfare.

Energy capture has likewise been revolutionized. Through the Bronze and Iron Ages dramatic changes occurred in the use of fire for metalworking and the manufacture of tools and weapons. Even when humanity was largely operating in an organic economy – eschewing reliance on fossil fuels like coal and petroleum stored under the earth’s surface that was unleashed during the first and second Industrial Revolutions of the post-1750 era – advances were plentiful in the harnessing of wind (for sailing and grinding grain), water (shipping logs along rivers), and fire (alchemy, primitive chemistry, flourished in workshops exploiting natural sources of heat). We put to shame with our mechanical devices and our knowledge of chemistry and physics what foraging tribes were and are able to achieve with fire. Admittedly technologies exploiting campfires – heating pots filled with meat and vegetables, refining metals, fashioning arrow heads, clearing forests through controlled slash and burning expeditions, transmitting signals through the atmosphere, casting shadows onto tree trunks and dense undergrowth – are powerful. How can you reasonably compare them to basic oxygen blast furnaces, nuclear powered submarines, movie picture theaters, massive cargo planes, and digitally controlled robots?

Today we communicate electronically; we read books and newspapers printed for mass markets; we use computers to talk to one another, interacting with one another on Skype.

Most of the world is literate. Elites are no longer the sole repositories of civilization. A growing slice of the world’s populace use more than one written language. For example Mandarin

10 readers used to communicating with pictogram based writing script are still able to handle texts printed in alphabetic European languages. Libraries stuffed with traditional literary material compete with online encyclopedias like Wikipedia. What a difference from the storehouses of knowledge limited to a small coterie of elders dominating hunting and gathering societies!

Settlement is no longer restricted to the temporary abodes of migratory hunters and gathers. Today we are likely as not to reside in massive cities: Tokyo, Beijing, Shanghai, London,

Paris, Berlin, Toronto, New York, Chicago, Houston, Tehran, Moscow, and Beirut are only the tip of a sprawling network consisting of global cities linked together by fiber optic cable, airplane traffic, and migratory flows.

To simplify we can say it is difficult to dispute the conclusion that there are many things new under the sun. Is this undisputable? In one sense one cannot help giving a resounding

“yes”. In another sense “no”: I shall argue once we have taken human nature into account the answer is not so obvious. In any event as a starting point, let us commence our enquiry with the assumption that there are indeed new things under the sun. How shall we describe the apparent novelty? We can say it as the growing complexity of human existence, modern lives being enriched by a vast and expanding cornucopia of activities, options, and concepts alive with diversity, complex as opposed to the relative simplicity of a foraging lifestyle. Describe it as the accumulated social and economic change ultimately stemming from the Neolithic and

Industrial Revolutions. It is a primary task of social science – sociology, economics, anthropology, geography, and political science – to measure quantitatively the change that has taken place; explain it, accounting for why it has taken place; and explore its lasting consequences.

I want to emphasize this is only a starting point. Whether the change that has taken place is fundamental or simply banal and superficial, is a philosophical conundrum to which regrettably there are no convincing answers. Was the typical hunter and gatherer happier than a person worried about how to make ends meet week to week in an unstable labor market; than an individual circulating around anonymously in a crowded densely populated metropolis never encountering an acquaintance; than a department store shopper strapped for cash tormented by a myriad of tempting tantalizing choices that are sadly unattainable? Those who say “no” must defend themselves against the assertion that the noble savage of bygone days – or a contemporary member of a miniscule tribal settlement residing in a remote local in the sprawling Amazon rainforest - enjoyed more control over his or her destiny than the city dweller of today. More to the point is happiness itself a meaningful concept that can be quantified and subjected to systematic analysis? Is it not highly subjective?

The trick is to reduce complexity to simple concepts that can be easily grasped. Working in the tradition pioneered by Herbert Spencer in the nineteenth century – his Principles of

Sociology advanced the notion that social evolution proceeded from the simple to the complex through a process of differentiation – Ian Morris (2010, 2013) developed four quantitative measures of social development: energy capture; social organization; war making capacity; and information technology. The logic behind focusing on these four measures is compelling: they are relevant; they are independent of culture; they are independent of one another; and by marrying literary evidence to the findings of archeology they can be estimated as far back as

2,000 BCE.

By energy capture Morris means a broad range of activities: preparing and consuming food that unleash calories, protein, and vitamins for physical work; harnessing fuels, notably fire, for cooking and manufacture of tools; and securing raw materials – wool for the textile industry, flax for fashioning linen, copper for bronze fabricators, iron ore and charcoal for smelting, silver, gold for adorning altarpieces, lead for roofing, clay for brickmaking – from which energy is extracted. Adjusting to what one can secure from nature’s bounty, surpassing the nutritional requirements for basal metabolism depends on human ingenuity and the constraints imposed by the environment, specifically climate. The consensus among scientists is that settled agriculture commenced sometime around the end of the last major ice age.

According to the theory of Milankovitch cycles there have been five major oscillations between greenhouse periods when there is no ice at the highest altitudes and glacial eras when ice covered much of the soil and rock that was not under the oceans. These lengthy cycles driven by positive and negative feedback forces – estimates suggest a range between 40 thousand and

100 thousand years per cycle – apparently were interrupted by the Neolithic Revolutions occurring on the Eurasian land mass and the Americas. By “interrupted” what is meant is that a natural process of warming – Morris suggests this began around 12,700 BCE – was extended by the domestication of wild animals and plants that occurred in a variety of zones that were initiated in earnest around 10,000 BCE.

Once humans began systematically denuding plains and mountains of forests, carving out canals for redirecting water flows, damming up lakes, reclaiming land from marshes, climate ceased to be purely exogenous. Greenhouse gases unleashed by farming, the destruction of carbon sinking forests, gradually reshaped the dynamics of climate. From a time

13 when oscillation between glaciation and greenhouse epochs shaped atmospheric temperatures depending upon the salt content of the oceans, solar activity, and volcanic eruptions a so-called

Anthropocene era was inaugurated, human activity increasing shaping climate and its local derivative weather. The idea is that wholesale glaciation might never happen again – today we live in a interglacial era, ice covering the north and south poles that could end due to the pumping of nitrous oxides, methane, and carbon dioxide gases into the atmosphere – because humanity began warming up the atmosphere and the oceans in a significant way beginning with the Neolithic Revolution, a process accelerating around 1,000 years ago as population pressing up the amount of land devoted to arable cultivation converted more and more wild biomass into human dominated settlement, an acceleration dwarfed by that unleashed by the systematic exploiting of fossil fuels in the eighteenth century 1.

In contemplating this global process in which glaciation has been interrupted it is important to distinguish between weather that is local and climate 2. Within a climatic regime governed by currents in the ocean and overall atmospheric temperature weather can vary tremendously across the globe. Indeed one reason hunting and gathering peoples migrated across large swaths of territory prior to the Neolithic Revolution was to escape inclement conditions in their search for more benevolent environments. An interesting case of the difference between local weather and global climate is the Medieval Warming Period discussed by Rosen (2014). Rosen argues the convergence of a particular set of global oceanic conditions

– specifically the way what he calls the two great “conveyor belts” moving back and forth from the North Atlantic to the North Pacific, cold salty waters flowing below, less salty waters moving above – operated in conjunction with a so-called North Atlantic Oscillation laying the

14 groundwork for the Medieval Warming Period that produced four centuries of extremely warm weather in Europe. Global currents in the oceans interacted with the fact that a regime of relatively low pressure – hence relatively warm – prevailed around Iceland and a regime of relatively high pressure – hence relatively cold – dominated the Azores to produce a remarkably warm period in Europe between the late ninth and the late thirteenth centuries. It is estimated that temperatures during this era were approximately two degrees Celsius warmer than they are in contemporary Europe, their warmth unleashing a dramatic expansion of population and arable land under cultivation, particularly favoring Flanders and the Netherlands.

Given the window of increasing warming opened up around 10,000 BCE a number of sub-regions of the world’s largest landmasses – specifically Eurasian north of the Sahara – embracing settled agriculture. Morris focuses on two core zones that evolved out of the aboriginal Neolithic settlements: an Eastern core that spread out of a crescent carved out between the Yellow and Yangzi River basins in Northern China initially focusing on millet and rice cultivation; and a Western core that developed in the Fertile Crescent adjoining the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers stretching into the Jordan River, barley and wheat playing a crucial role.

Following the reasoning of Diamond (1997), Morris argues that these two zones were ideally situated to take advantage of the warming climate. Both were home to wild ancestors of easily domesticated animals, specifically pigs, sheep, goats, cows and oxen, horses, and dogs. From these two locales cultivation spread as civilizations built on the bones of slowly improving energy capture began to take shape. By civilization Morris means literacy and information technology, war making capacity, and social organization. The idea connecting this to energy capture simple: the carrying capacity of the earth soared as settled agriculture spread, more

15 and more people able to generate energy necessary for carrying on physical and intellectual tasks. With population expansion settlements grew in size, cities emerging. With more and more people interacting with another, trading in markets became common, people specializing in a myriad of crafts and occupations. Technological creativity was given a boost. Warriors mastered firing arrows from bows even when rushing into combat in horse drawn chariots.

Officials in rudimentary bureaucracies mastered writing and the tallying up of accounts with numbers.

Because the thrust of the account given by Morris is that culture – Christianity wedded to Greek and Roman practice versus Neo-Confucianism amalgamating Confucian doctrine,

Buddhism, and Daoism – does not matter in the long-run for social development, Morris devises a quantitative framework for refuting the theory that culture matters in the long-run.

He focuses on comparing social development scores for what he calls the Eastern and Western cores that developed out of North China in the east (spreading southward to Thailand and

Vietnam and Indonesia and eastward to Korea and Japan) and out of the Fertile Crescent in the west (Europe and North America). Geography and geography alone differentiates east from west, not belief systems. Sloth, fear, and greed are human universals. They apply to all peoples at all venues and at all time. They apply everywhere regardless of cultural norms.

Springing forth from fear is the war making agenda: leaders believe security is constantly under threat, malevolent enemies intentionally working to undermine it, allies who could turn into feckless enemies in the future being less than steadfast in their loyalties. The impetus to improve technology stems first and foremost from greed. Innovators seek material rewards. But sloth is not far behind in the short list of levers of riches. After all devising new

16 ways to tally up acreages under cultivation and shipments of goods from which taxes could be assessed – for instance by a system of numerical reckoning, the development of tables worked up on clay tablets or papyrus, ultimately ushering double entry bookkeeping and harnessing a system of “zeros and ones” as a vehicle for tabulating and transmitting payments in a computer dominated economy– ultimately saves on labor by eliminating the need to communicate orally.

In so far as the innate desire to eschew effort, sloth has always been a driver, it does underwrite automation as an avenue for bolstering productivity.

Having set this agenda Morris basically works backward through historical time in constructing his four measures of social development. He sets maximum values of 250 social development points for each of his four variables based on estimates for the year 2000 CE in either the eastern or western zones he focuses on. For instance maximum city size – his proxy for the complexity of social organization – takes on a value of 250 for the eastern zone, Tokyo being larger than any of the cities like London, New York, or Paris that are located in the western zone. For war making capacity he uses contemporary approximations including a rather complicated set of measures developed by military experts (for instance, Army Colonel

Nevitt Dupuy built up a Quantified Judgment Model from 73 separate components); for information technology he multiplies literacy estimates by a proxy set at a value of 2.5 for the most advanced from of electronic communication available in 2000 CE (with a literacy value of

100 % and a 2.5 technology variable the result is a score of 250). Each of the four social development variables taking on a potential maximum value of 250 in the year 2000 CE, the total score available by summing up the four measures is 1000. Having arrived at scores for the year 2000, the rest of the exercise is straightforward, at least in principle: work backward, for

17 instance dividing maximum city sizes reached in earlier epochs by the maximum city size achieved in the year 2000 CE.

For sure the results are crude, lacking elegance and grace. Much of the actual estimation is really informed guessing. Still the resulting scores do suggest an interesting story.

Figures appear in Table 1.1. One way to think about these numbers that are proxies for levels of complexity is to think about them in terms of the relative costs of achieving objections.

Concentrating individuals in great metropolitan centers reduces the costs of securing goods and services for the average consumer. Developing woodblock printing, later on movable type printing, subsequently electronic communication reduces the costs of communication among adults but also reduces the costs of teaching children how to read and write. Threatening to obliterate civilian populations residing in enemy territory falls dramatically with thermonuclear weapons, opening up avenues for consolidating security that do not necessarily require large armies. In short what Morris is getting at is a four-fold index of social efficiency that directly links up levels of social complexity to economics. Lowering costs is another way of conceptualizing the gains in efficiency.

Efficiency and cost are really mirror images of one another. What does the story highlighted by the Morris accounting scheme tell us? It tells us that given human nature there is a pervasive drive to harness new technologies, reducing costs and improving efficiency.

Resisting the efficiency gains made by others through technological innovation is a thankless task in the long haul. There are short run exceptions of course. Tokugawa Japan rulers banned the use of guns that Japanese armies had embraced wholesale in the sixteenth century. They did so in order to prevent civil wars from breaking out. But once forcibly opened up by the West

18 in the nineteenth century, Japanese military officers were keen to employ cannons, rifles, and explosives. In short spread occurs. Once the genie is released from the bottle it just cannot help from making mischief somewhere.

Table 1.1 Energy, Knowledge, Settlement, and Organized Violence: Social Development in the Western and Eastern Cores (Morris Estimates)

Benchmark Energy Capture Maximum City Information War Making Total Date Size Technology Capacity Western Core (Levels in Social Development Points) 2000 BCE 18.52 0.56 0.02 0.01 19.11 1 BCE/CE 33.78 9.36 0.04 0.12 43.30 1500 CE 29.42 3.75 0.05 0.13 33.35 1900 CE 100.25 61.8 3.19 5.00 170.09 2000 CE 250.00 156.70 250.00 250.00 906.37 Western Core (Multiplier between Estimates for the First and Second Benchmark Date) 2000 BCE – 1 1.8 11.7 2.0 12.1 2.27 BCE/CE 1 – 1500 CE 0.9 0.4 1.3 1.1 0.8 1500 – 1900 CE 3.4 16.5 63.8 38.5 5.1 1900 – 2000 CE 2.5 2.5 78.4 50.0 5.3 1500 – 2000 CE 8.5 41.8 5000.0 1923.0 27.2 Eastern Core (Levels in Social Development Points) 2000 BCE 11.99 0.10 0.0 0.0 12.09 1 BCE/CE 29.42 4.68 0.02 0.08 34.20 1500 CE 32.69 6.35 0.06 0.10 39.25 1900 CE 53.40 16.39 0.30 1.00 71.09 2000 CE 133.33 250.00 189.0 12.50 564.80 Eastern Core (Multiplier between Estimates for the First and Second Benchmark Date) 2000 BCE – 1 2.5 46.8 n.e. n.e. 2.8 BCE/CE 1 – 1500 CE 1.1 1.4 3.0 1.3 1.2 1500 – 1900 CE 1.6 2.6 5.0 10.0 1.8 1900 – 2000 CE 2.5 15.3 630.0 12.5 8.0 1500 – 2000 CE 4.1 39.4 3150.0 12.5 14.4

Notes: n.e. = not estimated.

Source: Mosk (2013): pp.6-7. For the original estimates see Morris (2010, 2013).

It is not difficult to come up with reasons for rejecting the quantitative framework advanced by Morris. A critic can question the specific values that Morris assigns to his development scores. This is surely unfair to his approach. What stands out in his numbers is a broad picture that is convincing. Complexity has deepened; and it has spread geographically. In particular both have skyrocketed in the recent past. Between the beginning of the Neolithic revolution and the forming of great empires – Chinese and Roman eventually trading with one another along the Silk Road change was slow. After that it picked up in the East sustaining its steady drive. However not in the West. The collapse of the Roman Empire sent the Western core spiraling downward for centuries. However, the West regained its forward momentum by

1000 CE, complexity skyrocketing in the last several centuries. Acceleration has taken place.

Two conclusions flow from these observations. One is that Morris’s argument about

Western culture not mattering is fallacious. It was the very grandeur of Western civilization that attracted hordes of Central Asian marauders – Goths, Vandals, Huns, Mongols – enticing them to raid, attempting and sometimes successfully penetrating the defenses put up by the Romans and their allied peoples. Regrouping from the devastation visited on it took centuries. After that the legacies that the West inherited from the ancient civilizations laid waste by invaders once again fueled change, complexity building on complexity.

The second conclusion is that there is no iron law to the forces underpinning change.

When we are speaking of the transition from hunting and gathering to settled agriculture we are speaking of a very gradual process in which trial and error experimentation undertaken by myriads of people was a driving force. Constraints mattered greatly – for instance the existence of wild ancestors for easily domesticated grains - wheat, sorghum, rice, flax – and the

20 availability of animals that can be readily made obedient to human direction – oxen, horses, pigs, sheep, goats, dogs – precisely because making great technological leaps was difficult for preliterate peoples.

There is no reason to think that this is an accurate model for explaining why change has taken place since the seventh or sixth century BCE however. The development of forms of communication and the concentration of some groups in relatively large conurbations within regions favored by the availability of domesticated plants and animals – Mesopotamia and the

Levant, the Mediterranean including Northern Africa and Southern Europe – engendered a new force driving change, namely individual genius. The key is availability of an economic surplus sufficient to permit geniuses operating in small groups to pursue their dreams, their flights of fancy, their wild inspirations. Writing and reading manuscripts on papyrus allowed these geniuses to communicate with one another. What projects interested them and the organizations within which they functioned depends on culture. In this sense culture matters: it matters because it channels geniuses in certain directions.

To recapitulate: the long-run picture of growth and spread in complexity presented by

Morris is compelling but his conclusions about the irrelevance of culture are misguided. Culture matters because culturally informed genius matters. This observation is central to the thesis of this book.

Is Humanity Bounding along the Golden Road of Perpetual Progress? The naïve tourist hankering after observing vestiges from the distant past in the developing countries of the world is in for a shock. The signs of modernity are everywhere.

Travel to Africa where estimates of per capita income suggest poverty is endemic you find pickup trucks, cell phones, computers gathering images from the worldwide web, coffee shops, bookstores, knockoffs of the latest Hollywood or Bollywood productions, hydraulic presses, paved roads banked to handle ten truck trucks. Of course not everyone in Mali, Uganda, Sierra

Leone, and Namibia consumes the full panoply of goods and services available. Still it is hard to escape the truism that signs of opulence can be found everywhere on the globe.

Per capita income is a problematic measure, sharing with the indices of civilization cobbled together by Morris the advantages and disadvantages of simplification. In theory national income – the gross domestic product GDP – measures the flow of goods and services generated in an economy calibrated in market prices. In societies where barter and self- sufficiency prevail – farmers raising their own cattle and planting their own fruits and vegetables, exchanging labor services with their fellow villagers, haggling over the amount of labor embodied in a horse or ox or elephant – the concept of market prices and standardized measures for foodstuffs is problematic at best. Even in complex highly industrialized societies estimating gross domestic product means ignoring goods and services generated by household members – baking your own bread, cleaning toilets and bathroom sinks, changing diapers on new born infants – tantamount to throwing away almost half of the production supposedly captured by GDP. Home production in a technologically sophisticated economy is the analogue to self-sufficient production in a poorer setting.

Moreover to come up with estimates of prices from sectors of an economy that serve as the base for aggregating up an entire economy one is putting into the same basket a highly diverse range of goods and services. Take transport vehicles. You have recreational vehicles,

22 sedans, gas guzzling luxury vehicles, miniscule smart cars, cars with television sets and computer aided navigation devices. All of these types are priced differently. Aggregating up to a single measure for price means coming up with a weighting scheme. As the weights necessarily change with time due to changes in the structure of demand for transport vehicles, arriving at a consistent set of prices for capturing change in production in the transport vehicle sector is a challenge. Even greater is the problem of coming up with a set of international prices acceptable for all countries in the world. The estimates appearing in Table 1.2 are in 1990

International dollars, which is polite way of saying that they have been so massaged over through chains of assumptions about aggregation that they are really nothing more than educated guesses. Still they have their uses if only because the professionals who work up the numbers come to the discussion with a rich menu of practical knowledge and intuition subjected to critical thinking about what matters and what does not really matter.

Accompanying the numbers are estimates of population, life expectancy, and literacy.

Scholars and policy makers dissatisfied with opulence as an summary of human flourishing work with a more comprehensive measure of well-being, namely the human development index (HDI) which uses as inputs income per capita, life expectancy, and literacy. The arithmetic schemes used to weight together these three disparate indices vary depending on the assumptions used but the bottom line apparent from using these varying estimates tells the same story: over the last several centuries human development has soared everywhere.

Table 1.2 Population, Income per Capita, Life Expectancy, and the Human Development Index Estimated Over the Long-run Panel A: Per Capita Income (in 1990 Geary-Khamis International Dollars), y, for Various Regions of the World and Population Totals (P in Millions)

Benchmark y (Per Capita Income) P (Population) Date Europe Africa Asia Europe Africa Asia 14 CE 593 542 550 23 9 160 1000 CE 431 487 600 22 11 180 Western Eastern Western Eastern Core Core Core Core 1 CE 569 456 26 168 1000 CE 426 465 27 183 1500 CE 753 568 60 284 1820 CE 1202 581 144 710 2003 23700 4434 741 3734

Panel B: Per Capita Income (y in 1990 Geary-Khamis International Dollars) and Population (P in millions) for the World, 1 CE to 2003 CE

Variable 1 CE 1000 1500 1820 2003 y 467 450 567 667 6516 P 226 267 438 1042 6279

Panel C: Population Growth Rates (%) for Regions of the World, 0 CE to 2000 CE

Period Asia Europe Africa Americas Oceania 0 – 1750 0.06 % 0.07 % 0.08 % 0.02 % 0.06 % 1750 – 1950 0.51 0.68 0.38 1.46 0.74 1950 – 2000 1.94 0.57 2.51 1.83 1.67

Panel D: Life Expectancy at Age 0 for the World, the West, and the Rest of the World

Benchmark Date World West Rest of World 1000 CE 24 24 24 1820 26 36 24 1950 49 66 44 2003 64 76 63

Table 1.2 (Continued) Panel E: Literacy in the Western and Eastern Cores, 2000 BCE to 2000 CE (%)

Benchmark Date West East 2000 BCE 1.67 % 0.15 % 1 BCE/CE 4.29 1.02 1500 CE 5.00 5.61 1900 CE 63.00 30.00 2000 CE 100.00 100.00

Panel F: Human Development Index (HDI) Estimated for 1990 and 2017 for Selected Regions of the World

Group 1990 2017 Group 1990 2017 Very High HDI 0.787 0.894 Arab States 0.557 0.699 High HDI 0.571 0.757 East Asia/Pacific 0.517 0.733 Medium HDI 0.462 0.645 Latin 0.626 0.758 America/Caribbean Low HDI 0.351 0.504 Europe and Central 0.653 0.771 Asia Developing 0.515 0.681 South Asia 0.439 0.638 Countries OECD Countries 0.785 0.895 Sub-Saharan Africa 0.398 0.537 World 0.598 0.728

Sources: Livi-Bacci (2012), pg. 25; Mosk (2013), pp. 6-9; and United Nations Development Programme, Human Development Reports, accessed online at hdr.undp.org/en/content/human-development index – hdi on November 12, 2019.

Scoff at the numbers at your peril. They are unambiguous in saying the following: the carrying capacity of planet earth in terms of the ability of humans to feed, shelter, and clothe themselves has increased at a phenomenal rate, especially since industrialization began in the eighteenth century, spreading its tentacles across the planet at a remarkable rate in the twentieth century. The result is the average human is better off materially - enjoys a robust diet

(provided she chooses to embrace healthy choices eschewing junk food); resides in an hospitable structure warmed by electricity or gas, sheltered and insulated from the ravaging gusts of winter; and has access to information available at his or her fingertips - than was ever

25 possible in centuries past. This is not a statement about happiness. Nor does it deny that malnutrition, stunting of growth for young children, reliance on fetid water for bathing and cleaning laundry, the ravages of infectious disease like malaria and typhoid is the lot of many persons today, even in the wealthiest of countries. It is a statement about averages for humans that are managing to survive and reproduce. It is a statement about the spread of improvements to human welfare that has occurred across the globe 3.

With improvements in the standard of living comes the possibility for enjoying the contributions to civilization achieved by geniuses past and present. Tables 1.3, 1.4, and 1.5 speak to this. Musical concerts performing the operas by Verdi and Wagner and Berg; symphonies by Mozart and Haydn; Schubert song cycles; Beethoven’s late chamber music;

Bartok’s piano compositions; performances flourish on all continents. Jazz, modern dance, ballet, Balkan line dance, rock and roll, bluegrass, Gospel, the blues flourish in the Americas,

Europe, and Asia. Bonsai and tea ceremony is practiced globally. Art galleries and museums abound, albeit heavily concentrated in Europe and North America, while Asia rapidly catches up. Heritage of all stripes – European, American, African, Japanese, Chinese, Arabian, Persian,

Indian, Indonesian, Mexican, Chilean, and Caribbean – is celebrated worldwide. Tourism opens up opportunities: visiting the Louvre, German castles, and the Sistine Chapel is a bourgeoning industry. Genius is universal and a rising standard of living worldwide is celebrated this genius.

This is undeniable. To stubbornly contest this it is folly pure and simple.

Table 1.3 Concert Halls and Opera Houses for Regions of the World and Selected Countries, Constructed Before and After 1800, by Period

Panel A: Number of Concert Halls and Percentage of Total Number of Concert Halls by Region (Percentages in [ ]) a

Region Total Number of Concert Halls in Given Period Before 1800 1801-1850 1851-1900 1901-1950 1951- Africa 0 0 1 4 35 [0%] [0%] [0.7%] [0.9%] [2.3%] Asia 1 2 5 19 336 [5.6%] [5.7%] [3.6%] [4.4%] [21.7%] Europe 17 33 89 173 487 [94.4%] [94.3%] [63.6%] [39.9] [31.4%] North America 0 0 28 192 594 [0%] [0%] [20.0%] [44.2%] [38.3%] Oceania 0 0 3 6 22 [0%] [0%] [2.1%] [1.4%] [1.4%] South America 0 0 14 40 78 [0%] [0%] [10%] [9.2%] [5.0%] World 18 35 140 434 1552 [100%] [100%] [100%] [100%] [100%]

Panel B: Concert Hall Shares of Countries for Regions: Europe, and North America

Country Percentage of Regional Totals in Country

Before 1800 1801-1850 1851-1900 1901-1950 1951-

North America

United States - - 89.3% 94.3% 89.1%

Europe

France 0% 6.1% 4.5% 5.2% 4.3%

Germany 0 6.1 11.2 13.9 13.4

Italy 41.2 27.3 14.6 11.6 6.6

Russia 0 3.0 2.3 2.3 1.2

United 17.7 12.1 16.9 17.3 14.6 Kingdom

Table 1.3 (Continued)

Panel C: Concert Hall Shares for Countries in Asia

Country Percentage of Regional Totals in Country (or Group of Countries)

Before 1800 1801-1850 1851-1900 1901-50 1951-

Japan 0% 0% 0% 5.3% 22.3%

Taiwan 0 0 0 10.5 17.9

Japan + South 100 50 20 21.1 57.5 Korea + Taiwan

Panel D: Percentage of World Concert Halls in Countries in Which English is Primary Language (United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa, and the United Kingdom)

Group of Percentage of World Concert Halls Countries Before 1800 1801-1850 1851-1900 1901-50 1951-

16.7% 11.4% 32.9% 52.1% 44.9%

Panel E: Opera Houses in Regions of the World [Percentage of World Total in ( ) Beneath the Number of Houses] (b)

Region Total of Opera Houses in Given Period [Percentage of World Total in ( )] Before 1800 1801-1850 1851-1900 1901-1950 1951- Africa 0 0 1 2 9 (0) (0) (0.8) (0.8) (1.7) Asia 0 0 2 11 69 (0) (0) (1.2) (4.5) (13.2) Europe 64 96 149 190 321 (98.4) (97.0) (86.1) (77.6) (61.3) North America 0 1 6 20 76 (0) (1.0) (3.5) (8.2) (14.5) Oceania 0 1 1 4 11 (0) (1.0) (0.6) (1.6) (2.1) South America 1 1 14 18 38 (1.5) (1.0) (8.1) (7.3) (7.3) World 65 99 173 245 524 (100) (100) (100) (100) (100)

Table 1.3 (Continued)

Panel F: Percentage Breakdown of Opera Houses in Europe for Selected Countries

Country Before 1800 1801-1850 1851-1900 1901-1950 1951 - Austria 4.7 % 4.2 % 3.4 % 4.2 % 5.7 % France 17.2 13.5 11.4 9.5 8.4 Germany 18.8 18.8 19.5 21.6 18.1 Italy 42.2 37.5 29.5 24.2 16.8 Russia 1.6 3.1 3.4 3.7 10.9 Spain 0 4.2 3.4 2.6 4.0 Switzerland 0 1.0 2.0 2.1 2.5 United 3.1 2.1 6.7 7.9 6.5 Kingdom

Panel G: Ratio of Concert Houses to Opera Houses for Regions of the World

Region Before 1800 1801-1850 1851-1900 1901-1950 1951- Africa - - 1.0 2.0 3.9 Asia - - 2.5 1.7 4.9 Europe 0.3 0.3 0.6 0.9 1.5 North America - 0 4.7 9.6 7.8 Oceania - 0 3.0 1.5 2.0 South America 0 0 1 2.2 2.1 World 0.3 0.4 0.8 1.8 3.0

Ratio of Concert Halls to Opera Houses for Selected Countries in Europe and for the United States

Country Before 1800 1801-1850 1851-1900 1901-1950 1951- Europe Aus 1.7 1.5 2.6 2.4 3.3

tria France 0 0.2 0.2 0.5 0.8 Germany 0 0.1 0.3 0.6 1.1 Italy 0.3 0.3 0.3 0.4 0.6 Russia 0 0.3 0.4 0.6 0.2 Spain - 0.8 1.2 1.8 1.6 Switzerland - - 1.0 0.8 1.4 United 1.5 2.0 1.5 2.0 3.4 Kingdom North America United States - 0 8.3 12.9 9.8

Table 1.3 (Continued)

Notes: a A number of the concert hall citations failed to list date for the completion of construction. In these cases I assigned the halls to the “1951-“group. b Properly speaking the term “opera houses” should be “opera and ballet houses” as the two art forms are performed in opera houses. In addition plays, song recitals, and strictly instrumental concerts can be played there as well. They are more versatile and less specialized than concert halls. At the same time they are more expensive to construct as a general rule.

Sources: Figures on concert halls taken from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_concert_halls accessed between October 1 and October 10, 2018. Figures on opera houses taken from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_opera_houses accessed between November 29 and December 2, 2018.

Table 1.4 Symphony Orchestras, Opera Companies, and Ballet Companies for Regions of the World and Selected Countries Before and After 1800, by Period

Panel A: Number of Symphony Orchestras and Percentage of Total Number of Symphony Orchestras by Region [Percentage of Total in ( ) below Number]

Region Before 1800 1801-1850 1851-1900 1901-1950 1951- Africa 0 0 0 1 9 (0) (0) (0) (0.02) (1.1) Asia 0 1 1 16 84 (0) (3) (1.2) (4.5) (10.7) Oceania 0 0 0 10 25 (0) (0) (0) (2.8) (3.2) Europe 17 35 66 194 380 (100) (90) (75.9) (54.7) (48.3) North America 0 3 20 128 273 (0) (8) (23.0) (36.1) (34.7) South America 0 0 0 7 16 (0) (0) (0) (2.0) (2.0) World 17 39 87 355 787 (100) (100) (100) (100) (100)

Panel B: Number of Opera Companies and Percentage of Total Number of Opera Companies by Region [Percentage of Total in ( ) below Number]

Region Before 1800 1801-1850 1851-1900 1901-1950 1951- Africa 0 0 0 1 4 (0) (0) (0) (0.6) (0.6) Asia 0 0 0 1 15 (0) (0) (0) (0.6) (2.1) Oceania 0 0 0 0 14 (0) (0) (0) (0) (1.9) Europe 33 54 88 126 325 (97.1) (94.7) (91.7) (77.3) (44.6) North America 1 1 1 23 346 (2.9) (1.8) (1.0) (14.1) (47.5) South America 0 2 7 12 24 (0) (3.5) (7.3) (7.4) (3.3) World 34 57 96 163 728 (100) (100) (100) (100) (100)

Table 1.4 (Continued)

Panel C: Number of Ballet Companies and Percentage of Total Number of Ballet Companies by Region [Percentage of Total in ( ) below Number]

Region Before 1800 1801-1850 1851-1900 1901-1950 1951- Africa 0 0 0 0 0 (0) (0) (0) (0) (0) Asia 0 0 0 0 4 (0) (0) (0) (0) (5.2) Oceania 0 0 0 1 4 (0) (0) (0) (5.6) (5.2) Europe 6 6 6 12 24 (100) (100) (100) (66.7) (31.2) North America 0 0 0 4 44 (0) (0) (0) (22.2) (57.1) South America 0 0 0 1 1 (0) (0) (0) (5.6) (1.3) World 6 6 6 18 77 (100) (100) (100) (100) (100)

Table 1.4 (Continued)

Panel D: Percentage of Number of Symphony Orchestras (SO), Opera Companies (OC), and Ballet Companies (BC) for Six Countries in Europe

Country/Company Before 1800 1801-1850 1851-1900 1901-1950 1951- Austria SO (orchestra) 0 % 5.7 % 4.6 % 2.6 % 3.2 % Austria OC (opera) 0 0 3.4 4.8 9.5 Austria BC (ballet) 0 0 0 0 4.2 France SO (orchestra) 0 2.9 7.6 5.2 5.5 France OC (opera) 24.2 22.2 17.1 13.5 9.5 France BC (ballet) 16.7 16.7 16.7 16.7 8.3 Germany SO (orchestra) 41.2 31.4 25.8 20.6 15.5 Germany OC (opera) 24.2 25.9 25.0 22.2 `14.8 Germany BC (ballet) 16.7 16.7 16.7 8.3 8.3 Italy SO (orchestra) 23.5 17.1 12.1 6.7 6.8 Italy OC (opera) 24.2 27.8 22.7 16.7 10.2 Italy BC (ballet) 0 0 0 0 0 Russia SO (orchestra) 5.9 2.9 3.0 5.2 5.5 Russia OC (opera) 3.0 1.9 3.4 4.0 7.1 Russia BC (ballet) 33.3 33.3 33.3 16.7 16.7 United Kingdom SO 0 5.7 7.6 10.8 14.2 (orchestra) United Kingdom OC 0 0 1.1 3.2 16.0 (opera) United Kingdom BC 0 0 0 16.7 20.8 (ballet) Sum of Six Above SO 70.6 65.7 60.6 51.0 50.8 (orchestra) Sum of Six Above OC 75.8 77.8 72.7 64.3 62.8 (opera) Sum of Six Above BC 66.7 66.7 66.7 58.3 58.3 (ballet)

Sources: Figures on symphony orchestras taken from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_symphony_orchestras; figures on opera companies taken from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_opera_companies; figures on ballet companies taken from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_dance_companies. All sources accessed between December 2 and December 16, 2018.

Table 1.5 Art Museums for Regions of the World and Selected Countries, Constructed Before and After 1800, by Period

Panel A: Art Museums in Existence by Region of the World [Percentage of Global Total Given in ( ) underneath Number]

Region Before 1800 1801-1850 1851-1900 1901-1950 1951- Africa 0 1 3 10 36 (0) (1.1) (1.3) (2.0) (2.5) Asia 2 5 14 48 199 (8.3) (5.7) (6.0) (7.5) (15.6) Australia and 0 0 9 10 21 New Zealand (0) (0) (3.9) (2.0) (1.7) Europe 22 76 154 248 569 (91.7) (86.4) (66.1) (48.8) (44.7) North America 0 6 52 176 415 (0) (6.8) (22.3) (34.7) (32.6) South America 0 0 1 16 34 (0) (0) (0.4) (3.2) (2.67) World 24 88 233 508 1,274 (100) (100) (100) (100) (100)

Panel B: Percentage of Art Museums in Asia for Selected Countries

Country Before 1800 1801-1850 1851-1900 1901-1950 1951- China 50.0 % 40.0 % 14.3 % 8.3 % 12.6 %

India 0 20.0 35.7 45.8 16.1

Japan 0 0 28.6 12.5 15.6

South Korea 0 0 0 2.1 4.0

Taiwan 0 0 0 2.1 9.6

Panel C: Percentage of Art Museums in North America that are in the United States

Country Before 1800 1801-1850 1851-1900 1901-1950 1951- United States 0 83.3 % 90.4 % 89.8 % 83.6 %

Table 1.5 (Continued)

Panel D: Percentage of Art Museums in Europe in Selected Countries

Country Before 1800 1801-1850 1851-1900 1901-1950 1951- France 40.9 31.6 21.4 17.3 13.0

Germany 9.1 21.1 20.1 19.0 14.8

Italy a 9.1 7.9 10.4 9.3 17.9

Spain 4.6 4.0 2.6 4.0 5.1

Switzerland 0 1.3 3.9 4.4 5.5

Turkey 0 0 0.7 2.4 5.6

United 9.1 13.2 13.0 12.9 9.3 Kingdom

Notes: a After 1951 a significant number of palaces and religious structures were refashioned into museums under the UNESCO World Heritage Site program of the United Nations. Sources: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_art_museums accessed between November 1 and November 12, 2018.

Without giving oneself over to egregious, supercilious, self-serving cheerleading - touting the capacity of the human race to improve itself materially, to civilize itself culturally, over the long haul, breaking through barriers, relentlessly pressing on - there is no denying that living standards for the great mass of humanity have been increasing. Nor is this all about the present. Simultaneously more and more individuals are garnering access to the monumental achievements geniuses of eons past have been left us as in art, music, and literature.

Or is Humanity Rushing along the Dreaded Road to Apocalypse?

Or is this illusionary, a magical smokescreen conjured up through statistical trickery? Is progress simply a delusion conjured up by dyed in the wool optimists? In point of fact it does not take much thought to come up with counter examples that make a mockery of view that the good times are rolling on to a brighter and better future.

Any short list of the human capacity to undo all of the good it has managed to do should have as its capstone violence. Consider the short list of the world’s worst carnage that groups of people have meted out against other groups of people over recorded human history appearing in Table 1.6. There is no doubt that adjusting for world and regional population size undercuts the argument that violence has risen over the long haul. In fact as is convincingly demonstrated by Morris (2014) and Pinker (2011), it has not increased. Pinker suggests civilizing behavior – checking our weapons at the door before we eat dinner together, understanding how the logic of tit for tat behavior can lead to outcomes that harm everyone, forgoing vendettas, becoming more cognizant about the cultural conditioning of potential enemies through commercial and cultural exchange – has made leaps and bounds over the last several centuries. Morris entertains a glaring paradox by way of making his case. He argues organized warfare has undercut disorganized violence over the long run because groups that prevail through infrequent bouts of applying organized violence prevail over groups that turn to disorganized violence on a daily basis. Powerful states are built up through a judicious reliance on war. Since war is expensive to carry out strong states are reluctant to engage in it. How convincing is this thesis? White (2012) who came up with the definitive list of the world’s worst atrocities from which I draw in Table 1.6 points out that breakdowns in state authority are frequent events; that these breakdowns usher in chaos setting the stage for outbreaks of mass violence that are

36 hard to check by broken power structures; and that civilians are more likely to perish in these dreadful holocausts than are soldiers.

Table 1.6 Recorded Histories Worst Human Devised Disasters: The Top Twenty Adjusted for Population Size by Calibrating the Estimates as if They Occurred in 1950

Rank Name of Dates Death Toll % of World Region % of Event (millions 1950 Population in calibrated Population Region for 1950) (1950) 1 An Lushan Eighth 429 16.96 % Asia 30.58 % Rebellion Century 2 Mongol Thirteenth 278 10.99 Eurasia 14.26 Conquests Century 3 Mideast slave Seventh to 132 5.22 Africa 58.93 trade Nineteenth Centuries 4 Fall of Ming Seventeenth 112 4.43 Asia 7.98 Dynasty Century 5 Fall of Roman Third to Fifth 105 4.15 Europe 19.20 Empire Centuries 6 Tamerlane Fourteenth 100 3.95 Asia 7.13 and Fifteenth Centuries 7 Annihilation Fifteenth to 92 3.64 Americas 27.71 of American Nineteenth Indians Centuries 8 Atlantic slave “ 83 3.28 Africa 37.05 trade 9 World War II 1939-1945 55 2.18 World 2.18 10 Taiping Nineteenth 40 1.58 Asia 2.85 Rebellion Century 11 Mao (famine) 1949-1976 40 1.58 Asia 2.85 12 British Indian Eighteenth to 35 1.38 Asia 2.49 famine Twentieth Centuries 13 Thirty Years 1618-1648 32 1.27 Europe 5.85 War 14 Russia’s Sixteenth and 23 0.55 Europe 4.20 Times of Seventeenth Trouble Centuries 15 Stalin Twentieth 20 0.08 Europe 3.66 (famine) Century 16 World War I 1914-1918 15 0.06 World 0.06 17 French Wars Sixteenth 13 0.05 Europe 2.38 of Rebellion Century 18 Congo Free 1800 onward 12 0.05 Africa 5.36 State 19 Napoleonic Nineteenth 11 0.04 Europe 2.01 Wars Century 20 Russian Civil Twentieth 9 0.04 Europe 1.65 War Century

Source: Mosk (2013), pp. 11-12; and White (2012), various pages.

Additional ammunition countering the smug reasoning of optimists like Pinker and

Morris lies in the economics of warfare itself. Their arguments dance around the fact that technological advances in war-making capacity have profoundly impacted the relative cost of exerting mass destruction. Indeed the hard cold truth is that the falling costs of brandishing a big stick on the international stage could pave the way to the total destruction of human life everywhere. These costs have fallen dramatically in the period after the United States pulled the genii out of the bottle, dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in the closing days of World War II. Those who fear that thermonuclear war is likely to break out in the near future, threatening the safety of the entire globe point out that the recent development of hyper-speed intercontinental ballistic missiles reduces to a matter of seconds the amount of time necessary to arrive at informed decisions as whether to launch a full scale barrage of fire or not.

Fire away? Usher in Armageddon and the end of civilization as we know it? Well, no one will actually do this according to Morris and naysayers concerning the outbreak of thermonuclear war. You have a number of scorpions in a bottle. No scorpion wants to make a move as it is likely to result in its own death. The problem here is not the logic of mutual assured destruction upending resorting to horrific weapons of mass destruction supposedly guaranteeing safety for the states possessing them. The problem is the technology – the capacity of persons in charge of unleashing a barrage of missiles against which there is no

39 defense to discriminate between a flock of birds and an enemy launched first strike heading your way - may fail and fail abysmally given the possible repercussions. The law of unintended consequences tells us any technology devised by humans who are too clever for their own good

– and we as a species are too clever for our own good - is likely to backfire at some time. Maybe not today, but possibly tomorrow, and if not tomorrow possibly ten years and a day from today because the probability that something will go wrong is not zero on any given day. That is what the Bulletin of Concerned Atomic Scientists has been declaring for decades, setting its

Domesday Clock ever closer to a dreadful midnight when the lights go out everywhere on everyone.

If the possibility of thermonuclear warfare turning to probability is not frightening enough consider a second application of the law of unintended consequences: global warming.

According to the Anthropocene era theory human activity has unleashed unintended consequences on planetary climate beginning at least 8,000 years ago. The spread of large scale farming, cutting down forests and burning biomass, has gradually raised temperatures in the atmosphere. Domesticated animal populations – sheep, cows – emit methane gas whose particles gradually contaminate the atmosphere. Population growth spurred on by advances in food production – improved ploughs, genetic modification of plants through trial and error experimentation, applications of science exemplified by the electrochemical process for manufacturing artificial fertilizers, mechanization of harvesting and reaping, the growing use of tractors, systematic cross breading of livestock pushing up the size of animals readied for slaughter – has been both instigator and consequence of the steady conversion of biomass from unharnessed wilds to domesticated arable land.

With the onset of industrialization in the eighteenth century the slow transformation of the atmosphere turned into a rout. The first industrial revolution in England meant many things

– the concentration of workers in factories, the substitution of machines for human labor, the spawning of a sweeping industrial belt (known quaintly as the “Industrial Coffin”) stretching from Liverpool to London through the midlands – but one of its most salient features was an energy revolution. For the first time in human history it became possible for steam engines – first the Newcomen engine, then the Watt steam engine with a separate condenser for cooling the pulsating steam – to pump water out of mineshafts rich in coal deposits at reasonably low cost. In turn these innovations drove down the costs of manufacturing iron and steel in blast furnaces, stimulating breakthroughs in metal working exemplified by Henry Cort’s puddling process.

Why this mattered for the atmosphere is the tragedy of greenhouse gases. Methane gas is one. Added to its contamination of the atmosphere was the massive release of a second pollutant, carbon dioxide. As particles of the greenhouse gases spread above the earth’s surface they form a layer that reflects back onto the earth the heat absorbed by the earth from the sun. Think of the layer of greenhouse gases as a mirror. If you take away the mirror much of the heat escaping from the earth’s surface will dissipate; with the mirror in place the heat will be recycled back to the earth. A feedback system is created. Heat is recycled rather than wasted away. The temperature on the earth goes up.

How catastrophic this will be is a matter for conjecture, the more informed the conjecture the more convincing. What is clear is that there is a prima facie evidence for the period since 1990 suggesting that the rate of acceleration in the polluting of the atmosphere

41 that began in England in the eighteenth century – presumably small in magnitude at first as long as England was the only place on the globe spewing out not only methane but also carbon dioxide – has been intensifying. The obvious culprit is the rapid spread of manufacturing to areas once primarily agrarian: the Middle East, China, Southeast Asia, and Latin America. For instance historical data on recorded temperatures for the last 100 years tell a clear and sobering story: average temperatures have risen by 0.75 degrees Celsius over that period, two thirds of increase occurring since 1975. Surely acceleration is occurring.

Moreover it is increasingly clear the rate of acceleration is picking up. An

Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change assembled by the United Nations in 1990, consisting of thousands of scientists representing 195 countries, speculated that the rise in global temperatures would be gradual. In 2018 a new panel re-accessed the problem. It concluded that the 1990 panel had been too optimistic about the speeding up of temperatures.

It argued that as long as current trends toward the spread of manufacturing continue it will be difficult to limit warming to a range under 1.5 degrees Celsius over the next few years.

Climate is not weather. Weather is local; climate is global. Climate depends not only on the composition of the atmosphere but also on the currents unleashed at the upper and lower depths of the oceans that act as huge conveyor belts. What does seem to be clear is that weather has become more unpredictable everywhere; and that in one particular zone – the

West Antarctic – rapid warming is causing melting on an unprecedented scale. Given the currents swirling through the oceans the implications of a massive infusion of water into the waters of Antarctica are terrifying: already New York City has experienced massive damage to it subway system, delivering to the city a 4 billion dollar price tag for cleanup. What will happen

42 to the great coastal cities of the world? To Shanghai, Tokyo, Osaka, London, Amsterdam,

Rotterdam, Marseille, Venice, Boston, Los Angeles, Houston? What will be the tragic fate visited upon island nations in the Pacific, the Indian Ocean, and the Caribbean?

Not only has industrialization spawned pollution of the air, the ocean, and the earth’s surface it has increased the demand for raw materials buried under the earth’s surface: coal, petroleum, iron ore, lithium, zinc, copper, lead, a cornucopia of resources that factories are using as inputs on an accelerating scale. The twin concerns – pollution and exhausting scarce resources – are broadly categorized under the rubric Malthusian, named after the English parson and economist Thomas Robert Malthus who argued that population growth would eventually outstrip food production unless checked by preventative checks like late marriage and widespread celibacy. An influential study primarily carried out by engineers working under the collective umbrella of the Club of Rome using an elaborate set of feedback loops driving computer simulations issued a dire report in the 1970s suggesting crises would occur in the near future. The short list of Club of Rome concerns consisted of three: over-population, demand for foodstuffs outstripping supply, the traditional Malthusian bogey man; a rapid rise in the price of raw materials relative to other prices, notably seen in the markets for petroleum and minerals; and pollution. In an update to their original findings the Club of Rome argues that their original alarmism has proven true. Granted raw material prices have not spiked as their forecasts suggested it would. But pollution in the form of global warming is far worse than they originally anticipated.

In the Book of Revelation John of Patmos imagined a lamb unveiling seven seals, liberating four horsemen of the Apocalypse, War, Famine, Death, and Conquest. A White Horse

43 breaks out first, unleashing conquest; then rushes a Black Horse fomenting warfare; next comes a horse bringing on the plague. That humans may have to cope with a coming plague is evidenced by the emergence of new diseases, ones that the current arsenal of medical and pharmaceutical practices developed since applications of the germ theory of disease took off in the nineteenth century is ill-equipped to combat. As with the other unintended consequences of the Neolithic and industrial revolutions – pollution, potential resource scarcity, thermonuclear warfare, rapid population growth – there are two reasons why human activity has generated novel diseases: destruction of the wild biomass as primal forest lands are penetrated; and the fact that microorganisms and near-microorganisms – non-living viruses, living bacteria, and living archaea – evolve quickly. Wiping out microorganisms with antibiotics creates green fields for variants of the microorganisms to spread 4.

Consider HIV/AIDs, the human immunodeficiency virus that spread through sexual contact, blood transfusions, and pregnancy, ravaging homosexual communities in the developed world and African populations on an unprecedented scale. As of 2016 almost 37 million persons worldwide have been killed by the disease that makes individuals unusually susceptible to other infectious attacks. It is likely that the origin of this killer virus was contact between humans and non-human primates (African green monkeys) living in West-central

Africa. Before humans penetrated the environs where the primates lived in isolated circumstances the disease did not jump to humans.

The revenge of the germs outwitting the inventors of vaccines and antibiotic drugs is another harbinger of the coming plague. In China where viruses occasionally spread from wild animals sold in food markets to humans a number of new infectious epidemics have burst out,

44 threatened global tourism, disrupting normal economic activity, threatening (and ultimately succeeding) to unleash global pandemics like the influenza epidemic that ravaged the world in the aftermath of World War I. In 2003 SARS (severe respiratory syndrome) broke out in

Southern China and Hong Kong, spreading through respiratory droplets, ultimately infecting people in 37 countries. No vaccine has been invented to counter it. That diseases like SARS that are transmitted through the airborne virus infected droplets have the potential to run rampant, setting off pandemics like the bubonic plague that ravaged Europe during the fourteenth century is immensely worrisome. Not only do these pandemics decimate populations; they also deter commerce that requires face to face contact and interaction. In the case of the 2003 outbreak less than a thousand persons perished. The economic impact was relatively muted.

Far more disruptive a novel coronavirus outbreak (COV-19) first emerging in Wuhan, a major industrial conurbation in central China, at the end of 2019. Novel because knowledge about other coronaviruses – they are classified as corona type viruses because they have spikes sticking, mimicking crowns, corona meaning crown - has been around in the community of health professionals for a long time. It is believed that they were initially carried by bats and birds as early as 8,000 years ago, bovine, canine and human variants of the virus diverging from common ancestors during the twentieth and twenty first centuries. Transmission is through droplets launched into the air and deposited onto surfaces – it may spread in other ways as well

– leading to mild forms of respiratory infection including the common cold and SARS. Not only has the infection spread rapidly since December 2019 – much faster than 2003 SARS – its capacity to not only disrupt Chinese economic – but more generally global – trade and economic wellbeing is remarkable. Factories and businesses shut down from Wuhan to London

45 to Los Angeles; cruise ships prevented from unloaded their passengers and crews until quarantining measures are fully put into place; social distancing restrictions imposed upon almost every nation in the world. Beginning with China and Italy, eventually forcing virtually every nation in the world, to adopt draconian lock-down policies, demanding people to stay at home, eschewing work, spawning unemployment on a global scale not seen since the Great

Depression of the 1930s, slowing economic and social activity to a virtual crawl.

Moreover – as a dramatic instance of the law of unintended consequences – the outbreak has called into question to rectitude of the Chinese Communist Party’s censorship of free speech. The young doctor who first warned of the spread of coronavirus caused pneumonia in Wuhan was told to stop “spreading rumors” that might disrupt business as usual.

Had the authorities acted sooner the rapid spread of the infection might have been prevented.

As matters stand the spread has not been contained and the doctor himself died from the disease.

Those who reject the pessimistic scenarios – thermonuclear Armageddon, unchecked population growth ushering in famines, climate crises, rogue viruses and microorganisms setting off pandemics – point to the possibility of international cooperation overcoming the looming threats imperiling human survival. A short list includes the United Nations and its subsidiary organizations, the World Health Organization, the World Trade Organization, multilateral arms control treaties, the European Union – agreements and institutions operating above and over nation-states. A classic example of global agreements hammered out quickly to counter a climatic crisis is the banning of chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) particularly Freon gas that was ravaging the ozone labor. Scientists became increasingly concerned about the problem

46 during the mid-1970s, a 1985 research project measuring the air over Antarctica confirming that a crisis was in the making. In 1987 the Montreal Protocol banned CFCs, leading to a dramatic drop in their usage within a year. In principle it is possible for the community of nations acting as a assembled political body to counter a drift toward complete extinction for the species.

Unfortunately nationalism is a fact of life that is not going away. Arms agreements fall apart. The United States withdraws from the Paris Accords designed to reduce greenhouse gases. Developing countries like China, India, and Brazil argue that they should not be bound by protocols restricting their right to spew greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. They point out their per capita income levels are low and they need to prioritize economic advance at the expense of the environment. The League of Nations was unable to prevent World War II from breaking out. Why should one trust the United Nations to achieve what the League failed to achieve? Politicians are elected by, or secure control over, the constituencies of nation-states.

Is there any surprise they place more weight upon national priorities rather than multinational obligations negotiated largely by bureaucrats and professional diplomats?

Adding to the problem of negotiating treaties and establishing multilateral organizations is the fact that politicians lie. They lie in the domestic arena; they lie on the international stage.

Not always, but enough of the time that everyone who has studied the practice of politics recognizes the arguments Machiavelli made centuries ago in his classic, The Prince. Deception, resulting complicated strategies designed to conceal guile, is omnipresent. As well all nation- states engage in branding, adopting ideological positions of one sort or another. Sadly it is easy for sophisticated leaders to naively believe their own rhetoric. Even the most cunning of us are

47 subject to cognitive dissonance, discounting heavily the validity of statements made by ideological enemies.

The four horsemen of the Apocalypse may have been bottled up by seven seals for millennia but who knows when and if they might break out? Banking on the collective wisdom of political elites operating on the global stage is a dubious proposition, perhaps not a fool’s errand; but something uncomfortably close to it.

Exit and the Law of Unintended Consequences

Grim doomsday? Dawn of a future blessed with the spread of prosperity, protracted life expectancy, and freedom spread across the planet? Is it impossible to avoid horrific outcomes as humanity struggles to improve existence for our species, let alone for other innocent species that may suffer the consequences of colossal mismanagement of the planet’s resources by a benighted human race? Suppose an agent enjoying perfect foresight had lived at the time global warming was opening the door to widespread farming existed. Suppose she had been asked the question: is the prospect of a rising standard of living worth the risk of forever dooming the future for planetary biomass. How do we know what side she would come down on in coming up with a convincing answer? The bottom line is this: the law of unintended consequences holds with a vengeance. It holds for the long-run; it holds for the short-run. You cannot escape it.

For most of human history it was possible for individuals or groups to work around the law of unintended consequences through exit. Within a polity those contemplating escape from the law of unintended consequences besieging them could look to three options: exit, voice,

48 and loyalty 5. Jews in Iberia forced to convert to Christianity during the fifteenth century confronted precisely these choices: some moved to the lowlands; some converted becoming loyal Catholics; some converted but secretly continued to practice their ancient faith as

Marranos. Up until the first atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki it was possible to embrace exit at least in theory.

Short of establishing human colonies elsewhere in the galaxy, there is no exit. Faced with this prospect most people the world over put their heads in the sand. Perhaps they are fearful; perhaps they are blissfully unaware of the doomsday possibilities; perhaps they welcome the end of the life on planet earth because they cling to the hope that God has a place for them in heaven. Most people are profoundly risk averse. They fear that voicing their despair will only serve to bring down cruel opprobrium upon their heads. The hard cold fact is that the exit and voice have never been attractive or even viable options of most of the human race. Ask

African slaves brought to labor on the sugar plantations of the Caribbean; ask Russians caught up in Stalin’s great terror, dispatched to the Gulag; as Polish Jews rounded up by the Nazis; ask townspeople facing the Mongolian hordes unleashed by Genghis Khan, ordered to surrender or die in blood stained carnage, perhaps slaughtered one by one, perhaps dying of the plague spreading from diseased individuals catapulted into their environs.

Risk aversion occasioned by the law of unintended consequences runs deep. For all intents and purposes it is hardwired into the typical human brain. Under the plausible assumption that the human brain has not changed since hunters and gatherers were the only humans roaming the earth it is easy to see why the great majority of us are highly risk averse, finding succor by limiting the menu of risks to a tiny few that we are capable of finessing. A

49 hunter goes into the wilds with the aim of killing a deer or a bison knowing full well that a massive black bear may be roaming the hunting ground with her cubs in tow. At any moment the predator may become the prey. The intention is to be predator, knowing deep down that that outcome is not a given, Likely as not the hunter proceeds with caution, quietly moving through the brush, continually turning to study the lay of the land. More likely the hunter moves in a band, some members scanning the paths they have already moved along, others scouting out possible locales where they can secure game. Not surprisingly everyone in the band is prepared to share the food they garner with one another. Suppose one band member was to defect from the sharing rule, aggrandizing his or her personal cache of meat at the expense of colleagues. The law of unintended consequences, soundly embedded in the social consciousness, the norms of the group, would surely be invoked. How would you like a poisoned arrow to be shot into your back?

Risk aversion is the reason most people throughout prehistory and history have been loyal to the groups they belong to. It explains why the great mass of humanity is prudent, adept at putting their heads in the sand when unpleasant facts intrude, why cognitive dissonance is so strong. Sure everyone cheats to a degree; but cheating on a grand scale is another matter altogether. It brings on retribution in the usual course of events: this is the message of the law of unintended consequences. Granted there are exceptions. If it were not possible to evade the law history would not be replete with tyrants who amassed great wealth through nefarious means, yet still managed to die peacefully in their beds. Charismatic political leaders cynically manipulating sycophants and naïve masses of easily swayed individuals – sufficiently risk averse to say the emperor has no clothes – do get away with cheating while flaunting their ill-gotten

50 gains. So do hardened criminals who murder, steal, blackmail, and philander and yet garner the mantle of Robin Hoods. What sets these individuals apart from the masses who honor their deeds is their ability to act as if the law of unintended consequences does not apply to them.

Indeed that is the source of their charisma, their capacity to throw all caution to the winds.

Blatant corruption and cruel disregard for the safety and well-being of others is one dimension of the capacity to throw caution to the winds, acting recklessly, claiming a unique right to escape from the law of unintended consequences, to laugh in the face of the risk aversion that holds the great majority of individuals in its thrall. This is the charisma run amok, divination dedicated to the dark arts, Faustian bargains with the Devil as it were. Fortunately, there is a bright face: prophets and geniuses. Prophets and geniuses play a role in human history far beyond what they manage to accomplish in their short lives. Their fame resounds through time, it outlasts them. Paradoxically one of the reasons why they endure as symbols of hope for a suffering humanity is the fact they disrupt regimes that attempt through ideology and propaganda and intimidation to unify the polities they try to control. Theocracies and totalitarian one party Communist states are two examples of such regimes. In both cases these regimes rest on the assumption that they can instill virtue in the masses, that they can in fact ward away the unintended consequences arising from inherent human nature.

Espousing Unifying Virtue: Ideologies Religious and Materialist Confront the Law of Unintended Consequences Securing stability is key to foraging groups, polities, nations, perpetuating themselves.

Absent mechanisms for binding heterogeneous peoples together crises stemming from unanticipated shortages of food, the rapid spread of novel epidemic diseases, or invasion of

51 one’s own territory by an hitherto unknown foe, often as not precipitate breakdowns in stability leading to the destruction of the group as a distinct polity, along with its cultural artifacts, its religious shrines, perhaps even its language.

Lacking elites hunting and gathering peoples find various strategies for perpetuating themselves. Migratory bands move to safer or more richly endowed environs, ferreting out rock outcrops where they can flourish in cave networks overlooking fertile forests alive with elk, deer, bear, fish, wild birds, berries, and wild ancestors of grains. Having overfished the rivers and lakes, having so killed off the game to a point where the pool of wild animals is depleted, having cut down the foliage for food and shelter, move on. Violence is almost certainly a fact of life in these settings as they are likely to run into other mobile tribes seeking attractive, richly endowed, enclaves. The trick is to keep moving, honing your skills in hunting, gathering, and combat. At the other extreme are sedentary bands, living in isolated and forbidding locales. A classic example of the latter situation is the Inuit-Eskimo peoples of days gone by, establishing outposts in frigid climatic conditions, hunting for seals, fishing, harpooning whales and other marine mammals 6. In the traditional Inuit setting, a kind of primitive communism prevailed.

Food was scare, hence everyone willingly shared game that they brought in amongst the band.

Adult males functioned as patriarchs, taking primary responsibility for acquiring animals slaughtered for nutrition. Adult women prepared meals, wove clothing and other fabrics, tending to the raising of children. Children were encouraged to be cooperative at all costs, eschewing fighting, stifling their emotions. To perpetuate themselves a relatively rigid family structure that socialized offspring to be obedient and non-confrontational was the norm.

Ostracism in isolated environs like those prevailing in the extreme north of Canada and Alaska was a virtual death sentence.

Settled agriculture accompanied by population growth changes the logic of securing stability. Successful populations that have managed to perpetuate themselves after passing through the Neolithic Revolution have one thing in common: a group of elites that espouse ideologies aimed at generating a sense of unity, a common destiny, a set of ethical norms that are considered ideal for everyone in the group. As far as we can tell these groups all establish religions calling upon transcendental forces to give them legitimacy. Suppose a deity or a group of deities or a heavenly mandate or the legacy bestowed by a charismatic figure of bygone days is called upon by priests, shamans, or political leaders. Suppose attachment to the rituals, myths, and ethical rules propounded by these transcendental figures bestows on the people a unifying cement. If a figure so overwhelming, so powerful, so persuasive, is watching everyone in the polity from a remote distance (say from the heavens above), instilling reverence and even fear and dread, among the people, a kind of cement encouraging cooperation, honesty in barter and exchange, and loyalty entrenches a cement that allows the group to absorb the blows and trammels whirling out of the law of unintended consequences. Inclement weather, insect invasions crushing crops, raids perpetuated by nomadic peoples travelling through your territory: you need a powerful cement to handle these threats.

Unintended consequences? A committee loosely cobbled together from the ranks of priests and officials lay out an elaborate network of canals and rivers irrigating an immense plain abounding with fruit orchards and grain fields; protracted drought, a long run of years in which dry winters and baking summers predominate, makes a mockery of the regime’s efforts.

Once a cornucopia of foodstuffs, now an arid desert. Again, consider displaying your wealth.

Fashioning awe inspiring temples – festooned with emeralds and onyx, golden fixtures adorning the entrance, silver inlaid holders for candles lining the walls– attracts marauders from neighboring lands, devotees to other deities attacking your transcendental pantheon, laying waste to the magnificent edifices that took decades, perhaps centuries, to erect.

Ideologies generating the desired package of norms, ideals, rituals and myths vary greatly. For most of human history religions invoking transcendental forces have played a commanding role in providing a viable ideology. Until the Enlightenment contested the notion that religions the world over – Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Confucianism, Taoism, Buddhism,

Hinduism – were poorly equipped to deal with the challenge of the best intentions going awry, appealing to transcendental forces outcompeted alternatives.

The Enlightenment in Europe offered up a completely different package of panaceas, ultimately based on the assumption that recourse to transcendental forces is unnecessary.

Coming up with institutions whereby people are properly governed, motivated and incentivized, should ideally serve as a more realistic substitute, one more in keeping with the strengths and weaknesses inherent in human nature. Unlike other doctrines contesting transcendentalism – Greek and Roman atheistic materialism, Legalism (the draconian Rule of

Law School) in China – the Enlightenment program succeeded on the field of ideological fray. It did not do away with religion but it created an alternative that coexists with religious ideologies in the modern world.

Consider the extremes: on the one hand there are theocracies in which high priests rule together ordering their pliant minions to monitor the faithful and the faithless alike, punishing those dissidents found wanting in their piety. At the other extreme you have modern twentieth century Communism, atheistic in principle if not in practice. Theocracies abound in the Old

Testament: the ancient Hebrews operated under priests like Moses, Aaron, Joshua, and Samuel before David became king. However in most historical accounts it the standard model is one in which monarchs, emperors, or princes ruled in tandem with religious elites, secular rule being legitimized by religious doctrine.

Building on the assumption that most people are deeply risk averse, eschewing exit and voice, elites securing positions of power in states by dint of birth, ingenuity, or charisma are naturally drawn to establishing regimes stable enough to withstand the turbulence that the law of unintended consequences visits upon us all. After all no one possesses a crystal ball revealing what the future holds: contemporary forecasting based on acquiring immense amounts of information, often touted as methodology for grasping now what is going to transpire, is definitely not up to the task. How many forecasters predicted the global COVID-19 pandemic?

Given this reality, how can stability be engendered in a populace? The most obvious candidate is patriotism, drumming into the minds of subjects the notion that they are purer, more virtuous, than the remainder of the world’s population. Hubris? Yes. One of its unintended consequences is the idea that the most enthusiastic of the citizens believe they have a messianic duty. Convinced they are members of the most blessed of all nations on the face of the earth, their very virtue, their very purity, stirs deep strains of altruism among them. We need to spread the word, espousing our values, the secret of our superiority, to the benighted

55 inhabitants of less enlightened states. The road to world unity – everlasting peace and security for all peoples - rests on carrying the glorious illumination of the true faith to those still living in darkness.

Consider the Christianity of the Medieval Era. Popes, archbishops, abbots controlling monasteries, members of mendicant orders, devoted rulers like Charlemagne riding roughshod over much of Western Europe, believed their avowed faith engendered moral purity, virtue of the highest order. Indeed at the practical level of everyday life for most peasants laboring on feudal estates or monastic lands the doctrine espousing the seven virtues played as substantial a role in justifying the ways of the Christian God to humanity than did the stories captured in the Old and New Testament. This list of specific virtues – kindness, temperance, charity, chastity, humility, diligence, and patience – were designed to counter the seven deadly sins that are said to visit dire consequences upon those corrupted by evil. Kindness was designed to curb envy; temperance to quell gluttony; charity to combat greed; chastity to ward off lust; humility to temper pride; diligence to cure the lazy individual from wallowing in sloth; and patience aimed at preventing resort to violent aggression, namely wrath. From the psychological point of view the seven virtues were designed to inculcate peace, a positive work ethic, and acceptance of the poverty that was the reality of most lives among the beneficiaries of Christian teaching as channeled by the Church from its special relationship to the transcendent, the divine.

How did a virtuous life benefit the individual assiduously avoiding the deadly sins?

Avoiding the obvious snare that virtue would be rewarded in the present – after all the Books of

Job and Ecclesiastics suggested that this would not necessarily happen, and in any case the

Church was well aware it did not happen for most people – a after life in Heaven was promised

56 to those pure at heart. In principle an afterlife spent in Hell was the natural consequence for individuals whose combined sum, the heavy weight so to speak, of sins was sufficiently great.

Guaranteeing easy entry into heaven for the odious, the vengeful, the cruel, the sexually debased, would undermine the principle that virtue was good and its goodness would pay off at some juncture.

Of course the Church was prepared to assist the sinful individual who had strayed far too long on the path of unrighteousness and was prepared to repent. The way to avoid Hell is to secure a spot in purgatory. If enough people pray for you after your death you might even be able to escape purgatory altogether, immediately ascending to heaven. The logical conclusion of this reasoning is both simple and compelling: support Church activities through donations or acts of devotion: participate in a crusade against the Saracens; give money to monasteries (if you were a feudal lord you were encouraged to establish a new monastery), purchase indulgences at cathedrals at so forth. In this way you can purchase prayers repetitively pronounced by monks on your behalf, shortening the terrible time you are condemned o spend in purgatory where you pay for your reprehensible behavior on earth.

In theory global unity was possible. Provided Christianity managed to triumph throughout the world – dispatching to the dustbin of history the errors inculcated by Islam,

Hinduism, Confucianism, Buddhism, Taoism, Shintoism, paganism, atheism, and all of the other erroneous beliefs – great and good things would eventually happen. The Second Coming of

Jesus Christ might be ushered in. If not, at least conflict between competing faiths would end.

Like many other salvation religions – Pure Land Buddhism, Shi’a Islam – eschatological

Christianity has a teleological theory about history. History has a predetermined destination;

57 when the justice infused destination is reached souls will be dispatched to their deserved fates, either sent to Heaven or Hell; stability, peace, and unity in each of the two dominions – the good with the good, the evil with the evil - ultimately realized.

Ironically the Catholic Church at the end of the Medieval Era, successful in the sense that it was acquiring immense urban wealth – notably flexing its financial muscle in rebuilding the Vatican complex in fifteenth and early sixteenth century Rome – matching its sprawling landholdings bristling with monasteries, was about to be shaken by the Reformation that shattered forever its hold over Christian Europe, let alone over newly acquired outposts in Asia and the New World.

Atheistic Communism embraced a remarkably similar logic. If all of the world’s oppressed workers joined together on an international basis, throwing off their chains, nations and states would wither away. Ultimately class warfare – the mechanism driving history forward – would end. The virtuous socialist super person would emerge, enthusiastically committed to the common weal, eschewing personal aggrandizement and greed, working for the benefit of the masses. Eventually everyone would see the light, embracing radical socialism, inculcating an extreme form of altruism. Gone would be monarchs, emperors, self-aggrandizing despots; rapacious capitalists exploiting their minions and their naïve customers; religious leaders espousing delusions that are nothing more than pious placebos, doses of opium entrammeling the vulnerable. At last people would see reality free of flimflam and self-serving nostrums: like democracy, free speech, salvation through the faith in Jesus Christ, an afterlife in a Muslim heaven blessed with verdant groves and streams dancing with shafts of light.

Ironically charismatic dictators – Lenin and Stalin in the Soviet Union, Mao in China – laid the

58 groundwork for personality cults that turned so-called secular opponents of transcendental forces into demigods, their legacies hovering over the peoples they governed like Christian,

Muslim, or Hindu gods.

Mao once said that the Chinese peasantry consisted of a blank slate on which the truths of Communism could be written. Introducing a regime of forced collectivization on a wary peasantry more interested in farming private plots rather than working for labor points doled out by commune bureaucrats and party hacks, the Maoists promised that a world in which able members of the commune joyously labored for the common good, joyfully smiling with blissful contentment as they secured the foodstuffs that all members of the commune including those unable to work hard due to disability or disease would consume. The year 1956 was to be the linchpin of historical change, the great moment when the glorious light of pure Communism would prevail. Propaganda posters touted the new era when the future was to written on the communal present: giggling girls lifting stalks of rice plants from wagons, teams of workers joyfully and cooperatively planting spring crops, tractors everywhere. Two years later China experienced the Great Famine that left over twenty million dead in his wake. So much for the

Communist heaven!

In complex societies conflict is inevitable; unity is illusionary; everlasting stability is not in the cards. Every regime that has aspired to achieve these goals has aimed to do so by attempting to give birth to a virtuous people – sincere Christian or ardent socialist advocating materialist ideology as a panacea – who, acting as a catalyst, encourages through illustrious example, the spread of the ideal within the remainder of humanity, thereby saving every living soul from their own worst instincts. Promoting universal justice, stability, and peace through

59 the ideology of virtue has always failed and failed dismally, spawning horrific unintended consequences.

Why Corruption and Conflict Undermine Unifying Ideologies: Unchanging Human Nature In the Republic Plato advanced a famous argument about how and why elites should rule polities, fashioning regimes of benevolent despotism. Put simply the masses are unable to understand reality. In the famous allegory of the cave only philosophers escape the darkness, advancing into the sunlight where they come in contact with the deep seeded ideals – truth, beauty, justice – that solar goodness bestows upon them in the form of pure light. The masses remained prisoners of their own illusions, only glimpsing shadows cast on the walls of the cave by fires. They are ignorant; unfree; prisoners. Only the philosophers understand true knowledge. Motivated by altruism and pity for the masses who only observe shadows etched out by the dim light of conflagrations the philosophers take on the burden of creating polities that operate according to truth. The philosopher-guardians lay down the rules and norms through propaganda, conditioning the behavior of their inferiors, leaving policing and military functions to a middle stratum of soldiers, the commoners – craft workers, slaves, farmers – crowding into the bottom. It is a kind of idealized quasi-caste system in the sense that the philosopher-guardians share foodstuffs, luxuries, and access to females for sexual gratification and reproduction in communal fashion. Because the philosopher-guardians are best equipped to raise children who can mature as diviners of truth.

The critical assumption underlying the Republic is that the guardians are committed to truth and justice, therefore pure in mind and body. They instruct the policing agents who command their inferiors the common herd. But what if the guardians are impure? What

60 happens if they are corrupt? Greedy, lecherous, dishonest, avaricious? What happens if the truth is insufficiently evident to all of the enlightened guardians? What happens if one guardian fixates on a gleam of light that nobody else can see? What happens when the tightknit group breaks into quarreling factions, some supporting policy A while the others argue passionately for policy B? What happens if the truth is nothing more than a human concocted ideology, no better, no worse, than other potential aspirants? What transpires if jealousy and rage results from debates in the chamber of the powerful? What happens when the warrior-police receive contradictory directions depending on whom they receive their commands from? What happens if a faction of police, deeply dissatisfied with the bickering among the rulers, decides to carry out a coup d’etat, overthrowing the entire apparatus of government mandated by the guardian group? To repeat: what happens if human nature is a nest of contradictions that most of us – perhaps not the blessed few who are close to perfection in their purity of spirit – cannot escape? What happens when the road to Hell is paved with good intentions? What happens when the policing agents are just as confused, corruptible, and contemptible, as the masses over whom their policies ride roughshod?

Why is human nature so contradictory? A compelling answer is the makeup of the human brain where we process sensations, form instinctive drives, and reach decisions about how and when to act. Like it or not the brain we are talking about was developed millennia ago when are common ancestors - homo erectus and homo sapiens - evolved along a branch splitting off from a trunk that was the African ape. It is quite possible this common ancestor was closely related to bonobos and chimpanzees who like homo erectus survived in on the plains of

Northeast Africa. Interestingly enough, it would appear the human brain generates behavioral

61 activity that is a kind of halfway house between the typical behavior evinced by chimpanzees on the one hand, bonobos on the other. Observations on bonobo populations living in relative seclusion on the South bank of the Congo River suggest that they are matriarchal, seldom kill, operate in a fairly non-hierarchical manner, and make peace by engaging in sexual activity. By contrast chimpanzees who live in open environments where borders are hard to define and porous are patriarchal, highly territorial, aggressive, and prone to jealousy and anxiety. What is the chicken and what is the egg? Did environmental constraints select for certain behaviors over time? Or did populations with certain behavioral characteristics outcompete other populations struggling for existence in either open or closed environs? In any case the point is the distant ancestors of humans probably evolved in both environments.

Speculating on the original conditions faced by Stone Age humans, evolutionary psychologists have come up with models explaining how the human brain functions. In this endeavor they draw heavily from neurobiology that studies the physical makeup of the brain itself. According to the model developed by Pinker (2011) there are various emotion-laden circuits operating within the midbrain containing the hypothalamus and the amygdala.

Emotions of rage, aggression, and predation are swirling within this midbrain. Surrounding it is the orbital cortex where the emotions generated by the midbrain are combined with memories and physical sensations. This is the locus where regulation of, control over, behavior takes place. In particular the frontal lobe of the orbital cortex is the seat of reasoning and self-control.

It is the locus of cost-benefit calculation, figuring how the individual should behave in social situations where strategic actions are being played out. In this model of the brain there are dark demons and brighter angels. The midbrain generates circuits of emotional energy shaping

62 predation (greed, lust, ambition); it encourages us to be dominant and egotistical (the hormone testosterone plays a role here); it drives the impulse to seek and exact revenge; and at its darkest it generates a sense of joy and satisfaction from inflicting pain and suffering on others, namely sadism. Turned inward this erupts into masochism, the drive toward martyrdom, the urge to experience expiation through self-inflected punishment. Arguably this is the drive channeled by suicide bombers. Working against these impulses are our better angels that are seated in the orbital cortex. One is empathy (a hormone oxytocin produced by the hypothalamus is critical to this impulse), altruism and self-sacrifice flowing from this source.

The other is what Pinker believes is the central mechanism driving civilizing behavior (including resorting to diplomacy and deal making over violence), namely the frontal lobe’s reasoning capacity, encouraging us to control ourselves, to weigh up the costs and benefits of particular coping strategies, the locus of our willingness to postpone present satisfaction for anticipated future benefits. Among other things Pinker argues that virulent ideology – the capacity to treat certain people as impure, as heretics, as outsiders, as so-called “animals” – is one of the principal reasons why groups sufficiently indoctrinated with a hatred for the Other are willing to carry out acts of extreme cruelty.

The point is we are conflicted. Reason and enlightenment can only get so far. An important corollary of this analysis is that Plato’s idealist model of how to organize a perfect polity must be misguided. Given the fact that most of the philosopher-guardians are inherently conflicted in their behavior it is impossible to envision them arriving at a workable consensus that does not invite controversy and corruption. One can imagine a referee settling disputes as a way out of this conundrum of course, a well-intentioned tyrant, a dictator, even a benevolent

63 dictator. But how does the dictator become the dictator? Presumably by outwitting challengers.

Again one can imagine that a charismatic figure whose brain is hardwired in a way that favors the better angels over the dark forces might become the referee. But even in this case there is a problem. No dictator cannot act alone. He or she must rely on loyal minions to carry out policies. Assuming in a large pool of people most individuals are not exemplary in their goodness, that most individuals are not strongly biased toward the better angels in their behavior – I am presuming that there is a normal distribution of brains with the great mass of people being relatively similar, that is to say strongly conflicted – there is scant hope that a benevolent despot can achieve his or her goals in the way he or she originally intended. Too many chiefs spoiling the stew; too much backsliding; too much corruption.

It is important to keep in mind that political elites are under great stress. The stress arises from frustration over achieving goals through a line of command; the stress arises from the law of unintended consequences that haunts all decision-making. Under the conditions of stress we are more likely to fall victim to our worst impulses.

We have hard evidence documentary evidence to support this contention. One set of evidence concerns the Inuit-Eskimo. A highly simplified account of their treatment goes as follows. Subjected to so-called civilizing norms, the Canadian Inuit were wooed off their hunting and gathering life styles by fur traders, well-meaning bureaucrats, and pious Anglican priests, who rounded them up, settling them in towns and villages, placing their children in reservation schools where they could be tutored in Christian norms. The result has been a wholesale calamity. Sharing of food that is secured through hunting and foraging may still persist among the Inuit on some reserves but not sharing of food in general. Working for a boss, a company

64 manager, the average adult Inuit male has lost his sense of independence. Purchasing his food and consumer durables with his wage income he is unwilling to share food he has purchased on the market. He is prone to drink. He becomes violent when he is inebriated. He may abuse his children who in any case do not have the respect for him that they did when he was the sole source of food as a hunter endowed with superb skills. The children rebel, become argumentative, restive, even violent. Suicide spreads among the young. Peace and tight regulation of aggression of the young disappear. The law of unintended consequences holds with a vengeance.

Another group that has been studied in great detail is the German Reserve Police

Battalion 101 who participated in the killing of Jews in Poland during the period when the

Holocaust was at its most intense, the summer of 1942. During the 1960s West German prosecutors interviewed over 200 of the approximately 500 members of the Battalion, one of the many assembled as Ordnungspolizei by the Reich to assist in the Final Solution in the occupied Eastern front consisting of Poland and the western reaches of the Soviet Union that

Germany seized after Operation Barbarossa commenced in 1941. In a compelling account

Browning (1992) argued that the men involved in sending Jews to Treblinka for gassing or shooting in cold blood in a forest were simply ordinary persons caught up in an extraordinary situation.

Interestingly most of the men in Reserve Police Battalion were middle-aged – hence too old for conscription in the army – professional policemen who had worked in a variety of non- descript occupations prior to the war. Some had been dock workers, some businessmen, some truck drivers. They were sent to Poland in tandem with the other police battalions to assist

65 ethic Germans living in the East and Trawnikis (captured Lithuanians, Latvians, and Ukrainians trained at Trawniki, a conurbation lying in the vicinity of Lublin, who expressed an active interest in killing the Jews rounded up for extermination) in the Final Solution. Under this command they were expected to prepare shipments of Jews for transport to Treblinka where they were gassed. In addition if needed they were expected to shoot men, women, and children deemed unfit for forced labor in work camps set up to exploit Jewish and Poles slotted for brutal work leading ultimately to death.

In an infamous incident occurring in the summer of 1942 the Reserve Battalion 101 shot to death around 1,500 Jews who had resided in the village of Jozefow. Rounded up and marched to a forest near the village the men, women and children were ordered to lie flat on the ground at which point the individual policeman was expected to place a bayonet at the neck of their victim, killing the person paired off with him instantly. Blood, brain fragments, and bits of bone pelted the police as they carried out their grim work. Plenty of alcohol was supplied to the executioners; in any case if an individual opted out of the brutal task, he was allowed to exit, albeit to suffer the jibes of his more stalwart fellows who at least did their duty, perhaps enduring tormenting waves of guilt in the aftermath. Likely as not, he would be called a coward, a sissy, an insufficiently masculine person.

It is important to keep in mind that very few of the men were Nazis, let alone members of the SS. In this sense they were ordinary Germans, not necessarily heavily indoctrinated with

Nazi ideology and the anti-Semitism that was an obsession of men like Hitler and Himmler.

Based on the reasoning of the Milgram experiment that showed people given commands to shock with electricity unseen individuals placed in an adjoining room, Browning argued that

66 these ordinary persons were willing to carry out acts of extreme brutality and sadism precisely because they were ordinary. They were carrying out orders; they were afraid of ostracism, afraid of being accused of being insufficiently loyal to the commanders who were in charge. In short they were risk averse but not inherently evil.

Rebutted the thesis of Browning, Goldhagen (1996) maintained that it was not risk aversion, group pressure, and the willingness to follow orders that underlay the behavior of

Police Battalion 101. Rather it was ideology, the anti-Semitism that helped bring the Nazis to power in the early 1930s. In one sense it does not matter. Whether it is ideology that Pinker highlights in his analysis of the dark demons of our mental makeup; or the less frightening but equally plausible fact that our frontal lobes encourage us to be risk averse; the fact is people experiencing extreme stress are prone to act as groups in unpredictable ways. It certainly makes it harder for anyone to make a plausible case that Plato was correct in his devising of an idealized republic operating under the wise guidance of philosophers. Human nature corrupts us all.

In particular it corrupts religious leaders who purport to channel the voice of God on earth. Is it surprising that candidates for the papacy during the Renaissance in Italy were prepared to poison their rivals? Consider the following account by Burckhardt (no date: 72-73) who is discussing the Papacy under Borgia domination:

“…many of the Papal guards were waylaid and put to death. But those whom the Borgias could not assail with open violence fell victims to their poison … a white powder of an agreeable taste was made use of …. the official epitomizer of the history of the Popes, Onofrio Panvinio, mentions three cardinals, Orsini, Ferrerio and Michiel, whom Alexander [the pope] caused to be poisoned, and hints at a fourth, Giovanni Borgia, whom Cesare [Borgia] took into his own charge …. says Panvinio [Alexander] ‘would

have put all the other rich cardinals and prelates out of the way, to get their property, had he not, in the midst of his great plans for his son, been struck down by death.” Without a doubt the behavior of Renaissance popes was extreme, most popes being far more virtuous than the Borgias. Italy during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries was violent, the

Vatican not being immune from murder most foul. Still there is a basic problem that undermines the myth that a judicious completely virtuous ruler will emerge on the world stage, bringing peace and contentment to all: the fact power corrupts.

That power corrupts – and as the adage goes, absolute power corrupts absolutely – even amongst religious elites ostensibly committed to purity, is one reason why prophets exist.

