The Meaning of Economic Freedom: An Anatomy of the Rising “Economic” World
All four figures in the history of the emerging French economic thinking wrote their works at the very end of the 16th and the first 15 years of the 17th century – just the period leading up to the Thirty Years’ War, the most important warfare in Europe before – and leading up to – the Napoleonic Wars, the Franco-Prussian war of 1870-71, and the World Wars. France was indeed very much the centre of the emerging “economy” at that period, just when the Spanish Golden Age was about to end – and the French economic literature was both a sign of and an instrument for the rise of French power.
However, at the same time important and parallel changes were taking place in England as well, eventually resulting in England becoming the dominant European power, culminating in the Industrial Revolution and the rise of what is now called “capitalism”; or the “Great Transformation,” in the terminology of Karl Polanyi.
The rise of economic thinking in England is credited to a slightly later time, the 1620s; however, in the period when French economic thinking emerged crucial developments took place in English intellectual life as well. The extraordinary fermentation in the period evidently stimulated thinking in England more than in France, as the central figures of this fermentation are certainly better known that the obscure figures who pioneered economic thinking in France: they were Francis Bacon, William Shakespeare, and John Donne.
Bacon, Shakespeare, and Donne: Reflections on the Imminent Emergence of the “Economy” and the Theatricalized “Public Sphere”
Within the limits of this article, I can obviously only offer a few introductory words. It will focus on two points: the exact temporal coincidence; and the way in which, at the very heart of this coincidence, certain matters raised by Shakespeare and Donne can be directly connected to the transformative character of the times – a transformation that brought about the emergence of “the” economy.
The most important works of Bacon were written right in the period: Advancement of Learning was published in 1605, while Novum Organum in 1620. There is no need to emphasize the foundational importance of these works for modern science and philosophy; their relevance for the theme of these articles will become apparent soon. Here I will only mention that Bacon was also an alchemist – just as Newton, by the way, who lived and worked about a century later; much interested in the transformation of metals and the making of gold and is also recognized as being proficient in magic. His interest in knowledge and science was not simply about offering understanding about the way the world is, but about gaining power by its transformation – and so his activities perfectly fit in with the transformations involved with the rise of the economy.
Shakespeare’s most important works were written in the same period: the coincidence was so great that persistent rumors attributed them to Bacon himself. I will only evoke here one work, his last, The Tempest, first performed on 1 November 1611. In the play, not just in the performance, Shakespeare himself appears, thinly disguised as Prospero, a magician who released at the end of the play his magical tools – and with it, Shakespeare actually ended his own career as a theatrical playwright – and so as a magician and enchanter himself, in his own way. The point is that, far from there being an identity or even similarity between the works of Shakespeare and Bacon, the direction of their thinking pointed to the opposite direction: Shakespeare realized the harm that was being done by a recurse to “magical” transformation, whether in alchemy, science, or theatre, and so opted to abandon it, just when Bacon was pressing this agenda forward on a grand scale. And this agenda was exactly the same as the agenda of charlatans or fairground merchants who around the time were organising the stock-markets, paving the way towards the emergence of the economy.
The significance of all this – literally of all this – was best recognized in a long poem by John Donne, An Anatomy of the World, written at just the same time. This is a quite famous poem, but mostly only by scholars of literature, but has direct and extreme relevance for the theme of this article, so I offer a more detailed analysis.
John Donne, An Anatomy of the World
The poem can be exactly dated, as it was written on occasion of the first anniversary of the death of Elizabeth Drury (she died in December 1610, at age fourteen), so practically the moment when Shakespeare performed The Tempest. Drury’s father was Donne’s patron, but the occasion turned out to be only a pretense for Donne to offer an overall characterization of his times – and of the world; the world that was about to die itself.
