ABSTRACT
A protracted revolution Over the entire course of the seventeenth century England was shaken by revolution. At the end of this period of protracted turmoil and bloodshed, England embraced the Enlightenment. In doing so it became the first world’s nationstate.1 At the heart of England’s tortured path to the Enlightenment was the democratization of religion, the radicalization of politics, and the transformation of consumption. These three phenomena – some taking place in the world of ideas, some in humdrum material circumstances – were intertwined. The standard account of England’s “troubles” emphasizes religion so we begin there. In the aftermath of Henry VIII’s decision to break with Rome over the issue of his divorce, the Anglican Church was born during the sixteenth century when sect after sect was severing its connections with the Catholic Church. Sweeping across the Holy Roman Empire, Bohemia, parts of France were a variety of Protestant faiths: Lutheranism, Calvinism, Baptists, and Quakers among others. In England more and more subjects of the crown associated themselves with the beliefs espoused by one or other of these groups while paying nominal allegiance to the Anglican Church. A prominent group of antiCatholic Anglicans pursuing this agenda were known as Puritans. Another subgroup were the Presbyterians who were entrenched in Scotland, the original home of the Stuarts who acquired separate monarchy over England (and Wales) and over Scotland under arrangements made by Queen Elizabeth, the last of the Tudors. While the Protestant faiths radically differentiated themselves from one another in terms of the particulars of dogma – Calvinism for instance espoused the doctrine of predestination according to which only a select few were granted the possibility of salvation and this was totally determined by the grace of God – they tended to share a common theme: a commitment to narrowing the gap between the laity and the clergy. Most of these faiths eschewed the elaborate rituals – parading as keys to salvation – of the Catholic Church, thereby chipping away at the absolute control of the service and the practical elaboration of Church politics typically exercised by the Catholic priesthood. Total disdain and
distrust of corrupt officialdom within the Catholic Church engendered a search for an honest genuine form of Christianity stripped of the pomp and circumstance of the Vatican. Viewing the dogma of the faith as the positive visage adopted by each sect and the day to day practices of the communicants as the normative face of the sect there is considerable continuity in the norms across the various Protestant creeds, despite their divergence in the realm of doctrine. Given the goal of reducing the hierarchy of Christian learning promoted by the Protestant communities, it is not surprising to find that they were active in encouraging lay reading of the Bible. Johannes Gutenberg’s breakthrough in mechanizing printing in the mid-fifteenth century – employing moveable type – opened up the doors to a dramatic fall in the costs of accessing the knowledge economy, in religion but also in politics, science, and technology. The Reformation spread in Europe like wildfire during the sixteenth century partly because the opportunity to convert was made known through printed leaflets. Let us consider Calvinism that made strong inroads into the religious communities of England, Scotland, and the Netherlands in more detail. Gorski (2003) provides a convincing case for the view that they initiated a “disciplinary revolution” that attempted to transform the norms of adherents toward social welfare accorded the poor, toward the norms surrounding the work ethic, and toward the creed of being virtuous in daily life. In the material realm this approach was furthered by the dissolving of monasteries that, in principle, were devoted to the virtues of voluntary poverty. Even more telling was the normative. As Gorski (2003: 18) points out, Calvin outlined a set of institutional mechanisms for maintaining discipline within the congregation. Each congregation was ordered to establish a consistory peopled by respected lay elders who were elected by the laity that was given the task of policing the behavior deemed respectable and proper for the putative elect. Drinking, cheating on one’s spouse, wife-beating, and indolence were to be condemned in the strongest terms. The idea was to bring Christian principles down in the realm of daily life, to eschew the false husk of ceremony, to embrace Christianity in whatever one did, whether it was farming, beer making, getting filthy toiling in a mine, amassing wealth as a prosperous merchant. Buying your way to heaven by purchasing indulgences from a corrupt priesthood was a hideous illusion. One had to be Christian through and through, not just in a mass presided over by a priest. It is not hard to see why the normative went with the positive. If the elect was the elect it should be virtuous, deserving of its fate. Anything else would seem a lie, particularly to potential converts. Humans being human, backsliding being a reality: unregulated behavior was all too likely to fall short. In a properly conceived Christian community justification, the transformation of the human spirit through the imbibing of God’s spirit shapes behavior. A powerful correlate of this position is that the virtuous are trustworthy. The word of a member of the congregation can be trusted in business dealings; by the same token government left to the virtuous is likely to be good government. Implementing the laws of God in the practical world is the path to perfecting and improving commerce and political institutions. Not everyone can be saved, only the elect are accorded this