Prophets as Disruptive Visionaries and Purifiers

In his Theological-Political Treatise published in Amsterdam in the latter half of the seventeenth century Baruch Spinoza argued that prophets had three salient characteristics: they claimed to witness extraordinary events and creatures that are commonly conjured up in dreams in a fully awakened state; they were vouchsafed a sign indicating they were chosen by a transcendental force to preach; and they were widely, almost universally, considered to be morally pure, endowed with an overwhelming commitment to virtue 7. Pursuing this assumption to its logical conclusion,, Spinoza went on to argue that prophets were not wise, they were quite ignorant, lacking any scientific or mathematical knowledge, their inspiration being simply moral, their authority simply flowing from their charisma. He also pointed out that the Hebrew prophets whose accounts are contained in the Hebrew Bible were remarkably inconsistent with one another. Moses was said to have claimed that no human could see

Yahweh with his or her natural eyes; yet Isaiah said that he saw the glory of the Lord departing

68 from the Temple as a seraphim with six wings; at another juncture Yahweh appeared to him as a monarch fully clothed in finery, seated on a royal throne. Ezekiel had a distinct vision of

Yahweh as a beast; in another witnessing of the divine presence Yahweh was a holy fire fearsome and flashing.

Spinoza a descendent of Portuguese Jews who fled Iberia in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries in order to openly practice their faith – unlike the Marranos who nominally converted to Christianity while secretly practicing their religion, Sephardic Judaism – certainly knew scripture well. He had been a brilliant student of Torah learning in the Talmud Torah congregation as a youth, before his study of the scientific and philosophical theories of René

Descartes convinced him that theology and scripture were inconsistent with true knowledge of

God who was nothing more nor less than natural law itself best understood by scientists and philosophers, not religious authorities. His rigorous immersion in the Hebrew Bible and the New

Testament convinced him that religions of all stripes – Jewish, Catholic, Lutheran, strict

Calvinist, Remonstrant Calvinist, Unitarian, and Socicianist among a host of alternatives – were chock full of superstition and ignorance, chocking off critical free thought, oppressive insofar as they put a premium on unthinking obedience.

What stands out in Spinoza’s analysis of prophecy and the prophet as a charismatic figure is the peculiar nature of monotheism as a theological system. Spinoza is at pains to argue that other nations other than the ancient Hebrews were influenced by prophets – and he fully embraces the idea that Christianity and Islam continued the prophetic tradition laid down in the ancient kingdoms of Judah and Israel – but examples of prophecy, while not restricted to monotheistic religions, are not as readily found and commented upon outside the West and the

Middle East. There is a good reason for this. Polytheism – as exemplified by Greek and Roman religions and Hinduism – abounds in deities that are competing with one another. The Iliad and the Odyssey are potent examples. Prophecy under these circumstances is nothing more than signing on to an agenda laid down by one of a number of competing transcendent figures: in

Homer’s account of the Trojan Wars, Zeus, Apollo, Hera, Poseidon, Ares, Athena, and Aphrodite all play roles, favoring one or perhaps two heroes among the ranks of the warriors, responding to appeals by the humanity caught up in the tragedy of conflict. Where is the virtue? Where is the moral authority? Only when there is one God does it make sense to refer to prophets as charismatic figures exemplifying virtue that ideally should be followed by a people aspiring to ethical purity.

However at the same time that monotheism aspires to teach salutary lessons for a struggling humanity through its focus on one single transcendent figure it finds itself mired in polytheistic tendencies and contradictions which Spinoza with his detailed knowledge of the

Old and New Testaments exposed in a penetrating critique of scripture. The deity appears differently to different prophets. Each comes to the table of prophecy with their own agenda, their own idealized divine force, confirming their expectations in their visions. Setting aside the paradox that Yahweh appears in different guises when He makes His presence known to the virtuous is the fact that the God may be devious. For instance Moses lays down the punishment of death for false prophets; at the same time Ezekiel claims that Yahweh sent false prophets to deceive Ahab. Moreover what are we to make of Satan who negotiates with Yahweh over Job’s fate? As Spinoza points out a critical reading of the Hebrew Bible reveals an immense body of contradictions.

By the same token the Catholic Church has created a huge pantheon of saints to whom worshippers appeal for guidance and spiritual nurture. The key point about these demigods is that they perform miracles. By definition miracles are events that defy natural order, the laws of physics, chemistry, and biology. They are godlike at least in the sense that they are able to emulate Jesus insofar as Jesus was a miracle worker. The saints may not be immortal but at least they possess super-mortal powers.

The existence of a pantheon of saints from whom Medieval Era guilds took their names was one reason why the Protestant Reformation took place. To reformers, fifteenth and sixteenth century prophets, like Martin Luther focus on the Catholic Church’s pantheon of demigods diverted people’s attention away from focusing on the bedrock teachings of Jesus and the Apostles. This corrupted the original message laid out in the New Testament. Equally corrupting was the theory of purgatory that gave the Church a mechanism for extracting lucrative resources out of secular rulers and the populace more generally. An extreme example was the sale of indulgences, supposed guaranteeing to the devout purchaser a reduction in the time one spent suffering purgatorial torment before blissfully ascending to heaven.

In order to finance the rebuilding and refashioning of Saint Peter’s and the Sistine

Chapel in Rome, the Vatican – working hand in hand with Jacob Fugger, one of the capitalist geniuses of the Renaissance – underwrote a vast campaign involving the wholesale issuing of indulgences. It was this campaign that roiled the network of princes who dominated the politics of the Holy Roman Empire, encouraging a subset to openly defy the Church, protecting Martin

Luther, calling for a convocation of the Empire to grapple with the criticisms of Church practice

71 that Luther as a Renaissance prophet was espousing. Why did this risky strategy align itself with their secular interests?

There are four reasons. First and foremost the Reformation stripped away religious assets, bringing them under secular authority. This was definitely true in the Protestant lands where monarchs and princes padded their finances by closing monasteries. Certainly Protestant communities paid a considerable price for closing down Catholic Church institutions. They were compelled to take over social services for the destitute, infirm, and impoverished. One of the unsavory consequences of the Reformation was the introduction of workhouses where the indigent were forced to labor. In some communities the unemployed were placed in basements into which water was poured: go to work or die!

A second reason is the market. The Catholic Church was definitely corrupted by the spread of a monetized economy – by selling indulgences, by selling high church offices guaranteeing a lucrative tax-free income to claimants, by encouraging nepotism – but it had a monopoly over the articles of faith. Once the door to Protestantism was opened sects proliferated: Lutherans, Calvinists, Anabaptists, Presbyterians, Anglicans, Methodists, Puritans, on and on. Now there was a market for doctrine. In principle consumers could choose a faith.

Understandably religious leaders like Martin Luther were profoundly unhappy with unrestricted choice. They tried to become local monopolists wherever they could. A form of Protestant theocracy was tried, most notably in Geneva under Calvin’s iron hand: a heretic in Geneva was burned at the stake under Calvinist theocratic rule. But once religious ritual and religious thought became a market phenomenon it undercut the claim that one and only variant was valid. In this respect it set the stage for religious tolerance.

Third by highlighting “justification by faith” (whether predetermined by God’s grace or in some other way) the Protestant Reformation attacked root and branch the entire edifice built up by the Catholic Church during the Medieval Era. This included the ban on usury and the concept of purgatory inextricably linked to the sale of indulgences. After all in his Ninety-five

Theses Martin Luther had called into question the power of the pope to absolve sins. This fact certainly made Protestantism a practical choice for a ruler intent on promoting commerce – particularly when the ruler could shave off a piece of the action by granting monopolistic licences to powerful merchant houses at a price – a fact that Henry VIII and his conniving minister Thomas Cromwell were to grasp.

Fourth closing monasteries opened markets for workshops organized in guilds. No longer competing with monks who were subsidized through alms and grants of rent generating lands, completely commercialized workshops enjoyed enhanced leverage in markets. True, the decline of monasteries as competitors with workshops had been going on for centuries. The

Reformation simply accelerated the process initiated during the early Renaissance.

That the artisans committed to the religious orders still played a significant role during the Renaissance is indicated by the careers of two famous men of the cloth who painted in

Florence during the mid-1400s: Fra Angelico and Fra Filippio Lippi. Both figures are on interest because they illustrate how progressive and competitive the monasteries could be. It is worth noting that Lippi was a reluctant monk, eventually defrocked. He invited a bevy of nuns to live with him and ended up having a child with one of the ladies, Lucrezia Buti. Had it not been for the intervention of his patron Cosimo de Medici things might have gone very badly for him. As it was he was tortured on the rack. While Lippi focused on religious painting he showed a keen

73 interest in representing the Madonna in the most fashionable clothing. It is fair to say his secularism matched his piety, probably surpassing it in fact.

Not so Fra Angelico. He was a pious Dominican monk throughout his life, pursuing his career first in San Domenico in Fiesole, later in San Marco in Florence. It was in Florence that his painting caught fire, pushing him into the forefront of a wave of technological capitalism. In this wave he carved out a market niche, painting many variants on the Madonna theme, as well as representations of miracles performed by saints. Many of these were frescos gracing the walls of San Marco. He was known as the “angelic” painter for good reason.

What was the technological wave he rode? It was the innovation of geometric perspective and the vanishing point, a breakthrough of the purest genius. Beginning as scientific and mathematical speculations – and famous experiments carried out by Filippo Brunelleschi (a gifted architect who solved the problem of constructing the massive dome for the Florentine

Cathedral) – the theory and practice of using geometric perspective transformed Western painting. That is was profoundly scientific is indicated by the fact that it made heavy use of mathematical reasoning and an understanding of optics (mirrors and optical illusion). That it was technological is indicated by its spawning a model – a template - increasingly utilized by painters in Florence, then widely in Italy, and finally throughout Europe. It set off an innovation wave, imitation rippling out rapidly from the original inspiration. It was this innovation wave that set the stage for a flourishing of Christian prophecy during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.

How the genius Brunelleschi came up with his inspired experiments is unclear. Some speculate it arose from his attempts to accurately draw pillars in ancient Roman buildings, perhaps in Romanesque structures. It is said he carried out a famous experiment using a mirror.

On the face of the mirror he painted some of the features of Florentine buildings that could be observed if you looked out through the opened doors of a structure. Then he placed the mirror at a strategically thought out distance marked out from the opening of the doors in the interior of the structure. On a clear day one could see the reflection of the buildings outside the doors.

At the proper distance from the doors the images he painted on the mirror exactly lined up with the reflections of the buildings outside the doors. Looking directly at the mirror from outside the doors one could see a vanishing point toward which all of the rays converged.

Whether this story is completely true or apocryphal is open to debate. But what it does suggest is that Brunelleschi had a mathematical model in mind. What we do know is he spent considerable time intensely focused on a Euclidean geometric problem, one he solved by dint of observation, experiment, and mechanics. He was a seducer of nature, coaxing out of nature secrets hitherto unexplored. He wielded the tools of seduction: mirrors, mathematics, and mentality. He exemplified the progressive Renaissance project at its most optimistic. That monks like Fra Angelico could harness it to a project glorifying Christianity would have been a matter of great personal satisfaction. Revealing God’s secrets in nature was progress both religious and secular. Natural truth did not contradict faith; it revealed its common wellspring in the transcendental world of divinity.

Brunelleschi’s architect colleague and friend Leonbattista Alberti astutely realized that one could make a useable template out of Brunelleschi’s theoretical scheme. Alberti published

75 a treatise in 1435 – titled De pictura, the first treatise on painting as opposed to the practical workshop handbook penned by Cennini (1960) – working out an clear set of principles that could be systematically followed by practical painters.

The idea was quickly picked up by Masaccio (Ser Giovanni di Mone Cassai) who had come to Florence to paint, joining the guild of painters in 1422. Fra Angelico – perhaps encouraged by Cosimo de Medici who had a cell at the San Marco monastery set aside for him as a place of refuge from the stresses imposed on him due to his financial and political dealings

– struck by the fact that Masaccio was able to simulate three dimensions on his frescoed walls adopted the technique bringing it to a point of perfection. Here is a description of the

“Madonna and Saints” fresco at San Marco that Fra Angelico and his monk assistants produced in the period 1438 – 1440 8:

“More completely than any work of Fra Filippo Lippi, Fra Angelico’s San Marco altarpiece embodies the ideals of the new phase of the Florentine Renaissance. The pictorial space, measured by systematic perspective from the foreground plane to the horizon seen beyond the trees, provides a place for every person and thing. The space is projected by dividing the lower edge of the painting into equal segments represented by the squares on the carpet, then drawing orthogonals from these segments to the central vanishing point.” To say Fra Angelico carved out a market niche as an adept imitator of Mosaccio is unfair. His achievement was spectacular. He wanted to celebrate the glory of his Christian faith and he accomplished this with a vengeance. Still, once you realize he was riding an innovation wave set off by Brunelleschi’s thought experiments, his stroke of genius, one can say that he was part and parcel of gathering momentum in the field of technological capitalism (for a discussion of the two types of capitalism, merchant and technological capitalism, see Chapter 4). The point is it built on genius, not prophecy.

Even afterwards know that some monasteries were competitive in the fields of medicine and painting. This is definitely true during the early 1500s 9. Vasari describes the Monastery of

Saint Giusto alle Mura as a going concern, manufacturing glass for windows, working up medicines for sale, operating furnaces. At work on the building of St. Peter’s Raphael indicates that he was assisted by a knowledgeable aged friar. If not before, at least from the time of

Giotto monasteries had been fighting a losing battle in the fields of medicine and art. The

Reformation drove the nail into the coffin of the monasteries, at least in districts that turned staunchly Protestant.

One of the differences between monasteries and workshops was entrepreneurship, going after the market wherever it led. Many workshop masters were capitalists pure and simple. If a workshop controlled by a painter cum printer like Dürer could envision a commercial advantage by fashioning woodcuts for a humanist project – the print The Rape of

Europa is one example of his dabbling in ancient mythology - he had no misgivings. A monastery would have struggled to take on such a commission. Indeed the fiery preacher Fra Girolamo

Savonarola’s reaction to a painting by his fellow Dominican monk at San Marco in Florence, Fra

Bartolomeo is telling. Horrified when he learned that nuns had confessed to sinning when they beheld the erotic beauty of Saint Sebastian as portrayed with remarkable realism by

Bartolomeo, he had the painting removed from church.

Indeed the story of Savonarola’s brief reign over Florence – riding a wave of discontent with the Medici after the death of Lorenzo, he attempted to set up a theocracy in the republic between 1494 and 1498 - is indicative of problem the monasteries had in navigating between a growing secular world exalting the fruits of pure genius and adhering to the dictates of Christian

77 faith. Although Savonarola was not the first Italian preacher to denounce humanism and the corruption of the Vatican – Bernardino da Siena, Alberto da Sarzana, Jacopo della Marca,

Giovanni Capistrano, and Roberto da Lecce had undertaken earlier campaigns - he was undoubtedly the most eloquent. Like Luther charismatic, he set out to reform the monastery of

San Marco root and branch, eventually organizing all of the monasteries of Tuscany into an umbrella responding to his dictates.

Did he have in mind establishing a national Italian church centered on Florence? We do not know for sure but what we do know is that he organized the infamous “bonfire of the vanities” in 1497. Coming on the heels of the Carnival celebrations a huge “auto de Fe” was set up on a multi-platform scaffold. On it were burned musical instruments, gold coins, documents

(debtors were keen to put evidence of their borrowings onto the pile), false hair, manuscripts, and paintings. A harbinger of the iconoclasm to come in the Protestant Low Countries in the mid-1550s, up in smoke when masterpieces of art. Savonarola was determined to take on humanism root and branch. But his campaign came to nought. In attacking church corruption he alienated the Vatican that eventually tried him and two of his colleagues for heresy. His allies, the French crown, did not intervene – why should they precipitate a fight with their Holy

Roman Empire rivals – and having been tortured three times – confessing over and over again, recanting over and over again – Savonarola and his two staunchest colleagues were condemned to death, publically hanged, their bodies burned to ashes, their ashes strewn lest their graves turn into shrines.

What a monk in Italy could not accomplish a monk in Saxony could. But distance and hostility toward the Vatican helped in Martin Luther’s case.

An interesting question arises in this context. According to most writers – Machiavelli is often cited in this context and Burckhardt definitely supports his view – Italians in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries were not particularly religious. Monks were treated with contempt in

Florence and Venice. Why did Italy resist the Reformation? Ironically secularization may help account for the answer. Simony and the sale of indulgences bolstered the finances of the

Vatican, freeing popes like Leo to undertake the massive rebuilding of St. Peter’s Basilica.

Indeed it was a deal between Leo and the Augsburg banker Jacob Fugger that encouraged Leo to authorize the sale of indulgences – allowing purchasers to reduce the number of years of torture they would spend in Purgatory – a practice bishops had used in building Gothic cathedrals in the past. The result: Rome successfully raking off the rest of Europe. As a beneficiary Italians could hardly complain. Too cynical an argument perhaps but it does help explain why German princes in the Holy Roman Empire would be more outraged by Leo’s behavior than Italian preachers.

To this one can add superstitions that were deeply engraved in Italian communities and for that matter throughout the Iberian Peninsula due to the Crusades against the Moorish communities. Sadly this was precisely what the iconoclasts hated: the veneration of material symbols – amulets, pictures of the Holy Family (particularly the Virgin Mary to whose worship

Dante devoted his account of Paradise in the “Divine Comedy”), prayer beads – and ceremonies, festivals organized around patron saints. The rise of the fervent Jesuits and the reforms introduced at the Council of Trent certainly helped stem the tide. But the hard cold fact is this: the regions of Europe to which Christianity came relatively late – Northern Germany,

Scandinavia, and the Netherlands – were the most enthusiastic in embracing the Reformation.

Catholic ritual and superstition less well grounded in these soils was the easiest to extricate, to dispense with root and branch.

The fact that Greek and Roman myths accompanied the spread of humanism was another reason secularization could not be bottled up, despite the iconoclastic outbreaks sweeping the Low Countries and the stripping away of opulent decorations in churches, particularly in Calvinist communities. Italian operas embraced ancient mythology with a passion. Painters increasingly turned to classical mythology for their work. One reason: painting religious subjects brought in theology through the back door, Christian symbolism always involved in one way or another. Steering away from Christian symbolism was a way to sell works in both Protestant and Catholic communities. It was a good marketing strategy.

To simplify a complex story. One reason why the prophets ushering in the Protestant

Reformation gained traction is the challenge to priestly transcendental inspiration posed by the growing influence of genius – in financial matters, in art and music, in natural philosophy – within Europe, particularly in the most urbanized regions of Europe, namely Italy, the Lowlands, and the Rhineland. In effect the Church undercut its own credibility by succumbing to the appeal that genius offered. It indulged in merchant capitalism; it acquired monies through the sale of indulgences so that it might employ geniuses like Michelangelo to paint frescos on the roof of the Sistine Chapel. It was kowtowing to a new source of inspiration, one not steeped in prophecy but rather steeped in genius. For Europeans this naturally meant looking to the ancient world of Greece where genius supposedly flourished in abundance.

Given the far greater complexity of technological knowledge and economic activity in

Renaissance Europe – as opposed the lesser complexity of activity in Israel and Judah during the era of the prophets (as celebrated in the second part of the Hebrew bible, Nevi’im), prophets mainly inveighing against national sin attributable to corruption in the priesthood, worship of other gods like Baal, prostitution, and sacrifice of children in the “high places” – it is hardly surprising that the prophetic movement taking place within Europe during the sixteenth century was forced to struggle against far more powerful secular tendencies potentially undermining religion itself, tendencies gathering momentum with the unleashing of genius during the Renaissance.

Geniuses as Inspired Innovators Geniuses and prophets share one important characteristic. They are not risk averse.

They throw all caution to the winds. They simply ignore the law of unintended consequences.

Consider Socrates. He was definitely committed to his daemon, his inner voice. To stay faithful to this voice Socrates questioned the authority and wisdom that the gods worshipped by the

Athenian masses revered. For this he was condemned to either exile or death. While he could have gone to Thebes, Socrates believed his daemon would have viewed this choice of exit as cowardice, as a betrayal. He chose to drink a mixture containing poisonous hemlock instead. To call him stubborn is not the point. He was inspired; his inspiration condemned him to execution.

At the same time a genius is not a prophet. A genius does not claim to be virtuous. That is not the point. The point is harnessing creativity. As often as not geniuses are testy, imperious,

81 tempestuous, mercurial, abysmally difficult to live with, frequently solitary when they are channeling inspiration, quarrelsome to the point of being impossible to work with.

That genius emerged as a distinct criterion in evaluating culture was a powerful driver – an engine for fanatical devotion to creativity, to meticulous self-criticism, to an unbending and unrelenting work ethic, to unrelenting fastidiousness in completing works – among the growing field of geniuses. Regardless of external gratification – lucrative contracts and commissions, public adulation and praise, showering of sycophancy – what made a genius work intensely was the very assumption that they were blessed with insights other mere mortals lacked. The cult of genius was self-fulfilling: by celebrating genius it encouraged the emergence of genius.

Convinced he or she was inculcating divine inspiration, the genius became martyr and slave to noble truth, absolutely convinced of the rectitude of his or her calling.

To an important degree geniuses adroit practitioners of synthesis. They drew from what others did, from other geniuses to be sure but also from less inspired colleagues. By picking and choosing, by separating wheat from chaff, they absorbed influences, they devoured, blatantly stealing if they felt it justified to further their ends. In this sense the genius was best situated in a genius center where he or she had the greatest pool of competing techniques to either mimic or to consciously reject. Where the cult of genius shone the strongest, geniuses gathered, absorbing the light shining from a myriad of candles. A classic example is Florence during the mid-fifteenth century.

Neo-Platonism – cultivated by Cosimo de Medici and his son Lorenzo in the Florence of the fifteenth century – went hand in hand with the cult of genius. Whether the Florentine

82 philosophers sponsored by the Medici correctly understood Neo-Platonic thinking was not an accurate reflection and outgrowth of Plato’s philosophy is a matter for dispute is a controversial matter much disputed. What does matter is that the Medici assembled around themselves a circle of thinkers – notably Marsilio Ficino and Pico della Mirandola – who had immersed themselves of Neo-Platonic writings, including the philosophers Plotinus and his follower

Porphyry who had taken a strong stance against Christianity in the third century. Plotinus, a

Hellenized Egyptian philosopher, founded a school in Rome where he taught what he believed to be the essence of Platonism. In his work the Enneads he adheres to some of Plato’s views – the highest form of reality being immaterial, a conviction that immortality is possible, a belief that the goodness pervades the universe – but strays from boilerplate Platonism in arguing that there is continuous circuit running back and forth from the transcendental world to the material world, from the One to the many. All of nature embodies soul that is an extension of the One spreading out into the material universe.

As channeled by Ficino into the Florentine circle gathered around the Medici the consequences for a theory of genius were enormous 10:

“He [Ficino] believed that the life of universe … was linked to God by spiritual circuit continuously ascending and descending, so that all revelation, whether from the Bible, Plato, or classical myths was one. Thus the Neo-Platonists could invoke the ‘celestial Venus’ (that is, the nude Venus born of the sea …) interchangeably with the Virgin Mary, as the source of ‘divine love’ … this celestial Venus, according to Ficino, dwells purely in the sphere of Mind, while her twin, the ordinary Venus, engenders ‘human love’…. Plato’s concept of genius – the spirit entering into the poet that causes him to compose in a ‘divine frenzy’ – had been broadened by Marsilio Ficino and his fellow Neo- Platonists to include the architect, the sculptor, and the painter. Men of genius were thought to be set apart from ordinary mortals by the divine inspiration guiding their efforts …the concept of genius as divine inspiration …. Is nowhere exemplified more fully than in the life and work of Michelangelo … he himself, steeped in the tradition of

Neo-Platonism, accepted his genius as a living reality, although it seemed to him at times a curse rather than a blessing …” Not only was pagan myth channeled into art – including lascivious female nudes like Venus,

Dido, Europa – on an equal plane the stories pervading pious Christianity, whether they be Old or New Testament. The artist as receptacle of the divine should be left alone to pursue inspiration in whatever directions he or she wished. Genius trumped ideology. Christian truth was no more valid than was ancient Greek and Latin truth. The One touched both equally.

A crucial corollary – one that Nietzsche would develop centuries later into a theory of the Superman – is that the genius who drives progress in society as a swirling creative force should be set free from all constraints, including Christian morality 11. Along these lines there is evidence patrons approaching Michelangelo did not impose conditions on the work he did for them. They simply asked him to create something for them, whatever and wherever his whims took him. His will was supreme. He was completely convinced that the neo-Platonic doctrines espoused in the Medici court was valid: genius must be respected, coddled (by contrast

Leonardo da Vinci, his great Florentine rival, was contemptuous of neo-Platonic thinking despite his brash self-confidence in his own genius). Without doubt there was a dark side to this picture of unfettered genius. Exacting standards having been set by geniuses, exacting standards were expected by clients. Genius straddled a two-edged sword. Were they sure there inspiration would continue to flow in the future?

Leonardo and Michelangelo are widely considered the apex – the epitome – of the

Florentine progressive Renaissance. This is strange: both artists transcended the purest expression of the progressive Renaissance, namely the work of Donatello, Massacio, and Fra

Angelico. Michelangelo's highly muscled, exaggerated, portrayals of humans – exemplified by his famous painting of the Sistine Chapel ceiling and his sculptures – pointed the way toward

Mannerism. Leonardo, who was really Michelangelo’s opposite in many ways, critical of the highfaluting Neo-Platonism of Lorenzo de’ Medici, came out of the artisan workshop tradition while transcending it by moving around from patronage opportunity to patronage opportunity, working for cruel despots like Lodovico Sforza in Milan, and Cesare Borgia as an architect and military engineer.

Prelude to the Enlightenment Age: Genius in the Dutch Golden Age

The cult of Renaissance genius laid the foundations for the Enlightenment. Why? One simple reason is the explosion of genius in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries – not only in the fine arts, literature, natural philosophy, but also informing nascent capitalism and political experimentation, Venice and Florence being pioneers – laid the foundations for non- conformity. By definition geniuses aspire to do new things in unanticipated ways. They break molds. Because geniuses throw caution to the winds they imbibe a form of charisma that rivals that prophets possess. More to the point their agenda is primarily secular.

Even when the geniuses were sincere Christians they were inclined to reverse priorities in their work. Michelangelo was a sincere believer in the Catholic faith but when he painted the

Sistine Chapel frescos his goal was to stay true to his personal daemon, representing females as muscular creatures more akin to the sculptures he fashioned for heroic male figures. Religious rectitude was secondary; artistic integrity that was highly individual in nature was primary.

Clients could dictate some constraints on geniuses but most of the clients in Renaissance Italy

85 feared the independence demanded by the geniuses they employed. Freedom to create, freedom to stay true to one’s own inner voice took on a complexion it sorely lacked during the

Medieval Era.

The fact that tolerating the whims and demands made by self-directed geniuses seemed to pay off in economic, political, and cultural terms helped to make a case for unfettered innovation and unfettered exercise of voice. More than anything the Enlightenment movement of the eighteenth century was a welter of secular experiments that spun off innovations along a diverse set of lines, confusing and even contradictory in the directions they explored, a veritable crazy quilt that inherently lacked a clear central focus. From an ideological point of view the only thing binding together the rich avenues of reform and creativity advanced by

Enlightenment figures was the secular nature of the sprawling list of novel ideas.

What were the key innovations, the most intensely debated agendas, envisioned by key eighteenth century Enlightenment thinkers, government officials, politicians, and enlightened autocrats?

One agenda of the Enlightenment was decidedly humanitarian: do away with cruel and unusual punishments – burning at the stake, drawing and quartering, breaking on the wheel – an agenda that included as its most radical tenet abolition of capital punishment altogether. For instance the Holy Roman Emperor Joseph II was strong proponent of eliminating capital punishment altogether. Abolishing slavery often went hand in hand with this political agenda.

Extracting effort out of slaves by ruthlessly whipping them into obedience was certainly cruel

86 and unusual punishment. It is important to note that the Enlightenment inspired constitution of the United States condoned both slavery and capital punishment.

A second prominent agenda involved individual rights: freedom of speech, freedom of religion, and freedom of assembly. In effect this agenda was designed to widen access to voice, opening it up to the masses. Whether freedom of religion was consistent with state sponsored faith was an open question. Should there be a bulwark – a solid wall rigorously maintained by the legal system - separating church from state was vigorously debated in the Enlightenment literature. England and France came down on the side of state sponsored churches – Anglican in England, Catholic in France – while the United States veered in the direction of a strict wall dividing the religious from the secular state, at least in theory.

Enamored of genius, particularly genius applied in the realm of science and technology,

Enlightenment thinkers tinkered with ways to encourage advances in knowledge about the way nature operates: so-called natural philosophy. Allied to this agenda was the promotion of technical breakthroughs by which humans could turn natural forces – steam, heat, linear and curvilinear momentum - to practical use. Royal societies sponsoring research and teaching was one option. Another involved a mixture of government grants and protection of intellectual property through the patent system.

How to devise governments that were capable of protecting individual rights was an issue that profoundly divided the Enlightenment. On the one hand you had rulers like Frederick the Great of Prussia and Catherine the Great of Russia who were quite comfortable with absolutism but still desirous of encouraging free speech and practical applications of science

87 that could be usefully harnessed to bolstering state power and prowess. That was one extreme.

Another extreme was democracy. In the middle was constitutional monarchy. Should a constitution be written down? Should it be based on philosophical principles, in which case what kind of principles? These were open questions.

In reality all kinds of experiments were tried. France between 1789 and the early 1800s is a classical case illustrating how contentious the matter was. The French Revolution began as a Republican experiment in constitutional monarchy. After 1792 it veered toward a constitutional democracy as the king having attempted to flee. Then, in the aftermath of the

Reign of Terror carried out under Jacobin dictatorship at the hands of fanatics like Robespierre and Saint Just, it swung back toward a directorate that was prepared to rescind rights of freedom of speech and assembly. This set the stage for the consulate system concentrating power in a few hands, ultimately paving the way for a single consul, namely Napoleon, who as

Emperor of the French engineered the complete collapse of the Republic. From constitutional monarchy to radical democracy morphing into an Empire consolidated by military victories the law of unintended consequences prevailed over a remarkable period of chaotic experiments in

Enlightenment inspired government.

A pressing economic issue the Enlightenment struggled with was how to treat markets, merchants, and workers. At the practical level freeing up labor markets by abolishing guilds was something pretty much all Enlightenment thinkers favored. Mercantilist systems – holding on to colonies, chartering state monopolies like the East India Company, the Hudson Bay Company, and Northwest Company – were generally targets opposed by Enlightenment thinkers because they restricted free entry into markets by enterprising merchants and entrepreneurs. In short

88 encouraging fragmented capitalism was a goal of many Enlightenment inspired governments.

But not all. Certainly not in Prussia or Russia. Related was regulation; whether state managed banks were a good thing or a bad thing; and how much participation by government in the funding of large research and development projects was desirable. These were issues that divided policy makers into ideologically warring camps.

How to limit corruption was on the minds of Enlightenment philosophers and practical politicians alike. It was recognized that corruption – bribery, eliminating rivals through murder, misrepresenting the value of goods sold on markets – was not only crime that should be outlawed in principle but difficult to do so in practice. The problem they honed in upon was power, either economic power (monopoly or oligopoly) or political power (unbridled absolutism embodied in the theory of the divine right of kings and emperors). Their solution was obvious: bolster competition in economic and political markets. Encourage fragmented capitalism; set up a political system in which there are strong checks and balances, constraining the exercise of power, particularly absolute power that corrupts absolutely. The right to freely assemble and exercise voice was one way to unleash political competition, people liberated to coalesce, form political parties, fight for causes, criticize the way political elites were behaving.

This was a strong argument in favor of democracy, or at least Republican rule in which constitutional checks on the executive branch offered a viable solution. Better yet: separate executive, legislative, and legal power into three branches, each exercising the ability to examine the check the practices of the other two. Crafting a constitution for government in which legislation is vested in a parliament that passes legislation that the executive branch employs to carry out its functions – policing the way the laws are applied in practice, directing

89 ministries operating under the umbrella of the executive branch to spend funds on specific programs, fine tuning the rules for dispensing these monies, for instance – and that is in turn reviewed by the judicial system is one model. Another is to eschew unitary government in favor of confederation rule, individual provinces or states being granted considerable authority over the persons residing in their jurisdiction. The advantage of the latter solution is simple: people residing in a province whose policies they deeply resent have the option or exit, moving to another province or state. Competition is a good thing.

That the Enlightenment project was a hodge-podge of conflicting experiments in secular rule is evident. For instance what do you do with markets for slaves, opium, and prostitution?

How do you protect people during pandemics – like the COVID-19 pandemic – without restricting commerce, without shutting down stores deemed to serve frivolous needs, without imposing social distancing rules that effectively mean concerts cannot take place? Banning these practices through the force of law applied by policing agents, means government is regulating the economy. Humanitarian impulses are running into the logic of unfettered market competition. How do you prevent gangs from soliciting and selling sex when the officials ostensibly in charge of ferreting out illegal prostitution are being paid off by the gang leaders?

Creating a government monopoly that purports to regulate, theoretically eliminating sin – a cabinet ministry in a parliamentary system for instance – creates a host of potential corruption practices. Pay the officials too little and they succumb to bribery; pay them too much and they can secretly purchase the very sinful practices you are discouraging.

Deny it at your peril, the fact is most people with the possible exception of exemplary prophets are not angels; neither is the People a repository of virtue. How to set up a political

90 system that balances rights and freedoms with a relatively uncorrupted social reality is a major problem. This is one reason why state sponsored religions have an appeal to political leaders.

Brandishing funds channeled to them by the state church leaders – ministers, bishops, prelates of all stripes - speaking from their bully pulpits campaign to favor of moral virtue and the abandonment of sin. But what about the corruption that crept into the Catholic Church leading up to the Reformation? Letting other churches compete with the official sanctioned church –

Baptists, Calvinistic Puritans, Quakers, competing with government supported Anglicanism – is one solution. It removes monopoly in religion, fostering ideological competition in the marketplace of faith. But what do you do about atheism and agnosticism?

The importance of guaranteeing individual rights in matters of thought and spiritual sustenance raises goes hand in hand with the idea that individuals are inherently equal in the sense that they enjoy a set of natural rights that enlightened government should not squelch.

The problem is: what do you mean by equality? One meaning is equality of opportunity. In principle everyone who is not enslaved is endowed with the ability to control the use of their own labor. It is a kind of primordial form of private property. Guaranteeing that individuals, growing up destitute or wreathed in riches, enjoy equality of opportunity – to employ their talents and energies in the most lucrative and rewarding fashion possible – is one definition of equality. However it is not the only one. Another is equality of outcomes, what one might call social leveling. Under extreme versions of socialism income is redistributed to generate equality of outcome. Whether this erodes the incentive to work hard is at issue here as a practical problem. In any case as far as unleashing the activity of potential geniuses in population promoting equality of opportunity is clearly a winning strategy. Again a practical problem

91 arises: how do you make sure the most disadvantaged in a population have equal access to opportunity? This is another problem that policy makers acting with the best of intentions had to struggle with.

Why was the Enlightenment project so divided in terms of practical policies? Why did it lack coherence? The answer is simple: the dead weight of history. Given the diversity of states that existed in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries – absolute monarchies, republics, unwieldy confederations like the Holy Roman Empire – no one program for reform was attractive to all constituencies. Those who claim that there was a coherent core to the

Enlightenment project – the systematic application of human reason as opposed to revelation, the interest in supplanting analysis of natural law through science, by extension systematic study of the nature of human behavior and thought – are correct in claiming that the

Enlightenment was fundamentally secular, despite the willingness of individual Enlightenment thinkers, Voltaire for instance, to condemn Catholicism as a pack of grotesque fabrications and failures – the terror and draconian punishments visited upon so-called heretics by the

Inquisitions carried out by Church and Spanish authority in the name of Jesus, the Prince of

Peace, being a prime illustration - albeit a pack of fabrications that might be socially useful because they encouraged the ignorant masses to aspire to virtue.

Not surprisingly the royal road to the Enlightenment ran through the Golden Age

Netherlands. Why? It was the wealthiest country in seventeenth century Europe; it had the highest per capita home; it was remarkably middle class, bourgeois; it was the beneficiary of the Protestant work ethic (at a completely practical level the Protestant work ethic may have primarily benefitted from abolishing the plethora of religious holidays built into the Catholic

92 calendar); it had the highest level of literacy in Europe; it was the center of innovation in capitalist institutions; publishers congregated and competed there; it was religiously diverse; it was a republic albeit one ruled by an oligarchy of sorts. Genius unfettered flourished in the

Netherlands.

The Dutch Republic of the Golden Age economy of the Netherlands was the most opulent, the best educated and most literate, country in all of Europe. Bolstering its high standard of living were remarkable advances in developing capitalist institutions: a vibrant stock market and a powerful bank, the Bank of Amsterdam founded in 1609. It was home to the

Dutch East India Company, the VOC, established in 1602 that monopolized much of the trade flowing between Asia and Europe (after 1640 it was given the exclusive right to handle trade with Japan, operating out of Dejima, a tiny promontory connected to Nagasaki by a walkway; engineering entrepreneurship was rife in the Netherlands, companies established to drain water from the land, creating polders; windmills ground grain for the market; dairy farming was vibrant.

In so dimensions it was the mercantilist version of the Venetian Republic of the early

Renaissance. Aristocracy and oligarchy was not totally absent in the Netherlands – the House of

Orange (more precisely Orange-Nassau) was quasi-royal although not really a king, certainly not an absolutist monarch like Louis XIV in France who claimed he embodied the essence of the

French state. The House of Orange played an oversized role in Dutch political life by dint of history. William the Silent of the House of Orange had played a crucial role in organizing the

Eighty Years war (1568 to 1648) with Spain that led to complete Dutch independence from its

Catholic overlord. For this reason the House of Orange held onto the position of governorship

93 over the Dutch Republic. This position as the stadholder conferred a veneer of aristocracy onto the Dutch republic whose actual practical affairs were largely left to powerful merchants and cultivated political figures.

History had also turned the Netherlands into the most enlightened policy in all of

Europe. Religious diversity was remarkable: Jews had flocked to the Netherlands in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries; Huguenots fleeing France after the Edict of Nantes was repealed took up residence in the Republic; Flemish Protestants fled the southern lowlands in defiance of Catholic Spain. While it is true Catholicism was frowned upon, in practice Catholics were able to practice their faith by commandeering houses as quasi-churches, conventicle.

However Catholics could not hold public offices and they tended to live in quasi-ghettos, districts carved out within towns and cities. One can reasonably conclude that freedom of religion prevailed in practice especially for non-Catholics. Certainly it was not absolute. Spinoza was temporarily banned from Amsterdam by synagogue elders acting in concert with Calvinist authorities although he managed to return to the city later on.

Individual rights – freedom of the press, freedom of speech, and freedom of assembly – were part and parcel of Dutch life, if only because so many persons adhering to different religious faiths had gathered in the Republic. While it was not a full-fledged democracy operating with a formal constitution it lacked a powerful monarchy that could ride roughshod over the body politic. Moreover because the Dutch Republic operated as a coalition – seven quasi-independent provinces had come together to fight off Spanish rule and protect themselves against further aggression from Spain – a system of checks and balances on federal power was a fact of political life.

It is important to keep in mind that the Netherlands of the Golden Age was steeped in art, natural philosophy, free-thought, and outright non-conformity defying conventions that prevailed in most of Europe. Catholics married Protestants: Rembrandt’s mother was Catholic; his father Protestant. Hardline Calvinists feuded with Secularists intent on securing religious freedom for the citizens of the Republic. John Locke who fled to the Netherlands to escape the

Catholicism that James II might impose upon Britain, returned to England after the Glorious

Revolution, publishing a tract recommending religious toleration, albeit limiting Catholicism in favor of Protestantism. Spinoza was accused of atheism; it is likely Huygens was an atheist.

Who was Huygens? He was a perfect example of the scientific dilettante. Overshadowed by Newton, he still made the remarkable contributions to experimental and theoretical physics.

His father was a secretary to Prince William the Silent. In that capacity he recommended that the House of Orange patronize painters like Rembrandt. Like his father his son the scientist moved in cultured circles, promoting music, art, and poetry. His son met Rembrandt, coming away from his meeting enthralled by Rembrandt’s painting of Judas Returning the Thirty Pieces of Silver that the painter had worked up while he was in Leyden before moving to Amsterdam.

Huygens worked on a number of the same problems Galileo had labored with. He invented and perfected the pendulum clock; he discovered rings on Saturn; he worked out a formula for the relationship between the length of a pendulum arm and the time required to complete a complete rotation. This opened up a practical method for estimated g, the rate of gravitational acceleration. He expressed keen interest in the work being done by his countrymen using compound microscopes to tease out from nature the behavior of protozoa, bacteria, striations in skeletal muscle and the composition of nerves. The microscopic field was dominated by two

Dutch investigators – Antoni van Leeuwenhock (who also dabbled in mathematics and astronomy on the side, his main day job being bourgeois haberdasher) and Jan Swammerdam, a fanatical Christian obsessed with the physiology of insects, a study he believed would reveal secrets about God’s plan for the universe.

Most important, Huygens developed a theory of light based on his observations of light reflected in crystals and Icelandic spar, publishing his results in the Treatise on Light in 1690. In this last field Huygens collided with Newton who believed light was corpuscular, beams of white light being made up of rays embodying seven separate colored corpuscles; to the contrary claimed Huygens, light was a wave. As it turned out due to experiments carried out by

Thomas Young and Augustin Fresnel in the nineteenth century suggested Huygens was right and Newton was wrong. They argued light behaved like a transverse sine-wave oscillating around a straight line with tiny high frequency vibrations. Chapter 7 examines this controversy in greater detail, pointing out how pendulum swings in theories about the nature of light have driven advances in physics.

All of this meant fame for Huygens: he was celebrated as a genius. He was invited to become a fellow of the London Royal Society. He was courted by Louis XIV who provided

Huygens with elegant accommodation in Paris at the Royal Library, Huygens agreeing to develop a French rival to the Royal Society, the Académie des Sciences.

Huygens was not of the nobility but he was definitely an example of the cultivated rich person who could – and did – look down on persons like van Leeuwenhock whom he viewed as hopelessly bourgeois. In short Huygens was upper class, not nouveau riche.

In that respect Huygens was out of touch with the nouveau riche in mercantile

Amsterdam who built sturdy homes complete with marble tile floors, chandeliers, Turkish rugs, and pearl necklaces on display. This was the world of the well-to-do households who – despite

Calvinist disapproval of conspicuous consumption – were fully prepared to show off their wealth in display both elegant and frivolous. It was the nouveau riche clientele who fueled the demand for Dutch genre art, a field opened up by Gerard ter Borch in the 1640s. The greatest practitioner of this form of art was Jahannes Vermeer, the Delft Catholic painter. The field of genre painting – exemplified by Vermeer’s output – consisted of canvases modest in size, showed people eating oysters, playing lutes, putting on jewelry, displaying their opulence in elegant clothing. It was middle class to the core. More important it fit in perfectly with the market oriented reality of the Dutch Golden Age: explosive bubbles like the Tulip Mania of the

1630s driven by speculative buyers. Art – unlike music – is a physical asset that can be bought and sold on the market. Even during the early Renaissance merchants bought and sold paintings, purchasing them in Florence for instance, selling them in Spain and the Low

Countries. What happened in the Holland of the Golden Age was a virtual frenzy in the art market. Talented youth jumped into the field, hoping to become rich in the process. Buying art was business, not just pursued for status or pleasure, always an investment to hang onto and sell when prices were strong. It resembled a hothouse, demand driven in part by speculation.

The classic case of a genius undone by this type of seesaw market is Rembrandt.

Rembrandt definitely speculated. After he moved to Amsterdam from his native Leyden – attracted to the mercantilist metropolis by a commission to paint a group portrait, the resulting canvas known as The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Tulp. Group portraits competed with individual

97 portraits in the Amsterdam market, in part because professional middle class guilds populated by professionals flourished there. Rembrandt settled in the city, marrying Saskia van

Uylenbargh born into a wealthy family, making the mistake of purchasing a large expensive house in the Jewish quarter in the Nieuwe Doeknstraat district. Like many of the other

Amsterdam markets, the housing market had its own violent ups and downs, collapsing in the late 1640s. The mortgage Rembrandt had taken out was a source of his future financial woes that led to his near bankruptcy in the late 1650s. In the auction to settle his debts Rembrandt not only lost his home, he also had to put up for sale his prints, his collection of antiquities and curios (including Roman busts and Japanese samurai clothing), falling into such a perilous condition that he had to shutter his once thriving art business, turning its management over to his son Titus and the mistress who would become his second spouse, Hendrickje Stoffels

(Rembrandt became their employee). One could argue the speculative markets of Amsterdam undid the finances of an artist attracted to the nouveau riche lifestyle sweeping through the

Netherlands, dooming him to ultimate poverty.

Was Rembrandt excessively addicted to risk-taking? Was he too entrepreneurial for his own good? We know Rembrandt was entrepreneurial. We know he staked out a career as a dealer in prints done by other artists, that he purchased a printing press, that he had apprentices, perhaps even running a workshop. It is rumored that he trained assistances by asking them to make copies of self-portraits the master had originally painted. Some of these copies are very good indeed, testimony to the fact that imitation is a powerful force in the fine arts and science for that matter. Indeed some of the copies were so beautifully rendered that for centuries they were believed to be done by Rembrandt himself. Herein lies the paradox of

98 the cult of genius. If a painting is so elegantly produced as to be assigned to a genius like

Rembrandt – if for centuries art dealers, appraisers, and critics believed the work was in fact a

Rembrandt original – in what lies the originality of genius, the uniqueness, the stamp of the master that no student, no ingenious artist setting out to commit deliberate forgery can manage to put to canvas?

The point is genius best thrives when it flourishes in a genius center, lesser figures rubbing shoulders with more gifted contemporaries. Amsterdam during the Dutch Golden Age was such a center. As well it was highly entrepreneurial. Rembrandt was hardly unique in taking risks as an artist dabbling in mercantile matters on the side.

Again one could argue Rembrandt was a victim of his own genius. He was famous for working slowly on portraits, requiring long sittings. Were his standards too high? Was his innovation in etching a problem, launching a lucrative career that he could not sustain. Unlike engraving that requires slow work with a cutting tool, etching is done on a wax surface covering a metal plate. The artist draws in the wax, then applies acid that cuts through to the plate. Once the wax has been cleared off one retains a plate that can be used for producing prints. The technique favors an artist who is adept at drawing. Rembrandt drew regularly – doing landscapes, portraits and self-portraits, scenes of ruined castles – so the medium worked well for him, fueling his rise to fame throughout Europe as an artist to be reckoned with. Did this encourage him to become profligate in his ways? That he managed to stake out a European wide reputation is not surprising given his immense talent in etching.

Alternatively Rembrandt might have been undone by another problem associated with the progressive Renaissance project. This was opened up during the heyday of the Florentine

Renaissance and is particularly acute in the work of Leonardo and Michelangelo: the tension between psychological realism and natural realism. In point of fact we know Rembrandt was fascinated by prints and reproductions of Leonardo’s Last Supper, its psychological drama apparent in the faces and body language of the Apostles 12. As a painter who painted group portraits, as a painter who depicted on canvas biblical scenes in which multiple figures appeared interacting with one another, he was naturally attracted to conveying individual emotion through movement, facial expression, and body language. His painting of the blinding of Samson is a prime example. Delilah – modeled by Saskia – rushes out of a curtained room where Samson’s eyes are being gouged out. Her body language is clear. You can see her triumph in her face and her body propelled outward in the light. This is drama brutal, evocative, and powerful. Obvious perhaps but conveying this drama is problematic. It is artificial because you are pushing realism into a direction where the scene depicted is not capturing nature as we perceive it in real life. Did the drive to convey psychological realism encourage Rembrandt to only accept portrait commissions in which the sitter agreed to long sessions so the artist could get an accurate feel for the mental makeup of the person whose facial expression and posture he was putting to canvas? That he was the master of the self-portrait, rendering his own countenance in a completely merciless and penetrating way, is well known, indeed it is a hallmark of his late style in particular, the pinnacle of his legacy. Was his relentless pursuit of psychological truth in art a curse, punishing him with poverty in driven market where simple reliance on genre commissions would have kept his account books in the black, not in the red?

100

What we do know is that both Rembrandt and Vermeer died penniless, leaving debts that in the case of Vermeer needed to be cleaned up lest his widow become penurious, leaving

Rembrandt to be buried in a cemetery for paupers 12? Perhaps the problem with Amsterdam was it was too bourgeois, too driven by fickle swings in market demand and speculative booms and busts. Did the lack of aristocratic patronage in the Netherlands condemn geniuses like

Rembrandt to a dire end?

Exemplifying Dutch free-thought and non-conformity was Spinoza. He was the rarest of individuals. In his personal life he embodied the prophet; in his intellectual life he denounced prophets as ill-informed ignoramuses, paragons of virtue but perpetrators of superstition and blind hostility to intellectually informed thought. He rejected theology which he had steeped himself in as a young man in favor of science and critical philosophy, drawing heavily from the writings of Descartes whose views he championed, then harshly criticized. Already famous in his early middle age as a philosopher, he declined the offer of a chair at the University of

Heidelberg because he suspected accepting the post would compromise his devotion to free thought. Instead he labored as a lens-maker and instrument maker, fashioning telescopes and microscopes for leading scientific thinkers like Christian Huygens. He lived modestly, not in abject poverty but definitely not opulently, dying from a lung disease at the young age of forty- four years, the victim of the fine glass dust he inhaled in his profession. He was the purest of geniuses, Socratic in his willingness to martyr his own life for his deep-seeded principles. He was as close to pure spirit as you can imagine.

From a philosophical point of view his chief contribution to the field was unrelenting monism. The transcendental world apart from the physical world did not exist. God is nature,

101 and the laws of God are the laws of nature. Only through systematic critical study of nature can we understand how divinity operates. Prophecy cannot help us. Only through systematic study of human nature – that is a segment of the natural order – can we make informed rational decisions on how to best organize political and social institution. Spinoza’s monism was a wholesale rejection of Descartes’s mind-body dualism. While he was steeped in Cartesian philosophy his critical acumen was unable to reconcile body with mind. How could they communicate with one another? How could they coordinate activity with one another? One of the two had to rule. Spinoza came down on the side of the material, body. In reaching this conclusion he became a radical materialist. His secularism was informed by his monism.

Religion and prophecy can be explained in terms of their usefulness to elites who realize ideologies awash in virtue and divine punishment inculcate into a the minds and mores of a subject population norms reducing violence and rebellion.

Study of human nature tells us this. Unfortunately theocratic regimes promote ideologies that are little more than ignorance, chocking off critical free thought. Joshua tells us the sun revolved around the earth and it actually stood still for a while. What did he know? He was typical of the ignorant prophets. He was not a learned astronomer. How can you take his claptrap thinking seriously? Ultimately these oppressive thought systems break the back of creativity; they stifle genius; they stymie progress. Moreover, they are used to promote tribalism, placing a particular national group on a pedestal, superior to others, rejecting universalism that is the hallmark of natural law. Spinoza noted that among the contradictions vitiating the plausibility of the Hebrew Scriptures as philosophical wisdom is the fact the prophets appearing in them tend to make an appeal to all peoples – after all they were keen to

102 promote virtue everyone on earth – while that the organized faiths celebrating their visions are principally concerned with consolidating a particularistic political rule. As he noted 13:

“Jeremiah is called, not the prophet of the Hebrew nation, but simply the prophet of all nations.” Prophets are one thing: priests and kings are something else. For priests and kings the value of prophecy is that it binds the Hebrews together as a believing faithful nation. This is not being true to the voice of the prophets but it is a fact that is fully consistent with the laws of human nature which are contained in monism, in natural law, that is the real true God.

The idea that progress exists is one of the most powerful notions implicit in Spinoza’s approach to philosophizing. As scientists and students of social behavior make advances in critical knowledge, philosophy and its applications to political theory can and should change.

The notion that history is relevant to thought is a powerful concept with a myriad of consequences. In the hands of later philosophers – notably Georg Wilhelm Hegel – it becomes the basis for a historical argument about how beliefs and ideals evolve, how “God’s march through history” plays out. Hegel emphasized a dialectic process in which ideas generate counter-ideals struggling toward a synthesis. In Spinoza’s framework there is a struggle envisioned albeit one he framed in terms of his contrast between prophecy and philosophy. He was concerned with an ongoing ideological conflict between religion – transcendental thought

– and science. The fact that the religious made appeals to miracles – outright violations of natural law – as proof of the veracity of their faiths was particularly bothersome to Spinoza. As he argued 14:

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“The masses then style unusual phenomena ‘miracles’, and partly for the sake of opposing the students of science, prefer to remain in ignorance of natural causes, only to hear of those things which they know least, and consequently admire most.” Is ignorance bliss? Spinoza was not impressed with that appeal to blind piety.

That Spinoza was a secularist hostile to religious revelation spilled over into his theory of how to best organize polities. He thought only three types of government – the dominions of monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy – were contenders for being “best”. What made them

“best”? They were the only forms of government that could guarantee civic rights and freedom, protecting citizens from slavery to superstition or irrational faith 15:

“….he alone is free who lives with free consent under the guidance of reason … [a dominion is the best state because] it is ordered according to the dictates of reason … [democracy] being ‘perfectly absolute dominion’” While Spinoza thought monarchy and aristocracy could be compatible with dominion according to reason he was particularly enamored of democracy because 16:

“…democracy is the most natural, and the most consonant with individual liberty …in a democracy, irrational commands are still less to be feared, for it is almost impossible that the majority of people, especially it is a large one, should agree to an irrational design …. [as a result of living under a democracy] they may live in peace and harmony.” Progress, science, critical philosophy, secularism, materialism, democracy. That is a radical program. It is a touchstone, a corpus of reasoning that informed much of the thought that justified many – but obviously not all given the diversity of Enlightenment projects – of the

Enlightenment projects. When we speak of “progressives” we tend to think in terms of

Spinoza’s agenda.

There is little doubt that Spinoza was overly optimistic about human nature, or rather about how human nature would operate under democracy. A bitter critic of theocracy he

104 believed historical progress in human knowledge – something that dominions, especially democratic dominions foster due to protections guaranteeing freedom to think, speak, and publish – by banishing superstition and blind obedience – would filter down to the average citizen, convincing the people that violence and vociferous disagreement were injurious to the body politic.

The Enduring Appeal of Unifying Transcendental Beliefs and the Unending Struggle between Religious Doctrines and Enlightenment Age Doctrines

In the face of the optimism of Enlightenment thinkers that critical reason would win out over crass religious superstition, transcendental thinking did not wane after the eighteenth century. A case in point is Communism as practiced in the Soviet Union and mainland China. In principle both of these regimes condemned religions as festering sinkholes of unreason and illusion. In both countries state supervision of religions – the Russian Orthodox faith and

Judaism in the Soviet Union; Buddhism, Confucianism, Taoism, Islam, and Catholicism in China – was introduced by elites committed to atheism. Still religious activity continued to thrive.

During World War I, Stalin recruited the Russian Orthodox Church as an ideological ally designed to bolster patriotic thinking. Moreover in the aftermath of the collapse of the Soviet

Union, elites in the Russian Federation have encouraged growth in the Russian Orthodox

Church, acknowledging that the Communist campaign to drive out religious thought was unsuccessful. After the Cultural Revolution in China that carried out destruction of Confucian temples and excoriated Confucian thinkers, the Chinese Communist Party relaxed its anti- religious campaign to the extent that today it countenances religious worship of all stripes – provided the Churches, Mosques, and Buddhist temples do not advocate overthrow of the

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Party – even embracing Confucianism as a vehicle for selling Chinese cultural values abroad, notably in Europe and North America.

Why has transcendental thinking shown such staying power? Based on the analysis in this chapter the reason is not hard to find. Both the secularists promoting progressive

Enlightenment principles and the religious believers dubious of the direction the secularists are moving along both believe in a kind of transcendentalism, albeit of different types.

Secularists believe in genius. What is the source of this genius? Why are some persons gifted and others not so favored by nature, nurture, or both? Why explains a musical prodigy like Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart? A self-taught mathematical genius like Srinivasa Ramanujan? A physicist like Albert Einstein who at the mere age of sixteen was thinking about the transmission of light in terms of relativistic time? The fact that these geniuses are attracted to mystical Platonic beauty further supports the notion that their inspiration comes from transcendental springs from which flow the purest and most compelling fancies. Nikola Tesla, a scientific and technological genius of the first order – according to Einstein the foremost innovator of his generation in the field of physics – said it best 17:

“My brain is only a receiver, in the Universe there is a core from we obtain knowledge, strength, and inspiration. I have not penetrated into the secrets of this core, but I know it exists.” It is a commonly held view among geniuses: they feel they are vessels into which some form of transcendental wisdom is channeled. This is one reason why scientists are often attracted to mysticism, to Buddhism, Hinduism, and Sufism.

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A few examples from the highly contested field of twentieth century physics, quantum mechanics, will suffice to prove the point. Erwin Schrödinger, architect of one of the most stunning equations in the field, was said to have said that he was simply trying to get beauty into his formulation. When he was informed that an initial set of experiments disproved his equation he shrugged it off. How can nature reject the beauty flowing from his inspired mind?

When other physicists asked themselves how Schrödinger have the audacity to put the imaginary constant i (the square root of minus one) in his equation they could not help saying that it was pure Schrödinger. Nothing else could account for the fact. Einstein, himself a pioneer in the field of quantum mechanics with his analysis of the photoelectric effect – for which he received the Nobel Prize, his theory of special relativity being too controversial – became a bitter critic of some of the interpretations rampant in the field, notably the Copenhagen probabilistic interpretation due to Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg. Under the probabilistic interpretation experimenters – by injecting energy into their experiments involving quanta phenomena – created a laboratory environment in which the observer can only obtain probability distributions for the behavior of particles and waves. As a theory of physics the implication is that randomness is something a theorist cannot afford to ignore. Einstein argued this was nonsense. “God does not play with dice” or something like that was his position. What did he mean by God? What he meant by God is what Spinoza meant by God. It was a deterministic set of laws that nature followed. Randomness was ugly.

Adding to an appreciation of genius as a driver of progress among the ranks of secularists is the hard cold fact that reason cannot explain why we should be virtuous. The boldest attempt was made by the German philosopher Immanuel Kant. Kant argued that reason

107 can and does lead us to the Categorical Imperative. Behave in a way that amounts to a universal rule for everyone in society, for all of humanity more generally. Act in a way – exercising your free will – consistent with the principle that everyone else should act accordingly, thus ruling out selfish self-interested evil deeds that are inconsistent with the preeminent duty to behave in a way everyone should behave, towards each other, and of course towards you yourself as a self-interested individual. Thinking of robbing the local savings and loan? Before you do so consider the moral rule: do you want everyone in your community to rob the banks and savings and loans in town? Thinking about purchasing a gun to kill your neighbor? Think before you act: do you want your neighbors to the left, to the right, behind you to do likewise? To rephrase the universal moral law slightly differently: “do unto others as you have them do unto you.” Is this nothing more than Christian piety warmed over by philosophical speculation, by a subtle distinction between laws of nature that hold empirically and a priori principles like the universal moral code, the Categorical Imperative, that does not operate according to the laws of physics and chemistry which we observe and measure with experiments but rather operates immaterially?

Again consider the reasoning of Adam Smith in his The Theory of Moral Sentiments: a self-interested individual imbued by the Invisible Hand a rational benevolent Deity will willingly take into account the fiscal interests of the community he or she lives in, will underwrite the incomes of less successful relatives and financially pressed associates through generous loans and subsidies for a simple reason: by doing so, by being altruistic, the individual is rewarded with respect, adulation, garnering a reputation of rectitude. This is a rational strategy. The problem is that reason philosophical thought or a self-interested strategy for bolstering one’s

108 reputation alone is not convincing. Smith himself realized this when he hedged his bets, calling upon the idea that the Deity provided humans with a conscience, thereby overriding simple unadulterated self-interest.

Sadly plausible theories of why children eventually take on the mantle of moral maturity

– for instance the theory of child development stages put forward by Piaget – fail to convincingly justify the rationalistic approach Kant suggested or Smith’s combination of self- interest wedded to conscience. There is no doubt that this approach may suffice for some individuals particularly those who take a relatively optimistic view about human nature properly civilized through education. But for those people who believe humans are drenched in sin and must be saved from lest they be condemned to an afterlife in some kind of Hell the arguments of Kant, Smith, and Piaget fall on deaf ears. More than anything else the dispute over why people may be altruistic and do unto others as they would do unto themselves leads many religious adherents to contest Enlightenment principles, seeing them as either wrong- headed or, to be chartable, incompletely buttressed by irrefutable evidence. Competition in the political arena cannot prevent hatred and tribalism from corrupting government; completion in markets cannot prevent entrepreneurs from selling drugs laced with death inducing toxins, from claiming contaminated fish is fresh and delicious, from making claims that a used car about to require a refurbished transmission is in fine shape, to sign off on a disclosure form that a house that has been used as factory for growing marijuana has never been lived in by drug dealers. So much for Enlightenment projects touting the virtues of competition 18. The only convincing way to encourage virtuous behavior is to hope that enough appeal to transcendental forces exists among the ranks of the citizenry to discourage crime, systematic

109 lying, and tit for tat vendettas. This is surely one reason Enlightenment thinkers of the eighteenth century did not want to banish religion, only temper its influence.

For the religious who rely upon the direct intervention of transcendental forces as part and parcel of their creeds promoting virtuous living there is no doubt about the existence of divine, heavenly, karma like forces that will ultimately punish wickedness. Given the debased nature of human nature – given the demons within – the only hope for a suffering humanity is surrender to prophecy and religious authority of one stripe or another. Deism is bad enough as it rests on the assumption the author of the universe set in motion a machine operating according to natural laws, stepping away from directly intervening in mundane human events.

Miracles are out of the question. Most abominable is atheism. A believer in at least one set of deities is better than someone who denies all transcendental forces. That said, believing in my god is better than believing in another divine figure. Tribalism is rampant despite the best attempts by activists promoting ecumenical alliances between faiths. It is hard to escape the trap that all human devised religions fall into: my god is superior to your god. Yahweh trumps

Baal; and so forth. The goal of establishing unity under the banner of a single ideology is a naïve dream. Given the thousands and thousands of deities worshipped by followers the world over how can plausibly assert that there is one and only one transcendental truth? To make this claim is to submit to the logic of tribalism writ large.

That societies struggling during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries with the appeal of secular nationalism – the idea that sovereignty rests with the people rather than with a a king or select group of elites appointed by a guardian deity – found the panoply of lessons and strategies unleashed by the Enlightenment hard to digest should not be surprising. If you are at

110 heart a secularist you have to choose among a wide-ranging set of Enlightenment dictates. At the same time you have to find a way to accommodate the staunchly religious sharing citizenship with your ilk. For the religious the reverse is the case. You have to find a way to rein in the secularists, carving off as best you can a niche you can prosper in, one from which you can preach, hoping to recruit a growing band of converts to your cause. That these agendas engendered deep cleavages in the body politic, that they could not help but create ideological controversies, even occasionally chaos, was a hard lesson Europe and its overseas offshoots – the United States, Canada, New Zealand, Australia, and the Spanish speaking lands of Mexico and South America – had to swallow. Ideological conflict between the transcendental and the secular – something Europe had been struggling with in earnest since the Renaissance – was inexorably taking on the trappings of normality, first and foremost in the various continents that comprised the Western world, eventually spreading globally to all corners of the globe.

For most people the world over the complexity of life has increased manifold. At the root of this explosion of complexity is a potent combination of cooperation and creativity.

Unfortunately these two forces, though compatible at times, frequently clash with one another, spawning conflict. In relatively simple hunting and gathering populaces, conflict is typically – but not universally – channeled into physical violence. As complexity increases this is no longer the case. Why? Because the expression of power wielded by political and social elites takes two forms: soft power and hard power. With the growth of complexity power takes on new dimensions short of unleashing mayhem on subject populations: ideology is one dimension; another is the marshalling of the fine arts and science to suppress unrest set into motion by the disruptive agendas ushered in by prophets, geniuses, and charismatic political leaders. Soft

111 power gradually but inexorably supplants hard power is the tools elites have their disposal for quieting restive populations grow in multitude, the menu of techniques growing by leaps and bounds. Were perfect unity possible under a regime ruled by cynical elites adept at manipulating a potent mixture drawn from a rich cornucopia of power enhancing devices – propaganda disseminated through film, radio and television broadcast, indoctrination in the educational system, suppression of information about corruption potentially eroding the credibility of elites in command – it might be theoretically possible for cooperation and creativity to coexist. Unfortunately the law of unintended consequences precludes this, first and foremost because geniuses, prophets, and charismatic political figures ignore it. Human nature in all of its manifold dimensions stands in the way. There is no shelter from the storm.

Chapter 2 Genius and the Dialectic: Why Conflict Accompanies Innovation

Summary of the chapter: Sharing with prophets their willingness to defy authority in pursuit of their destinies, geniuses flourish best when they are unbound by social and political constraints. When bound in one market environment, they can still thrive if they are able to exit the market. The more fragmented is the geopolitical regime geniuses reside within, the greater is their ability to create because of their access to exit options. By its very nature creativity is inconsistent with equilibriums fostered within and between distinct markets.

The More Intense the Dialectic, the More Vigorous is Change Between the fifteenth century and the early twentieth century Europe emerged as the sparkplug driving innovation globally. To make this claim is not to fall into the trap of euro- centralism. It is simply an acknowledgement of the unleashing of creative genius in Europe during the six centuries between 1400 and 2000, unparalleled in human history. Likewise

112 absurd is the ridiculous statement that change was not occurring elsewhere in the world. What we are discussing is the relative speed of change experienced in Europe and its overseas extensions over this era: it was simply faster in Europe and the West more generally than in was in Asia, in Africa, in the Middle East. We know this because we have measures like those assembled in Tables 1.1, 1.2, 1.3, 1.4, and 1.5 that demonstrate how Europe pioneered across the board: rising per capita income; increasing complexity; and deepening of cultural institutions on a per capita basis (symphonies, ballets, art museums for example). The overall social development index for the Western core is 33.35 in 1500; by 1900 it has jumped five-fold to 170.09. Per capita income almost doubled between 1500 (estimated at 753 in Geary-Khamis international dollars) and 1820 (reaching a figure of slightly over 1200 dollars). No other region of the earth comes close to what Europe achieved between 1500 and 1900.

Yet this achievement pales in comparison with what Europe and the Western core more generally managed to generate between 1900 and 2000. Over the course of a single century, the twentieth century, the Western core drove up the social development index measured by

Morris five-fold; and per capita income jumped for Europe from around 1200 dollars to over

23,000 dollars. Acceleration was taking place on a scale that was completely new to history.

Setting aside quantitative approximations for a minute it is equally apparent that change was thoroughgoing in every corner of human existence, beginning in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. European politics were revolutionized through the spread of the nation- state system coupled with diffusion and extension of Enlightenment principles. Revolutions and warfare saw to that. The French Revolution laid the foundations for the Napoleonic Code that was disseminated throughout Western Europe by French bayonets, cannons, and muskets.

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Germany and Italy were unified through wars. Which country could muscle its way into hegemony on the European continent – Germany or France – emerged as a key concern overshadowing European the practice of diplomacy. How could a balance of power be arranged to rein in drives to dominate the continent? In economic affairs the first industrial revolution

(exemplified by steam power, the factory system, semi-automated machinery) gave way to the second industrial revolution (cheap steel, electricity, the internal combustion engine, the germ theory of disease). In the visual arts photography emerging as a competitor with easel painting shifting the focus of artists away from portraiture. In music the diffusion of large scale symphony orchestras satisfied the growing demand by a flourishing bourgeois audience hungry to partake of musical enchantment, if perhaps not on an equal footing with aristocrats, at least as a second tier cluster of patrons. In science the development of organic chemistry promoted materialism – amazing things can be carried out in laboratories exploring carbon chains - at the expense of theories drawing a sharp line between the living and the non-living; in physics the theory of electromagnetic fields challenged the idea of a mechanical universe behaving according to Newton’s laws of motion and force.

That change was so ubiquitous and revolutionary in Europe during the nineteenth century raises the question: why? The argument of this book is simple: change was dramatic because dialectic processes bolstered creativity. Why was the dialectic so important; why was it something Europeans had been concerned with for centuries?

Thinking in terms of dialectics run deep in West. Its currents underpin the exercise of voice: in intellectual debate; in mathematics and logic; in the exercise of violence in warfare; and in the logic of revolution. Dialectical reasoning as a method for exercising voice was well

114 known in the ancient Western world – notably in the Greek city states, especially in Athens – as study of Greek philosophy and drama reveals.

Based on the extant writings of Plato and on the Athenian dramatists who made references to Socrates the gadfly and sophistry as a widely practiced intellectual game beloved by the Athenian polity. There is ample evidence concerning the interplay of Greek polytheistic ideology - with the use of dialectic as a vehicle for reasoned discourse. Indeed relying on dialectical debate to question the virtue of the Athenian gods was one reason Socrates was condemned. In Plato’s dialogue Euthyphro Socrates asks Euthyphro to define piety. Upon hearing Euthyphro’s definition – piety is what pleases the gods, what they love – Socrates embarks on dialectics to undermine Euthyphro’s case: he points out that there are many gods, the deities contesting, openly quarreling, with one another over what they should love and what they should hate. This leads to a contradiction: according to Euthyphro’s definition there is at least one thing that one god loves while the other gods hate. This makes no sense.

Euthyphro admits that his definition is false. That the debate makes use of contradiction is fundamental. It is a hallmark of how thinkers in the West have viewed dialectics.

Contradiction is fundamental to the famous paradoxes of ancient Greek thought. Zeno’s paradoxes are famous. Particularly delicious because it is so devilish is the Epimenidian paradox: Epimenides was a Cretan who said “all Cretans are liars.” That the contradiction inherent in this joke is so bothersome to thinkers is evidenced by the despair in threw Bertrand

Russell in when he was working with Alfred North Whitehead on their three volume classic expounding the logical foundations of mathematics, Principia Mathematica. At one point in developing the logical mechanisms undergirding simple calculation – proving that one plus one

115 equals two proved to be a massive undertaking – Russell ran into the paradox of Epimenides.

He realized that if you wrote on one side of a piece of paper the following sentence “The statement on the other side of this paper is true,” at the same time writing on the other side of the paper “The statement on the other side of this paper is false” you ended up in contradiction. That such an elementary paradox – child’s play – could drive a sophisticated genius of Russell’s caliber is indicated by the fact his discovery turned Russell’s wonderful run of inspired days composing the Principia into utter gloom.

Why exploiting logical contradictions as a dialectic method of proving theorems – including theorems about the logical absurdity of God not existing, a preoccupation of Medieval

Era philosophers – it is with Hegel’s application of Spinoza’s philosophy that we find dialectics looming larger and larger in Western discourse, not only among the learned but among practical politicians, economists, and students of armed conflict.

In Hegel’s application of dialectics the confronting of a thesis with an antithesis is a driving force in historical evolution. State a thesis, a statement about ideals. Find in it a contradiction that undermines it. Building on this contradiction develop an opposed ideal, a total antithesis that itself harbors contractions. Out of this conflict emerges a synthesis, setting the stage for a new thesis. This is a straightforward application of Spinoza’s theory of progress to dialectics.

Using dialectical reasoning it is easy to see how Hegel’s evolutionary approach to history can be turned on its head. Materialism and idealism are opposed. Substitute materialist forces for ideals. As Karl Marx, a student of Hegel who rejected idealism, showed this reasoning

116 naturally leads to treating the opposing elements in the paradigm as productive forces underlying economic change. Feudalism – rule by a military class over a peasant class – generates contradictions, namely the emergence of an urban class consisting of craft guilds and merchant guilds producing luxuries consumed by the military elite. This is a contradiction within feudalism as a system. Eventually the merchants accumulate enough riches to undercut the feudal lords. Their interests and ideology of how to organize production clashing with feudalism that rests on unpaid services extracted from the peasants, the nascent capitalist class overthrows feudalism through revolution. They install a new synthesis, capitalism, and a new form of government, bourgeois democracy, which does away with unpaid mandated services owed superiors, bringing in complete commodification of life through wage payments for work and product prices for goods. Now two new classes confront each other: capitalists owned the means of production and a proletariat working for wages. The contractions of capitalism – cut- throat completion and the tendency of capitalists to use their profits to promote wholesale mechanization, filling up factories with machinery that ultimately automate workers out of their jobs – leading to massive commercial crises, bankruptcies spiraling out of control, unemployment soaring. This ushers in a new age of revolution, workers rebelling against the bourgeois state and its steadfast commitment to private market capitalism.

Marxists were not the only ones enamored of dialectics as a way to understand how materialistic forces compete and contest power. The military strategist Carl von Clausewitz penned a famous tome in which he applied dialectics to warfare, On War. Armies using weapons and strategies oppose each other on battlefields. If one secures a temporary advantage over the other, putting into the hands of troops ferocious new weapons like breach-

117 loading rifles as opposed to front-loading muskets used by your opponent for instance – the loser government learns, albeit at the expense of soldiers, its failure to stay abreast of the latest military technology, refashioning its arsenal for future confrontations. Moreover in the venerable fog of war the very ebb and flow of combat creates a kind of dialectic dance, temporary gains being made by one party gradually eroded through strategic retreat, reassembly of dispersed troops, and re-launching of penetrating attack by the once seemingly hapless opponent.

The problem with using the word “contradiction” in analyzing long-run historical evolution is that dialectical reasoning in rhetoric and philosophy is ill-suited for capturing the way history operates. Substitute the “law of unintended consequences” for “contradiction” and the appeal of the dialectical method is strengthened,

The idea is this. Geniuses promoting innovation make the case for changing the way we do things. From their creations – writings, scientific theories, artistic works – flow consequences both intended and unintended. Trusting in exposure through markets – political, economic, and ideological– they lay the foundations for schools that flourish through imitation. Beethoven writes the Third and Fifth symphonies ushering in volumes and volumes of romantic music written by followers both inspired and jejune, subtle or simply bombastic. The insipid imitations undercut the integrity of the very path Beethoven was laying out in his mid-period romanticism, something he himself abandoned in his late works, the last string quartets. Critics of this approach – composers hostile to excessive romanticism, to huge orchestras hammering out crescendos and gigantic climaxes – take up the cudgel, mocking and rejecting the breakthroughs made by the romantics, carving out a refined classicism. Think Debussy for

118 instance. The thesis – Gothic inspired romanticism (morbid, obsessed with death and sin,

Faustian, steeped in Medieval Era mysticism, defiant but conflicted) – interacts with its antithesis – progressive Renaissance classicism (cool and measured, inspired by the rational and scientific, idealist in the Platonic sense of aspiring to perfect beauty and geometrically balanced form) – to generate forward movement at both extreme ends of the spectrum. Synthesis is one outcome; continuing on separate opposing paths is another. Both occur. That the dialectic operated in the fine arts and scientific circles of Europe as well in and political life is a theme

Chapters 6 and 7 explore. The ubiquity of the process across a wide range of fields testifies to the deep penetration dialectic struggle achieved in all areas of European life, showing up with particular force in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, accelerating in intensity during the latter half of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Why did a strongly voiced thesis provoke an equally articulated antithesis driving creativity in European history? There are two salient factors: displacement and destruction of vested interests once staunchly held onto by privileged groups; and ideological competition.

Displacement has a cruel unforgiving logic. Elites lose their prerogatives under the logic of

Enlightenment inspired reform: exemption from taxation is stripped from the Second Estate, the aristocracy, during the French Revolution. Handloom weavers are driven out of existence by cotton textile factories, vigorously exploiting steam power to run power looms in business of weaving; while utilizing semi-automated water frames and mules to carry out spinning. That the secular Enlightenment agenda harnessing inspired genius competed vigorously with religious transcendentalism as it had been traditionally embodied in the field of European Christian worship testifies to the power of ideals as well as material interests.

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Of course ideological rectitude and interests overlap. Consider teaching. Academic instruction, once primarily reserved for clerics or persons trained in theologically charged fields, the growth in purely secular fields – in scientific endeavors like physics and chemistry, in economics and political economy, in the fine arts - with officially sanctioned educational institutions undercut the value of religious morality in the classroom, promoting the views and agendas of Enlightenment inspired educators and text book writers at the expense of lectures delivered by professionals trained in Christian seminaries.

A question naturally arises as to why dialectical conflict tends toward dualistic confrontation, largely characterized by the struggle between progressive and conservative camps. This is due to the logic of coalition building. To prevail in markets – economic or political

– the force of numbers, the massing of adherents, the sheer volume of imitators bent on riding a potentially fashionable wave - is crucial. Without doubt there are compelling reasons why coalitions break down. Ideological priorities is one reason. The Enlightenment was a welter of movements promoting separate agendas. Coalescing to gain momentum in promoting practical agendas was always important – compromise papering over divergent principles – but sometimes it simply postponed inexorable conflict between groups ostensibly fighting on the same side. Consider the American Constitution that originally legitimized slavery in the interests of holding the confederation of states with diverging attitudes toward slavery together to form a “more perfect union.” Only through the tragedy of a bloody civil war was this politically convenient but morally questionable compromise resolved once and for all.

Again the coalitions between social democratic parties and Marxist revolutionary parties created pressure on legislatures, demanding legislative action benefitting industrial workers. A

120 case in point is Imperial Germany. Bismarck, the arch conservative German chancellor was a opportunist, pioneering laws guaranteeing health insurance and compensation for injuries suffered on the job precisely because he had to stave off pressure from labor’s voting bloc in the Reichstag. Sadly for his legacy the compromises began to crumble during the early twentieth century when Bolshevik theorists pushing the concept of the dictatorship of the proletariat clashed with moderate social democrats who were perfectly willing to negotiate with bourgeois politicians in democracies.

That the coalitions are cobbled out through compromise is one reason why so-called progressives often become conservative in practice (or at least are accused of being conservative by their former comrades). Consider politics in constitutional monarchies with parliaments. Gain legislative victories. Your opponents attempt to undermine them, passing laws that counteract the thrust of your successful parliamentary efforts. Within your ranks are those whose priority is holding onto the fruits of your efforts to gain traction and those who wish to go even further, moving in a more radical direction, hoping for republican government freed from monarchy. By definition the members of your party committed to conserving hard- won gains made in the past are conservative in their approach. Their more radically inclined colleagues taunt them with this embarrassing fact. Consider an example from the visual arts.

Claude Monet, the great Impressionist painter lived into the early twentieth century when cubism was emerging. While it is true the cubist painters like Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque claimed to derive some of their inspiration from Paul Cezanne who was a friend and contemporary of Monet, Monet was simply unable to understand what cubism was all about.

He could not say whether he liked it or disliked it. He simply did not understand it. He was an

121 artistic revolutionary from an earlier generation unable to understand what his own movement had helped to create. The law of unintended consequences was at work.

Examples like these help explain why it is difficult to define what constitutes progressive and conservative over the long-run. What is true, however, is that the conflict between those inspired by the Enlightenment as a diverse movement espousing a secular focus and those adhering to religious transcendentalism shapes the way many coalitions of progressives and conservatives are formed in actual reality. In general one can say those working to buttress the collective voice of the community steeping in religious transcendental thought tend to be conservative in the sense that they are uneasy with government programs and laws that substitute the authority of the state in condoning and regulating behavior for the moral authority of religion. Having said this it is important to recognize trenchant counter-examples.

In the lead-up to the American civil war the Northern evangelical movement split with the

Southern evangelical movement. Northern churches were in the vanguard in opposing slavery.

They joined a coalition that was spearheaded by secular Enlightenment advocates opposed to slavery on both humanitarian and economic grounds (arguing that the freely contracting employee, incentivized by remuneration agreed upon, works harder than oppressed slave labor). Still the Southern evangelical movement remained staunchly pro-slave and pro-

Confederacy.

While the argument and the evidence supporting my view is specifically focused upon

Europe – precisely because creativity was so remarkable in Europe during the six centuries we are concerned with in this book – the fact is it is a general argument applicable elsewhere. Hints of this point are explored briefly in the book, noting how dialectical dynamics played out in

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Japan. Even in extreme cases that seem to belie my thesis – say totalitarian Communist China – the dialectic swung wildly. After the Cultural Revolution unleashed a vituperative campaign excoriating private property and Confucianism, Mao’s demise set in motion a reform program that vigorously attacked collectivist peasant communes, encouraging the cultivation of private plots and the opening up of the seacoast to foreign enterprise. Today the Chinese Communist

Party celebrates the legacy of Confucius.

There are many reasons why dialectic processes were especially dynamic in the

European case. One is the existence of two distinct traditions – that of ancient Greece and

Rome that included republicanism and the integrity of inspired genius even when it questions the norms adhered to the masses and that of ancient theocratic Judaism and early Christianity that venerated prophets and prophecy – that have shaped European culture and political life.

The other is political fragmentation brought on by the fall of the Roman Empire. One reason why fragmentation was so important is because it fostered exit as a viable option. With this in mind I turn to why genius tends to thrive when exit is possible.

Genius Thrives When the Exit Option is the Most Attractive: Europe Between 1450 and 1650 Because genius is contemptuous of the law of unintended consequences it is best suited for an environment in which the genius can find refuge when his or her ideas, projects, and views prove anathema to entrenched interests. Europe in the fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries was an excellent example. The existence of the Republic of the United

Netherlands is a dramatic case in point. That this was the continuation of a state of affairs that had been long-standing in Europe is a logical consequence of the fact Europe was profoundly

123 fragmented, an apparent source of weakness that was actually a great strength. With this in mind consider Florence, home to some of the greatest geniuses of the Renaissance.

What Leonardo’s career captured in a nutshell is self-assured Florentine genius on the run, grabbing every opportunity to exit from one Italian environ in search of better working conditions elsewhere. After all who could turn on the community where he had once thrived with such arrogance? No person better exhibits these traits than does Galileo who always referred to himself as a Florentine gentleman who was following in the footsteps of Leonardo,

Michelangelo, and his own father, a gifted musician and mathematician.

Son of a musician and author of a text of lute playing, Galileo Galilei, himself an able musician and student of drawing in chiaroscuro, was born in Pisa, then a part of the Duchy of

Florence under Medici rule. His father was an ardent humanist, in addition to being mathematically inclined, developing a formula for lute spring vibrations that involved taking twelfth roots (this was a major step on the way to formulating a logarithmic formula for the pitches in an octave). Galileo followed in his footsteps: carrying out experiments including studies of pendulum motion and gravity that demonstrated bodies of unequal weights fall with the same speed; observing nature through newly devised instruments (like the telescope, a compound microscope, the pendulum clock, a powerful military compass that could be used for shooting off cannons with gunpowder); and formulating mathematical laws based on his observations. In a phrase: invention; observation; induction. Most prominently he became an ardent defender of the Copernican heliocentric theory of the solar system, a controversial position that landed him in hot water with the Inquisition 1.

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The heliocentric theory of solar system put forward by the Polish priest Nicolas

Copernicus who lived between 1473 and 1543 was a typical product of the progressive

Renaissance. Copernicus studied in Italy, absorbing the influence of Neo-Platonism that made him skeptical about the tenets of Scholasticism, particularly the way Ptolemy reconciled planetary motion with the voluminous observations that had been made after he lived, notably by Islamic astronomers and astrologers. For Scholasticism the geocentric theory of the solar system was crucial for two reasons: it confirmed statements appearing in the Old Testament; it was consistent with Aristotle’s model of the universe; and it placed humanity at the center of the Universe, people on earth being essential to God’s long run plan for His creation.

Copernicus was not interested in contesting Aristotlean physics (he agreed with Aristotle that moving in circles were a natural way for round objects to express their “form”) – Galileo was definitely concerned about this conceptual problem but not Copernicus – but Copernicus was very concerned about the mathematics of the Ptolemaic system. To him it appeared unnecessarily complex, shot through intricacies and patchwork, hopelessly cluttered like a ugly

Rube Goldberg apparatus. To place the sun in the center of the solar system gave a far cleaner explanation of what was going on than did a geocentric model. Far fewer circles rotating around circles were required. It met the criterion of simplicity. With this in mind – adding that his model gave better results for setting the calendar for Easter – he put forward his thesis in a publication as an hypothesis open to debate, dedicated his work to the pope, and moved on to other projects.

For Galileo defending Copernicus was a cause that cut far deeper than simply cleaning up messy mathematics. It was a vehicle for attacking Scholasticism root and branch. As

125 someone attracted to the artisan workshop tradition he thrived on building devices with which he could accurately measure things. Convinced through his observations of the Milky War – published as the Starry Messenger in which he described his telescope, his observations of the four moons of Jupiter (that he named Medicean stars as a way to curry favor with Cosimo II, fourth duke of Tuscany, to whom he dedicated the work), and his observations of valleys and hills on the moon. Running through his account published in 1610 is a conviction matter is the same throughout the universe, obeying the same laws of motion that apply on the earth, laws revealed to him with his experiments on falling bodies subject to gravitation, laws revealed to him with his experiments on pendulum motion.