This world, while thought to be in good health by many, is actually sick: “thou, sick world, mistak’st thy self to be/ Well, when alas, thou’rt in a lethargy.” The previous lines already contain two central words, alluding to the character and modality of this sickness: “earthquake,” or as if an earthquake had destroyed the “old world”; and “doubt,” as a main instrument of this destruction. Even more, the world is not just sick, but outright dead: “Sick world, yea dead, yea putrified.” Let’s stop with this word, as “putrefaction” is a central term of alchemy, considered as the fifth stage of death, a result of the systematic decomposition of matter, central mode of proceeding in alchemy – and which, in a paradoxical way, Donne himself was doing, with his “anatomy” of the world – though he was not decomposing “the world,” only analyzing the way in which it was decomposed – recalling the way Camus was not promoting revolt, as Voegelin repeatedly recalled it, just analyzed how the modern world itself, by his times, was the product of a revolt – a Gnostic revolt, in the terminology of Voegelin. Thus, in a truly prophetic vision, a main characteristic of poets, Donne accommodates a key term of modern rationalistic philosophy, doubt, with the similarly destructive-decomposing method of alchemy.
Such decomposition undermines “The cement which did faithfully compact/ And glue all virtues”; and so, as a result, “the soul [is] gone.” A few lines below Donne even identifies, in a flowery and classical language that is here made strikingly specific, the culprits for this destruction: “of themselves produce no venomous sin,/ Except some foreign serpent bring it in”; or, the cause of death, similar to the Biblical serpent, comes from the outside, are brought in by foreigners: theatrical troupes? alchemists? sophists? – Donne does not specify. But, as the running commentary to lines 91-93 states, under such conditions, health becomes impossible. This is because health, and freedom, are maintained by the heart: “The heart being perish’d, no part can be free.”
With this, we arrive at the most portentous lines of the poem. Directly evoking one of Shakespeare’s most famous lines: “as mankind, so is the world’s whole frame/ Quite out of joint” (ll.191-2; evident allusion to Hamlet, I.v.189, performed less than a decade before), he points the finger to the new kind of thinking: “new philosophy calls all in doubt.” The result is devastating: the world “Is crumbled out again to his atomies./ ’Tis all in pieces, all coherence gone,/ All just supply, and all relation./ Prince, subject, father, son, are things forgot,/ For every man alone thinks he hath got/ To be a phœnix, and that then can be/ None of that kind of which he is, but he. This is the world’s condition now,” containing Donne’s most famous lines.
The tragic, almost hopeless character of this world destruction is brought fully out in a few lines below: “this world’s general sickness does not lie/ In any humour, or one certain part;/ But as thou sawest it rotten at the heart,/ Thou seest a hectic fever hath got hold/ Of the whole substance, not to be controlled./ And that thou hast but one way, not t’admit/ The world’s infection, to be none of it.” These lines also give further indication about the reasons of this destruction: it is animated by an uncontrollable, spiralling activity that is characterized as a hectic fever. The only way out is a full-scale exit from this dead or feverish world, evoking the identity of the zero and infinity.
I only single out for attention two further points in this astonishing piece of poetry. The first is the characterization of this destruction by the loss of beauty and form, and in particular, repeatedly, by the disappearance of proportion, one of the most frequently used and always emphatic words in the poem. Beauty and proportion together evoke grace, or the Greek word charis. And, indeed, the second point concerns the proper theological meaning of grace: not as the invisible and inexplicable will of a hidden God, but as the connection between Heaven and Earth. It is this “art” or “correspondence” that is lost, as “heaven gives little, and the earth takes less,” so the “commerce ‘twixt heaven and earth” is barred, and “all this traffic quite forgot.” Note that Donne uses the words “commerce” and “traffic,” central terms of the new “political economy,” still in a kind of classical sense, alluding to the most important modality of interchange – according to Donne – between Heaven and Earth, and so this is what has been destroyed, and altered, by the new world: which is nothing else than the world of “the economy.”
Frances Yates on Shakespeare, Bacon, Descartes and Rosicrucianism
One of the most important analysts of this change is Frances Yates (1899-1981), exact contemporary of Eric Voegelin. This has its importance for readers of VoegelinView, as Yates’ studies on the impact of alchemy, Hermetism, magic, and Neoplatonism has been compared to Voegelin’s “modern Gnosticism” thesis, for e.g., by Stephen McKnight.