privilege, but the rest of humanity can enjoy the benefits of God’s laws provided the business and political world gives itself over to the norms advocated by the Calvinists. Gorski (2003) argues that the Calvinist disciplinary revolution strengthened the state in a number of arenas. It made it easier for officers in armies to drill their troops, enhancing the speed and efficiency. For instance, Dutch troops were organized into ranks of five. After firing their muskets the front rank marched to the rear, reloading their muskets while they waited to be advanced to the front. The result was continuous discharging of muskets, enhancing killing power (in terms of the military force equation this reduced the relative cost of exerting military force). Equally important was honesty in paying taxes. Other things equal a population that is better disciplined is more willing to pay taxes thereby enhancing the power of the state, among other things raising the conversion rate m in the military force equation.2 As well, the Calvinist disciplinary revolution impacted commercial dealings. It enhanced trust. It encouraged dedication to one’s chosen occupation. It discouraged beggary. In terms of the productivity of labor equation it bolstered h and e(h).3 For this reason it is not accidental that Calvinism put down strong roots in England, the Netherlands, and the commercial oriented communities of France. All three of these countries were actively competing in the expansion of the Atlantic community and the European driven globalization of trade ushered in in the late fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Once Luther’s revolt against the Catholic Church ushered in religious competition within Christianity in the early sixteenth century, letting the cat out of the bag so to speak, there was a natural proliferation of new sects each claiming to best embody the true message of the Gospels. Competition in religion increased the range of choice available to informed Christians. Not surprisingly sub-populations of Europe tended to select according to their social and economic proclivities. Taking this position does not mean arguing along causal lines that Calvinism promoted capitalism, or the converse, capitalism promoted Calvinism. Rather it recognizes that the Reformation set in motion the splintering, the growing heterogeneity, of Christian belief systems. With more options available communities could and did select doctrines that were most compatible with their day to day activities. For this reason there is an intimate connection between the diffusion of Calvinism in the Netherlands and England and the industrious revolution discussed by de Vries (2008). De Vries argues that the New Luxury emerged in the seventeenth century, partly due to the introduction and diffusion of sugar, tea, coffee, tobacco, porcelain, silk, cotton cloth, spices, dyestuffs, and spirits.4 These products entered European markets as a result of Western European conquest and colonization of the New World and the carving out of oceanic trade routes to China, Southeast Asia, and India across the Pacific and around the cape of Africa. Unlike the Old Luxury that was the exclusive province of elites who lived in mansions and employed retinues of servants, the New Luxury was fairly democratic, reaching into the ranks of the “middling classes,” the proto-middle class. In the Netherlands the spiritual transformation accorded by Dutch
Calvinism took on the trappings of this consumerism, promoting the collecting of bibles, books, and church architecture. One result of the commercialization of consumption was a reallocation of time use in the household. In order to purchase the plethora of commodities flooding Western European markets “middling” households reduced the amount of time they devoted to producing foodstuffs and clothing at home (the eponymous “home production” component of their total time allocation), substituting purchases for the market for these items hitherto manufactured and processed at home. In order to pay for the New Luxury households increased the amount of time they devoted to the market. In effect they increased h and worked at improving e(h). In short, Calvinism was completely compatible with the “industrious revolution” analyzed by de Vries: not only did the “disciplinary revolution” point to greater attention to efficiency in the use of time and enhanced time inputs in work but the consumer revolution worked in the same direction. So did the emphasis on promoting literacy in evangelical communities. The Catholic Church did not look on the onslaught delivered to its spiritual hegemony in that part of Europe under its grip – the Greek Orthodox brand of Christianity in the east did not compete with it through most of Europe lying to the west of the Carpathians and north of the Balkans5 – with equanimity. The result was the Counter-Reformation initiated by the Council of Trent during the 1540s, 1550s, and 1560s. The Counter-Reformation had two aims: reform Catholicism so that it could blunt the Protestant argument that the Roman Church was hopelessly corrupt, wallowing in venality; counter the spread of Protestantism through military means, encouraging political leaders to conquer territories that had embraced doctrines the mother Church viewed as heretical. In short, a militant campaign steeped in ideology buttressed by troops on the ground was launched by the Vatican. Of the various new orders of Catholicism created to promote the CounterReformation the Jesuit order was the most successful. Founded by Ignatius of Loyola at the University of Paris in 1534, the “Society of Jesus” was confirmed as a militant wing of the Counter-Reformation in a papal bull of 1540. Ignatius was a true believer in the infallibility of the Pope who to his way of thinking was God’s vicar on earth. It is said that he argued that he would see white as black if the hierarchical church so ordered it. In countering the Protestant promotion of learning the Jesuit order opened universities and colleges, ironically educating a number of future supporters of the French Enlightenment.6