There is no doubt that Galileo had an agenda in mind in dedicating the Starry Messenger to Cosimo II. He wanted to leave Padua where he was lecturing on mathematics at the university, looking for a better position where he was free to carry on experiments and write treatises in Pisa. Had he remained at Padua that was in the orbit of Venice a jurisdiction where the Inquisition had little if any force and not moved back to Pisa and Florence where the

Inquisition had teeth he might have escaped his famous showdown with the Inquisition. One suspects he had greater faith in the Florentine tradition of debate than was warranted given the Counter-Reformation’s obsession with fighting off heresies of all types.

It should be acknowledged that another reason why Galileo may have felt Florence and

Tuscany were more attractive than were Padua and Venice was the creation of Lincean

Academy, the Accademia del Lincei (literally academy of the linx-eyed), founded in 1603 in

Rome. The academy was created by wealthy and politically powerful elites to carry on studies of natural philosophy including those dealing with experiments and mathematics. Florence,

126 relatively close to Rome geographically, is much closer to Rome than is Padua. It is patently obvious Galileo counted on his fame as a scientific investigator garnering a lucrative patronage position with the Medici that would allow him to pursue his experimental and theoretical studies in greater depth.

The problem for Galileo was Scholasticism that was deeply entrenched in the elite circles of the Church – though not necessarily in the mind of particular popes – and the statements made in the Bible. With this in mind Galileo felt he had to take on the Biblical statements. His argument was simple: the writers of the Bible were elites, too sophisticated to believe what they actually wrote. As sophisticated thinkers they knew the earth was not necessarily the center of the solar system. But they were appealing to the masses, just as Aron was pushing the Golden Calf against the more religiously appropriate position of Moses. With this in mind – recognizing that common sense suggests the earth is stationary (after all if it moves why don’t objects fly off it? is it not intuitively clear the sun and the moon are moving because this is what we perceive with our naked eyes?) – Galileo made a crucial distinction that he believed would convince elites, secular or religious.

Galileo may have been right about secular elites. But he was dead wrong about the

Catholic Church that was intent on pushing back Protestantism by putting forward a common sense interpretation of Christianity that appealed to a mass audience. Recognizing church elitism had been arrogant, the Council of Trent was bent on selling Catholic thought to a far wider audience than in had during the fifteenth century. Christian faith, once a veritable monopoly of the Catholic Church, had become profoundly competitive with the onset of the

Reformation. To stay competitive the Church had to simplify its message for the masses.

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Trucking around with elitist – and hair-splitting – distinctions between sophisticated truth and common sense truth was a non-starter. Did Galileo not see the handwriting on the wall when

Giordano Bruno, a philosopher who travelled around the courts of Europe espousing a version of materialism antithetical to both Protestantism and Catholicism – a prophetic genius perhaps

– was burned at the stake by the Inquisition?

To boot a key tenet of Scholasticism was the distinction between the physical reality of bread and wine and its form as the body and blood of Christ crucial to the celebration of the

Eucharist. According to standard Catholic doctrine the priest transforms the material into the spiritual through the prescribed rituals. Had a miracle taken place? Some might think the priest nothing more than a charlatan using the smoke and mirrors of mundane magic to mislead his flock. Not so said the Vatican. By tying the philosophy of Aristotle to the instruction of priests and mendicants alike the Church had built a doctrinal fortress within whose walls priests and monks alike were expected to operate. More important than simply paying attention to the duties proscribed by the Church ordinances it was crucial that the priests – and the monks who were recruiting adherents as part of their outreach duties – actually believe that they were more than magicians. After all faith was crucial, a point the Jesuit order was determined to impose on novices, boasting that it could instill Catholic truth in a lad provided he was put in their charge, subjected to their guidance. Their claim about faith overruling personal sensory experience in the world was heroic: if the Mother Church said black was white, then black was supposed to be white for the masses reared in the belief that divine truth was channeled through the Vatican hierarchy.

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In writing Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems Galileo portrayed a fictional duel – a kind of Socratic dialectic dialogue – between Simplico a defender of Scholasticism and the geocentric theory of the universe and advocates of the heliocentric theory of the universe.

Using the very name “Simplico” (simpleton) mocked the Scholastic worldview. Alienating the

Pope whom Galileo had naively believed supported his iconoclastic views, Galileo was turned over to the Inquisition which interviewed him while showing the instruments of torture they could apply to his body. The inquisitor ruled that Galileo was a heretic. He was sentenced to house arrest; his books were banned, placed on a list of publications that the Church considered heretical; and he was ordered to forgo all future publication.

So ended the progressive Renaissance project in Italy. Tragically for the Catholic countries the study of natural philosophy moved into the Protestant lands shattering the close relationship that had existed between science, art, and music that had been Italy’s greatest contribution to a modernizing European project.

While Italy suffered the law of unintended consequences Galileo did not. He realized that while he was denied physical exit from Catholic dominated territory he could exploit avenues available for intellectual exit. He defied the ban on publishing future works, penning

Two New Sciences while he was residing in his villa near Florence. To publish this work that included his theory of mechanics and a systematic shredding of Scholasticism he reached out to printing houses in the Netherlands, the volume coming out in 1638. Exit in Europe was remarkably easy. The Inquisition may have successfully condemned Galileo in body but not in spirit. His voice remained unfettered. His ideas spread throughout much of literate Europe from

129 its erstwhile home in the Netherlands, even penetrating through the wall of Vatican imposed censorship in Catholic France.

Steeped originally in Aristotle’s science, ancient logic, and Scholastic metaphysics, René

Descartes took advantage of the relatively open-minded curriculum offered at the Jesuit

College of La Flèche to immerse himself in the latest scientific discoveries, including Galileo’s observation of the moons of Jupiter. A mathematical genius Descartes was attracted to the use of equations and geometry that was central to Galileo’s analysis in Two New Sciences. The contradiction between Scholastic metaphysics and Galileo’s scientific approach so tormented him that he finally abandoned his studies at La Flèche, hiring himself out as a gentleman soldier enjoying an inheritance, taking up a position as a technical mathematical expert interested in applying laws of physics to warfare in support of the Protestant Prince Maurice fighting against

Catholic Spain, taking up residence in Breda (in the Netherlands). Agitated by his attachment to skepticism – unable to reconcile Galileo with Scholastic learning – he decided to eschew metaphysics in his published work, turning to mathematics a field in which he could apply his genius to practical as well as purely theoretical problems. Working on the problem of understanding how projectiles behaved when shot out of guns and cannons, he combined his knowledge of geometry and algebra, ultimately developing analytic geometry in which equations are represented graphically. It was a huge breakthrough in mathematics, setting the stage for the differential calculus which was concerned with tangent lines adhering to the edge of curves representing parabolas, quadratic equations, and exponential growth among other things.

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At this time – 1618 when the thirty years war commenced – Galileo had not yet been condemned a heretic by the Inquisition. As long as Descartes lived outside of France, the

Iberian countries, or Italy he himself did not have to worry about the Inquisition calling him before a tribunal. While he left the Netherlands temporarily on visits to France and Italy, he returned to Protestant lands, settling near Munich. It was there – in 1619 – that he received his prophetic like calling, dreaming a set of three dreams convincing himself that he had to apply his skepticism to the root and branch reform of philosophy.

Channeling his aspiration and inspiration into an ambitious project rivaling Galileo’s writings on the inconstancies between scientific fact and Scholastic metaphysics, Descartes devoted himself to composing a sprawling treatise, The World. Consisting of three volumes – one dealing with light; a second dealing with humans; and a third aimed at explaining where the soul was in the human body and how it influenced behavior – it laid out a theory that was grounded in his mathematical reasoning. Pursuing the path laid out in his analytical geometry he concluded that material corpuscles extended in three dimensions constituted ultimate physical reality. In his scheme all matter – embodied in animals, people, rocks, soil, structures – consisted of minute subunits of various sizes. There was no void; in this Descartes’s view was inconsistent with the atomistic theories propounded by ancient Greek philosophers. Even light itself consisted of particles, albeit the smallest of the smallest. As a means of communicating information about objects, light moved through a subtle physical medium impacting human and animal eyes. Combining the laws of motion – a direct application of his mathematical reasoning, equations describing movement corresponding to paths that can be drawn on paper, corresponding to observations made by scientists, engineers, and craftspeople – with a picture

131 of matter built up from minute physical units – yielded a comprehensive theory of physical reality. Great vortices in space – shooting stars and the like – could be satisfactorily accounted for in this schema. Heat, cold, moisture, and other sensations associated with physical matter are simply the result of motion of the particles embodied in it. Rejecting Aristotle’s claim that the universe consists of rings around the earth in which motion and everything within the ring is homogeneous – air, fire, ether – Descartes followed Galileo in arguing the universe, observed in microscopes, observed in telescopes, was the same everywhere.

What about the soul? Descartes argued this was immaterial. Only humans had souls; animals did not. Soul located in the pineal gland was the source of pure thought, reasoning ability and spiritual and ethical orientation. Appreciating dualism – mind-body in humans – was basic to a properly constructed philosophy.

One of the most radical notions implicit in Cartesian thought was his skepticism.

Descartes maintained that a rational individual - guided only be reasoning, observation of material bodies that were mere collections of particles extended in three dimensions, discovering and learning about natural laws that can be adequately described by mathematical equations - can arrive at metaphysics independent of theology rooted in revelation and miracles. The entire corpus of Catholic Church inspired Scholasticism was completely unnecessary; worse yet, it was misleading.

Descartes, residing in the Netherlands, was working through his massive treatise when he learned Galileo was being condemned by the Inquisition. At this point he abandoned parts of the project, eventually allowing the sections dealing with light and humans to be published.

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Eventually, emboldened by the fact he could live out the rest of his life in Protestant countries free from the grasp of the long tentacles of the Inquisition, he went on to publish what he had initially decided to jettison. His Meditations, Discourse, and Meteorology became famous throughout Europe, establishing a school of thought known as Cartesian.

Exit was crucial for the dissemination of critical natural philosophy, the development of a mathematical methodology for doing physics, and the open espousal of the Copernican system.

Genius Thrives When the Exit Option is the Most Attractive: Japan Between 1850 and 1920 When the Japanese bakufu – intent on reining in the capacity of restive feudal lords who had opposed the rise of the Tokugawa as hegemons to form alliances with Western power = sealed the country off from the West – allowing only one window onto the West to exist, the

Dutch inhabited island of Dejima off Nagasaki harbor – it banned exit for Japanese nationals. Go abroad and return: you risk being executed. By the latter half of the seventeenth century travel of Japanese outside of Japan was impossible.

This seclusion regime ended in the 1850s as the aggrandizement of military prowess by the Western powers active in the Pacific – notably Great Britain, France, and the United States, following the lead pioneered by the Spanish, Portuguese, and Dutch – broke open China with the first Opium Wars ending in the early 1840s and Japan in the early 1850s. One result was the creation of the extraterritorial system under which Western merchants, entrepreneurs, and missionaries established residence in coastal conurbations looking out onto the Pacific, operating according to their own laws, not Chinese or Japanese laws. Japan opened up three

133 ports in 1859, paving the way for ordinary Japanese to interact with Westerners. When enterprising men like Fukuzawa Yukichi, a low-ranking samurai who had been raised in Osaka, visited the treaty port of Kanagawa he discovered most Westerners were speaking and reading

English, not Dutch. Originally interested in studying Dutch learning (rangaku) in Nagasaki,

Fukuzawa abandoned his Dutch inspired project in favor of English learning. Fired with enthusiasm for promoting Western learning in Japan he established an academy in Tokyo (Keio

Gijuku) whose stated agenda was widening the dissemination of Western culture and technology, rescuing it from a narrow Dutch focus, to a broader Western-wide focus, the

United States and Great Britain being of prime interest. That fact that English was rapidly becoming the primary language of international commerce was certainly a primary consideration.

Tapped to join the first diplomatic mission to the United States in 1859 Fukuzawa deepened his knowledge American culture and technology and – crucially - of English as a written and spoken language. He acquired a copy of Webster’s dictionary that served as a base for his preparation of a Japanese-English dictionary. These were stepping stones on a career that was devoted to promoting “civilization” in Japan, a program aimed at digesting examples of Enlightenment, promoting it as the more advantageous road for Japan to follow in responding to the Western challenge. Fukuzawa published widely – including a massive tome

An Outline of a Theory of Civilization – establishing a newspaper Jiji Shinpo through which he exhorted the Japanese public to respond to Western intrusion into Japan not in adversarial military terms – building mighty armies and powerful navies to combat the Western powers -

134 but rather through a cultural agenda, Japanese traditions enriching world culture while adopting many of the concepts pioneered by European thinkers and political leaders.

This was hardly a disinterested stand. This was an ideological stand carrying potent meaning in the Japanese political arena. In the context of the ideological divisions that were roiling Meiji Japan at the end of the nineteenth century this meant promoting “rich country” at the expense of “strong military”. A fragile coalition of elites emerging in the Meiji period were attempting to cobble together a compromise ideology that Japanese geniuses of all stripes could adhere to – represented in a four Chinese character phrase, fukoku kyōhei, the first two characters taken together meaning “wealthy country” and the third and fourth characters taken together meaning “strong army” – and Fukuzawa was emerging as a strong advocate for fukoku. That exit had allowed him to build up a powerful reputation as a highly informed and sophisticated student of Western ways and languages was crucial. It gave him credibility.

What Fukuzawa was achieving in the cultural field Shibusawa Eichi was achieving in the economic arena. Known as the “father of Japanese capitalism” – advocating joint-stock ownership of companies, double-entry bookkeeping and accounting, and private banks issuing banknotes – Shibusawa, like Fukuzawa, was a beneficiary of exit opportunities. He was able to visit Europe as a member of the 1867 delegation headed up by the young Tokugawa Aitake that participated in the Exposition Universelle in Paris. His abiding interest was in business and its interaction with government in shaping the commercial sector. After the Meiji Restoration did away with the bakufu regime Shibusawa joined the nascent Meiji government as a key policy maker in the Ministry of Finance. From that springboard he jumped into the private sector, organizing as president the first modern bank in Japan, Dai-ichi Bank, founding with capital

135 raised by the bank over five hundred fledging companies and institutions. A short list includes the Tokyo stock exchange, Tokyo gas, the Keihan Electric Railway, Oji Paper, Sapporo Breweries, and the Imperial Hotel.

Shibusawa was an ardent supporter of fragmented capitalism as opposed to concentrated capitalism. His key idea was the virtues of what he called gappon (joint-stock) capitalism as opposed to concentrated zaibatsu (conglomerate) capitalism. He was opposed to the zaibatsu model – as exemplified by Sumitomo, Mitsubishi, and Mitsui conglomerates that were held together by a central holding company that spun off subsidiaries in a variety of industries – for several reasons. He favored competition not just oligopoly. He was opposed to the tendency toward oligarchy that went hand in hand with oligopoly, the favored families owning zaibatsu along with the managers that ran their enterprises enjoying a close, potentially stultifying connection to powerful politicians and heads of ministries that formulated and oversaw rules governing the commercial sector.

Shibusawa joined prominent individuals like Fukuzawa in promoting the interests and influence of the fukoku camp. He was instrumental in advocating diplomacy not military aggrandizement. Influenced by Confucian principles of balance – bringing potentially opposing drives into conformity with one another – he believed ethics (adhering to the Confucian classic the Analects) could prosper at the same time the abacus (the economy) prospered. He was convinced his gappon-shugi (joint-stock principle) was the best way to reach this goal. His ideology was designed to combine Adam Smith’s concept of the invisible hand with Confucian inspired ethics. While he favored harmony he was not prepared buckle under, signing onto a politically shaky coalition between “strong army” and “wealthy country”.

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What these two examples testify to is the importance of exit in informing genius. On both sides of the divide between “strong army” and “rich country” there were geniuses who took advantage of the Western intrusion to learn from the West: cannons, repeating rifles,

Gatling guns, dreadnoughts, on the one hand; Enlightenment inspired learning and the unleashing of technologically informed capitalism on the other hand. Exit opportunities fueled

Meiji Japan dynamism.

Genius Thrives When the Exit Option is the Most Attractive: Russia Between 1910 and 1950 In the last decade of the nineteenth century and the first decade of the twentieth century Paris became the global capital for soft power. No other center – London, Vienna,

Berlin, Dresden, Munich, Venice, Amsterdam, Rome, and Saint Petersburg to name a few possible contenders – was a serious rival to Parisian dominance in culture. Geniuses flocked to

Paris because it was the place to be. Among other geniuses arriving in Paris during this period were the group of dancers, choreographers, and composers associated with the Ballet Russes that operated under the guidance and entrepreneurial brilliance of Serge de Diaghilev.

To understand why the Russian input was important to Parisian dominance in soft culture it is important to provide a bit of historical background. Specifically the French state became deeply concerned about its reputation, fearing among other things that French music was in wholesale decline at least compared to German music which was enjoying triumph upon triumph as Wagner’s operatic masterpieces garnered international acclaim. Why was this a matter of political significance? The reason lay in the field of hard power: the Franco-Prussian conflict of 1870-1871 saw French forces badly defeated on the field of battle. Humiliating

French defeat ushered in the unification of Imperial Germany under Prussian leadership. In

137 addition the resulting political crisis in France set off bitter street-fighting in Paris, ending with the bloody suppression of the short-lived French Commune. Something had to be done.

Smarting under the criticism that France had somehow lost its way – had deviated from its vaunted superiority over other continental contenders for power both soft and hard in

Europe – the composer Gabriel Fauré organized the National Society for French Music with the aim of revitalizing French musical composition and performance (as well he became the first president of the Independent Music Society) 2. The idea was to create an alternative venue for resuscitating the distinctively French approach to music – elegant, understated, eschewing the bombastic excesses of German romanticism, subtle, refined, balanced – striking out an end-run around the Conservatoire that was mired in lethargy. Appealing to French eighteenth classicism, emphasis was placed on composing the kind of music Rameau excelled in. Rameau had become the premiere composer of operas in Paris, incorporating dance and ballet into his performances. He tried to compose music that mimicked nature, using “cool sounding” woodwinds – bassoons and horns – in an effort to “paint” with tones, attempting to make his performances as vivid and descriptive of sounds heard in the outdoors as possible. To be sure his program of reproducing nature with “colors and nuances” was grounded in rigorous triadic harmony. After all as a theorist he had championed a theory of music rooted in the tonic chord, modulation to the dominant and subdominant, and the major and minor scales. He wanted to wed strict harmonic logic – believing as a “scientist” of musical composition that this was the most natural of all approaches to the correct grounding of music, rules akin to Newton’s laws of force and inertia – to compelling and pleasurable tone painting.

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Inspired by this agenda a number of French composers rose to the challenge. Of these nationalistically inspired musicians the most successful in striking out an innovative path that drew from the eighteenth century tradition while at the same time breaking new ground was

Claude Debussy. Debussy was a master orchestrator; in addition he was completely at home on the piano. His orchestration had all of the flair considered unmistakably French: subtle, soft, using muted strings, one the one hand balanced and graceful, on the other hand exotic in exploring new sounds. He used the celesta, the glockenspiel, the kettledrums, and the xylophone. He experimented with instruments indigenous to Asia. Like the French

Impressionists who were fascinated by Japanese woodcut prints and scrolls, he was eclectic and international in his outlook. A perfect example of his work for large forces is the piece Nuages

(Clouds) that drifts along putting the listener into an almost dreamlike trance. Very reminiscent of Monet’s water lily compositions. So much so that the word “impressionism” was applied to his music. Order, restraint, dancelike rather than bombastic, subtle, rhythmic, exploring tonal color rather than harsh and dramatic bursts of discordant sound, in short the essence of the progressive Renaissance vision, decidedly not Gothic (see Chapter 6 for systematic analysis of the dialectic clash between the progressive Renaissance and the Gothic visions).

That Debussy achieved this feat despite in the face of Wagner’s highly popular innovations was one thing. That he achieved this feat while rejecting Rameau’s emphasis on triadic chords – tonic, dominant – was perhaps even more impressive. There is relatively little sense of classical modulation in Debussy’s orchestral compositions.

In his equally impressive piano compositions he indulged in humor, the light touch, poking fun at other composers. Consider the way his Golliwog’s Cake Walk pokes fun at

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Wagner’s famous opera Tristan und Isolde vamping up one of its motifs. Debussy’s piano works convey luster, irony, good spirits, most of all emphasizing the light touch with their heavy reliance on the damper pedal. The five collections of piano scores he composed – Estampes; two volumes of Images; and two volumes of Préludes – capture the essence of impressionism applied to music.

In incorporating exotic foreign influences Debussy was influenced by compositions ushering out of Russia, notably scores composed by the Mighty Handful. The five composers making up the Mighty Handful – Alexander Borodin, Modest Mussorgsky, Mily Balakirev, César

Cui, and Nikolay Rimsky-Korsakov – were the perfect example of a group of geniuses nourished in the aesthetically adventuresome environment of St. Petersburg, Russia’s capital. With the exception of Balakirev who was a classically trained musician, the group consisted of gifted amateurs brought together by the desire to create music true to Russian folk traditions, capturing the sonic impact of the great bells ringing out for Russian Orthodox churches. In extracting folk themes and in attempting to mimic speech patterns in their vocal compositions they were inspired by nationalism. Russian folksongs have a characteristic cadence, indulging in constant repetition recycling rhythmic figures and phrases: cells of musical thought spliced together through shifts in rhythm. In particular Debussy was fascinated by the music of

Mussorgsky, notably his piano suite Pictures at an Exhibition, the tone poem Night on Bald

Mountain and his opera Boris Godunov. This was innovation you could get your teeth into. On the one hand it was profoundly non-Germanic; on the other hand it was colorful.

There is no doubt that one thing driving the Russian musical agenda was writing for ballet. Consider Panel D in Table 1.4. Russia stands out as having a large concentration of ballet

140 companies, the Bolshoi being the most illustrious. Originally oriented to the St. Petersburg aristocratic elite, the surge of interest in Russian nationalism spurred on composers of ballet to experiment with adventuresome choreography centered upon folk themes.

The folk themes captured by the Mighty Handful were a little bit here and a little bit there. There was nothing systematic in the way they were incorporated into scores. Composers heard folk singers, studied some rudimentary scores annotated by trained musicians, lifting them into and sprinkling them around in their oeuvre. This changed with the availability of phonographs. Originally debuted in the late 1870s, the phonograph emerged as a technological innovation revolutionizing music7. In Russia the ethnographer Yevgeniya Linyova travelled around the Russian countryside recording folk songs in remote villages. As she revealed in her publications the phonograph was indispensable for her research 3:

“ [the phonograph is] an astonishingly useful notebook … I notate too slowly. A song successfully recorded on the phonograph retains all aspects of its rhythmic and harmonic character …. [capturing the fact that] the singer …. subordinates the tunes to words …” In 1903 Linyova published her first volume of Peasant Songs of Great Russia. Consuming the fruits of her monumental efforts, young composers had a source from which they could systematically draw in writing scores that accurately embodied the “spirit” of the Russian soil.

Igor Stravinsky was a member of the group that believed incorporating folk music directly into modern scores was the royal road opening up a new Russian music.

It is fair to say that composers like Stravinsky were responding to a political as well as an aesthetic agenda. The ideology of Eurasianism was important. As Pipes (1974) points out

Russian history has been profoundly shaped by its natural environment. There are three main

141 geographic zones in Russia; a northern tundra zone (similar to Canada’s northern tundra zone); further south a forest zone, poor in the natural plant foods that enrich the soil; and an immense steppe – a black earth belt – stretching from Hungary to Mongolia. Securing control over this steppe was essential for Russia’s long run economic future because it is the black earth belt that is blessed with relatively good soil for growing crops and raising cattle and horses. After the Mongolian invasions the principal power exercising hard power over the steppe was the

Golden Horde that subjected Russia (Moscow and its environs) and Novgorod to vassal state dependency. It was the task of Russian leaders to reverse this state of affairs, defeating the

Mongols and securing control over the steppe lands of central Eurasia.

In short Great Russia emerged as the pivot area of the Eurasian land mass, facing China and Japan in the far-East, Poland and the Baltic in the west. Russia alone could move troops relatively easily from east to west, particularly once the Trans-Siberian railroad was completed.

Russia was both European and Asian. Its rulers viewed it superior to Europe because they believed they espoused a purer form of Christianity – the Russian Orthodox faith owing its origins to Byzantium and the Greek Orthodox faith – and because they had a special relationship to the black earth soil, evinced by the existence of cohesive villages known as mir that sprouted up on the vast steppe lands, typically isolated from one another by vast distances that precluded market oriented agriculture.

What Eurasianism as an ideology exemplified was a mystical union: the mir, Russian

Orthodox faith, plus submission to a fearsome state apparatus ruled over the iron fist of a Tsar leaning upon a carefully selected cluster of bureaucratic officials for guidance. Pipes (1974) suggests that the traditional view of the Tsars – modified during the reigns of Catherine the

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Great and Alexander I – was that all of Great Russia was their patrimony, that private property in the sense that Western Europe developed the concept was simply unknown or at least disregarded in practice. Nobles were expected to serve in the army as officers. Tsars were prepared to subject them to the iron will of the state. The peasantry – the vast majority isolated in the communal like mir – was for all intents and purposes enslaved. To be sure Alexander I supposedly freed the serf-slaves of Russia in the early 1870s, but the communal hold over so- called free peasants remained strong even in the face of emancipation. As a political creed

Eurasianism emphasized the importance of a soft power agenda in moving Russia forward to a respectable nation-state cum Empire exemplified by Imperial Germany. Promoting Russian folk culture in music, poetry, drama, painting, sculpture, and literature held out great promise for resourceful political leaders.

This is the background to the efforts made by the impresario Serge de Diaghilev to put on ballets in Paris 4. Avant-garde French musicians like Debussy were excited about Russian music; Rameau was considered one of the greatest composers of ballet music; the Russian ballet was highly esteemed, training some of the greatest dancers of the age at the Bolshoi. It was a match made in heaven. With this in mind Diaghilev created the Ballet Russes ballet company, securing venues in Paris for his performances.

With this in mind Diaghilev convinced Stravinsky, eager to break out from a circle of St.

Petersburg composers simultaneously influenced and overshadowed by Rimsky-Korsakov, to write ballet music for his productions. While Stravinsky was keen on discarding his tutelage to

Rimsky-Korsakov in point of fact he had imbibed many techniques from his teacher and master that he was fully prepared to utilize in pursuing a Eurasianism agenda. The best example of this

143 is the ballet Petrushka first staged in Paris with Vaslav Nijinsky dancing the male lead in June

1911. What Stravinsky employed with remarkable skill was the octatonic scale that Rimsky-

Korsakov had developed. Basically the octatonic scale was neither major, nor minor. If analyzed in terms of major and minor scales it could be characterized as polytonal, simultaneously juxtaposing two standard keys. The famous “Petrushka chord” is a prime example. It is highly colorful, exotic, and deeply sonic and exciting: it grabs your attention.

The Petrushka ballet proved to be a great success in Paris 5. Danced to choreography and a set of tableaus conceived by Alexander Benois with a polytonal score alive with constant changes of rhythm it put Paris on the map as the epitome of the musical avant-garde. It was deeply steeped in Eurasianism: the tableau were organized around the interaction of puppets with people – evoking the popular Shrovetide fairs popular in the streets of Russian cities and towns – that were an immense source of pride to Russian intellectuals pursuing a folk agenda.

More to the point Stravinsky was able to incorporate an abundance of folk music into his score as he had available to himself the publications of ethnographers like Linyova. His music was both atavistic and determinably modern.

Stravinsky continued to compose scores inspired by Russian folk music for a number of years before turning elsewhere for his inspiration. The Le Sacre du Printemps (Rite of Spring) is widely believed to be the most revolutionary music composed in the twentieth century. Its initial performance in Paris instigated a true scandal, a veritable riot, in which aficionados of the avant-garde attacked the bourgeois elite disturbed by the gyrations of the dancers and the pulsating rhythms of the music. Still the score penned by Stravinsky that most deeply channeled

Russian folk traditions was Les Noces (The Wedding), scored during World War II when

144 orchestras were hard pressed to put on performances, for a small ensemble consisting of four singers, four pianos and percussion. In this score Stravinsky captured the essence of the Russian mir, exemplified by the complete control over the lives of the couple being married by the village collective, the mir.

The radical Russian approach to composing music was mimicked by an equally radical approach to painting. Consider the origin of abstract expressionism. The Russian painter

Wassily Kandinsky joined a radical group of Expressionist painters in Munich, the Brüke.

Generalizing the expressionist notion that primal instincts was paramount he concluded that realism was dead, advocating pure geometrical abstraction as the only refuge for depicting incomprehensible reality. Returning to Russia where he founded the Academy of Arts and

Sciences, hoping to promote radical painting experiments in Russian art, he joined a group of fervent Russian painters advocating Suprematism. The high priest of this new movement was

Kasimir Malevich who argued that pure feeling was paramount, objective reality of no consequence. Harnessing Freudian concepts Malevich argued objects appearing in the so-called real world are meaningless; equally meaningless is conscious thought; feeling alone matters, art becoming completely non-objective, totally abstract.

Not surprisingly once the Leninists took over in Russia pushing a working class ideology - the dictatorship of the proletariat wedded to electricity as the materialistically grounded savior for Russia mocking the high culture of elites (Lenin himself had complete contempt for experimental art or music) Kandinsky fled the Russian scene returning to Europe.

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That art and music fell under the shadow of government repression and censorship notably in the totalitarian countries speaks to the changing nature of dimension. By the mid- nineteenth century artists had increasingly felt their art needed to make a social contribution: decoration, symbolism, and genius were not enough to justify the work of artists. Their calling now included exposing social injustices that political leaders ignored to their peril: group- oriented Arts and Crafts designers in England joined extreme individualists like Vincent van

Gogh in the Netherlands in dedicating their art to the social betterment of humanity.

Censorship aimed at protecting the public from the evils of pornography was one thing; harnessing art and music to flat out crude propaganda was another agenda all together. Still both spoke to a common theme, protecting social stability by a combination of censorship or state sponsorship.

What connection if any was there between Soviet suppression of freedom in the fine arts and Soviet economic success? Table 2.1 speaks to this issue. It suggests two conclusions: one is that Soviet emphasis on science and technology at the expense of the fine arts was not as bad a bargain as one might think. The Soviet Union started out much poorer than did the

United States if we compare the two countries as matters stood in the period just before World

War I broke out (in this case the comparison is between Tsarist Russia and the United States as the Communists did not take over until 1917). Thereafter the Soviet Union grew at a respectable rate: at about the same rate as the United States did between 1913 and 1950 and at a faster rate than did the United States between 1950 and 1973. After that the Soviet performance is abysmal in comparison to that of the United States. The other point to keep in mind is that at all times the United States was more opulent than the Soviet Union. Opulence

146 favors the fine arts. In short the Soviet suppression of the fine arts was probably not a negative factor as far as economic growth per se was concerned, at least up to the point when the Soviet

Union when the Soviet state had reached relative prosperity. After that it was probably a corrosive factor. Suppression of the fine arts stifled creativity, channeling Soviet citizens into politically safe careers in which risk-taking was frowned upon in all walks of life, not just in the fine arts. It imperiled the emergence of unfettered genius in all fields, not just in music, architecture, and painting. Who knew when the iron hand of a benighted unimaginative bureaucrat might descend upon a genius shaking up the hallowed ranks of a politically entrenched scientific establishment? The Russian slowdown after 1973 points to the stifling of innovation characteristic of a society intent on suppressing freedom of expression.

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Table 2.1 The United States and the Soviet Union Compared: Population, Gross Domestic Product, and Gross Domestic Product per Capita, 1820-2003

Panel A: Shares of World Population (P) and World Gross Domestic Product (GDP): Percentages

Country Year 1820 1870 1913 1950 1973 2003 Population United States 1.0 % 3.2 % 5.4 % 6.0 % 5.4 % 4.6 % Former 5.3 7.0 8.7 7.1 6.4 4.6 Soviet Union Gross Domestic Product (1990 International Dollars) United States 1.8 8.9 18.9 27.3 22.1 20.6 Former 5.4 7.5 8.5 9.6 9.4 3.8 Soviet Union

Panel B: Per Capita Gross Domestic Product

Country Year 1820 1870 1913 1950 1973 2003 Per Capita Gross Domestic Product (1990 International Dollars) United States 1,257 2,445 5,301 9,561 16,689 29,037 (A) Former 688 943 1,488 2,841 6,059 5,397 Soviet Union (B) Ratio (A/B) 1.83 2.59 3.56 3.37 2.75 5.38

Sources: A. Maddison (2007) The Contours of the World Economy, 1-2030 AD (New York: Oxford University Press): pp. 378, 381, and 382. Contrary to the Marxist myth that the state withers away under Communism,

Communism is basically state capitalism. In theory enterprises are all owned by the proletariat; in practice this means all enterprises are directly controlled by the state, whether they be collective farms, steel factories, or department stores. In theory state employed bureaucrats –

148 subject to ideological vetting by the Party – come up with plans for how to allocate resources to industries, including the cultural sector. In theory the bureaucracy sets prices for all commodities and services because the enemy – deregulated capitalism – relies heavily on the forces of supply and demand in determining prices. In practice setting prices and correctly anticipating the needs of particular enterprises is impossible: there are far too many prices and gluts and shortages are impossible to anticipate with complete certainty, particularly in an economy expanding quickly. In practical reality factory managers negotiate under the table with each other, bartering glass for rubber, iron ingots for lathes, and so forth. Not surprisingly a black market develops as avaricious managers exploiting their political muscle as power brokers run their factories at night or full bore during off hours, surreptitiously producing goods not mandated by the planners, even paying off thieves and gangsters to enforce their illegal market activities.

Corruption runs rampant. All of this undermines the credibility of the system, adding to the pressure on key state actors – particularly members of the Party’s inner circle of power brokers reporting to the leader - whose personality cult is carefully and secretly fashioned to protect the leader from being summarily executed by jealous subordinates – to rigidly adhere to a Party line that consistently lies, spewing out fabrication after fabrication. If you instruct people over and over that they live in a socialist paradise despite the reality of living in a terrorized hell you confuse the masses. There are always true believers. When trust breaks down in a world bedeviled by continuous lying and base chicanery who knows who is really being honest and who is actually a government employed spy, an agent whose principle job is ferreting out dissent. Propaganda promoting the Big Lie prevails. Political manipulation trumps

149 rational economic policy. Creative individuals – geniuses believing in their destiny – are caught between the exigencies of satisfying political hacks and their desire to pursue honesty in their chosen fields of endeavor. Particularly vulnerable are artists, musicians, scientists, writers, and innovative engineers interesting in exploiting new scientific advances.

Stalin once made a penetrating remark about the scientists who were working on the atomic bomb project. When told that they were pursuing a form of physics anathema to official

Soviet policy grounded in Marxian theory of dialectical materialism he told one of his colleagues to not worry. Let them do what they need to do to create an atomic bomb. We can always shoot them afterward!

How Stalinism impacted the field of music is best illustrated by comparing the fates of three of the most esteemed composers of the twentieth century: Igor Stravinsky, Dmitri

Shostakovich, and Sergei Prokofiev. All were Russians. All thought in Russian, composing music that drew up the natural rhythms and dynamics of the Russian tongue. Stravinsky ended up pursuing his career in Russia Abroad, in the community of Russians who hated the Soviet Union

(but not Russia itself). Shostakovich’s entire career was a career as a Soviet composer. Prokofiev oscillated, joining the world of Russia Abroad for a brief stint, eventually returning to Russia where he became a full-fledged Soviet composer.

During World War I and its aftermath Stravinsky continued to write ballet scores for

Diaghilev’s Ballet Russe Company. In that capacity he was strongly influenced by what Diaghilev himself wanted to accomplish in the field of post-World War I ballet. What Diaghilev wanted was neo-Classicism, sophisticated music celebrating the great tradition of European music

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(notably the progressive Renaissance styles espoused by Italian, French, and Spanish composers). What Diaghilev did not want was heavy emphasis on folk traditions. To be sure

Diaghilev was willing to stage in 1923 Les Noces that made heavy use of Russian folk song; that said he encouraged Stravinsky to move onto traditional European fare, the best example being the Pulcinella that was staged in 1919. The latter score is really warmed-over Italian music of the seventeenth and early eighteenth century, supposedly composed by Pergolesi but in point of fact composed by lesser Italian composers. Diaghilev had picked up scores when he was in

Italy and asked Stravinsky to arrange the music for a ballet. Stravinsky himself – now that he was cut off from Russia by the revolution, denying him access to Russian folk music collections – was surely enthusiastic about pursuing a new direction. In this spirit he composed the scores for Apollon Musagéte and his last ostensibly Russian project Marva.

What Stravinsky craved were boon companions – the more gifted, elitist, and sophisticated the better – and money. His attraction to the almighty franc, dollar, and lira was proverbial. As long as Diaghilev’s ballet company was a magnetic for composers, painters, and poets – Jean Cocteau and Pablo Picasso gravitated to it because they were interested in seducing the ballerinas who danced for the company – he was happy 6. Provided commissions for new music came his way, accompanied by lucrative performing and conducting opportunities, he could satisfy both of his needs in the Diaghilev orbit. Paris was the perfect site. No proletarian fantasies requiring attention. There were two problems however: the fact

Diaghilev was mortal; and the political instability overhanging Europe, particularly after Hitler took over as Reich Chancellor in Germany. Granted Stravinsky was not immune from the appeal

151 of dictators: he was attracted to Italian Fascism because he say potential for European anti-

Communist redemption in figures like Benito Mussolini. To boot he was anti-Semitic.

As Europe lurched toward joining the drift toward global warfare pioneered by Japan

Stravinsky sought a more secure refuge. The United States beckoned. In 1938 Walt Disney arranged to use sections of the Rite of Spring in the soundtrack for his feature length cartoon masterpiece Fantasia. With the assistance of his protégé Nadia Boulanger he secured an appointment to deliver the Eliot Norton lectures at Harvard University in 1939; on top of this he was offered a wonderful opportunity to record his music with Columbia Records in New York, headed up by Goddard Lieberson who was assisted in his search for composers willing to conduct recording sessions by his wife Vera Zorina Lieberson. Applying for American citizenship in 1940 he took up residence in Hollywood in 1941. Ironically he ended up residing close to

Arnold Schoenberg who had also fled a Europe roiled by German aggression, Russian

Communism, and the likelihood of entering a second major Europe-wide conflagration. Ironic because Stravinsky had an intense dislike of German music and of twelve-tone music in particular. As explained by Crafts (1983) Stravinsky always viewed twelve-tone music as the antithesis of his own “bag of tricks.”7 That fact that twelve-tone serialism became popular among American composers who held academic appointments in American university music departments – Anton Webern was especially revered by young composers – only served to keep Stravinsky and Schoenberg apart.

Still Stravinsky embraced change. As he said “the only thing that does not change is stupidity. The devil remains constant; God is forever changing.” 8 Once Schoenberg was dead it was no longer personal. Stravinsky proceeded to embrace serialism, composing a number of

152 compositions employing the method during the last fifteen years of his life. Working alongside his assistant Robert Crafts he wrote Agon, The Flood (for a television special), Threni, Abraham and Isaac, and Canticum Sacrum, much of this inspired to ancient mythology or religion. Given the emphasis Stravinsky placed on rhythm – he was less inspired by melody, more attracted to vertically sounded chords and rapid changes in tempo – it is not surprising that twelve-tone methods emphasizing repetition of fragments – ostinato – appealed to his proclivities. The fact that he could embrace serialism in one arena while emulating Mozart’s style in another – the opera The Rake’s Progress – testifies to Stravinsky’s eclecticism. That twentieth century artists and musicians were becoming increasingly eclectic is hardly surprising. With fragmentation of styles and ways of thinking about the fine arts, the opportunity – the temptation – to experiment with novel techniques developed by other creative geniuses is certainly plausible. In many ways this advertises the potency of genius as opposed to the other components making up dimension.

Of course, this presupposes that the geniuses are free to try out various alternative approaches to creation. What was true in Western Europe – at least before the Nazis came to power in Germany condemning “degenerate art and music” - and in the Americas was not true in the Soviet Union committed to proletarian inspired “socialist realism” that was a cover for patriotic propaganda. Consider the case of Dmitri Shostakovich. As a gifted performer – a pianist – and composer of fifteen symphonies, three operas, and fifteen string quartets (making him one of the masters of the classical style begun by Hayden and perfected by Beethoven),

Shostakovich was one of the musical geniuses of the twentieth century. He was the target of trenchant ideologically driven campaigns designed to rein in criticism of the Communist Party

153 and its propaganda program: first in 1936; late in 1948. In both cases it is probable the attack on Shostakovich was part and parcel of a larger campaign purging Communist Party elites and generals whom Stalin personally distrusted. In short cracking down on so-called “formalist” adventures – compositions highlighting technical innovations such as the use of dissonance, atonality, serialism, themes neglecting the proletarian line of the Party – was usually a signal for a sweeping revamping of the political landscape. Certainly like many young artists caught up in the Russian revolution Shostakovich was not opposed to writing compositions that celebrated the October 1917 revolution. His 1927 second symphony was entitled “October”; he briefly worked with colleagues at a proletarian youth theater during the 1920s and 1930s, perhaps to secure politically safe cover for his own endeavors. Still his 1929 opera, The Nose, was subjected to writhing criticism by the Russian Association of Proletarian Musicians. This was a harbinger of the future.

As Stalin was ramping up the campaign against old Bolsheviks and other powerful members of the inner circle of the Party elite, Shostakovich came under attack once again.

During the mid-1930s a series of show trials took place in Moscow: prominent party members were accused of treason, of being foreign agents, of being bourgeois opponents of the party line. Typically the accused confessed, encouraged to do so due to threats against their relatives and spouses, encouraged to do so by imprisonment and torture in the dungeons of Soviet jails.

The trial completed they were condemned to death. Stalin, who enjoyed attending a ballet performance in the early evening, signed death warrants upon his return to his study in the

Kremlin. Under these circumstances it was highly likely Shostakovich felt he was let off easily when his 1936 opera – Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District – was subjected to harsh criticism

154 in the official Party newspaper Pravda. Stalin had himself attended a performance of the opera and expressed his personal dissatisfaction with the dissonance running through the score. First premiered in Leningrad, the opera was quickly withdrawn from performance. Shostakovich was dully instructed by his party superiors: write music that gives an accurate account of life on collective farms.

What was meant by the word “accurate”? Rosy pictures of happy farm workers celebrating the joys of Soviet Communism. Was this realistic? In a year when the dragnet was terrorizing the Russian countryside, when collective managers were being hauled off to the

Gulag, when a forced trip to Siberia was in the cards for anyone caught in a political dispute with the wrong Party official, realism was hardly rosy at least for people who were prepared to deal with reality, for those who were aware of the forced starvation campaign crippling the kulak population of Ukraine.

In the late 1940s Shostakovich was humiliated once again. In 1948 he was denounced – as a member of a group of Soviet composers – for engaging once again in un-proletarian

“formalism”. Perhaps Shostakovich thought he had satisfied the Party censors by writing his patriotic seventh symphony, the so-called Leningrad symphony celebrating the heroism of the

Leningraders in the face of the German invasion that came close to capturing the city. Not so.

Heaping onto to Shostakovich’s sense of self-worth and integrity further cruelty he was forced to read an official Soviet statement condemning Stravinsky’s music at the Cultural and Scientific

Congress for World Peace held in New York in 1949. Everyone who knew anything about

Shostakovich’s personal views knew he had tremendous respect for Stravinsky and his style of composition. Everyone who was in the know knew that Shostakovich was being compelled to

155 read the proclamation by a repressive Communist Party machine. Everyone who was in the know that the message being sent was loud and clear: the Party was in command; not some petty bourgeois composer who liked experimentation and innovation in music.

Like Shostakovich Sergei Prokofiev was a gifted pianist, a prodigy, a genius. Like

Shostakovich he was attracted to dissonance at an early age. Unlike Shostakovich Prokofiev carved out an international career in the non-Soviet world. He joined the White Russian – anti-

Soviet Union – community gathered around Diaghilev and the Ballet Russe during the 1920s. He wrote the ballet score for Chout (The Buffoon) based on Russian folklore. He traveled around

Europe and the United States performing. He became friends with Stravinsky in Paris, then feuded with him, then became friends again. Finally in the year before and the year when

Diaghilev died – 1928 and 1929 – he wrote one of his most melodic and powerful compositions, the much celebrated ballet The Prodigal Son considered one of the great triumphs of the Ballet

Russe. Whether it was difficulties securing lucrative contracts and performance opportunities in the wake of the demise of the Ballet Russe, or the onset of the Great Depression in the United

States, or the growing political instability of European politics in the mid-1930s – perhaps all three factors combined – Prokofiev returned to the Soviet Union only to find himself denounced for “formalism” along with Shostakovich in 1948. Ironically both Stravinsky and

Prokofiev abandoned Europe both in completely opposite directions. Europe was once more sliding into a hard power abyss, turmoil which soft power had little ability to ward off. This had already been made clear in 1914. When Germany invaded Poland in the fall of 1939 it was clear another conflagration was going to eat up Europe’s claim to being the powerhouse of soft power innovation and experimentation.

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Geniuses Vie with One Another Enhancing the Dialectic Why does an experimental physicist publishing his or her findings – or more likely a group of physicists operating out of a massive laboratory – expected to describe in detail all of the procedures and equipment used in arriving at results? The answer is remarkably simple but profound: so that other experimenters can reproduce the work, carrying out the same experiments on their own. Why is this important? Because scientists are not wholly disinterested investigators. They know one way to make a name for one self, to generate a following and the rewards of research funding that come along with recognition, is to refute what others have done.

This applies to all geniuses. It is applicable to painters, musicians, writers, charismatic politicians, philosophers, scientists, and even ingenious rogue underworld figures like Bugsy

Siegel.

There are a number of compelling reasons why geniuses vie with one another. One is to make a claim for individual creativity, for inspiration unique to the person involved. Another is because creativity involves deconstructing what others have done, coming up with new ways of doing what others in the same chosen field have already achieved. You can call this a form of reverse engineering if you want to cast in mundane terms, Geniuses not only attack and criticize one another on a regular basis; they also attack the contributions made by veritable ghosts, geniuses already deceased, notable figures from the distant past whose shadow looms large over matters intellectual, artistic, and political.

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A few examples will suffice. Leonardo and Michelangelo were arch rivals during the

Renaissance. Galileo took great relish in refuting Aristotle. Spinoza, although teaching Cartesian science and philosophy in the Netherlands, rejected the mind-body dualism Descartes had developed. Newton rejected Descartes’s theory of light, carrying out experiments designed to show white light was made up of discrete colors a finding that a Cartesian could not justify.

Einstein, committed to electromagnetic field theory in which bundles of energy are moving throughout the universe ended up rejecting completely many of the mechanical principles that

Newton had developed. In particular Einstein argued that time was not absolute. Time – along with the three dimensions of space – was itself a dimension, one that expanded or contracted depending on the speed of the reference frame along which it was calibrated. In music

Schonberg rejected the classical principles of harmony, the dominance of tonic note and its dominant tone in composition. He rejected principles of composition that had informed Johann

Sebastian Bach, Joseph Haydn, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, and Ludwig van Beethoven.

Stravinsky hated classical German music: for him it was ponderous, bombastic, and profoundly boring. In political life experiments in government are often designed to improve upon what others have pioneered, a prime example being the constitutional system of checks and balances developed by Americans as an alternative to the unwritten constitutional rules that underlay

British political practice. Gone was monarchy; gone was common law as the sole basis for judicial practice. Gone were titles for aristocratic elites.

Competition between inspired geniuses are one reason why pendulum swings take place, why dialectic processes have the salience they do. Genius rebelling against genius is a

158 major reason why history moves dialectically and why change is more rapid the more vigorous is the competition between competing positions.

Market Equilibrium is Not Compatible with Rapid Economic Growth Assembling the various threads of the argument made in chapters one and two at this juncture allows us to step back from the details in order to assess the relationship between mainstream economics and the historical processes undergirding economic change and political change.

There are six lines of reasoning underpinning the logic of this book. The first is that complexity increases with social development that is fueled by an uneasy alliance forged between cooperation and creativity. Conflict arises from the disruptive tendencies set in motion by creativity, thereby undercutting cooperative. Call this the law of the four “c’s”: cooperation, creativity, complexity, and conflict.

The second is the importance of genius and the cultural climate within which genius flourishes. As means of communication have improved and literacy has spread the number of geniuses has increased at a phenomenal pace, outstripping the rate of population growth.

Geniuses emerge when they learn from each other, in turn competing with one another. This is why acceleration in the level and spread of complexity has occurred.

The third point is that the law of unintended consequences holds. For most individuals the existence of the law of unintended consequences renders them highly risk averse, unwilling to take on grand risks, to push ahead with their projects willy-nilly. Geniuses are different. They are bold, one can say exceedingly fearless in the broadest meaning of the word. They are not

159 afraid to stand out from the crowd. They are prepared to be peppered with criticism and opprobrium if that is required to make their mark.

The fourth point is belief in transcendental forces remains strong even amongst peoples who have rejected ideologies that purport to spread virtue among the masses. Even if you reject prophets on the grounds that you do not believe in the religious doctrines they claim are blessed messages delivered to humanity from an immaterial spiritual world you still have to wonder about why genius exists. Movements like the European Enlightenment that accelerated the capacity of geniuses to emerge and exercise voice was surely responsible for a decline in religious devotion. But flagging religious attachment does not necessarily mean belief in a transcendental world was being eroded. The very existence of inspired genius seems to suggest there is more to heaven and earth than is revealed in material reality. The fact that transcendental belief has not been dissipated by the force of purely secular doctrines in and of itself means the complexity of options available to elites has immensely increased.

The fifth point is that geniuses are more than willing to go head to head with one another. They disagree with one another, quarreling over the validity of their visions. Because camps of followers cluster around geniuses relatively large groups opposing one another form.

The logic of forming coalitions, factions, or blocks comes to the fore. A tendency to cluster into opposing camps – while not absolutely inevitable – is a typical outcome. This underscores the existence of dialectic processes at work in history. One corollary of this reasoning is as follows: the more vigorous is the dialectic, the more dramatic is change. Geniuses are driven. They aspire to success, not necessarily material success but success in promoting their beliefs and

160 their contributions. Proving opponents are fundamentally misguided acts as a magnetic field into which geniuses cluster.

The sixth is the importance of exit. When the voice of genius is suppressed exit is a way for it to persist. This means that escaping from one market into another market matters. The existence of markets does not guarantee that geniuses can effectively exercise voice within them.

The viewpoint advanced here calls into question some of the hallowed principles of mainstream economics insofar as mainstream economics purports to explain long-run change in the standard of living. The problem does not reside in the notion that markets exist; denying they exist is absurd. The problem is mainstream economics differs from other Enlightenment theories by its claim of unity. If you allow unfettered markets to meet demands placed upon them by peoples of wholly different backgrounds – religious, ethnic, socioeconomic – you can satisfy everybody without appealing to virtue. All that is required is to channel aggressive impulses into market competition, egotistical self-interest motivating people to do as well as they possibly can. Markets naturally tend toward equilibrium. Once all markets are in equilibrium no change in behavior occurs anywhere. A stable unity is achieved without the intervention of deities, without the iron hand of a dictator espousing an ideology promoting virtue, instigating campaigns designed to promote true socialist brotherhood and the like.

The classical treatment of this approach – classical in the sense that it is a touchstone for all future work in mainstream economics – is Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations. Smith, a

Scottish Enlightenment thinker was heavily influenced by Isaac Newton’s theory of mechanics.

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In the Newtonian framework the universe was a self-regulating machine, a gigantic clock. While

Newton himself believed God had to intervene occasionally to rewind the clock, many of his followers and critics pointed out that a perfect God would not create an imperfect clock. The ideal clock is self-regulating. It is in equilibrium. The equilibrium exists because of natural laws captured in equations describing force applied to mass. Force either acts through collisions or through a distance in which case it is most accurately characterized as force of attraction or repulsion generated between two points, the centers of mass of objects. Gravitational force is what holds the solar system together. Other forces similar to gravity hold together multi- colored rays of light consisting of corpuscles that make up beams of white light.

Smith carried over these ideas into his theory of the Invisible Hand. The Invisible Hand – in this case operating through equilibrium established in a competitive market equating supply and demand for goods and services, equilibrium price being the established – is the analogue to

Newton’s theory of forces acting to produce either linear movement or passage along curved paths. The regular movement of the planets along elliptical paths is convincingly accounted for by gravitational attraction diverting planets away from linear motion. Gravitational attraction acts as universal force emanating from the centers of mass of bodies occupying space. The centers of mass in Smith’s model were individual decision makers operating according to the principle that should maximize their wellbeing – like programmed robots – by adjusting their purchasing and selling behavior according to an array of changing price signals spewed out of shifts in supply and demand within markets. The analogue to gravitation is Smith’s idea of altruism that holds together households and social groups. Individualism is tempered by the glue of social gravitation, arising either from the desire to be admired by others or conscience.

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Social welfare is maximized when every individual is maximizing their wellbeing in a stable market equilibrium.

The great impact that Smith’s theory has had on mainstream economics is evident from the fact that his individualism, his idea of altruistic social glue, and his fascination with equilibrium dominate the field, at least that segment of the field that has driven to the margins of the field competing approaches like Marxism and radical political economy. The attractiveness of mathematics and analogues to a physical balance of forces is one indicator.

Another is Smith’s ignoring of political power and ideology. Smith basically assumed private market capitalism was a given. Private property rights were basic to his approach. To be specific following John Locke, Smith adopted the labor theory of value. According to the labor theory of value everyone owns private property: even the poor who do not enjoy rents from land ownership or profits from capital they lend out at interest. They own their own labor. According to the theory Smith laid out the natural price of a good – the own that would result when market prices settled down to natural Invisible Hand given prices in equilibrium – the price of a commodity or service would be the number of labor units it imbedded. If good A was produced using in total ten labor units and good B twenty labor units the relative price of B compared to

A would be two.

Some kind of growth was implied by Smith’s competitive theory of equilibrium due to the self-regulated drive toward natural prices inherent in the Invisible Hand regulating markets.

The idea was simple. Expand the market, stimulating specialization and division of labor, encouraging people to focus on doing one thing well rather than many things poorly. The larger the market the more efficient is each labor unit in terms of generating output, driving down the

163 natural prices that obtain in equilibrium. To be sure Smith saw a downside to this process of improving efficiency through specialization: the deadening impact of repetitive action stripping away a sense of satisfaction, denying the worker challenges posed by confronting novel situations, the veritable lifeblood of the craftsperson toiling in his or her own shop.

Smith did not deal with ideological competitors to private market capitalism like the thorough going socialism that came to a fore during the French Revolution (Robert Malthus, who wrote after Smith, did take on socialism as an alternative to a regime of private property).

For this reason the only power he was interested in was power concentrated in the hands of governments acting in league with powerful mercantilist interests. Reducing their power over the use of labor units was a good thing because it freed up competitive forces that could operate through the Invisible Hand of competition. In any case mercantilist governments were operating according to principles of private market capitalism. The ideology that motivated government officials was not a problem per se; their belief in commerce was exemplary. Only their attachment to monopoly and oligopoly as impediments to a properly operating invisible hand was anathema.

Without a doubt Smith believed spread of unregulated markets would advance a number of agendas other Enlightenment thinkers were interested in promoting, for instance abolishing slavery. Rather than introduce regulations restricting slavery, one could imagine the force of invisible hand competition accomplishing the goal. Smith believed with some justification that slavery, rooted in coerced as opposed to freely contracted labor, was inefficient. Slaves just did not work that hard because they lacked the incentive to do so.

Competing against free labor markets should accomplish the task that politicians of the early

164 eighteenth century were seemingly unable to bring about precisely because slave owners in the southern colonies of British America resisted attempts at legal reform. This was an argument many Enlightenment thinkers – Thomas Jefferson for one – trusted. To his everlasting shame it was totally fallacious. Only a bloody civil war was able to batter down the walls erected by

Southern slave owners.

Ignoring power and ideology was a major defect in Smith’s approach, one that has continued to haunt economics as a field distinctly hostile to intellectual invasion by theories of political behavior. Beyond this, however, is a more profound defect: confusion of what should be with what is. Smith was making an argument about how the invisible hand would produce social results that were as good, as benevolent, as you could possibly imagine. It was an imperfect world but at least it was the best you could come up with. The problem is he was basing his reasoning on a Newtonian theory of physics. Newton was not interested in comparing world systems. He believed he was accurately describing with his laws of force and attraction the way the universe operates, not how it should operate but how it actually does operate. The burden of Smith’s position is that sticking to the invisible hand is a way to improve how an economy should operate, thereby unleashing behavior through which people are led to maximize their welfare. This is a fallacy because it confuses what ought to be with what occurs by following natural law. “What ought to be” is not what natural law dictates; “what ought to be” is a set of rules undergirded by an ideology.

I believe this agenda is ill-construed. It is based on a fallacy about unity through equilibrium that fails to explain how change actually occurs within economies. What I offer in this book is an alternative framework. It makes use of some important economic principles that

165 are independent of equilibrium while rejecting other economic principles that are part and parcel of mainstream thinking. To be specific: in this book I reject equilibrium, utilitarianism, and maximizing behavior. While I concede that these ideas are useful from a pedagogical point of view – they are logically consistent, they can be represented by a straight-forward graphical analysis (or better yet, emulating Newtonian physics, by calculus), and they constitute a plausible scenario explaining why people make trade-offs in their daily lives (choosing a determinate consumption bundle that include housing, clothing, food, and leisure) – they are extreme abstractions. By extreme abstraction I mean they neglect to take into account ideology, bargaining power in households and in places of employment, and the unfortunate fact that people take pleasure from comparing themselves favorably with the less fortunate.

From a psychological point of view they are woefully shallow. In the Appendix to this book I discuss my reservations about these concepts in greater detail.

In any event my reservations about the realism of equilibrium, utilitarianism, and maximizing behavior are really a side issue to a degree. My agenda is to explain long-run economic, political, and cultural change. A framework based on the simplistic assumption that everyone is doing as well as they can ignores the law of unintended consequences that is crucial to the way historical processes play out. Moreover it fails to take into account pendulum swings, dialectics. It cannot explain why genius is important. Adhering to it sucks the lifeblood out of history.

How to incorporate formal economic reasoning into historical change? My approach is to develop a productivity growth framework that takes into account labor input; the quality and quantity of capital services; inputs of land adjusted for productive usage through fertilizing,

166 irrigating, and other treatments; and a parameter - total factor productivity – that incorporates economies of scale, innovation, and shifts in the composition of output (for example shifting away from agriculture towards manufacturing). This is standard economics, rooted in decomposing growth into growth in three distinct factors of production, incorporating technological improvements in two niches: embodying it in quality improvements in capital and land; and incorporated it as disembodied advances in knowledge – primarily scientific and organizational – in the total factor productivity parameter. In the Appendix there is a formal presentation of this framework, algebra being used for the sake of rigor (and decidedly not in an attempt to intimidate readers). From time to time I introduce into the text variables that are defined in the Appendix. Those readers averse to mathematical formalisms should simply ignore these discussions.

Where my account differs from standard mainstream accounts of growth lies not in the use of formalism but rather in interpreting the formalisms. Consider innovation. In my account innovation is not progressive in the sense that it positively builds upon itself. It is both destructive and constructive. Geniuses set inspiration in motion and imitators apply their breakthroughs ploughing through fresh furrows the geniuses have discovered. At the same time detractors enter the fray, suggesting alternatives to the innovations, attempting to bottle up both the intended and unintended consequences flowing from the innovation. Several steps back accompany steps forward so to speak. Pendulum swings slow the pace of change. If the unintended consequences are severe enough measured total factor productivity increase may end up being negative. One of the reasons why negative growth emerges is suppression of genius. This is a crucial point.

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Beyond my unconventional interpretation of productivity growth in terms of genius and dialectics is the fact I take into account ideology and power in interpreting long-run change. In the Appendix I develop a formal framework for explaining how economic logic explains how power is aggrandized, and why the composition of power changes, the exercise of soft power contending with hard military and police power. However power transcends the simple logic of making economic decisions. It rests on ideology. In turn ideology depends upon beliefs regarding materialism and transcendentalism. Material considerations are only one component in appreciating how ideologies shape the concrete world of economics.

None of these forays into reinterpreting long-run economic change dispense with the notion that markets play a critical role in historical dynamics. However the relationship between markets and genius is complicated because exit from markets goes hand in hand with the fullest expression of genius. Consider scale economies – concentrating people in geographical niches where they share in the benefits flowing from public resources (e.g.: cheap electricity, bus service, large-scale distribution centers, sprawling supermarkets and the like).

One could argue – as Marx himself did – that scale economies justify unifying production and distribution under the aegis of a government managed umbrella – thereby rationalizing public ownership of capital. Applying this logic one could argue fragmentation is a bad thing. The problem is genius. If genius thrives best when exit is possible then there is a strong argument in favor of breaking up capital assets.

There is no doubt that markets – political; cultural; agricultural, commercial and industrial – channel much of the activity that takes place in complex societies. When one includes barter as a means of exchange this statement is compelling. In hunting and gathering

168 settings barter, give and take involved in assigning tasks, is ongoing. In complex modern

Communist centrally planned economies barter between factory managers is common; the existence of centrally mandated state prices does not mean that exchange designed to correct imbalances between supply and demand does not take place. In practice, as opposed to in principle, central planning according to the premises of a five or ten year plan is an illusion to which only the naïve cling. No dictator or absolutist monarch can carry out policies without relying on others to carry out orders. People have to be recruited; cajoled through a combination of carrots and sticks; incentivized to be diligent and systematic in their duties.

Ultimately they are recruited through a market. Whether the market is broad or narrow is another matter altogether. Search is never absolute; constraints always exist.

However the ubiquity of markets in shaping history does not mean the markets are in equilibrium, that supply and demand are equated. In theory perfect balance in a market is achieved when nobody operating according to market rules desires, initiates, change. That most people, being risk averse, are plausible candidates for behaving according to the prevailing dictates of a market, not upsetting the applecart as it were, is surely reasonable.

With some justification mainstream economists touting the importance of equilibrium in determining incentives – for instance in setting relative prices – point to the importance of risk aversion.

The problem is this analysis ignores genius. Geniuses ignore the law of unintended consequences. They are bold. More important for this argument, they gear themselves up for conflict. True genius is in short supply. But just as there are outliers who operate outside established laws – hardened criminals operating in gangs, Mafia, terrorists – so there are

169 geniuses in every society. Whether this geniuses are able to emerge and accomplish great things depends upon the polities they reside within. If they are able to exit stultifying circumstances they can pursue their visions but not at home. Their own market has failed them.

Leaving their domestic market is change in itself. The assumption that everyone is satisfied with the status quo is implausible, especially in relatively open societies, or at least in settings where exit to a more hospitable environment is possible.

Why some regions of the world become particularly conducive to innovation at particular points of time is an ongoing question in history, particularly economic history in which innovation is usually cited as a driving force in raising the standard of living over the long- run. The thrust of this book is that unleashing genius is crucial, Fragmentation in the political dimension is surely one reason why genius is unleashed. When stymied in one locale the capacity of geniuses to move to locales where their ideas, their writings, their voice are likely to be best protected they can still flourish, reaching their potential. The existence of exit from markets as an option for the fiercely motivated individual is an underappreciated but telling factor.

Why the peculiar circumstances promoting a sustained onrush of genius emerged in

Europe, particularly after 1400, is a tantalizing question. Political fragmentation is one reason. A second reason is the division of authority – the fragmentation of power - between secular rulers exercising military and police force and religious rulers appealing to transcendental force.

A third is the existence of two powerful competing traditions – one emphasizing genius and democracy (Greek and Roman), the other prophecy (Jewish and Christian) – in Europe. How the table was set for this post-1400 story, why it was steeped in dialectics as opposed to

170 equilibrium processes, and how the story played out in particular fields is the burden of the remainder of this book.

Plan for Part II of the Book

While it is impossible to develop a definitive test for explaining history – indeed in the eyes of some scholars history just is, defying all attempts to account for its evolution over time

(a view I believe is defeatist) – I do believe it is possible to convince through examples.

Ultimately convincing readers is a rhetorical problem. Whether the examples prove useful and illustrative of general principles or not is up to the author and the reader. In this sense the remainder of this book is an exercise in rhetoric.

My focus is on Europe between 1400 and the early twentieth century. I will illustrate my thesis about the importance of dialectical evolution in history by looking at capitalism, nation-state building, art and music, and science. Why do I draw from a variety of fields? I do so because nobody lives in a vacuum. In particular geniuses do not exist in a vacuum. Scientists deeply attracted to music and political debate are legion: is it plausible that they are so insulated from the social disputes of their day that they are not influenced by the debates involving the arts and politics when they develop their theories about nature? Einstein played the violin; he loved to sail; he was a socialist; he was proud of his Jewish heritage; he was a defender of the Israeli state even being considered for the Presidency of Israel according to legend. Helmholtz was a great enthusiast of music; he played the piano beautifully; he believed

Beethoven was the greatest composer of all time; he wrote one of the most influential books in the field of acoustics, attempting to use a physical theory of waves coupled to a physiological

171 theory of how the ear operates to explain why tonal music revolving around the tonic and dominant was superior was especially compelling.

The point is not that there is a close correspondence between a particular scientific theory and a particular type of music or art. In some cases that may be true but it certainly cannot be true in general. What is true is that the existence of dialectic evolution in one field – say the arts, literature, or politics – makes thinking in dialectic terms within science all the more attractive. Genius draws from many things. It may or may not focus on narrow problems but it must be alive to possibilities if it is to function untrammeled.

To properly understand why the fifteenth century is a natural breaking point it is essential to appreciate how the Medieval Era background leading up the 1400s shaped the dialectic forces in play during the five centuries between 1400 and 1900. This is the burden of

Chapter 3. Emphasis is on conflict and the separation between transcendental authority and secular authority. Chapter 4 explains how both merchant capitalism and technological capitalism emerged in the 1400s, tension between the two forms shaping its dialectic evolution thereafter. Chapter 5 turns to nationalism, explaining why all attempts to fashion a unifying ideology impervious to passionate debate between opposing parties has failed. Chapter 6 focuses on the opposition between the Gothic and the progressive Renaissance visions in art and music. Finally Chapter 7 looks at heated debates in the physical sciences: the nature of light being fundamental in these debates.

One of the purposes of this treatise is to critique mainstream economics, in particular the application of mainstream economic principles: equilibrium, maximizing behavior,

172 utilitarianism, failure to adequately treat ideology and power. In the Appendix I treat these issues. In addition in the Appendix I develop a few equations – formalizing my treatment of soft and hard power, and laying out a growth accounting framework for analyzing the rise in per capita income and labor productivity – that I hope at least some readers will find useful. Those unafraid to tackle the equations should turn to the Appendix before reading Part II of the book.

In Part II I make reference to these equations at points in the text. Readers unfamiliar with the algebra involved should skip the various parts of the text that make reference to the equations.

As well they are advised to skip that portion of the text in Chapter 7 that lays out equations for

Newtonian physics and the speed of light.

This is the plan. As noted the proof of the pudding is in the eating. I do hope to convince at least some readers that my thesis is worthy of consideration. More I could not ask of any reader, hostile or friendly.

Part II Conflict, Capitalism, and Culture in the West

Chapter 3: Conflict, Commerce, and Culture in Medieval Europe

Summary of the chapter: Medieval Europe was a perfect example of how cooperation could co-exist with violent conflict, the exercise of hard power, as evidenced by the constant resort to warfare, rendering it highly fragmented but also expansionary, particularly after 1000 CE. The expansionary impulse brought Europe into sustained contact with the Islamic world, eventually laying the seeds of merchant capitalism which began to flourish in urban conurbations that proved adept in playing off rival overlords against one another. With the spread of a vibrant urban culture, market oriented artisan workshops began to flourish, stripping away from the Catholic Church its monopoly over soft power production originally

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the province of monastic communities. Genius inspired by a revival of interest in Greek and Roman culture was unleashed.

Conflict and Competitive Cooperation

Justifying the argument of this book empirically – genius unbound is the generator of vigorous dialectic change; call it progress if you are an optimist; call it the rocky road to doomsday ruin if you are a pessimist – relies on a reading of European history. To be precise it rests on two stools: first, by enhancing the exit option that allowed geniuses to seize opportunities, European political fragmentation was a necessary if not sufficient condition; second, the interplay between two deeply entrenched and strongly opposed heritages - Greek and Roman on one side, Christian on the other side – set in motion dialectic movements in ideology, culture, economics, and political organization that stimulated genius. It is the burden of this chapter to explain how Europe arrived at a point – in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries – for the establishment of these two conditions.

European fragmentation, extreme during the Medieval Era, was rooted in a remarkable mixture of cooperation and competition. Paradox? Not really. To carry on conflict between competing jurisdictions – feudal enclaves - you have to have more than a modicum of cooperation within the districts. Moreover for the conflict to be normalized – that is for it to be justified ideologically – you need some implicit agreement on how to carry on conflict. During the Medieval Era power elites operating within the Church forged a consensus within warring feudal military elites regarding the rules that should be followed by armies opposing each other

174 on the field of battle. The existence of substantial cooperation within Medieval Europe is the reason why merchant dominated capitalism emerged prior to the Renaissance.

Absent cooperation, you cannot set up a farmers market in which vendors vie for customers, heirloom tomato sellers going head to head against luscious beefsteak beauties.

Absent cooperation motivating all the echelons of a military unit you cannot carry out a successful raids on an opposing army’s fortifications, you cannot ferret out the furtive movement of enemy spies.

Without stability, trusting everyone plays by the rules of self-interested price indexed exchange or peaceful barter – so many gallons of goat milk negotiated for so many sticks of margarine, so many haircuts given for covering the cost of having a legal brief drawn up – commerce would atrophy. Without the stability of trust binding together armed battalions, the belief your fellow combatants have your back, are following the same plan of attack, are motivated by loyalty towards each other and their commanders, respect and obey the orders coming down the chain of hierarchy, warfare would wither.

To be sure trust given may be trust betrayed. Cooperation has its limits. Still the cooperation is essential for engaging in two human endeavors considered diametric opposites is suggestive. It suggests a continuum exists: at one end win-win perfectly transparent buying and selling in markets negotiated by honest participants; at the other end win-lose blood soaked brutality leading to rape, pillage and destruction of property.

In point of fact many markets would not exist if warfare had not proceeded their inception, laying the groundwork for the very existence. Think the Opium Wars in China that led

175 to the creation of treaty ports on the Chinese coast and the Yangtze River delta; think the

Mongolian conquests of the thirteenth century paving the way for the pax Mongolica; think the

Atlantic slave trade of the seventeenth century; think the conquistador conquests over the

Incas, Aztecs and Mayans that ultimately opened up trans-Atlantic Ocean commerce in sugar and precious metals for Spanish merchants, soon afterward joined by competing groups of

Dutch, French and British trading companies.

By the same token competition for the control of raw material markets has ushered in battles on land and sea. Think naval competition between Venice and Genoa in the Eastern

Mediterranean during the late Medieval Era; think the Anglo-Dutch wars of the seventeenth century; think the rivalry of France and England in India and the Americas that laid the groundwork for the mid-eighteenth century global warfare known as the Seven Years War; think the defeat of a Chinese army at Talas River by Muslim armies leading to the consolidation of the great bulk of the Silk Road by Islamic powers; think the civil wars fomented in contemporary Africa by tribal conflict over the rights to control diamond mining rights or oil fields.

In point of fact, military conflicts have often as not disrupted commerce. Blockades are a classic example. In attempting to bring Britain to its knees, Napoleon’s government designed the Continental System with the aim of choking off its arch rival’s (the United Kingdom’s) sprawling markets in Europe; the Union government relied on the Anaconda Plan strangling

Confederate commerce through the closing of southern ports on the Atlantic Seaboard and control of the Mississippi River. Again civil wars erupting in a repetitive cycles have sent countries into economic tailspins: Syria, Libya, and Afghanistan today. Moreover highly

176 militarized societies – North Korea is an excellent example – organize society around hierarchical values, promoting fawning personality cults, exploiting cruel intimidation

(executing disgraced officials with antiaircraft guns that reduce bodies into bloody smithereens, virtually vaporizing the victims is the way the iron hand of tyranny is exercised in the North

Korean Communist paradise) domestic terror campaigns, and heavy doses of propaganda drummed daily into the minds of the citizenry. Setting up command and control models for industrial and agricultural production units inimical to the give and take required to equilibrate supply and demand for inputs and outputs, trumpeting politics over economics, laying the foundations for deep rooted corruption by powerful officials and military commanders.

In small groups it is easy to imagine trust inducing cooperation to flourish. Members of the group monitor each other; sharing common enemies, protecting the group naturally goes hand in hand with protecting the individual. Enjoying a common ideology – say devotion to a patron saint, reverence for an archbishop – certainly helps. In miniscule groups or in homogeneous groups reputation matters a great deal. Shunning untoward behavior works.

Informal sanctions short of organized violent campaigns directed at malcontents and shirkers is sufficient for cooperation.

How do you foster trust amongst anonymous individuals or foreign institutions? How do you keep them resorting to warfare, banditry, pillage, blackmail? In short how to foster trust between anonymous commercial units, between anonymous individuals, separated from one another by vast distances or distinct cultural norms. To use a Medieval European example: how do you get Flemish speaking merchants in Bruges to trust English speaking wool suppliers in

London sufficiently to forge a stable trading route tying together the Champagne Fairs, the

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English landed interests raising sheep, and the Italian speaking trading houses of Lombardy and

Tuscany? Consider the excess supply of desperate lower class knights and footloose infantry ravaging the countryside of Europe during the thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth centuries.

How do blunt the tendency of these armed thugs to give into an urge to attack and rob merchants and artisans in rival cities? Indeed it must have been extremely tempting to city dwellers or local lords aggrieved about a debt unpaid, an insult unintended, the delivery of contaminated meat to a feudal overlord to resort to violence, disrupting markets, rending norms designed to encourage trust.

In addressing this question it is useful to start with a estimate of the proportion of the population engaged in active training for warfare. What was the burden on economic activity imposed by knighthood? Consider the burden that feudalism imposed Japan where we have rough estimates. Tokugawa Japan between 1600 and 1868 was divided into approximately three hundred fiefs controlled by warlords the daimyo. Each fief was headquartered in a castle town into which were assembled their military underlings, the samurai allowed to carry two swords. Assuming the samurai constituted on a country wide basis five percent of the total population, it is evident Japan was heavily militarized like Medieval Europe. While we have no hard estimates of the proportion of the Western European population that was in active military service – the horse riding armored knights digging in their spurs on their great chargers occupied elite positions at the apex of a military retinue that included peasants and townspeople dragooned into combat from time to time, serving as support troops, caving out trenches, constructing massive siege machines designed to hurl boulders at castle walls – we

178 are certain Medieval Europe was also highly militarized, local warlords spread throughout the countryside. A figure ranging from five to ten percent of the population of Europe is quite likely.

Functioning like armored personnel carriers – slits for eyes grooved out of metallic helmets, chainmail underneath shiny armor covering horse and rider alike, shields, lances – outfitting a retinue of knights was an expensive proposition. The unit cost (in the Appendix the symbol pmf is used for this variable) involved in fielding armies of knights was hardly a trivial financial proposition. Unit costs for infantry and support personnel: far lower. This was the hard cold economic reality of chivalry. What it meant in practical economic terms is simple: a substantial share of the population joined an equally large share of the population serving the

Catholic Church in avoiding toil in the fields. What it meant in terms of social norms undergirding trust is also simple: trust was highly conditional and incomplete, subject on the one hand to a complex set of calculations concerning the costs and benefits expected from going to war that varied from time to time, equally subject to impulses outside the purview of the frontal lobe of the brains of military leaders.

Despite being heavily militarized, despite being fragmented into numerous feudal estates, despite embracing incredible violence – breaking malcontents on the wheel, burying thieves alive, sawing criminals into pieces, drawing and quartering enemies, burning heretics at the stake was regularly countenanced in Medieval Europe; if ordered to kill oneself committing hara-kiri ritual suicide by disemboweling oneself with a sharp knife was central to the bushido ideology pervading the ranks of the samurai – both Tokugawa Japan and Medieval Europe managed to become highly commercialized, spawning a sprawling host of urban conurbations

179 where merchants plied their trade, even forming powerful guilds to enhance their political muscle.

How did this come about?

To understand why the two regions overcame their military orientation it is useful to begin by making two key points. There are important differences between the two cases.

Japanese feudalism was closed; Medieval European feudalism was open. Why this matters will be clear as our argument unfolds. Yet despite this difference a similar logic holds for both cases: on-going competition between decentralized highly fragmented military and religious interests created umbrellas of safety under which merchant dominated conurbations could and did prosper. Avoiding killing the goose laying the golden eggs was common to both cases.

Why the eggs were golden and why military rivalry spawned protection is an interesting question. Before we get into the specifics of the historical details it is useful to lay out analytical concepts that will guide us through the thicket of the historical details. One involves diversion both military and commercial on the Eurasian land mass; a second the relationship between

Europe as a region and the remainder of Eurasia; and third the geographic distribution of feudal institution within Medieval Europe.

Military Diversion Shapes Core and Periphery on the Eurasian Land Mass, 300 CE – 1300 CE Specialists analyzing trade patterns differentiate between trade creation – all regions expanding their trade – and trade diversion, some regions expanding their trade at the expense of other regions that see their trade opportunities wither. The same holds for military invasions.

Sometimes one region is spared invasion while other regions suffer them. For a contemporary

180 example, consider the crazy quilt pattern established by the COVID-19 virus in the early months of 2020, invades some populations with a frightening intensity – Iran, Italy, Spain, New York

State – sparing other places, leaving them relatively unaffected at least for now.

Invaders are opportunists. As predators they are constantly on the lookout for the best prizes, the softest opposition, and the easiest points of entry for their armed forces. Geography matters in offering or denying easy access. Mountain ranges or parched valleys - the Hindu

Kush, the Takla Makan desert, and the Himalayas, the Alps, the Caucasian range naturally impact predatory opportunities. By dint of the barriers to mobility of people and arms, the existence of geographical barriers raises the unit price of exerting military force (pmf). Still if the glitter shining off the prize is sufficiently blinding, predators will ramp up their efforts, exerting greater effort to carry out conquest even crossing perilous mountain passes. It is the logic of cost/benefit applied to warfare. Great conurbations offer attractive targets, for terrorists today looking to disrupt tourism, for Central Asian armies swirling out of the steppes.

When wealthy Rome was in its heyday as capital of a vast empire it was a dazzling prize.

Once dismembered by Goths, Huns, Avars, Lombards, and Vandals it was no longer a magnet. In the heyday of the Abbasid caliphate Baghdad became a likely target, nicely situated in the crosshairs of the Seljuk Turks and after them the Mongols. What is the attraction of miniscule

Rome, Paris or Florence when you think you can sack Baghdad, Damascus or Cairo?

Central Asian groups were not only predators. They were traders as well. Conquest or commerce were options, not fixed points of destiny. Moreover the core regions of Eurasia – whether Roman Empire, Persian Empire, Chinese Empire – were all trying to push out into the

181 periphery. Competing with the Central Asians often as not meant bringing them to heel militarily. It was a two-way street.

An Eurasian pattern ancient in its origin, really only terminating with the Mongolian invasions of the 13th century, involved periphery groups of all stripes – mainly nomadic - crashing into the great core regions, into China, into India, into the Roman Empire and the

Mediterranean, into the Iranian plateau. As noted, in the most prominent cases the periphery groups originated in Central Asia. But they also came from the far north – from contemporary

Scandinavia for instance or from the south, from Northern Africa, the Berbers being a prominent example. In all cases the invaders conquered and colonized – that is seized territory and plundered; in all cases they eventually settled in the great core regions, adapting themselves to the cultural and political norms of their adversaries to a degree, in particular converting to their religions.

What is peculiar about the period 1000 CE to 1300 CE is the absence of invasion into the

Western European core zone. Consistent with the military diversion argument it should not surprise us to discover that Western Europe became remarkably expansionary as a result.

Indeed it pushed eastward and northward on the continent, pushing southward into the

Mediterranean, pushing into the Levant where Islam prevailed, pushing into areas ruled by

Slavic groups, and driving the Muslims out of most of Iberia and Sicily at the foot of the Italian boot. While other regions of Eurasia suffered invasion – notably on-going Turkish inroads into the great Islamic zone stretching from Iberia in the west through North Africa; and Mongolian penetration of the great Silk Road centers peppering the Middle East (including what is today

Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan) as it rolled on leading to wholesale conquest of China itself –

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Western Europe was not only left alone but actually expanded at the expense of at least one of these other zones. Western Europe, pulverized by invasions from the fourth century onward was spared largely because other regions suffered. Diversion was at work. This brutal fact is crucial in understanding the dynamics of open feudalism in Medieval Europe.

A detailed account takes us too far afield. What I provide with Table 3.1 is a cursory summary:

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Table 3.1 Three Waves of Peripheral Population Penetrations Remake the Great Core Regions of Eurasia, 300 – 1300 CE Panel A: 300 – 600 CE

Western Roman Empire Eastern Roman Empire/Persia Eastern Core (China/India/Japan)

Population (1,000s) – Circa 500 CE

25,057 n.e. 139,550

Peripheral Population Invasions and Their Impact

Huns, Goths, Ostrogoths, Visigoths, Alans, Vandals, Sueves, Byzantine and Persian Empires Invasions from Central Asia Burgundians, Jutes, Angles, Saxons relatively untouched by invasions destabilize China leading to carve up Western Segment of collapse of Han Dynasty Roman Empire

Major Political Events in Region

Rome sacked by Vandals in 410 and again in 455 Code of Justinian promulgated Dynastic Instability in China from Arian Christianity competes with establishing a groundwork later 220 CE to 589 CE Nicene Christianity utilized in developing Canon and Three Kingdoms (220 – 2650 secular law in Europe Christianity established as official Jin Dynasty 9265-420) religion of Roman Empire Persian Empire (Sassanian Empire) and Byzantine Empire deplete each Northern and Southern Dynasties Comitatus inspired Central Asian other’s military capacity by fighting (386-589) organized interacts with with one another particularly disintegrating Roman organization contesting the Middle East and Central Dynastic Rule returns to China with establishment of Sui Merovingian Empire Established Levant (contemporary Saudi Arabia, Syria, Iraq Dynasty

Buddhism spreads from India to China along the Silk Road

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Table 3.1 (Continued) Panel B: 600-1000 CE

Western Roman Empire Eastern Roman Empire/Persia Eastern Core (China/India)

Population (1,000s) – Circa 500 CE

25,413 n.e. 157,500

Peripheral Population Invasions and Their Impact

Invasions by Viking raiders (Danish, Norwegian, and Swedish) from Turks begin penetration into Tang China expands into Central North, extending down into France Muslim held areas especially in Asia making bid to consolidate and England; invasion from east by eastern reaches of Islamic Empire control over eastern Silk Road; Magyars; Invasion from south and defeated by Muslim Central along shores of Mediterranean by Asian/Persian army in Talas Valley Muslim raiders

Fall of Iberia to Muslims

Sicily falls to Muslims

Major Political Events in Region

Carolingian Empire established, Muhammad establishes Islam in unified under Charlemagne, Medina and Mecca

disintegrates thereafter Rule of Islamic community by four An-Lushan Rebellion roils China righteous Caliphs; fourth Caliph Ali assassinated leading to Sunni/Shi’a Normans invade Italy split, Arabs drive Byzantine and Vikings explore Northern Pacific Persian Empires out of Middle East waters, establishing colonies in Northern Africa and Syria lost by Iceland, Greenland and Vinland on Byzantine Empire to Muslim rule; the North American continent Persia conquered by Muslim armies Viking inroads into Britain repulsed Umayyads establish caliphate making Damascus their capital

Central Asian/Persian army bolsteredAbbasids overthrow Umayyads, establishing Baghdad as capital

Umayyads establish rival caliphate in Iberia (al Andalus) making Cordoba their capital

Pro-Shi’a Fatimids establish control over Northern Africa

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Table 3.1 (Continued) Panel C: 1000-1300

Western Roman Empire Eastern Roman Empire/Persia Eastern Core (China/India)

Population (1,000s) – Circa 500 CE

57,268 n.e. 228,400

Peripheral Population Invasions and Their Impact

No further invasions

Mongol conquests spare Western Turkish and Mongol invasions Mongol Invasions Europe Conquering Jin Empire in North, Europe becomes expansionary later Southern Song Empire Christianizing much of periphery, Protracted sieges of Jin capital driving Muslims out of most of Kaifeng and Southern Song capital Iberia, establishing foothold in of Hangzhou Levant eventually lost to Islamic armies

Major Political Events in Region

Crusades directed at Islam first, later directed at “heresies” in Abbasids become figureheads, Mongols establish Yuan Dynasty in Europe (Albigensian, Waldesian, losing power to Turks China Hussite) and at “pagan” peoples in Eastern Europe Fatimids take Cairo Mongol Empire broken up: Empire of the Great Khan in China, Holy Roman Empire consolidated Crusaders set up Crusader states in Chagatai Khanate, Khanate of the by Otto Levant: Kingdom of Jerusalem, Golden Horde in Eastern Russia, Il- County of Tripoli, Principality of Conflict between Holy Roman Khanate in Persia and Georgia Antioch, and County of Odessa Empire and Papacy roils the Pax Mongolica creates huge trade German/Italian territories Saladin defeats Crusaders at Hattin zone in central Asia, expanding the i Norman conquest of England geographic reach of the Silk Road n 1187, retaking Jerusalem Teutonic Knights establish rule over eventually establishes Ayyubid territories in Northern Europe, dynasty in Cairo, followed by fighting Russian and Mamluks who defeated Mongols in Polish/Lithuanian peoples 1260

Mongols capture Baghdad in 1258, but fail to defeat Arab armies in Syria in 1260

Black Sea Constantinople becomes major terminus on Silk Road

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Thinking in terms of military diversion and in terms of the trade-off conquest and commerce provides a useful hook into the dynamics of Eurasian core/periphery interaction.