Yates devoted an entire book to Shakespeare’ last plays, claiming that the figure of Prospero is taken from John Dee, the famous magicians and mathematician who for Yates was one of the most important figures connecting Renaissance Hermeticism and magic with modern science. Even more important and extensive is her discussion of Bacon. I can only mention here her ideas expressed in The Rosicrucian Enlightenment – a most pregnant title. Rosicrucianism was an obscure and controversial movement in the history of thought, producing certain manifestos about the advancement of science and the necessary transformation of society. While several such manifestoes were published in between 1610 and 1615, and at that time generated quite a sensation, their author(s) are still not fully identified, and it is widely thought that the entire movement was a hoax. Perhaps the best way is to consider the movement, or the manifestoes, as the first example for using the “public sphere” to invent something out of pure air, which then, solely by being discussed in “public,” would gain a life on its own, and even exert effects – or, as a pioneer “media parasite.”[1]
For Yates, Rosicrucianism was a direct link between the thinking of Bacon and Descartes: Bacon was one of the main intellectual sources behind the manifestoes, while Descartes’ thinking was much influenced by them. The interpretation of Yates remains controversial, and for a good reason: similarly to Voegelin’s “modern Gnosticism” thesis, it questions modern thinking at its very heart. However, the connecting of both Bacon and Descartes to Rosicrucianism is not her invention, but is part of a long-standing historical tradition.
The significance Yates attributes not simply to Rosicrucianism, but the specific period discussed in this article and its central figures comes out best in a major summary claim of the book, which also makes an indirect argument about the significance of liminality: “History falls inexorably into ‘periods’: for Europe as a whole it divides into the Renaissance and the seventeenth century; for England, it divides into the Elizabethan age and the Stuart age. In this periodisation, the important interstices tend to be overlooked, the times between the periods, times when survivors of an earlier period are still alive and influential, times when an earlier period has not fully ceased, and the new period is not yet fully born. The first fifteen or so years of the seventeenth century were such a time in all Europe.”[2]
Let’s now turn to the English economic theories of the 1620s.
The English “Discovery” of Economics, 1620s
I take as guide into the emergence of economic thinking and the economy in early 17th century England the classic work of Joyce Appleby.[3]
The starting and central argument of Appleby is that the emergence of what she calls a “market economy” (and, as I argued before, was really a “fairground economy” – nobody is perfect) was not a natural evolution but a radical transformation that turned upside down the very order of things. People at various levels tried to resist these changes, keeping their ways of life intact, but this was of no use: the transformation seemed irresistible, inexorable. This implied something more than the search for private profit: a new and complicated social organization emerged, where the range and power of commercial forces was vastly extended, and furthermore this extended commerce increasingly became the center of social life.
The first work that gave an account of this new “economic reality” was a 1621 pamphlet of Thomas Mun. Its central term was “flow”: trade, or commerce, is nothing else but “the persistent, complementary, and orderly flow of goods and money.” This flow was inalterable, impossible to tamper with: “Everything followed the flow of trade,” and so “neither prince nor statute could restrain this flow.” Thus, what so far was experienced as a radical transformation was now perceived as a law, in conformity with the very nature of things. This meant that human life had a new centre: “The market mechanism thus became a regulator of human activity,” as it “turned individuals and their communities outward toward the assessment of the economic demands and productive possibilities of other,” implying a “reordering of social values, placing a premium upon utility and efficiency.” In this way “the vital link between society and economy that justified political direction was cut” (98). The outcome was a new vision of society where – and note that here Appleby is quoting from the Preface to Sir Dudley North’s 1691 Discourse on Trade, many centuries before the current discourse on ‘globalisation’ – ‘ “the whole World as to Trade, is but as one Nation of People.” ’
Let me emphasize here the radical, epochal contrast between the 1611 poem by Donne and the 1621 pamphlet by Mun. The first perceives, and laments, the end of the world itself – a world in which thing were still at their place. The second hails the coming of a new world, with “the economy” at its center – and which for us is taken for granted in a natural manner as our home. But are we free in this new home? Can we live there a meaningful life? Donne evidently doubted this.
Before going further let me add a commentary. Mun’s ideas about the fundamental and irresistible character of the “flow” are very close to Newton’s ideas about the fundamental character of the “flux.” `Was Newton a Marxist ante litteram, discovering that the economy is indeed the basis of everything, even of science? Or, rather the other way around, should we realize that Newton’s undertaking itself was deeply rooted in the Donnean experience of the world as being dissolved – only Newton universalized it, forgetting in the process the simple fact that we do not live in the “universe,” rather on Earth, which is our home as Nature? And that therefore a “natural science” and a “universalistic science” are quite different matters?