Military conquest leading to the consolidation of empires leads to trade; it fosters diffusion of technology across vast land areas. The positive feedback of conquest on commerce persists for a while; but it does not persist indefinitely. Eventually empires atrophy. Empires atrophy because holding together diverse populations is politically fraught. They atrophy because periphery populations girded for war scratch and claw at the borders of empires, eventually overturning the institutions that once cemented them into unified regions.

Imperial capitals, great prizes for conquerors, are especially vulnerable to sacking by invaders; concentrating religious and political power in a handful of regional capitals creates economic and military vulnerability. Whether we are thinking of Rome and Cairo during the heyday of the Roman Empire - or Baghdad, Damascus, Cairo and Cordoba during the period when three major power centers (Abbasid/Fatimid/Umayyad) controlled Islamic areas – or the two capitals of China ravaged by the Mongols during the thirteenth century we are witness to a common theme. Other things equal a decentralized urban system like the one evolving in

Western Europe between 1000 CE and 1300 CE is less vulnerable than one with a steep rank hierarchy, top heavy, centered upon one or several massive conurbations.

Trade displacement following on the heels of military displacement is a concomitant of the disruption of major empires. The collapse of the Roman Empire in the West severely weakened the ability of the Byzantine rump to exercise military power in the Levant and

Northern Africa. Intent on holding onto as much as possible of the eroding Roman imperial authority in the West – for instance in Italy – sapped the military capacity of Byzantium in its

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Eastern reaches. The door was opened for a peripheral population – Arabs inspired by Islam – to seize much of the territory once operating under the administrative and economic dominance of Rome and Constantinople. That the armies of the Persian Sassanian Empire also found themselves exhausted opened another swinging door: Arab expansion across the Iranian

Plateau under the aegis of Islam. As a result a new empire emerged one organized commercially around control of the Silk Road, or rather Silk Roads, one laid out on the landmass, another consolidated through merchant shipping expeditions into the Indian Ocean and the Strait of Malacca. In turn the Mongol conquests disrupted these commercial highways, moving trade routes further north, connecting Western China through the Takla Makan desert to Constantinople in the West.

Eurasian Technological Diffusion is a Cup Half-Full/Half-Empty

Up to this point we have analyzed the impacts of commerce and conflict in static terms.

Conflict shapes the political landscape; commerce gives rise to specialization and division of land, labor and capital enhancing their economic productivity. This is hardly the whole story. As well both commerce and conflict generate improvements. In terms of the algebra of growth discussed in the Appendix these improvements can be captured formally by assigning them to growth in the total factor productivity parameter A, namely G(A).

There are three reasons why these occur. Technology transfer is one. Contact – Chinese merchants discussing the quality of their wares with Italian merchants; craftspeople adept in reverse engineering taking apart manufactures devised by foreigners; prisoners taken in conflict hoping to improve their chances for survival by divulging methods for making paper, magnetic

188 compasses, and gunpowder; taking control of territory bristling with novel inventions and ingenious building styles; hiring architects and doctors who have mastered their skills in distant lands – is an potent conduit, ideally suited for spreading technological knowledge. Bolstering total factor productivity through securing fresh knowledge either disembodied as blueprints, disseminated by masters training apprentices, described in manuals and treatises goes hand in hand with growth in total factor productivity.

Scale economies are another. Bringing together peoples of diverse backgrounds and skills in conurbations – or in networks of conurbations connected through the churning of merchant activity – stimulates competition in the creative arts, stimulates competition in the world of idea, throwing up the much admired capacity to “think outside the box.”

Finally total factor productivity grows because of shifts in the composition of the labor force, specifically due to a fall in the percentage of the labor force engaged in farming matched by a gain in the percentage of the labor force working in services and manufactures. Fewer farmers toiling in the fields, pasturing sheep and pigs; more artisans fashioning cloth, wax and tables. Key to accomplishing this shift is raising output per agrarian worker. What underlies agricultural output per worker? Climate, soil quality, seed varieties, rotation cycles and fallowing, plows and threshing floors, barns where grains can be safely stored, hours worked, and efficiency per hour worked stemming from a person’s experience in farming and the community’s grasp of the state of the art. Clearly some of these are variables that agrarian workers operating in communities steeped in practice can control; some are not.

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Covering the topic of technology transfer in detail is not our goal here. Rather I wish to limit my observations to a few cursory comments concerning the role conquest followed by empire building enhanced productivity growth in the Islamic Empire and the Central Western

European Medieval period, namely the era of Western European expansion 1000 CE to 1300 CE.

Beginning with the Islamic conquests that remade the Eurasian land mass it is useful to divide the pre-1000 era into two phases: the period of the four righteous caliphs and the unified Sunni Umayyad caliphate (623-750); and the period when the Sunni Abbasid caliphate controlled most of the territory ruled by Islamic leaders, sharing it with two other powerful rival groups, the Shi’a inspired Fatimid dynasty (occupying the Maghreb and eventually taking Cairo and Jerusalem) and the rump of the Umayyad dynasty that established a rival caliphate in

Cordoba (750-1000).2 After approximately 1000 CE periphery invasions – Seljuk Turkish,

Western European and Mongolian – reshaped the Muslim political landscape sufficiently to consider it a third era.

During the first wave of Arabic conquests the focus was on seizing territories held in the west by Byzantium and in the east by the Sassanian Empire. For all intents and purposes the

Arabs inspired by Islam fervor commenced their campaign of conquest defensively. Their goal was driving the Byzantines and the Persians out of the Arabian region.

In the west their conquests – Carthage falling in 697; Berber troops crossing the Strait of

Gibraltar, defeating the Visigoths, and occupying Toledo in 712 – consolidated control over an area heavily Christianized, Jews being a distinct minority. As the Qur’an draws heavily on Jewish and Christian Biblical accounts Jews and Christians often welcomed Islamic rule, preferring it to

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Byzantine dominance. Indeed Jews and Christians were considered “people of the book” and – provided they paid special taxes – operated as dhimmi using their own religious courts and worshipping their own deities.

In the east the problem of integrating non-Arabic peoples was more complicated. As

Arab armies pushed eastward – overcoming the Sassanians in the 640s – they established control over lands steeped in Zoroastrianism, Manichaeism, Buddhism, and polytheistic Greeks.

These peoples were not “peoples of the book.” Without doubt the difficulties of subjecting these Central Asian regions – contemporary Afghanistan, Pakistan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan,

Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, and Iran – to Arabic rule inspired the successful revolt of the Abbasid faction against Umayyad dominance during the mid-eighth century. After all much of the military muscle behind the Abbasid campaign originated in Turkic-Persian troops recruited out of Central Asia. In the upshot the Abbasid caliphate abandoned the Umayyad capital of

Damascus, moving it eastward to Baghdad, then Samara, to the east. Defeat of a Chinese army at the Talas River in 751 cemented Abbasid dominance over a Central Asian Silk Road empire stretching into India.

The point is that through military conquest the Islamic knowledge base took soared, expanding to encompass Greek and Roman learning (manuscripts assembled in Alexandria),

Persian learning, and Indian learning under its umbrella of learning. In terms of disembodied technological knowledge – a crucial component of total factor productivity A – the libraries seized, the manuscripts pored over, offering treasure troves to ambitious Islamic scholars, doctors, architects, engineers, astronomers, and mathematicians. Just focusing on the Greek and Roman trove indicates the range of speculation and empirical background Islamic thinkers

191 could contend with: Hippocrates and Galen in medicine; Pythagoras and Euclid in mathematics;

Aristotle in biology; and Ptolemy in astronomy.

The result was the Golden Age of Islam. Exemplified by the House of Wisdom established by Caliph Harun al-Rashid in 786 and patronized by successor caliphs notably Abu

Jafar Abdullah al-Mamun, the House of Wisdom especially on Central Asian initiative as Starr

(2013) reminds us. To be sure pure theoretical learning sometimes has practical applications, for instance geometry is utilized in architecture, surveying and ballistics. In that sense knowledge is power. Additionally it is prestige. Rulers the world – Holy Roman Emperors,

Chinese Emperors, English and French monarchs, caliphs – have tried to attract the cleverest scholars of their day lest they be seen behind the times, ignorant and uselessly indulgent in their use of largess. Not surprisingly – taking advantage of the Abbasid’s faltering power at the end of the tenth century - the Fatimid dynasty chartered Al-Ashar University, following up this bold stroke by fostering a second rival House of Wisdom in Cairo. In point of fact the Islamic world was alive with several centers spearheading advances in science, medicine and mathematics arising including Toledo in Iberia. Even after Toledo was conquered by Christian forces in 1085 it remained a vibrant magnet for Islamic thinkers who worked constructively with Jewish and Christian colleagues in translating works penned in Arabic into Latin.

Acting as a transmitter of ancient Greek, Islamic mastering of Chinese and Indian knowledge was only the tip of the iceberg for the Muslim intellectual pioneers of the Golden

Age. Consider mathematics and astronomy. First and foremost is the admittedly mundane but ultimately powerful Indian-Arabic numerical symbols, each symbol apparently based on the number of corners used in their construction. Imagine doing accounting; carrying on complex

192 financial calculations; or dreaming up solutions to algebraic equations using Chinese or Roman numerals. The concept of “zero” made its appearance. More generally consider algebra. In the ninth century a Central Asian genius Al-Khwarizmi developed modern algebra publishing his classic Algebr wal Muqabala and training a host of followers at the House of Wisdom in

Baghdad (it was only in the early thirteenth century that Leonardo of Pisa known as Fibonacci introduced a Western European audience to Indian-Arabic numerals and algebra with his book

Liber Abaci). 3 Islamic scholars also pushed the envelope in geometry including applying it systematically to astronomy and astrology.

In the classical Greek and Roman world mathematics, particularly geometry, and astronomy went hand in hand. Indeed the Ptolemaic system of epicycles was based on a belief in the perfection of circular motion, an idea not dispelled until Kepler put forth his three laws of planetary motion. At the House of Wisdom in ninth century Baghdad the Elements of Euclid and

Archimede’s The Measurement of the Circle were translated into Arabic, joining translations of

Sanskrit texts on planetary motion; Al-Shammasiyah observatory was opened in the environs of

Baghdad yielding myriads of new observations that either confirmed or contradicted classical thought. Islamic astronomy flourished: Al-Battani, Al-Buruni (who measured the circumference of the earth with a high degree of exactitude), and Ibn Yunus who made thousands of records, including forty planetary conjunctions and thirty lunar eclipses.

Pure science? Not really. More like a marriage of theory with technology. One of the most important practical applications of the marriage of geometry to astronomy was the astrolabe, an ingenious device constructed from interconnected plates representing the heavens at different latitudes. Without this travel along the two Silk Roads would have been

193 immensely more difficult and perilous; without this Islamic merchants would have been far less successful than they were.

Indeed Islam was the first major religion in world history evolving key ideas out of the practical concerns of a merchant community, namely how to cement trust among warring tribes of traders. Submission to one god, Allah, was a key ingredient. Not surprisingly Islamic legal schools justified the issuing of bills of exchange, obviating the need to move specie from one local to another in order to settle accounts. Interestingly enough drawing up bills of exchange at a fee was also an ingenious device for charging de facto interest, without actually stipulating interest payments due. Credit creation thrived. All of this required a convenient form of mathematics for reckoning transactions. In short the advances in numerical counting, algebra, geometry and astronomy yielded practical results stimulating trade, ultimately laying the foundation for banking. Disembodied total factor productivity got a strong boost.

As well embodied technological change – in capital and land quality – thrived during the

Islamic Golden Age. Consider energy production. The windswept deserts of Central Asia and the

Middle East posed great challenges. Water management systems developed in Sassanian Persia

– employing a series of L-shaped wells – passed into use throughout the Middle East and North

Africa. Large waterwheels (norias) were constructed to draw water from rivers. As early as the caliphate of Umar windmills made their appearance in Arabia. Windmills powering a millstone were built in Persia during the seventh century. Their use spread throughout the Islamic world.

Applying geometry to construction Islamic architects and engineers made notable advances in the construction of domes, arches, vaults, and spires. The Great Dome of Damascus erected during the eighth century was a novel achievement. Followed by the pointed arch, the

194 intersecting arch, the multi-foil arch, and the Ogee (two “s” shaped) arch, Islamic designers realized innovations captured centuries later by the builders of Europe’s great Gothic cathedrals. In short the quality of capital was gradually enhanced and refined in the Islamic world. The beautiful geometric patterns achieved in Muslim tile manufacture is testament to the merging of mathematics, artistic instinct, and practical engineering.

Likewise the quality of land. New crops made their way across the Middle East: cotton originally from India; sugarcane; cocoons and mulberry plants supporting silk reeling. Under the umbrella of Islamic commerce the spread of these crops was rapid and wide. In Cordoba during the heyday of Iberian al-Andalus, thousands of weavers were fashioning silk curtains, shawls and cushions. More crops, more land under cultivation, more soil nutrients depleted.

Fertilization using pigeon dung replenished soil exhausted from cultivation came to the rescue.

Papermaking – originally learned by Islamic armies who interviewed Chinese prisoners after the Tang debacle at the Battle of Talas River in 751 – became a major industry in Baghdad during the eighth century. Syrians began growing hemp to meet the demand for paper mills. By

800 CE paper manufacture had spread to Cairo and Morocco.

All of these devices and agrarian practices were witnessed - and diligently studied - by

Crusader armies and Christian merchants as they made their way into the Levant, capturing

Arab held territories along the coast of Turkey, Lebanon and Gaza; in Iberia; and in Syria wrestled away from Fatimid rule by Norman Crusaders. With a lag the conquering Western

Europeans translated and absorbed the knowledge advanced by Islamic scholars; took over use of the inventions, learned how to build grander churches; ultimately pushing the envelope

195 further in the realm of mathematics, accounting and banking. Still, a lag is a lag: the first paper mill in Christian Europe (in Bologna) was not set up until the end of the thirteenth century.

Lags were long but not necessarily long in all endeavors: the lag was exceeding short in one field, war-making. Consider gunpowder. Needhan (1981) tells us early Chinese experiments in finding the correct formula for making gunpowder probably occurred in the early ninth century. By 919 it was being used in the slow match setting off a flame thrower and by 1000 CE it was being encased in bombs used by Chinese armies. Needham also waxes at considerable length on the interaction of Arabic technological knowledge with that of China, notably in the field of alchemy. By the 13th century a Syrian writer Hasan al-Rammah published a book The

Book of Horsemanship and Ingenious War Devices describing the trebuchet used for flinging missiles; explaining how to construct and use the crossbow; and offering an account of how to purify potassium nitrate in fashioning gunpowder. Indeed at the Battle of al-Mansura in Egypt in the thirteenth century Crusaders were routed by Arab fighters using incendiary devices; even

King Louis IX was taken prisoner in the clash. In the field of war-making the Europeans were quick to adapt. The crossbow and gunpowder remade European warfare in the later Medieval

Era, ultimately downgrading the skills of knights by promoting the value of the infantry armed with powerful bows and incendiary devices whose projectiles could penetrate the strongest armor.

In short the Western European penetration of the Islamic world during the period 1000 to 1300 yielded immense rewards. Disembodied technology taking form of pure ideas espoused by Islamic scholars interacting with one another in universities and at the two Houses of

Wisdom – in mathematics, in medicine, in alchemy, in astronomy – all enriched scholarship in

196 the West. Ultimately applications to manufacturing capital equipment sprung forth from these disembodied concepts on European soil. Moreover many concrete innovations made by Islamic engineers and designers were taken over lock, stock and barrel by the Europeans.

What about land quality? What about productivity in agriculture that was the most crucial arena for technological change in Medieval Europe? Not much.

Agriculture is local. It depends heavily on natural endowments and climatic conditions peculiar to locales. This is why I refer to a cup half-empty in describing the transmission of knowledge from East to West – and its further refinement and application – opened up by the forging of a vast Islamic civilization stretching from Spain to Mali, from Mecca to Baghdad, from the Caucasus to the Hindu Kush.

As a matter of practical reality, the advances in Western European agriculture made in the period 1000 to 1300 were mainly indigenous to the area.

Cutting down forests and filling in marshes in order to carve out more arable land is hardly novel. Shoring up rivers with embankments in order to better control their flow, to prevent flooding, and to irrigate fields is basic to farming everywhere. Use of the fields once reclaimed is part and parcel of the institutions unique to Medieval Europe. Marling of soil is ancient. The three-field rotation cycle – moving through a cycle in which the fields put to a

Spring crop harvested in the fall are turned the next year into fields devoted to winter crop taken in during the spring months, and allowed to go fallow in the third year – is a logical outgrowth of the manorial system and the emphasis on farming long strips of arable lying next to one another.

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Plowing was revolutionized by replacing the ancient Roman swing plow with the

Germanic plow. As ploughs with metal ploughshares employing mould-boards with two handles cut through the soil in deeper furrows in the planting season crops realized in the harvest season were much enhanced. Shoulder-collars for horses, frontal yokes applied to oxen, refining the art of making horseshoes, improving the protection of hooves for the livestock employed in farming work: all of these things contributed.

Some innovations learned from the Islamic world may have played a role – perhaps windmills and watermills are a case in point although it is not clear how important was the

Muslim example in this technological arena – but there is scant evidence that the growing employment of beaters for fulling, for cleansing linen, and the construction of tanning mills on manorial estates was a by-product of contact with Islamic civilization during Western Europe’s military expansion into the Levant, into Spain, and into Sicily.

This raises an important point. From what has been said it is evident that the impact of contact with Islam upon Western European productivity was mainly associated with improving quality of capital embodied in structures, improving merchant practice, and transforming the practice of warfare, not farming. Ultimately the repercussions were felt most strongly by the cities. The great Gothic cathedrals were largely urban; the commercial classes were concentrated in conurbations; the relative power of knights was diminished relative to urban centers who mainly relied on infantry, not cavalry, for protection.

The Three Faces of European Medievalism: Militarism, Christianity, and Manorial Economy 4 The three faces of Medieval Europe are well advertised: knights, castles, chivalry in the military sphere; decentralized self–sufficient manorial estates and isolated villages in the

198 economic sphere; Nicene Christianity in the religious sphere, monasteries populating the countryside, monks praying for the souls of the departed, lessening their wretched time in purgatory. As well the prevailing consensus is that Medievalism reached its apex during the three centuries between 1000 CE and 1300 CE, the so-called era of the Central Middle Ages.

Mythology to a degree, truth to a degree: the characterization of Medievalism as reaching its truest historical expression in the era of expansionism, its truest form in the three faces of knighthood, manorial economy, and Christian piety is useful as a starting point in serious analysis, useless as a guide to grasping the detailed events of interest to the specialist.

Think of historical movement as a floating iceberg. Much transpires on its choppy surface, cold winds whipping icy fragments off the turbulence, flinging them willy-nilly into the atmosphere in a violent fury. Despite this, underneath the churned up frigid waters there is a solid mass, an iceberg, that moves to be sure but moves extremely slowly, ponderous and resistant to change.

Characterizing this medievalism iceberg slowly moving beneath the waters as a simple system is a daunting challenge. For what it is worth, my attempt is to work with two sets of equations – the military power equation and the productivity equation – that are discussed in detail in the Appendix. Labor productivity depends on hours worked h and the efficiency with which people labored per hour worked [for a discussion of the hourly labor productivity variable e(h) please see the discussion in the Appendix]. As we noted earlier in discussing the likely economic burden imposed on Europe by feudalism it is likely that it was substantial in terms of hours lost to work. During the Medieval Period it is risible to describe warrior knights

(often described as “armed thugs”) as hard working laborers. 5 The same can be said of monks although the degree to which monks actually worked in the fields as opposed to copying

199 manuscripts, praying and chanting, varied from monastic order to order. In effect the labor force consisted of free farmers, serfs, and slaves. Some worked independent farms; many were unfree to move, bound to great secular estates supporting knights or great abbeys supporting monks. The upshot is that the average input of labor per capita was severely limited given the diversion of labor to relatively unproductive tasks.

Market exchange largely took place in barter terms. Gold coinage disappeared. In so far as currency was concerned silver took precedence over the gold which fueled Muslim commercial activity. Rents paid on use of land largely took the form of grain, animal hides, slaughtered pigs, berries and – mostly important – labor services. The rents so extracted supported the knights, their noble overlords, the monks, the bishops, the priests.

In short medievalism was a system organized around extracting output out of land rent, elites being the prime beneficiaries of the rents. Knights and monks and bishops and archbishops were beneficiaries of land rents, extracting a surplus for the exertions of serfs, free villagers and slaves. It should be kept in mind that slavery did not melt away with the consolidation of Christianity in the West. Many of the slaves came from the east: the regions known as Eastern Europe (Ukraine, Bulgaria, Romania, and Hungary) and Russia. The word

“slave” is based on the word “Slav.” Presumably slaves were taken by feudal lords in battle; presumably some were captured by Scandinavian Vikings that moved along the great rivers of western Russia, establishing a headquarters in Kiev, selling their captives along with furs and timber to western European rulers.

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Serfs, free farmers, and slaves being largely illiterate, it is fair to describe their efficiency per hour worked as low. In addition their lifespans were short and their food intake sub- standard according to contemporary definitions of adequate diet. It is reasonable to assume they were often as not sickly, as often as not carrying out their tasks in excruciating pain unrelieved by the pills we consume today. To be sure there were lots of Christian holidays to relieve their agonies. However these days of rest cut into hours worked.

The problem with the “land rents and extracted labor services” characterization is not that it is false. Rather that it is woefully incomplete. The iceberg of history was melting. It had already melted away after the ninth century and the loss of frozen mass melted away particularly after 1000 CE. It melted away because commercialization and long-distant trade undercut barter; it melted away because walled cities appeared along the fringes of abbeys and castles; it melted away because changes in military technology undercut the skills of knights. In short it melted away because Western European became aggressively expansionary, absorbing vast amounts of knowledge and knowhow from the Muslim world.

If there was a period when the knight/manorial estate/monastery model applied it was during the time of Charlemagne, that is the late eight and early ninth centuries. If there was a place where it applied it was in West Francia, that is what is today France. It applied there and then because Western Europe was under attack on all fronts: Viking ships haunting the coastlines of France and England, dismembering rural monasteries, working their way down great rivers where they ravaged the few conurbations that existed.

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Magyar armies crashed their way into northern Italy; Muslim armies took hold of Iberia and Sicily, attacking the coastline ports of southern France and Italy, intercepting Venetian fleets on their voyages to Constantinople. But it was West Francia that appeared to fragment the most thoroughly into self-sufficient estates dependent of the military protection of knights and squires.

The knighthood model ultimately derived from the comitatus, the band of loyal warriors serving their leader as he rode roughshod over the steppes of Central Asia and the north. In the

European environment it evolved into the hierarchical system of vassalage. Vassals owed military services – so many days a year as a rule – to overlords. In turn the vassals were served by subordinate vassals. It was a kind of elaborate gift exchange hierarchy: in theory if not in reality a norm of extreme loyalty, in principle obedience unto death, was at stake. Over time vassalage became increasingly complex: vassals might owe allegiance to several overlords.

Betrayal might occur if one of these overlords disputed with another. In an era when survival as a secular or religious institution was challenged by constant raiding - by Vikings, Magyars, and

Muslim pirates – adhering to the norm of vassalage made a great deal of sense. No so later. Not surprisingly after 1000 many of these CE vassalage obligations were commercialized, taking the form of scutage payments paid in lieu of going into battle.

The manorial estates arose from the vici and villa of the decaying Roman Empire. Village life became increasingly local as marauders plied their way through the countryside. These were the increasingly isolated vici. Villas were large estates increasingly forced to defend themselves against invaders. Carolingian manorial estates were assembled from separate villae organized around a spacious demense carved out of wilderness by the retainers of great

202 military overlords. Serfs who were often former slaves on villae owed limited service to the demense fields, threshing barns, and winepresses. So many days a year. They joined slaves who worked fulltime on the demense where they were also housed in rude huts. Like the slaves they made clothing and shoes, turned out pottery, fashioned hemp, and produced wine. Only free peasants covered their rent by turning over goods – not labor services – to the estate.

Great estates were hardly restricted to military secular control, knights being supported on the produce generated off the demense and the rents paid by free holders. Great abbeys were organized along similar lines. After all the monks were supposed to be praying for the souls of the powerful nobles who allowed them to sprinkle their estates through the countryside. In many ways the abbeys provided crucial services for the nobility. In order to streamline inheritance, avoiding breaking up estates, some of the sons of powerful lords would find themselves pledged to monastic life; as well abbeys were supposed to house feudal lords and their retinue as they travelled around the countryside. That the monasteries were organized along the lines of orders following specific rules laid down by the administrators of the order (e.g.: at first Benedictine followed after 1000 CE by the new Cistercian, Cluniac, and

Carthusian monastic orders) rendered the “tourism” aspect of monasticism particularly attractive.

The behavior of Charlemagne, first Holy Roman Emperor, illustrates nicely the way the vassalage/manorial/monastery complex operated as a highly decentralized form of political economy. Charlemagne was a sincere Christian committed to spreading the Gospel with the sword. His favorite reading was Saint Augustine’s The City of God and the World. When the spring season arrived he organized the annual military campaign he was preparing to carry out,

203 eliciting commitments from his vassals. He expanded Carolingian territory to the east, absorbing Bavaria, erecting a defensive “wall” against the Slavs, defeating the Avars in the east.

He demanded conversion to Christianity. He issued regulations (capitularies) that were supposed to hold throughout his lands, dispatching envoys who may or may not have successfully convinced his vassals to follow his dictates. He was relatively unsuccessful in stopping blood feuds erupting between his powerful vassals. He ruled by example, by law only in a faltering manner. Not surprisingly his empire was divided up by his quarrelling grandchildren. It was fragmented in the extreme.

One military weapon Charlemagne lacked was a navy. This was one reason he was reluctant to push his campaigns southward toward Venice, toward Marseille and Arles. It was a

Byzantine fleet - not a Carolingian fleet - that challenged Muslim pirates and raiders in the

Mediterranean, the Adriatic and the Aegean. Indeed Venice and southern Italy operated under a Byzantine military umbrella to an important degree. In this sense Italian economic destiny was significantly different than Carolingian. Certainly the nascent Italian city states were part of feudal Europe geographically – knights, monasteries and villa were in abundance there; Rome was the nominal capital of Western European Christendom - but there is good reason for thinking they escaped the full force of decentralized, barter infused, manorial organization prevailing in French and some German dominated regions of the West.

A final point suggesting the three faces of Medieval Europe were more characteristic, less contested, of Europe during the Carolingian era than during the three centuries 1000 CE to

1300 CE involves Christianity. During the Carolingian period official Christian worship did contend with so-called paganism at the local level: it is not clear how pious was a typical

204 peasant, let alone a slave. However its validity as an ideological umbrella was not in dispute among elites and those among the masses who attended church. In point of fact the

Carolingian era preceded a latter era when the question of what constituted true Christian faith became a major political question. It preceded the definitive split between the Greek Orthodox version of the faith and the Catholic version. It preceded the issuing of Crusades directed at chiastic movements within the Christian fold that preached virtuous perfection was possible for mere mortals (for instance the Cathars, the Albigensians) while simultaneously denouncing the

Mother Church that was hopelessly corrupt and wallowing in sin in their eyes. Notable among these pre-Reformation movements calling out for reform within Christianity were the

Waldensians and Hussites. These movements roiled the politics of official Christianity during the era of Western Christian expansionism, extending across the three centuries after 1000 CE.

All of this divisiveness to Catholic ideological hegemony took place after 1000 CE, not in the

Carolingian era when force of arms was extending the grip of Nicene Christian ritual across northern and eastern Europe.

Consider the bitter ideological and even militarized struggles between Holy Roman

Emperor and pope, most notably involving the power over the granting of investiture of bishops, a major source of revenue for the investing body. Again consider and the split between the pope residing at Avignon and the pope residing in Rome. These struggles were not to come later, during the era of European expansion. In comparison to the experience of the Holy

Roman Emperor Henry IV - excommunicated by the pope - the experience of Charlemagne (the first Holy Roman Emperor) in dealing with Rome in his role as the first Holy Roman Emperor

205 was pleasant and diplomatic, albeit marred by minor controversy particularly over how to handle diplomatically ideological disputes between the pope and the Byzantine Patriarch.

In short the three pillars of medievalism – manorial organization, fragmented militarization, and doctrinally uncontested Nicene Christianity – reached their apex during the

Carolingian era and were in slow decline in the three centuries after 1000 CE.

European Battles and Sieges, 400 – 1500 CE

Given the fact a substantial share of the medieval population was trained for fighting, restive when not properly respected and rewarded economically (an unfortunately common occurrence) it is not surprising warfare was unrelenting in Medieval Europe. That pressure on the standard of living of knights was a hard cold reality it only need be pointed out that the average level of income per capita was quite low. You cannot get blood out of a turnip. The fact living standards were low and subject to considerable variation depending on the weather and the presence of insects severely constrained what an economically non-productive individual could expect to secure when times were tough. In point of fact battles and sieges took place regularly.6 How frequent were these armed conflicts? Regarding this point we possess substantial hard evidence, numbers we can sort through, figures with which we can work.

Scholars must rely upon written records in compiling lists of battles and sieges, in estimating the number of combatants, in attempting to describe how the events unfolded. The fact is during the early Medieval Era – from approximately 500 CE to 1000 CE - written documents recording many decisive military events and important political decisions was sparse at best. Illiteracy was rampant, even among high Catholic Church officials who were

206 certainly expected to work from written texts. There is a very good reason why the Dark Ages are known as the Dark Ages. Even Canon Law was not put into a usable from until after 1000

CE. Riven through with contradictions and inconsistencies trying to assemble a workable Canon

Law document was a monumental achievement Johannes Gratian pioneered.

In short the evidence amounts to a mixed bag. After 1000 CE or so it is probably safe to assume all major battles and sieges were at least accounted for. It is probably safe to assume the locations and dates of the most important military exchanges were accurately recorded.

That said, figures on the number of armed participants and figures on casualties and injuries are certainly rough guesses at best, fabrications at worst. In coming up with figures on the number of combatants as often as not I had to take averages, working from wildly varying guesses.

My results appear in Table 3.2.

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Table 3.2

Battles and Sieges in the Western European Medieval Period Organized by Region and by Period, 378 CE to 1499 (a)

Panel A: Organized by Region

Period Core Regions of Western Europe: Number of Major Military Events (b)

Britain France Germany Italy

378-999 CE 2 11 3 3

1000 – 1299 CE 24 29 21 27

1300 – 1500 CE 13 54 22 31

Total 39 94 46 61

Period Periphery Regions: Number of Major Military Events

Balkans/Hungary Baltic Iberia Levant

378 – 999 CE 18 0 4 6

1000 – 1299 CE 19 15 26 19

1300 – 1500 CE 23 10 23 2

Total 60 25 53 27

Panel B: Organized by Type of Conflict (Crusades, Dynastic, City-State, Other) (c)

Crusade Dynastic City-State Other

1000 – 1199 CE 19 (18 in Levant)

1200 – 1500 CE 33 (5 in Levant, 7 114 42 207 in Iberia, 8 in France, 6 in Balkans/Hungary, 4 in Baltics/Russia)

208

Table 3.2 (Continued)

Panel C: Estimates on Number of Combatants Involved for 225 Battles and Sieges, 378 CE- 1500 CE

15,000 or More

100,000+ 50,000-99,999 40,000-49,999 30,000-39,999 20.000-29,999 15,000-19,999

7 17 16 17 26 20

14,999 or Less

10,000-14,999 7,500-9,999 5,000-7,499 2,000-4,999 1,000-1,999 100-999

30 20 18 28 8 14

Panel C: Average Number of Years In-Between Conflicts 1000 – 1500: Sieges, Battles; Crusades, Dynastic, City-State (d)

Period (CE) Battles or Sieges By Type of Conflict

Battle Siege Crusades Dynastic City-State

1000-1049 0 5 0 10 0

1050-1099 3.1 2.6 8.3 8.3 50

1100-1149 3.3 2.5 6.3 5.0 0

1150-1199 6.2 5.0 12.5 16.7 0

1200-1249 1.8 1.8 2.8 5.0 4.2

1250-1299 10.0 2.6 25.0 6.3 10.0

1300-1349 3.1 1.6 16.7 2.4 12.5

1350-1399 5.0 1.4 16.7 3.3 5.0

1400-1449 2.3 1.6 10 2.6 3.9

1450-1499 3.6 2.7 50 3.3 10.0

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Table 3.2 (Continued)

Panel D: Average Number of Years In-Between Conflicts 1000 – 1500: Organized by Region

Period (CE) Core or Periphery Two Sub-Regions of Core

Periphery Core Germany/Italy Britain/France

1000-1049 7.1 12.5 25 25

1050-1099 2.8 3.3 4.6 12.5

1100-1149 2.9 2.8 8.3 4.2

1150-1199 5 6.3 10.0 16.7

1200-1249 1.9 1.7 5 2.9

1250-1299 10.0 2.6 3.6 10.0

1300-1349 4.2 1.4 5.6 1.9

1350-1399 3.3 1.6 2.8 3.9

1400-1449 2.9 1.4 2.8 2.8

1450-1499 3.1 1.8 5.6 2.6

Notes:

a One battle included in the list occurred in 1520.

b Switzerland and the Netherlands included in “Germany”; Flanders and Belgium included in “France.”

c City-state conflicts included some battles between Scandinavian and North German cities as well as Italian city-state conflicts.

d Average number of years in each period calculated by dividing the number of events in each period by the number of years included in the period.

I have organized the battles and sieges into categories: regional categories; categories defined in terms of the type of conflict involved. I divide the regions where battles and sieges occurred

210 into eight regional spheres: four core sub-regions (England, France, Germany and Italy) and a periphery zone with four sub-regions (Balkans/Hungary, Baltic, Iberia and the Levant). The core is basically Western Europe as of 1000 CE; the periphery is basically the areas either conquered or at least contested militarily by Western European forces. In conceptualizing the core zone I divide it into two sub-regions: a Germany/Italy geographic axis in which power was regularly contested between two ideologically opposed parties, the pope on the one hand, the Holy

Roman Emperor on the other hand; and a England/France geographic axis defined in terms of intertwining dynastic rivalries between powerful English and powerful French feudal lords, later kings. As for military encounters defined in terms of underlying motives for fighting I define four groups: ideological conflicts in which religious norms and beliefs were contested; dynastic conflicts that were mainly about secular political power; and city-state conflicts that were primarily economic; and other.

From the table several points are clear. Ideological conflicts were mainly concentrated in the 1050 CE to 1250 CE era; city-state conflicts were especially concentrated in the 1250 CE to 1350 CE period; and dynastic conflicts in the post-1300 CE era. It is tempting – and I believe correct – to argue that there was a limited supply of persons and economic resources that could be devoted to fighting. When demand surged in one arena it slackened in the others. In short I am making a basic point with this argument: military diversion was alive and well in a highly militarized Medieval Western European political setting.

Commercial diversion carried out through trade basically is a problem of how to negotiate dynamic shifts in supply and demand. If you divert resources – ships, financial infrastructure, information gathering – to increasing your clout in one market you reduce the

211 resources you have available to bolster your impact in another market. Admittedly if the overall volume of trade for all suppliers and demanders of goods expands you may be able to expand your sales and purchases in all markets simultaneously. That is trade creation. But in a static environment where the volume of trade is unchanged, zero-sum logic applies.

Military diversion follows a similar logic. Start with a situation where the overall level of income available to be split up among military overlords is unchanging. Now consider the conundrum facing a particular overlord. Suppose the resources the overlord commands is to carry on military activity (the share of total income available multiplied by the percentage of that income share that can be extracted for military purposes)– or at least deter aggression from other lords eying the lord’s land and castle - is being used to a maximum. In the chivalry model of the Medieval Period these resources were abundantly clear to organizers of military campaigns: so many days of service imposed on vassals, so many horses, so much metal for armor and weapons, so many days of services that could be extracted out of serfs, so much in the way funds that could be used pay grunt labor and artisans designing siege machinery. Of course at the same time resources had to devoted to defending your castle while you were out campaigning if you chose to boldly sally out to war.

In a static economic environment with a large number of overlords contending for power the strategic possibilities are complex. For one thing the likely outcomes of conflict are unpredictable but - other things equal - those commanding more resources in a head to head conflict are likely to prevail. This basic fact impacts calculations of whether to fight or not. As well all parties know that winners acquire more resources at the expense of the loser, notably land, perhaps vassals and income generating assets. So winners are likely to gather momentum

212 allowing them to keep on winning in future military exchanges. This leads us to an important observation regarding the transition between the early Medieval Era (the Dark Ages) and the

Central Medieval Era.

In the Dark Ages when Western Europe as a whole was under attack by Vikings,

Muslims, and Magyars successful overlords were those that could hang onto territory and the loyalty of vassals. Not squandering resources, seeing your capacity to exert hard power was kept intact, was far more important than gaining resources. Established overlords were likely to leave each other alone. However once Western Europe became expansionary the reverse was the case. Gaining land and resources in territories conquered from outsiders became a viable strategy for increasing your future military prowess. However diverting resources to aggressively pursuing campaigns outside your own territory renders your home base vulnerable. There are risks to pursuing aggression abroad; by the same token there are risks to not pursuing aggression abroad. Your rivals may outstrip you in the race for resources.

Forming alliances – coalitions – was another option available to feudal lords in guaranteeing security for your home base or in securing a share in the fruits of military victory, thereby acquiring more land. Cementing alliances by arranging marriages was a well- established mechanism used by Central Asian invaders crashing in the core regions of Eurasia.

As well it became the template for forging alliances in Medieval (and even post-Medieval)

Europe. 7 This is the logic of dynastic aggrandizement of power that was effectively utilized by

European monarchs in amassing kingdoms or fragile empires like the Holy Roman Empire.

213

Add to these considerations regarding strategic options available to overlords operating in an environment in which the territorial base of Western Europe was growing, the fact is the output per unit of land area was expanding. As a result the potential productive resources from which taxes and bribes could be secured by ambitious military overlords grew not only because the European territorial base was growing but also because intensive growth, economic output per land unit, was taking place in tandem with extensive (territorial) growth. From Table 3.3 appearing below we can conclude this was the case. This should not surprise us as we know commerce was expanding as Western European merchants, coming into contact with Islamic civilization, improved their ability to generate credit and manage their accounts using double entry accounting based on the Indian-Arabic numerical system. In short with the gradual spread of merchant communities – cities – overlords came to realize there was a new option available to them: charter a “burg” in your environs. Reap rents from the “burg” in terms of tax revenue

– or re-chartering fees – and tariffs.

214

Table 3.3

Population and Per Capita Income in Sub-Regions of Western European Core and Periphery: Circa 14 CE, Circa 1000 CE, Circa 1500 CE, and Circa 1600 CE

Region Circa 14 CE Circa 1000 CE

Population (P) Per capita income Population (P) Per capita income (y) (y)

Core 18,100 604.5 18,700 428.8

Britain 800 400 2000 400

France 5300 471.2 6900 425

Germany 3700 411.2 4500 425

Italy 800 809 4600 450

Periphery 11,700 465.3 12,850 416.7

Baltics 400 400 800 400

Iberia 4150 493.3 4600 446.7

Eastern Europe, 4750 415.2 8050 400 Rest of Europe

Region Population (P) Per capita income Population (P) Per capita income (y) (y)

Circa 1500 CE Circa 1600 CE

Core 46,442 775.5 60,370 894.3

Britain 3942 714 6170 974

France 16,400 739.6 20,100 851.8

Germany 14,950 695.2 20,000 785

Italy 10,500 1100 13,100 1100

Periphery 24,390 525.7 30,358 851.6

Baltics 1450 662.7 1810 779.1

Iberia 7800 654 9340 839.7

Eastern Europe, 16,290 493.8 18,808 545.7 Rest of Europe

215

Table 3.3 (Continued)

Source: Maddison (2007): Tables A.1, A.4, and A.7 in Statistical Appendix, pp. 376, 379, and 382.

The lords were competing with one another for military resources; as a result they also found themselves competing for merchant communities. Of course powerful abbeys also joined the fray since they could aggrandize resources to support their orders, to subsidize their religious pilgrimages, to build their chapels, to purchase their holy relics, to fund their manuscript collecting.

Exploiting their political connections with the military nobility a patrician class of urban boosters negotiating charters with abbeys and military overlords emerged. In effect they shared in the rents extracted by feudal overlords and abbots. These rents derived from the activities of the merchants and artisans who gathered within city walls.

The patricians were hardly stupid. They knew they could play off one lord against another.8 Why not? Behaving strategically, being duplicitous, within a decentralized, highly militarized, environment would open convenient avenues for amassing riches. They were fully prepared to carve out arrangements with a rival military overlord when it became obvious their economic interests would be better protected under the umbrella of the rival lord who was successfully aggrandizing territorial acquisitions in their neighborhood. Not surprisingly they cultivated strategy dealing with patricians controlling other cities. In doing so they appreciated a basic economic reality: it was in their interests to forge cooperative alliances with other cities.

As a group cities had a common interest in expanding trade for the entire network. Trade creation was in the interests of all. Economists call this a scale economy. It was crucial to the

216 emergence of the Hanseatic League, the Champagne Fairs, the alliances between cities in

Lombardy and Tuscany.

There are limits to scale economies. One limiting factor is the dangle of quick enrichment through aggressive trade diversion. Grab the trade routes held by rivals. For instance one group of cities might decide to blockade the trade of another city network bound together by dint of a carefully worked out alliance; for instance one group of cities might raise sufficient funds to hire away knights from declining manorial estates, raising a army, forging a militia, commissioning a naval fleet.

Another limiting factor was the control of city government. Patricians were extracting rents from merchants and artisans. Not surprisingly the merchants and artisans resented this.

As well they resented the power the patricians exercised over the activities of – and legal disputes erupting among – their rank and file. Ultimately they formed alliances of their own to protect their own interests, to fight for their rights over city laws and taxes, in short to exercise leverage, power. One option was to form their own militias.

All of these factors – strategic playing off of rival lords and abbots; forging alliances with other cities; purchasing military services from knights; forming militias - played into the hands of Medieval European burg power elites determined not only to survive, but more importantly prosper handsomely, despite the fact they were operating within a highly militarized and politically fragmented setting.

Commercial Cities and Sieges, 1000 – 1500

217

The network of commercial trading centers – patrician dominated merchant cities of

Medieval Europe – were remarkably successful in surviving during the period 1000 to 1300. Our best indicator of this is our figures on sieges. Very few major trading centers were subjected to withering sieges. In so far as European commercial hubs were subjected to siege, the major rationale for investing them was ideological, tied up with Crusades. Table 3.4 reveals this. Cities taken in Crusades dominate the list of important commercial centers subject to siege. Iberian centers loom large in the lists of overlapping cases; Toulouse in France was subject to siege by

218

Table 3.4 Commercial Cities and Towns Subject to Siege between 1000 CE and 1300 CE, and Estimates of Urbanization for Regions of Western Europe, Circa 1300 and 1500 CE Panel A: Sieges Taking Place in Major Medieval Cities and Towns: Commercial Centers in the Case of Bennett/Holister, Oxford Atlas, and DK Atlas; Centers Establishing Universities between 1250 and 1450 in Hammond Atlas

Data Feature Bennett/Holister Oxford Atlas Hammond Atlas DK Atlas

Number of cities in 52 66 57 158 data set

% experiencing 17.3% 15.2% 5.3% 9.5% siege

List of cities sieged Toledo, Jerusalem, Cologne, Rouen, Toulouse, Huesca, Bruges, Rouen, Bruges, Lisbon, Tours, Toulouse, Seville Aachen, Cologne, Milan, Rouen, Lisbon, Seville, Toulouse, Valencia, Toulouse, Cordoba, Cordoba, Milan, Jaen, Cordoba, Seville Parma, Palermo Lisbon, Milan, Parma, Mantua, Faenza, Palermo, Syracuse

219

Table 3.4 (Continued) Panel B : Estimates of Urbanization (%) for Countries of Europe, Circa 1300 CE and 1500 CE

Country Based on assumptions about the cities Given in the DK Atlas Maddison lacking direct estimates (for 1300 CE): In Column 1 all such cites Estimates (for are assumed to have 5000 inhabitants; in Column 2, 10000 1500 CE) inhabitants; in Column 3, 15000 inhabitants; in Column 4, 20000 inhabitants (direct estimates included in calculations when available)

Belgium 6.67% 6.67% 6.67% 6.67% 21.1%

France 2.27 3.06 3.85 4.65 4.2

Germany 0.02 0.03 0.04 0.06 3.2

Italy 9.87 12.17 14.47 16.77 14.9

Netherlands n.e. n.e. n.e. n.e. 15.8

Scandinavia n.e. n.e. n.e. n.e. 0.9

Switzerland n.e. n.e. n.e. n.e. 1.5

England/Wales n.e. n.e. n.e. n.e. 3.1

Scotland n.e. n.e. n.e. n.e. 1.6

England/Wales/Scotland 3.8 6.2 6.2 8.5 n.e.

Portugal n.e. n.e. n.e. n.e. 3.0

Spain n.e. n.e. n.e. n.e. 6.1

Iberia (Spain/Portugal) 7.6 8.8 10.1 11.3 n.e.

Western Europe n.e. n.e. n.e. n.e. 6.1

China n.e. n.e. n.e. n.e. 3.8

Japan n.e. n.e. n.e. n.e. 2.9

Sources: Barraclough (1999): pg. 100; Bennett and Holister (2006): pg. 170; Black (2000): pp. 190-191; (Maddison (2006): Table B-14, page 248; and O’Brien (1999): pg. 100.

220 forces assembled by Philip Augustus, monarch of France, who was acting at the behest of the pope who called a Crusade against the so-called heresy of the Albigensians but was also conveniently taking advantage of the situation offered by the cloak of piety to consolidate control over rebellious feudal lords in the Toulouse region.

In considering the importance of the Crusades in the sieges of crucial commercial centers one must keep in mind that the Crusades were not nearly as disastrous an undertaking for Western Europe as is often claimed. True Saladin defeated Crusader armies at Hattin, wrenching away from Christian rule Jerusalem in 1187. True Jerusalem was only in Christian hands for less than two centuries, having been seized first in 1099 during the First Crusade. The fact is the Crusader conflicts taking place in the Levant were only part – not necessarily the most important part - of a much more complex project.

First and foremost the Crusades were integral to Western European expansionism. By directing military force outward they absorbed warriors that otherwise might have fought each other with greater ferocity within the core region of Europe than they actually did. The

Crusades were part of a generally expansionary military and commercial drive outward into a periphery that included the Baltic, the Balkans, Sicily and Iberia. They were definitely warlike.

But they fueled much commercial activity as well. Venice, Genoa, and Pisa all benefited from the Crusades. They ferried Crusaders; the established commercial outposts in the Levant.

Interacting with Muslim merchants they took in valuable tips about how to create credit and how to carry on long-distant trade. The all but complete re-conquest of Iberia – only Granada holding out as an Islamic outpost – by the mid-thirteenth century brought into Christian hands

221 extremely well developed commercial centers that were subsequently integrated into a growing network of European cities.

The Crusades reshaped Christianity. It drove a decisive wedge between the Greek

Orthodox Church expanding northward and eastward into Russia, Bulgaria, and the eastern reaches of the Baltic and the Catholic West. From their very inception the relationship between

Rome and Constantinople played out during the Crusades had been fraught with deception and intrigue. The great schism between Rome and Constantinople had already occurred in mid- century. After the Byzantine Emperor was taken captive by a Seljuk Turk led army pushing its way into eastern Anatolia, a traditional holding of Byzantium, at the Battle of Manzikert in 1071 the Byzantine rulers looked to Rome for help, arguing along the standard strategic lines conveyed in the well-known dictum “the enemy of my enemy is my friend”.

Feigning cooperation with Byzantium but actually coveting growth of Rome’s influence in the global Christian world, Pope Urban agreed to call a Crusade. He did so in late 1095. His bid to aggrandize the influence of the Roman pope was two pronged. By guaranteeing immunity to Western feudal lords (guaranteeing that their home territories would not be invaded by rivals while they were away crusading) he hoped to promote a “Peace of God” in the West, thereby strengthening the authority of the papacy and bolstering particularly the weapon of excommunication that previous popes had wielded, notably against the Holy Roman

Emperor Henry IV. 9 In addition he wished to effectively diminish the power of the Byzantine

Emperor and the appeal of the Eastern Patriarch. Indeed during the Fourth Crusade, in 1204, the Crusaders sacked Constantinople, establishing a Latin Kingdom in place of the Byzantine

Empire.

222

Finally the Crusades commercialized chivalry, or rather intensified the drift toward commercializing chivalry. Consider the Knights Templar one of the three Military Orders created by the Church during the Crusades (the Knights Hospitalliers and Teutonic Knights being the other two). In theory devoted to stringent self-discipline and absolute obedience to the pope, the Poor Knights of Christ and the Temple of Solomon (the Knights Templar) was a new order assigned a prestigious headquarters in the al-Aqsa Mosque complex used by King Baldwin of

Jerusalem as a royal palace. Gradually the order became remarkably rich, garnering loot seized from Muslim armies, donations from convents and monasteries throughout Europe.

Maintaining warehouses that it guarded it gained a reputation as a safe place for holding wealth, a place to which one could make deposits. Not surprisingly it began to charge interest, fees, for its services. It became a powerful bank. What about Luke’s assertion that the root of all evil was money? What about the prohibition against usury adopted at the Council of Nicaea?

In point of fact it grew so corrupt that it was decisively suppressed by the pope during the 14th century, some of its high officials even executed.

Disbanding knights who had joined the Crusader campaigns in the Levant commercialized chivalry in other ways as well. A classic case is the phenomenon of condottieri, heads of free professionally trained military units contracting their services out to the highest bidder. Many knights returning empty handed from the Levant in the aftermath of the disastrous Second and Third Crusades - Saladin’s forces decimating Crusader forces at Hattin, retaking Jerusalem for Islam – ended up foraging for a living in Italy, basically reduced in their penury to becoming mere bandits and violent ruffians, cobbling together gangs that could extract revenue from wealthy Italian merchant centers made rich from trade with the Levant.

223

Hire them on as protectors of the cities, killing two birds with one stone as it were. You buy protection by employing mercenaries, drafting a condotta, contract that you sign with the condottiero. The increasingly powerful city-states of Italy saw this solution as a way to aggrandize power with pumped up military muscle, weakening the threat of invasion from the

Holy Roman Empire on the one hand, warding off threats from the avowed enemy of the Holy

Roman Empire, the pope.

Ironically by their very nature mercenary armies working at the behest of cities or feudal overlords or kings operated with a mixed set of motives. The commander of a regiment for hire was highly invested in the soldiers serving under the regimental banner. In effect they were capital, valuable capital. Losing them in battle meant losing assets. Better to protect these assets by feigning conflict, avoiding its most displeasing consequences, maiming and murdering.

Provided your opponents play by the same rules everyone benefits. The condottieri and their minions have employment; the employers enjoy the fantasy of actually having a fearsome military force available at their fingertips; diplomacy can function largely freed from actual carnage.

In fifteenth century Renaissance Italy city-states basically operated in this kind of environment. Too powerful to yield to an aspiring leader for all of Italy – an outcome additionally hampered by on-going struggles between the German Holy Roman Empire and the papal authorities in Rome – city states in Italy operated in a world of constant squabbling that sometimes resulted in open warfare but as often as not was handled through diplomacy and negotiation. In his classic The Prince Machiavelli railed against the condottieri. He himself had been commissioned by Florence to raise a militia army for his employer, a militia that could

224 bring Pisa to its heels, consolidating Florence’s hold over a major port on the coast. Hoping for a new Cesare Borgia to emerge in Italy, one committed to unifying the Italian peoples as a whole through an aggressive military campaign, Machiavelli viewed the phenomenon of mercenary warfare as an oxymoron. Why play at fighting? Launching military action should be a serious issue, a matter of life and death. War carried on by militias, by the rank and file, by ideologically committed commoners, is real warfare.10

Mercenaries and militias: these were two ways cities could and did protect themselves in the Medieval Period. Militias were certainly becoming into their own in European warfare, a fact driven to some extent by changes in military technology. The growing importance of the crossbow and the gun – both of which sent flying towards heavily armored knights atop their steeds propellants that could and did successfully penetrate steel plated armor – was transforming warfare, raising the value of skilled infantry relative to knights operating on horseback. From a cost point of view outfitting a soldier trained to fight in the infantry was far less than the cost of putting onto the field of battle a mounted knight. Cities populated by merchants and artisans who could be trained in fighting with spears, bow and arrow, and powerful crossbows at relatively low cost posed an increasingly potent threat to knights as competition between armed forces transformed military units, knights giving way to the infantry. 11 In short the relative power of cities compared to feudal overlords rose as free floating mercenary armies and militias spread throughout Europe.

It should not be forgotten that cannons were as important, if not more important, than muskets or smaller handguns in moving European warfare towards gunpowder. How to transport cannons was a problem to be sure. That said it was perhaps a problem better solved

225 by putting cannons on galleys and armed ships. For ports along major waterways – wide rivers and especially seacoasts, the cannon offered considerable advantages. You could place them at strategic spots on hilltops and in front of city walls where they could ward off attacks. You could put them on ships. The gradual embrace of gunpowder did favor cities over overlords relying on the vassalage services of knights and squires.

Still the principal avenues pursued by medieval cities in avoiding debilitating siege lay not in the field of fighting but rather in the field of political strategy. The trick was how to cajole powerful overlords into protecting cities, appealing to the self-interest of overlords who often feuded with one another. How do you get powerful protectors who might contest with one another at the drop of a hat– and therefore were subject to the dictum that “the friend of my enemy is my enemy” – to leave you alone?

One approach successfully initiated by cities was securing “market safe conduct”

(conduit des foires) guarantees from powerful lords. The merchants operating at the fairs of

Champagne secured these guarantees from the Count of Champagne. Not only did the Count of

Champagne grant the rights to merchants in his domain. He realized the fairs in his jurisdiction could not operate effectively if the merchants in Champagne could not go back and forth to southern France and Italy safely. With that in mind he arranged for the protection to be extended to the Duchy of Burgundy. Since it was in the economic interests of the Duke of

Burgundy to increase the trade taking place in his jurisdiction he was agreeable. In short if trade raises the incomes of both rulers – more tariffs, more taxes, and more wealthy merchants from which one can borrow funds – it is in their mutual interest, even if they both apply the

226 additional income to building stronger military forces with which they can potentially attack one another.

Of course this does not prevent a powerful city from trying to divert trade away from rivals by appealing to a powerful military ruler to do their bidding. That there were no dominant cities in Europe, rather networks of commercial centers of roughly similar size, reduced the risk of this happening. The network nature of Medieval Europe must not be discounted in seeing how rival military lords could be induced to cooperate in protecting each other’s merchants despite their potential rivalry on the field of battle.

Indeed institutions set up by networks of cities promoted the creation of commercial law. Consider contracts drawn up at fairs designed to prevent merchants from cheating one another. Officials at a fair were appointed to supervise fair ordinances; contracts were drawn up and witnessed by third party notaries guaranteeing enforcement; a court for the fair was set up to adjudicate disputes between rival merchants and rival merchant houses. Most important: you could excommunicate the merchants of a city from the fair altogether. In effect this meant each city in the network had to police the activities of the merchants within that city.

Safe conduct along routes carved out between cities posed another problem. How is a merchant or group of merchants moving English wool and French linen along rivers or over mountain passes? Here competition between rival districts was crucial. Since it was in the economic interests of an abbey or a manorial estate to direct trade through its vicinity it was in the interests of powerful economic actors within feudal domains to lobby their military protectors to forge travel routes beneficial to their commerce. Of course merchants were

227 hardly passive players in this arena. They formed syndicates, negotiating as a collective bargaining agent with groups of lords. As a classic example consider the road traversing the pass at Mont-Cenis. A merchant syndicate successfully negotiated to have a new road created that competed with an ancient road.

The fact that forests were systematically cut down as part of the drive to expand arable acreage helped in the carving out of roads. Bandits operate in dense forests, relying on the cover offered by thick vegetation. Fewer thickets, safer passage.

Networking between urban centers was crucial to the expansion of commerce during the period 1000 to 1300 CE. To be sure it had its drawbacks. Networking allowed city groups to defy each other. The Hanseatic League pressured the cities of Flanders into surrendering markets. They used a boycott to accomplish this. As well the Hanseatic League blockaded

Bergen, causing a famine to break out there.

One thing is evident. From the point of view of city networks the more powerful was the friend they depended on for protection– the more likely the friend was an actual or at least potential whale or shark operating in a sea populated by minnows - the greater was their chance of averting attack. This made important dynasties hoping to establish kingdoms highly attractive friends. To be sure it was also in the interests of dynasties vying to be monarchs to ally themselves with powerful cities from which they hoped to secure revenue thereby enriching the coffers they depended on for carrying on conflicts, including bringing restive subordinates to heel. This logic became increasingly important in the late Medieval Period, after Medieval Europe may have reached limits to growth.

228

Limits to Growth? State Formation, Urbanization, and Social Levelling in the High and Late Medieval Period

As historians it is difficult for us to erase from our consciousness a story line we have learned over and over again: the period from 1300 CE to 1500 CE is a transitional period. After

1500 Europe moved along a path of global expansion, discovering and colonizing the New

World, establishing an oceanic based trading system that connected the coastlines of China and

Japan to the coastlines along the Atlantic, a global oceanic trading system that displaced the Silk

Road systems pioneered in the Ancient World, expanded by Islamic traders and enriched geographically by the Mongolian conquests. Seen in the rear view mirror of historical development subsequent to the Renaissance we can easily tell a story of progress.

Beginning in the 1490s powerful Western European states emerged, centralized enough to garner a generous revenue base began naval expansion programs. Aggrandizing military power – notably galleys bristling with cannons - five states began to systematically explore and establish ports of call on the world’s first global trade system, one spanning the world’s oceans:

Portugal and Spain in Iberia, France and the Netherlands along the Atlantic seaboard of the continent, and the island kingdom of England. Voyages around Africa opened up routes to the

Indian Ocean and the South China Sea; voyages across the Pacific opened up the opportunity to establish vast colonial empires in the Americas. The Spanish ultimately turned the Pacific into a major trade route. Opening up a complex of silver mines in Potosi and in Mexico Spanish galleons shipped silver ingots to the Philippines, their colony in the Asia-Pacific, penetrating into the southern island of Japan, Kyushu. With the exception of Brazil which fell to the Portuguese

229 they grabbed territories through most of the Americas, from the southern tip of contemporary

Argentina to California and Florida.

Thinking along these lines is fine as far as it goes. The basic story line is one in which

Western Europe begins expansion around 1000 CE, accelerating the process after 1500 CE. It is a story in which progress builds on progress.

The problem with the story is it is incomplete. It does not take into account two centuries when Western Europe struggled as a region: struggled in terms of economic performance; struggled in terms of social stability; struggled in terms of warfare exemplified by the Hundred Years War that ravaged France and Britain, turning the border between England and Scotland into a contested military zone. Looking at the two centuries of late Medieval

Europe from this vantage suggests limits to growth were reached, limits arising from the way

Europe had expanded during the previous three centuries.

Beginning in 1315 famine hit the Western European countryside. It ravaged the core regions of Europe for almost eight years. Was it due a cooling of climate, perhaps stemming from volcanic eruptions? Was it due to soil exhaustion stemming from insufficient fertilization of the soil? Was it due to bringing into cultivation marginal lands of such poor quality – given the technology of soil management prevailing at the time – that crop failure had to eventually occur? Was it due to excessive specialization in the planting of crops and the pasturing of animals – too many fields turned over to raising sheep for wool, too many vineyards planted, too many citrus orchards – thereby suggesting trade during the previous three centuries had pressed too strongly against resources?

230

What we do know is that on average land quality (for a discussion of the land quality variable qla see the discussion in the Appendix) declined. We know this because much land was returned to waste. Forests grew. Farms along the high ridges of mountains – attributing to the previous three centuries when the mean altitude of arable cultivation was pushed willy-nilly every higher – were abandoned after the early fourteenth century.

From an economic point of view the consequences were devastating. Less food, starvation followed by spikes in mortality. Marriages were postponed. Couples were separated as people scavenged throughout the countryside. The birth rate plummeted. Population growth

– vibrant up to 1300 – slowed. Prices for food rose; land rents on the land still arable soared.

The rich grew richer; the poor poorer.

This was the first stage in the fourteenth century demographic crisis. It was followed by the horror of the Black Death. Perhaps brought on by the Mongolian invasions and the establishment of trade routes across the steppes of Central Asia – there is evidence the plague may have had its origins in the Himalayan region – the Black Death took three forms as it spread. In its bubonic form it was carried by rats who hitched rides on caravans. Fleas bit rats, devouring the bacillus from the bloodstreams of their victims. Biting humans, the fleas transmitted the disease to humans. Lodged in human populations the disease takes two other forms: pneumonic and septicemic. In the pneumonic form it is transmitted by person’s sneezing. It spreads through the air. In the septicemic form it attacks the bloodstream of a victim. Then it is spread by fleas biting humans. Between 1347 and 1350 the plague spread across Europe, moving from Sicily and Sardinia in the Mediterranean northward to France (it

231 reached Paris by the summer of 1348), penetrating northern Europe by 1350, Danzig and

Prague falling under its shadow at mid-century.

The population decline that resulted – some estimates of percentage losses in human numbers exceed 30% - reconfigured the relationship between arable land and people. Lower population densities meant wages rose relative to land rents. Manorial estates now competed for labor. In the Western districts of Western Europe, where commercialization of farming had gained special force due to the opening up of cities and trade routes, slaves and serfs were able to cast off their bondage, their required labor services dwindled. Real wages rose because nominal wages increased and food prices plummeted. Social leveling of a sort occurred. We know social leveling occurred in the countryside of France: in 1358 a great Jacquerie Revolt spread across the northern districts. Peasants were exerting political voice, albeit by taking up arms, attacking wealthy monasteries, threatening the lives of feudal lords and their retainers.

In the eastern reaches of Western Europe – in the periphery zones in Poland and

Lithuania, Pomerania, the Baltic coastline and Russia – the plague had not been as devastating.

Moreover armed nobles exercised more power relative to central authority, in part because city networks were undeveloped in these lands. Isolation was more extreme. Mobility was far more limited. Bondage was easier to enforce. Peasants could not easily escape to cities where “city air made people free.”

Social leveling took a different form in the western districts of Europe where urban networks were far better developed, where fairs had prospered, where land and river routes

232 had been fructified by merchant comings and goings. Burgs as a whole gained power and within burgs merchant guilds and artisan guilds gained power relative to the patrician classes.

Burgs aggrandized power because monarchs coveted their wealth, wishing to tax them so they could fill their coffers with revenue with which they could purchase mercenaries, commission cannons, secure muskets and crossbows, and build navies. We know this occurred because the early parliaments in England – for instance those called in session by Edward I during the late thirteenth and early fourteenth century included not only shire knights but also burgesses. Parliaments were called in England because monarchs needed funds to fight wars. In

France Philip the Fair also established a parliament though it was largely restricted to judicial matters. It was clear Philip was after more revenue. He filled his coffers with taxes extracted out of the clergy, showing a willingness to take on the pope over this matter. Moreover the

French Estates General established as an infrequently called but still somewhat effective shadow institution whose voice the French monarch was required to listen to and take into account in policy making included three estates: the clergy; the nobility; and townspeople.

Operating under the umbrella of burg governance, guilds gained power. They gained power because they were the real source of urban wealth. They did so because they could move elsewhere. They did so because they were the backbone of city militias. They did so because they had sufficient numbers to drive out unpopular patrician leaders. The Medici of

Florence discovered this hard fact of political life to their chagrin in Renaissance Italy.

Keeping these points in mind, it is useful to consider the estimates of urbanization appearing in Panel B of Table 3.4. As crude as these estimates are it is clear the most urbanized

233 regions of Europe were Belgium, the Netherlands, England, France, Spain, Portugal and Italy.

Setting aside Italy for a moment it is apparent that the states that emerged as the leaders in promoting Mercantilist expansion across the oceans were all relatively urbanized (albeit

Portugal is a marginal case). In short cites and centralization of power appear to go hand in hand.

Italy is a special case for several reasons. It was highly fragmented. Why? First it was the home of the papacy, most of the time anyway (some popes established a formal base in French

Avignon where they resided in an immense castle, and there was even a period when three popes contested the Holy See). Since the papacy and the highly fragmented Holy Roman Empire were intertwined through constant political and military interaction – popes making it a practice to weaken the Holy Roman Emperor by encouraging nobles in Germany to reject imperial authority, and Emperors contesting the independence of the Vatican by regularly invaded Italy, attempting to extend their control over swaths of territory both in northern Italy

(Lombardy and Tuscany) and southern Italy thereby hemming in the power aggrandized by the pontiff operating out of Rome – the lack of central authority secured by Italians is easier to understand. An alternative explanation revolves around cities gaining too much power in the

1100s as a result of the Crusades and the expansion of Mediterranean commerce they were able to command. Venice, Genoa, Pisa, and Florence became powerful political entities, each carving out city-state jurisdictions outside of their own walls. Again by 1300 Italy was prosperous. Perhaps too prosperous, making itself a target coveted by other powers, by

German kings, by Spanish monarchs, by the French.

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In any event it is apparent that three zones opened up in Europe as a result of reaching limits to growth as a feudal system. In one zone were the regions of Europe heavily urbanized and/or well situated geographically to expand onto the Atlantic. This zone included Spain,

Portugal, the Netherlands and the Low Lands, France and England. With the conquest of

Granada by the Spanish Iberia was once more completely within the European core zone. These states were sufficiently centralized and sufficiently rich to commit their sailors to oceanic exploration. A second zone included the highly fragmented Holy Roman Empire/Italian axis.

Italy was rich and highly urbanized; the Holy Roman Empire was highly decentralized politically and far less urbanized than Italy. As a zone it was urbanized but too fragmented for centralization. The third zone included periphery states. It included Scandinavia, the Baltic,

Poland, Lithuania, Russia and the Balkans. In these areas urbanization rates were low.

Centralization was contested by powerful nobles and rivalry between monarchs.

The fall of Constantinople to the Ottoman Turks in the mid-fifteenth century – an event that took place almost simultaneously with the fall of Granada to the Spanish – profoundly shaped the destinies of these three zones. It decisively closed the Black Sea window into

Central Asia. Using land routes to access trade to Asian markets that were the dominant world markets in terms of sheer size was now almost totally abandoned by Western European merchants. If anything it was clear an expansionary Ottoman Empire was likely to contest the periphery zone of Europe – notably the Balkans – with the Western Europe powers.12

At the same time the almost simultaneous occurrence of the fall of Granada to the

Spanish and the fall of Constantinople to the Ottomans strengthened the hand of the first – most highly centralized in monarchical states and most highly urbanized – zone of Europe. True

235 for the feuding monarchies inhabiting this zone conquering the New World was unexpected; however carving out safe havens along global oceanic shipping and commercial routes was not.

Expansion meant going out to sea, securing avenues to access trade with India and China without going through the great landmass of Eurasia.

This discussion naturally leads us to speculate on why it was Europe – not China, not the

Islamic world – that discovered and conquered the New World. What I can offer here are observations based on the analysis of Eurasian power dynamics.

Why not Islam? True Islamic traders had pioneered much of the naval commerce in the

Indian Ocean. But what incentive did they have for going out on the Atlantic or the Pacific for that matter? Their land trade zone was vast geographically. The oceanic portion of it was an add-on. They penetrated Indonesia and Southeast Asia where their commerce friendly religion made important inroads. The loss of Granada along with the Ottoman conquest of

Constantinople kept the focus of their merchants on land based commerce. They had been weakened by the Mongol conquests but regaining control over the Black Sea helped. The fact the Mongol empire split apart into rival states helped as well. The military thrust of the Turkish

Muslims was in the European periphery not in the heartland.

The Chinese had suffered grave defeat by the Mongols. After the collapse of the Mongol dominated Yuan dynasty and the emergence of a native Ming dynasty Chinese military calculations were naturally focused on keeping powerful Central Asian groups from attacking and conquering them. First and foremost they were a land power. To be sure the sheer size of their economy was vast. The resources the Ming administration was able to cobble together

236 was sufficient for Chinese engineers to design the largest ships the world had seen. During the period between 1405 and 1433 a naval commander, born in Mongolia into a Muslim family who took him on a pilgrimage to Mecca as a boy, Zheng He, made seven voyages with his fleet of

“treasure ships” visiting thirty-seven countries. But where did he go? Into the Indian Ocean; onto the eastern seaboard of Africa. He went where the lure of markets was the strongest. He went where displaying Chinese power would have the greatest impact politically. Europe was not an attractive target and in any case reaching Europe for a Chinese explorer meant going around Africa. Sailing across the Pacific made no sense.

The fact that Zheng He, a Muslim, sailed for China and not an Islamic state is itself interesting. It suggests that the Islamic world was too fragmented – not nearly as fragmented as the European world but still divided into states defined in terms of ethnicity or variants of the faith – to commission a massive fleet of the sort Zheng He sailed on.

This brings us to the Western Europeans. Europe was fragmented but less so in the zone best equipped to commission fleets for exploration of the oceans. Fortunately for the European sailors venturing out onto the waters the Atlantic Ocean is much easier to navigate than the

Pacific. It is smaller; it has more stepping stones to land on, more stepping stones from which one can jump on a further voyage. Indeed around 1000 Danish Vikings had accomplished the feat. They established bases in Iceland; moved onto Greenland; and eventually established a community on the coast of Labrador, Vinland.12

In short the states forming out of late Medieval Europe centralized and mostly urbanized had the incentive and the ability to discover the New World. This does not prove that

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European conquest was inevitable. Nothing in history is inevitable. However it does establish that it was highly probable. The incentives were in place; the geographic advances allowing

Europeans to get their first, beating out Chinese and Islamic contenders, were there. It is on this note that I conclude my account.

Open Feudalism versus Closed Feudalism: Medieval Europe in the Japanese Mirror

A major theme in this account is the way commerce and conflict shaped Medieval

European political and economic development. My line of argument tends heavily on the importance of decentralized feudal competition for the successful emergence of capitalistically oriented urban networks.

A similar logic can be applied to Japan during the so-called early modern (Tokugawa) period, Tokugawa rule successfully established at the Battle of Sekigahara in 1600 and persisting until 1868 when a group of economically successful southern fiefs defeated the forces of the Tokugawa shogun, establishing imperial rule under the Meiji Emperor, ushering in government by a centralized nation-state.

It was during the Tokugawa period that market oriented merchant capitalism spread in

Japan just as it did in Europe between 1000 CE and 1300 CE. It was during the Tokugawa period that infrastructure connecting together the disparate regions and islands in the Japanese archipelago was put into place: five major road networks were built; the banks of rivers were shored up; irrigation ditches were extended into the valleys and plains; new villages sprang up; population grew.

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Key to all of this was the way Japanese feudalism during the Tokugawa Era operated.

First and foremost guns were banned. Warriors, owing comitatus- inspired loyalty to their feudal overlords – were allowed to carry two swords. Not guns. The Japanese certainly knew about guns. Europeans – Spanish, Dutch – introduced guns into Japan during the sixteenth century when civil warfare roiled the land, powerful warlords contesting power with one another. Great warlords like Oda Nobunaga attempted to bring his rivals to heel; Hideyoshi

Toyotomi followed his footsteps in stamping out powerful adversaries. Ultimately at the Battle of Sekigahara Tokugawa Ieyasu was able to cobble together a successful alliance system that proved able to defeat a rival alliance system, bringing open civil warfare to an end. Or almost to an end: investing Osaka, Hideyoshi’s castle town, he defeated Hideyoshi’s son and heir shortly after 1600.

The problem Tokugawa shogun rulers faced was how to prevent a reoccurrence of civil war. To that end banning guns and banning contact with foreign powers made sense. Hideyoshi had already realized that allowing samurai warriors to roam the countryside was destabilizing,

Warriors continually fought one other, villages engaging in vendettas against rivals, farmer- warriors creating havoc in the rural countryside. Forcing the warriors to reside in the castle town of the daimyo overlord to whom they owed service removed them from open conflict in the rice fields and also kept the supporters of rival overlord clans apart. In taking these steps the Tokugawa shogun’s (bakufu, a kind of “military tent government”) government created a form of closed feudalism.

Crucial to the whole project of closed feudalism was demilitarizing the countryside. One of the great economic benefits arising from closed feudalism in Japan was the expansion of

239 arable land. Once the villages no longer engaged in regular fighting against one another they were able to form cooperative arrangements that were in the interests of them as a network.

The network was basically a vehicle for extending irrigation lines, channeling the water sloshing down rivers along irrigation ditches. New rice fields were created because irrigation lines were extended. Fiefs had strong incentives to make sure peaceful conditions prevailed in the villages allocated to them. Taxing the villages at approximately a rate of 40% (or rice produced) allowed the fief administrators to transfer rice stipends to the loyal warrior retainers who populated the castle town.

With the expansion of irrigation lines the ratio or arable to total land area soared. Land quality jumped. So did population. More mouths to feed went with more rice that could be produced. Between 1600 and 1720 or so the population grew at a rate of approximately 1% per annum. By 1720 it was around 26 – perhaps 27 – million persons.

Each of the fiefs established by the Tokugawa authorities had a caste town. As a result hundreds of urban centers sprang up throughout the country. At the apex of this urban network were two conurbations: Osaka and Edo. Osaka became the so-called “kitchen of the bakufu”: the daimyo in southern and western Japan were required to maintain warehouses there. These warehouses held rice. The fiefs could buy and sell rice to one another in the Osaka market thereby staving off famine in their fiefs when rice output in their bailiwick fell short of demand. It was not an absolute bulwark against starvation. Famines did occur partly due to volcanic eruptions. However it helped.

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Beginning by managing the rice trade merchants in Osaka began to venture out into other businesses: textiles, food processing, sake, fertilizer, dried fish, and so on. Osaka’s population soared.

Edo grew rapidly for other reasons. It was the main castle town of the Tokugawa shogun, originally a small fishing village on the coastline of a sprawling fief carved out of the

Kanto plain. To keep an eye on the daimyo – in short in order to spy on them – the Tokugawa bakufu required the lords to attend their court on an alternating basis. That meant they had to maintain luxurious residential compounds in Edo; this meant they had to travel on Tokugawa controlled roads where their baggage could be carefully checked for weapons. To be sure this system did create perfect peace and harmony, it did not absolutely hermetically suppress invidious blood feuds between rival lords, but it was effective in suppressing civil war. To be sure violence was not uncommon. During the early part of the Tokugawa era samurai retainers sometimes rebelled; in the second half of the Tokugawa era (1720 – 1868) peasant rebellions were not uncommon. Still it was a pax Tokugawa.

As the shogun’s capital Edo joined Osaka in growing to immense size. As a result two major urban conurbations existed in Japan. In these two conurbations powerful merchant houses thrived. The great houses of Sumitomo and Mitsui emerged, each spinning off franchise branches.

By the mid-eighteenth century limits to growth had been reached. New arable lands proved increasingly costly to create; forests had been so cut down to meet the demand for wood in construction and heating, wood was becoming more and more expensive. Reflecting

241 these limits during the second half of the Tokugawa period – from approximately 1720 until

1850 – population hovered from around 26 to 27 million persons. Evidence increasingly suggests this was achieved mainly through control over reproduction within marriage, infanticide (mabiki) being resorted to by many families. In the northeast of Japan this practice seems to have produced negative population growth. In central - and highly urbanized - Japan something like zero population growth seems to have prevailed. It is likely this was achieved through a regime of deaths exceeding births in the two great conurbations of the region, Edo and Osaka, both becoming “mortality sinkholes.” 14 In the southwest of the country, the region where the climate was most benevolent, it appears population grew somewhat. Overall from a total country point of view something like a steady state was achieved.

The most obvious sign of the “closedness” of the Tokugawa form of feudalism is the banning of guns. Ultimately it was applications of gunpowder that allowed European explorers and colonists to prevail against the populations they encountered at trading ports. To be sure disease was important as well, particularly in the New World. Most Europeans had developed natural immunity to infectious diseases like smallpox that jump from cattle to humans. In the

New World where horses and cattle had not been domesticated – because there were no indigenous wild ancestors of these animal species – natural immunity did not exist.

Nevertheless it was ultimately guns that paved the way for European dominance of trade along the coastlines of Asia.

Closed feudalism is possible: the Japanese case proves this beyond a doubt. However when closed and inherently opposed to expansion, it is less likely to generate sustained growth.

The fact that Japan reached limits to growth in the eighteenth century is testimony to this fact.

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Let me close out this contrast between open and closed feudalism with Table 3.5. The table compares schematically key differences between Japanese closed feudalism and open

European feudalism. It makes a crucial point. Feudalism comes in a variety of guises. More than anything else that distinguishes the European from other varieties - Japan being a prominent example – is the warlike character of Europe, particularly its tendency to embrace new ways of carrying out armed combat, the harnessing of gunpowder being a salient example.

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Table 3.5 Key Features of Closed and Open Feudalism. Japan 1600-1868 and Western Europe 1000 – 1300 Western Europe Japan

Military Rule

Comitatus loyalty crucial to vassalage concept in Comitatus loyalty crucial to relationship between Europe daimyo overlords and rank and file warrior samurai

Knights become the “tanks” of European warfare, After Battle of Sekigahara (1600) Japan divided into heavily armored, serving as linchpin of Medieval war approximately 300 fiefs; samurai removed from countryside forced into the castle town of the damyo Turks defeat Byzantines at Manzikert; Knights move to whom they are subordinate out into the periphery of Europe, establish Crusader States in Levant, establish temporary rule over De facto closing of country Jerusalem (1099) Abandonment of military designs on Chinese mainland Most of the “Re-conquest” of Iberia achieved by Banning of guns, samurai allowed to use swords Christian forces Road network established so that daimyo and some of In 1204 Venetian inspired Crusade leads to sacking of their retainers can travel to Edo, the shogun’s castle Constantinople by Western force; “Latin Kingdom” town, in order to attend to court rituals established in East Emperor’s capital established in Kyoto; shogun Ara//b armies using gunpowder and guns defeat constructs castle near emperor’s emperor to spy on Christian army, introducing guns into Europe imperial court Papacy promotes crusades partly to divert knights away from fighting in the core regions of Europe

Economic and Demographic Changes

Pushing knights out into the periphery reduces Removal of samurai from countryside reduces rural disruptions of peasant farming due to battles within conflicts between villages core regions of Europe Land reclamation on-going, new rice fields (shinden) Manorial estates – secular and abbeys – introduce established throughout Japan; river embankments crop rotations shored up, irrigation ditches expanded throughout valleys Forests cut down, impinging on common rights of villagers over access to wood Forests cut down leading to silting of rivers, limits to growth on a infrastructure leaning heavily on wood for

construction of homes and city structures

Rapid population growth (1% per annum) from approximately 1600 to 1720; followed by population Population growth sustained throughout period both stagnation at the national level; negative growth in in core and periphery of Western Europe North East due to extensive reliance on infanticide; positive population growth in southeast

Urban centers flourish in Italy, urban networkks grow Edo and Osaka flourish throughout, many urban charters

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Recall when the European powers – notably Catholic Spain and the Protestant Netherlands – penetrated Japan in the sixteenth century the Japanese first adopted, later abandoning completely, the use of gunpowder and muskets. As already noted during the sixteenth century

– the period of warring states - Japanese military elites were not adverse to employing guns in order to gain an edge in their power struggles. Indeed Japanese artisans responded to demand by producing arms that they offered to domestic and foreign purchasers alike. However once

Toyotomi Hideyoshi was able to establish hegemony over most of the land – building a mighty castle in Osaka from which he and his heirs could rule – he took two radical steps aimed at squelching civil war once and for all: banning guns and demilitarizing the countryside with his famous “sword hunt.” That no European power was able to achieve what the Toyotomi and

Tokugawa clans were able to achieve is testimony to a powerful paradox.

Weigh up the costs and benefits of Japan’s remarkable solution. On the plus side the samurai retained their exalted status. Compare the European knight who witnessed his career slip into oblivion, his vaunted feudal loyalty commercialized, his skills in jousting and archery denigrated, his best options lying in being a mercenary recruit often in nothing better than a ragtag brigade vying for a generous contract from a duke or count. Consider peace. In Japan rebellions did take place during the Tokugawa period: samurai tended to take up arms during the seventeenth century; peasants were more likely to brandish at least the threat of violence during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Still fighting on a per capita basis declined.

Peaceful cooperation obtained to a remarkable degree: irrigation ditches were successfully dug

245 into interior valleys far from raging rivers, villages hitherto warring with one another over water rights, agreeing to let bygones be bygones in the interest of promoting mutually beneficial economic success. It can be rightly said that the existence of a military overlord in Japan – the

Tokugawa shogun – demilitarized the countryside.

The fact Japan consisted of an island archipelago helped. Difficult to invade – the

Mongols had failed albeit due to the intervention of typhoon, the famous “divine wind”- it could go its own way when a single overarching military authority secured hegemonic control, effectively deal with threats from abroad, decisively preventing rival warlords from establishing alliances with foreigners, whether they be Chinese, Korean or European. The fact three competing religious systems – Neo-Confucianism, Buddhism, and emperor-worshipping Shinto

– managed to coexist helped as well. Not surprisingly suspecting that with the cross came the sword the Japanese authorities – concerned that some daimyo were embracing Christianity – banned practice of the faith altogether. In many dimensions Japan and Western Europe were mirror images of one another. The strengths of one were balanced by the strengths of the other.

Could a hegemon like the Tokugawa shogun have ever emerged in Europe? Not likely.

To be sure there were advocates of a Pope-centric Europe commonly known as Guelfs and Holy

Roman Emperor enthusiasts, the Ghibellines. During the High Gothic they contended especially in Italy and Germany. For one Dante, a Ghibelline, was ever hopeful that the Holy Roman

Emperor attracted to the opportunity to sell feudal patronage, dispensing titles and collecting rents, south of the Alps could unify hopelessly divided Italy, fiercely contested by Milan, Venice,

Dante’s native Florence, and the Pope. For their part the Guelfs hoped for an Italian future

246 dominated by the Vatican. It is hard to see how anyone could unify Europe let alone Italy during the High Gothic. There were too many highly armed contending parties – France, England, the

Holy Roman Empire, Spain, Portugal – too many disputes over the interpretation of true

Christian faith, too many rival economic entities benefitting from oceanic trade, too many mercenary armies selling their services to the highest bidder; too many natural boundaries, mountain ranges, mighty rivers; too many vernacular tongues competing with Latin in publishing; too many distinct ecosystems. By the early Renaissance the well-educated elites of

Europe were aware of their sharing a common heritage –Greek, Roman, Christian – yet being equally aware that this common heritage went hand in hand with being Germanic, or Celtic, or

Anglo-Saxon, or Viking.

Lacking a diplomatic overarching political framework for settling their conflicts, destructive fighting was the path which they chose. Progress is Janus faced: creative destruction accompanies it simply because change is taking place. One cannot embrace one without embracing the other. A case in point is the gradual collapse of the two dimension character of the Early Gothic period to which we now turn out attention.

A Tale of Two Parallel Hierarchies

That the Medieval Era was basically two periods hinged around 1000 CE, defensive conflicts - aimed at holding off Muslim armies and navies, Viking raids, and invasion by Lombard forces – giving way to expansion to the north, onto the Mediterranean, and venturing out onto the Atlantic suggests an interesting way of describing the way the Roman Empire collapsed.

Rather than thinking of its demise as fragmentation into two parts (Roman west and Greek

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Byzantine east), perhaps it is best to think about its collapse as ushering in a world dominated by three successor empires: the Holy Roman Empire allied to the Roman Catholic Church in the west; the Greek Orthodox Byzantine Empire that aggressively expanded during the sixth century, only to lose much of its holdings to Islam after 1650; and the Umayyad and Abbasid

Caliphates that successfully wrested away the Levant, Egypt, and northern Africa from the

Byzantines.

Thinking in these turns naturally leads down the intellectual path laid out by Herren

(1987). Herren’s thesis in a nutshell is that it was during the eighth century that the foundations for these three successor states to the Roman Empire were firmly laid. Herren puts special emphasis on Charlemagne’s coronation as Holy Roman Emperor in 800. I would like to suggest a slightly different dating of the hinge point, moving it forward to the late tenth century. My argument is that the Holy Roman Empire was formally split apart upon Charlemagne’s death – it was divided amongst his sons according to standard Merovingian and Carolingian practice – not to be re-established as a recognized entity until 962 (when Otto I had himself declared Holy

Roman Emperor), it is better to think about the Empire as a concept only realized in fact as opposed to theory around 1000. Adding to this logic is the fact that that Hugh Capet became

King of France in 987, opening reign by a hereditary succession of male Capetian kings that lasted until the fourteenth century.

In short around 1000 France and the Holy Roman Empire emerged as contenders for power within Christendom. This had enormous consequences as the two states that emerged were organized along completely different lines and were both extremely powerful in a military sense but in remarkably different ways.

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France became a hereditary monarchy adhering to primogeniture, abiding to the Salic principle that only males could become kings of the realm 15. The second, third, fourth sons of a

French king were awarded apanage titles and privileges denied them due to primogeniture. In terms of raising funds for carrying out military campaigns the fiscal centralization realized by the Capetians gave them a huge advantage relative to their Holy Roman Empire rivals. Taxes could be imposed on the whole territory controlled by the crown subject to the proviso that three French estates established after 1000 (representing clergy, aristocracy, and bourgeoisie might resist the demands placed on them). True the state had to rely on feudal lords for assembling armies but at least coming up with a budget for commencing a war was something that could be carefully thought out by the monarch and his advisers.

The Holy Roman Empire was another kettle of fish altogether. It was a political nightmare, an expression of decentralized feudalism at its fragmented extreme. Consisting of hundreds of quasi-independent jurisdictions – duchies, kingdoms, princedoms, Free Imperial

Cities granted special privileges as cities did not exhaust the list – it functioned under a vassalage model. The emperor, elected by a small set of the jurisdictions, was forced to negotiate with his vassals whenever he envisioned mounting a campaign for conquest. When the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick invited his nominal vassal Duke of Burgundy, Charles the

Bold, to visit him he had to borrow funds from Jacob Fugger a wealthy Augsburg merchant, lest he appear threadbare in front of his nominal inferior. The Holy Roman Emperor was always fighting off destitution although Frederick’s son and heir Maximilian I was able to impose a tax on his domains into which he could dip when he was raising troops.

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That the coronation of Charlemagne was a geopolitical watershed in the making is indicated by the fact that it finally put an end to an illusion, What was the illusion?: it was simply the belief that a sprawling territory could be reunified after it had experienced repeated military blows; invasions of Goths, Vandals, Huns and Lombard tribes; defeats at the hands of the Persian forces aiming at seizing away Mesopotamia and the Levant from its grasp.

Theodosius I who reigned from 379 to 395 CE was the last emperor to rule both halves of the empire – the Latin and the Greek halves – as an integrated jurisdiction. Two parallel regimes emerged, each consisting of jurisdictions managed to an alliance of Christian elites and secular emperors. After the Germanic Roman General Odoacer smashed his way into Italy deposing the Western Emperor Romulus in the fifth century the western half collapsed, leading to an uneasy alliance between Odoacer as nominal vassal of the Emperor Zeno ruling out of

Constantinople. The problem as always is the case when power is shared between two powers that do not completely trust each other’s decision making – each facing different military threats - is that it was difficult to manage both domestic fiscal matters and foreign affairs under these circumstances.

Recognizing the problem, the Justinian dynasty established in Constantinople during the early sixth century tried to re-establish control over the entire empire. To some extent he was success, expanding the holdings of the Byzantine Empire over most of Italy (including Rome).

Justinian was a remarkably successful Christian emperor. He appointed a commission that thoroughly revamped and systematized the legal system of the Roman Empire, the resulting

Justinian Code serving as a venerated model for subsequent state building. He worked assiduously to root out pre-Christian philosophical thought, closing the Neo-Platonic Academy,

250 and promoting the ascendency of a purely Christian ideology with the construction of the massive church, the Hagia Sofia boasting a suffused light through its clearstory windows that was unrivaled in the Christian world.

The problem Justinian’s successors struggled with was holding together a territory under constant threat from Central Asia on the one hand and the Persians on the other. This proved impossible in the long run. In a valiant effort to defeat the Persians, Justinian’s successor seized upon the Christianizing ideology of his predecessor, going to battle with a massive icon displaying the face of Jesus Christ before him. It was this appeal to the miraculous powers of Christian figures that helped drive a final nail into the coffin of the unraveling Roman

Empire. Around icons would emerge a dispute over soft power symbolism that would irrevocably put an end to attempts to glue back together two ends of the Roman Empire.

Icons and Plainchant

Why did icons become a major issue? Representing Christ, the Virgin Mary, the Holy

Family in painting, in sculpture, in wooden figures, is an issue that has divided Christians from the very inception of the faith. There are many reasons. First there is crass commercialism. Is it proper for devoted monks to allocate their time to readily marketable matters like painting, engraving? Should they not be praying? What about workshops run be secular masters? How do you know they may be fashioning images of Zeus, of Pluto, of Apollo, of Diana, of Eros, on the side? How can a proper Christian art form be distinguished from a pagan art form? That is one problem.

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The second problem revolves around the second of the Ten Commandments: “Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image …Thou shalt not bow down thyself to them, nor serve them…”. The fact is both Jews and Muslims who eschewed the fashioning of icons derided Christians for their idolatry. From a relatively early point on Caliphs took a hard line against icons, the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem displaying Koranic texts but not eschewing holy pictures. It is not farfetched to argue that Islamic armies taking on both Persian and

Byzantine forces during the seventh and eighteenth centuries benefited from being told that they were crushing impiety, idolatry, in their holy crusades to bring true faith to the inhabitants of the two dying empires, Sassanian and Byzantine.

Is the veneration of icons – appealing to their power to invest an infertile woman with the power to become pregnant; to aid an incompetent general to achieve military victories; to save a corrupt politician from the fiscal errors he has brought down on her community; to cure and preserve a community devastated by the plague – not magic pure and simple? Does iconography not corrupt pure religion?

Icons became a major problem for the Byzantine Empire struggling as it was to infuse ideological enthusiasm among its soldiers. As always placing an excessive emphasis on physical symbols – flags, banners - is was a two-edged sword. Soldiers having suffered defeat after defeat are likely to turn on the icons that are designed to guarantee a victory that never comes.

That is one problem. Second there were priests and monks who feared the potential corruption of the faith – perhaps even unleashing popular revolt against the Church itself – that iconography might engender.

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With this in mind the Byzantine Emperor reversed its support of icons. Among other measures it took down the Chalke Gate icon from the entrance to Great Palace of

Constantinople. This icon displayed two pictures on Jesus Christ – one as a youth, the other as an adult festooned with long hair – on its two faces 16. Replacing it with a cross was an act designed to satisfy the growing ranks of iconoclasts. That the Emperor decided to take action was tantamount to the Byzantine Patriarch following suit. In the old Roman Imperial model, the

Emperor was the more powerful of the two parties – Emperor and Patriarch – since he was the successor to Constantine who had opened the door to Christianity as a favored religion in the

Empire. Constantine V, the Byzantine Emperor, went as far as composing tracts – or having them ghost-written by theologians – arguing that the Eucharist was the only proper way to celebrate the image of Christ. After all while the Eucharist used physical symbols – bread and wine – they were not easily confused with devotional objects into which Christians could invest special powers. The Eucharist was public Church ritual.

The Byzantine iconoclastic position was unacceptable to the Roman pontiff. The result was a theological dispute over soft power that intensified the divide between the Latin and

Greek Christian worlds. The pope declared iconoclasm a heresy. It should be kept in mind that pope and the patriarch were already arguing over how to deal with the Lombard takeover of northern Italy so there was already tension between the two parties. Who was to raise the funds for a massive military campaign? Then there was the perennial problem of who was top dog in the Christian Church: pope or patriarch. Piling on to these issues a vexing ideological problem only made the politics of reconciliation between the eastern and western Churches worse.

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It was in this set of circumstances that the pope decided to reach out to the Carolingian

Franks. With a deal in mind – one that would iron out the military threat represented by the

Lombard troops and the ideological dispute – the pope took a dramatic step, travelling north of the Alps to stay at the monastery of Saint Maurice where he met representatives from Pippin’s

Carolingian court. The result was a carefully worked out agenda. Pippin would agree to fight the

Lombard forces. Pippin would support the anti-iconoclast position of the pope. Pippin would adhere to a Roman version of the plainchant – the organized prayer set to ancient Greek scale or at least to a scale that was derived from Greek predecessors – supressing the “Galician” form of plainchant that had been favored by the Merovingian and Carolingian courts.

There is no doubt that the Byzantines saw the handwriting on the wall. They were being cut out of the negotiations between the Franks and the pope. Desperate to get back into the diplomatic game the Byzantine Emperor Irene approached through representatives

Charlemagne, Pippin’s son and heir, when he was visiting Italy. Irene was willing to abandon iconoclasm. Still these overtures put forward in the 780s were insufficient to stop Charlemagne from taking on the burden of defeating Lombard forces and adhering to the soft power position hammered out between the pope and Pippin decades earlier.

The result was the coronation of Charlemagne as Holy Roman Emperor, a direct slap at any Byzantine claims that its Emperor would ever again become the sole descendent of

Constantine ruling over a re-unified Roman Empire. Byzantium now went its own way, reorganizing its administration with the theme model in which quasi-independent jurisdictions operated loosely operating under a Constantinople administrative umbrella, once again descending into iconoclast disputes during the ninth century.

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In effect the final establishment of a continental geopolitical system in which Holy

Roman Empire contended with France in the west while Byzantium was left to contend with the

Muslim threat confirmed the three party division of the ancient Persian and Roman Empires.

Islam controlled a vast region extending from Iberia through to the borders of India; the

Byzantines floundered in the middle, ultimately having to call on the Roman pontiff for military aid in their desperate fight to stave off Muslim attacks directed at their holdings in

Constantinople and Anatolia (thereby ushering in the Crusades); and western Europe went its own way, dominated by feudal decentralization and Latin Christianity, a de facto power sharing arrangement in which religious elites and the most potent secular authorities vied for ascendancy.

At the heart of the power sharing arrangement hammered out between Vatican and secular rulers was the division of power. In principle soft power was to lie in the hands of the

Church while hard power – the sword – was to lay with secular rulers, kings and Holy Roman

Emperor. To be sure this is an idealized picture. But the ideal was important. In many ways it was represented by the spread of Romanesque churches after 1000 CE. Borrowing from principles embodied in Roman buildings – the pride of Italy – they were designed to accommodate large congregations gathering for services, gathering for the mass, gathering for prayer ringing in plainchant. It was this Roman tradition that French authorities determined to counter with their own cathedral building program.

Paris versus Rome: The International Gothic Movement

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The International Gothic movement owed its origins to the French, specifically to the

French capital Paris 17. In designing the rebuilding of the royal Abbey Church of St.-Denis on the outskirts of Paris Abbot Sugar – a project initiated in 1137 and completed seven years later – the Abbot working with his monarch Louis VI envisioned a mighty edifice that would install awe in the hearts and minds of the vassals of Louis VI, helping him consolidate his power over his kingdom while simultaneously bringing the pope over to his side in his cold war with the Holy

Roman Emperor. Sugar wanted to turn St.-Denis into a pilgrimage church outclassing all of the other pilgrimage churches of France, one that could compete with the Romanesque edifices that had sprung up all over Europe after 1000 CE. With this in mind he evoked a novel geometric order consisting of seven units that fan out from the apse’s center. Slender arches, ribs, and columns support the vaults, creating an open space bathed in light beaming in through stained glass windows high above. In many ways it achieves the same sense of divine light enveloping the world of humans that was realized by Byzantine craftspeople operating under

Justinian I in their construction of the Hagia Sophia.

The movement to build massive structures rivaling that of St.-Denis spread. Archbishops carried out fund raising campaigns, selling indulgences – that claimed to buy off a purchaser from spending as much time in Purgatory as he or she might otherwise be condemned to do so due to his sins on earth – as a vehicle for building massive heavenward looking edifices. It is important to keep in mind that the Church’s control over remission from earthly sins that would otherwise be sorted out by divine judgement in purgatory was a major facet of Catholic

Christianity was it developed in the early Medieval Era. It was one reason why military overlords funded monasteries: the monks were supposed to pray for their souls once they died,

256 reducing the time they would spend tortured in purgatory before being granted entry into paradise. Remission of earthly sins was a promise made to Crusaders as they embarked on their campaigns to wrest away Jerusalem and the Levant from the Muslims. The theory of purgatory

– loosely justified by writings in the two Old Testament Books of Maccabees – rested on a model in which Christ, acting like the Roman Emperor, forgave individuals for their deviation form rectitude on the face of the earth. Ironically it ran counter to the view of one of the

Church’s early theoreticians – Saint Augustine – who argued in his book The City of God and the

City of the World that God had predetermined who was to be saved, being allowed to enter the presence of divinity upon death, and who was to be condemned to hell. There was nothing the

Church as an institution could do about that judgement.

The tension between Saint Augustine’s predetermination thesis and the Church’s practical money-making purgatory model was an ongoing problem in Christian theological circles in the sense that priests were supposed to be acquainted with the writings of Saint

Augustine, but not in the practical day to day operation of cathedrals, abbeys, and monasteries.

To be sure it was a problem that eventually burst out of the corpus of Church doctrine like a massive explosion of water spurting out gaping hole in a dam during the sixteenth century

Reformation. However that was in the distant future. In the meantime Gothic style architecture spread like wildfire over Europe. Only in Italy did it have a serious competitor, the Romanesque style holding its own.

Scholasticism – the reconciliation of Aristotle’s theory of the material world – went part and parcel with the International Gothic movement initiated by the Parisian Catholic Church movement. Saint Thomas Aquinas, the famous thirteenth century Dominican theologian,

257 studied at the University of Paris, imbibing the basic tenets of the Parisian school of theology, ultimately teaching there and becoming the rector of the institution. Part of the appeal that

Thomism – the views of Saint Thomas Aquinas as communicated through his voluminous writings, notably his Summa theologiae – made was the influence Paris made on the papacy.

After all it was during the fourteenth century that the pope took up residence in Avignon in

France. In returning to Rome in the late fourteenth century the pope was certainly trying to establish distance between the divine pontiff, the Vicar of Christ on earth, and the French

Catholic Church centered on France’s capital, Paris.

Scholasticism versus Alchemy

What were the chief ideas of Scholasticism? In one sense it was a huge stepping stone to the revival of ancient philosophy – including natural philosophy – in the western world.

Aristotle had been a pupil of Plato who took Plato’s Socratic and Pythagorean theories down a completely different path from the views of his master. Plato had emphasized the divergence between a real transcendental world of ideal forms and a material world that was misinterpreted as reality by everyone except a philosophy trained elite who understand that the ideals were primary. As we have seen for Plato the government that governs best is a kind of totalitarian state run by philosopher-kings who withhold truth from the masses who are incapable of comprehending the ideals. Aristotle, retaining the distinction between forms and material substance was much more empirical in developing his theories, doing detailed work in biology, developing arguments about physics, laying out an empirical analysis of legal and political institutions that strayed away from Plato’s idealized republic run by philosophers who shared spouses and goods in a communistic academy dedicated to running the state efficiently

258 and ethically. There is little doubt that Aristotle’s practical side – his observations about natural forces – had great appeal to the pragmatic Muslim scholars who read his manuscripts, either those stored in libraries in Alexandria or in Byzantine enclaves that they conquered.

Over centuries Islamic and Jewish philosophers living in Islamic lands did the heavy lifting of reconciling God-centric theology with Aristotle. Their publications formed the core upon which Christian theologians based their Christianized version of Aristotlean thought.

While Aristotle’s reasoning was central to the theory they developed – known as scholasticism

– the actual body of knowledge and speculation they drew upon was wider than Aristotle. It included Ptolemy, Euclid, Galen, among others. It was a Christianized Aristotlean framework in the sense that the truth of Christian revelation took precedence over Greek traditions concerning the four elements, earth, fire, air and water. Still it relied heavily on Aristotle’s particular distinction between substance and form. The key thing to know about “form” is that it imparted causation, purpose, to natural processes.

According to the generalized Aristotlean theory of the universe the earth was in the center. On the earth’s surface the elements earth, fire, water, and air were all in active motion, existing in a state where they had not fully realized their form. Their form dictated they reach a circular ring, a sphere, centered upon the earth. Water sought the clouds above, trying to stay in the spherical layer where its form, its purpose, its reason for existing was fully satisfied. Air sought a higher realm and fire an even higher ring as one could see fire in the outer realms when comets streaked across the firmament. At the very edge of this Russian doll construction of the universe lay the ethereal realms, the pure heavens free of all contamination, home to the fixed stars whose luminosity was their form. By contrast to the heavens was earth and its fiery

259 core Hell. They were the most corrupt. In particular earth was contaminated by the relentless fury and continual disturbing motion of the elements trying to realize their forms. Water rushed into pots because it was water’s purpose to fill space; fumes from fires drifted upward attempting to reach their natural sphere.

The distinction between form and substance was crucial to thinkers like Saint Thomas

Aquinas who set out to reconcile the Aristotle inspired picture of nature with the Christian narrative. That the earth was the center of the universe was crucial because it made clear God’s plan for saving a portion of humanity was at the center of things. That form could be separated from substance was likewise crucial for justifying the Eucharist: the priest by dint of being a representative of Christ on earth was able to convert bread and wine to the body and blood of

Christ. As well you could locate heaven and hell in the model of the universe, purgatory being a place presumably located between the hellish center and the crust of earth. That the earth was corrupted by the elements struggling to realize their forms was analogous to humans struggling with sinful lust, greed, envy, in short with the struggle against the seven deadly sins. It was the burden of humans – enjoying free will, hence the architects of their own destiny – to seek virtue rather than vice, adhering as best as they can to the seven virtues rather than the seven deadly sins. The ethical corruption of earth bound humans echoed the physical corruption of earthliness.

What practically minded individual workers employed by aristocrats on their feudal estates or laboring in urban workshops organized into guilds made of Scholasticism is surely subject to debate. That said the groups that called themselves alchemists operating with the

Hermetic tradition were almost surely skeptical about the amalgam of Christian theology and a

260 theory about the operation of the four elements. The Hermetic tradition drew upon the ancients as did the Scholastics but upon a different school of learning, namely the occult tradition associated with the god Hermes Trismegistus. According to this school of thought one could turn plain metals to gold or silver through the use of an elixir, the term “elixir” being a

European version of the Arabic word “al-iksir” used by hermetically trained alchemists in the

Islamic world. This is the Philosopher’s stone. The elixir is a magical ingredient that functions as a kind of chemical agent causing reactions to the substances to which it is mixed. Using

Hermetic knowledge one can accomplish great things, the most exalted being the creation of gold, the king of the metals, the most luminous, out of mundane metals.

As it was mystical in a non-Christian sense, as it relied on belief systems that were not discussed in either the Old or the New Testaments, as it could be easily associated with the black arts including Satanism, as it threatened monasteries who competed with workshops in the making of gold leaf studded illuminated manuscripts and jewelry, alchemists often found themselves attacked by Scholastics. Still secular rulers courted them in rural areas – after all if they come up with gold that could be fashioned into coins their services was clearly valuable to kings, princes, and dukes – and in cities workshops formed the backbone of the guilds that began flourishing after 1000 CE especially in urban settings. Like monasteries and workshops co-existing and competing with each other, Scholasticism and alchemy co-existed and competed with one another.

Giotto and His Workshop

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The existence of workshops suggests leakage was occurring in the Catholic Churches putative control over soft power. By the early 1300s this leakage was evident especially in the

Florence made famous by Dante Alighieri, his The Divine Comedy being a powerful statement about the legitimacy of ancient Greek and Roman mythology and poetry. Dante did not go so far as suggesting ancient pagan works were should be placed on an equal plateau with Christian writings and art but he did make a strong case for their legitimacy. The fact that he wrote in his native Tuscan rather than Latin sent a message. That said Dante’s greatest achievement – The

Divine Comedy – was deeply steeped in Catholic doctrine. It portrayed a human drama in which the deceased went to three places: hell (the inferno), purgatory, or paradise. Within a fundamentally Catholic ideological frame he presented people as people, humans in all of their complexity. It was a big step toward creating a work of art that spoke to people not as symbols or members of a stylized group but as distinct individuals. His ironical approach, matching up the sins of prominent Italian figures – politicians on the take, priests who reveled in luxurious living, merchants wallowing in usury, corruption piled on corruption at the individual level – showed remarkable psychological insight applied to human nature with a remarkably graphic touch. People were more than religious symbols.

As well Dante recognized people are naturally political, a point that Aristotle had emphasized but had not necessarily been adequately dealt with by the Scholastics. A significant slice of Dante’s body of writing involved political advocacy, reflecting the ongoing factional fighting between Guelph and Ghibelline parties that was engulfing Italian city states in the fourteenth century 18. Indeed it was the political infighting that laid the foundations of merchant and artisan rule over Florence: in 1293 the Guelph faction representing the interests

262 of the commoner population as opposed to the nobles who provided the financial muscle for the Ghibelline cause managed to establish their guilds with the famous Ordinances of Justice passed in that year 19. In effect this legislation stripped voting power away from the nobles, many of whom were driven out of Florence altogether.

Dante’s analogue in the field of art was Giotto. What is striking in Giotto’s frescoes

(applied on wet plaster) and secco (applied on dry plaster) is the individualism he rendered on the walls he painted. In rendering people and backgrounds realistically he took a major step away from the stylized International Gothic style in which pictorial representation is limited to working with variations on circles and straight lines. A work by Villard de Honnecourt commissioned in the mid-thirteenth century yields important clues about the advances made by Giotto. It purports to represent the face of a lion without even attempting to capture the physicality of a lion. It is geometry but not realistic geometry. The same could be said of the

Byzantine icon art. It was flat, no attempt to suggest individual people or animals were studied prior to the completion of the drawing or painting

What Giotto did was convey people and things by observing them carefully, the rendering their features as realistically as it could, albeit constrained by the traditions of artistic creation and architecture he was trained in. Why was he able to make a decisive break with both Gothic and Byzantine art? Hartt (1987) suggests the answer lies in the fact Florence, where he did much of his work, had fallen decisively into the middle class merchant and artisan hands of the Guelph faction 20:

“It is against this triumph of the energetic, prosperous commercial and artisan class, who equated their values with the highest ideals of the state, that one most understand

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the firm, quiet, eminently practical art of Giotto, with its emphasis on clarity, measure, balance, order, and on the carefully observed drama developing between human beings at close quarters.” Giotto’s greatest masterpiece is the Arena Chapel in Padua. Giotto and his workshop assistants painted three sets of fresco or secco panels – thirty-seven scenes in all, arrayed on three tiers – depicting two cycles, that of the Life of the Virgin, the cycle of the Life of Christ, as well as virtues and vices 21. Dedicated to the Virgin of Charity the chapel was commissioned by Enrico degli Scrovegni, a wealthy Padua merchant whose father had been attacked politically for the sin of usury. Clearly part of the reason Scrovegni wanted to build a chapel was to secure some remission of the sins that had built his fortune. On a more practical level he wanted the chapel to be a burial site for himself and his wife and as a locale where annual mystery plays could be performed.

One of the most remarkable features of the chapel is the panel placed directly over the door. It depicts the Cross of Christ upheld by angels. Placed prominently elow it is a painting of the patron himself, kneeing and holding up a model of the chapel, presumably praying that his gift to Christian community of Padua will be accepted. What is remarkable about the rendering of Scrovegni is its realism. There is no doubt he posed for the painting.

Like Dante Giotto was a genius whose work was in demand throughout the network of

Italian cities. He painted frescoes for wealthy Florence merchant families, notably in the Church of Santa Croce in Florence where he fulfilled commissions by the Bardi, Peruzzi, Giugi, and

Tosinghi, painting the chapels they had secured within the church’s edifice. He was called to

Naples by King Robert Anjou and he and his workshop apprentices toiled in Milan, Rimini, and

Rome. In short demand in newly opulent Italy was exceeding supply, at least for a genius of

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Giotto’s caliber. He ended up securing the contract as chief architect for the Florence Cathedral, a project he was unable to see through to completion. No wonder Dante himself referred to

Giotto in The Divine Comedy, commenting that Giotto had become so famous that he had virtually extinguished the memory of his predecessor Cimabue.

That Giotto was an artisan, albeit exceptional, laboring in the workshop tradition that included alchemy is evident from the manual for painting composed by a member of Giotto’s workshop writing almost a century after Giotto died. The writer was Cennino d’Andrea Cennini who published Il Libro dell’ Arte (The Craftsman’s Handbook) in the 1530s 22. Who was Cennini?

Coming on the heels of his opening sentences – in which he recounts God’s creation of humanity and Adam and Eve’s expulsion from paradise – he says 23:

“I, Cennino, the son of Andrea Cennini ….was trained in this profession for twelve years by my master, Agnolo di Taddeo of Florence; he learned this profession from his father Taddeo, his father; and was father was christenened under Giotto, and was his follower for four-and- twenty years; and that Giotto changed the profession from Greek back into Latin; and brought it up to date …” In short Cennini was a typical member of a workshop. Following in the footsteps of his grandfather and his father he was apprenticed at an early age, reaping the benefits created by

Giotto who was the founder of an illustrious artisan organization that flourished in part because it stayed true to Giotto’s vision, turning Byzantine art on its head, reinvigorating the practice of painting by rendering it “Latin” that is Italian.

Cennini’s manual is remarkable for the detail it sheds on life as an artisan. Key in his opinion is dedication. He suggests that you need to regulate your life – just as you would if you were studying theology or philosophy, eating and drinking moderately, eschewing wild sexual exploits 24. You need to draw every day, using slender coal sticks that you coax out of willow

265 sticks by baking. You need to learn how to make your own colors, employing alchemy when necessary. He runs off a huge list of colors: red vermilion, dragon’s blood red, red-lac, ocher yellow, realgar yellow (very poisonous), saffron, terre-verte green, malachite green, verdigris green (manufactured by alchemy), ultramarine blue. Some are pounded out of stone; some can be purchased from druggists; some are herbal; some originate with wild plum juice tempered with egg yolk; some can be worked up from shearing cloth; some come from powdered lime.

He describes how to make brushes, starting with the white hog bristles or tails secured from small birds. He spends pages on how to lime, sand, and plaster walls in preparation for applying fresco. He discusses making glues and cements, mordant embellishments, and face castings. All of this is incredibly labor intensive. All of this makes sense in a workshop where specialization and division of labor is practiced. Apprentices work on the alchemy, the pounding of stone, and the mixing of gesso applied to panels that should be sanded and carefully smoothed; more experienced artisans do the fresco painting; the master signs contracts, directing the entire enterprise, putting his or her touches on the final product.

What is also clear is that Cennini’s mindset is heavily commercial, strongly market driven. He recommends purchasing the finest gold leaf for illuminations of “Our Lady” because employing the finest gold will attract wealthy purchasers who will compensate you for your expense because “as the saying goes ‘good work, good pay 25.’” He instructs you on how to differentiate your product for diverse market opportunities: you can paint shields; you can work on tapestries; you can finish clothing; you can work up makeup for female clientele; you can paint caskets and chests; make mosaics and gilded eggshells; even cast life masks.

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In short Giotto’s influence was not limited to his lifetime. He had apprentices who became successful painters on their own, earning a reputation by aligning their techniques with the founder of the workshop. Giotto was surely a genius. But he was also an astute entrepreneur, a kind of artisan-capitalist if you will.

What workshops like the Giotto workshop did was compete, and gradually drive out of the market, monasteries that had once been the sole supplier of religious jewelry, illuminated manuscripts, and refectory walls on which Last Supper frescos were painted. The workshop steeped in alchemy was gradually gaining a growing share of the supply of European soft power, one time a virtual monopoly of Catholic institutions, particularly the monasteries.

Leakage was occurring especially in opulent urban settings.

Entertainment and Symbolism in Music: Gregorian Plainchant

Leakage also occurred in music. To some extent leakage occurred because troubadours and trouvères travelled through the French countryside, playing secular songs to nobles. Their speciality was the poem-song, each line of poetry having its own melodic structure. In German the minnesinger tradition flourished, religious and love themes intermixed, performed at times with church modes, sometimes with a tonal structure similar to major tonality. In one of his most famous works Richard Wagner celebrated the Meistersingers, artisans in German towns and cities who reached legendary status as a group. Wagner’s particular focus was on

Nuremberg 26.

Even in the music directly controlled by the Church leakage of a sorts was taking place, notably in the field of plainchant. The proper role of plainchant is symbolic. It is prayer

267 practiced in unison by a body of singers, whether an experienced choir or a group of parishioners. As mandated by the agreements forged between the pope and the Carolingians in the eighth and ninth centuries the idea was simple: standardize. The music was monophonic, all voices singing the same pitches, typically moving along a line of thirds, often travelling a seventh but usually not an octave. It was systematically organized around four, later eight, ultimately twelve modes. The modes were scales organized around particular tetrachords. The normal pattern of recitation was to end on a closing pitch around which the melodic line revolved. For instance chants ending on the notes A was known as Aeolian; the chants ending on C were called Ionian. There were species and sub-species so to speak but the key was adherence to a standard.

The entire business of plainchant was aimed at singing the office and the mass it churches and in monasteries, convents. The problem was performing the chants in great Gothic cathedrals where sound has to fill a huge space. With this in mind it should not surprise the reader to learn composers at Notre Dame in Paris began experimenting with octave doubling – one group of voices moving an octave above or below other the other group of voices – and the organum based on a cantus firmus line in which a succession of unequal pitches are arranged in a definite pattern that is repeated as a kind of ostinato. In this way you can fill more space with sound, you can amplify, you can engage parts of the congregation that naturally sing in a lower or in a higher range. One by-product of the organum was experimentation with polyphony in which voices moved against each other, singing different melodic lines (the round and the fugue are examples of polyphonic writing). In this way the musical composer becomes an arranger, one sought after if talented because he or she is a good entertainer.

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That the coexistence of secular song writing and increasingly complex Church music writing led to leakage is not surprising. What a composer learned listening to a troubadour’s singing could be applied to writing a convincing cantus firmus. Cross-fertilization was encouraging creativity. One example of creative license unleashed by cross-fertilization was the appending of “alleluia” sections onto the end of chants. These were melodies without text so they were not prayer per se. They were entertainment. Because “alleluia” sections varied from locale to locale – there was no proscribed standard – they proliferated creating a crazy-quilt pattern that violated the original principles laid down for plainchant in the eighth and ninth centuries. During the Reformation when the Catholic Church was struggling with how to reorganize itself to better counter the spread of Protestant sects, it established the Council of

Trent to issue dictates regarding the shoring up of the institutions most vital to the future of the faith. One of the things the Council of Trent decreed – along with defining heresy, establishing the Vulgate as the standard Bible, laying out the precise structure for the Mass – was that the number of allowable “alleluia” segments should be dramatically reduced to only four acceptable versions.

During the International Gothic era the nature of soft power was slowly but seemingly inexorably transformed. Increasingly the Church was losing whatever monopoly over it that it had once had, notably during the late ninth and tenth centuries. Thereafter – as a growing body of cities spawned workshops catering to a clientele of aristocrats, merchants, and prosperous artisans – the Church faced growing competition from the secular sphere. The competition so engendered exploded into full-fledged fury during the heyday of the High Gothic and the early

Renaissance, the period when capitalism launched itself into full flight.

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Chapter 4 Capitalism at War with Itself

Summary of the chapter: Capitalism is the accumulation of capital bolstered by credit creation. In this sense it is consistent with fragmented private market capitalism or centralized state capitalism, for example Communism or Mercantilism. It takes two forms differentiated by its focus either on bolstering cooperation in markets, the province of merchant capitalism; or upon innovation, technological capitalism drawing heavily upon the pursuit of science. Given the broad range of formats capitalism takes it is not surprising to find it at war with itself, variants co-existing while vigorously opposing one another. The tension between the varieties of capitalism is exacerbated by ideological conflict, ideologies promoting private market capitalism, ideologies buttressing socialism, and ideologies advocating communism vying with one another.

Capitalisms: It is the Ideologies that Matter, not the Ownership of Capital

Much is made of the distinction between private and public ownership of capital. It is claimed that the hallmark of capitalism is the concentration of capital in the hands of private citizens, many purchasing a share of ownership by securing stock in privately managed firms. At the other end of the spectrum is communism, under which the state owns and manages the means of production, ostensibly in the interests of the workers who toil in factories, collectivized farms, and commercial outlets. Socialism lies in the middle between the two extremes.

The characterization in terms of ownership is completely wrong-headed. Consider physical capital: structures, transport vehicles, machines. From a physical point of view does it matter whether the object is privately or publically owned? Does the steel, the glass, the plastic, embodied in an automobile take on a different complexion if it was produced by a state owned factory as opposed to a one possessed by a private firm? Does it matter in terms of the

270 practical reality of climate change - carbon is being pumped into the atmosphere by a cement firm in Osaka - whether it is owned by Mitsui Company shareholders or is provincially owned and managed by Osaka Province? It is important to separate capital as a usable concept from the first sustained use of the term by Karl Marx and his followers crowding into the First

International who were ardently campaigning against private property. At that time most industrial capital was privately owned and managed – notably in England during the latter half of the nineteenth century – but that is a matter of historical fact, one that can and should be deposited into the dustbin of history.

What is needed is a general definition. Elsewhere – in Mosk (1918) - I have defined capitalism as the mobility of capital assets bolstered by credit creation. The credit may arise in a myriad of ways: from factory profits; from the activities of state managed central banks; from the portfolios of privately held consumer cooperatives; from accounts held in savings and loans institutions; from private investors purchasing stocks and bonds; from taxation extracted by governments planning to invest it in physical assets. The point is it is mobile across space – hence internationally movable - and between sectors within an economy, a dying industry surrendering it to an expanding industry.

The reality is that the private-public distinction is not very useful because economies throughout the contemporary world operate with a mixture of private and publically held capital. At one extreme you have countries like the United States in which publically owned capital is largely concentrated within the military sector and in infrastructure, schooling considered to be infrastructure devoted to learning. Public schools, airports, power grid firms, toll road and freeway maintenance and repairing entities, Federal Reserve System banks, are all

271 in the business of purchasing buildings and transport equipment. Jeeps, submarines, tanks, cargo carrying airplanes, jet fighters, are owned by various branches of the American military. It is certainly true that renting capital from private companies constitutes a significant share of the expenditures that these extensions of government, (federal, state, county, and municipal) within the United States make. However it is also true that they own capital and employ workers to perform services with the capital. At the other extreme are countries like China,

Vietnam, and Cuba where government owned and managed factories play a significant role in carrying on industrial production. Mines, steel plants, textile factories, automobile assembly lines, computer assembly plants in contemporary China may either be privately or publically owned. In point of fact there is no such thing as wholly private or wholly public today.

From a conceptual point of view differences between private capitalism (by which I mean an economy in which production of goods and their redistribution through governmental fiscal avenues is severely constrained), socialism, and communism should not be ownership per se rather the way these systems operate in tandem with the other principles crucial to the

Enlightenment project: freedom of speech and religion, equality, regulation of markets, and democracy. Why? Because while full-fledged private market capitalism before the

Enlightenment the other two types of systems did not emerge until after the Enlightenment. In a fundamental sense socialism and communism are offspring of the Enlightenment.

Consider the issue of how to conceptualize equality, central to the ideological distinctions buttressing the systems. There is equality of opportunity; there is equality of outcome; there is the joining of the two types of equality through the promotion socialist virtue. The gap between the three systems rests first and foremost on the assumptions you

272 make about human nature. Capitalism rooted in promoting private market completion wherever possible rests on three assumptions: the ability and the willingness to work varies greatly within populations; human nature is corruptible and imperfect, cheating and backsliding are endemic; and the belief that supporting by generous transfers of income from the well-to- do to the poor who are not high achievers (for whatever reason) encourages laziness and indolence among the population as a whole. It corrupts. Not surprisingly in countries like the

United States where this ideology is deeply entrenched the most ardent defenders often as not identify with pious Christianity. Only through faith – inculcating the seven virtues in all areas of life including the workplace – is it possible to dampen the corruption intrinsic to humanity.

Socialist ideology rests on similar assumptions about human nature but assumes that many persons are unsuccessful in the market because of impediments – due to social discrimination, physical disabilities, or poverty in household of origin – not because of inherent unwillingness to toil in the interest of generating wealth and income. Not surprisingly many socialists argue that this agenda is compatible with Christian doctrine as espoused by Jesus who denounced moneylenders gathering around the Temple in Jerusalem. Since many socialists are thorough-going secularists soundly denouncing religious interference in politics it is not surprising there is a non-Christian version of the doctrine that achieving equality is a admirable goal: it is inequality that engenders jealousy and bitterness, unleashing criminality. By redistributing income it is possible to construct a society in which peace and non-violence prevail. Social harmony is not only desirable because it suppresses conflict – theoretically promoting national unity – but by in addition by suppressing robbery helps protect private property rights.

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Communism rests on the assumption that people should work if they can but are unable to achieve full success in their lifetimes due to the instability of private markets that generate booms and busts. The only way to counter the instability inherent in complex economies with a multitude of sectors competing for capital, some thriving, some failing, is to carry out central planning on a comprehensive scale. Making full use of all the productive resources available and not squandered in upturns and downturns, is the best way to generate income which can be redistributed through institutions based on collective, not private, ownership. It assumes people are malleable, that virtue is something a strong willed altruistic socialist ideology can instill in people. What is needed is a government committed to instilling that ideology.

The problem with all three positions is that the law of unintended consequences holds.

This is a particular problem for communism that assumes virtue can be instilled in people who are not inherently virtuous.

Consider socialism. Forms of socialism in which the bulk of production is carried out by private held parties exist in many countries. In the interest of redistributing income flows so that some form of equality of outcome can be achieved a combination of fiscal measures – taxation and transfer – is used. Typically the wealthier are taxed heavily under a progressive income taxation schedule that raises marginal tax rates as reported income goes up. A share of the income taxed away in this manner is transferred by federal and/or provincial authorities to the less well off. This has absolutely nothing to do with ownership of capital. It is important to keep in mind that the term “wealthier” refers to those who honestly report their income and enjoy a high standard of living, not to those who enjoy a high standard of living while fraudulently failing to report all or any of their income. This is not a trivial point. The hard cold

274 reality is that the self-employed wealthy are often able to shelter their income from taxation.

That is a form of corruption that is unfortunately endemic in many socialist countries. Still the advantage socialism however imperfectly achieved enjoys over a regime of private capitalism in which redistribution of income is downplayed should not be downplayed: greater stability.

When downturns occur, people being thrown out of work, the existence of a strong safety net – putting income in the hands of those otherwise made penniless – bolsters consumption demand at the national level stabilizing national income.

Guaranteeing stability always been a selling point for those favoring state capitalism – communism - because the state, employing its command and control over where people are employed – can simply reallocate workers, guaranteeing their access to jobs. In addition state ownership of the means of production facilitates the collection of taxes from wage earners.

After all they are all employed by the state. This does throw a potential counterweight against the creep of corruption that undermines real equality in decentralized socialist economies.

Still there is a heavy price to be paid for the equality of income that is supposedly generated in a country where the state owns many if not all of the factories and businesses.

Under the logic of command and control hard working individuals are not necessarily compensated for their diligence. This state of affairs undermines work incentives. Black markets arise. After factories shut down for the night some workers return to the premises, turning out goods they sell illegally. Fostering altruistic virtue – adhering to the rubric “from each according to his abilities to each according to his needs” – is a pipedream. The early rush in China to collectivize agriculture during the second half of the 1950’s is a case in point. Production fell.

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Cheating was rampant. Distributing work assignments under campaigns in which work points were assigned by committees ended up wasting hours and hours of time in bickering.

What about regulation of markets by government agencies? Under regulation companies are typically required to follow rules that constrain the returns on the capital they invest. A case in point is the capacity to pollute rivers, the soil, and the atmosphere. Much of the controversy over the ownership of capital in countries like the United States where the lion’s share of capital is owned by private investors has less to do with the actual ownership of capital and more to do with the degree regulations designed to limit pollution – for example the emission of greenhouse gases – should be applied, and the levels of fines accessed against polluters. To state the obvious: if the government owns a cement factory and is interested in limiting greenhouse gases it can regulate freely without alienating the managers hired by the enterprise. Insofar as ownership is involved it has more to do with regulatory authority than it has to do with whether the firm is privately or publically held.

Theoretically easy access to tools regulating industry is a plus enjoyed by officials in centrally planned economies. As a matter of fact the historical record of polluting the environment is much worse for countries like the Soviet Union and Communist China under the control of the Maoists than it was in the countries that enjoyed a mixture of private and public ownership of factories. More telling is the fact the communist countries relied on slave labor.

Persons dispatched to the Gulag in the Soviet Union operated as slaves. It was not uncommon to assign them to crews digging out uranium from mines, a de facto death sentence.

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Is there an inconsistency between the potential for democracy and the way economies work under private capitalism, socialism, and communism? Insofar as private capitalism fails to redistribute income it opens the door to the rich buying votes at the expense of the poor. This was one reason why the writers of the original American Constitution struggled with the problem of how to allocate representation in the House of Representatives to states where slave holding was prevalent. As non-citizens slaves could not vote. In theory this undercut the capacity of plantation owners to exercise excessive political voice. Slave owners could not magnify their voting power by the number of unfree humans whose decisions about how to vote were completely in the de facto hands of the owners. However plantation owners exercised considerable commercial clout in their districts by dint of the scale of their operations. As well many were extremely rich; able to cajole local ministers into preaching a gospel to their slaves in which the virtue of work hard was primary; able to make sizable donations to political campaigns; able to invest in newspapers whose editorials promoting the virtues of slavery and white supremacy. In short slave owners as an entrenched oligarchy dominated the political life of the states where slavery was entrenched.

What about the remainder of the people, the free whites? What about their ability to exercise voice? It was already threatened by oligarchy. To further erode it at the level of federal elections was the fact that slaves resided in their districts, working lands that otherwise could be divided up, made available to them for purchase or rental. Were they really better off under a slavery regime? Would not their political and economic interests be better served if they would were operating under a non-slave regime? To reassure these individuals that their voice would not be squelched dictated the logic of a grand compromise. Somehow the influence of

277 their rank and file free whites must be magnified particularly in elections sending representatives to the House of Representatives. The result hammered out at the

Constitutional Convention: a formula involving representation that squared the circle. The infamous three-fifths compromise was cobbled together, papering over the law of unintended consequences inherent in reconciling two key Enlightenment principles clashing against each other (the sanctity of markets and democracy). In actual reality slave owners called the tune through the Southern states, rarely challenged by the occasional popular movements threatening their grip over policy.

Short of this it is hard to explain how and why poor whites who ended up dying in a bloody Civil War that fundamentally revolved around perpetuating slavery in the United States - a system that hardly benefited them personally - were dragged into the political logic of secession, launching a military attack on a Union fort located in the South, all aimed at creating a slave-friendly Confederacy separate from the Union and the Presidency slave owning elites despised. There is no doubt that defending two ideologies - White Supremacy and state’s rights

- were important factor encouraging poor whites to join Confederate militias. Still it is widely believed by most historians who write about the Civil War that slavery and slavery alone was the issue that ultimately precipitated Southern succession from the Union.

Socialism has its own share of problems accommodating markets to political democracy.

As long as political power is allocated according to votes, incentives exist for parties offering programs ostensibly benefitting the disadvantaged to extend the base of beneficiaries, bolstering their competitive edge in future elections. One way to do this is exploit the inherent corruptibility of human nature. Were everyone honest, unwilling to game the system by lying

278 and dissembling in the way they present themselves to agencies allocating benefits, the demands they make fiscal resources ultimately extracted from taxpayers would certainly be acceptable to most people, both rich and poor. Sad to say – a central theme of this book - people are not angels. Lazy people lacking the work ethic really do exist (I have met many of them)! They are so imbued with virtue that they are willing to forgo income in exchange for the leisure they covet. To counter human nature bureaucracies that administer benefit programs have to employ persons whose sole task is ferreting out corruption, monitoring beneficiaries of the programs. The result is upward pressure on fiscal resources, hence a steady climb in taxation imposed on those who do work, potentially discouraging them from honestly reporting their incomes. There is a well-known positive relationship between the incidence of underground economic activity and the steepness of the marginal tax rate.

State capitalism, communism, has a more trenchant problem with democracy than does private capitalism. Why? Because if people in state capitalist countries are allowed to vote they might decide to dispense with communism altogether. Why would they want to do that? One reason is corruption, the aggrandizement of wealth by political elites demanding bribes from persons who lack power. Equality in income and equality in political influence are both compromised in practice under state capitalism. In addition most people realize that the people they meet on a regular basis are corruptible, lacking in socialist virtue. They become cynical.

They game the system every way they can.

A Crucial Dichotomy: Merchant Capitalism versus Technological Capitalism While it is useful to give a general definition of capital that applies everywhere it is important to keep in mind that capitalism as it is actually implemented varies tremendously

279 from country to country. There are two distinctions that are important. One is the distinction between fragmented and concentrated capitalism. The other is the distinction between technological capitalism and merchant capitalism 1.

The idea of concentrated capitalism is best captured with two words: monopoly and oligopoly. The idea here is that the force of competition in driving down prices and encouraging product improvements as a vehicle for commanding greater sales is constrained by the structure of the industry. If there are only a few big players in a field – whether these be state owned or privately owned should make no difference – there is less pressure for prices to be driven down. It is easy to show graphically that under pure monopoly fewer goods are produced, the overall market for the good is smaller, and prices in equilibrium are higher than would be the case under atomistic competition. Setting aside the issue of whether equilibrium comparisons best capture the dynamics involved, the intuition is appealing. At any event standard comparisons comparing equilibriums are great as expositional tools: they capture something that common sense untrammeled by geometry can easily comprehend.

However as a practical reality the stories you can tell with the diagrams hinge on assumptions about whether markets are closed or open. Open them up to imports and exports for instance. The storyline changes. Oligopoly is even more complicated. Depending on the type of power structure inherent in a particular oligarchy the economic consequences vary, which in practice means that vary all over the place. For instance members of an oligopoly can cooperate in a cartel: in which case a government managed cartel is preferable to a privately managed cartel because it is less likely to be secretly undermined, corrupted, by one or several participants in the pact. Or they can carry on price wars. Or they can move from one regime to

280 another regime, cooperating sometimes, falling back on bitter in-fighting dashing any hope for a stable equilibrium. Scholars make careers out of working out nifty solutions for these hypothetical situations – invoking game theory is a popular academic game played by economists doing this - establishing beyond a doubt that changing a few assumptions about the putative behavior of firms operating in these kinds of markets generates a remarkably variegated set of conclusions, and best of all a wide stream of journal articles.

Since there are relatively few markets free of some oligopoly – even farming once considered the purview of atomistic family run enterprises has increasingly been taken over by behemoths, giant food companies capturing scale economies by integrating planting, harvesting, processing, packaging, and advertising – the idea that a form of capitalism based solely upon atomistic competition is naive. On the other hand it would be equally misleading to argue that there capitalist economies are wholly monopolistic or saturated by oligopolies. This latter assumption – made by Marxist theoreticians like Nikolai Bukharin and Vladimir Lenin – has mercifully proven nothing more than so much text rudely deposited into the wastebasket of history.

What is involved in the distinction between technological capitalism and merchant capitalism? By the term “technological capitalism” I mean direct investment in technological progress fueled by credit creation. Inherent in the concept of technological progress investment is the promotion of ideas - particularly scientific ideas - that are subsequently refined and applied to industrial or artistic production. Technological capitalism differs from merchant capitalism because merchants have a tried and true model for how to invest. They arrange a

281 loan that is backed up by collateral. They come up with a way to assign an interest rate on the loan. The loans have a definite expiration date. They can be rolled over if needed.

The problem with ideas – especially scientific and artistic ideas - is that there is a strong incentive to make them public. A typical scientist is mainly interested in publishing his or her findings, making a reputation, acquiring followers and perhaps even critics, thereby enhancing knowledge in the field. This is particularly true in the case of scientific geniuses who are driven by a deep interest in ferreting out the secrets of natural order. How do you fund their endeavors? One mechanism is government grant. Another is the patent, a temporary monopoly granted by a government to the recipient who is protected against others making use of the idea over a specified period of time, say fifty years. One advantage of the patent is it is saleable.

If a scientist does not want to become an entrepreneur developing market applications of his or her idea, he or she has the option of selling the patent to a business person who is more keenly market oriented. Another advantage is securing approval for a first patent may increase the opportunity to secure a second or third patent. The appeal to scientific geniuses who believe they can generate idea after idea is obvious.

In the case of buying and selling commodities and services that are already well established on the market – something merchants and bankers are very clever and studious in doing because it is short-term – investing in technological capitalism is intrinsically long-term, solidly attached to an informed belief in future progress within the relevant field involved. One reason why technological capitalism that was gaining force in Europe during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries took off was competition between rival courts and rulers for inventions

282 and novel ideas about natural law. This bolstered a sense within cultivated circles of Europe that progress was unending. It gave a fillip to Enlightenment thinking.

Why is the distinction between technological capitalism and merchant capitalism useful? It is useful because both types of investors were drawing from a common pool of capital. Both parties came to the same table but not necessarily with the same case concerning future returns. Investing in an already well-established line of work is one thing. One has a sense of a normal distribution of returns, some projects likely to fail with a high rate of probability, others likely to succeed with a lower rate of probability (for instance in the restaurant field it is commonly believed most startups fail within a year). With technological capitalism you simply do not have a good idea. More than normal risk – that can be analyzed using a standard probability distribution – is involved because there is no known distribution of risk for bold new ideas. This is one reason why political fragmentation played a vital role in the evolution of technological capitalism in Europe. Exit from Italy to England was a possibility dangling over the heads of erstwhile inventors and scientists. If Italy would not grant a patent then go to England where the crown might be more easily persuaded to accommodate your request.

Communist countries leaned heavily towards technological capitalism for a variety of reasons. Ideologically merchants as the epitome of the bourgeois were considered anathema.

Adhering to mandated prices threw a monkey wrench into trade. For instance communist countries trading with one another had to negotiate barter type agreements as each was operating with its own set of officially stipulated prices. Politicians not merchants hammered out agreements. Factory managers who operated as quasi-entrepreneurs under central

283 planning were also forced to engage in barter with each other. The merchant as middleperson buying and selling inputs used by one industry from another sector was displaced by professionals trained in engineering who thought in terms of relatively fixed technical coefficients. So much electricity; so much gasoline; so much steel; so much glass; on and on.

Technology as imagined by technically trained professionals was in demand.

More important, using state grants to motivate genius served as an important tool in generating economic advance. Set up a winner take all competition for ambitious government employees. The program to develop the AK-47 fully gas-operated automatic rifle is a case in point. Teams were set up by the Soviet government in 1946. The one headed up by Mikhail

Kalashnikov prevailed, its design passing the rigorous battery of tests with flying colors. It was put into full scale service in the Soviet Union’s army in 1947. Hence the number “47”. It was the perfect example of how to unleash genius in a planned economy.

The Cult of Capitalist Genius during the Renaissance: Medici and Fugger The initial sprouting of a cult of European capitalist genius is surely in the field of merchant capitalism, notably in banking. Credit creation and capital mobility were one side of the coin. The other was power, soft power especially but hard power as well.

How did the Medici who rose to prominence in banking exert power? One avenue they exploited was their hold over borrowers. As creditors they could exert pressure on politically prominent debtors, thereby securing votes they used to dictate policy in Florence. They did not mind stooping to the use of violence as well. The Medici clan had gangs at their command.

Everyone with influence spied on everyone else exercising influence. Indeed even as their

284 vaunted bank closed most of its offices during the late fifteenth century the Medici aggrandized their power once based on financing through the cultivation of “boss-ism”, crafting elaborate vertical client networks for controlling votes in the city council, extending influence through religious organizations like the Confraternity of the Magi (for which they commissioned a famous painting in which several generations of Medici were pictured), making sure they had armed followers on the ground to enforce their will. Still they had to exercise caution: it was not uncommon for assassins to kill wealthy patricians at the doorstep of churches. When disaster happened, the Medici family having been driven out of Florence by their republican enemies, they returned to Florence with a army, ultimately managing to become hereditary dukes. So ensconced in power, they employed the artist Giorgio Vasari to create a remarkable passageway above the city streets along which they could walk from their old quarters in the city center to their new ducal palace without passing through the streets. Powerful figures travelled with guards knowing full well that assassins favored open spaces as well as churches for their murders, their victims being the most vulnerable in places of worship and public squares. Vendettas were accepted as a way of life.

They dazzled rivals by showing exceptionally astute taste in the fine arts, promoting their own cultural agenda, neo-Platonism as a bold ideological statement, a form of advertising as it were, to be reckoned with, commissioning statues and buildings designed by the most sought after Florentine geniuses, Michelangelo a case in point. They stood for something. They promoted a brand that was recognized throughout the cultivated centers of Europe. The court the Medici assembled around themselves rivaled that put together by princes, dukes, the

Vatican, even kings. Inevitably it was expensive to keep afloat.

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In aggrandizing power and prestige the Medici eventually ran down their businesses.

Too much attention to politics; too much expenditure on frescos, paintings, statues, impressive libraries, altarpieces, and musical instruments. When their banking business – over-extended by the strain put on it to finance their luxurious way of life - crashed it was on a grand scale. When it declared itself insolvent in 1494 its wreckage shook Italian financial circles.

Still it did not stop other banking firms from making grandiose bets in finance. Consider

Jakob Fugger, often characterized as one of the richest men in history. With backing from his merchant family in Augsburg who had substantial dealings in textiles Fugger went to Venice during the latter half of the fifteenth century to carry on the textile business and study Venetian financial practices. From this base Fugger expanded into the copper business, securing

Hungarian mines from which his firm shipped minerals through Lisbon into distant markets, including India. All of this served as prelude for his financing of Hapsburg political and military ambitions and for the Pope’s project to build St. Peter’s Basilica and to restore the Sistine

Chapel in Rome. Fugger funded the political projects of Maximilian I who was German King and

Holy Roman Emperor, following this up by raising the huge financial war chest required to bribe the electors of the Holy Roman Empire into making Charles V, son of Maximilian I, Emperor at the expense of a French rival for the throne. Fugger operated at the highest level of power in

Europe.

Ironically one of Fugger’s pet projects – funding the Vatican building project – helped initiate the Reformation that Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor, ended up opposing with armed forces on the battlefield, drawing heavily upon Fugger for funding. To compensate Fugger for his loan the Curia agreed to sell indulgences on a grand scale. This exercise of unscrupulous

286 venality was the final straw for Martin Luther who was already deeply offended by other aspects of Church corruption. This was a perfect example of how the law of unintended consequences undermines the best intentions of people. Fugger’s massive fortune was put at risk by his simultaneous dealings with the Papacy and the Holy Roman Emperor. How could he anticipate the impact funding the Curia would have on his long-run interests? The point is

Fugger moved boldly, letting the chips fall where they may.

These two examples point to one of the problems with capitalist genius: instability, boom and bust, forward momentum and crash. While the Medici continued to prosper and aggrandize political power in Tuscany in the aftermath of Medici Bank collapse what about the fate of the clerks working in the bank offices, the depositors who may have seen their assets wiped out, those caught up in the chaos? These examples also bring out another downside of capitalist genius: its attraction to power. Both Medici and Fugger strutted on the political stage.

The Medici exercised de facto control over the Florentine Republic of the fifteenth century.

When they were driven out by republicans who opposed their prowess as arrogant oligarchs, they returned leading an army that retook the city, turning it into a dukedom that they ruled outright. Members of the Medici family became popes. They wielded power like haughty princes, exploiting the power of the purse to bribe Florentine political figures. Eventually they even destroyed republican rule in Florence, turning it into a veritable fiefdom. Likewise Jakob

Fugger who cut deals with the Holy Roman Emperor and the pope. Exercising financial power is like offering nectar to bee. Its fragrant odor is difficult to resist.

Fragmented Capitalism versus Concentrated Capitalism: Mercantilism and the Industrial Revolution

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European fragmentation – prevalent in the Medieval Era and in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries – began to wane during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. There are two main culprits: mercantilism and the organizational transformation of war. The two forces are intertwined. Both agendas spoke to the centralization of authority by states determined to bolster their status and prowess on the European stage. By the European stage I mean to include the settlements, plantations, and trading zones established in “Europe-abroad,” consisting of Caribbean islands, mainland America, Indonesia, the Philippines, and coastal territories in India. Centralization of government fostered concentration of capital.

It is important to keep firmly in mind the long-run process at work in European geopolitical history. During the first wave of European expansionism – driven initially by the

Crusades in the Levant – European communities bordering the Mediterranean secured control over most of its water, only losing its control over the eastern zone to the Ottoman Turks in the mid-fifteenth century. The second wave that commenced at the same time Constantinople was lost to the Turks saw the European powers bordering on the Atlantic flex their expansionary muscle. In both cases three agendas – bolstering trade opportunities, aggrandizing military power, and promoting Christianity – were tightly intertwined. The cross, the sword, and the accounting ledger marched out into the Indian Ocean, the South China Sea, and the Caribbean in lockstep with one another.

Inevitably the commercial core of Europe shifted as trade opportunities arising from exploration and commercial exploitation of shipping lanes on the Atlantic Ocean and Pacific

Oceans blossomed. In no sense did this spell the end of mercantile activity in Italy. To be sure

Venice, desperately holding onto its sprawling sea empire in the Adriatic and Aegean in the face

288 of Ottoman naval aggression, did see its imperial holdings gradually slip out of its grasp. More important was the fact that the relative importance of Mediterranean trade as a percentage of overall European oceanic and sea trade fell. This could not help but transform the geopolitics of northern Europe. Increasingly the Baltic and North Seas emerging as entry lanes onto the riches of Atlantic Ocean commerce became prizes worth exploiting for merchants and naval commanders alike.

What Venice had achieved, states having ready access to the Atlantic – Spain and

Portugal in the south; England, the Low Countries, and France in the center; and Sweden dominating Scandinavia in the north – began emulating with a vengeance. Sponsor the building of mighty arsenals (the Venetian Arsenal that inspired Dante was the most esteemed and excellent model of the beast); expand your fleet, encouraging merchants to finance the construction of ships that in time of war could be outfitted for combat; outplay your rivals through deft diplomacy or outright conflict, using the power of the purse to finance mercenaries.

The result was mercantilism a system designed to promote state power. We can understand its logic – it’s linking up of trade, military prowess, and the domestic economy of a state like the Venetian Republic – if we think in terms of the military power equation elaborated in the Appendix. The step by step logic is simple: (1) bolster export opportunities, the state raking off a slice as rent thereby amassing resources devoted to funding military campaigns on land and sea by either selling monopoly rights to merchant houses or running state monopolies in favored commodity lines; (2) encourage technological progress that reduces the relative costs of exerting lethality and engaging in oceanic shipping through state

289 sponsorship of engineering and science (a good example is the British prize offered for inventing an effective marine chronometer for accurately measuring longitude); and (3) run a trade surplus, thereby aggrandizing the inflow of precious metals thereby bolstering the state’s capacity to issue currency greasing the wheels of the domestic economy; (4) impose tariffs on both imports and exports adding to the state’s coffers; and (5) secure and hold onto colonies, merchant enterprises securing access to precious metals and timber and the opportunity to harvest plantation crops like rice, spices, tobacco, indigo, and coffee.

Keep in mind the size of the domestic economy has two dimensions: per capita income and population size. Relatively small jurisdictions – the Netherlands in the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries – as measured in terms of population and land area were able to become major players in the power struggles of mercantilism precisely because it enjoyed a very high per capita income by the European standards of the day. Indeed as we know from our earlier discussion of the Netherlands the period from approximately 1580 to 1714 is known as the Golden Age of the Dutch economy. How did mercantilism benefit the Netherlands?

Drawing descriptions provided by de Vries (2008) we get a fairly clear idea 2. His idea is that the Netherlands passed through an industrious revolution during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, labor productivity rising to unprecedented levels for a pre-industrial economy. Exploiting mercantilist outsourcing of goods – bringing in spices, textiles, ceramics, tea from Asian markets in particular – gave a strong fillip to economic life in the Netherlands.

One unintended consequence was consolidating a set of social norms that are commonly known as the Protestant work ethic.

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That Protestantism itself played a role in the industrious revolution there is little doubt.

According to the account given by de Vries there was an increase in the supply of labor driven by a decline in peasant leisure, many saint’s days and Christian holidays being stripped away as a result of the diffusion of reformed Calvinist theology throughout the Netherlands, systematically rationalizing the liturgical calendar everywhere, influencing all faiths, including

Judaism and Catholicism. The diffusion of education due to the Protestant emphasis on literacy, the ability to read the Bible being of supreme importance was another spinoff of Calvinism. As we noted earlier the Golden Age Netherlands was the most literate society in all of Europe, in all of the world as a matter of fact.

Religion was only part of the story. Mercantilism was crucial because consumption goods were inundating the market as distributors negotiating with the VOC transformed domestic markets, inducing households to substitute imports for commodities hitherto producing within households, inducing craftspeople to turn out domestic products – Delft blue bowls are a classic case – that competed with imported Asian manufactures. All of this encouraged people to become increasing market oriented, buying and selling commodities in markets as opposed to turning them out in the household kitchen or the in household’s workshop. Specialization and division of labor due in part to growing specialization in farming, some producers focusing on grains, some focusing on vegetables, to which one can add growing specialization due to the fostering of new employment opportunities in crafts and transport, for instance working on canal boats. The spread of rural by-employments, so-called proto-industry, farmers picking up new opportunities in part-time textiles for instance, spinning and weaving and dying cloth at home during the winter months went hand in hand with this

291 process. Note that much of this stems from an expansion of trade, workers responding to new export opportunities in textiles, workers and responding to the introduction of novel imports into the domestic market – say tobacco, coffee, Chinese ceramics – by working harder in order to purchase consumables; merchant capitalists dreaming up ways to substitute domestic products for imports, the best case being ceramics where Delft blue China competed with

Chinese ceramics.

We can use the production function framework – see the Appendix for details - to systematize the descriptive accounts provided by de Vries and van der Woude (1997) and de

Vries (2008). Assuming the number of days a year worked by peasants was around 250 to 260 – given the multitude of religious holidays – it is probable the typical Dutch peasant forwent 40 to

50 of these rest days, the reformed liturgical calendar reserving only day out a week – Sunday – for regular religious services. This would put increase the number of hours worked by around

20%, a significant intensification of work. Taking into account the expansion of by-employments would add an even greater total number of hours to the 20% I have estimated. Draining the polders – largely achieved in the period 1580 to 1621 – improved the quality of land significantly. That windmills were revamped and increased in efficiency – their mechanical equipment improved – definitely augmented the capital stock in terms of quality. Shipbuilding was another field in which refinements were made. In the financial field the scale of the stock market and the operation of the Bank of Amsterdam due to the influx of Protestant merchants leaving Catholic Antwerp at the end of the sixteenth century rationalized further the financing of capital accumulation, adding to the overall efficiency of the environment workers toiled in, bolstering total factor productivity. Adding to all of this is the impact of the Dutch war of

292 independence waged against Spain, the dominant military power of the sixteenth century. The

Dutch developed a new way of organizing the firing of muskets by troops. The troops were organized into lines running from the front where the firing was done to the back where soldiers reloaded their weapons. Once a line had shot off its gunshot it moved to the rear, the line behind it moving to the front to resume the firing of barrages of metal pellets. Some have gone as far as arguing the Dutch “industrialized” military behavior in this way. The point is discipline in carrying out operations was being instilled in the population. This bolstered the efficiency of an hours worked.

Employing the symbols laid out in the Appendix: hours worked h jumped, at least by

20%; the productivity of labor per hour worked e(h) improved due to enhanced discipline; the quality of land qlan was augmented through the draining of polders; the quality of capital qk went up, newly fashioned and outfitted windmills and ships adding to labor productivity; and the overall efficiency of the Dutch economic environment – the funding of the VOC as a major mercantile enterprise active in Asian waters and especially in Indonesia and the Bank of

Amsterdam’s operations in fiscal matters – was given a strong push by the influx of merchants fleeing Antwerp. This gave a strong fillip to A, total factor productivity.

A combination of transcendental religious aspiration and materialist mercantile ambition fueled a mercantilist superpower, during the heyday of the Netherlands, the

Republic’s vaunted Golden Age

There is no doubt the fostering of the Golden Age economy Netherlands represented one end of a wide spectrum of adaptations to a new European wide revamping of trade and

293 military challenges. This is reminiscent of Venice that lay at one end of a spectrum of innovations in urban civilization stretching from the Adriatic to the Low Countries. What the new trade opportunities on the Atlantic Ocean opened up was a complete revamping of trade itself, warfare as well. As the economies on the Atlantic – Spain, Portugal, France, Flanders, the

Netherlands, and the English – expanded they demanded more raw materials, more timber, more coal, more charcoal, more timber logs, more barley and wheat – from the European interior including Russia, Poland, and northern Germany. Derived demand brought the

European east into the growing maelstrom of trade.

Paradoxically at the very time the western zone of Europe was decisively abandoning feudal obligations around corvee labor services extracted from peasants – serfs virtually disappearing there – serfdom was given a new lease on life in the east. For instance large

Junker estates in the Germany lands responded by tightening their hold over peasants, the burdens of serfdom intensifying there. In Russia where serfdom was virtual slavery, the burden of exactions and taxation extracted from the rural village were driven up even further 3.

Warfare also intensified but in the case warfare being states enjoying domestic economies far in excess of those populating Italy during the fifteenth century. Spain, the Netherlands, France, and England were all embroiled in fighting each other. Catholic versus Protestant was one; but so was mercantilist competition over trade. The Protestant Dutch fought the Protestant English; the English warred against the Catholic French who warred against the Dutch; the Catholic

Spanish sent the Spanish Armada to crush the British, even garnering support from the offices of the pope who declared a crusade against the Protestant heretics in England. Religion, trade, and hard power.

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One corollary of this potent convergence of forces is sheer scope: during the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth mercantilism was far greater in terms of economic activity, military conflict, and diplomacy than the proto-mercantilism of fifteenth century Italy. This is hardly surprising. The volume of oceanic trade was expanding by leaps and bounds. Incomes were rising rapidly among the mercantilist powers meaning more and more funds were available for outfitting military forces. The sheer magnitude of armies in terms of personnel and total cost exploded, relatively expensive muskets replacing cheaper pikes, larger and larger cannons being placed on ships. To give some examples: the Spanish army consisted of approximately 20 thousand men under arms in 1470 while in 1630 it had reached a grand total of 1630; likewise France that saw it its land forces grow for 30 thousand in 1550 to 150 thousand in 1630. That the Netherlands with a relatively small domestic population was able to defeat Spain, securing its independence from Catholicism and dominance by the most powerful state in Europe during its Eighty Year War with its imperial overlord is testimony to several things: the transformation of warring occasioned by the exigencies of armed combat 4.

None of this was lost on the periphery countries of Europe. By the periphery I mean

Russia, the German interior, Poland, and Scandinavia. In effect for these regions building up military strength was seen as a way to accomplish two aims. One was warding off invasion by the other parties clustering around the Baltic and North Seas. In this region some countries, despite being poorer than the emerging core powers in the central coastline zone (e.g.: France,

England, and the Netherlands), managed to bolster their militaries through mandatory conscription. The first to do so was Sweden. In 1544 the Riksdag instituted an annual census of men with the aim of organizing the formation of a permanent army. The famous king of

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Sweden Gustavus Adolphus who drove back Catholic forces all over the German lands during the Thirty Years War – his army soundly defeated the Catholic League, an alliance of German

Catholic states, in 1631 – was able to do so because he had a conscripted military to rely upon.

Among the jurisdictions of the Holy Roman Empire that Adolphus rode roughshod over was

Brandenburg-Prussia ruled by the Hohenzollern dynasty that had managed to amalgamate the

Electorate of Brandenburg with the Duchy of Prussia. Smarting under these loses – the

Hohenzollern ruler had desperately switched sides from Protestant to Catholic and back, suffering occupation by Swedish forces as an additional humiliation – Brandenburg-Prussia transformed its old militias in the 1690s, implementing compulsory military service for all unmarried males in the early 1700s. Russia under Peter the Great followed a similar path, introducing compulsory military lifetime service for every tenth peasant male – the recruits selected at the village level – demanding his nobles serve as officers or in the rank and file military lest they be stripped of their status as landowners, crushing revolts lead by traditional military groups resisting incorporation into a highly centralized state military.

Just as France, England and the Netherlands – contiguous areas of a sort, forming a relatively close knit geographic bloc – warred with one another so did the powers around the

Baltic Sea: Sweden against Russia; Sweden against Brandenburg-Prussia; Russia against Poland; and Brandenburg-Prussia against Poland. At stake was not simply survival as a cohesive territory aggrandizing resources sufficient to build a military machine that could hold its own in a region being increasingly drawn in European geopolitics. In addition securing ports on the

Baltic or North Sea through which a merchant fleet or warships could gain access to the Atlantic was at stake. Getting a piece of the mercantilist trade pie being carved up by the Spanish, the

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Dutch, the French, and the English was at stake as well. Peter the Great managed to improve his access to both Balkan and the Baltic waters. In defeating the Ottoman Turks he secured

Azov as a port of the Black Sea; defeating the Swedish he founded a port on the Baltic. Peter was so determined to secure access to the Baltic that he ordered marshes drained so he could found Saint Petersburg on swampy - hopelessly mosquito infested - land so he could establish a great commercial window on the west. Transforming Russia from a Tsar ruled territory into an

Empire in 1721 he was declared the Emperor of All Russia.

What Peter the Great –and to a lesser extent Frederick the Great created in

Brandenburg-Prussia – was a form of mercantilism in which the state was all powerful.

According to Gerschenkron (1970) this meant a situation where “the domestic economy …. [is able to] support effectively the power of the government.” 5 As examples of this Gerschenkron points to the securing of shipping ports, the construction of mighty navy arsenals, an brutal increase in taxation, the state owning and operating mines and factories, the exploitation of the peasantry, and the management of state export monopolies in potash, ship timber, and furs.

Mercantilism was a good thing for nascent states that were aggrandizing power, carving out overseas empires, promoting trade with politically organized blocs. However the unintended consequences flowing from it were considerable: it stifled capitalist genius in the technological field. Concentrating capital in the hands of powerful merchant houses that built up their riches through investments in foreign lands – in India, in the Americas, in the

Caribbean, in Southeast Asia – it stripped away capital resources from domestic enterprises. A prime example of this is the way capital was accumulated by the nascent industrialists of the

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First Industrial Revolution in England. To a remarkable degree it was the recycling of profits that generated the capital fueling the rise of the textile industry in eighteenth century England. The first industrial revolution was fragmented capitalism at its best - eschewing the heavy hand of government sponsored mercantile monopolies and merchant controlled banks – taking bets on innovations that might or might not garner patents but in any case might well improve the efficiency which factory workers did their tasks.

What was achieved in the Industrial Coffin springing up between Liverpool – where raw cotton was unloaded from sailing ships – and the Port of London was revolutionary. It was not just that the new industrial towns like Manchester, Leeds, and Sheffield were growing in size at a phenomenal rate, staking out a novel form of economic concentration. It was not just because workers entering the factories were taking away employment opportunities from persons who operated in the world of putting-out craft production – the handloom weavers and home based spinners who eventually thronged together, destroying water frames, mules, jennies, and power looms in the factories they assaulted – although that certainly was an unintended consequence of the industrial revolution that the capitalist geniuses had not anticipated. It was the very charisma of the geniuses who made their names innovating; it was the fact that people from all walks of life – artisans, laboratory technicians, ministers – could go where no one had gone before.

That the unleashing of genius was a story any reasonable account of the First Industrial

Revolution should tell is evident from a short list of eighteenth century British industrial innovators. In the energy sector pride of place goes to the geniuses who harnessed steam.

Notable was the pioneer, Thomas Newcomen, inventor of massive steam pumps drawing water

298 out of coal mine shafts. Newcomen’s lead was taken up by James Watt, inventor of the separate condenser for steam engines, who with the assistance of his business partner

Matthew Boulton applied steam generated power to rotary motion, laying the groundwork for steam engines running on track. In the field of iron and steel manufacture there was Abraham

Darby who used coking coal in blast furnaces and Henry Cort who initiated the puddling process, and showed how sliding the molten down a lattice of rollers sped up the process of squeezing out impurities. Particularly striking were the improvements made in the spinning and weaving sectors of the textile industry. Here again genius abounded: John Kay (the flying shuttle); Lewis Paul (spinning frame); Richard Arkwright (water frame); Samuel Crompton

(spinning mule); James Hargreaves (spinning jenny); and Edmund Cartwright (power loom). It is a remarkable list.

That a massive economic transformation emerging out of decentralized fragmented capitalist activity had the potential to reshape the world was not lost on critics of mercantilism who decried the heavy handedness of government controlled monopoly. The Scottish

Enlightenment philosopher Adam Smith, while not anticipating the implications of steam power for the future, certainly drew inspiration from the unleashing of creative genius from the striking success of decentralized fragmented activity in the early phases of the British industrial revolution. Surely it was one reason why he touted the role of the “invisible hand” of the market in improving the standard of living for everybody in his classic The Wealth of Nations.

Technological capitalism, having made leaps and bounds advances, was laying the groundwork for the abolition of mercantilism as a system brandishing the prowess merchant capitalism brought to the table. The pendulum was in full swing.

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American Capitalism Confronts Miracle Growth Japanese Capitalism: Was the Opponent Industrial Policy or Unfettered Capitalist Genius? During the period between World War I and World War II, Japanese politics swung from a “wealthy country” toward a “strong military” agenda. By the early 1930s, the Imperial Army of Japan was exerting growing influence in policy making circles. Its agenda was clear: imperialist expansion onto the Chinese mainland; opposition to Soviet Communism. This was not the goal of the Imperial Navy which coveted expansion onto the Pacific. Even within the

Japanese military establishment there were turf wars. To further its goals, commanders in the

Imperial Army that seized control over Manchuria turning it into a puppet state, Manchukō, nominally under the aegis of the Chinese Emperor (who had been deposed when the Xing

Dynasty collapsed at the beginning of the twentieth century) embarked on a campaign to create a command and control economy in Manchukō. In effect they were doing what the

Soviet Union was purported to accomplish under a totally different ideological agenda 3.

The goal of the militarists was to lay the groundwork for a Greater East-Asian Co- prosperity Sphere on the mainland that would eventually sweep away Western influence, including that of the Soviets, from the mainland. Devising a central planned economy that would outstrip the claims made by the Russians was an important arrow in the ideological quiver of the Imperial Army. To this end the Imperial Army enlisted the support of the zaibatsu, some of whose directors – for instance the chief manager of Mitsui – had opposed the rise of the militarism during the early 1930s. There is no doubt some of the zaibatsu were ardent supporters of the militarists – Mitsubishi that developed the Zero Fighter is usually put into this category – but many were reluctant recruits. Not surprisingly the merchant oriented managers

300 in the great combines were skeptical about the efficiency of a command and control economy managed by military officials and the technically trained bureaucrats they employed.

After Japan was defeated in 1945 and an American controlled Occupation was established a myth developed in policy making circles prevailed in formulating policies carried out by the Japanese Parliament. The myth was that the zaibatsu were in league with the militarists in promoting Japanese aggression on the Chinese mainland and in the Pacific. With this in mind laws were passed dissolving the zaibatsu. While the former zaibatsu did revive some of their prewar features as keiretsu, loosely bonded through cross-holding of stock and the sharing of information through cross-fertilization of boards of directors, nothing like the old holding companies centralized under the guidance of a single powerful managerial staff persisted. Beyond this the dissolution of the zaibatsu gave a strong push to Shibusawa’s “joint- stock” agenda. The program favored small and medium sized business because it opened up capital markets that hitherto were concentrated in the hands of zaibatsu big-city banks. As well it unleashed capitalist genius in Japan, pent up the war effort, pent up by the heavy hand of military cabinets who espoused planning. It was the very antithesis of government planned and directed economic development.

Examples of unleashed capitalist genius abounded in Miracle Growth Japan, the period between the end of the American Occupation in the mid-1950s and the Nixon shocks of the early 1970s (the ending of the dollar based gold standard and the imposition of tariffs on

Japanese textiles). Two examples, both for the automotive industry, will demonstrate the point that innovation, driven by geniuses, was instrumental in Japan’s rapid rise to become a global giant in a myriad of industries. Both examples illustrate the importance of geniuses working

301 together, one adept in the technical engineering field, the other in marketing. These pairing are reminiscent of the famous British Industrial Revolution pair, market-oriented Matthew Boulton teaming up with engineering genius James Watt, promoting the expansion of the steam engine based sector during the eighteenth century.

In the case of the rise of Honda Motor the two geniuses were Honda Soichiro, engineer, and Fujisawa Takeo, marketing guru. Beginning with motorized bicycles in 1948, the two worked in tandem to develop innovative lines in motorcycles. They made a major breakthrough with the Super Cub that featured a “step-through” design appealing to female motorcycle enthusiasts. Eventually, after they moved into automobile production, Honda and his engineering team designed the VTEC, variable value timing system, during the late 1980s. From the outset Honda was keen on unleashing creative genius in his engineering department, pushing the concept of a “paperweight” structure for product design, engineers and designers securing positions as chief or executive engineers on the basis of their talent rather than because the product design division had a certain number of subordinate employees who needed to supervised from above. In the alternative pyramid structure, a chief engineer becomes a chief engineer because he or she is needed as a supervisor for a designated number of subordinates, a mathematical calculus ruling the structure of divisions within the firm. Honda wanted to get away from that because his focus was on innovation.

On the marketing side Fujisawa was equally innovative. As the company diversified into new lines – from the Dream to the Cub to the Super Cub in the case of motorcycles and motorized bicycles, from motorcycles into automobiles (exemplified by the Accord and its latter rival the luxury-oriented Acura) – he promoted the idea that recruitment of new dealers to

302 handle market lines should be restricted to specific niches. Dealers handling Cubs were not licensed to handle Super Cubs and so on. The idea was to create a marketing environment where old lines were not rendered obsolete, dashed to pieces, by new lines. If dealers handled the early Dream and the Super Cub, they would have an incentive to push the Super Cub, holding back on the Dream, because Dreams were cheaper than Super Cubs. Marketing along product lines was a way to keep all phases of the business moving together. As well it was

Fujisawa who envisioned a global future for Honda Motor, focusing on developing a niche in the

American market first.

The other remarkable pair consisted of Toyoda Eiji and Ohno (Ōno Taichi) who developed the kanban (flag) system that revolutionized shop floor design and organization at the Toyota Motor Corporation. The idea was to employ the supermarket principle, pioneered in the United States, to automobile production. Toyoda visited the United States, observing the way shop floors were set up in extremely large plants, components being pulled out of warehousing facilities to accommodate the needs of assembly line workers. Economics of scale dictated the way production was set up, work on one particular model setting the stage for a week or a month. Toyoda working with his engineering genius technical expert Ohno decided a better more efficient model of the shop floor could be created. According to this model consumer demand would pull production quotas. If people wanted a certain type of car painted in a certain color that would be the task set for an assembly line on a given day. The logic of the supermarket is you only produce what you need. Maximizing throughput, minimizing wasted shelf space, is crucial. Produce what will sell right away, not what may sit on a dealer’s lot for months. To achieve this goal Ohno pushed the idea of “just-in-time”. You only make the

303 components you need when you are actually going to use them. You minimize warehousing. To accomplish this idea flags indicating parts attached to boxes required were attached to carts that drove around the shop floor, depositing them on pallets outside each production center. If a certain type of bolt or screw was needed, the empty box with the appropriate flag signaled to the bolt and screw making division what was required. You just made what you needed “in time.”

One of the chief benefits flowing from the “just-in-time” principle was a lack of tolerance for defective parts. Defects slowed up the shop floor flow. Hence “build the quality into every component” became the watchword. This put the burden for quality control (QC) onto the shop floor workers. Since the shop floor workers often knew better than managers working away in distant locales why defects were occurring, the quality control movement at

Toyota elicited the input of workers who formed QC circles to problem solve defective parts problems. It was a perfect example of worker democracy. Rank and file workers, not technically trained college graduates specializing in academically taught engineering, ruled the roost. The shop floor became the center of innovation.

Another crucial aspect of the “just-in-time” system was its stress on worker skill.

Assembly line work can be remarkably boring. Making it interesting was part and parcel of the

Toyota kanban approach. Workers devoted time to setting-up machines, practicing how they could speed up setup times so they could produce “just-in-time” efficiently. They competed as teams and within teams as individuals. Merit was rewarded. QC teams that came up with innovative ideas were rewarded.

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It should be emphasized that “just-in-time” labor management ran up against a hallowed principle of mainstream economics. It rejected the concept of specialization and division of labor that was central to Adam Smith’s argument about why factories were more efficient that decentralized putting-out networks. By concentrating all workers onto a single factory floor divided into divisions that repeated the same tasks over and over again there were supposed to be efficiency gains. Turning workers loose to do a myriad of tasks required to keep a factory moving along relatively seamlessly - pressing up against bottlenecks that might arise when components were finished fast enough - appeared to be a dangerous bet in the minds of many American managers when they studied the kanban system. However to the great chagrin of the American critics the Toyota system clearly worked. One of its unintended consequences was a high rating for quality. High quality being built into all stages of production under the logic of “just-in-time” proved to be strong selling feature for Toyota manufactured vehicles when they began to flood the American market in the 1980s.

Besieged by American business leaders alarmed by the inroads Japanese imports – first in textiles, later in motorcycles and automobiles - President Nixon misread the reality of

Japanese capitalist creativity. His response: launching a two-pronged policy aimed at slowing the growth of the Japanese economy - cutting down American imports of textiles, simultaneously eliminating the potential benefit Japanese producers received from an overvalued dollar relative to an undervalued yen - is indicative of the fact Americans tended to blame Japanese politics not Japanese capitalist creativity for the growing presence of Japanese products in the United States.

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Why politics? According to the “Japan Inc.” theory, Japan’s Ministry of International

Trade and Industry (MITI) wielded industrial policy as a tool for catching up with the United

States technologically. The fear was Japan would soon surpass the United States from a technological point of view, making American producers increasingly reliant on Japanese exports.

What did MITI do during the Miracle Growth era? It encouraged industries like the cotton textile industry to form recession cartels preventing gluts from overwhelming markets.

MITI directed workers would actually go into cotton textile firms, tying up spindles.

Government regulated cartels have an advantage over private cartels because the government as a neutral player in the industry is even-handed in forcing all firms to conform to the cartel policy. MITI wielded administrative guidance of this sort in a number of industries, encouraging mergers in the iron and steel sector. As well because MITI exercised some control over foreign exchange available to Japanese companies keen on purchasing foreign technology from

American or European rivals it was able to intervene in negotiations between a foreign company and a Japanese company, acting as a single buyer in effect, playing off potential foreign firms interested in signing a contract with the MITI designated Japanese company chosen to receive the contract for new innovative technology developed outside of Japan. To make this acceptable to Japanese firms competing with one another in specific industries, MITI guaranteed that the patents issued to the selected Japanese companies would be short-lived, giving all parties involved a chance to exploit the purchased technology within a relatively short time frame.

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While these were certainly things that MITI had least aspired to do – court cases initiated by companies opposing MITI’s plans stymied the ministry at a number of junctures – the main thing MITI was said to have done, particularly infuriating the American business community that had the ear of the American White House – was picking “winners and losers”, directing Japanese business along certain lines. This was planning and to be sure the Japanese government did announce plans like it’s highly touted “income doubling” plan. The classic case of how this worked was the way MITI treated Japan, IBM. IBM (International Business

Machines) had a virtual lock on the mainframe computer market during the 1950s and early

1960s. As a first mover in the industry enjoying deep pockets it was able to rent out mainframe computers to companies (rather than selling them), selling them its services, including designing software tailored to their needs as businesses. IBM naturally wanted to move into the

Japanese market because many Japanese businesses wanted to lease its computers. MITI agreed to allow IBM to enter the Japanese market, creating a Japanese subsidiary Japan IBM. In exchange for its right to enter the market, MITI forced IBM to divest itself of much of its proprietary technology, turning around and sharing it with Japanese companies eager to enter the computer market, Fujitsu, Hitachi, and so forth. Adding insult to injury MITI proceeded to set up a semi-private company, the JEEC (Japan Electronic Equipment Corporation), granting it large sums of cash. In turn the JEEC purchased computers from companies like Hitachi and

Fujitsu, renting the computers out to Japanese companies eager to utilize computers in their chosen fields. Japan IBM withered under the onslaught.