Returning to Appleby, and Mun, “flow” as a foundation still has something paradoxical about it: a “foundation” must be solid. Appleby argues that the foundational idea of the new economics was not simply the “flow” of commerce, but the growth of this flow, or economic growth. This, however, is another paradox, as only living beings grow: rivers flow, but they don’t grow; they might overflow and flood, but this is not “growth.” So “economic growth” is just a metaphor, for the increase of commercial flows; but what animates this increase?
The texts of the period offer two basic ideas. One is the “extension of markets.” This is usually considered as an external increase of markets, involving more and more distant areas in trade. However, Appleby argues that the internal extension of markets was even more significant; this meant that the logic of buying and selling was extended to ever more areas of human life: in this way the “propensity to value things by their utility extended to the valuing of people and land. The involvement of people and land in the logic of the market was a critical stage in the transformation of modern society.” Far from being a natural development, it was forced, through “The intrusiveness of the market.”
The second idea concerns interchangeability. All things that we value in human life are concrete and singular; they cannot be identified or rather confused with others. But what is concrete and valued cannot be exchanged. In order to be exchangeable, the concrete value of a thing must be given up; it must be made interchangeable. This again implies a thorough process of social transformation. Here Appleby must be quoted in length: “The extension of the market was absolutely dependent upon the extension of consensus on equivalent values. Regular market dealings in land and labor required that the perception of the uniqueness of persons and things be replaced by the peculiar cognitive processes of market calculations. Thus, evaluation replaced appreciation as a fundamental attitude, and the depersonalization, the calculations, and the uniformities introduced by this change of consciousness helped prepare for the imagining and accepting of the scientific model of economic relation.”
The specificity and at the same time the enormous transformative capacity interchangeability can be seen by considering its synonym, “substitution.” While hardly given any attention in social and political thinking, “substitution,” or “substitutability,” has become a central term in current thinking, whether in economics or politics: one should only recall the expression “nobody is irreplaceable,” which in my experience was one of the animating slogans of the managerialism that was so successful in destroying universities. This is because, obviously, the opposite is true: everybody is irreplaceable; no concrete human being can be substituted – though, of course, every living being becomes old, and eventually dies, and then and in this sense, must be replaced. But it cannot be substituted. In this case, then, what is the meaning of substitutability? And interchangeability? And of our greatest Holy Cow, and Idol, “the economy,” which is based since its emergence on the idea of interchangeability?
The book of Appleby, just as the entire work of Frances Yates, are astonishing feats of thinking, managing to render historically concrete, and problematic, what has thus far been taken for granted as the discovery of natural processes. Note that both these key guides into the “positive unconscious” or “historical a priori” of modern thinking in this transformative period are women – but before and outside the Marx-and-Freud inspired modern feminism.[4]
Intermediary Reflections
But what is the relevance of such historical accounts? Who cares about the exact way we reached the current, glorious state of the “world economy”?
Well, in my view – and I will try to further substantiate this point in subsequent articles, just as I was also doing it in the three so far completed – quite a lot. The basic point is that this shows that the economy, the economy as such, the economy, ruler of life and death in our modern world, was never a place of freedom, but always a locus of enslavement, since it emerged. Enslavement to the king, first of all, who gained new powers with the emergence of the modern state, resulting in absolutism (as this was best analyzed by Alexis de Tocqueville, and also Edmund Burke); enslavement to the increasingly bureaucratized state, even more once it became separated from royal authority; enslavement to those potentates who, with the rise of the stock-market driven economy, increasingly traded their rights and duties over the populace to “freely” enjoying the rent derived from their properties; enslavement to those enterprises who became ever larger and ever more powerful, providing increasingly exclusive employment to the people who were gradually deprived of their land, of their workshops, of any of their property – genuine private property, which they acquired over lot of hard work, following – in so far as this is relevant – the Lockean justification of private property: culminating, so far, in the current multinational companies, which through the internet exert ever greater and ever more exclusive power. This is because, for very simple reasons, following the Newtonian and Pascalian laws of large numbers and the movement of fluxes in the void, they soon developed into monopolies – and with monopolies evidently there is no question of economic, or any, freedom, only their freedom to extort from us whatever they want. This is what Microsoft is now doing to all universities.