All of this smacked of central planning, akin to what the Japanese Army had advocated as a model for how to spread Japanese industrial superiority in the rest of Asia. Naturally this

307 irked American politicians. The problem with this “Japan Inc.” interpretation is that it is more myth than reality. While it is true MITI exercised some influence over the way Miracle Growth played out in Japan, its influence is exaggerated. A case in point is the automobile industry.

MITI never picked it to be a future “winner.” It was more interested in promoting the growth of the aviation sector than it was in promoting the automobile industry. Ironically it was the automobile industry – not in airplane production – that became one of Japan’s most celebrated industrial winners.

It was not concentrated government coddled capitalism that prevailed in Japan during

Miracle Growth. It was genius inspired fragmented Japanese capitalism that stunned the

Americans during the 1960s and 1970s. Capitalism was at war with itself for sure; but the nature of the battlefield was misconstrued. It was misconstrued because the Americans faced the challenge of Japanese competition in global markets wearing ideologically tinted blinders that preventing them for reckoning with the triumph of capitalist genius in emerging Asia. Out of unfounded arrogance they assumed triumphant Japanese capitalism was rooted in imitation of American technology, in essence nothing more than pure imitation fostered by government intervention, lacking creativity. After all the true essence of American capitalism was unfettered genius applied to technological challenges. It could be argued this nexus of ideas was sheer bunk, myth-ridden, nothing more than self-serving ideology.

The lesson is clear: it is impossible to discard our ideological blinders, try as we will. Still ideology is remarkably malleable in politics. The practical political corollaries of ideological positions do change, often frequently, often radically. This is hardly surprising. The

Enlightenment unleashed a host of principles whose practical application spin off in a myriad of

308 often conflicting agendas. Consider free speech. Free speech may be of great appeal to one generation of liberals, even becoming anathema (or at least only tolerated in a begrudging manner) for their children or grandchildren. One reason why this occurs is the law of unintended consequences. Push an agenda hard enough and the consequences you end up living with may become intolerable or at a minimum disconcerting. However basic ideological orientations – left versus right, belief in stronger government as opposed to weaker government, adherence to regulated markets versus embracing unregulated markets for instance - are much more resistant to modification. Simply put ideology is a fact of life. How it plays out on the field of practical policies is another matter altogether.

Chapter 5 States Embracing or Rejecting the Pendulum Swing

Summary of the chapter: The inability of modern nation-states to avoid disunity, eschewing the pendulum swing in which rival parties or factions espousing different political ideologies temporarily secure power only to relinquish it later as their opponents grasp the levers of government is the focus of this chapter. As complexity grows and change accelerates the problem of achieving a stable equilibrium in which unity of purpose prevails in a populace, political conflict becomes increasingly entrenched. That this is true even as hard power is increasingly centralized in nation-states – while soft power is simultaneously decentralized - is a perfect example of the tension between cooperation and creativity.

A Kind of Unity: Decentralized Soft Power, Centralized Military Power Given the mercantilist agenda sweeping Europe in the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, what were the implications for hard power? The answer is clear. To a remarkable degree they were de-feudalized, centralized, professionalized. While not completely swept away was the feudal regiment became an anachronism. Increasingly troops

309 were either organized into units financed by great military entrepreneurs – the greatest being the flamboyant Albrecht von Wallenstein, a Bohemian entrepreneur who recruited far and wide in raising troops for sale as disciplined military mercenary units during the Thirty Years War – or organized into centralized units under the command of sovereign monarchs.

Doing away with feudal power was a two-edged sword. It weakened the power of regional nobles, transferring power to monarchs who increasingly sought monopoly power over violence. It allowed monarchs to experiment with new technologies and organizational models.

It lead troops to wear a single uniform, to respond to a precise set of standardized commands, to be drilled over and over again until they functioned as one huge well-oiled machine. As engineering and siege preparation took over as a key weapon in warfare it precipitated wholesale systematization. Increasingly troops were dispatched to hold onto border regions, fortifications placed further and further away from the interior. In countries in which naval forces were built up it was difficult to standardize to the same degree as it was with armies but the goals were the same. Centralized, rationalize, discipline, promote according to ability not according to social status. To be sure the last goal was weakly adhered to until the end of the eighteenth century – the French Revolution and Napoleon introduced meritocracy principles that rode roughshod over traditional myths that ascribed the pursuit of true glory to the aristocracy – but the general trend was in play throughout the centuries leading up to the

French Revolution. Anderson flatly says 1:

“Nowhere were feudal obligations by the end of the seventeenth century any longer a factor of importance [in military matters].”

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A corollary was the transformation of the aristocracy from one dabbling in hard power to one mainly concerned with building status through soft power.

Concentration of military force in the hands of states, professionalization in the drilling and organization of troops, eroded the status of the nobility. Vanishing was the myth that aristocrats embodied the courage and daring needed to succeed in battles. Increasingly planning sieges was left to military officers trained in engineering and the science of ballistics.

War was not becoming mass activity heavily informed by scientific reasoning and technological expertise but it was definitely becoming an industry that the state tried to control in a centralized fashion. One consequence was the dismantling of rural castles, no longer needed, replaced by huge fortifications in border regions. Some simply fell into ruins, others were transformed in palaces.

Affixing a precise quantitative picture to the process through which castles disappeared from Europe, titled nobles and nouveau riche bourgeois favoring the palace rather than an antiquated feudal relic, is difficult. Working with contemporary censuses of castles and palaces

– ideally but not always sources giving dates of construction – allows us to garner estimates that frankly should be taken with a grain of salt. The figures appear in Table 5.1. From these numbers as fragile as they are we can draw three conclusions: early modern Europe was unique in having a large number of castles; over time the number of castles declined precipitously, the number of palaces growing – presumably replacing – the castles; the European country with the largest number of castles (in absolute terms and as a ratio of castles relative to palaces) is

Germany. The last point is hardly surprising. Modern Germany is largely carved out of lands

311 once organized in the highly fragmented Holy Roman Empire, a political relic of the feudal period if there ever was one.

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Table 5.1 Palaces and Castles, Constructed Before and After 1500, for Regions of the World and Selected Countries [Percentage of World Total in ( ) Beneath Number]

Panel A: Castles in Regions of the World (a)

Region Before 1500 1501-1600 1601-1700 1701-1800 1801-2018 Africa 1 1 6 7 62 (0.3) (0.3) (0.2) (0.2) (13.0) Asia 28 31 273 274 39 (8.4) (8.9) (45.4) (43.3) (8.2) Oceania 0 0 0 0 0 (0) (0) (o) (0) (0) Europe 303 316 321 351 374 (91.3) (90.6) (53.4) (55.5) (78.6) North America 0 1 1 1 1 (0) (0.3) (0.2) (0.2) (0.2) South America 0 0 0 0 0 (0) (0) (0) (0) (0) World 332 349 601 633 476 (100) (100) (100) (100) (100)

Panel B: Palaces in Regions of the World (b)

Region Before 1500 1501-1600 1601-1700 1701-1800 1801-2018 Africa 26 27 29 36 84 (15.7) (10.5) (7.8) (6.2) (5.7) Asia 49 59 77 107 541 (29.5) (23.0) (20.8) (18.5) (36,7) Oceania 0 0 0 0 12 (0) (0) (0) (0) (0.8) Europe 89 164 255 416 702 (53.6) (63.8) (68.9) (71.9) (47.6) North America 1 3 5 13 63 (0.6) (1.2) (1.4) (2.3) (4.3) South America 1 4 4 7 72 (0.6) (1.2) (1.1) (1.2) (4.9) World 166 257 370 579 1474 (100) (100) (100) (100) (100)

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Table 5.1 (Continued)

Panel C: Castles and Palaces in Europe, Percentage Distribution

Country Before 1500 1501-1600 1601-1700 1701-1800 1801-2018 Castles Austria 0 % 6.3 % 0.3 % 0.3 % 0.3 % France 4.6 4.8 4.7 4.6 4.3 Germany 87.5 84.8 83.5 81.8 77.3 Italy 1.0 0.9 0.9 0.9 1.1 Portugal 0.3 0.3 0.3 0.3 0.3 Russia 0 0 0 0.6 0.8 Spain 1.3 1.3 1.3 1.1 1.1 United 0.7 1.0 1.3 1.1 1.1 Kingdom Palaces Austria 3.4 3.7 5.1 5.8 9.4 France 19.1 16.5 13.3 9.9 7.4 Germany 5.6 5.5 7.8 11.8 10.7 Italy 34.8 28.7 21.9 16.4 9.8 Portugal 6.7 5.5 7.1 8.9 9.7 Russia 1.1 0.6 0.4 7.2 5.7 Spain 2.3 9.2 8.6 6.3 9.1 United 14.6 14.6 11.4 8.7 6.0 Kingdom

Panel D: Ratio of Castles to Palaces for Regions of the World and Selected European Countries

Region/Country Before 1500 1501-1600 1601-1700 1701-1800 1801-2018 Regions of the World Africa 0.04 0.04 0.21 0.19 0.74 Asia 0.57 0.52 3.55 2.56 0.08 Oceania - - - - 0 Europe 3.41 1.93 1.26 0.84 0.53 North America - 0.33 0.20 0.08 0.02 South America - 0 0 0 0 World 2.00 1.36 1.60 1.09 0.32 Selected European Countries Austria 0 0.17 0.08 0.04 0.02 France 0.82 0.55 0.44 0.39 0.31 Germany 53.00 28.78 13.40 5.86 3.85 Italy 0.10 0.06 0.05 0.04 0.06 Portugal 0.17 0.11 0.06 0.03 0.02 Russia 0 0 0 0 0.17 Spain 2.00 0.27 0.18 0.15 0.06 United Kingdom 0.15 0.13 0.14 0.11 0.10

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Table 5.1 (Continued)

Notes

a In some cases sites denoted as “forts” are included in the “castle” category. In the case of North America, forts are not included (e.g.: forts maintained by the Northwest and Hudson Bay Companies) and forts established by the armies fighting in the Civil War in the United States or in the western reaches of Canada and the United States. The noticeable jump in the number of castles in Asia in the 17th century is due to the establishment of rule by Japan’s Tokugawa Shoguns. Most of the castles that existed in Japan between 1600 and 1870 were demolished during the Meiji Restoration that commenced in 1868. The numbers of castles recorded for Germany are an undercount. Only large castles are included. Some sources indicate there are over 25,000.

b Designating palaces is to a degree a cultural issue. In some locales “mansions” are treated as palaces; in other locales a distinction is made between a grand mansion and a palace.

Sources http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_palaces accessed between November 10 and November 25, 2018. What did the aristocracy do once they no longer resided in antiquated military fortifications? Those who could afford to do so built palaces where they could hold concerts and display their art work, their oil paintings and their sculptures, their scientific instruments, their microscopes and telescopes, their globes of the world, their mineral collections, and so forth. In short they built mini-museums where they could show off their cultivated learning and flaunt their discerning taste, where they could play their flutes and lutes, where they could practice on their harpsichords and clavichords, where they could organize poetry readings. In short they became paragons of soft power.

This was one face of the transformation in power dynamics unleashed by mercantilism.

The other face was the metropolis, the great cities like London, Paris, and Amsterdam where finance – stock markets, bank offices, merchant house headquarters, and insurance companies

– was concentrated. Under mercantilism the great financial centers grew by leaps and bounds.

Appendix Table A.2 speaks to this phenomenon. Estimates in the table, albeit crude and

315 imprecise given the flows of persons entering and exiting cities on a regular basis, suggest that by 1700 London and Paris had populations over a half million, Amsterdam over 200 thousand.

In these great metropolises soft power markets – consisting of music, art, and scientific enquiry aimed at a mixture of aristocrats and bourgeoisie alike – flourished as never before. No longer need one go to Italy to hear opera; no longer need a painter travel to Venice or Florence to study painting – Rembrandt never left the Netherlands – or a composer need to take up residence in Venice or Rome to master the newest techniques in writing concertos, sonatas, partitas, and arias. Of course one could go to Italy but the point is you no longer needed to.

Italy would come to you.

Consider two composers of the early seventeenth century, Georg Phillip Telemann and

Johann David Heinichen. As Director of Music in Hamburg, a thriving commercial Hanseatic port city in northern Germany that was blessed by avoiding the worse devastations of the Thirty

Years War, Telemann organized a set of productions advertised as “Musique de Table”

(Tafelmusik) in 1732 – he placed advertisements in the newspapers aimed at recruiting the widest possible audience to his concert series – in which he displayed his ability to compose music of all styles, French, Italian, and German. His audience was to be treated to a “mixed taste,” hearing a plethora of styles, Polish, French, German church, Italian chamber, and Italian aria. Befitting a city steeped in Italian opera (developing a taste for opera was considered a requisite for displaying aristocratic taste), Telemann knew his musical stew would please an audience populated by prosperous merchants and nobles alike. Again consider the court of

Catholic Elector Frederick Augustus III at Dresden – the “Florence on the Rhine” – in the early eighteenth century. This was a famous court that could have employed Johann Sebastian Bach

316 had it desired. But it preferred a composer who had lived in Italy and who had imbibed the latest Italian styles. After all the Elector planned to take his orchestra on the road with him as he made a grand tour of Europe, treating guests in Vienna and Venice to the beautiful music his private ensemble produced. With this in mind he hired Heinichen as composer and musical director, expecting his servant to provide him with festive music of all types, music in the Italian style for sure, music that could be enjoyed after a day spent hunting. With this agenda clearly laid out Heinichen was fully prepared to do his duty, even composing music that evoked the hunt itself.

In a European world increasingly studded with noble courts and great metropolitan centers the artist, the composer, and the natural philosopher had market options that would have astounded the geniuses of the Renaissance. That these geniuses moved around from country to country promoting a mixture of regional styles that was the hallmark of European culture written large – freely exploiting the exit option – testifies to the fact that fragmentation was alive and well in Europe. At the same time it testifies to the magnetic attraction exercised by the great metropolitan conurbations that were increasingly dominating cultural life: London,

Paris, Amsterdam, joining an elite group that comprised the older centers of advanced civilization, Florence and Venice. A kind of national unity was being fostered in a small number of countries, notably Great Britain and France. Unity of a sort: yes. But not an end to the dialectic by any measure. A unity fashioned through the emergence of great cities did not prevent the pendulum from swinging politically. Indeed concentrating people in conurbations where militant groups could readily coalesce into belligerent mobs actually fostered the struggle between radically opposed variants of Enlightenment experimentation.

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Great Britain Embraces the Pendulum Swing During the seventeenth century Great Britain veered between French Catholic inspired absolutist monarchy – a concept best expressed by Louis XIV in his succinct statement that he was the French state, that his sovereignty (solidly rooted in the theory that there is a Divine

Right of Kings, God selecting rulers) was unrivalled in France – and Protestant, specifically

Puritan, inspired dominion 2. Advocates of a strong king untrammeled by a weak Parliament railed around the Stuarts – James I, Charles I, Charles II, and James II – while the Puritans pushed forward the theory of a political order in which Parliament – the House of Commons and the House of Lords – would rule in tandem with the king, better yet would overshadow the monarchy in actual practice. A two decade long period of political turmoil between 1640 and

1660 – declaration of a long Parliament meeting in defiance of the king, civil war, the execution of Charles I, launching a Commonwealth and later a Protectorate under the leadership of Oliver

Cromwell, reestablishment of the Stuart monarchy under Charles II – divided the political elite of Great Britain into two opposing camps, a Whig camp advocating constitutional monarchy, the Crown being relatively weak, and a Tory camp ardently opposed to republicanism.

Many practical matters divided Whigs and Tories. As a whole Tories were High Church by which was meant a variant of Anglicanism that was akin to Catholicism. As well Tories tended to be landowners although not necessarily the wealthiest of the landowning gentry. The ranks of Whigs were peppered with powerful families living off their rural estates but powerful merchants rubbed shoulders with them. The Whigs wished to create a Bank of England that catered to mercantilism – after all under Cromwell parliament passed the Navigation Acts that restricted the right of overseas colonies to ship goods from one colony to another, that

318 restricted their right to directly ship goods to continental Europe requiring them to utilize

British carriers that transshipped the products through Great Britain, thereby generating revenue for the state while bolstering commercial opportunities for merchants – while the

Tories wanted to launch a powerful bank that looked after their interests as powerful agriculturalists. The point is they were at each other’s throats. Compromise was difficult to cobble together although compromise did occur. After the Glorious Revolution of 1688 compromise was largely carried out within the walls of Parliament.

What was the Glorious Revolution? It was the invasion of England by a massive fleet assembled by the Dutch stadtholder William of Orange - husband of Mary who was the daughter of James, Duke of York, who eventually became king as James II – that overthrew the monarchy headed up by James II, a Catholic and an advocate of absolute monarchy. While the invasion was technically an act of international warfare it was really nothing of the kind. It was an extension of the civil war that had roiled the country since the late 1630s: the Whigs had invited William to invade; they staunchly supporting his military takeover.

Why? The Whigs wanted Mary to become Queen after the death of James II which would leave the throne open to one of his children, ideally Mary, who was first in the line of succession. Since she was entitled to take the throne as the daughter of James II there were grounds for thinking this would be the natural outcome given primogeniture. But in point of fact there barrier to this outcome, one rooted in the ambiguity of primogeniture. The problem was simple: James II continued to have children younger than Mary including a son who was raised Catholic. If he ascended the throne on the grounds that he was male and males should take precedence over females, a Catholic dynasty would be established. Despite the fact that

319 her father was Catholic Mary was not. She had been raised Anglican at the behest of Charles II, brother of James II. Preventing French leaning Catholic absolutism was central to Whig doctrine. Hence either guaranteeing Mary’s claim to the throne – or rather a joint-monarchy of

William and Mary that would certainly eventually usher in a monarchy under Mary since she was younger than William – or finding another Anglican to prevent establishment of a Catholic dynasty under the son of James II was paramount in the eyes of the Whigs. But not the Tories and certainly not James II.

Defying James II a rebellion – known as the Monmouth Rebellion – broke out, supported by the Whigs. It aimed to seize the crown away from James II: its nominal leader was an illegitimate son of Charles II who was Anglican. Not surprisingly, it was violently suppressed by

James II who made sure key insurgents were executed in bloody fashion. This precipitated the decision of the Whigs to invite William to invade.

The upshot was the ascendency of Whigs to power with a de facto constitutional monarchy. Eventually, upon William’s death, Mary became Queen; when she died, without heirs, the decision was made to invite a German house, the House of Hannover, to take up the throne. The Hannover line was Protestant. It agreed to abide by the principle that parliament was in the driver’s seat. A series of parliamentary decrees were passed ensuring that only

Protestants could occupy the royal throne. As well, bills were passed ruling out the use of “cruel and unusual punishments,” torture, in the execution of persons declared treasonous. James II was driven out of England, eventually securing French support for rebellions aimed at reestablishing Stuart control of the British throne. These rebellions – so-called Jacobite rebellions headed up by James, later his offspring – were all eventually suppressed. For all

320 intents and purposes civil war ended. What did not end was Whig-Tory competition. Over the course of the eighteenth century the Whigs assumed the role of progressives, pushing extensions of the Enlightenment program, encouraging bourgeoisie participation in policy making, while the Tories became their natural opponents, taking up the mantle of conservatism, defending the interests of rural landowners. In the latter half of the century the predominance of political power gradually swung away from the commercially oriented Whigs, favoring the Tories. A two party system in which the pendulum swung back and forth was firmly established.

Unity was elusive. In its place was on-going political conflict. When we speak of the establishment of the modern British nation-state we have in mind a system in which two powerful parties – one the government, the other the official opposition - fight for control over the application of Enlightenment inspired ideas within the walls of Parliament: progressives against conservatives.

Evasive Unity Roils the French Revolution When the French Revolution broke out at the end of the 1780s, the French had the

British example as a useful model for building a constitutional monarchy 3. What the British lacked – a formal written constitution – the Americans established in the new-found state, the

United States. The initial idea was to build on these two innovations in Enlightenment inspired government while going a step further. The further step was a bound attempt to forge a unity neither the British nor the Americans had managed, or even desired, to create. The idea was to imbed the concept of the General Will into the new constitution: among the rights accorded citizens was the right (duty?) to contribute to a collectivist General Will. The General Will was a

321 novel concept stemming from the thinking of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. What was it? To some it is the essence of the Enlightenment; to some it is the essence of the Counter-Enlightenment because it encourages officials of the state to promote a unifying, potentially totalitarian, ideology imposed upon the populace as a whole. It is the basis for the idea that a civil religion should be created – definitely not Christianity – that embodies the spirit of collective citizenship, a kind of revolutionary virtue. Some critics of the concept argue it is an argument in favor of a one-party state, the officially sanctioned party acting in parallel, dictating the policies adopted by formal organs of government, ministries, police forces, military units. Those aspiring to ideals contrary to the civil religion are unwelcome. In his writings Rousseau actually suggested that malcontents dissenting against the General Will should be executed. As a call for secular unity that is prepared to wage terror in its campaign to instill virtue it is definitely a doctrine inimical to Enlightenment guarantees of free speech, freedom to practice a religion, and freedom to assemble as a means of voicing political discontent.

The long-run reasons why the decade during which the French Revolution caught the attention of the Western world (inflaming political divisions in the Americas and the Caribbean, fomenting slave revolts in what later became Haiti, setting off a chain of wars that embroiled all of Europe) occurred when it did – commencing in either 1787 or 1789 and ending around ten years later – are clear enough. Absolute monarchy in the French mold was running into severe fiscal constraints. Trying to match the success of the British and the Dutch in generating growth in both domestic activities and in foreign colonial possessions was draining the coffers of the king and his court. At the end of the Seven Years War France lost Quebec to Great Britain; exacting revenge – and bolstering its interests in the Caribbean – through its military support

322 for the American troops combatting British forces during the American Revolution – was costly.

No sooner had a big power balance between France and Britain been reestablished through force of arms, the French government found itself facing debts it could no longer handle. It was forced to call together the Estates General in an effort to extract more revenue out of the economy. One obvious solution was to tax the First and Second Estates – the Church and the

Nobility – but that required delicate political compromise.

Added to the constraints imposed on the French monarchy was the spread of

Enlightenment inspired rebellions elsewhere: in the United States for one, in the Austrian

Netherlands (notably Brabant, a portion of Belgium that was ruled over by the Holy Roman

Emperor). Echoing the American Revolutionaries, secessionists in Belgium declared a

Declaration of Independence in 1789. The spread of publishing in France was another problem.

Broadsheets and pamphlets mocking Louis XVI and his Austrian wife, Marie Antoinette, were being hacked all over Paris and the major cities. Added to the woes of an overly worked group of official censors were the writings of Enlightenment philosophers like Denis Diderot and Jean le Rond d’Alembert who edited the multi-volume Encyclopédie to which fiery writers like

Rousseau contributed. Diderot was as savage and passionate in attacking Catholicism as was

Voltaire.

Finally there was the holdover of feudal practices: subjection to corvee labor services; the right of members of the Second Estate to chase rabbits and foxes on their hunts willy-nilly throughout the fields peasants farmed, ravaging crops carefully planted and tended for months on end. These violations were particularly odious to a heavily taxed peasant. Peasant led

Jacqueries had broken out in centuries past – during the fourteenth century for instance - over

323 excessive taxation and noble abuse. A death march of poor harvests contributed to peasant discontent. Jacquerie fomenting issues continued to fester, adding fuel to the flames that the

Third Estate set into motion when it demanded the establishment of a National Assembly in

1788 devoted to composing a constitution, upsetting once and forever the already chaotic debates and political infighting that broke out at the meetings of the Estates General.

From the very beginning of the French Revolution the battle between progressives and conservatives was apparent, making a mockery out of the concept of the General Will that remarkably – considering its appeal to a super-unity - appears in the preamble of every constitution France has operated on since the 1790s, the famous Declaration of Rights and

Citizen. The Third Estate sat of the left of the chair where the King or his representative sat at the Estates General. They were the party of the “left”. Later in the Legislative Assembly the radical Jacobins continued the tradition of seating themselves on the left. This meant their opponents had to occupy seats somewhere else. The party of order elected to seat themselves as far from the jeremiads thrown at them by the left as they could, hence on the right side.

Moderates ended up in the middle, in the plain, forming an erstwhile center attempting to elicit compromise from the two extreme politically opposed wings. Hence the terms “left-wing” versus “right-wing,” progressive versus conservative, moderates bridging the gap. Only after the Thermidorian reaction of 1794 – the leaders of Thermidor dispatching to their deaths the members of the Committee of Public Safety that instituted the Reign of Terror- did this seating arrangement end at least temporarily. Suppressed temporarily, it was subsequently revived.

You could not do away with the left-right axis dividing political parties, dividing citizens, even dividing wealthy elites at sumptuous salon gatherings.

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Due to its sheer complexity the French Revolution is impossible to capture in storyline fashion. What is relevant for our purposes are a few summary points regarding the competition between reactionary right and radical left generating political pendulum swings stunning in the sheer contrast between regimes arrived at. As a whole the left was in favor of de-

Christianization, at the minimum the closing of nunneries and monasteries, takeover and sale of

Church assets particularly land, and a program of making priests and bishops swear allegiance to the state, effectively making the clergy state functionaries. Not surprisingly the right opposed these demands. The famous revolt of the Vendée – a peasant revolt led by clergy opposed to taking the oath and royalists opposed to republicanism during which some of the most virulent acts of terrorism visited by the left on their enemies took place – was largely fomented by attacks on the independence of the Catholic Church. The attempt by Robespierre to establish a state religion evoking the sanctity of secular Reason and revolutionary virtue – evoked at the Festival of the Supreme Being in the waning days of the Reign of Terror – was the epitome of the attempt by the left to institute the General Will as an ideology.

Another source of bitter division between left and right was whether a King should rule over France, either operating with some real authority, or at least as playing the role of titular, nominal, head of state. After Louis XVI, who had attempted to escape France as his power was gradually stripped away from him, was executed on the scaffold by the guillotine France became a republic. After Napoleon was deposed in the aftermath of the Battle of Waterloo

Bourbon rule was reestablished but did not last long. Throughout the nineteenth century republicanism actively opposed attempts by Church and the royalists to return France to a pre- republican France. A classic example of this is the left-right divisions that occurred over the

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Dreyfus affair that broke out at the end of the nineteenth century. A third issue involved socialism. What most of the Jacobins were not socialists they were ardent democrats; and in some cases they ended up advocating government intervention in the market as a means of distributing food, especially bread, to the indigent and impoverished. This meant setting up a system of price controls. In principle these price controls were designed to balance demand with supply. In practice they encouraged peasants to withhold grain from the market, feeling that price controls were reducing the incomes they could and should be making. Government as a price-fixing monopolist proved to cause as much pain as it elevated by subsidizing the poor.

How much of this experimentation was driven by mobs attacking politicians and bureaucrats and how much was rooted in a carefully thought out agenda for instituting a form of communism is not obvious. In any case it was a radical step that was taken during phases of the

French Revolution and it returned as a politically potent agenda in the aftermath of the Franco-

Prussian war of 1870-1871, a radical Commune, short-lived to be sure, being established in

Paris.

The French Revolution looked backward – to fourteenth century Jacqueries and simmering resentment over the rights of aristocrats to hunt on cultivated fields – and forward to Soviet Communism that defined the General Will in terms of the Dictatorship of the

Proletariat. It was a striking example of the hinge of history written dramatically in the bloody events of a nation-state in the making. A thesis (collecting in unsettled agendas from the distant past, wielding them with forward looking principles of the Enlightenment) ended up generating an antithesis that not only made a mockery of the very principles that the thesis was based on,

326 but set the stage for an even bloodier twentieth century hinge, the experiment in Socialism in

One Country carried out under the dictatorship of Joseph Stalin.

Soviet Union Communism: Unity through Tyranny

Behind the phrase “Socialism in One Country” was a bitter struggle over ideology and power. The notion that the Russian Revolution ushering in Bolshevik one-party rule would once and for all time demonstrate that successful revolutions could occur, avoiding the tangle of practical problems that condemned the French Revolution - divisive infighting between opposing right and left factions laying the groundwork for military rule under Napoleon – proved to be an illusion 4. Why?

From the outset the Russian Revolution was a contradiction. It was a coup d’etat carried out by revolutionary party espousing a Marxist ideology asserting that only through a gradual buildup of class consciousness among the masses could a genuine revolution take place. It was the seizure of power by a small relatively disciplined group of fanatics who hated both the Czar and Western bourgeois governments alike. In principle their stated goal was to instigate revolution throughout the industrializing world, in Europe, in North America, in Japan. In practice revolutions did not occur throughout the rest of the industrialized world: the failure of an aborted Hungarian Communist revolution, the collapse of a takeover of the German government by the radical Spartacus League headed up by Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebnecht were particularly galling and disheartening to the small group of Bolsheviks like Vladimir Lenin,

Leon Trotsky, Karl Radek, Joseph Stalin, and Nikolai Bukharin who had to prepare themselves for the Soviet Union coexisting with bourgeois states.

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Even more glaring as a blatant contradiction undermining the legitimacy of the Russian

Revolution as a true Marxist revolution was the fact Russia itself was not an industrial power. It was primarily an agrarian economy mainly populated by a land hungry peasantry that knew nothing about Marxist theory, was staunch in its attachment to the Russian Orthodox Church, that might despise the Tsar but only because of the heavy taxation burden imposed upon the peasant communes.

If there were ever a set of contradictions inviting political disputes this was it.

By the early 1920s hard cold political reality had set in over the Kremlin. The politburo making policy for the Soviet Union rapidly factionalized. One faction – headed up by Leon

Trotsky – refused to abandon the idea of promoting Marxist inspired revolutions abroad, espousing the ideal of permanent revolution. This faction was also committed to a radical restructuring of the Russian economy, a kind of utopian communism, collectivizing agriculture, nationalizing industries, state management of the economy, highlighted by the formulation of ambitious five year plans. These were the leftists. Opposing this faction was a group of rightists headed up by Lenin, Bukharin, and Stalin. They advocated a go-slow strategy. Encourage the growth of a private capitalist economy, waiting for it to grow sufficiently successful and wealthy until the decisive day when the Communist Party which had nourished it would take it over, nationalizing and collectivizing. The rightists prevailed between 1921 and 1928, creating the

New Economic Policy that even invited in to the Soviet Union investment from capitalists living in bourgeois states. The rationale for this was step back from revolutionary purity could be found in the Marxist scriptures themselves, in writings that said that private market capitalism and bourgeois rule was a stage that history necessarily had to proceed through before a truly

328 proletarian economy could emerge Phoenix like from the dying embers and ashes of corrupt unstable private capitalism.

That the New Economic Policy was an inconvenient expedient, a contradiction of the very sort that Marxist dialectics suggested would have to be deposited into the dustbin of history, was an uncomfortable fact that many Bolsheviks found hard to swallow. From the standpoint of propaganda it could only be viewed as a decisive step backward, discouraging young idealists, sending the wrong message to the myriads of professional opportunists who joined the ranks of the Communist Party once it became apparent the state would not collapse through either foreign invasion or internal civil war. How do you indoctrinate these enthusiastic recruits to the party committed to building a truly virtuous society? One stopgap was to promote personality cults celebrating the wisdom of charismatic revolutionary leaders. After

Lenin’s death he was turned into a demigod. His tomb became a touchstone. Statues of Lenin appeared everywhere. His portrait, joined to a portrait of Karl Marx, appeared on billboards. He was the first great revolutionary genius, a source of inspiration for the masses everywhere but particularly the masses in the Soviet Union. But this was hardly sufficient.

It was no surprise that Stalin, who was slowly but steadily building a career for himself as the leader of a faction deeply involved in expanding membership in the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) realized that the New Economic Policy was an uncomfortable fit with ideology that was rooted in proletarian rectitude. With this in mind he moved in 1928 to dismantle the New Economic Policy, shifting leftward, determined to wipe out the old leftist that drew its inspiration from charismatic figures like Leon Trotsky who had opposed the New

Economic Policy. To Stalin, Trotsky and his henchmen were anathema. They must be crushed

329 through revolutionary justice. Stalin set in motion a political process that eventuated in Trotsky being driven out of the Soviet Union. Eventually living in permanent exile in Mexico Trotsky was assassinated by a Party member who had wormed his way into Trotsky’s inner circle. Wielding an axe, he thrust it into Trotsky’s skull. Freed from prison after two long decades of incarceration, the assassin returned to the Soviet Union where he was awarded a prestigious medal for his great devotion to Stalin and the CPSU leadership. The party of revolutionaries who had fought off assassination plots in the early twentieth century had become the party organizing assassinations as an act of political will. Purges – sifting through the ranks of the

Party for dissident voices who deserved death – became the order of the day.

This was the basis for Stalin’s reign of terror in the late 1930s. In 1936 a committee commissioned by Stalin who had aggrandized power to the point when he could dispense with collective leadership of the CPSU promulgated a new constitution for the Soviet Union. It promised freedom of speech, freedom of religion, and freedom of assembly, all grand

Enlightenment principles that were made a mockery of it in the aftermath of its promulgation.

As the noted historian of Russian Communism Isaac Deutscher asserted these hallowed bourgeois principles were “a veil of liberal phrases and premises [glossing over] the guillotine in the background.”

No sooner had the constitution been ratified by the CPSU, Stalin began to ramp great purge trials that wiped out the careers and lives of most of the old Bolsheviks. Dragged before courts set up during the Great Terror a number of the very members who had sat on the committee drafting the constitution were accused of perfidy, treason, deviation from the Party line as dictated by the Supreme Leader. After the hypocrisy of show trials contrived to convince

330 foreign journalists that Stalin’s purges were fully justified, each so-called counter-revolutionary traitor legally condemned were dispatched by a gunshot to the back of the head. Bukharin and

Radek, two of the most influential members of the Party during Lenin’s lifetime, were executed as flagrant counter-revolutionaries.

So much for unity in the CPSU. So much for the ability of Marxist revolutionaries to avoid the bloodletting that had turned the French Revolution into a battleground in which the evocation of virtue proved to be nothing more a stepping stone for wholesale wallowing in vengeance, implacable hatred, and despicable terror.

Chapter 6 Two Poles of Artistic Genius: Progressive Renaissance versus Gothic

Summary of the chapter: The world of art – the epitome of pure soft power – is as prone to ongoing conflict as is the field of politics. This chapter highlights the ideological conflict between Gothic and progressive Renaissance approaches in Europe between the fifteenth century and the late nineteenth century. It also shows why soft power grows relative to hard power, redirecting conflict away from violence, channeling it into the field of culture.

Artistic Geniuses and Renaissance Capitalism Accompanying the cult of capitalist genius that emerged in the commercially successful geographic zones of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries – Italy, the Lowlands, and the southern Germany (Bavaria) was an explosion of creativity in the fine arts. It consisted of a variety of experiments in painting, sculpture, architecture, and music. What it is perhaps an over-simplification to describe this movement as falling into two distinct camps that competed with one another, I believe one can make a plausible argument that it was Janus-faced. One

331 side I dub the “progressive Renaissance” looked forward, embraced the idea of progress, believing strongly in science and technological advance in transforming artistic endeavors. The other face was the Gothic; it looked back to the Medieval Era and its potent symbolism for inspiration.

The progressive Renaissance was committed to revolutionary change; it emphasized heroism, glory, and the potential for virtuous, increasingly civilized, behavior; it was deeply infatuated with the light, the sun, the harmonious, the orderly exemplified by the reduction of natural philosophy to a small set of simply elegant mathematical equations. Historically this movement emerged out of humanism, one of whose pillars was celebration of pre-Christian

Greek and Roman mythology and philosophy. In later guises it morphed into the Enlightenment project, spawning Deism, Unitarianism, and atheism.

The other face, Janus swivelling around as it were, I dub the “High Gothic.” The high

Gothic looks backward; it focuses on the tragic; it invites us to appreciate the suffering and darkness of the human condition; it wants us to come to terms with the horrors of damnation; it wants us to spurn sin or at least willingly accept the consequences of our debased, temptation ravaged, lives. Despite dwelling on the cruelty of war it imbibes a profound conviction that the horrors that humanity imposes upon itself are inevitable. It invokes the four horsemen of the Apocalypse: warfare is inevitable; the best defense is offense; humans are riven by evil impulses, or at least incapable of voluntarily governing their instincts. In politics it promotes the use of hard power by state authorities – or a powerful Church wielding an inquisition – as a wall designed to counter the spread of flames of civil warfare and rebellion.

Beginning with the Inquisitions put in motion by the pope, later joined by separate movements

332 aimed at stamping out heresies by monarchies, notably those in Iberia reclaiming territories once held by Muslims it was transformed into the cult of chivalry by the Dukes of Burgundy.

Later morphing into Counter-Enlightenment philosophy, it laid the soft power foundations for two great totalitarian police-state atrocities of the twentieth century, Fascism and Communism.

Think the infamous Nuremberg Nazi rally captured in the film “The Triumph of the Will.”

The harsh reality is that totalitarianism is terrified of the very anarchism it helps to unleash, feasting on ferreting out the impure, the impious, the putative traitor, the fomenter of discontent with the status quo. It you cannot purify them, suppress them, torture them, drive them out, break them with thought control, bend their spirits until they break. Use the threat of terror to bring them to their knees. Hence the Terror of 1793-1794 in France aimed at monarchists, the rich, staunch supporters of the traditional Catholic Church free of Republican control. Bring on the guillotine! Hence the Nazi embrace of Gothic symbolism and regalia.

Hence the campaign to rid Germany of Jews and gypsies, the so-called malefactors destroying the purity of the nation. Hence the attack on the kulaks in the Ukraine, and the creation of a far flung gulag archipelago in the Soviet Union. Hence the Purge Trials of the 1930s in the Soviet

Union, Stalinists demonizing the old Bolsheviks and the followers of Trotsky in show trials replete with contrite tormented confessions of guilt leading up to the bullet dispatched to the back of the head. Hence the Cultural Revolution in China, iconoclastic to the core, destroying the remnants of Confucianism and the cult of the Emperor. In the realm of political theater the

Gothic is a fearsome force to be reckoned with.

Still there is a sunnier side to the Gothic: Romanticism. Romanticism rides an undercurrent of the tragic, the mystical, the hopelessly heroic, the yearning for an evasive

333 absolute. Not surprisingly romanticists in the fields of art and music dwell as often as not on the

Promethean, the dramatic shaking of one’s fist at cruel Fate, the conscientious rebel embracing self-sacrifice, the Robin Hood figure unmasking the greed and evil that pervades humdrum existence. Think Beethoven’s Third and Fifth symphonies.

The dynamic interaction - the dramatic dance swirling around and between dueling agendas, progressive Renaissance and Gothic, advances in one sphere continually challenging practitioners in the other - imparted a strong fillip to experimentation in the field of soft power.

All of this novelty fed demand, especially from those purchasers intent on securing the latest experiments in the arts. In this sense the frontiers within which soft power flourished continued to expand outward sometimes slowly, sometimes in striking discontinuous leaps and bounds. A giant iceberg – painting like the old masters, composing along lines laid out a century ago – moved forward because generations of consumers raised from childhood learned to revere what their parents revered. At the same time radical experiments by young and vibrant arts added layers of ice to the massive body, speaking particularly to a younger audience.

By dint of the widening range of expression encompassed under its umbrella, soft power garnered new audiences, it’s very adventuresome exhibiting an almost magnetic attraction to those wishing to shock their compatriots and companions. Its restlessness was a major engine pushing soft power forward at the expense of hard power. Novelty is beguiling; market competition is a powerful instigator of creativity.

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That said, steady growth on the demand side coalescing around the iceberg was was surely more telling in the long run than were the periodic bursts of dynamism on the supply side attracting new adherents. What was the source of this steady advance?

The crux of my argument is that urbanization was a major factor in pushing forward the power ratio, the ratio of soft power relative to hard power. In turn this acted to suppress outbreaks of violence. The law of unintended consequences saw to this. In making this case I want to emphasize the relationship between the middle classes heavily represented in urban settings and the nature of the art that they demanded as clients.

One of the hallmarks of this artistic response to the growing demand for soft power among the ranks of the bourgeois was the “seduction of nature.” For the first time a premium was placed on the insights in the working of nature considered broadly. Purchasers of art – patrons commissioning concert music – wanted the art to speak directly to them as consumers, speaking to their romantic experiences, their walks in the woods, their emotional responses to the political and social realities they had to deal with in of their lives. They wanted to take in the “natural world” through the eyes and ears of geniuses uniquely able to channel “nature” into works of art.

What do mountainsides pockmarked with indentations from ancient molluscs tell us about the ingenuity of a creator God? What does the water rushed down rapids swirling and engulfing rocks as it debouched into marshes tell us about laws of motion? What are the secrets of a life force expressed the plethora of so-called unconscious animals: beavers, horses, barnyard cattle, loyal dogs, imperious cats, groundhogs, cockroaches, and humble centipedes?

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And most important of all: what are the wellsprings of human emotions, virtuous at times, despotic, dark, and brooding other times? In a portrait rendered by an insightful genius do we not see flitters of character - arrogance, humility, lasciviousness, brutal power seeking - revealed in their clothing, their furnishings, their postures, and most tellingly in manifestations of their individual soul shaping their visages? And what of their animal nature? What are we to make out about the mechanics of the human body when we observe in autopsies the organs, when surgeries reveal the pumping of blood throughout the body?

Appreciating genius, distinguishing it from mere cleverness and artifice, understanding it was a gift rising above the technical capacity to adorn and entertain, distinct from the simple channeling of religious symbolism and allegory, was novel. It did not happen overnight. It took decades to sink in. It is not simply the fact that a growing number of artists, musical composers, and natural philosophers gained notoriety on the European stage. More to the point it was the fact these famous individuals challenged existing norms about the liberal arts. Unique in as they were in steadfastly – obsessively - pursuing their private visions, they acted as pioneers, leaders, spawning schools of imitators, heading up as masters commercially successful workshops bristling with apprentices and subordinate artisans, sweeping away competitors. In their own way they mimicked the innovative merchant capitalists – the Medici, the Fugger – who were establishing branch banking, financing everything from the building of massive structures like the Florence Cathedral or Florence’s towering Campanile or St. Mark’s Cathedral in Venice to mining and shipbuilding. They were innovators per excellence.

That genius emerged as a distinct criterion in evaluating culture was a powerful social driver. It became an engine for fanatical devotion to creativity; it emerged as an agent

336 promoting meticulous self-criticism; it served as an irritant scolding the lazy by confronting them with the virtues of what an unbending and unrelenting work ethic could generate in spawning glorious works of genius; it served to stir would be painters and composers to cultivate unrelenting fastidiousness in completing their works. Regardless of external gratification – lucrative contracts and commissions, public adulation and praise, showering of sycophancy – what made a genius work intensely was the very assumption that they were blessed with insights and talents vouchsafed to themselves alone, denied to other mere mortals. Think of Beethoven as he contemplated suicide when he became increasingly sure that he was going deaf, that he was unlikely to wed and have his own children. What did Beethoven do? He rejected self-destruction: he dedicated himself to fulfilling the genius within himself, consigning himself to a tragic life, albeit illuminated by his creation of incomparable works of genius.

The cult of genius was self-fulfilling: by celebrating genius it encouraged the emergence of genius. Convinced he or she was inculcating divine inspiration, the genius became martyr and slave to noble truth, absolutely convinced of the rectitude of his or her calling.

To an important degree geniuses are adroit practitioners of synthesis. They drew from what others did, from other geniuses to be sure but also from less inspired colleagues. By picking and choosing, by separating wheat from chaff, they absorbed influences, they devoured, blatantly stealing if they felt it justified to further their ends. In this sense the genius was best situated in a genius center where he or she had the greatest pool of competing techniques to either draw from or to consciously reject. Where the cult of genius shone the

337 strongest, geniuses gathered, absorbing the light shining from a myriad of candles. A classic example is Florence during the mid-fifteenth century.

That geniuses were special is one reason they were mobile. To be sure not in the case of the genius painter or print maker – they needed assistants who could mix paints, prepare varnishes, fashion knock-offs – tapestries worked up from cartoons by the master, woodblocks tediously carved from the master’s paper designs, engravings etched onto metal or stone, or duplicate canvases originally created by the master. As entrepreneurs they reached distant markets as long as they abandoned a once heavily demanded commission, working up fresco painting realized on the walls of buildings.

Consider three of the most famous composers of the fifteenth century 1: Johannes

Ockeghem moved from Antwerp to France, serving three kings (Charles VII, Louis IX, and

Charles VIII); Jacob Obreht moved from Cambrai, then to Burges, then to Antwerp, finally ending up at Ferrara; the re-known Josquin des Pres (described by Martin Luther as “the master of the notes” and hailed as a “Michelangelo of music” by Cosimo Bartoli) moved from positions at Milan (enticed there by the Sforza dynasty) to Rome, then to France, then back to Italy in

Ferrara (a competitor to Milan in music), finally settling down at Condé-sur-Escaut near his birthplace.

In short demand was determining where geniuses went or where they were most likely to sell their works. Exit was both a stimulator to creativity, a source of freedom, and a necessity if one was to succeed financially. The question is why.

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That there was a urban cultural belt – analogous to the industrial belts of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries – stretching from Venice through Northern Italy across the Alps into the southern Rhineland and on to the Low Countries – along which geniuses moved or resided suggests an explanation regarding the spur to demand. As the most urbanized regions of

Europe they were the most opulent. They had the greatest concentration of merchants, commercial elites, middle class households, and of course workshops primed to offer their goods on market. Were the descendants of old feudal elites extracting rents from their communities in a position to dominate demand? Were the Dukes of Milan, Ferrara, and

Burgundy the principal shapers of the burgeoning demand for culture? Or was the middle class

– particularly the wealthier members of the middle class, the bourgeois - able to muscle their way into the markets?

The evidence such as it is, suggests middle class demand was crucial. As the ranks of merchants and professionals residing in towns expanded in response to economic growth increasingly a prosperous bourgeois kept the iceberg of the fine arts moving forward. Elites – princes, dukes. Kings, queens, found themselves competing with their social inferiors for the attention of the most gifted geniuses. Consider the Burgundy lands from which sprang oil painting. One of its founders – perhaps its most important early innovators – was a man known as the Master of Flémalle and is probably Robert Campin2:

“[he] was not a court painter, but a townsman catering to the tastes of well-to-do fellow citizens ….” What held for Campin also held for Jan (John) Van Eyck, the great master of the Low Countries during the mid-1400s. True Van Eyck was in the service of Philip the Good, Duke of Burgundy.

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That said one of Van Eyck’s most famous compositions – Giovanni Arnolfini and His Bride painted in 1434 – was commissioned by a wealthy Italian merchant residing in Flanders. There is no doubt there was an important affinity between the painters of the Low Countries and their middle class patrons: both were commoners. Indeed in the painting of Giovanni Arnolfini there is a cryptic note to the effect that Jan Van Eyck was there, indicating he was a witness to the marriage. The painting as marriage certificate, its religious symbolism – Passion scenes on the frame of the mirror in which Van Eyck’s own face as witness is reflected, a single candle burning in daylight reflecting Christ’s presence – advertising the sacredness of the matrimonial vows being taken.3

Many other examples – the importance of Venetian merchant spending for St. Marks and the early seventeenth opera; the determination of the Florentine middle class to divert spending into buildings open to the public; the production of woodblock and engraved prints aimed at a middle class audience unable to climb the patronage mountain – all testify to the fact that the urban cultural belt of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries existed because demand was flowing from a diverse mixture of social classes. In this respect it is important to emphasize that most of the art and music of that period is lost. Frescos have disappeared because buildings have disappeared or fallen into ruin with age. Paintings have been lost. Prints on relatively fragile paper have simply disappeared. Many musical compositions were never written down or their printed scores – the printing of music on moveable type presses beginning during this period – have simply been deposited into the proverbial dustbin of history.

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Geniuses did not exist in a vacuum. They rode a wave – a surge in demand - that gathered force in the late 1300s. The most salient characteristic of this wave is the change in the power ratio. As noted a major factor promoting the change in power ratios was urbanization, growing in the districts most heavily involved in merchant dominated commercial trade and craft production. Hence the urban cultural belt of the Renaissance. Its adverse was the decline in demand for hard power, particularly salient in rural districts, less so in urban conurbations bent on protecting themselves against powerful landlords.

As I have argued earlier hard power, embodied in military and policing force, depends upon total resources available to its wielders (including calling upon non-monetized services, for instance commitments required of dukes, princes, and monasteries to provide a certain number of armored knights, battle horses, and attendants for a certain number of days out of a year), hence upon total income generated within the jurisdiction headed up by the persons exercising authority. As well it depends upon the relative prices of exerting violence. For instance outfitting a knight for battle was an expensive proposition whose cost rose relative to land rents when agricultural output soared, poor harvests following upon poor harvests. It became harder and harder to induce people to become knights when the market value of the lands with they were rewarded for their services. Outfitting an army with an infantry employing guns became a far more economic attractive option. While ideological commitment to chivalry as a rationale for Christianizing feudalism discouraged dukes and princes from using guns it did not deter townspeople living in cities from forming militia armed with muskets. The result was a decisive change in the balance of hard power between cities and rural landlords.

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The dynamics of soft power – exerting influence through diplomacy and cultural refinement – were similar to hard power in some dimensions but not in all dimensions. Wealthy individuals lacking feudal underlings could exert it through sheer flaunting of financial wealth.

Like the Medici they could commission the most talented artists and musicians to produce entertainments, easel paintings, frescos, elaborate weddings, regal perfumes for mistresses, and the ability to bribe others into serving their interests. At the level of a jurisdiction soft power depends upon per capita income. More wealthy merchants, higher per capita income in communities dominated by the middle class. Because most European cities enjoyed per capita incomes far in excess of the rural hinterlands from which they drew foodstuffs, minerals, and timber they enjoyed a decisive advantage in wielding soft power. The fact that guilds specializing in painting, music, and medicine, were concentrated in cities bolstered their relative prowess in commanding soft power. The powerful merchant houses in Florence,

Venice, Pisa, and Milan were situated chock-a-block with the guilds. The costs of securing a talented genius to work in their service were far lower than those encountered by a prince or duke living in a remote rural castle.

Soft power that was increasingly aggrandized by capitalist geniuses in cities grew by leaps and bounds transforming the market for power. To keep up aristocracies aspiring to status within the growing ranks of the so-called civilized elite world defined by refined merchant culture had to divert resources away from hard power. If exercising diplomacy instead of exercising armies required refinement and good taste in the arts, so be it. Like it or not the cult of capitalist genius was becoming increasingly important as a potent ideology deeply opposed to feudalism.

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What evidence do I have concerning the growth in the power ratio? I have already discussed – in the previous chapter - the decline in the number of castles and their replacement by palaces a phenomenon largely restricted to rural environs or the suburban extensions sprouting up around major cities. Much important is what transpired within metropolitan centers. In cities what gathered force was strong positive feedback, soft power building on soft power, soft power replacing hard power. According to the logic of the consumer demonstration effect demand for a product or service spreads when people hitherto unaware of the product or service come to realize that it is available because a select group is purchasing it. The active presence of artistic and musical endeavor encouraged further growth in the markets disseminating paintings, woodcuts, illustrated broadsheets, and advertisements for concerts.

Given the high densities characteristic of European cities, many still surrounded by walls, it was almost impossible for an urban dweller to be unaware of the arts. Not only were they were exposed to the arts in churches and in city halls; servants witnessed the display of culture amongst the well-to-do for whom they worked. In response to the growth in demand would-be woodcut masters, aspiring painters, violinists and composers of popular ditties flocked to densely populated conurbations where demand per capita was especially intense.

An unintended consequence of this feedback phenomenon was a decline in per capita explosions of violence. There was a kind of trickle-down effect. As the mass of city dwellers aped the preferences of urban elites diverting their expenses from employing street gangs to enforce their wills and enforce their prestige toward commissioning sculptures, portraits, and concertos, the power ratio – soft power displacing hard power – soared. Urban violence declined, putting in motion and important tenet of the Enlightenment, the suppression of cruel

343 and unusual punishment as a method for curtailing crime. In short urbanization was a major reason underlying the gradual decline in mayhem. What evidence supports this assertion?

As a first approximation I am going to assume that all of the organized violence taking place during this period was directed at cities, not directed from cities outward onto the countryside. This is not strictly true but it is helpful to start with this assumption in order to grasp the logic of the argument. I will make an additional assumption: the percentage of the resources – human, material, mechanical, capital and so forth – devoted to military activity during this period was one percent of the overall level of economic activity. Under these assumptions the urbanization rate (UR) is a rough indicator of the ratio of soft power to hard power (directed at cities), namely POWR. Let SOFPOW stand for soft power (generated out of urban conurbations) and let HARDPOW stand for hard power (directed at cities):

(6.1) UR = UR/1% = SOFPOW/HARDPOW = POWR.

This is certainly an overestimate. Tempering it somewhat consider one half the urbanization rate, a state of affairs that obtains when the percentage of the economy of a region is devoted to organized military force.

(6.2) POWR = UR/2.

This is probably more realistic for a starting point. Even so I will put forward caveats suggesting it is a bit too high shortly.

To put some meat on the bones consider Maddison’s estimates of urbanization for regions of Europe assembled in Table 3.4:

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Region UR UR/2 = POWR

Belgium (Burgundy) 21.1 10.05

Netherlands (Burgundy) 15.8 7.5

Italy 14.9 7.5

France 4.2 2.1

Germany 3.2 1.6

Spain 6.1 3.05

Under my assumptions the power ratio is far higher in the urban cultural belt than in the rest of

Europe. This is not surprising given my assumptions crude as they are. The fact that urbanization increased across Europe during the period between 1600 and 1800 – see Table A.2 in the Appendix – suggests a trend toward an increasing power ratio was active in Europe prior to industrialization that pushed urbanization to much greater levels.

Now to the caveats. There are a number of accounts suggesting civility – getting along with each other without taking up arms – did go hand in hand with urban life. Why? One reason is monitoring. As Chapter six of Kunzle (1971) demonstrates with woodcuts, engravings, and etchings done during this period city administrations advertised their tough policies regarding brigands and assorted malcontents. At their gates they placed gibbets, criminals hanging from trees, wheels upon which the guilty – or the innocent falsely accused – had been broken, their ravaged bloodstained carcasses sending a message to one and all: if you come here to rob and murder you will be tortured – hot pincers biting your flesh before you are broken or

345 disemboweled or castrated – then executed perhaps even by burning at the stake. In an urban community where people live chock a block to one another it is far easier to ferret out wrong doing than it is in a countryside full of forests where former soldiers cut loose from their regiments lurk waiting to ambush ill prepared wayfarers. For precisely this reason most merchants, pilgrims, guild journeymen, and diplomats travelled in groups the better to protect themselves.

Even so murder, robbery and physical bullying were hardly unusual events in cities. It was a violent era. Cities were certainly not immune to violence. That said in a comparative sense they were less violent than the countryside. There is little doubt that soft power outstripped hard power within their walls. Interestingly enough trends set in motion with commercially oriented towns and cities impacted titled elites, not just powerful landlords increasingly building palaces to replace defunct castles, but more important the very apex of the elite, namely kings, queens, dukes, and princes.

It is important to keep in mind that European dynasties did not always resort to hard power in acquiring territory. They used marriage as an avenue for extending their control over land from which they secured property taxes, excise taxes, and graft. With the development of oil painting on boards later on canvas finding a suitable match involved commissioning painting.

Hale writes4:

“All over Europe the agents of princely bachelors were checking genealogies, scrutinizing nubile candidates for indications of health and fecundity, reporting on … the size of breasts, indications of temperament …. so intrusive could these investigations be that the official responsible for the Saxon end of Henry VIII’s inquiries about Anne of Cleves asked indignantly whether the King’s agents would like to see her naked. Instead, Holbein’s portrait of her played its part in forging this link with a useful Protestant

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European ally. Henry did marry, but then could not bring himself to make love to his ‘Flanders mare’” Of course marriages had to be celebrated with musical performances. In point of fact not only royalty assemble orchestras for ceremonial occasions like royal weddings. Many dukes and princes learned to play instruments. Charles the Bold of Burgundy was an accomplished instrumentalists and composer. Henry VIII played lute and virginals, was able to read musical scores from sight, and even composed songs and masses despite pressing political duties.

Indeed assembling an excellent orchestra was becoming essential for rulers. By the fourteenth century and certainly by the fifteenth century most royalty were constructing private chapels where daily masses were performed. Charles the Bold, Duke of Burgundy, laid out the following instructions for his chapel in 1469 5:

“…his domestic chapel …. be maintained and governed by 25 persons named below, that is 13 chaplins ….. My Lord shall have five battle trumpets, six minstrel trumpets, three players of soft instruments ….. [so that] each day of the year at a suitable hour an ordinary high mass shall be celebrated …. [in] chant and discant …. For singing (polyphony) from the book there will be at least 6 trebles, 3 tenors, 3 bass contras and 2 middle contras ….” Moving the singers and instrumentalists back and forth from sacred to secular duties was a logical way to kill two birds with one stone.

Other indicators involving the displacement of hard power by soft power abound. For the first time secular rulers were seeking ways to avoid conflict through peace-keeping treaties that did not involve the Vatican 6. The subject of a general peace-keeping arrangement was broached to King Louis XI of France in 1462 through the agency of Antonio Marini, a banker- merchant. Although this floundered bilateral alliances were increasingly aimed at avoiding conflict. Henry VIII arranged a marriage contract for his two-year-old daughter with the eldest

347 son of Francis I (still a babe in arms) as a way to head off conflict between the two powers who had warred for over a hundred years during the late Medieval Era. What was yet to come was the idea of a Europe-wide balance of power. Still rulers were thinking along these lines.

The fact that the publication of Baldassare Castiglione’s Courtier made waves in elite

European circles is not inconsequential. The book had a huge influence, going into many translations, securing a strong readership amongst philosophers and practical political figures alike 7. Castiglione was no pacifist. He was cynical enough to realize warfare was going to continue in Europe. But as a cultivated humanist and advocate for civility he did believe diplomacy could serve as a brake on settling disputes without resort to arms. He was sensitive to the needs for etiquette including the importance of proper decorum around females.

Certainly this deference towards women could be interpreted as male chauvinism – and it was by some social critics – still it was also an genuine appeal to good breeding. Ending wars quickly through peace treaties required diplomats able to square apparently round circles that were not in fact round. Sharing humanist sophistication was an avenue for finding common ground, for hatching out clever solutions to seemingly intractable disputes. Music has charms to soothe the savage beast. Exchanging paintings rather than swords and armor is a step toward bonding around an appreciation of soft power.

Even when warring campaigns took place the booty was increasingly soft power booty, not instruments of hard power like standards, swords, muskets and cannons. Consider the campaign waged by Charles VIII in Italy during the mid-1490s 8:

“Charles VIII brought home …. goldsmiths, an alabaster worker, a marquetry specialist, a blender of perfumes, a gardener … they were joined in the next reign by medallists,

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stucco and faience workers, cabinet makers and advisers on the manufacture of glass wares and mirrors. The most valued imported craftsmen were given naturalization papers …. the process of importing skills, then copying and finally becoming independent of them [was under way] ..” War was becoming increasingly a mechanism for effecting import substitution in the soft power industries.

The fact that dukes, princes, and lesser nobility, let alone monarchs with their attendants moved around – staying with their aristocratic colleagues – promoted the diffusion of soft power. If Queen Elizabeth I was going to stay at your estate you had better gather an orchestra to entertain her majesty, you better grace your household with rich tapestries, you better show off portraits of yourself and your offspring painted by competent artists.

European soft power went hand in hand with secularization laying the groundwork for the Enlightenment. This assertion may seem paradoxical. After all the Protestant Reformation of the early 1500s ushered in fervor, unleashing fury in religious matters. Moreover

Reformation and Counter-Revolution democratized religion increasing putting it in the hands of rank and file congregants. By attacking the arrogant power of Catholic Church religious elites, particularly the Vatican, it forced the Catholic rump to revamp some of its more avaricious practices regarding simony, the selling of indulgences, and nepotism that had shocked

Europeans all over Europe 9. Indeed it could be argued it politicized religious doctrine, forcing persons who were indifferent to the niceties of theology to choose, to take a stand. Among parties forced to take a stand were monarchs and princes forced to contend with bitter internecine divisions within their realms. You cannot satisfy everyone when you proclaim a

349 policy regarding faith; still you have little choice. It is inherent in your position as a leader to take a position.

Looming over politics was the seesaw ideological battle between Protestants and

Catholics that raged on – often descending into open warfare fought on battle fields - for over a century. The bitter Thirty Years War between 1618 and 1648 ending with the Peace of

Westphalia hammered out in 1648 finally established a modus vivendi, an umbrella, under which communities divided by doctrine could coexist.

An unleashing of religious fervor: how can you argue this promoted secularization? One can because prophecy itself was opening up ideological divides. Perhaps genius – by contrast – could open floodgates promoting peaceful political solutions, appeals to transcendental intervention ignominiously failing to do the trick.

Accompanying ancient mythology was eroticism. It was standard to paint Dido, Venus,

Psyche, as lascivious nudes. While fervent Protestants joined figures like Savonarola in rejecting

350 humanistic eroticism, the market was not on their side. Indeed one of Luther’s complaints against the Vatican involved the scandal of prostitution. The two Italian communities in which prostitution was the mostly deeply entrenched – a book listing the names, prices, specialties, and addresses of the cortegiane, prostitutes possessing their own houses or apartments, as opposed to workers at brothels was published in 1535 – were Venice and Rome. In both cities tourism was a flourishing business. In addition in both cities unmarried men – priests and monks in Rome, second and third sons of merchant families prevented from inheriting the family business 9. Luther thought one way to close the brothels was to permit religious elites to marry. He followed his own advice, marrying a former num.

That eroticism was rampant is apparent from the print collections discussed by Kunzle

(1973). In one of his prints he displays a high class courtesan walking on pattens called zoccoli that allowed them to tower over lesser mortals10. The fact is the high class harlots of Venice were an elite. They sang, they danced, they played musical instruments like the harpsichord, the resided in luxurious dwellings sporting elegant tapestries and paintings. They were the

European equivalent of the Kyoto geisha.

Europe was becoming increasingly secular. The Reformation did not change this. Nor did the Counter-Reformation. Iconoclastic revolts against humanistic culture aside, Europe was increasingly absorbing the soft culture flowing out of Italy, Bavaria, and the Low Countries. One way it absorbed the fruits of the urban cultural belt stretching from Venice through to Bruges and the Netherlands was through military invasion. In this sense hard power and soft power were inextricably intertwined.

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The urban cultural belt of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries was highly diverse.

Imagine it as it stretched east to west. Let us begin with Italy.

Start with Venice in the east, a mighty military republic nominally controlled by an elected Doge who was more figurehead – the mouthpiece for a mercantile oligarchy. Through its lavish expenditure on a war fleet fashioned and outfitted in the greatest European seaport of the age, the Arsenal, it exercised control over a sprawling oceanic empire that it had secured in the aftermath of the Fourth Crusade. True it lost Constantinople quite soon after 1204 but it held onto Naxos, Crete, Cyprus, Corfu (and six other tiny Ionian islands) and outposts on the coastline of Greece (Modon) and Dalmatia 11. It was an empire unto itself. Padua laying to the west was solidly positioned within in its sphere of influence. Moving through Northern Italy one has Florence the jewel of Tuscany, a republic until 1531 (when Alessandro de’ Medici was installed as hereditary Duke of the Florentine Republic by Pope Clement VII) and a host of small conurbations under Florence’s implicit or explicit control of Florence (Pisa, Lucca, and Sienna).

There is Rome, Vatican headquarters after the popes returned from Avignon in the latter half of the fourteenth century. Most important, dominating the Lombard plain, was Milan, a despotism controlled first by the Visconti, then the Sforza.

Beyond this Italy was a crazy quilt of tiny despotisms, many ruled by Condottieri like the

Sforza. How Italy became fragmented into so many small despotisms – ruled by the Varani in

Camerino, the Malaterta in Rimini, the Manfreddi in Faenza, and the Baglioni in Perugia – is a huge story unto itself. That said one can see three forces at work: the legacy of the Crusades; political instability in some jurisdictions (notably Florence and the Vatican); proto-mercantilism; and the prospect of foreign invasion.

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The disbanding of the Crusades played a major role. Many knights returning from the campaigns fought in the Levant joined mercenary armies selling their services to Italian despots, armies controlled by powerful military overlords, the Condottieri. There is no doubt dealing with the decline in demand for military services provided by knights was a general problem throughout Europe but it was a particular problem in Italy because Italy was the logical place for warriors abandoning the Levant – either coming through Mediterranean ports or crossing over from Byzantine territory – to settle. When supply exceeds demand something has to give. Those who wielded the sword were not going to give up their status gladly. Pillage was one option. This was bad for business, for trade. Not surprisingly energetic rulers looked for other options. One was to hire on those who might fleece you. Of course you ran the risk of having them turn on you. Indeed this was what happened in many cases. Condottieri simply took over cities. Milan was an excellent case in point.

Domestic instability was an issue. How could you make solid deals with an entity known to change its mind with flamboyant abandon? In Rome and the Papal States power was in the hands of the pope, elected by cardinals from all over Europe, and his advisors and confidantes.

Getting elected pope was an exercise in bribery. It was said you had to satisfy the interests of the Venetian cardinals who resided in what was undoubtedly the least religious jurisdiction in

Europe, awash in skepticism and hostility towards the Roman curia, in order to get elected.

Corruption within the Vatican was rampant at times: particularly when men who placed personal avarice or military power on a pedestal. The Borgia were a prime example: not only did the pope go on killing spree; his ruthless son Cesare Borgia embarked on a brutal military campaign aimed at expanding the territorial holdings of the Papal States.

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Florence was a different kettle of fish altogether. As Burckhardt points out Florence was the most modern state in Europe. It was a republic enjoying a storied history in political affairs.

Its constitution was continually fiddled with to better bring its concrete reality in line with its vaunted destiny as a beacon of democratic rule, beckoning the other cities of the Renaissance to follow its example. The Florentine people were passionate about politics. Two of her writers

– Dante Alighieri and Niccolò Machiavelli - generalized from their Florentine experience in formulating theories about the best way to run European politics (Dante in De Monarchia advocating rule by the Holy Roman Emperor, Machiavelli penning his famous defense of political calculation The Prince). Interestingly enough neither writer was happy with the very thing that made Florence such a political hotbed: on-going factional fighting and continual political change. Pro- and anti-Medici factions fought for control of the republic. In the infamous Pazzi conspiracy of the late 1470s Lorenzo de’ Medici and his son were brutally attacked, Lorenzo alone surviving as his son collapsed, perishing under an onslaught of bloody sword cuts. The very political creativity at work in Florence went hand in hand with artistic, musical, and scientific creativity. Sure experiment is good! But could rulers outside of Florence trust it as a reliable staunch ally?

Adding to the difficulty of hammering out stable alliances in Italy was proto- mercantilism. By “proto-mercantilism” I mean the carving up of territory by big fish in order to bolster their economies. I do not mean the system that developed during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and is exemplified by Britain’s Navigation Acts. Proto-mercantilism was a little simpler in terms of policies but it shared with mercantilism the idea there was a trade pie that was being cut up. A big fish like Florence, lying on the Arno River but in the interior, could

354 only guarantee a stable port on the Ligurian Sea if it kept Pisa on its side as a dependable friend.

So why not colonize it? So the logic went throughout northern Italy. Milan was close to the

Alps. It had a natural geographic advantage in siphoning off trade coming in from France, the

Swiss cantons, and southern Germany. Venice protected to a degree by the Dolomites was a thriving port on the Adriatic exploiting its colonies in the Aegean. Rome on the Tiber was further south naturally exploiting its access to the Tyrrhenian Sea. Carving up territory along these lines made sense but it required trust on everyone’s part. It was always in the interests of one of the parties to undermine the position of at least one of the other parties, thereby increasing their access to markets.

Complicating the entire was the possibility of foreign invasion by the two biggest fish on the European continent: the Habsburg Holy Roman Empire and France. As they were rivals on the continent they were also rivals within Italy, going all the way back to the thirteenth century feuds between the Guelph and Ghibelline (the Guelph party being pro-French and pro- commerce, the Ghibelline being pro-Holy Roman Empire and pro-feudal), a bitter rivalry that caused Ghibelline Dante to be driven out of his beloved Florence. The problem was this. Was it better to form an Italian military alliance designed to keep both military whales out of Italy altogether or was it better for an individual party in Italy – say Venice, Florence, Milan, Naples or the papacy – to form an alliance with one of the two whales, bolstering their own prowess within Italy?

That forming an Italian-wide alliance through diplomacy proved possible in fact as well as in fancy is indicated by the fact that the Most Holy League (Florence, Venice, Milan, Naples and the papacy) kept Italy relatively free from internecine conflict and out of the hands of the

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Holy Roman Empire and the French between 1455 and 1494. But trust did break down, in part because the Sforza in Milan courted Maximillian the Holy Roman Emperor (with a marriage) and Savonarola in Florence courted France. Through these festering – yet arguably petty - disputes were ushered in the frightful Italian wars of the sixteenth century.

Could the Italians have avoided this fate if their leaders had not spent so lavishly on soft power, acquiring orchestras and bevies of female singers, building lavish palaces studded with statues, tapestries and paintings? Had the allure of culture diverted rulers from their true vocation, the most ruthless and ambitious managing the establish hegemony throughout Italy?

Machiavelli thought so. Believing as he did that the primary duty of the successful prince is to manage warfare – prepare for it, be victorious in it – he felt one of Italy’s greatest problems was what most of us today would view as Italy’s greatest triumph: the promotion of art, music, and science, the very embodiment of soft power.

The Gothic in the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Century Lowlands

At the other end of the urban cultural belt were the lands held by the Dukes of

Burgundy for over a century stretching between 1363 and 1477. In many ways the ideological opponents of Italian Neo-Platonism – the Dukes promoted the cult of chivalry, the third Duke

Philip the Good celebrating the “Feast of the Pheasant” at a sumptuous banquet put on for his

Knights of the Golden Fleece, a chivalry order created by Philip himself, the lands of Burgundy suffered a fate not dissimilar from that of Italy in the sixteenth century, ultimately absorbed by

France and the Holy Roman Empire. Control of the rich Burgundy lands was an indirect artifact of the Hundred Years War. John the Good, king of France, wanted to incorporate them directly

356 in his kingdom but feared English intervention aimed at stripping him from this jewel. With this in mind he passed it on to son, Philip the Bold, as an apenage of France, nominally independent.

Upon his death the lands he controlled were divided up amongst his four segments into four parcels – Charles V securing France with its capital at Paris; Louis, Duke of Anjou with its capital at Augers; Jean, Duke of Berry, with his capital at Bourges; and Philip the Bold, establishing his capital at Dijon. The four sons vied with one another in patronage. The famed Limbourg brothers were painters supported by Jean; Rogier van der Weyden and Jan Van Eyck served in the Burgundy 12.

As long as the Hundred Years War raged the Dukes of Burgundy managed to stay independent of France in both name and hardnosed reality. Burgundy allied with England during the conflict, alienating France but keeping a free hand politically. Once the conflict expired it was clear to the Burgundy political elite that their best option for surviving was to gain complete independence from France, becoming a kingdom, something that was technically possible provided the Holy Roman Emperor was prepared to take the risk of offending France by issuing a declaration turning the powerful Duchy into a full-fledged monarchy. To this end

Charles the Bold tried a combination of diplomacy and warfare. He approached Frederick the

Holy Roman Emperor (father of Maximilian, the next Holy Roman Empire, who later married

Charles’s daughter known quaintly as Mary the Rich). He entered into a military campaign fighting the Swiss over Alsace and Lorraine, a gamble that turned sour as he found his forces severely overmatched by the Swiss in three major battles. Perishing at the Battle of Nancy and leaving no son as heir, Charles the Bold was the last of his Valois line to hold onto the rich urbanized belt of lands that included Dijon, Bruges, Lille, and the Netherlands. The bulk of the

357 estate reverted to France which absorbed it. A small rump was granted to Mary the Rich who had married the Hapsburg Maximilian, setting up a scenario where Burgundy as a whole ended up being divided by France and the Holy Roman Empire, the main prize secured by the French.

In short just as in Italy the biggest military fish of the continent managed to meddle in – and extinguish in the case of Burgundy – the soft power belt of Europe.

Was Machiavelli right? Did the focus on soft power set up Italy and Burgundy for conquest? In one sense the answer must be “yes.” Opulence and culture made Italy and

Burgundy natural targets. On the other hand small fish are small fish. Had Charles the Bold been successful at Nancy the outcome might have been different. But lacklustre support from the bourgeois exercising influence in connurbations like Nancy did him in. Soft power was a problem. When push came to shove hard power prevailed over soft power.

Reflecting the ideology of chivalry pervading much of France and Burgundy the art and music of Burgundy and its immediate environs is primarily high Gothic. By this I mean it was romantic but dark, an undercurrent of tragic love doomed by feudal obligation flowing through its pores. It looks backward to the International Gothic. Missing is the progressive agenda of the

Florentine Renaissance. That said it embodied the spirit of rational, scientific observation and experimentation that was characteristic of Florence. What differentiated it was its brooding, its celebration of the grotesque, its focus on the horrors of damnation and debasing sin, its portrayal of the ways of the flesh as contrary to salvation. While it would be a mistake to argue that this generalization is applicable to all of the art and music produced in France and

Burgundy its traces are evident everywhere in the cultural field. No better proof is needed that the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries produced two dramatically opposed traditions – one

358 celebrating optimistic progress, the other brooding and looking backward – than the contrast between the High Gothic culture of France and Burgundy and the progressive Renaissance tradition of Florence and Venice.

In thinking about the High Gothic it is important to keep in mind that it was diverse, hardly monolithic. For one thing it was not exclusively Protestant; Catholics could engage with it as they did during the Counter-Reformation. One element was ascetic piety, the holiness of the pure penitent asking for forgiveness for ones sins. Eroticism was suspect: it put the pleasures of the flesh above pure romantic love (its highest form being divine love epitomized by Dante’s treatment of Beatrice in the Divine Comedy) Dominican Savonarola exemplified this tendency.

Fear of the darkness of Hell, its walls blistered from the intense heat, devils dragging down sinners of all stripes including wayward priests and cold-blooded murderers (it is said Dante based his description on entering Hell from his experience in Venice when he delved into the

Arsenal teaming with sweaty bodies) was the other side of the same coin. Misunderstand true love – wallow in carnal lust, take up the life of a prostitute, rake, or brother of the cloth devoted to the brothel – you will pay the price in the next world.

Chivalry was another component: feudal loyalty, dedication to the duties of a true

Christian knight, military analogies were never far away. Protestantism evoked it. Think “a mighty fortress is our God”; think “onward Christian soldiers”! As well the Gothic played well in

Catholic Spain that was fresh from wresting away the moors, forcing Jews and Muslims alike to either convert to the true faith, leave, or expect to be burned at the cross. Steeped in the mysticism of the mighty Gothic cathedrals, light splashing through the congregation from beautifully stained windows above, it spoke to the soul. It was romantic; it was mystical; it

359 embraced the divine light from above promising salvation to those who lived in the darkness of sin on earth but were able to resist its temptations.

The fifteenth century composers of France and Burgundy reflected the mixture of piety and chivalry characteristic of the High Gothic movement. They combined the sinuous Burgundy chanson melody – drawn from the troubadour tradition of composing popular secular songs – with the cantus firmus grandeur of the mass. The Burgundy court exemplified the two-sided nature of the music. Charles the Bold wanted masses and motets performed at his chapel; as well it wanted entertainments for his guests feted at grand parties. The fact the Burgundy court moved around from place to place meant his orchestra and composers moved with it: the idea was to impress elites all through the realm. The Burgundy dukes - aspiring to chivalry-driven glory on the field of battle, to a kingdom of their own, combined with the sophistication only soft power could bring – wanted their cake and eat it too. It was in this spirit that they attracted the services of Jacob Obrecht composer of chansons, masses, and motets. At various times in his storied career he composed at Cambrai, Bruges, and Antwerp.

While the “Michelangelo of music” – the “master of the notes” according to Martin

Luther – Josquin des Prez did not work for the Burgundy court he was attracted to France and he did finish his career in Condé-sur-L’Escaut. Like Obrecht he combined the popular with the religious tradition, penning masses, motets, and secular songs alike. His great innovation was the imitation mass, all voices subject to free fantasy as they transformed an older traditional mass into a new work altogether fresh. It was parody of a sort. Stirring the pot des Prez played with a mix of fugal statement and answer and popular genres including Italian melodies he had been exposed to when he worked for the Sforza in Milan and the pope in Rome. Key to his

360 achievement was expressiveness – systematically suiting the musical lines to the words of the text – the affectations, the emotions, being realistically captured in the composition 13. In short it was a kind of realism mimicking the realistic tendencies – the precise representation of human emotion and soul – of oil painting.

Realism captured in oils lay at the heart of the great Burgundy painter Jan Van Eyck who followed in the footsteps of his brother Hubert Van Eyck. Unlike fresco painting applied to walls oil painting was applied to wooden panels, later on canvas. There is no doubt painting in oils was introduced during the Medieval Era, but used sparingly. The Romans probably experimented with it, although they preferred mosaics or “encaustic” wax painting in which the colors were stirred into a bed of hot molten wax. Apparently Giotto used in oils to finish off some of his fresco work. What the Van Eyck brothers brought to the table was a new method of working in oils. Eastlake (2001) suggests that climate - and perhaps the tradition of painting on stained glass – had much to do with the Van Eyck experiments in preparing colorless drying varnishes, oleo-resinous, readily dried out, even in the shade. Unlike Italian warm dry weather, air in the Low Countries was laden with moisture. Once the Van Eyck brothers had learned the appropriate alchemy – because this was what laborious preparation of oils, pigments, and varnishes was all about, practical chemistry – they had in their hands the ability to render in great detail the subtle differences in shade that light creates when it plays over the faces, the walls, the smoke from a candle, the creation of atmospheric perspective in distant mountain ranges and the like. Working from a dusty prime coat painted on a panel, a meticulous painter like Jan Van Eyck could add layers of color (building up zones of color in places to suggest depth and shadow) in order to obtain remarkable realism.

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Eastlake describes Van Eyck’s technique as a variant of glass-painting – the tradition well established in embellishing the glass gracing Gothic cathedrals – because he was able to bring brightness out of his dusty prime coat by layering. The layering in subtly distinguished zones of color imparted depth. This method is distinctly different from Florentine geometric perspective that rests on the illusion of space – people and objects moving around or standing in a three dimensional place – not on the illusion of depth. To be sure the two methods could be combined as they were by Leonardo da Vinci but this was not the agenda of the fifteenth century painters of the Low Countries.

Beyond alchemy it is apparent Jan Van Eyck used other offshoots of practical mechanics, namely mirrors. In a number of pictures he painted mirrors appear, for instance he shows simultaneously a woman’s face, bosom, and back by painting in a mirror onto the wall behind the model who sat for the portrait. As we know mirrors are a device for “extending” space, imparting a sense of depth 14.

Van Eyck’s work represents one side of the Gothic. It is steeped in rendering the light that pervaded Gothic cathedrals. A more extreme – ideologically driven – version of the Gothic spirit is exemplified by the painting and drawing of Hieronymus Bosch whose career spans the period 1480 to 1516, the temporal doorstep to the Protestant Reformation. Indeed Bosch belonged to the Brotherhood of Our Lady of s’Hertogenbosch that had been founded by a

Netherlands preacher in 1318. Both Martin Luther and Erasmus of Rotterdam had joined the

Brotherhood. Its doctrine emphasized the independence of true Christians from the Mother

Church. It ridicule monks whom the brothers felt were wasteful and impractical, eschewing life

362 in the hustle and bustle of practical commercial reality. In short they were Protestants before

Protestantism.

Bosch’s work exemplifies the dark side of the Gothic. Sin is evil. Sin pervades the corrupt

Catholic Church. The Church hierarchy cannot be trusted. The suffering of the Redeemer – His blood-stained sacrifice – is paramount. The Seven Deadly Sins are the apex of folly. Wallowing in the Fountain of Adultery – prancing around in the Garden of Earthly Delights – is a preparation for the Descent of the Damned into Hell where the tormented soul of the wicked is dragged by hard-working devils who find pleasure in tormenting the faithless. There are only two futures in the afterlife: Paradise – souls being drawn heavenward in a circular funnel bathed in an ethereal light – and its antithesis, Hell.

The High Gothic world of Bosch is populated by the grotesque: giant cockroach-like bugs devouring humans, demons in bizarre costumes, elephants not larger than the giant insects roaming about, plants growing out of the anuses of humans. It is a nightmare world. That the

Spanish court was attracted to Bosch is evident from the fact that a large number of his works ended up in Spain’s museums including the Prado. What attracted the Spanish is almost surely the Gothic emphasis on rejecting sins of the flesh and on highlighting the horrors of damnation.

This was definitely a key theme exploited by the Hapsburg Charles V in his war against the

Protestants during the mid-1500s. Interestingly enough Venice possess a Bosch painting as well.

Yet what jurisdiction was more steeped in carnal sin than Venice.

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To summarize. The High Gothic was as much a feature of the spread of soft power during the fifteenth century as was the progressive Renaissance agenda. The two faces of Janus confronted each other in every venue.

The Progressive Renaissance in Fourteenth and Fifteenth Century Italy and Southern Germany Venice was the home of the Carnival. From its flamboyant revelry prior to Lent grew opera, the most secular form of music springing forth from the progressive Renaissance. Who better to represent this powerful innovation than Monteverdi?

Monteverdi rode a popular wave in Italian music. Singing was a major art form during the fifteenth century. The Sforza of Milan were patrons of female virtuosi. The dukes of Mantua and Milan vied for talented women who could modulate between sweet soft passages barely audible to mighty piano embellishments. Carnival songs were part and parcel of festivals in

Florence, processions and pageants during the holiday seasons bristling with floats funded by trade guilds that advertised their services with appropriate lyrics (a predecessor to the musical commercials selling cars, laundry soap, and toothpaste on television) 15. Beginning in the late sixteenth century and gathering steam in the seventeenth opera emerged as a way to combine stage drama with singing and accompaniment. It is not surprising that this form took off during the seventeenth century and that Venice was its incubus. Opera plots drew heavily upon

Roman and Greek myths and Roman history (the Iliad and Odyssey were a prime source for the dramas as were the exploits of Pompey). The Crusades were represented on stage as well but the main focus was on the secular. Rich merchants built opera houses – between 1637 and

1678 more than 150 houses were purpose-built – while the less wealthy vied for box seats. As

364 well the less well-off could purchase a ticket for a specific performance, presumably graced by a famous diva 16.

The problem was how to combine three different aspects of monody– arias, recitative, and polyphonic madrigal – in a satisfactory manner. Monteverdi who secured the position of choirmaster at St. Mark’s in Venice in 1613 (holding onto the position until 1643) drew heavily on innovations made by his illustrious predecessor Jacopo Peri in reforming opera performance, creating a plausible mix of drama, singing, and instrumental accompaniment. Part of his agenda was mastering the contrast between consonance and dissonance to better bring out the emotions expressed in the narrative. Another was the liberation of the recitative: increasingly it was allowed to imitate the natural rhythm of speech, the pitches detached temporarily from the basso continuo line. The result was greater expressiveness, an expansion in realistic portrayal of dramatic situations.

To this Monteverdi added a huge buildup in the orchestral forces he employed. In his operas Orfeo and L’incoronazione di Poppea (The Coronation of Poppea) he used over forty instruments. In his famed Vespers of 1610 he unleashed a brew of traditional psalm while exploiting his innovations in aria and recitative. He divided the choir, a technique that emphasized the homophonic chord-based approach at the expense of the more traditional contrapuntal method of writing for religious works. As well he exploited a remarkable range in orchestral color, creating parts for a wide range of instruments.

What Monteverdi accomplished in music – an enlarging of the range of expression capturing depths of human emotion through sound – Leonardo da Vinci achieved in oil painting.

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It was Leonardo’s goal to capture a person’s soul in a painting. This he was able to accomplish by dedicating himself to the subtle revelation of inner life through his capture of the way natural light played off the faces of people he depicted in his paintings. Careful attention to the physical makeup of the human torso – Leonardo was an avid student of cadavers, drawing muscles, bones, organs including hearts and wombs – served as a backdrop for his experiments in depicting the flow of light and darkness on skin, mirroring his fascination with the way shadows formed in clothing and on tapestries. That Leonardo’s rendering of the human frame was idealized to a degree – surely shaped by Greek and Roman sculpture that he drew inspiration from – does not detract from the fact that his agenda was suffused by a fascination with natural order as he observed it with his eyes.

From the outset Leonardo displayed his attachment to the alchemy workshop tradition.

His work with oils and varnishes – his fastidious labor intensive preparation of nut oil is a classical illustration – was alchemy pure and simple. This led him down the path of practical natural philosophy, explaining why he contributed to science through his careful drawings of the interior organs – the thorax, the muscles, the heart, the thorax – of dissected humans.

Following in the footsteps of workshops that specialized in medicine – after all the painter’s guild in Florence was dedicated to Saint Luke, patron saint of medicine – he approached the field with an observational intensity hitherto unknown in the West.

Leonardo’s other great contribution to science involved his study of light that he applied in a practical way to his painting of human flesh and costume. He carried out countless experiments with the camera obscura. In a wall facing buildings across a street drill a small hole. Letting the light shine through it you will be able to produce an upside down version of

366 what is across the wall if you place a screen a reasonable distance away from the hole within the building where you are carrying out the experiment. Suppose there is a fresco painted on the wall across the street, a figure with cap on head and costume arrayed around the neck. The rays from the top of this figure – the cap – will be directed downward toward your hole, penetrating it and appearing at the bottom of the figure projected on the screen as the ray of light is moving along a straight line (it is actually a transverse wave of light). The opposite will true for the clothing around the neck. The image is inverted on the screen. Moreover it is fuzzy at the edges indicative of the diffusion of light arising out of the shade. It is smoky what the

Italians called “sfumato”. Imagine you are painting the face of a model in a darkened space, working within the hallowed tradition of chiaroscuro, the blank sheet or panel primed with a dark color. As you create a lighter layer of color on this darkened canvas you are bringing light out of the shadows but there are always shadows that appear – perhaps less obviously – on the chin, the side of the nose, the neck. To model them realistically you can use sfumato, a very subtle change of color rendering the painted face as life like as possible.

Having carried out these experiments Leonardo set up his studio in a systematic manner designed to best capture the graduations of light and darkness he was trying to capture. Hartt

(1987) captures his method with this penetrating description 17:

“…the beauty of faces passing in the street in the morning before the sun has appeared, or in the early evening when the sun has just gone done … to produce such effects in the studio, he recommends painting all four walls of the courtyard black, stretching a sheet of linen over the courtyard, then placing the model under the linen, so that a diffused light will irradiate the face, with no sharp reflections or shadows to break up the forms …”

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In this Leonardo was able to capture the mysterious that so ever gently spreads across a countenance when in repose.

Not all of Leonardo’s experiments were successful. The classic case is his fresco The Last

Supper that he painted on the refectory wall of Santa Maria delle Grazie in Milan. Far more comfortable with working in oils on panels – allowing him to slowly build up his shadows and subtle sfumato shadings – he was too impatient with the “section at a section” method of working that best suited fresco. Leonardo painted directly on the dry wall, using an oil tempera that commenced deteriorating in the sultry Milanese humidity soon after he completed his masterpiece. To cover up the shabby state of the work widely considered one of the greatest examples of Leonardo’s genius painters reworked the mural, further compromising an already compromised masterpiece. Despite this failure, or perhaps because of it, numerous prints and copies of the work appeared soon after the work was completed, a fact Rembrandt benefited from in the seventeenth century. The dramatic interplay of the Apostles captured in the fresco

– the way countenances and body language were captured in the clusters of persons gathered around Jesus above whom was the vanishing point – was legendary, serving as a model for later generations of painters.

Testifying to his contempt for convention is Leonardo’s widely celebrated atheism. How someone who placed little if any faith in a higher divinity could paint some of the most famous religious works in Western art is a paradox of the highest order. That he was homosexual – thereby a target for religious literalists – may help explain this. How could a divinity that supposedly cared about the quality of human life leave poor Leonardo so cursed in the eyes of his representatives on earth?

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Ironically Leonardo became so celebrated - his fame as a universal genius during his lifetime being celebrated throughout cultivated circles in Europe - he himself became a soft power prize bartered over by rulers. After Lodovico Sforza’s capture by the French forces he had originally invited into Italy in order to humble Naples (only to turn against them once he observed their success), Leonardo abandoned Milan sending money onto Florence for safe- keeping, even befriending Machiavelli in Florence who was in a position to negotiate good patronage opportunities for his artist-friend (after Savonarola had been executed, Machiavelli was able to secure a high level position in the Florentine administration). The French administration in Milan wanted Leonardo back, pressuring the Florentines into letting him go.

On the basis of negotiations mediated by Louis XII of France, Leonardo was allowed to go to

Milan on a three-month leave of absence. Leonardo was in no hurry to return to Florence but the outbreak of war – the Holy Roman Empire, Venice, the pope, Spain, and England entering into an anti-French alliance – changed the dynamic, France losing control over Milan, restoring

Massimiliano Sforza as the new duke.

Once more fleeing the Milanese scene Leonardo headed off to Rome where he was given generous lodgings but was forbidden to carry out dissections. This is the era when he drew High Gothic pictures, including his infamous representation of a great Deluge that would destroy the earth. But the French had not given up on him. As the greatest prize in the Soft

Power firmament – only Michelangelo could compete – Francis I, King of France, was able to bid him away from the Vatican, installing the genius in a palace (palazzo) in the Loire, at Cloux near the royal palace at Amboise. There he served as a magnet for younger Italian painters,

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Benvenuto Cellini and Andrea del Sarto in particular. In his old age Leonardo became a soft power trophy.

Part of this is due to the fact he was as much intuitive scientist as he was artist. Make no mistake: Leonardo’s art was grounded in a systematic analytical approach, informed by careful observation of models, thorough experimentation with technical options, albeit misguided at times, approaching a scientific study of nature including psychology. There is no better example than the failed The Last Supper project. Science is always about failure. Failure of experiments, failure of theories, is a driving force in its creative drive.

That said, many of the drawings Leonardo penned in his notebooks – for giant crossbows, for flying machines, and mechanical devices – were flights of fancy more than anything else. What they demonstrate is a mechanical intelligence whether we are interested in the way the interior organs of a human perform their roles in keeping us alive or in the way we can harness natural forces to generate useful energy. Engineering of a sort but often as not grotesque. Perhaps they were motivated by a desire to absorb some of the grotesqueries of the

Gothic lowlands.

Leonardo was hardly unique in combining penetrating knowledge of scientific experimentation – clearest expressed in his study of light – with visual art. In southern Germany a remarkably astute printmaker, painter, and amateur mathematician and astronomer matched

Leonardo’s claim to be a universal genius: Albrecht Dürer. Dürer was a genius of the Leonardo stripe. Emerging out a pragmatically market oriented workshop culture he still managed to compose treatises on mathematics and perspective. His famous experiment demonstrating the

370 principles of geometric perspective – the diagram shows how one can trace out a shape on a flat surface rendering it accurately in geometric perspective – was the subject of one of his remarkable woodcuts. A printmaker by trade – he successfully ran a thriving workshop as a master – he travelled to Italy, improving his painting technique in Venice. An astute entrepreneur he courted Fugger knowing he was a client to be reckoned with. He was nobody’s fool. As the most famous woodblock printer of the fifteenth century he developed a Europe- wide reputation that won him lucrative contracts for painting. More to the point he profited from his exalted presence in the printmaking world. Prints, being far cheaper than paintings, had a much wider audience that did oil paintings or fresco wall paintings. It was this demand that he met building a substantial business for himself and the artisans he employed. Germany, being a center of publishing and reading was a perfect locale for a printmaker: prints were put into books as illustrations. The success of books recounting Biblical stories was nothing to be sneezed at.

There was nothing Gothic about Dürer. In contrast his competitor in the German painting field, Matthias Grünewald, was steeped in the High Gothic. The dark skies, the blood stained hands and body of Christ crucified, the grotesque was central to his work. To be sure like Bosch, Grünewald had mastered the techniques of perspective. Trained as an engineer he could think systematically. But he knew an audience when he saw it. It was the demand for clients enamored of the High Gothic which he chose to satisfy. No wonder Dürer referred to the works of his High Gothic competitors as the wild crude products of unsettled minds. Humanistic and progressive Renaissance to the core, he relied on a middle class consumer attracted to the vision radiating most strongly out of Italy.

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The British Gothic: From Romanticism to Arts and Crafts

William Blake is a classic case of the romantic creator: absorbed in the Gothic, hostile to science, opposed to slavery, critical of the hypocrisy of the Anglican Church (more generally critical of officially sanctioned religions), enthusiastic about the American and French

Revolutions 18. When we describe him as romantic it is important to keep in mind a famous quip made by Goethe, who in his old age was asked to distinguish classical from romantic art.

Goethe said: “Classicism is health: romanticism is disease.” In Blake’s compelling fantasies, the

Gothic unsettling fantasy of Bosch is in full display 19.

Born in London and spending most of his career in London working as a printer, etcher, and poet (albeit addressing a small audience of readers during his lifetime) Blake defined his fiery visionary illustrations printed in illuminated books as “Vision or Imagination is a representation of what Eternally Exists, Really and Unchangeably …”. In his slim volume of poetry illuminated along the lines of International Gothic volumes, Songs of Innocence and

Songs of Experience, he derides progressive Renaissance art as “Mathematic Form” while

Gothic art is “Living Form.” In his volume Urizen he attacks precise measurement, materialism, clear definitions like those employed by scientists: the monster Urizen is the prophet of a scientific and materialist religion of progress corrupting humanity. In another volume he depicts

Newton as a corrupter, an evil power inflamed by a measuring calculating intelligence, pictured as a nude figure holding a pair of calipers. Blake went back to the ancient civilizations of Greece

372 and Rome in condemning science and the arts connected with science, claiming that they were actually destroyers of art.

Given this agenda you might think Blake was deeply opposed to technological innovation. Not so. He developed a novel technique for etching known as relief etching – backgrounds etched, relief lines added above the etched lines, the entire page printed, then colored by hand – which he employed in presenting his volumes of poetry. While he never became wealthy he made a decent career as a printer and etcher. He even studied at the most official art institution in London, the Royal Academy, albeit criticizing its President Joshua

Reynolds for being insincere and hypocritical. Despite his absorption in mystical Christianity, despite his visionary approach to art, despite his attraction to the Medieval Era, he was grounded in practical commerce.

In short he was alienated. He was the classical romantic artist awaiting an understanding of his genius that never came to him during his lifetime. You could say he was a forerunner of

Vincent van Gogh. Except unlike van Gogh he married; except that unlike van Gogh he managed a printing business successfully. In short he was alienated but only to a degree. He was not completely alienated from the market.

The same paradox applies to a second English romantic genius J. M. W. Turner. Turner began his storied career painting watercolors of Gothic buildings. He did so at the bidding of his father who was determined to exploit his son in the same way Mozart’s father exploited his son’s genius: satisfy the demand for marketable products. Turner’s father knew well that watercolors of picturesque scenery were highly saleable in a market celebrating English

373 nationalism. While he painted most of his most famous works prior to the invention of paint tubes – prior to the development by John Goffe Rand in 1841 of useable paint tubes painters had to lug around pig bladders and glass syringes if they were on the move – Turner was fully prepared to dispense with Renaissance practices in which painters had to mix and grind their own pigments. In the eighteenth century the chemical industry began producing new synthetic pigments – Prussian blue and cobalt blue – increasing the range of colors an artist could employ in realizing a work. Armed with the newest paints Turner revolutionized romantic painting with a palette of bold color choices. His goal was using colors to unleash emotions. Not surprisingly he was fascinated by Goethe’s Book on Color in which the author attacks Newton’s scientific theory of color, substituting a romantic thesis in which colors represent emotions.

Painting landscapes and scenes of ships in the ocean does not make you a romantic. Yet

Turner who mainly focused his painting in oils on landscapes – some historical in the sense they are ostensibly about actual events that occurred in the storied past – was a pure romantic. The reason: nature as he depicted it was malevolent. He painted towering waves sinking steamships and sailing vessels. He painted mighty whirlwinds, thunderstorms, avalanches. Human figures appearing in most of his works are dwarfed by a hostile brooding nature. A prime example is his

1839 canvas The Slave Ship. It depicts a ship sailing away from slaves thrown into a treacherous sea to drown or be eaten by sharks. Massive splashes of yellow sweep across the sky. In another slave ship scene – Slavers Throwing Overboard the Dead and Dying – Typhoon Coming

On – Turner dredged up from his dark imaginings the apocalypse. Is nature exacting retribution on the cruel market driven ship captain so focused on making it to land with the remainder of his human cargo that he is prepared to throw Africans to a terrifying fate?

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Turner’s romanticism was suffused with Gothic leanings. Yet unlike Blake, he was never alienated, actually handsomely rewarded for his work, enjoying fame and profit from his successful marketing savvy. His artwork was displayed at the Royal Academy. He was prolific in part because oil paints had fallen in price relative to other prices, synthetics driving down costs of producing paints (he produced over 500 oil paintings and 2,000 watercolors over the course of his career). He became wealthy in old age, purchasing several homes and estates where on which he could observe nature in all its fullness. He demonstrated with a vengeance that the individual artist – set free from workshop management by the advances in paint and canvas production that allowed a painter to simply purchase inputs on the market – could not only survive but actually prosper in a market in which workshops were being steadily eradicated by factories.

There is no evidence that Turner was opposed to steam power per se. He painted a famous canvas - entitled Rain, Steam, Speed - depicting a steam train coming toward the viewer through wild weather. However he did not paint industrial towns. He did not paint the black satanic mills spewing out steam in Manchester. This does suggest that even if his artwork evinced “airy visions, painted with tinted steam” he was not a fan of industrialization and the factory system. But this is just speculation.

Still artists could not ignore industrialization one way or another. A striking example is the emergence of the Arts and Crafts movement during the latter half of the nineteenth century. To understand why it emerged when it did it was useful to briefly describe the Crystal

Palace Exhibition of 1851 that set all of London agog. It was the flaunting of industrial

375 machinery and its setting in the glass and steel exhibition hall that shocked and repelled the pioneers of the Arts and Crafts school.

With Britain’s embrace of industrialization, there was a gradual but ultimately overwhelming shift amongst Whig elites toward a free market philosophy highly critical of mercantilism. It is known as the Manchester School philosophy.

According to the theory of technological progress applied to manufacturing it should be possible to raise the standard of living of the mass of citizens living in a country. Science and entrepreneurial talent harnessed to free markets should do this. The Manchester School of

Economics made famous in the writings of David Ricardo can accomplish this provided politicians align their policies with the rationality of unfettered markets. Ricardo’s theory of comparative advantage was the distillation of this reasoning.

Ricardo built his theory using principles laid down by Adam Smith: unfettered trade is desirable; the wider the market the more efficient is labor due to specialization and division of tasks among the ranks of workers. What Ricardo added to Smith’s reasoning was an important twist: under free trade countries should specialize. Countries should focus on what they do relatively well. If you are endowed with abundant land and scarce labor and capital you should produce food and raw materials that you have a comparative advantage in bringing to market

(land intensive products being relatively cheap in your environment); you should eschew manufactures. Other countries enjoy a comparative advantage in capital and labor, in relative terms lacking in land that can be used for agriculture, the mining of minerals, and the allocation of acreage to forests. If free trade is organized between a group of countries so endowed

376 something almost magical happens. Consumers in all jurisdictions are rendered better off. In the absence of trade the country having abundant land relative to scarce labor and capital is consigned to a domestic market in which foodstuffs and raw materials are very cheap and manufactures very expensive. If it opens up to trade it can sell its foodstuffs and raw materials on a (larger) international market, prices for their exports rising relative to what they were before they engaged in trade. Consumers benefit because the relative prices they enjoy under trade as opposed to autarky permit them to secure a consumption bundle with a more satisfactory mix of foodstuffs and manufactured products. By the same token the consumers in the country enjoyed abundant labor and capital is made better off by trading with countries having abundant land and scarce labor and capital. Before trade their manufactures were cheap and their foodstuffs pricey. With trade they can realign their consumption patterns, substituting food for manufactures, ideally reaching higher levels of satisfaction.

Smith’s theory was aimed at dismantling mercantilism in favor of free trade. Ricardo’s theory was aimed at dismantling the Corn Laws. The Corn Laws in Britain involved a set of tariffs designed to protect British landowners, the backbone of the Tories. Imports of food were heavily tariffed, rendering them expensive in the domestic market. Landowners benefited because it meant they could sell their wheat, barley, rye, beats, and meat at high relative prices, enhancing their capacity to purchase manufactures that were relatively cheap. The land they owned was also favored under this policy as it was a heavily utilized input for farming – farming is land intensive – hence its value rises when the products derived from its use increase in relative value. In short debates over the rectitude of mercantilism and the Corn Laws were highly political, pitting industrialists and workers in industrial conurbations like Manchester

377 against aristocratic landowners. Ultimately the industrial sector won, dismantling both systems during the mid-nineteenth century. This was the ideological environment in which the great

Crystal Palace Exhibition of 1851 took place in Hyde Park, London 20.

Behind the push to put on a great exhibition was Albert of Saxony, husband of Queen

Elizabeth and Prince Consort. Building on the fact that Paris had already hosted international exhibitions (in 1801, 1802, 1806, and 1819), the fact that German Customs Union, the

Zollverein had carried out major trade fairs, and the fact a British Society of Arts was sponsoring trade shows in the 1840s, Prince Albert leaped to the challenge of assembling a wide-ranging group of domestic and international producers of machines, of mass produced consumer durables (cotton, silk, leather, ceramics, cutlery, and glass), of raw materials (from mining, foodstuffs, and chemicals), and of fine art.

Prince Albert’s goal was progress. What did he mean by progress? First improvements in material welfare. Second international peace. He truly hoped that free trade in goods and services would do away with war. Soft power could prevail over hard power. Free of conflicts that reduced welfare for all combatants, international trade based on the principles of comparative advantage would raise all boats everywhere. This is how he phrased it in a rousing address he delivered at the Mansion House as part of his drive to whip up enthusiasm for his project 21:

“Nobody …. will doubt … that we are living at a period of most wonderful transition, which tends rapidly to accomplish the great end to which, indeed, all history points – the realisation of the unity of all mankind …. the distances which separated the different nations and parts of the globe are rapidly vanishing before the achievements of modern invention …. [and] the great principle of division of labor, which may be called the

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moving power of civilization, is being extended to all branches of science, industry, and art.” In short the Crystal Palace Exhibition, magnificently encased in glass and metal but – to grumblers - resembling a massive greenhouse was the expression of a philosophy, the moderate Enlightenment theory of British nationalism wedded to Smithian and Ricardian principles of international trade. The vision was clear: all of humanity would benefit if trade were allowed to take place, within and between nations and states. Human potential was to be unleashed. There is little doubt that the project ultimately encouraged all social classes of

Britain to attend. Special ticket days made this possible. Prince Albert himself was very interested in developing cheap housing for the laboring classes. Surely it was not socialism by any means. But the vision of drawing the best and brightest out of all social classes was surely there.

There was little doubt that Prince Albert’s philosophy did not sit well with lovers of the

Gothic in Britain. A group formed around John Ruskin and William Morris immediately emerged as critics of the Crystal Palace approach, arguing that the manufactured goods on display were too ornate and shoddy, the designers and executers turning out woven goods, upholstery, calicos, were generating “novelty” bereft of beauty and beauty lacking “intelligence.” This group of reformers that eventually created a movement – Arts and Crafts, the name derived from the name of an exhibition they arranged in 1887 – attacked every premise of the Crystal

Palace philosophy. According to Ruskin specialization and division of labor gave birth to “servile labor” that did “dishonest” work because it was mandated by floor managers dictating a fixed set of standards for output, dictating the narrow range of tasks a worker did. The employee could no longer take pride in his or her labor. He or she was alienated from the production

379 process. Ruskin, notably in his book on Venetian architecture The Stones of Venice looked back to the early Renaissance when small workshops flourished and ideas regarding construction were voiced from a wide range of hard-working highly motivated artisans. As well he thought machinery was an evil.

Of the Arts and Crafts reformers Morris was the most deeply committed to working with his own hands. He was both designer and executant in a remarkable number of projects. Other designers were not so inclined. Many simply their creative designs to commercial firms that operated along mass production lines or at least mixed mass production with craft input.

Hypocrisy was a cold hard fact of life. Ironically the Arts and Crafts movement flourished in – of all places – Birmingham, located at the center of England’s Industrial Coffin. One reason: small establishments dominated the industrial scene in the city. Still many of the purchasers of products sold by craft oriented individuals like Morris who himself specialized in wallpaper sporting beautiful sinuous elegant shapes – elegantly wrought but simple in design furniture, woven items turned out by individual craftspeople, calligraphy and embroidery – were members of the upper middle class, including prominent industrialists among their ranks.

The Arts and Crafts movement was strongly influenced by an institution that was intertwined with it in terms of membership: the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood founded in 1848.

The Brotherhood was an offshoot of the romantic Gothic revival in England. The group took its name from its opposition to the views of Joshua Reynolds, former President of the Royal

Academy. Reynolds argued all modern art descended from the work of the Italian Renaissance painter Raphael who overlapped with Michelangelo. Members of the Brotherhood protested,

380 claiming the height of Italian Renaissance painting was achieved in the earlier period when it was more “primitive” but also far truer to its avowed religious agenda.

The Brotherhood was ambitious. Its aim was reform of society through art. Its motto was to achieve “pure transcripts” from nature in art, somehow realizing a purity in capturing nature that the early fifteenth century painters in Florence had managed to achieve. Its most noted figure was Dante Gabriel Rossetti who managed in a single stroke to convey sublimated eroticism in his art. The problem with painters like Rossetti is that they painted anachronistically: Medieval inspired themes that had nothing to do with contemporary nature.

It would be a stretch to say he painted nature, although he certainly used real models in realizing his themes on canvas. A successor artist, Walter Crane, who became the first President of the Arts and Crafts Exhibition Society, was able to unleash a similar sense of eroticism ready to explode in a noted political cartoon he did for the publication Cartoons for the Cause published in 1886 22. The woodcut shows a suggestively clad angel Liberty holding a giant shield with the word “socialism” on it bringing the joyful promise of socialism to a worn-out sleeping worker who has been subjected to mindless torture by evil Capitalism. Onward Christian socialists!

In point of fact many of the principals in the Arts and Crafts movement were socialists.

But not Marxists. Marxists were completely in favor of factories, the specialization and division of labor, and rational state control over industry. As well they did not believe in a peaceful transition to socialism. They believed in revolution led by the vanguard of the working class, the dictatorship of the proletariat under the guidance of the Communist Party.

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The Progressive Renaissance in Nineteenth Century France: Photography and Impressionism

In the mastering of light as a physical phenomenon London was Europe’s premier genius center. By contrast Paris is Europe’s premier genius center in the mastering of light as an artistic endeavor.

To be sure science played a role in Paris’s surge to dominance in the understanding of how light shaped the aesthetic perception of nature. Photography – a hybrid child born of scientific investigation wedded to technological improvements in engraving and etching – opened the door for French artists to penetrate light’s secrets.

Experiments in creating photographic images commenced in England but it was in

France that photography emerged as a market phenomenon. Thomas Wedgewood, head of the powerful Wedgewood ceramics company had an abiding interest in science, experimenting with photograms, images made by placing objects on a chemically treated surface sensitive to light. No camera was involved. Spurred on by interest in capturing the effects of light as an image making vehicle the English scientist, Davy – head of the Royal Institution in London – tried fixing the images using electrochemistry. These efforts went nowhere, a fact typical in science where failure is the common lot of the experimenter. Realizing the key to making effective “sun-drawing” was the use of a camera – basically the camera obscura of Leonardo’s day realized as a mechanical device – the French scientist Joseph Nicéphore was able to produce images on photoengraved plate. From the plate he was able to secure prints following well established practices pioneered by engravers and etchers. Coming up with the idea that a natural asphalt, bitumin of Judea (a product widely used by etchers), could be enlisted in

382 coating copper plates onto which the images were realized making the whole process relatively cheap, Nicéphore came to realize he was onto something that could be marketed.

Like inventor James Watt teaming up with Matthew Boulton a distiller of spirits and a gifted businessman to manufacture and market steam engines Nicéphore enlisted the assistance of the painter Louis Daguerre, the two forming a business partnership in 1829.

Working together they developed a new photosensitive substance, a lavender oil distillate.

After Nicéphore died, Daguerre persisted, inventing a process called daguerrétype. Negotiating a contract with the French government that agreed to purchase the invention – in lieu of securing a patent in France (he did secure a patent in England however) – Deguerre proceeded to perfect his methodology for making photographs. Between 1840 and 1860 his technology reigned supreme. It consisted of four stages: (1) polish copper plates with silver; (2) add fumes rendering the plates light sensitive; (3) expose the plate to light using a camera; and (4) render the latent image secured on the plate visible by applying a fume enriched with a mercury vapor.

In short: expose; develop; and fix the image with salts. This is applied chemistry.

It did not take a long time for inventors to come up with substitutes for the cumbersome plates. Henry Fox Talbot in Britain invented calotype a process using silver iodine as a developing agent. This he applied to salted paper. This was a step toward a goal that everyone concerned could envision: manufacturing a film – a photosensitive paper – on which the images taken by a photographer using a camera could be realized without the need for a plate or a batch of noxious chemicals. The next logical step forward was taken by George

Eastman in the United States. Now photographers could travel around to take portraits and

383 photograph landscapes without having to cart around boxes holding plates and chemical agents.

Implicit in the logic of automating photography was eliminating the professional photographer. In 1888 Eastman’s company began marketing a Kodak camera – “you press the button, we do the rest” – followed by mass marketed Kodak Brownie released to the public at the dawn of the new century.

As it turned out photography was both an aid to - and an enemy of - painting. It offered it powerful substitute for the painting of portraits. To be sure up until the new century color photography was an idea but not a reality, giving portrait painters an edge because they could realize their images in resplendent colors. But everyone knew that it was only a matter of time before color photography became a practical reality. Indeed the famous physicist James Clerk

Maxwell in preparing a lecture that he delivered in 1861 enlisted the services of Thomas Sutton in preparing a set of three black and white photographs that he could project onto a screen.

Each projector utilized a color filter: red, green, and blue were Sutton’s choices for the filters. In this way Maxwell was able to suggest that the potential appeal of rendering “sun-painted” images in color.

Rather than saying that photography was the arch enemy of painting it would be better to say that it liberated painters 23. How is best seen in the Impressionist movement that swept

Paris beginning with the early 1860s.

The first thing one has to keep in mind in referring to the Impressionist movement is that it was profoundly different from the Arts and Crafts movement in Britain. The

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Impressionists were a group of diverse individuals lacking a common ideology. They formed an association with the common purpose of not showing their works at the Official Paris Salon at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts. Why? The official salon was a child of the elitist French state. Facing widespread rebellion against his policies the French Emperor Napoleon III agreed in 1963 to create a second salon devoted to displaying the works of painters like Edouard Manet whose work was rejected by the judges of the official salon. Without doubt republicanism – detest of constitutional monarchs and emperors who had betrayed the principles of the French republic after the French Revolution – played a role in forcing Napoleon III to create a second salon known as the Salon des Réfusés. He was under attack and he wanted to fend off riots reminiscent of the uproar of 1848. The rejected painters called for further salons devoted to their work only to be stonewalled by the establishment. In retaliation the nascent Impressionist group signed an agreement to not show their work at the official salon. Instead they convinced a prominent photographer to arrange an exhibition of their new paintings. A total of eight

Impressionist shows took place before the group disbanded in 1886, its ranks riven by political and aesthetic differences.

In actuality the Impressionist umbrella was strange. Included as submitters were Edgar

Degas who was mainly interested in painting interior scenes; Cézanne who spent hours in the

Louvre making copies of works by masters of French historical painting like Nicolas Poussin; and

Claude Monet and Camille Pissarro who were primarily landscape painters. It was not surprising that they split up over factional disputes over aesthetics, specifically deciding whom to invite to their group exhibitions. Beyond this the individuals were highly diverse in their political views.

For instance during the Dreyfus Affair that deeply divided the French political scene in the late

385 nineteenth century – Dreyfus was a Jewish officer accused of treason – Monet supported those arguing Dreyfus had been unfairly treated and unjustly condemned. By contrast Degas – by the end of the century a virulent anti-Semite despite enjoying the patronage of prominent Jewish families – subscribed to the most virulent anti-Semitic journals and newspapers all denouncing

Dreyfus. In short the Impressionists were a motley group mainly motivated by a desire to advertise their artwork in venues separate from the Official Salon.

Coming to the rescue of the Impressionists were powerful art dealers, notably the firm of Durand-Ruel. Paul Durand-Ruel was born in Paris, the offspring of a successful art dealer.

Entrepreneurial in the extreme Durand-Ruel experimented with a variety of novel projects: he invested in his favored artists, offering a select few, generous stipends; he arranged for showings at his Paris gallery of works produced by a single artist. Beginning with the 1870s he decided to cast his fate with the Impressionists, promoting the work of Monet and Pissarro in particular. Extremely well-connected in the English speaking world – understanding the importance of widening the market in order to expand demand pushing up prices – he opened the first of ten annual exhibitions for the Society of French Artists at his gallery in London. More boldly – sensing the power of the American purse – he dispatched three of his sons to New York where they managed a gallery on a daily basis, showing Impressionist art. Durand-Ruel always claimed that it was the American market that saved his bacon: the Americans bought art. Why did they purchase Impressionist art, particularly Monet? One reason is the appeal that landscape painting for ambitious American painters who lived in an environment peppered with natural beauty: the Grand Canyon, the Rockies, Yellowstone, Yosemite, the Mojave Desert, the Mississippi River.

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Indeed it was the English speaking market that raised the fortunes of Monet to the point where he could purchase a property about forty miles northwest of Paris at the confluence of the Epte and Seine Rivers. This was in the small village of Giverny. From his estate at Giverny

Monet embarked on a massive project that made him the visual art poet of light.

From an early point on Impressionists like Monet and Pissarro who were concerned with painting nature took advantage of technological innovations. First there were the tin paint tubes that made travelling to remote sites to paint practical: the cost of carrying with you a wide range of colors fell dramatically after the 1850s, particularly in Paris where painting was a major field of artistic endeavor. As Monet’s son Jean said without paint tubes there would have never been Impressionism, there would never have been a Monet, a Pissarro, and a Cézanne.

As well cheap transportation stemming from the construction of a sprawling railroad system facilitated travel to spots alive with natural beauty, seashores graced by cliffs, forests of poplars, river banks, fields full of haystacks, ancient cathedral sites, and so forth. Monet himself painted railway stations bustling with passengers and enlivened by steam spouting out of engine boilers. The Impressionists shared none of the Luddite fervor of the British Arts and

Crafts school.

In his early phase Monet emphasized painting “at a glance”, capturing the short bursts of color on natural objects. Carrying multiple canvases with him Monet would paint little sections on each canvas. He claimed he often had no more than a seven minute window to capture the impact of light on a tree or a haystack. The idea was to return to the same spot at the same time on the next day to advance his work canvas by canvas. To do this he needed to

387 paint quickly; to master this he needed to be a keen observer; to accomplish this he needed to gauge time and space very accurately.

Were this his main achievement we would not pay some attention to his legacy. His greatest legacy was not capturing the impact of sunlight on natural objects. His greatest legacy was his painting of series – haystacks, the front of the Rouen Cathedral, the water lilies – that he realized in the years he lived at Giverny. The idea was to paint the same scene at different times of the day, showing how light profoundly shaped what one saw. There is relatively little doubt that his study of Italian art – he vacationed in Venice – suggested that doing a series was a noble way to reveal a theme. Think Giotto or Michelangelo.

Had Monet not become relatively affluent as a result of the sale of his works in the

United States he might never had been able to focus so intensely on time intensive projects like the haystacks or water lilies series. Each involved elaborate investment of funds and time. To avoid the crowds of American painters who pestered him in the fields surrounding Giverny he purchased hay fields so he was not disturbed. To create the pond of lily pads that graced his series of lily pads he spent years, diverting river water, working up an elaborate garden, dredging and planting. Each step of the way making money helped. It bought him time to advance his dream of creating a fairy-tale world in which the play of light could be transferred to canvas, creating an art that was the apex of the illusionary, that was abstract in the sense that viewing the massive canvases he did of water lilies from a close vantage revealed only areas of pure color splashing across space. In short Monet was no socialist unlike his friend and compatriot Pissarro. He was happy to make friends with the Americans with whom he rubbed

388 shoulders at Giverny, ferreting out opportunities to sell his paintings to wealthy buyers.

Without money he would not have able to focus as obsessively as he did.

The water lilies series was Monet’s greatest triumph. It is said that he slashed up five hundred canvases out of frustration with the work. In this series he captured pure illusion.

Some critics went as far as to claim that viewing the works reminded them of Plato’s allegory of the cave: all that most of see are the illusionary shadows cast by the ideal forms standing in front of a blazing fire. In the late 1810s Monet began negotiating with the French state regarding their purchase of twelve massive canvases that were the boldest expression of his vision. In 1920 came the official announcement that the French government was receiving the twelve huge canvases, preparing a special museum to display them. Monet died in 1926; a year later the Museé de l’Orangerie opened in Paris. This was soft power nationalism in display.

Perhaps it helped erase some of the horrors of the Great War.

Monet was inspired by a transcendent vision in creating an illusionary art that epitomized the pursuit of light. It was poetry pure and simple. By contrast Georges Seurat was a scientist 24. He studied the physics of light, learning how colors were perceived by the retina of the eye. He concluded that if one painted in dots – points – of carefully arranged colors the eyes of the beholder would mix the colors, overcoming the defect of color representation due to mixing shades with the brush. He called the technique Pointillism or Divisionism. Seurat was anything if not rigorous in pursuing his agenda. What emerged on his canvases was the exact opposite of the abstraction achieved by Monet in his water lily series. The dots were so evenly laid out, the shapes of people and trees so geometric, that you felt more in awe of the intellectual achievement than you did emotionally. The fact that many viewers have felt the

389 same way over generations is probably one reason why Seurat had few followers. To be sure

Pissarro tried to master the method; but it does not seem to have advanced his own art.

I believe there is an important lesson to be garnered from these facts. Monet gave in to instinct. He had a metaphysical vision akin to the lofty inspirations motivating early Italian

Renaissance artists. He employed techniques that were furthered by science in reaching his goals. However unlike the masters of the progressive Renaissance his interest in science was limited. He shunned theory; he recognized that a wide chasm had grown up between theoretical science and the fine arts. By contrast Seurat tried to bridge the gap. Without being unfair to Seurat it is fair to say that he failed, at least in comparison with Monet.

Monet captured the surface of reality while evoking the transcendental as an unintended consequence; he was the poet of illusion inspired by the creative force of sunlight.

His oeuvre did not try to capture the ideal forms that philosophers like Plato argued lie behind the illusionary pictures we use in guiding ourselves in everyday humdrum reality. By contrast the two painters I discuss next – Cézanne and van Gogh – were obsessed by finding deep seated realities underlying the natural order. For Cézanne the ideal forms were geometric: cylinders, cones, spheres 25. Revealing these fundamental shapes – extensions of mass occupying space – meant streamlining the use of color and the employment of perspective. For van Gogh the ideal was Christian mysticism, the sun standing for divine inspiration. Both artists were saturated with the mystical fervor of the Gothic.

Post-Impressionism in France: A Swing toward the Gothic

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While Cézanne exhibited with the Impressionists – he came to Paris from his native

Province to display his work at the Salon des Réfusés in 1863 and he participated in

Impressionist some exhibits thereafter (only Pissarro showed paintings in all eight Impressionist exhibitions) – he was at heart a true classicist, devoted to the clarity, balance, and grace of

French art of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. This he brought to his highly intellectualized study of the way the spreading of light upon bodies spawns apparent distortions - challenging our intuition, based on Euclidean geometry, of the perspective we see in nature (forests, mountains, bays) and in still life compositions, fruit littered plates displayed on tables). His art both a feast for the eye and a feast for the mind.

The early paintings of Cézanne are dark, morbid, bordering on Gothic. An example is his painting The Murder. Elsewhere he fantasized about a family seated around a dinner table, devouring a severed head put out by the father. It is said that he despised his father; perhaps a

Freudian can find something there to explain these visions, just as a Freudian can read something into van Gogh’s troubled relationship with his stern rigid Calvinist minister father.

What is clear is that Cézanne managed to sublimate these turbulent emotions in his later work that is disciplined, highly disciplined, to a remarkable degree.

Cézanne was remarkably fortunate enough to inherit a sizable financial nest egg upon his father’s death. Without a doubt one thing both Cézanne and van Gogh shared in common was the fact that they did not expect to make a regular income out of their painting and drawing. In van Gogh’s case he was highly reliant on his parents, his uncles, and especially his brother Theo for financial assistance. It is probably easier to be obsessed by your art when you are not trying to put bread and butter on the table for a growing household.

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Once Cézanne embarked on displaying his artwork with the Impressionists he learned to settle down to a trio of projects: landscapes; still life compositions; and portraits, of individuals, and of groups. Perhaps inspired by Monet’s agenda of creating series – the two painters admired each other’s works despite their different agendas – he tended to paint the same things over and over again. The best example is his painting of Mont Sainte-Victorie. He continued to paint the mountain for years, each time finding ways to modify his approach.

The key to Cézanne’s classical approach to Impressionism is the way he violated the presentation of reality, distorting perspective, distorted colors. Think about a table that you can look at from a variety of angles. Well Cézanne did that. He looked at it from one angle, then from another angle, bringing out its natural extension in space. You are walking around the table; you are taking in its natural material fullness, denying the illusion of Renaissance perspective that realizes all everything depicted in terms of a vanishing point.

The same holds for Cézanne’s use of color. He applied color vigorously, filling in shapes with a variety of closely related hues. At first this may seem to make a mockery of the natural color we see when we look at a mountain or a group of trees or a seaside. But it is not. One of the primary lessons of Impressionism is that there is no singly color we can call the natural color of an object. Grass does not always look green. Sunlight grass may take on a yellowish appearance; grass seen on a cloudy day may look blue. For instance this is how van Gogh described the color of the Mediterranean Ocean 26:

“The Mediterranean is the colour of mackerel, that is to say it varies. One can’t always say it’s blue, because a second later the reflection changes to pink or grey …”

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One of the most important lessons learned from Monet and his colleagues by late Impressionist

– or Post-Impressionist – painters is that there is no one color associated with an object. It depends on the sunlight hitting it in the case of a landscape. This is something that Cézanne knew very well because he exhibited with the Impressionists. His distortions in the use of color

– modulating it a bit from place to place so it shows up as a nuanced zone of color – matches his distortions in the presentation of masses extending out into space. Paradoxically the way rocks on mountains, apples and oranges on tables, masklike faces on people appear in his canvases are not suggestive of distortion. Rather they convey solidity. That Cézanne took the liberties he did was hardly arbitrary. As already noted he saw everything in terms of ideal forms, cylinders, spheres, and cones. He was simply trying to stay true to his perception of natural reality.

Coming from the Netherlands soaked as it was in the Gothic van Gogh was not inclined to think in terms of idealized geometric shapes 27. To the contrary he wanted to find a pure form of Christianity in the nature he observed. He was looking for God. He ended up finding

God in the sun.

From the outset van Gogh appears to have had considerable difficulty adjusting to reality. A Freudian would say he had a very strongly entrenched id (driven by instinctive drive to create) coupled with a very strongly fashioned superego (expressed in his commitment to a very pure form of Christianity), all of this wedded to a very weak ego struggling and floundering to adjust to the daily pressures of making money and staying faithful to the various women he fell in love with. He tried to become an evangelical preacher, espousing a highly idealistic form of Christianity when he was living in the Netherlands. This experiment ended in abject failure.

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Turning to art – his three uncles were art dealers well positioned to market his work and introduce him to Dutch painters; his brother Theo ended up taking up a position as a representative of an uncle’s firm in Paris – he tried to combine his altruistic Christianity with his art. He devoted his early years as a visual artist – basically the years 1880 to 1886 when he moved to Paris to be with his brother Theo – to drawing and painting coal miners, agricultural laborers, and impoverished working class households. His famous painting of the potato eaters is a prime example of art in service to a program of social betterment. He is saying: look, this is social reality; do not turn away; do something about it. One might say that he was inspired by the same concerns that the members of the Arts and Crafts movement were vocalizing through their art, their workshops, and their writings. For instance it appears to be the case that van

Gogh’s characterization of Jesus was as a devoted social worker, spreading love and succor to the oppressed. Some of his writings suggest he was uncertain as to whether Jesus was a god made man or simply an extremely altruistic individual. Surely this put him on a path designed to annoy and alienate his rigid Calvinist minister father.

Always short of funds van Gogh started out drawing, moving onto watercolors before he even attempted oil painting that was far more expensive to carry out successfully. Indeed of all of the Impressionists and Post-Impressionists van Gogh was the outstanding genius of drawing.

Throughout his ten year career as a visual artist he drew and drew with consummate skill.

Often doing studies in pen and ink before setting up to paint in oils or in watercolors. Evident in these works is dramatically distorted perspective, a strongly grasped intuition of how to expressing receding distance with muscular penned lines. In point of fact Van Gogh often made his own pens chiseling them out of reeds, seeking tools ideally constructed to capture intense

394 feeling. The notion that van Gogh was an instinctive artist is belied by his great abilities as a draftsperson. His great intelligence as a focused artist is on display everywhere in his art: nowhere is more apparent than in his drawings.

Joining his brother in Theo soon brought Vincent into sustained contact with the

Impressionists. As it turned out he arrived in the French capital in 1886, the year of the last

Impressionist exhibition, the group breaking up with great rancor. While it is a truism widely believed that van Gogh immediately embraced color when he arrived in Paris this is a bit of an exaggeration. While he was still living in the Netherlands he was using a bright palette in fashioning watercolors. Even before his arrival in Paris he had exchanged correspondence with his brother, engaging in a sustained debate over the proper use of color on a canvas. His own reading suggested to him that colors are more vibrant when they are mixed by the eye of the observer rather than by the painter mixing them before applying them. No doubt viewing

Impressionist works helped drive this point in. How could you look at a painting by Cézanne or

Seurat without grasping this point? In any event what is true is that he found Paris exhilarating at first. Contact with the most creative group of visual arts in Europe unleashed a frenzy of painting. His productivity was remarkable, albeit assisted by his reliance on Theo for money.

Soon however he tired of the French capital: too many feuds; too much backbiting; too much commercialism; too much greed.

Through his friendship with Emile Bernard he learned about the Midi region. As someone who had mainly lived in small towns – he did reside briefly in London and in The

Hague but for short stints – the appeal of a rural setting was electric. The idea of being in a place where people did honest labor, working under a blistering sun with their own hands, was

395 exciting. He could continue to mix with the so-called downtrodden peasants who to his way of thinking were the salt of the earth, the kind of people to whom Jesus preached. Most important was the sun. He wrote to Theo about the sun blazing over the fields of Provence in ecstatic terms, arguing that the sun is the source of energy, the wellspring of all the creative forces, the closest to the divine.

Van Gogh’s obsession with the sun as the “only image of the divine” tells us a lot. It tells us that van Gogh was seeking – and ultimately rewarded in his search – God in nature. It was a transcendental vision.

Did this make him a symbolist? Paul Gauguin was definitely a symbolist, evoking very specific religious themes in many of his paintings, adding mystical musings to a number of the canvases he painting in Tahiti. Because Gauguin and van Gogh are often discussed as a pair –

Gauguin spent several months in Arles living upstairs in van Gogh’s Yellow House – it is inviting to see them as both motivated by a desire to put symbols into their artwork.

The problem with this argument is that there are no obvious symbols in van Gogh’s artwork. His depiction of nature is distorted - wild arabesques appear in starry skies and swirl around his head in self-portraits – but it is a stretch to interpret them as symbols. Rather, like

Cézanne he was an idealist, capturing a transcendental system of belief: how can forget his distorted depiction of a starry night sky; the beckoning of a yellow house reflecting the warm rays of the sun; a gloomy pool hall realized in two violently clashing colors (green and red) suggesting murder might break out at any moment; and the colorfully garbed individuals whose portraits he fashioned?

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The point is both van Gogh and Cézanne were on a mission – dedicating their unique genius – to revealing a truth about the natural order that had never before been realized, or at least realized in the way they were captured it. Gothic infused genius trumped symbolism through its religiously inspired idealism; genius trumped impressionism through carefully calibrated distortion.

Both artists spoke to the soul. Project out on material world your deep-seeded emotional response - colours chosen, hatching, swirls, internal conflict, and unease - onto what you are ostensibly depicting. To the viewer the very distortions that make a mockery of realism and our scientifically informed understanding of what we observe in the world bring us in touch with the spiritual, speaking to the heart and soul of a person engaged with the canvas a sense of the compelling struggle experienced by the soul of the artist as he realized the work with his brush and palette knife. Is it surprising that both artists began their artistic careers steeped in the

Gothic?

The Gothic Triumph in Habsburg Vienna

The Vienna of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries had great potential to lead

Europe into a bright future in which soft power trumped hard power. Instead it paved the road to one of Europe’s darkest movements – Nazism; to boot it led Europe into the catastrophe of

World War I. What happened?

The Habsburg Empire was an umbrella. Rather than being a nation-state it exemplified a league of nationalities unified under a dynasty. It was multi-ethnic, multicultural, political entity that exercised control over a massive territory cutting across central Europe, facing two other

397 great multi-ethnic empires – the Russian and the Ottoman empires – on its borders. From its

Austrian core it stretched northward into Poland and Bohemia; incorporated a slice of Italian territory in the south; its reach extended eastward, incorporated Hungary and portions of the

Balkans into his sprawling holdings. After the defeat of the Habsburg Empire by Prussia in 1866

– Austria and Prussia had vied with each other in the German Confederation set up after

Napoleon’s final defeat rendering unification of all Germans a will-o-wisp– it was forced to make concessions to the restive Hungarians who were increasingly emboldened to break up the entire enterprise 28.

With this agenda in mind the Habsburgs set up a Dual Monarchy, the Habsburg crown resting on two political shoulders, one Germanic, the other Hungarian. Had Austro-Hungary been able to survive the centrifugal forces of nationalism – giving birth to Hungary,

Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, and Austria as rump nation-states in the aftermath of World War II

– it might have served as a model for incorporating diverse nationalities under a single political umbrella, a miniscule League of Nations. Sadly, political turmoil in Vienna undermined this peaceful agenda.

Not that the Viennese liberals didn’t try 29. At the beginning of the 1860s the Austrian liberals – emboldened by the Habsburg Army’s defeat at the hands of French and Piedmont forces – managed to secure two significant victories: they secured from the Habsburg dynasty consent to set up a constitutional monarchy along British lines; they were allocated a massive swath of geography in greater Vienna whose development they basically oversaw. This territory lay between the old center of Vienna and its suburbs. It was a glacis historically allocated to the military as a staging area for its defensive actions against invaders, the Ottomans first, then the

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French invading under Napoleon. The liberals set up a City Expansion Commission to carry out their design for populating the empty space with grand public buildings and residential structures.

It was the victory of soft power over hard power; it was the victory of a progressive

Renaissance vision; it was a victory for the theory that peaceful competition through markets could ward off armed conflict enunciated by leaders like Prince Albert, consort to Queen

Victoria, instigator of the Crystal Palace Exhibition of 1851; it was the victory of the bourgeois flexing its political muscle. Textile manufactures, railroad builders, mining consortia, financial heavy weights – like the Jewish firm created by the Rothschild family – were all involved in remaking Vienna a liberal bastion dedicated to science, education, hygiene, and rational market oriented planning.

The project that ensued is known as the Ringstrasse project. The idea was to organize the glacis around a “ring street” along which public transit ran, upon which would be seated four great monuments to liberal cosmopolitan values: a university; a city hall; a parliament; and a theater. Soft power, rational debate fueled by knowledge, law, and public planning: all were to be harnessed in a valiant effort to remake the Habsburg Empire as a modern fully enlightened state. Vienna could lead the way to peacefully stave off the centrifugal forces of contending national aspirations by laying out a golden road of market oriented cooperation and competition harnessed to the spread of democracy providing a forum for the expression of political voice from all social classes.

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To this end the City Planning Commission came up with a plan designed to satisfy a broad range of constituents. The Rathaus – the city hall - was conceived as a Gothic structure, testifying to Vienna’s medieval heritage as a commune. The Burg Theatre architecture was baroque, appealing to the lovers of music written by Bach, Handel, and Telemann. The university design was Renaissance, evoking Florence, Pisa, and Padua. The parliament structure was completely classical and pre-Christian: it was based on a Greek design, a statue of Athena, the goddess of learning greeting the visitor as he or she entered the hallowed structure. To raise funds to pay for the construction of these massive buildings most of the Ringstrasse land was put up for sale to developers who favored six story “palace” style architecture rather than detached houses favored by Arts and Crafts inspired builders working in the London environs.

The idea was to carve the “palaces” in apartments with commercial establishments placed on the ground level facing the great street. An upwardly mobile bourgeois could secure housing in the heart of the city, ideally working in the same neighborhoods that they resided in. While not joining the aristocratic elites, the “palace” style catered to their dreams. This was bourgeois cosmopolitanism designed to quell all critics.

Yet there were harsh critics. On the one side were urban planners who favored a more functional future directed style, stripped of palace style ornament on the outside and ostentatious entry ways on the inside. On the other side were critics like Camillo Sitte who attacked the Ringstrasse project as insufficiently historical. In his 1889 volume Der Strädtebau

(City Building) he argued for a freer form, more medieval in inspiration, more Gothic. He advocated irregular streets punctuated by squares and parks, a forum here, an agora there, a marketplace in an unexpected place. Most important it should draw from the Arts and Crafts

400 principles developed in Britain, empowering the workshop artisan. The guilds having been disbanded the large number of workshop owners clustered throughout the suburbs of Vienna where the working class tended to reside demanded government programs aimed at training artisans destined to toil in small establishments, not in massive factories. With this in mind the

Ministry of Education organized a network of vocationally oriented craft schools, appointing the vocal Sitte to the directorship of a new State Trade School organization. It was from this perch that Sitte attempted to counteract the eclecticism of the Ringstrasse designers, mixing as they did Gothic, Roman, and Greek in an ill-considered incoherent vision.

Sitte was profoundly influenced by Richard Wagner’s opera music 30. According to Sitte

Wagner was the creator of a mythical hero – Siegfried, a Teutonic age ideal who embodied the great physical and moral virtues of the medieval era – whose celebration could and would revitalize the German peoples in a crass, ultra-rational, overly functional, utilitarian age. He would liberate society from domination by scientists, technologists, and profit oriented crass merchants. By creating a viable social alliance with “pre-industrial” people – workshop artisans as opposed to overly regimented factory workers – the Wagnerian inspired artist cum educational planner could redeem society, eschewing Faustian progress in favor or regeneration.

As it turned out Sitte’s Wagner inspired Gothic program gluing the romantic appeal of the International Gothic with the practical needs of artisans resonated with political leaders active in the Reichstat, the parliament. The spread of the franchise to the working class created

Schan electorate harking to the views of radical German nationalists like Georg von Schönerer.

His radical political platform was directly aimed at undermining the principles of the liberal

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Ringstrasse developers with its emphasis on rational knowledge, respect for law, belief in progress through science, and the aspirations of the bourgeois. Schönerer pursued an agenda later adopted by Adolf Hitler in the post-World War I era. He was avowedly anti-Semitic, arguing that many of the big banks – the financial institutions that were often behind the

Ringstrasse projects – were run by Jews. Jews – the classic “state people” who were supposedly not national in their orientation because they were mobile, moving their capital with them, did not respect the needs of German nationals. Moreover Jewish peddlers cut into the businesses of the small scale artisan dominated workshops. He argued that the bourgeois were elitist, out of touch with the common person. He argued that Austria should curry the favor of the German

Reich. He was fully prepared to advocate the breakup of the Dual Monarchy because it coddled

“Slavs.” While he was unable to build a mass movement like Hitler’s Nationalist Socialist (Nazi)

Party, he was perfectly willing to unleash violent unruly street demonstrations designed to bully and intimidate.

Hardly alone in his anti-Semitism, Schönerer’s campaign against Jewish influence in

Vienna was joined by Karl Lueger’s Christian Social Party, an amalgam of Catholics, artisans, and opponents of cosmopolitanism. The chief difference was Schönerer’s anti-Catholicism: his movement was anti-socialist, anti-capitalist, anti-liberal, anti-Habsburg, anti-Catholic, and anti- multicultural. In this respect his stance was very pro-German Empire (Bismarck had launched an attack on Catholicism in Germany in the late nineteenth century). Lueger who was more successful than Schönerer in organizing mass rallies and street demonstrations benefited from the Catholic orientation of Habsburg Austria: his party was decidedly pro-Gothic, anti-liberal, anti-Semitic, anti-cosmopolitan, and anti-multicultural.

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This was the environment that fostered a fascination with the Gothic in Vienna. To a degree the fascination with the Gothic arose from the world of artisan workshops, highly resentful of the liberal attack of guilds; to a degree it arose from the Arts and Crafts movement that spawned art nouveau in Austria; to a degree it arose from the German Gothic movement associated with the cult oscillating around Richard Wagner’s Bayreuth Festspielhaus and the emergence of Expressionism in German art. In 1908 and 1912 Wilhelm Worringer, a young

German scholar fresh out of graduate school published two highly influential volumes on art, the second of which Formprobleme der Gothik (Form in Gothic) argued that the

“transcendentalism of the Gothic” was deeply rooted in the soil and social evolution of the

Transalpine peoples 31. According to Worringer there was a deep chasm between the progressive Renaissance movement and the Gothic movement. In the Gothic there was profound distrust of nature, the organic world was not peaceful, It threatened safety; it was the enemy of stability. Failure to acknowledge these dark forces was repressive. It stymied the fullest expression of emotions. The fantastic, the grotesque, was fundamental to reality.

It was possible to be comfortable with the progressive theory of improvement in the fine arts as long as they were closely linked to science. The reason is simple: applying science to manufacturing and agriculture was yielding increases in output per worker that bolstered the standard of living. But what happens when the way science is channeled into the market begins to fundamentally diverge from the way it the fine arts are channeled into market activity? Does this not open up the possibility that progress in art and music is an illusion? The concerted attack upon the myth of progress that gathered force with romanticism in the arts reached a crescendo at the beginning of the twentieth.

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Unleashing the bizarre, the irrational, the primitive: this is one way to describe Sigmund

Freud’s monumental Die Traumdeutung (The Interpretation of Dreams) first published in

Leipzig and Vienna in 1900 (subsequent enlarged and revised German language editions were published between 1909 and 1942). In this work Freud took a series of steps away from his mentor Josef Breuer with whom he had co-authored a monograph on hysteria; as well he severed his ties with the school of psychology that stemmed from the influence Hemann

Helmholtz held over the field of cerebral study. As a medical professional who desired an academic appointment in the University – but was denied appointment for years because he was Jewish – Freud had secured a position at the Institute for Cerebral Anatomy that was dominated by researchers investigating the central nervous system and the physiology of the brain. Freud, immersed in clinical treatment of psychotic behavior became deeply convinced a new approach to dealing with a host of complaints his patients brought to his attention - paranoia, hypochondria, obsessive-compulsive outbreaks, psychosomatic pains – feeling that chemical treatment, while promising, was incapable of holding at bay the mental torments that incapacitated people from gainful employment, marriage, and healthful interaction with their surroundings.

It is important to keep in mind that Freud came to his study of psychotic behavior with a multitude of talents and abilities – a personal genius – that profoundly impacted the way he structured his research approach. He was a gifted writer. He was strongly attracted to the fine arts – notably theater as well as painting (he wrote a monograph about Leonardo da Vinci). He was fascinated with Italy, particularly Rome. In short he was prepared to adopt an analytical approach in which artistic creativity interacting with trauma at the personal level. He was

404 fascinated by the power of dream work to construct fantasies flush with symbols and allegories that were heavily edited by the brain. He was fascinated with the fact that his patients mimicked actors in a play, influenced and haunted by their family members, either alive or deceased; that they were part and parcel of a larger family drama that shaped their mental processes; they were Hamlet-like.

In his 1900 classic Freud laid out a theory about dream work that captured the way the

Gothic – the grotesque, the fantastic – operated in all humans. His theory was comprehensive in the sense that it (1) explained the reason why people dreamed; (2) the specific tricks that the brain plays in shaping the dream work; and (3) the value of recounting dreams as a tool for therapy 32.

Why do people dream? Because they have unconscious wishes that they are compelled to deal with but do not want to entertain in conscious thought. Automatically a dream is something that involves deeply repressed desires that are struggling to come out. Think of brain as a system obeying the conservation of psychic energy. Within the brain is a conscious zone that deals with mundane reality and an unconscious zone. Freud came to the conclusion that the id was rooted in infancy. It was instinctive; it was absorbed in exploring its own sexuality.

Impacted by sensory input the child develops an ego. Within the cortex of the brain the ego springs from the id as the sensory organs mature. It seeks pleasure; it is devoted to self- preservation. Nurturing, tutelage, and discipline of parents unleashes further mental maturation: a superego concerned with morality develops naturally 33. While Freud never developed a theory that linked this model up with a theory of cerebral maturation – in terms of chemistry and electricity – it is likely his long run goal was to link up his theory of the

405 interaction of id, ego, and superego with research being done on the physical development of brains in humans.

While individuals dream individual dreams the dreams are typically rooted in family situations that are akin to dramas. Consider a few classical cases that Freud wrote about 34.

Dora became his patient because she was suffering from dyspnea, depression, and hysterical outbreaks that disrupted family gatherings. As it turned out from Freud’s account of treatment she was sexually attracted to the husband of a woman who was having an affair with Dora’s father. In the case of the “rat man” who was an obsessive-compulsive his punishment fantasies

– he dreamed about a cruel torture in which rats placed in a bowl eat out the anus of a naked man tied to a stake, the bowl placed under his anus – the man’s relationship with his father appears to have been central, at least according to Freud’s analysis. Perhaps the most bizarre of the behaviors Freud analyzed in terms of relations with fathers (in this case a deceased father) was that of Dr. Daniel Schreber. Schreber – diagnosed with sleeplessness and extreme paranoia imagined being transformed into a woman. The reason? Because Schreber was selected by God to be a redeemer. Schreber’s God consisted of two deities: a lower deity who was worshipped by dark people, modeled on the Old Testament God; and a higher deity who ministered to blond people. As the chosen redeemer Schreber was in a conundrum. His God was constantly defying him, excoriating him, attacking him for being rebellious. Whenever Schreber wished to evacuate his bowels God intervened to counter his need to defecate: someone else was always in the lavatory. To somehow reconcile to his deity Schreber felt he needed to be emasculated, to be turned into a female. Not surprisingly Freud interpreted this psychosis in terms of a

406 troubled relationship between father and son. In short, he analyzed the mental process of the individual in terms of a family situation.

In the relationship between family dramas and dream work of individuals that we see

Freud’s twin interests in theater and in the seemingly bizarre distorted world of dreams. That he pounced on the Oedipus drama of ancient Greece and on Shakespeare’s play Hamlet in arguing the geniuses are driven by unconscious desires in fashioning their works is hardly surprising. This is probably one reason why Freud’s insights into psychology are more popular in literary circles than they are in clinical psychology circles. The less said about this the better:

Freudian thinking has been so severely attacked – as being unscientific, as being chauvinistic, as being rooted in Freud’s own elicit behavior – that I will go no further with this point here. I simply want to point out that Freud’s dream analyses often involve discussions of family situations that are akin to theater. It is almost as if the theater of dysfunctional families becomes the theater of the absurd in dreams.

What creative devices does the brain create to deal with the conflict between wishes that the conscious mind views as taboo but the unconscious mind wants to entertain? Here the influence of the Gothic movement on Freud’s model of dream work leaps out: symbols, displacement, and condensation. Symbols appear throughout dreams. Freud – particularly focused on sexual symbolism was keen to point out that climbing stairs could represent sexual intercourse; that a jewelry box could represent female sexual organs; that trains entering tunnels could stand for penetration of the vagina by the penis; that sausages were penises; and so forth. Displacement and extreme condensation are also remarkable in dream work. In Freud

(1960b) there is a very illuminating discussion of how jokes – Freud believed jokes were rooted

407 in the unconscious in the sense that both parties, tellers of the joke and listener to the joke – are sharing amusement around repressed thoughts that they would not put into regular discourse – are extreme cases of condensation and displacement. He gives an example of a joke told by Heinrich Heine: a Catholic priest behaves like a clerk with a post in a big business – all he wants to do is avoid bankruptcy as the Church is the source of his sustenance - in contrast to a

Protestant cleric who acts like an owner of a retail shop, constantly worrying about competition from other vendors. This is displacement with a vengeance.

That dreams are crucial to psychoanalysis was Freud’s main application to clinical practice. His idea was simple: if the ego becomes aware of the repressed wishes harbored by the id through analysis of dreams it is liberated to better deal with the day to day exigencies imposed by reality upon the already stressed ego. Freud expressed the idea that dream analysis was primary to his clinical approach in this famous passage 35:

“Flectere si nequeo superos, Avheronta moveba [If I cannot bend the Higher Powers, I will move the Infernal Regions]. The interpretation of dreams is the royal road to a knowledge of the unconscious activities of the mind.” In evoking the Aeneid Freud was emphasizing is expressing a profound thought: it is in the deepest realms of the bizarre, the grotesque, the fantastic - in short it is only through entertaining the Gothic within – that lie the tools that a clinical psychologist should wield in bringing hopeful treatment to the mentally disturbed.

Is Freud’s breakthrough in decoding the unconscious in his own dreams the result of a frustrated liberal deploring the failure of his parent’s generation to push through a viable liberal program for reforming the Austro-Hungarian Empire? Schorske (1979) takes this position: his thesis is that Freud and other intellectuals of his generation were tormented by the failure of

408 their fathers, openly rebelling against them. I am less sure. My claim here is that Freud’s approach was a channeling of the Gothic movement into psychology. To be sure Freud generalized his theory to analysis of social and political behavior 36. But this was largely an exercise in attempting to apply Darwin’s model of a primitive social group to social psychology.

There is little doubt that Freud was terribly troubled by political cults developing around leaders like Schönerer and Lueger both of whom were vocally anti-Semitic. Jumping from this fact to a general claim about politics being preeminent in Freud’s work is something else altogether different.

That Freud’s theory of the unconscious was a potent stimulant to artists absorbed in the

Austrian Gothic is apparent from the painting of Oskar Kokoshka. Coming from a working class artisan background Kokoschka was naturally interested in the Gothic. The idea that the unconscious and the Gothic were firmly intertwined was not surprising. The Gothic was all about expression of troubling anxieties, dark fears, and haunting nightmares. In his color lithograph visual fantasy that combined poetry with visual art, The Dreaming Boy, Kokoschka wove the feel of stream of consciousness folk song with sexually explicit of boys exploring their own sexual identities 37:

“red fishling/fishing red with a triple-bladed knife I stab you dead with my fingers rend you in two that there be an end to this soundless circling”

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In the artwork that he did for a play written by Heinrich Kleist, Murder, Hope of Women,

Kokoschka expressed a dark vision in which murder, blood, erotic lust, and Grimal anxieties were amalgamated in a heady brew. Essentially Kokoschka was depicting a Gothic inspired tragedy.

Having channeled Freudian theories of the unconscious into the artwork that he did around 1910 Kokoschka moved on to paint a remarkable set of Expressionist portraits. In doing so he proved that portrait painting was still viable in an age when photography provided a cheap alternative to painting. Here is the description of a painting he did of Mr. and Mrs. Hans

Tietze 38:

“A kind of crackling light seems to spring from the head of the male partner. From his back rise sharpened, finlike, scorings suggesting radiating energy …. energized surround, a field of light, where electric currents crisscross at random in the cloudlike undulating atmosphere.” Not only was Kokoschka channeling Freud; perhaps he was also channeling Maxwell’s theory of electromagnetism!

Chapter 7 Scientific Struggles

Summary of the chapter: This chapter echoes the theme of the previous chapter, arguing that conflict in the field of science mirrors conflict in the other fields. In particular it focuses on competing theories concerning the nature of light – is it a particle or a wave? Through what medium is it transmitted? Why is its speed important? – that increasingly became entangled with rival theories of the universe, mechanical and field theories opposing one another during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

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Light versus Sound: Waves versus Particles As a system designed to aggrandize and centralize military and commercial power at the state level, mercantilism put heavy weight on promoting practical technological progress. In effect mercantilism promoted technological capitalism. Politically influential thinkers like

Francis Bacon advocated the felicitous amalgamation of theoretical natural philosophy with the artisan alchemy tradition in pursuit of this goal, penning his tract The New Atlantis to much acclaim. The state could assist in cementing together the worker who practiced his or her skills with tools hands-on with the worker who practiced his or her skills as a theoretician by subsidizing societies designed to integrate science and technology. With this in mind during the first year of his becoming monarch over England Charles II – the Stuarts having been sidelined during the years of civil war and rule by the Lord Protector of the Commonwealth Oliver

Cromwell in which fervent Puritanism ran roughshod over the monarchical tradition – established the Royal Society of London for Improving Natural Knowledge in 1660. Its motto

“Nullius in verba” (Take nobody’s word for it) expressed its commitment to reasoned debate and experiment; its regular meetings at Gresham College in London expressed its commitment to discussing the newest findings in experimental and theoretical research; its program of nominating gifted researchers as Fellows of the Royal Society expressed its agenda of bringing together the best brains in the promotion of progress. Like the Lincean Academy established in the Papal States six decades earlier the Royal Society was an institution designed to carry on the progressive Renaissance vision of Galileo.

One of the first fellows to be named was Isaac Newton who became a fellow in 1672.

Newton was a polymath, taking up a chair in mathematics at the University of Cambridge as a

411 theorist who also built devices useful for doing experimental observation, specifically a reflecting telescope he donated to the Royal Society. In his dual roles as mathematician and physicist committed to explaining the latest experimental findings Newton became one of the most celebrated geniuses of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The poet Alexander

Pope celebrated Newton’s Promethean image in his famous couplet:

“Nature and Nature’s Laws lay hid in Night/God said, Let Newton be! And all was Light.”

Not only did Newton develop the calculus, work on power series, generalize the binomial theorem; as well he published in Latin Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica

(Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy) one of the greatest texts in the field of science, developed a theory of optics, publishing “Opticks” in 1704 where he elaborated a theory of light as the motion of minute particles, demonstrated using a prism that white light was composed of various colored lights, and experimented with temperature.

In the Principia Newton elaborated three laws of motion that applied everywhere in the universe. These three laws of inertia generalized ideas Galileo had been developing earlier. In this sense Newton was synthesizing progressive Renaissance science. Not only are the laws of great practical utility for mechanical engineering they are also beautiful in their simplicity:

 An object that is not operated on by a force is either in constant motion or is at

rest. In the lingo of calculus dV/dt = 0 if and only if the sum of all forces are zero

(V being velocity, t being time).

 The sum of all vector forces acting on a mass is F = m*(dV/dt) = m*a (where F is

force, m is mass, and a is acceleration).

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 When one body exerts force on another body, the second body simultaneously

exerts a force equal in magnitude in the opposite direction. In common parlance

for every action there is an opposite and equal reaction.

The elegance, the simplicity, of this formulation is remarkable. That Newton and his scientific colleagues believed it explained inertial motion everywhere in the universe was a generalization of Galileo’s attack of Aristotlean physics that posited laws applicable to the earth that were not applicable in the higher spheres. It should be noted that the way we formulate these laws today differs from the way Newton formulated them. Today we think in terms of relativity theory, the idea that what an observer captures with instruments measuring time and space depend on the inertial reference frame in which the observer is located. No such considerations bothered Newton. He thought in terms of absolute time and space. Given his religious views this is not surprising. Newton was developing a picture of the universe that one could imagine is in the mind of a benevolent deity that occasionally intervenes to keep the entire project going, keeping it on track so to speak like a person winding up a watch.

The Principia went further than simply stating laws regarding force, mass, and inertia.

The treatise boldly explained Kepler’s three laws of planetary motion. Basing his reasoning on observations of planetary movement painstakingly assembled by Tycho Brahe, Johannes Kepler derived three laws that explained how a Copernican system held together by the attractive forces concentrated in the sun operated. They are: (1) the planets move in elliptical (not circular) orbits; (2) the planets sweep out equal areas in equal times (a principle that is easily explained by integral calculus); and (3) the square of periodic times exhibited by the planets are in ratio to each other as are the cubes of their mean distances from the sun. Time and distance

413 are interconnected. Using mathematical reasoning Newton was able to establish a single law for planetary motion that is expressed in the simple equation:

2 (7.1) F = G*[(m1*m2)/r ]

Where F is the gravitational force exerted within system by the interaction of the two masses m1 and m2 under the law of universal gravitation; G is a universal gravitational constant (not estimated experimentally until the 1890s; and r is the distance between the two masses. It is important to realize that Newton was proposing a force operating throughout the universe that was exerted through empty space – or an ethereal substance consisting of miniscule particles – at a distance.

The point is Newton was able through the power of mathematical reasoning applied to experimentally measured data to synthesize the findings of other scientists, specifically Galileo and Kepler. That he did so using the notion of “action at a distance” is testimony to appeal of the Neo-Platonic approach for thinkers like Newton8. It allowed them to conjoin the transcendental immaterial with the material. It was a way to bring God into a physical system; it was a way to avoid crass materialism that seemed to pervade the thinking of French philosophers like René Descartes (or worse yet the pantheism or strict materialism of the

Amsterdam based Jewish-Dutch philosopher Baruch Spinoza who was widely reviled as an atheistic free-thinker) who envisioned a universe made up of small particles colliding with one another, forming great vortices in space. As a by-product it was a way to synthesize natural philosophy along eminently Florentine Medici-inspired lines. It owed much to the Italian early

Renaissance tradition.

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To be sure Newton’s reasoning about the role of a deity in creating – and stabilizing through regular intervention – a material universe was part and parcel of an agenda he had that harked back to the late Roman Empire when Nicene Catholicism was combatting Arianism.

Newton was convinced the Trinitarian theory of Christianity was heresy, that it had been propounded by intellectually corrupt bishops operating at the Council of Nicea in the fourth century. Without going in details here concerning the nature of the debate in 325 CE – it revolved around the question of whether Jesus was created by God or co-existed with His

Father God from the very get-go – Newton was sincerely convinced that there was only one

God. You can either call this Deism or Unitarianism if you want to put a name on it. The point is it was heresy as far as the Anglican Church was concerned. For this reason Newton never published in his lifetime his voluminous writings and notes concerning theology. Nor did he advertise his obsession with alchemy. Newton was profoundly tied to philosophies that had enjoyed intellectual currency during the late Ancient and Medieval Eras. While his science and mathematics broke totally new ground he himself as a thinker was deeply attracted to the past.

In some senses he was almost Gothic in his attachment to mysteries that many of his scientific colleagues would have considered bizarre had they known of his private thoughts. Newton was a child of both progressive Renaissance and High Gothic speculation. Therein lay his peculiar genius.

Notwithstanding his fascination with the archaic – the Council of Nicea and debates occurring in early Christianity, alchemical mysticism to name two – Newton surely believed in progress, in the improvement of knowledge through logical reasoning applied to empirical observation. How else can we explain his heated dispute with Leibnitz over who invented

415 calculus first? How else can we explain his willingness to publish his theories about light and planetary motion in the face of criticism from defenders of fundamentalist Christian doctrine coupled with his refusal to publish his Unitarian speculations? That he was selective about what he was willing to put before the public knowing full well that what would advance natural philosophy was infinitely more important than his cranky suspicions about what undermined true Christian principles centuries before testifies to his sincere belief in progress.

That many philosophers and artists agreed with this position is evident from the writings of Rameau, d’Alembert, and Helmholtz. Rameau, building on earlier observations published by

Joseph Sauvier, argued that the existence of upper partials – overtones in common parlance – proved that homophonic music rooted in triadic harmony was “natural.” It was the seduction of nature in sound carried to its greatest perfection. In his Traité de harmonie (Treatise on

Harmony) he argued that the most advanced music rested solidly on the principle of the

“fundamental bass”, noting that the fact that upper partial tones captured in triads proved that this was the realization of progress in music. What are the upper partials? They result from the sounding of pitches, the most forceful being the octave above the original pitch, the next the fifth above the original pitch, the next the second octave above the original pitch, the fourth the fifth above the octave and so forth. In short vibrations set off in the air – pitches simply reflecting the number of vibrations per second – generate more vibrations that are multiples of the original set of vibrations.

Rameau put forward this argument in developing his mathematical theory of musical harmony, a view that was critiqued – perhaps improved upon - from a scientific point of view by d’Alembert who was deeply involved in studying fluid mechanics and the waves generated in

416 within various media including the air. The point of this line of attack was to establish a purely scientific theory of music, grounding it in mathematics and the logic of vibrations set off by strings, air in organ pipes, beating on drum skins and so forth. The music was in nature, it was not a figment of the imagination, it was not produced by our ear drums, it was rooted in the physical environment, it was eminently real to so speak. This line of reasoning accorded with

Newton’s decomposition of white light using a prism to show how colored line was simply a component, enveloped within, white light. Color was real. It was not generated by the retina of the eye. It was not imaginary.

The ninth century German physicist Hermann Helmholtz was ideally suited to sort this matter out. Trained as a doctor he was fully capable of analyzing in detail the operation of the ear, and for that matter the operation of the eye including the retina 1. He was ideally suited as a medically trained scientist to sort out what aspect of mental perception is generated by our sensory receptors reacting to vibrations that are actually in the natural world as opposed to the aspect produced by the way the sensory receptors, ear drum and eye retina, operate. Setting up careful experiments, working extensively with tuning forks, he was able to confirm Rameau’s theory of overtones, extending his analysis of vibrations in the air to include a theory of dissonance. He argued beats set off by the simultaneous sounding of vibrations of unequal length – higher pitches having more vibrations, lower pitches less, per time period – created natural dissonances. Helmholtz went on to elaborate a theory of music as motion in natural space that allows the listener to experience emotion 2:

“…it becomes possible for motion in music to imitate the peculiar characteristics of motive forces in space, that is, to form an image of the various impulses and forces

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which lie at the root of motion. And on this, as I believe, essentially depends the power of music to picture emotion ….” In short music is able to conjure up emotion in the listener through the vibrations it makes in three dimensional space. Consistent with this thesis that music was natural – in was a reflection of the way nature operates on us – he argued that painting was the imitation of nature. Neither field was pure artifice that people were seduced into thinking were a reflection of nature. They were the seduction of nature. This was a very Renaissance view.

To be sure this was a view contested by some thinkers, notably by Goethe. In his treatise The Theory of Color Goethe attacked Newton’s theory of color. Goethe was definitely confused about the seduction of nature. True he completely misunderstood the idea that an experiment was erroneous in reaching conclusions because it was based on setting up an artificial environment – a carefully construed laboratory experiment so to speak – from which you make your observations, arriving at theoretical conclusions. Goethe based his critique of

Newton’s theory that white light was made up of colored light by pointing out a fact that other observers had found out before him. If you change the distance between the prism and the card onto which you capture the various colors making up white light you do not realize the pattern Newton discovered. From a statistical point of view only one distance between prism and card gives the result that white light is made up of diverse color lights. You get fuzzy pictures, blurred pictures, no decomposition at all with a large number of setups. Goethe, fired up by his belief that statistical sampling trumped definite conclusion from experiments, argued

Newton had been capricious.

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Goethe went on to argue white light was homogeneous and that color was the interaction of two polar opposites: darkness and light. Color was a boundary phenomenon revealed in an environment in which neither pure light or pure darkness reigned. It was real, it was in nature, but not in the sense that Newton had postulated. Having taken this pseudo- scientific stance, Goethe proceeded to contradict it. He argued that you could construct a color wheel in which all of the colors could be generated out of the purest tones, namely blue and yellow. Everything else was a mixture of these two primal colors. Moreover the colors had allegorical meaning: yellow was good; blue was common; mixing yellow and blue to create orange yielded a noble tone; mixing them to generate green produced a useful tone; generating violet yielded an unnecessary tone. Goethe was basically taking a psychological position. Colors resonate in us because they bring out emotions to which we respond. These emotions are not generated by distinct waves of light with distinct frequencies that are transmitted to our retinas through space. They arise out of boundary conditions, out of fuzziness, out of the interplay of darkness and pure light that we experience when we view objects.

Goethe’s challenge to the Newtonian theory of natural reality is compelling. Not on the ground of scientific experiment where he was surely wrong, misunderstanding what the seduction of nature is all about. Where it challenges Newtonian theory at its most trenchant point is when it questions whether imitating nature – channelling nature – has anything to do with art or music. If one abandons the position that imitating nature – seducing it – through the mixing of musical tones or colors – is the reason why we respond emotionally to art and music one must likewise abandon the position that there is progress in art and music. The reason is simple: if the reason why we deem music good or bad is unrelated to its supposed relationship

419 to physical reality then the idea that progress has occurred because we are getting closer to imitating – seducing – nature is also erroneous. Progress is an illusion fostered by the

Renaissance agenda claiming imitation – seduction – of nature is the only correct foundation for art and music.

For all of Newton’s fame and the provenance accorded England’s capital by the Royal

Society late seventeenth century London was probably best known for its musical culture.

Handel’s operas, followed by his Old Testament oratorios that appealed to a broad coalition of

Whigs and Tories who believed – each in their own way – the Britain was a pious beacon to all the nations – were all the rage. Queen Anne knighted Handel and Newton testifying to the marriage of artistic and scientific genius in the Promised Land.

Mechanics versus Fields Mastering nature is different. Technology is in the driver’s seat. The goal is to harness natural forces for industrial purposes. As long as the practical technology field was the province of alchemists while the church took the lead in advancing soft power in monasteries, cathedrals, and church schools technology and natural philosophy moved along separate, even adversarial lines. Scholasticism and alchemy were hardly bosom buddies. Under mercantilism there was a movement to join natural philosophy and alchemy – Francis Bacon was a key intellectual figure in pushing this agenda – but the progress achieved in fostering this union was muted at best. After all the Royal Society was an elite group, its meetings attended by aristocrats, members of the royal household, academics and dilettantes like Huygens. All of this changed with the first industrial revolution. Increasing the demand for new technological knowledge was focusing inventors and scientists on fields that were expected to yield great

420 benefits for heavy industries: the burgeoning iron and steel and chemical fields; the transport sector making great leaps in the practical application of steam power; and mass production consumer goods industries producing a widening menu of cheap cotton clothing, furniture turned out on lathes, iron stoves, and ceramics.

Consider electricity and magnetism 3. The electric telegraph was being developed in the early nineteenth century; Atlantic cables were being laid in the 1860s; and in the 1870s

Alexander Graham Bell was devising telephones. The market opportunities for applying electromagnetism were seemingly endless. To say this is not to imply that the two British geniuses who made path-breaking advances in the science of electromagnetism, Michael

Faraday and James Clerk Maxwell, were driven by personal greed. Unlike Liebig and Watt who were both cagey entrepreneurs as well as scientifically gifted individuals it is clear Faraday and

Maxwell were more concerned with garnering potential acclaim, in deriving personal satisfaction, from elaborating a satisfactory theory of electromagnetism than in starting a profitable sideline in business for themselves or their friends. There must be an eureka moment, a sense of euphoria, that comes from nailing down with hard cold facts something you believed was true but had yet to prove. Detectives must sense immense relief bordering on euphoria when they finally nab a master jewelry thief; a big game hunter must feel immensely gratified upon tracking down and killing a dangerous beast of prey terrifying a rural community.

One surmises it must be like that. That said it is difficult to separate the genius of Faraday and

Maxwell in mastering electromagnetism – one consequence of which was arriving at a theory of how light is generated, it itself being an electromagnetic wave, albeit with special properties –

421 from the fact that the scientific community as a whole was being challenged to come up with a compelling model of how electricity and magnetism interacted.

That the process by which Faraday and Maxwell advanced scientific knowledge about electromagnetism was not divorced from the practical world of technology is evidenced by the institution where Faraday made his breakthroughs as a paid researcher during the 1830s, showing that electricity could be induced by a magnet moving near a wire. This principle – electromagnetic induction – arose from experiments Faraday was carrying out as an employee of the Royal Institution of Great Britain.

What was the Royal Institution of Great Britain? It was the brainchild of Count Rumford,

Benjamin Thompson, a successful military expert and administrator, made a count of the Holy

Roman Empire as a result of the practical work he did in Bavaria – he managed to get vagabonds off the streets there - then a district of the sprawling empire. Flush with money and fame he returned to London where he founded the Royal Institution of Great Britain “…a public institution for diffusing the knowledge and facilitating the general introduction of useful inventions and improvements, and for teaching courses of philosophical lectures and experiments …” that concern the “application of science to the common purposes of life.” In short, unlike the elitist Royal Society, the Royal Institution was aimed at wide distribution of scientific knowledge to artisans, industrialists, and so-called common persons. As it turned out no one was more “common” in his upbringing than Michael Faraday, born into modest circumstances in Yorkshire.

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By dint of his influence in the elite soft power echelons of London, Count Rumford was able to convince the talented chemist Humphrey Davy to take a post as assistant lecturer at the newly furnished Royal Institution (shortly after his first appointment Davy was promoted to professor). As part of his duties Davy was expected to give lectures. As he was particularly interested in generating extremely elevated temperatures to carry out chemical experiments he conducted experiments using electrical arcs, reporting on his research in lectures he delivered under the auspices of the Institution. It was as an interested student of Davy’s lectures on electricity that Faraday learned about the physics of electricity, showing sufficient interest to take copious notes that he forwarded onto Davy. Impressed by the fortitude shown by the ambitious young recruit to science, Davy had Faraday appointed to the Institution as a researcher.

Aware of earlier advances in physics demonstrating that magnetism could be induced by electrical current running through wires Faraday reasoned that the reverse – the obverse – might also be the case: magnetism can induce electricity 4. This is the principle of symmetry. It supposes that nature does not do something ugly as to permit the existence of asymmetry. The fact that humans have two eyes symmetrically placed, that the typical higher order vertebrates do as well, suggests that symmetry is a fundamental property of the universe. True there are fish that defy the principle, having eyes on one and only one side of the face; true light waves and sound waves do not behave the same way, sound waves curving around screens that do not deny light passage but these exceptions do not rule out the principle holding in other realms. You cannot prove this; it is instinct. In short in carrying out a long series of experiments with magnets and electrical conductors Faraday was working with the following syllogism: (1)

423 magnets act on other magnets; (2) electric current acts on magnets; and (3) electric currents act on other electric currents; by deduction you arrive at proposition (4) magnets can produce electricity in conductors since magnets act on electrical conductors. Establishing this is the goal.

It is important to keep in mind that the idea of electrons moving in wires was not entertained at the time when Faraday was carrying out his studies. So at first he persisted working with static magnets and static electrical conductors. Happily he was determined to step outside the box, putting a magnet in motion around wires. Working along these lines he was able to create the world’s first electrical transformer, a moving magnet inducing an electrical current to flow in a neighboring circuit. This is the principle of electromagnetic induction.

Faraday was proudly able to make a copper disc turn around the great horseshoe magnet of the

Royal Society.

In addition to demonstrating that electromagnetism embodied symmetry Faraday was able to show that the magnets emitted lines of force, emanating out of one end of the magnet, curling around to the other end. By analogy the magnetic field of the earth emerges from one pole travelling to the other pole. Faraday came up with an ingenious way of representing the lines of force induced by magnetism. Placing a sheet of paper in which a host of iron filings are laid over a magnet one gets a distinct pattern. The filings rearrange themselves into a distinctive pattern, arc like lines of force asserting themselves. It looked like a field being ploughed up by a farmer.

While Faraday possessed superb physical intuition he was not a gifted mathematician.

With this in mind he approached James Clerk Maxwell, holder of a Chair in Physics at Marischal

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College in Aberdeen, Scotland. When Marshall received a letter from Faraday in 1857 requesting assistance in developing a mathematical theory of electromagnetism, Maxwell was already a celebrated scientist, revered throughout Europe for his great analytical skills. He had already studied the rings on Saturn, publishing a book on the subject; he had worked on the kinetic theory of gases; had published in the field of thermodynamics; worked out a statistical model for how gases are distributed; and had done stellar research on the perception of color, furthering the research of Helmholtz who was trying to come up with precise measures of the frequencies generating the three primary colors. But this is not the reason why Faraday was particularly interested in writing to Maxwell. Rather it was because of Maxwell’s fame as a mathematical genius. What Faraday wanted Maxwell to focus his attention on was clear: help us establish a mathematical theory of electromagnetism. Think abstractly about the problem.