One could argue that the social sources of English Puritanism should be much traced to attempts to retrieve at least some of the traditional freedom lost by the emergence of the economy. Marxist historians like Christopher Hill, so dominant in modern historiography, tend to attribute Puritanic and revolutionary unrest to proto-communist ideas, but they were nothing of the sort: rather an expression of English individualism, as traced in his classic book by the Cambridge anthropologist Alan Macfarlane.[5] It was this sentiment and spirituality which travelled eventually to America, animated among others the drive to the West and the frontier myth, and surfaced as a major theme in the Golden Age movies.
The regulation of monopolies, through the anti-trust legislation, was a most important aspect of American politics and law since the end of the 19th century. When I studied for a PhD in economics in the 1980s at the University of Texas at Austin, it was still a core part not only of economic policy, but also of economic theory. We learned about things like “natural monopolies,” a term that – quite wrongly – has been expelled from economics textbooks; and also that monopolies, even oligopolies, are unacceptable, as they are incompatible with the workings of free markets. In contrast to this, by today, an increasing and now certainly dominant part of commerce is done by monopolies or virtual monopolies, like Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Amazon, and the like. In fact, a few years ago Mark Zuckerberg had to face congressional hearings, and for a time this generated some attention, but then it disappeared, from the “media,” almost without a trace – somehow, Zuckerberg proved to be more powerful than the US Congress.
But this is where we need to turn to the American Dream, and its incompatibility with any kind of limitation of freedom, whether by economic monopolies or political states. I apologize for saying a generality and commonplace, but it must be stated here: America always contained, and still contains, much of what is the best and the worst in the world. About to worst, we hear and know enough; but the “best” must also be stated sometimes, and this best is the irrepressible American desire for freedom and the intolerance of falsehood and injustice when this is personally encountered. The personal-experience-component is very important, as this is where the American Dream becomes, from a vague utopian ideal that anyway cannot be put into practice, an effective force. It is not a generalized activist stance to “liberate the whole world” – that is just a piece of Marxist dogmatics and liberal rhetoric, and an abusive one at that – but it is that when and if somebody personally encounters a threat to or denial of liberty, or acts of falsity and injustice, one cannot help but stand up against it.
This leads into the heart of the present, and the extraordinary re-election of Donald Trump as president, against the unrelenting hostility of the liberal medias, the almost entire professional political establishment, and many of the major gurus of internet-driven economics. The point is not about the personality and character of Donald Trump – as this show precious little that is exemplary; and not even a justification of his acts or words. And the core of it concerns not “populism,” the progress of “nationalism” or the “extreme right,” as liberal establishment commentators and intellectuals all around the world argue, but what is still the best of “America,” in the sense of the basic “values” of the United States: an unshakeable belief in freedom, and in the idea that the central government should not be telling people what to do, constraining their activities or indoctrinating them, while making their quiet background pact with the monopolistic powers – as it happened in the Obama times – but somehow provide conditions in which people can live freely.
Of course, it will be said, and was stated endless time, that this is utopian thinking. In a way, it is. But without a hint of this kind of “idealism,” we just resign ourselves to our enslavement. And this cannot be accepted.
NOTES:
[1] See the important book of Arndt Niebisch, Media Parasites in the Early Avant-Garde: On the Abuse of Technology and Communication, London: Palgrave, 2012.
[2] Frances Yates, The Rosicrucian Enlightenment, London: Paladine Books, 1975, p.80.
[3] Joyce Appleby, Economic Thought and Ideology in Seventeenth-Century England, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1978.
[4] If I can digress here, the necessarily organic character of growth, and thus its connection to fertility, comes out well in Hungarian language, where “growth” and “woman” are identical words: nő. So, it might have needed women to return to the real meaning of growth, beyond its metaphoric (ab)use for the flow of trade as “economic growth,” and beyond the Newtonian positing of the flux as original and “natural,” ignoring the fundamental fact that the growth of life in nature is based on something like “fertility.” No matter how hard it tries, “science” still cannot explain the origin of life.
[5] Alan Macfarlane, The Origins of English Individualism: The Family Property and Social Transition, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978.
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