This is precisely what Maxwell did. He thought about the interaction of electricity and magnetism in terms of the interaction of two fields. Thinking in terms of fields naturally arose from studying Faraday’s description of lines for force. Once you think in terms of one set of fields – say electrical – generating a magnetic field next door, it is natural to think about how an electromagnetic wave would be generated. Unlike a wave caused by a rock thrown in a lake or a sound wave dissipating as it spread out into a forest an electromagnetic wave should have the property of jumping forward through space, starting as a disturbance in an electrical field that stirs up a disturbance in a neighboring magnetic field setting off a further disturbance in an electrical field next to it and so forth. In theory transmission is unimpeded. What Maxwell worked out with his famous dynamical equations was a system that simulated this dynamic. In

425 point of fact Maxwell’s original principles were spread across a host of equations, reduced to four by a later researcher 5.

Maxwell’s theory of electromagnetic fields was revolutionary. Why? It called into question the validity of the mechanical model proposed by Newton. Newton’s theory of the mechanical operation of the universe was widely accepted as valid among both scientists and a wide spectrum of educated individuals, destined to never be replaced by an alternative approach. It was the final word in physics. The noted Enlightenment era scientist Joseph-Louis

Lagrange summarized this notion by quipping that Newton was the greatest and most fortunate among scientists because the science of our world could only be created once 6. But from

Maxwell’s concept of fields whose disturbances generated waves that could be propagated through empty space came three important consequences 7:

 A changing electric field will produce a magnetic field.

 A changing magnetic field will produce an electric field.

 Light is a form of electromagnetic radiation.

Building upon Maxwell’s theoretical insights the German physicist Heinrich Hertz was able to demonstrate experimentally that electromagnetic radiation was responsible for generating light. Let c be the speed of light in open space. Then Hertz and his colleagues working on electromagnetic radiation were able to generalize Maxwell’s third proposition to the following:

 There are a family of electromagnetic waves transmitted by electric and magnetic fields

changing each other in open space. Light is the fastest of these waves, the rest of the

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waves in the family having frequency of vibration f and wave length λ satisfying the

condition:

(7.2) f * λ = c or f = c/λ

The family of waves include X-rays, gamma rays, radio waves, television waves, and so forth.

For instance light moves at an approximate speed of 186,000 miles per second having a very an ultrahigh frequency of vibration; a typical radio wave has a frequency of 106 cycles per second and a wave length of 300 meters; by contrast with the long wavelength exhibited by a typical radio wave a gamma ray has a frequency of 3 * 1020 cycles per second and a miniscule wave length of 10-10 centimeters (one ten-billionth of a centimeter).

Why did these findings unleash an attack upon the Newtonian mechanical theory explaining how the universe operates, ultimately ushering in the theory of relativity that displaced classical mechanics? The answer is simultaneously simple and complicated.

The simple answer is the idea of transmitting energy – electromagnetic energy radiating out at certain frequencies in the form of waves moving through fields – opened up a view of reality in which waves move through empty space. No medium is required. It is possible there is no material – akin to air in the case of sound, akin to water in the case of ripples radiating out from a stone tossed into a lake – through which the waves move. Empty space is a possibility.

The key point about fields is that as they radiate energy through continuous change induced in fields that are immaterial. In a Newtonian world you think about particles moving through a medium. Imagine a ball stuck by a cue stick. It is set in motion travelling along a billiard table until it strikes another ball sending the second ball into a pocket. Mass is in motion inducing

427 further motion in masses it collides with. It moves through a material medium – along a table, along the surface of the ocean, through the air in the case of musical vibrations – in a completely mechanical manner.

The complicated answer is that physicists had been trying to measure the impact of the earth’s motion on the transmission of light from the early nineteenth centuries6. Aware that light moved at a constant speed in a vacuum they speculated that there must be something in a vacuum through which the light wave moved. They called it the ether (also spelled “aether”).

To simplify a complex model we can say it consisted of extremely small particles whose function was to transmit light waves. Since light moved in the same speed on the face of the earth, not just in a vacuum tube, they speculated that the ether was everywhere. According to the logic of

Newton’s theory of absolute space it was reasonable to suppose the ether was fixed relative to the earth that was moving around the sun with a constant speed v (an alternative model postulated that the ether moved with the earth just as air moves with the earth but this argument did not resolve the problems involving the retardation in motion of light that should be observed in experiments like the Michelson-Morley experiment of 1887). Since the ether was fixed one should detect a retardation of the speed of light by a factor of v/c (c being the speed of light). The trick was how to measure it.

It is important to understand why this was a matter of great concern to physicists. Lying at the core of the Newtonian approach to mechanics there are two bedrock principles. The laws of physics hold everywhere. They are invariant. This is called the Galilean relativity principle. If the laws of physics are observed in Florence they also hold in Venice, in Paris, on the moon, on

Saturn. Validity in one reference frame means validity in all reference frames. The second is

428 geometric, specifically Euclidean. Speeds add. Light moves at speed c; the earth is moving at a speed v relative to the ether that is fixed; hence a light moving in the direction of the ether should be slowed down by the “ether wind” it encounters, moving at a speed equal to the speed c-v. In mathematical terms we are saying vectors add when they are laid out along a single dimension. As well if light is moving perpendicular to the direction the earth is moving it should not be affected. It should move at the speed c.

Experimental physicists had been struggling with the problem of how to measure the impact of the ether wind on speed of light throughout much of the nineteenth century. The problem was technological, coming up a device that could detect very small differences in light speed. The reason lies in the ratio v/c: it is infinitesimally small. Maxwell himself speculated that it would not be possible to observe the impact of such a miniscule ratio with experimental equipment (however he believed you might be able to observe the square of the ratio v2/c2). In

1887 the Michelson-Morley experiment was carried out: its authors believed that there evidence was definitive: there was no “ether wind” effect, at least none they could detect, the authors of the experiment arguing that the statistical probability of the ether existing was insignificant7.

Thus the gauntlet was cast down. If the universe operated according to field principles there was no problem: dispense with the ether. If the universe was Newtonian come up with an explanation for the lack of an “ether wind” effect. One approach that could salvage the

Newtonian theory was the possibility that the length of the tube along which the light ray moving against the putative “ether wind” was shortened physically because it was moving. If it was shortened by just the right amount – an insignificantly miniscule amount that nobody had

429 been able to detect before because the ratio c/v is so very tiny – it could explain why the

Michelson-Morley experiment failed to detect the ether.

Working the mathematics and physical interpretation explaining how this could happen were the Dutch Hendrik Lorentz and the French Henri Poincaré, the former a physicist, the latter a theoretical mathematician. What they came up with is the Lorentz transform operating in a so-called mathematical construct known as a Lie group. The details are unimportant. The bottom line is that the resulting set of equations offered a way to move from one reference frame to another reference frame in such a way as to preserve Galilean relativity. Subject to a

Lorentz transformation space and time were jointly preserved in the following sense: the relative position and the observed time of experimental equipment – rods to measure length and clocks to register time – were invariant. If I postponed an experiment by ten hours it did not matter; if I carried it out ten miles from the locale where I initially devised it there would be no problem.

The point to keep in mind is this: the Lorentz transform was non-Euclidean. You did not add and subtract speeds the way Newton said you did using standard Euclidean rules regarding the adding up of speeds along a single dimension. The basic principles of physics were invariant with respect to your reference frame. However – and this was a huge caveat – measuring results of experiments in a frame of reference moving at a constant speed with respect to the frame of reference where the experiment was being conducted – would be different from the measurements taken in the reference frame where the experiments were being done. You needed a Lorentz transform to recalibrate the results for the reference frame in motion. What might be simultaneous in the reference frame where the experiment was being done – a speed

430 between two objects calibrated by a clock – would not be simultaneous in a reference system moving. You needed the Lorentz transform to recalibrate as you moved from one reference system to another 8. The implications of this formulation were revolutionary. For example if the sun were fixed relative to the ether then one needed the Lorentz transform to recalibrate the results of the Michelson-Morley experiment: the earth was a moving reference frame relative to the sun; in theory from the point of view of an observer on the sun the Michelson-Morley experiment would demonstrate that there is an ether.

Let me summarize. Mastering light raised a conundrum setting various groups of scientists against each other. Younger scientists embracing the new electromagnetic field theory were perfectly happy to abandon the ether, committed to working out a theory of matter and energy based on transmission through open space. Others – particularly noted figures like Lord Kelvin (William Thomson) who thought in terms of traditional thermodynamics according to which laws of energy conservation joined to Newtonian mechanics explained the way the universe operated – were committed to the ether. They distrusted the conclusions reached by the Michelson-Morley experiment. Into this debate stepped a young scientist who was struggling with understanding the logic of experiments involving electromagnetic during the dawn of the next century: Albert Einstein.

Evasive Unity: The Early Phase of Relativity Theory and Quantum Mechanics

At the beginning of the nineteenth century there was a consensus in scientific circles that the crowning achievement in science was the Newtonian theory of mass, inertia, gravitation, and force describing the universe as a massive machine. Refined to incorporate two

431 laws of thermodynamics it rested secure in its rectitude, the absolute bedrock of how to advance knowledge of the physics of the universe, never to be replaced by another system.

What were the philosophical assumptions underlying the Newtonian approach. One was the

Galilean principle of relativity: the laws of inertia and acceleration in Pisa are also valid in

Padua. The second is Euclidean geometry: along any axis velocities add and subtract. If a passenger moving forward in a passenger car within a moving train passing an observer standing at a railroad station is moving within the train at speed v1, the train passing the observer at speed v2, then the speed of the passenger relative to the stationary observer is v1 + v2. Using the jargon of vectors we say that the two vectors add up to single vector moving at a speed greater than the speed of the train.

Buried within this model of how things work is the idea that time does not enter into the analysis. In the Newtonian worldview there is a sharp demarcation between the treatment of time and that of space. For instance under the theory of gravitation that attracts two masses whose centers of inertia are a specific points p1 (described in Cartesian analytical geometry as numbers marked off on a two horizontal axes and one vertical axis) and p2 (likewise described in analytical geometry by a second set of numbers marked off on the same two horizontal axes and one vertical axis), there is no mention of time. Action is immediate. Time only matters when you are talking about velocities and accelerations that arise from the instantaneous interaction of masses positioned in space. Time required for interaction to take place is irrelevant.

The elaboration of Maxwell’s theory of electromagnetic radiation taking time to spread out in space – pure energy generated by changes in electric and magnetic fields – suggested

432 that time required for interactions to take place does matter. This is because electromagnetic fields transmit information – sound waves, gamma rays, X rays – at speeds slower than the speed of light that is the fastest moving electromagnetic wave. More to the point it suggests that observations requiring measuring the use of rods and clocks involve time to carry out.

What is simultaneous to one observer in a reference system – a ball dropping on a plate smashing it to smithereens and a clock registering the time of the event as 2:00 pm – might not be simultaneous to an observer moving at a speed relative to the event taking place in the original reference system. The reason is simple: it takes time for light to travel to the moving train, so the observer on the train does not believe that the ball dropped at 2:00 pm but a few micro-seconds later. In one reference system ball making contact with plate occurs at 2:00 pm; in another it takes place at 2:00 pm plus a few micro-seconds.

Note that this approach implies that clocks in inertial reference frames moving rapidly move slower than do clocks in inertial reference frames that are at rest relative to the moving inertial reference frame. Suppose a jet plane breaking the sound barrier sends out a flare that explodes making a dramatic flash in the stratosphere. A clock on the jet records the flash at a time of ten seconds. On the ground a clock registers the flash at full minute, light taking time to reach it. Relative to the clock on the jet the clock on the earth is running fast; alternatively the clock on the jet is running slow. Similar conclusions can be reached about mass: objects in inertial reference systems moving at high speed gain mass (the mass that resists force applied to it according to Newton’s equations). Mass and time are relative.

Accounts given by Einstein regarding the development of his theory of relativity – first published in 1905 in the journal Annalem der Physik as a thirty-page paper with the title “On

433 the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies” – indicate he came up with this insight at the age of sixteen. What is clear is that his intuition that time mattered in the experimental process – in the exact recording of events – was deep seated. He was fascinated by Maxwell’s theory of electromagnetic radiation that explained transmission of light; he concluded that observations could only be made taking into account the role of light or other forms of electromagnetic radiation – like sound – in transmitting information to observers. One radical conclusion that follows from this approach is that moving clocks slow down. Another is that events take place in space-time, not in space alone. A third radical conclusion is that Euclidean geometry is not the proper tool for describing transformation of physics laws from one reference system to a second reference system moving relative to the first reference system: the Lorentz transform is.

Velocities do not add the way Newton believed they did. Their interaction only makes sense when you take into account the relative motion of reference systems in motion. The laws of physics are invariant with respect to Lorentz transformation but not invariant with respect to

Euclidean transformation.

That Einstein was guided to these conclusions is apparent from a paper he published in the next issue of Annalem der Physik, “Does the Inertia of a Body Depend on Its Energy?” that concerned research being done on subatomic particles. The reason that the focus on subatomic particles matters – electrons, protons, neutrons, quanta of energy – is because the speeds with which these particles having miniscule mass are extremely high. They approach the speed of light. At these speeds the problem of determining the invariance of laws of physics becomes crucial. In the world that we normally encounter in our daily life a Newtonian approach is fine because the masses are large and the speeds involved relative to the speed of light are slow.

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But at the subatomic level things are very different; it is clear Einstein had this in mind when he proposed the special theory of relativity.

What was Einstein concerned with in the paper dealing with subatomic? His focus was on findings involving the photoelectric effect, specifically the existence of “black body” radiation absorbed and emitted by metals (according to Einstein’s interpretation of results recorded by Planck using spectral analysis for an electron to be ejected from a metal a certain critical level of energy needed to be harnessed). What both Planck and Einstein were fascinated by is the fact that some types of light – for instance ultraviolet light – shining on a zinc plate caused electrons to be discharged from the surface of the plate. Einstein speculated that the ultraviolet light was a “high energy” form of light, distinct packets of energy striking the surface of the plate with sufficient amounts of energy contained within them to induce electrons to jump off the plate. Later called photons the packets of light were corpuscles. Einstein’s idea was simple: as Newton had speculated centuries earlier light was corpuscular. If the so-called energy packets contained sufficient energy they could impart the energy to electrons that were now sufficiently energized to leap off the plate. This is the photoelectric effect for which

Einstein eventually received the Nobel Prize when experimental evidence finally convinced skeptical physicists that Einstein’s radical rejection of the theory that light was nothing more than a wave was in fact verifiable. What Einstein was asserting is that light is both wavelike and corpuscular.

At the heart of the nascent field of quantum mechanics Einstein was basically arguing the subatomic matter was inseparable from subatomic energy. In short for objects moving at

435 very high speeds, at high frequencies, mass and energy are interchangeable. Tapping atomic energy is a possibility.

To recapitulate: according to Einstein the Newtonian approach was completely wrong.

Time and space formed one continuum. Mass and energy formed one continuum. You need to substitute the conservation of mass-energy combined rather than the conservation of energy as conceived by nineteenth century physicists.

Many things that seemed separate were really one in the same. Light could behave like a wave but also behave like a corpuscle as it did in the photoelectric effect. Viewed from a moving reference system an electric field might display some of the characteristics of a magnetic field and vise-versa. This was disturbing. It suggested the entire progressive

Renaissance project initiated by so-called heroes of natural philosophy like Galileo who battled

Catholic Church oppression was wrong-headed. Newton might be right when it came to understanding the laws of mechanical interaction commonly observed by people lacking special equipment for ferreting out subatomic dynamics; but his overall theory of reality was mistaken.

This was naturally upsetting, first to scientists, then to a larger public as evidence accumulated buttressing the validity of Einstein’s reasoning. A clever writer of limericks picked up the queasiness the general public felt when they learned the world did not behave the way it seemed it had behaved a generation earlier 9:

“There was a young lady named Bright Who travelled much faster than light She started one day In the relative way

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And returned on the previous night”

What used to make sense no longer made sense: what was going on? Had scientists gone mad?

How can you deny that time moves at the same pace everywhere, at all times, absolute in the way it measures out chronologies? How can we talk about time demarking events that occurred before or after one another? What is historical time? Is time a more complicated concept than we were led to belief when we learned how to read time on a clock; when we studied history in school?

Chapter 8 Elusive Unity, Perpetual Conflict: Tragedy or Comedy? There is no getting around the fact that a central thesis of this book is grounded in a kind of pessimism. There is no escaping the fact that the argument laid out in these pages disparages the idealistic assumption that it is possible to achieve a stable state in which all peoples everywhere can live together in blissful harmony. Call me a pessimist if you will; still I would prefer you call me a realist. I am not naïve about the names people come up with for attacking views they do not like. I have no illusions that everyone reading this volume will come away convinced I am even close to correct in my conclusions about humanity. So be it.

Perhaps you might accuse me of being too harsh in my depiction of human behavior.

That would be unfair in my opinion. The fact the transcendental is of great significance for the evolution of societies speaks to the better angels of our nature. The fact that a secular agenda – evinced in the Enlightenment project – has appealed to some many people the world over

437 speaks to the better angels of our nature. The fact that soft power has risen relative to hard power, thereby reducing violence, speaks to the better angels of our nature.

Having said that I cannot conclude that violent conflict has withered away. Resort to arms may have withered away although the fact that ongoing wars in Syria, Yemen, and

Afghanistan have generated human misery of staggering proportions does make you wonder about the future of armed conflict. And then it would be pointless to put our heads in the sand, ignoring weapons of mass destruction that are stockpiled in the United States, the Russian

Federation, Communist China, North Korea, India, Pakistan, and Israel.

However, even if resort to armed conflict does dissipate in the future, there is no evidence that political conflict engendering political swings is going away. If anything the suggestion of this treatise is that political conflict, mimicking conflict in science and the arts, is not disappearing and in fact may be increasing. The mere fact that complexity has increased, thereby making it an increasingly arduous task to forge unity even within groups that coalesce under an ideological umbrella - which is after all simply a matter of cobbling together a coalition formed to combat things the ideology abhors - thereby countering opposing groups that have also coalesced under a stridently different ideological umbrella, suggests conflict is not only not going away, Rather it may be picking up stream due to the onslaught on the social fabric stemming from the steady march of complexity. Further complicating conflict is the existence of the law of unintended consequences. One corollary of this law is sobering: every success on the field of political battle will eventually usher in a future defeat. Success is invariably short-lived.

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Moreover success is paradoxical. Progressives have no choice but to become conservative at times. In order to hold onto the gains they have managed to achieve they must continually fight to prevent these gains from being eroded by opponents, who are really not acting as so-called conservatives in this case – but rather as progressives - when they rally behind an agenda of undoing what their opponents have achieved. A case in point is a woman’s right to choose whether to have an abortion or not, a bitterly fought over issue in the United

States Constitution. Those rallying around a Right to Life agenda aimed at banning abortion are simply saying that there are two rights – a right to privacy and a right to protect the unborn – neither of which were explicitly dealt with when the Constitution of the United States was originally promulgated. As a result Supreme Court decisions guaranteeing a woman’s right to choose can swing either for or against the right of privacy enshrined in Roe v. Wade. Even if the

Right to Life agenda fails to ban abortion (including in case of rape) throughout the United

States (short of a constitutional amendment banning abortion it is difficult to see how this could occur) it acts as a clarion call, encouraging opponents of abortion to vote for Republicans in elections. The consequence – intended or not – is the campaign against a woman’s right to choose blunts the rise of progressive agendas in the Democratic Party because it forces many

Democrats to focus on protecting the principle of a woman’s right to choose rather than enthusiastically embracing a forward-looking progressive agenda.

This is a perfect example of how the highly diverse and conflicting set of Enlightenment principles – rights conflicting with rights just as the right to own slaves conflicted with the

Declaration of Independence – has introduced into the sphere of political voice conflict, eating away at unity.

439

Unity is an illusion. Is this a good thing or a bad thing? I am of mixed feelings when I confront this question. Sometimes I see the failure of unification as a tragedy. It would be wonderful to live in a world – let alone a country or a state or a province – where everyone agreed on policies, norms, ideas, and ethics. Then again supposing this actually came to pass.

How do I know whether this state of affairs might or might not unleash unintended consequences I might find abhorrent? If everyone agreed what would be the value of free speech, of voice? Would genius itself be stifled? Would boredom be the dreary result? Dante to the contrary, the thought of a Heavenly Paradiso is not as enticing as you might think, that is if you take sufficient time to think about it. Why is the Faust legend so compelling? Why is Don

Giovanni’s defiance at the end of Mozart’s great opera, choosing Hell, so compelling? Is the

Gothic terror of a Bosch painting fascinating because we secretly like to imagine sinners being tortured, abused, and even barbequed in a fiery Hell? After all which one of Dante’s three books is the most interesting? Are we honest about this?

In closing I am left with the thought – and I would like to leave you the reader with this thought – that the truism unity being nothing but illusion is actually comic. We all want it or at least think we want it; we all end up frustrated because it can never be achieved at least on our own terms. We rail and rant at people we view as benighted because they do not share our ideological outlook. We act like bewildered clowns wandering through a House of Mirrors where everything is distorted by the law of unintended consequences. Rather than being depressed by this hard truth, I say: do not be despondent! There is no shelter from the storm.

Revel in the pounding cold rain; embrace the ecstatic fury of lightning bolts splashing across the heavens; watch with wonder as furious winds bend mighty trees in cruel contortions.

440

Remember: after a mighty downpour there will appear a beautiful rainbow highlighting the grandeur of a pristine intense cobalt blue – resplendent, placid, through the turmoil of the storm completely purged of rueful clouds - afternoon sky. So there.

Appendix

Summary of the Note: This note argues that standard mainstream economics – by avoiding a systematic treatment of ideological conflict and power – is unsuitable for explaining long-run change in societies, specifically economic change itself. It argues the mainstream market model that developed out of the European Enlightenment was the only theory associated with the secular agenda of the Enlightenment that espoused unity, arguing that it could be achieved even in the face of a human nature that inherently resists virtue. In particular the note rejects mainstream economics because of its excessive reliance on equilibrium and a theory of utility that is inconsistent with what we know about the way the human brain operates.

Economics: A Critical Note

Market Equilibrium and Optimizing Behavior are Not Useful Concepts for Analyzing Dynamic Change in an Economy

Economics as a modern academic discipline is a product of the Enlightenment movement. To say this is not to disparage contributions to economic reasoning that precede the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The problem with these approaches is that they appendages to discourse that focused upon other issues, philosophical, theological, or historical. The idea that a general equilibrium in which atomistic actors who are not intrinsically virtuous interacting through the invisible hand of market clearing, supply and demand shifting

441 towards an idealized balance point, is one of the most profound inspirations to emerge from the Enlightenment project. This is why most mainstream – non-Marxist – economists go back to

Adam Smith as the great, great, great, grandfather of modern economists. From this point of view of this treatise the equilibrium approach that most economists adhere to today is misguided. That I am not alone in arguing that contemporary economics as it is taught in principles classes at universities and colleges is seriously flawed is indicated by the fact that there is a movement afoot to revamp teaching in the profession of economics. For instance

Komlos (2015) sets out one version of a revised curriculum. The version advanced by Komlos differs from mine but it speaks to a common issue: dissatisfaction with the mainstream.

As noted Adam Smith’s idea of the invisible hand of market competition directing economic activity towards an equilibrium was a prime example of Enlightenment genius. Think of actors in an economy as gas molecules contained in a box, bouncing around willy-nilly against each other, eventually settling down to a steady state equilibrium. Short of an infusion of more gas into the box – or drilling the tiniest of apertures into the box allowing gas molecules to escape – the equilibrium persists. Think of the bouncing between molecules as attempts at establishing contact with other parties, ferreting out opportunities to effect purchases and sales, searching out job opportunities. At its simplest level we can imagine these searches taking place between discrete individuals. Even being recruited by a textile mill involves meeting with agents scouring the countryside for recruits. Selling fish and carrots in an open air market is similar: you chat up customers, arguing your catch of the day is superior to that sold deeper into the rows of stalls assembled together for shoppers. Smith’s point was

442 simple: the more you allow trades to take place in a deregulated manner the better off each individual will be. More trades, more opportunity to better your circumstances.

What about the size of the box? Dealing with this was key to Smith’s argument about efficiencies resulting from invisible hand trading. If you enlarge the box, expanding the number of trade opportunities, you increase the opportunity to make a living by specializing into tinier and tinier niches. Instead of making a mélange of woodblock prints, wooden stamps, primitive banjos and violins, you specialize in woodblock printing because the volume of your business as a specialist jumps when there are more customers purchasing woodblock prints. This was on reason free trade between countries was a good thing. As the size of the market expands so does the diversity of niche markets operating under the umbrella of a capacious market.

How are invisible hand prices determined for goods and services? Smith adhered to the labor theory of value that emerged out of the late seventeenth century Enlightenment, specifically the natural law worldview of thinkers like John Locke. Locke argued that a properly construed government should protect “life, liberty, and estate” of the individuals over which it rules. By “estate” he meant not only private assets – tools; clothing; a hovel, house or grand castle to reside in – but also the labor one commands through one’s own personal exertion and effort. Everyone rich or poor enjoys the potential to work, hence enjoys property. The market price of a commodity is the number of privately owned labor units that goes into its production.

When machines and tools are used – lathes for instance in a carpenter’s shop – it is embodied labor. An hour spent using a lathe consists of one hour of the artisan’s private labor plus the number of labor units embodied in the lathe. A chair might be selling for twenty labor units, trading on the market with a two brooms each separately worth ten labor units. This was

443 natural law at work. It was natural law operating under laws guaranteeing private property rights at work. Under this framework one of the primary duties of government was ensuring private property rights were protected. By extension this meant creating a legal regimen guaranteeing returns of intellectual property, notably patent and copyright.

In Smith’s argument about the size of the market benefiting overall economic welfare he was simply pointing out that specializing in one task – repeating over and over again – reduced the average number of labor units required to manufacture objects. In his famous pin factory example, specialization on the shop floor - dividing the tasks up into stages, molding or affixing heads to shafts prepared by someone else working at an earlier stage of production, everyone working under the same roof - efficiency meant lower prices for pins, a boon not only for seamstresses but also for fashion designers. Factories were a step forward from putting-out enterprise. In putting out in the textile industry for instance a network consisting of craft oriented households – some spinning, some weaving, some dying, and some affixing colorful trims – was assembled together by a merchant (or merchant enterprise employing apprentices) who as oil and grease do in an automobile’s gear box, facilitating the seamless meshing of various stages in production. It was a step forward because it reduced the cost of transacting involved in integrating various stages of the clothing industry under putting-out.

Without doubt another appeal of the Smithian framework was the idea that its policy agenda implied full employment of labor was possible. If gluts appeared from time to time selling surpluses in foreign trade markets operating like a vent, releasing pressure on the invisible hand within a national economy. Rather than suffering through business cycles resulting from gluts ushering in bankruptcies and the sacking of workers, exploiting vents

444 offered a way out of deep downswings. Of course this did not mean unemployment could not arise. For one thing it arises naturally from search for jobs and search for buyers and sellers.

Information is not perfect. It takes time to ferret out the best opportunities available. The law of unintended consequences holds. Some people end up regretting their decisions, quitting one job, taking time off to find another. Some unemployment will exist in an atomistic box.

However since most persons are highly risk averse the cement of inertia keeps them from striking out towards new horizons that may in fact be nothing more than fantasies, the grass on the other side of the proverbial fence. A little instability within in the box in no way compromises the basic principle that equilibrium is a natural outcome under atomistic competition.

It would be churlish to deny the appeal of this framework. Rooted in individualism that was a principal focus of the British Enlightenment, it offered an explanation about how promoting equality of opportunity – promoting access to markets for everyone in a population

– could generate social welfare superior to those that could be secured under other systems, notably under mercantilism. The problem with mercantilism was monopoly and oligopoly.

Chartering royal monopolies like the Hudson Bay Company promoted imperialistic overreach, induced warfare between mercantilist rivals, and channeled capital into usages that were inefficient. At least inefficient in the sense that if the capital were made available to investors and entrepreneurs instead of to monopolists who were interested in aggrandizing market power it could be better utilized to generate output. Implicit in this argument was the assertion that there was a trade-off between investing abroad and investing at home. Asserting this did not mean international trade per se was bad. Trade carried on across national boundaries was

445 fine as long as it was atomistic. After all atomistic trade between countries widens markets, promoting efficiency. Moreover atomistic trade does not foment mercantilist wars like those over breaking out over the control of markets in Asia, the Americas and the Caribbean by imperialist rivals. As long as merchants, intent on importing and exporting commodities raised capital in competitive markets they would have to generate rates of return on capital comparable to those generated by entrepreneurs investing at home in order to remain viable.

The reason mercantilism was inefficient was simple: it diverted capital from its most efficient use.

Despite its great appeal – logical simplicity leading to profound implications for social life – the doctrine is highly flawed in the sense that it begs more questions than it resolves. It assumes away crime and dishonesty in business dealings as a first approximation. In its bare primitive logic it brushes away the question of who provides public goods that can be accessed by everyone, citizens and foreigners alike. For instance consider the roads; hydroelectric grids; compulsory school systems mandating curriculums for all enrolled students. Again who sets standards for health and safety in the workplace? Should government act as an insuring agent protecting people laid off from work by their employer? If so for how long? In reality as opposed to pure theory, people form political and social groups to protect their collective interests, attempting to imposing regulations on markets being one of the main reasons why they band together. Should the sale of semi-automatic rifles be banned? What about the right to an abortion? Practitioners of the invisible hand approach are willing to concede there is a role for governmental intervention in markets; there is a role for government managed, even publically owned, monopolies. The question is how much intervention? Who pays for it? At the

446 practical level of advising government economists trained in this form of economics, struggling with these questions as technical conundrums, eschewing ideologically charged debates that they argue are the intellectual province of experts on politics. Or rather economists pretend to treat the issues as technical ones. For instance employing comparative statics, you compare one equilibrium outcome (in which a tax or a regulation is imposed) to another equilibrium outcome (in which the tax or regulation is not imposed). You draw conclusions based on these types of stylized contrasts. Whether you properly take into account unintended consequences is surely a flaw in this type of reasoning but in principle you can argue about why the unintended consequences would not be too troublesome.

Lurking behind the mathematical and empirically grounded reasoning of most economists are ideologies. Many refuse to explicitly reveal their ideological biases to the audiences they address; or when they do reveal these biases, argue that the biases stand on their own, cleanly separated and walled off from the technical matters they claim expertise in.

For instance some economists believe the government that governs best is the government that governs least. Libertarians take this approach. Some believe government is as often as not stymied when it attempts to intervene in markets because private actors work around the rules imposed. Put an upper limit on interest rates banks can charge. Bankers negotiate loans with compensating balances, requiring holdbacks on funds dispersed, effectively avoiding the caps imposed by regulators. Some concede that government intervention is imperfect, its impact blunted by cagey businesses and investment managers in major financial institutions, but still maintain that imperfect intervention trumps a regime that permits social discrimination on the basis, of skin color and creed, the existence of financial chicanery like Ponzi schemes, and illicit

447 drug cartels to run wild. Again how much regulation, how to impose it, how to fund it, are questions left over for debate. Technical advances in the field have changed the way the debates are formulated but in point of fact have not reached definitive solutions convincing everywhere.

Many ideological debates in economics are simply about self-interest. How much taxation should be imposed upon wage earners? How progressive should be the income tax schedule? Should wealth holding be taxed? What about inheritance taxes? Insofar as the debates are restricted to these issues it is possible to formulate atomistic reasoning grounded in individualism to set the table for a reasoned technical debate. But what about ideologies that motivate people to engage in political activity, pushing agendas that do not necessarily benefit them personally but satisfy their sense of virtue? What about the opponents of slavery who simply argued it corrupted society? That it might be efficient in terms of returns on capital invested in slave plantations but morally wrong? Consider social welfare defined in terms of fairness as well as in terms of efficiency. Is it fair that some people, growing up in rich powerful households, have access to opportunities other people do not have access to? Is that fair?

From a static point of view – disregarding long-run change in societies – a case can be made for the view that technically grounded debates avoiding implicit treatment of ideology, should be the proper province of economics. Emulating physics -albeit a real stretch given the difference between natural law in physics and normative principles in equilibrium driven economic - is one way to achieve this goal. It is not an overwhelmingly convincing argument at least to the skeptical but it is at least intellectually defensible. It can be used to explain why gas stations located at opposite sides of an intersection charge marginally different prices (drivers

448 going one way are not inclined to turn around to take advantage of a few cents a gallon differential because they care about their time). And so forth.

However it is simply ludicrous when it is applied to long-run evolution of economies. A prime example of the distortions brought on by the application of equilibrium principles to economic history is the widespread reliance on counterfactual analysis in the field. How do you sort out whether a new technological innovation – say the steam railroad – profoundly shaped the economic history of countries like Great Britain, Germany, the United States, and Japan during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries? One way is to set up a counterfactual framework in which alternative methods of transporting goods and services replaced the railroads: say canals linked to rivers and the ocean. Comparing what actually happened with what might have happened allows a researcher to put a quantitative estimate (or rather a range of estimates) to the impact the railroad made (for instance by computing national income with and without the railroad, thereby coming up with the marginal contribution of the railroad to overall economic activity). In effect two equilibriums – or to be more accurate an actual outcome is being compared to a hypothetical equilibrium outcome - are being compared to one another. The problem is: is the assumption that things are in equilibrium reasonable?

The biggest problem with the equilibrium doctrine is it assumes all actors interacting through atomistic trades take into account – or at least try to take into account - the unintended consequences of their actions. For people who are highly risk averse this is probably a reasonable conjecture. However it does not hold for geniuses; it does not hold for charismatic politicians; and it does not hold for prophets. These remarkable individuals break the mold. They dream big and they dream often. Geniuses operating in economic, scientific,

449 and artistic markets are the very epitome of the Enlightenment’s belief in continuing ongoing progress. They disrupt. Was Martin Luther willing to desist in his savage attack on Catholic

Church corruption? Did James Joyce not realized his masterpiece Ulysses would challenge restrictions imposed on the sale of pornography? What about the Molly Bloom soliloquy that ends the book? Steadfast and unafraid of pushback, they attract followers because they are bold, because they symbolize possibilities for an as yet not realized future, because they are not simply immersed in the humdrum world of the present. Rather than helping to establish equilibriums they are bent on disruption. This makes no sense in equilibrium.

Dialectic Movement Not Movement Lurching from Equilibrium to Equilibrium along Steady Growth Paths That mainstream economics formulates its analyses in terms of equilibriums that can be compared with one another has a natural corollary. Compare economic change in terms of equilibrium paths. Ignoring unintended consequences stemming from economic growth – for instance pollution that contributes to soil depletion or global climate change – the natural comparison is the rate of growth. Assume two countries start out with identical standards of living and natural resource environments, differing only in terms of their educational systems, for instance in terms of the balance between religious and secular teaching mandated in the curriculum. If the society enjoying a more scientifically oriented curriculum advances more quickly in terms of growth in per capita income – a result some empirical studies demonstrate – one can conclude that religious instruction is a barrier to economic advance as measured in income terms. One can say the steady state growth potential of a society in which education is slanted toward the secular is superior to steady state growth engendered by a system in which

450 education is slanted toward the religious end of the spectrum. In point of fact this is one of the arguments that Enlightenment thinkers made in the eighteenth century.

The problem with this analysis is it glosses over the dialectic. It glosses over the conflicts that arise when proponents of religious teaching clash with proponents arguing for a wholly secular curriculum, emphasizing physics, chemistry, mathematics, and engineering. It glosses over the political consequences. Just as some studies show that a secular curriculum puts you on a path for more rapid income achievement you encounter examples where the reverse is the case, where conflicts between opposing parties become so intense the political consensus making dissolves, perhaps even civil war breaks out.

To simply say you have left out a variable that if properly incorporated into the analysis would change your conclusions is a subterfuge. It ignores conflict; it ignores unintended consequences. It is flawed at the very outset.

Conflicted Decision Making Trumps Utilitarian Theory Have you ever encountered a bully? Have you ever been subjected to verbal abuse by a neighbor intent on encroaching on your property rights? Have you ever wanted to, or were forced into, hiring a lawyer to deal with a dispute over your ownership of something that you actually owned because a neighbor motivated by nothing other than jealousy wanted you to suffer? Wanted you to experience financial loss and personal frustration? Perhaps you are incredibly lucky and fortunate in life. I cannot say the same thing about my own experiences. I have witnessed too many futile disputes carried on by neighbors or relatives fighting over

“justice” that have ended up benefiting lawyers, costing both parties contesting the issue

451 nothing but financial loss and personal bitterness. Can you honestly say the people involved are acting in their own best interests?

It is an unfortunate fact of human nature that people not only receive satisfaction from consuming goods and services but also from lording it over their neighbors, flaunting their well

–being through conspicuous consumption, inviting jealousy. Among other philosophers – Plato comes to mind – Spinoza (1954: 43) was clear this was not a road to happiness, rather a road to self-defeating greed:

“Every man’s true happiness and blessedness consists solely in the enjoyment of what is good, not in the pride that he alone is enjoying it, to the exclusion of others. He who thinks himself the more blessed because he is enjoying benefits which others are not … is ignorant of true happiness and blessedness, and the joy which he feels is either childish or envious and malicious.” One of the problems with the utilitarian framework is the unfortunate fact it is caught between two stools: either people take into account other people’s utility or they do not. If they do not, they must either be totally narcissistic or live in complete isolation, for instance on Robinson

Crusoe’s famous desert island (famous to economists at least who used to use it as a framework for talking about consumer demand). If they do they are liable to sacrifice their virtue – hence their true happiness – for their greedy acquisition of material objects. Of course they can resist sacrificing their virtue. But that itself becomes a choice, a choice that actually makes no sense in the utilitarian framework because virtue is not something one is supposed to worry about. Some choices are allowed and some choices are simply ignored in the analysis.

Where does that leave you?

People are conflicted. Predators seeking power over others exist. People act in ways that defy self-interested calculations that presumably take place in their frontal lobes. To

452 assume away the fact that the human brain is conflicted, that the frontal lobe and the frontal lobe only matters, is simplistic nonsense. Yet there are many economists who take this very position. One of the reasons why they take this stance is that it allows them to analyze behavior solely in terms of market signals – prices – at the expense of taking into account other inputs into decision making, particularly that evidenced by groups following charismatic leaders.

Market signals are simply the manifestation of the invisible hand. Sticking to them and to them alone allows you to calculate equilibrium outcomes, not straying away from the central paradigm. It is bad psychology but so what? Did you honestly think the picture you were presented with was realistic? That it could account for civil wars fought over ideologies?

Power, Hard and Soft, Should Play a Prominent Role in Political Economy

To the shortcomings of mainstream economics – an obsession with equilibrium and utility – one should add a decided failure to grapple with the realities of human society: the exercise of power and the grip that ideology holds over individuals, groups, and nation-states.

Ignoring power is a huge mistake. Influence, getting your way at the expense of others, is something that we encounter daily. Whether exercised in the home, in the management of cities, in corporate boardrooms, on the shop floor where managers abusively take out their frustrations on subordinates, in international negotiations and summits, power is always in play. How can a social science grappling with the long-run evolution of society take itself seriously if it simply shoves power under the rug?

Power comes in two guises: soft power and hard power. Hard power is the exercise of military or policing force. Killing enemy forces whether in the air, on the seas, or through battle

453 between troops on the ground is hard power in an active form; destroying enemy structures, attacking its information infrastructure, its power grids, its computer driven machinery through sophisticate cyber methods is also hard power actively applied. Threating to do so without necessarily carrying through on the dispatching of troops or viruses hurtling through the internet is hard power brandished but not unleashed. Soft power is something else altogether: display of personal status or financial muscle that has the potential to humiliate others, forcing them to kowtow to your wishes. Collecting expensive art and jewelry, driving expensive automobiles, hobnobbing with political elites, putting on ostentatious parties designed to signal social superiority and the wherewithal to command subordinates. In a caste system soft power is strictly regulated through marriage markets, conspicuous consumption, and political muscle.

In a quasi-caste system religious affiliation or ethnicity is exploited as a signaling device underscoring soft power hierarchies.

In treating the amalgamation of soft power and hard power I differentiate between the crucial role income exercises: I assume hard power depends on the aggregate economy controlled by an actor – say a nation-state or a terrorist group – while soft power depends on the per capita income of individuals within a group or state.

Military potential M depends upon the size of the economy from which military leaders extract resources, the degree to which they are able to secure a piece of the economic pie (the ratio of military expenditure to total economic output m), and the relative prices of exerting military force. Relative prices (compared to the average price level for all goods and services generated within an economy) for exerting military force depend upon a number of variables: the costs of acquiring and outfitting soldiers; the unit cost of lethality for the weapons their

454 soldiers brandish; the efficiency of transport methods they harness (like chariots, horses, tanks; the burden of upkeep for the roads their armies march over; the challenges for mobility of forces imposed by geographic impediments; and the like.

It is important to keep in mind that the concept of “relative price” invoked here refers to real resource costs implicitly or explicitly priced up in the market. To argue that feudal obligations were often satisfied in terms of loyal service or payment in kind was not obviate the point I am making. Even in a barter economy real prices exist. They are not necessarily stated in currency terms but they undergird cooperative exchange. How expensive securing swords, armor, the use of horses always prevails in terms of their implicit opportunity cost (for instance the cost reckoned in terms of forgone uses of metals – for ploughshares – and animal power for that could otherwise by devoted to pulling ploughs). In what follows I assume the logic of opportunity cost prevails.

Putting up all this together in a simple equation Mosk (2013) captures the logic of military potential:

(A.1) M = (m * Y)/pmf

pmf being the relative price of exerting military force and Y is total output or income. Note that

Y is equal to per capita income y multiplied by population size P so:

(A.2) M = (m * P)/ pmf

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In short population size is a determinant of potential military capacity. It should be emphasized that this refers to potential capacity. It is not equal to success in warfare. History is replete with examples of cases in which understaffed armies defeated larger threatening forces.

Technological progress in the military sector tends to reduce the relative price of exerting military force. This is one reason states subsidize professionals involved in developing new weapons or devising new methods for organizing armies and navies. Basic to warfare of all types is combining methods for shooting projectiles (including fire) or engaging in killing or maiming enemy through person to person contact.

From a long-run historical perspective warfare has advanced through three major phases. The first was an early era when hand to hand conflict prevailed. Using rocks, swords, the phalanx, horse drawn siege machinery, chariots, the bow and arrow was characteristic of this method of engaging in battle. Technological advances occurring as Stone Age civilization evolved - through the Bronze Age - into the Iron Age precipitated slow declines in the relative price of exerting military force. In this phase population size matters a great deal.

Stones, swords, spears, crossbows, daggers, missile launching engines for smashing down walls or throwing plague ridden infected bodies into cities to spread terror among city dwellers, incendiary or poison tipped arrows, axes: the list goes on and on stretching from rocks dug out of the soil to biological warfare. For most of human history these have served as the weaponry of conflict. Whenever an advance was made and implemented it was adapted by the victims. From the field of battle victors and the defeated not only pulled away the corpses of their fallen companions. As well they removed blood stained weapons. By reverse engineering

456 the methods of manufacture producing these weapons they adapted their own methods of fighting, rendering the agents of their defeat into the instruments of their future victories.

As late as the era of the Mongolian Conquests in the thirteenth century, slow improvements in the manufacture of weaponry improving lethal capacity had not advanced the science of warfare far past this point. To be sure the Chinese had developed gunpowder and used it in primitive cannons and tube like “guns” to harass enemies; learning how to refine gunpowder so it could be effectively used in armed skirmishes was key to Arabic conquests over Crusaders in the 13th century. Still a case in point: lacking guns the Mongols were still remarkably successful in riding roughshod over most of the Eurasian land mass, Success was theirs because they possessed a large percentage of the Eurasian horse population, were unusually adept in organizing their troops, and promoted common soldiers to high rank if they proved ruthless and ambitious enough in combat.

The use of gunpowder ushered in a second phase. Technological progress increasingly focused on creating more accurate guns, more potent shells, and more prodigious cannons.

Front loaded flintlock guns gave way to muzzle loaded rifles in the nineteenth century, finally to

Gatling guns and automatic weapons. During this phase industrialization became increasingly important for mobilizing military force. The importance of population size begins to fall off during this phase. An industrial power advanced country like England was able to defeat the

Chinese in the first Opium War fought between 1839 and 1841.

A third phase was gained ascendency during the 19th century. This is the era of technological warfare. Declining prices of steel during the nineteenth century paved the way for

457 increasingly formidable battleships. The Dreadnaught race of the late 19th century pitched

England against Germany. Tanks and aerial warfare came into their own during World War I.

Poisonous gases were employed. Eventually atomic weapons were developed. During this phase science has become increasingly important for devising state of the art methods of carrying on combat. Today warfare is being carried on with drones in the aerial sphere; nuclear powered submarines ply the oceans; and a completely technology driven style of fighting - cyber warfare using computer hacking – has taken off.

It is now possible for a relatively small country – North Korea – to develop weapons of mass destruction, allowing it to punch way above its population size in the military arena. In the

North Korean case this arises from a high value of m, the military conversion rate. Another way to say this is to say the percentage of output available for personal consumption by the civilian populace is low. The average consumer is short-changed, enjoying very little in diet, housing or clothing. The same conclusion holds for Israel that is overshadowed in terms of human numbers by Egypt. In this case tiny Israel holds its own against much larger Egypt because the average standard of living of the Israeli populace towers over that of the Egyptian policy. This is ultimately the reason why the relative price of exerting military force matters.

The point about Israel makes clear there the close relationship between the average standard of living of a populace and its military capacity matters a great. As noted earlier total income of a populace is per capita income times the size of the polity, Y = P * y where y is per capita income and P is population size. Raising the economic productivity of a society enhances its military capacity other things equal. Political leaders securing power over high productivity

458 populations automatically enjoy a power advantage that they can turn to military purposes, By the same token encouraging growth in productivity is tantamount to achieving growth in military potential.

As highlighted in my earlier comments on the two forms of power I believe soft power is a function of the relative opulence of members of a group compared to the standard of living of other groups within a social setting. That is the soft power of a household i for instance enjoying a per capita income yi is:

(A.3) SOFTPOWERi = spr*(yi)/psp

Where the variable spr represents the ratio of soft power expenditures as a percentage of total expenditure by the household and psp is the relative price of a unit of soft power prevailing in the economy the actor is operating within. The soft power of a group is the sum of the soft power of all households associated with a group. Most households are concerned with the soft power they exercise within the jurisdictions they reside in. Soft power is most easily displayed in your local community, in the society pages of a local newspaper or in twitter field in social media. Prominent people display their soft power at the level of the nation-state or better yet at international gatherings.

The soft power of a nation-state is first and foremost a function of its per capita income relative to other nation-states. In addition it depends on the attractiveness of the propaganda it commands and the ubiquity of its products on international markets. In short it depends on both per capita income and total income.

Total power is the sum of soft power and hard power. Total power aggrandized by an actor is:

459

(A.4) POW = SOFTPOWER + M and the power ratio expressed in these terms is:

(A.5) POWR = SOFTPOWER/M

The soft power of a political jurisdiction – a fief, a metropolitan conurbation within a state, or a nation-state itself– depends upon its per capita income, its population size (the product of the population and per capita income being total income) and the relative prices for soft power and hard power that it commands. That is:

(A.6) POW = [(m*Y)/pmf] + [(spr*y)/psp)*P]

One consequence of this formulation is that the power ratio depends upon the ratio of the relative costs of securing a unit of military power compared to the relative costs of obtaining a unit of soft power.

Ideology Tempers Economic Growth The assumption that elites shaping societies are all driven by the same common set of beliefs is one of the ideas that this book vehemently contests. Once you let in ideology to the analysis of economic behavior you open the door to the observation that ideologies not only condition the growth paths that societies evolve along, but also engender conflict. That a population wrestling with the unintended consequences of an ideology – for instance the suppression of genius in theocracies or under totalitarian communist rule – is unlikely to be homogeneous in their acceptance of the ideological stance of the elites in power is a position that this book has advanced with a multitude of examples. It is one thing to say that ideological

460 preferences in policy making set societies on growth paths that differ from one another based on the preferences. It is another thing to say that everyone is a supporter of the particular ideology in place within a state. If some ideologies are more or less likely to channel conflict over beliefs into destructive as opposed to constructive ways then ideologies matter not just because of the policy preferences but because destructive conflict generates instability, sabotage, and outright violence including terrorism.

Growth Accounting is a Proper Mechanism for Capturing Quantitative Aspects of Long-run Economic Change

Turning to productivity growth as the engine of improvements in the standard of living and or the carrying capacity of the environment that is population size (both enhancing military capacity in accordance with the logic of the military power equation) I introduce a growth equation for productivity. The idea here is to express output generating by a population residing in a politically defined jurisdiction into the product of a function of three factors of production – labor, land and physical capital - each augmented by knowledge multiplied by a second variable, total factor productivity (A) that is a function of general purpose knowledge

(ideas), economic structure (the composition of the labor force divided into three sectors, agriculture, manufacturing, and service sector, each sector being further divided into subsectors) and scale economies.

Stripping away the jargon let me express the intuition economists use in developing their analytical framework for analyzing productivity and the standard of living. There are two logical steps, details intruding at each stage. The first step involves establishing a relationship

461 between per capita income (y) as a summary measure of the average standard of living for a population, and the average productivity of labor. The key conclusion is that y is a simple multiple of the average level of labor productivity (q). By definition labor productivity q is output (Q) divided by the number of workers (WOR):

(A.7) q = Q/WOR

Noting that per capita income y is output Q divided by population P, we can write:

(A.8) y = Q/P = q* (WOR/P) = q * W% where the variable W% represents the proportion of the population that is in the labor force.

With this established let us turn to a decomposition of labor productivity, breaking into down into the factors shaping it.

The intuition behind the decomposition of labor productivity is this: labor productivity depends upon labor input (lab*), namely how hard and efficiently a worker toils as measured by hours worked (h) and the efficiency of an hour worked e(h); it depends upon the amount of capital each worker has access to (k*) that we can further decompose into the quality of the capital qk (a measure of the sophistication of the technology “embodied” in the capital) and the capital quantity (k); it depends on the amount of land (Ian*) a worker is employing in his or her tasks, where land – like capital – is decomposed into land quality (qlan) and land quantity (lan).

On top of these factors of production one must add the overall efficiency of the environment a typical worker finds herself or himself in, namely the overall state of technological knowledge harnessed by society, the existence of geographic scale economies, and the composition of

462 production in terms of the relative shares of farming, manufacturing, and commerce (labor productivity being higher in manufacturing than in agriculture for instance). Lump all of these

“environmental” conditions into a variable we have already dubbed total factor productivity A.

Let us write all of this up as:

(A.9) lab* = h * e(h); k* = qk * k; and lan* = qlan * lan

Intuitively what we would like to accomplish is to tie all of these factors together as inputs into the overall level of productivity of a worker, taking into account the overall level of efficiency of the environment the worker finds himself of herself in. Economists have developed this idea into the idea of a production function. In a production function you basically multiply the three inputs together – each input weighted by its share in the distribution of total output – adjusting the entire product for the overall efficiency of the environment. The result is the Cobb-Douglas production function discussed below.

Following the standard Cobb-Douglas equation for output, I write labor productivity q as:

(A.10) q = A *f(lab*, k*, lan*) = A * {(lab*)α * (k*)β *(lan*){1-(α+β)}}

A being the index of total factor productivity; lab* being labor input per capita adjusted for hours worked h and the efficiency of an hours worked (that depends on the diffusion of knowledge concerning production); k* being per capita capital adjusted for the quality of capital

(that depends on the knowledge embodied in the physical machines and structures); and lan* being land adjusted for the quality of land (e.g.: irrigated fertilized land enjoying a warm climate

463 being superior to parched dry fields left to grow weeds). The variable α is the share of labor in the distribution of output between the owners of each factor (laborers assumed to “own” their labor services); β being the share of capital in the economy (owned by capitalists and shareholders in the enterprises within the economy); and – since the three shares must add up to unity – the share of land being 1- (α + β).

To once again strip away the intuition from the formalism: the point is to multiply together the three inputs in production – labor, capital, and land – each adjusted for their relative importance to the economy (their shares) – magnifying the entire product up by multiplying the resulting product by the overall efficiency of the environment a worker is thrust into. In should be pointed out this environment includes the presence of absence of wars, including civil wars; the climate (for instance excessively hot or frigid, heavily impacted by typhoons or earthquakes and the like); corruption; and domestic political instability.

One of the pleasant features of this presentation is the fact it can be easily turned into a statement about growth rates G(x) = дx/x, (дx = x2 – x1), being the change of a variable x on its base.

(A.11) G(q) = G(A) + α*[G(h) + G{e(h)}] +β*[G(qk) + G(k)] + [1-(α+β)] * [G(qlan)+G(lan)]

Thinking in terms of growth rates is the most appealing way of exploiting this framework. The reason? If we start with a baseline state growth is simply enhancement of the baseline. One can index the baseline any way one wants to, say denoting it by unity. The growth simply magnifies up the number. For instance if labor productivity starts out a level of one, reaching a level of 5

464 three centuries later, we can say labor productivity has increased five-fold, that is by a magnification of five hundred percent.

There are several points that can be drawn from this equation. An important corollary is that ideas are mobile. Absent barriers to their diffusion, their capacity to invigorate production everywhere throughout the globe is limitless. As noted earlier warfare is one endeavor in which diffusion is remarkably potent. Sadly for the global spread of income enhancing techniques barriers to the diffusion of non-military concepts are much more daunting. To be sure plenty of barriers exist: patents; classified national secrets; censorship by governments; religious prohibitions on certain types of knowledge (for instance on medical procedures like abortion); quotas and tariffs imposed on foreign products entering the domestic market where reverse engineering of state of the art technologies embodied in the products can occur.

Without a doubt one of the deficiencies in this approach is a failure to grapple with the unintended – negative – consequences of economic change. Nothing in my formal framework speaks to pollution, to the fact some groups are marginalized while others prosper under the impact of technological and organization change. However conceding that this formal framework is incomplete - acknowledging that a complete analysis embedding the algebra into a storyline in which dialectic conflict and unintended consequences play an equally important role in shaping economic and social history – does open the door to a satisfactory framework.

The hard cold fact is a generalized system of equations capturing dialectics and productivity gain is nothing more than a pipe dream. Both quantitative and qualitative forces shape long run history. For instance how do you capture the appeal of the transcendent in an algebraic formulation no matter how cleverly construed.

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Appendix Tables

Table A.1 Improvements and Innovations: Mechanical Instruments and Chemical Processes Used in Science, the Visual Arts, and Music, 1400 – 1900

Panel A: 1400 – 1599

Science Visual Arts Music 1400 – 1499 Leonardo da Vinci’s notebooks Oil painting developed Harpsichord describe machinery for textiles manufacturing exploits (spindles and looms); centrifugal Printing press and ink for market segmentation and drive pumps for dredging; printing developed manufacturing small breech loading cannon; machine portable and large tools (drills, lathes); universal Woodblock printing used to stationary models joints; produce block books Metal casting of type replaces Lutes used to accompany Leonardo makes multiple sand and wood casting singing in polyphony experiments with camera obscura Painters begin exploiting market segmentation selling prints of paintings

1500 – 1599 Verge escapement with folio In oil painting four modes of Galileo’s father advocates balance using color elaborated : twelve-tone equal chiaroscuro, cangiante, temperament for lute Clockmakers exploit market sfumoto, and unione playing, advocates using segmentation, selling pocket twelfth root watches and table/mantel Etching developed clocks Trumpets exploited; five Printmakers exploit market course (stringed) guitar Galileo experiments with segmentation, selling engraved developed; ancestor to pendulum clock, vacuum and dry point etched products bassoon (double reed pumps, telescopes, and wind woodwind thermometers Chiaroscuro woodblock printing instrument) developed; developed organ manufacturers Tycho Brahe’s observatory develop larger models; Titian introduces wide, square- harpsichord ended brush for painting manufacturers produce small and large models

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Table A.1 (Continued) Panel B: 1600 - 1699

Science Visual Arts Music With his telescope Galileo Shift from painting on wooden Stevin publishes ratios of discovers four satellites orbiting panels to painting on canvas 1.059200 for determining Jupiter, naming them twelve semitones making Mendicean stars, discovers new New pigments discovered due up an octave fixed stars, speculates on to the European voyages of sunspots and craters on the discovery Violin production takes off moon; defends Copernican in Cremona, Italy: Amati theory of solar system Tenebrism (dramatic and Stradivarius perfect illumination due to pronounced production Magnification of telescopes chiaroscuro develops out of improved; microscope techniques advanced by Hunting horns improved; developed, van Leeuwenhoek Caravaggio, exploited by Medici court employs develops powerful lenses Rembrandt in painting early piano; brass trumpet approximating 270x resolution playing devalued due to Mezzotint developed; inability of Experiments with prisms in the Rembrandt exploits printing instrumentalists to play in study of light press; Rubens maintains a different keys; lute playing stable of engravers in his begins to die out Huygens adhering to a wave Flemish workshop theory of light transmission experiments with polarization of light; Huygens improves pendulum clocks, law for pendulum motion

Gilbert experiments with static electricity, comparing magnetic attraction to impact of electrical charge

Kepler states three laws of planetary motion ultimately explained by Newton’s theory of gravitational attraction

Calculus developed by Leibnitz and Newton

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Table A.1 (Continued) Panel C: 1700-1799

Science Visual Arts Music Clock movement reaches Chemical industry introduces In Cremona workshops of modern form: Hooke works on new pigments for painting: Stradivarius and Guarneri pendulum clock; recoil and Prussian blue and colbalt blue produce high quality “dead-beat” escapements violins; Stainer studies in introduced; Harrison develops Aquatint and lithography Cremona at workshop of marine chronometer invented; Blake develops relief Amati, returns to Austria etching process to set up violin production Patents taken out for vacuum pumps; pump installed in Increasingly musical scores Crooks used to lengthen London using a prime mover to printed from engraved plates tubing introduced for lift the plunger; Savory publishes horns and trumpets A Miner’s Friend advocating use permitting playing in of pumps in extracting water out several keys; piano of mine shafts; Newcomen and manufacturing flourishes Watt steam engines in Austria; Stein designs “Viennese fortepiano” Lathes used for screw using an escapement to manufacturing improve control over hammers; Angle of neck of Boring machinery introduced by violin lengthened; heavier Wilkinson making for greater bass bar developed; entire precision in the production of range of skilled player steam engine cylinders required extended to four octaves for efficient use in steam based energy Denner invents clarinet; clarinet substituted for Standardization of trumpets for performance measurement with the metric in high registers; clarinets system tuned to B-flat and A most popular Franklin’s experiments with Leyden jars and lightening; Equal temperament gains Volta’s experiments with early adherents batteries (piles) Upper partials (overtones) analyzed

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Table A.1 (Continued) Panel D: 1800 – 1899

Science Visual Arts Music Steam transport; postage stamp Paint tubes superseding pig Precise measurement of bladders and glass syringes tones based on vibrations Electric telegraph; electric light developed by Rand, liberating of waves, standardized by bulb; devices for determining painters to paint quickly German Association of electromagnetic force outdoors Natural Philosophers; developed; Faraday’s metronome patented experiments on “induction Chemical synthetics increase rings” using batteries; Maxwell’s spectrum of available colors Helmholtz systematizes equations for electromagnetism analysis of musical tones, and theory of light generated by Wedgewood experiments with beats, chords, dissonances electromagnetic fields; Lorentz photograms; Niépce creates and consonances, and transform and Michelson- “sun-drawings” using primitive scales using wave theory Morley experiment measuring camera, moves on to use of sound; confirms theory impact of ether on speed of light bitumen of Judea to coat of upper partial tones copper plates on which Organic chemistry developed; negatives produced; Daguerre Bach-Gesellschaft carbon chains analyzed refines process using silver- publishes work of Bach in polished plates, rendering fifty volumes Spectroscope developed; new images visible with light elements discovered by sensitive fumes; Eastman Rotary and piston valves analyzing spectral lines invents dry gel film, replacing for horns; manufacture of plates for negatives; goes on to guitars advanced in Seville; Using crystals properties of market Kodak camera using cast iron frames for polarized light analyzed rollup film; Maxwell pianos; steam organs; demonstrates possibility of Bohm improves range and Theory of evolution by natural color photography intonation for flutes, selection oboes, and clarinets; Rotary press and mimeograph Lord Kelvin’s first definition of developed setting stage for Early recording devices for absolute temperature Photostat printing capturing live performances

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Table A.2 Estimates of Major City Populations for Europe and Russia, 1400-1900 (Figures in 1,000s) (a) Panel A: Estimates for Europe and Russia, 1400-1800

City 1400 1500 1600 1700 1800 Europe Excluding Russia Amsterdam - 30 65 – 175 175 – 210 195 – 201 Antwerp 20 100 – 200 46 – 90 75 - Berlin 6 - 12 20 172 Bruges - - 60 50 - Cologne 40 45 - 40 50 Florence - 70 70 - - Hamburg - 15 – 20 40 – 100 63 – 75 117 – 130 London - 50 – 120 225 – 410 550 – 700 861 – 1,000 Milan 125 100 180 113 122 - 250 Paris 280 225 245 – 420 515 546 – 830 Prague 95 – 100 70 100 48 77 – 100 Rome - 50 – 60 90 – 110 120 – 150 150 Venice 100 – 180 100 – 150 200 140 140 Vienna 24 45 30 – 60 100 – 113 250 Total 775 1,135 1,987 2,349 3,698 Russia Moscow 30 – 40 100 200 200 270 St. Petersburg - - - 100 220 – 425

Panel B: Estimates for European Cities in 1400, 1700, and 1800 (b)

1400 1700 1800 City 1,000’s City 1,000’s City 1,000’s Paris 275 London 550 London 1,000 Bruges 125 Paris 500 Paris 600 Milan 125 Naples 215 Naples 426 Venice 110 Lisbon 188 Vienna 250 Genoa 100 Amsterdam 180 Amsterdam 240 Granada 100 Venice 138 Dublin 200 Prague 95 Rome 130 Lisbon 180 Ghent 70 Milan 120 Berlin 172 Rouen 70 Belgrade 100 Warsaw 120 Seville 70 Lyon 100 Madrid 100 Vienna 100 Total 1,140 Total 2,921 Total 3,158

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Table A.2 (Continued) Panel C: Estimates for European and Russian Cities, 1400 – 1900 (1,000’s)

City 1400 1500 1600 1700 1800 1900 European Cities Amsterdam - - 48 210 195 510 Berlin - - - 26 172 2,707 London 50 50 187 550 861 6,480 Milan 80 89 107 113 122 491 Naples 40 114 224 207 430 563 Palermo 25 39 105 125 135 255 Paris 280 185 245 540 547 3,330 Prague 95 70 70 48 77 117 Rome 33 38 102 138 142 438 Venice 110 115 151 143 146 171 Total 713 700 1,239 2,100 2,827 15,062 Russian Cities Moscow 30 80 80 114 248 1,120 St. - - - - 220 1,439 Petersburg

Notes: a The totals for Europe are calculated by adding the figures with the highest value for each city when several estimates exist. b This second set of estimates was published by Hohenberg and Lees in 1985. c This third set of estimates was advanced by Chandler.

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Footnotes

Chapter 1 1 See Brown (2007) for a useful elaboration of Big History that integrates prehistory with

recorded history.

2 See Rosen (2014) for an insightful discussion of the Medieval Warming Era. He argues

that any attempts to make assertions about contemporary climate change and global

warming are ill advised. In his view the Medieval Warming Era was an example of

favorable weather, not global climate.

3 For a forceful assertion of the optimistic view – things are getting better and better,

pessimistic doomsayers are simply misguided – see Simon (1996).

4 See Garrett (1994) for a systematic analysis of epidemics and pandemics.

5 For a classic analysis of choice between exit, voice, and loyalty, see Hirschman (1970). In

my interpretation of Hirschman’s framework the “voice” concept involves expression of

all types – in the political arena, in the military arena, in the cultural arena – and loyalty

means acceptance, grudgingly or willingly given.

6 On the Eskimo and the Inuit see Schaefer (1996).

7 I draw upon the translations of Spinoza’s writings appearing in Spinoza (1951).

8 Quotation taken from Hartt (1987): page 209.

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9 Eastlake (2001): pg. 6.

10 Quotations taken from several pages in Janson (1970): pp. 345, 348, and 357.

11 For the various writings of Nietzsche see the translations and selections compiled in

Nietzsche (1954).

13 Spinoza (1951: 50).

14 Spinoza (1951: 81).

15 Spinoza (1951: 206-207). In an unfinished work, A Political Treatise, Spinoza laid out a

theory of political science, expanding the treatment of dominion that he had earlier

developed in the Theologico-Political Treatise. Fragments from a A Political Treatise

appear in Spinoza (1951: 379-387).

16 Spinoza (1951: 206-207).

17 I found this quotation attributed to Tesla on my internet feed in February, 2020.

18 For the contrary view - that the middle class, the bourgeoisie, brought in a regime of

virtue by unleashing market competition – see McCloskey (2010). I remain unconvinced

by this argument because I fail to see how it explains corruption in business. Consider

the collapse of the Mississippi Company in 1720; the collapse of the South Sea Bubble in

the same year; the failure of the Dutch East India Company (VOC) in 1799; the

bankruptcy of the Overend, Gurney, and Co. railway company in 1866; and the myriad

of banking failures in the twentieth century including Dunatbank (1931), Herstatt Bank

(1974), Lincoln Savings and Loan (1989), the Bank of Credit and Commerce (1991),

473

Nordbanken (1991), and Barings Bank (1995). Again consider the Chinese Communist

Party today that is by and large a middle class party: it is incredibly corrupt as evidenced

by the ongoing campaign by higher-ups in the Party to purge it of malfeasance and

financial abuse, the results being mixed at best since many of the higher-ups are

themselves drenched in conniving, factional backstabbing, and bribery.

Chapter 2

1 For my discussion of Galileo I draw upon Drake (1957) and Jacob (1997).

2 This section draws heavily on pp. 396 – 404 and pp. 677 – 686 in Grout and Palisca

(1996) for the discussion of Rameau and Debussy and on pp. 122 – 123 and pp. 661

following in Volume I of Taruskin (1996).

3 Quotation taken from pp. 727 and 728 in Volume I of Taruskin (1996).

4 This section draws heavily from pg. 718 ff. in Volume I of Taruskin (1996).

5 It is said the Debussy incorporated motifs from Petrushka into his Etudes.

6 Picasso married one of the dancers who performed in the Diaghilev company, Olga

Khokhlova, surrendering his Bohemian lifestyle in Paris for family life and fatherhood.

See Richardson (2007). Picasso viewed his experience creating sets and costumes for

Stravinsky’s Pulcinella ballet a milestone in his career, turning him toward a neo-

Classical approach to painting, drawing, and etching.

7 After he heard a piece written by Schoenberg performed at a concert where one of his

own pieces was performed – in 1937, the Schoenberg composition being a Septet-Suite

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– Stravinsky was said to have told journalists that the piece was not music, simply being

an experiment devoid of lasting aesthetic value.

8 Reported in a brochure entitled “Igor Stravinsky 1882 – 1971 the Edition” accompanying

a complete set of Stravinsky recordings done for Columbia Records and released by

Sony Classical.

9 Crafts was adamant that he did not convert Stravinsky to serialism. He said that as an

assistant to Stravinsky he helped explain serial composition techniques to Stravinsky but

that no one – let alone himself – could influence a headstrong genius like Stravinsky. See

Crafts (1992).

Chapter 3 1 This section draws heavily on the Appendices in Mosk (2018).

2 The discussion of the Muslim conquests and the ensuing account of draws heavily on al-

Hassani (2010), Findlay and O’Rourke (2007), Morgan (2007) and Starr (2013).

3 Lucca Pacioli, the inventor of double-entry accounting that revolutionized European

merchant house practice, was trained in the tradition established by Fibonacci. See

Gleeson-White (2011).

4 For my account of the three faces of the Medieval Era I draw upon Bautier (1971),

Bennett and Hollister (2006), Fried (2013), Hay (1965), Latouche (1961), and Le Goff

(2012).

475

5 For a graphic illustration of the “thug”-like behavior of knights the pictures displayed in

Pinker (2011: 65-66). Pictures showing knights driving knives into the skulls of

defenseless peasants should sober up even the most ardent fan of “gentle, refined,

cultivated” chivalry.

6 My principal source for Medieval European battles and sieges is the encyclopedia edited

by Rogers (2010). In addition I consulted Hindley (2003) on the Crusades, and the

encyclopedia of warfare compiled by Dupuy and Dupuy (1993). The volume by O’Connell

(1989) provides some useful observations on changes in military technology. The

volume by Corvisier (1979) is an excellent source for the social aspects of military

organization.

7 Teschke (2003) argues dynastic politics pursued through marriage alliances continued to

dominate European politics and diplomacy through the seventh century, even after the

Peace of Westphalia that ended the Thirty Years War between 1618 and 1648.

8 On patrician rule over European cities see the classic account given by Weber (1958).

9 The Third Crusade (1187-1192) illustrates how tenuous was the papal immunity

guaranteeing to European monarchs and feudal lords protection for their European

holdings while fighting in the Levant. After Jerusalem fell to the forces led by Saladin in

early October 1187, the call for a new Crusade went out. Richard the Lionhearted of

England and Frederick Barbarossa the Holy Roman Emperor led forces into the Holy

Land. Frederick died en route. Richard’s campaigns against Saladin proved relatively

fruitless. On the way home from his campaign Richard was taken prisoner by Leopold of

476

Austria who nursed a grudge against Richard. Eventually Richard was turned over to the

new Holy Roman Emperor Henry VI who preceded to put a price on Richard’s head.

Henry demanded a ransom of 150,000 silver marks. Swayed by Philip of France who

coveted Richard’s extensive holdings in France, Henry held up negotiations as long as he

could. This illustrates in a nutshell the logic of military diversion: go abroad to fight,

leave under-defended your territory at home. Papal assertions to the contrary, there

were obvious limits on the capacity of the pontiff to put a lid on infighting between rival

feudal lords.

10 For a useful account of the wildly divergent views circulating among the elites of

Renaissance Italy – specifically ultra-puritanical opponent of Church corruption

Savonarola; cynical proponent of republicanism Machiavelli; and advocate for humanist

inspired diplomacy Castiglione – see Roeder (1953).

11 The siege of Bruges – also known as the Battle of the Golden Spurs – illustrates how the

‘infantry revolution” of the fourteenth century dovetailed with the growing importance

of urban militias populated by well- trained commoners, frequently organized into guild

regiments, in the field of Medieval warfare. The battle waged in 1302 took place in

Flanders at Courtrai, It was the centerpiece of the Franco-Flemish war that raged

between 1297 and 1305, pitting Flemish military resistance to French dominance over

Flanders against the forces of Philip IV “the Fair”. After Flemish went on a rampage

brutally attacking French persons residing in Bruges – basically carrying out a massacre

that in modern day terms might be disparaged as ethnic cleansing – French troops led

by Count Robert II of Artois approached the city with approximately 3,000 mounted

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knights plus squires and 5,500 infantry. According to the standard calculations of

commanders of feudal army a mounted knight fitted out in full armor equaled

approximately ten foot soldiers. The Battle of the Golden Spurs overturned this

arithmetic altogether. The militia of Bruges consisted almost solely of infantry, dressed

in chainmail hauberk, wielding spears, pikes, bows, crossbows, and the fearsome

goedendag (a metal club tipped with a spear designed to penetrate between the plates

of heavy armor. Channeling the battlefield into rivers and ditches the militia of Bruges

(joined by militia from most of the other towns of Flanders with the exception of forces

representing Ghent) rendered the cavalry charge of the French virtually useless.

Knocking the struggling knights from their steeds, the Flemish killed the fallen nobles by

thrusting their goedendag between the steel plates of armor. The French were

completely routed. Many French nobles were slaughtered including Count Robert II of

Artois. Once military planners came to realize the potency of a highly disciplined infantry

– the unit costs of outfitting a foot soldier probably being a tenth of the unit costs of

outfitting a knight in full battle array – the heyday of the mounted knight came to an

end. As guns and cannons became increasingly common of battlefields of Europe the

death knell of chivalry was sounded.

12 Magocsi (2002) provides an invaluable account of the political and economic

development of the periphery zone of Europe.

13 See Diamond (2005) for an account of the collapse of the Vinland settlement.

478

14 For a discussion of the dynamics of Tokugawa population growth see Drixler (2013),

Hayami (2015), and Mosk (2001).

15 In 1316 the French king Louis X died without leaving a living son as heir to his throne,

albeit a possible son not yet born. In the upshot his son was born only to perish soon

afterwards opening the door to a succession crisis finessed when Philip, brother of Louis

X, negotiated a solution in which he acquired the crown as Philip V.

16 See Herren (1987: 310-311). The symbolism of the Chalke Icon was presumably its

representation of the Incarnation.

17 See Janson (1970: 229 following).

18 Dante was a member of the Ghibelline faction, aligning itself with the decentralized

feudal model of the Holy Roman Empire. Dominated by traditional elites, their

membership who feared the rampant republicanism of the artisan class who made up

the rank and file membership of the pro-French Guelph faction. As a result of his being

an advocate of Ghibelline politics, Dante was banned from Florence, required to pay a

hefty fine as a condition of re-entry into the polis. Dante refused to pay the fine and

remained in permanent exile from his beloved homeland.

19 Hartt (1987: 63).

20 Quote taken from Hartt (1987: 63)

21 A photograph of the Arena Chapel appears on page 64 of Hartt (1987).

22 Cennini (1960)

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23 Cennini (1960: 2).

24 Cennini (1960: 16).

25 Cennini (1960: 60).

26 I rely on Grout and Palisca (1996: 63 following) for this paragraph.

Chapter 4 1 For the distinction between merchant and technological capitalism, see Mosk (2018).

2 See de Vries (2008).

3 For this section see Chapters 6 through 8 in Mosk (2008).

Chapter 5

1 Anderson (1988: 131).

2 For a more extensive discussion of the relationship between ideology and nation-state

building that includes a discussion of the emergence of British nationalism see Mosk

(2013).

3 On the French Revolution, see Lefebvre (1964) and Schama (1989).

4 On Russia and the Soviet Union see Gerschenkron (1970), Lazitch and Drachkovitch

(1972), Lincoln (1998), Pipes (1974), Service (2015), and Taruskin (1996).

Chapter 6

1 See Grout and Palisca (1996: 163-174).

480

2 Janson (1970: 287).

3 Janson (1970: 292).

4 Hale (1994: 72).

5 Grout and Palisca (1996: 140).

6 Hale (1994: 132 following). Hale discusses several proposals.

7 Hale (1994: 152, 162, 181, 270, 294, 489 – 490).

8 Hale (1994: 179).

9 Hale (1994): pg. 499.

10 Kunzle (1973): pg. 272.

11 See Morris (1980) for a detailed description of the Venetian holdings in the

Mediterranean.

12 For an excellent example of the delicate detailed illuminated manuscript painting

achieved by the Limbourg brothers see Colorplate 26 facing page 259 (October from Les

Très Riches du Duc de Berry painted between 1413 and 1416) in Janson (1970). The

Limbourg brothers exploited the concept of “atmospheric perspective” that Jan Van

Eyck perfected.

13 See Grout and Palisca (1996:177).

14 Eastlake (2001: 412). An interesting question concerns the representations of naked

females in the Gothic and progressive Renaissance traditions. Clark (1959) argues

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convincingly that the Gothic tradition was more realistic than the progressive

Renaissance tradition in depicting women because it emphasized a woman’s elongated

sagging stomach. By contrast he asserts that the progressive Renaissance relied on an

idealized image of female beauty, drawing heavily from the way the Greeks depicted

nude women in their sculptures. In the Greek tradition the hips are given prominence as

opposed to the stomach. Clark notes that Rembrandt’s depiction of naked females is

basically Gothic as opposed to progressive Renaissance.

15 See Grout and Palisca (1996: 181 – 202).

16 For this paragraph and the next several paragraphs I draw heavily on Grout and Palisca

(1996: 284 following).

17 Hartt (1987: 439).

18 For this section I draw heavily upon Clark (1973).

19 Another striking example of the Gothic in romantic art is the late work of the Spanish

painter and etcher Francisco Goya. In a series of etchings – Capirhos – he revelled in the

grotesque and the supernatural. Reminiscent of Bosch he portrayed body parts

emerging from the strangest places – heads emerging from legs - witches, goats and

donkeys dressed like people, one-eyed hags and the like. In his famous attack on the

violence unleashed by Napoleonic armies on Spain, his monumental book of etchings

known as the Disasters of War – see Goya (1956) - he displayed human cruelty at its

most bestial. Firing squads8, hangings, dismembered bodies affixed to trees, women

being raped by soldiers, corpses being deposited in graves, priests running in horror: the

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horror of humanity in a so-called Christian and rational world is on display. In late Goya

we see romanticism at is sickest.

20 This section draws heavily upon pages 3 – 5 in Mosk (2013).

21 Quote taken from quotation on page 4 of Mosk (2013).

22 For Rossetti and Crane see pp. 499 – 500 in Janson (1970). The cartoon by Crane

appears on page 500.

23 In point of fact a number of painters associated with the Impressionist and Post-

Impressionist movements made use of photography. Edgar Degas dabbled in

photography, making use of the advantage photography offered over painting, the fact

you could spontaneously take a picture with a camera, catching people doing things

without their knowing they were being captured on film. Many of his paintings of

ballerinas have this quality to them. Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec took photographs,

working up paintings based on the pictures. A pair of pictures appearing on pages 56

and 57 of Huisman and Dortu (1964) make this point: on page 56 is a copy of a

photograph taken by Lautrec of his neighborhood friend Helène Vary; on the facing page

is a reproduction of the painting he fashioned from the photograph. In using a

photograph Lautrec saved his friend from having to sit for hours while he painted. As

well he was able to engage his imagination in rendering the image on canvas, in color,

and with subtle changes to her countenance raising mere stenography to art. Monet,

the Impressionist painter most committed to the ideal of trying to capture the moment

by moment play of light on natural objects had a photography studio built as part of a

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structure that housed his skylight enhanced workspace that he built at Giverny. One

suspects he took photographs from which he painted, probably not frequently –

because that was not his preferred technique for capturing the impact of light on

objects – but because it helped him in gauging physical dimensions.

24 For the discussion of Monet I draw heavily on Metropolitan Museum of Art (1978) and

Stuckey (1988, 1995). For the discussion of Seurat I draw from pages 507 – 508 in Janson

(1970).

25 For the discussion of Cézanne I rely heavily on pp. 507 – 509 in Janson (1970) and on

Shapiro (1952).

26 Quotation taken from page 113 in Elgar (1958).

27 For the discussion of van Gogh I rely heavily on Elgar (1958), Shapiro (no date) and Stone

and Stone (1960).

28 Under the leadership of Bismarck Prussia managed to unify most of the German lands –

but not Austria – into a single German Empire. Three wars were crucial: a war with

Denmark in 1864 that saw Prussia and Austria cooperating; a war between Prussia and

Austria in 1866; and Prussia’s victory over France in the Franco-Prussian conflict of 1870

– 1871.

29 This section draws heavily from Schorske (1979).

30 This paragraph draws heavily from pg. 70 in Schorske (1979).

31 The discussion of Worringer draws from pg. 52 ff. in Read (1974).

484

32 See Freud (1960a).

33 In Freud (1949) there is a clear layout of the way the id, the ego, and the superego

interact. Freud changed his position a number of times thereby making it difficult to

decide what constitutes the definitive statement of his theorizing. In Freud (1959) he

developed a kind of entropy based model, according to which “the goal of all life is

death”. There is a death instinct. The pleasure principle laid out in his theory of how the

ego behaves is insufficient to explain behavior. In this work Freud becomes almost

mystical, in short he allows his Gothic leanings to completely dominate his analytical

thinking.

34 See Freud (1963a) and Freud (1963b).

35 Appearing on pg. 647 of Freud (1960a).

36 Freud (1965) speculates on the need of humanity for strong leadership ideally

personalized in a charismatic figure. He roots this theory in his observation that libido is

a powerful force binding together individuals within a collectivity. As well he argues that

“social anxiety” – the fear of being isolated in a group – drives groups to coalesce

around a powerful individual who performs the role of “superego” for the collectivity.

37 Quoted on pg. 330 of Schorske (1979). The discussion of Kokoschka draws heavily from

the Schorske text as does the discussion of Arnold Schoenberg.

38 Quotation taken from pg. 341 of Schorske (1979). The picture appears in Plate XV in the

Schorske volume.

485

Chapter 7

1 Helmholtz (1954). In writing about music Helmholtz was following a tradition that had

been well established in natural philosophy. Galileo’s father was a famous lute player,

author of a treatise on lute playing that appealed to mathematical reasoning. Galileo

himself, an accomplished lute player, was not only influenced by his father’s work but

also by observing the vibrations of strings on a lute and on other keyboard instruments.

The famous French natural philosopher René Descartes wrote a treatise on music

theory, Musicae Compendium, published in 1650. D’Alembert who worked on fluid

dynamics was also fascinated by the waves generated by vibrating strings on musical

instruments, formulating his theory of sound waves, light waves, and seismic waves

based on his experiments in both fluids and in music. The fact is music is the most

mathematical of the fine arts, hence its appeal to mathematically inclined scientists

many of whom play musical instruments as amateurs.

2 Helmholtz (1954: 370).

3 I rely on Crumb (2001) and MacDonald (1964) for this section.

4 Faraday relied heavily on advances made earlier by Alessandro Volta who invented the

first practical battery generating a steady stream of electricity necessary for carrying out

electrical experiments; Christian Oersted who discovered that a wire carrying an electric

current could deflect a magnet; and André Ampere who showed that electricity in a

conductor could generate a magnetic field around the conductor. The idea that you

486

induce magnetism through electricity suggested you could do the opposite, namely

induce electricity through magnetism. This is the principle of symmetry.

5 The four equations that go by the name of the Maxwell equations are elegant, arguably

rivalling in their compelling simplicity and symmetry the Newtonian equations for

mechanical motion and Einstein’s equation equating mass to energy as the most

beautiful conceptions in all of physics. In the form they are typically presented they

consist of four equations stated in terms of vector calculus that converts statements

about three dimensional fields into statements about scalar magnitudes (either

numbers or linear equations). The first two equations are expressed in term of

divergence operators: the first equation involves electrical flux on an enclosing surface;

the second the breakdown of a magnetic field into closed loops and lines of force

extending out to infinity. The third and fourth equations use a curl operator – mimicking

rotations – expressing Faraday’s law of induction and Ampère’s law about current

flowing due to exposure to a magnetic field.

6 Infeld (1956: 10–11).

7 McDonald (1964: 89 following).

8 For this paragraph and the next several paragraphs I rely heavily on Infeld (1956) and

various pages in Schilpp (1959).

7 The physicists who carried out this famous experiment are Albert Abraham Michelson

(who received the Nobel Prize for his research) and Edward William Morley. They

carried the experiment out at the academic institution known today as Case Western

487

University. They used sophisticated devices capable of detecting very small differences

in the speed of light, specifically employing interference patterns to make their case for

the lack of an “ether wind” effect (interference patterns arise when waves are out of

sync, a phenomenon Helmholtz exploited in explaining why dissonant beats arise

naturally when two sound waves having different frequencies of vibration interact.

8 In the volume edited by Schilpp (1959) appears an intellectual biography that supports

the revolutionary nature of the Lorentz transform. In a book first published in the 1920s

based on lectures Einstein gave at Princeton University – see Einstein (1956) – Einstein

describes the intellectual origins of his theory of special relativity as the result of his

grasp of the Lorentz transform at the mathematics of Poincaré. While it is true that the

mathematics of the Lorentz transform emerged out of an effort to explain the

Michelson-Morley experimental results there is no reason to think Einstein was

particularly concerned with the Michelson-Morley experiment when he advanced his

theory. To be sure he dispensed with the notion of an ether as a needless concept in his

theory of special relativity. In Einstein (1950) provides very simple and appealing

discussions of relativity theory and the equivalence of mass and energy, deriving the

famous equation E = mc2 with the aid of a very common-sense diagram based on

relativistic principles and the conservation of momentum, a body in motion with respect

to a reference system absorbing radiation from two sources placed on opposite sides of

it emitting energy E/2. The simplicity of the discussion bears on Einstein’s dictum that

simplicity is intrinsic to a compelling scientific theory. A theory must be simple because

only then can it be beautiful. Natural law is beautiful, it is suffused with divinity

488

according to Spinoza, something Einstein believed with a fervor. If you can’t explain it

simply you cannot explain it at all.

It is important to appreciate the radical step Einstein took in developing the

special theory of relativity. On page 433 in D’abro (1951) a distinction is made between

the interpretation given by Lorentz and that given by Einstein regarding the significance

of time differences for the interpretation of natural reality. For Lorentz the significance

was limited to the phenomenon of electromagnetism; for Einstein the significance was

fundamental to all physical phenomena. It is for this reason that Einstein is considered

the original founder of relativity theory.

9 Quoted on pg. 250 of Fara (2009).

Appendix

1 Spinoza (1954: 43).

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