"The institutions of property rights, the rule of law, and free trade can be found in many civilizations throughout human history. For example, as McCloskey points out, Genghis Khan's Pax Mongolia of the thirteenth century enforced property rights and the rule of law over a land empire stretching from Korea to Hungary, which protected global free trade throughout Central Asia. China had private property, extensive markets, and large firms many centuries before England had s...uch institutions. Even ancient Mesopotamia had property rights and trade protected by law four thousand years ago. What all of these countries lacked, however, was the bourgeois ethics of Smithian liberalism that led to the Great Enrichment beginning in nineteenth century Great Britain.
"Institutions without ideas are not enough to explain this. In fact, as McCloskey points out (BE, 518), even institutionalists like North will occasionally admit this. In Violence and Social Orders (2009) by North, John Wallis, and Barry Weingast, there is one passage (pp. 192-93) where the authors must fall back on ideational explanation for the transition to "open access societies": they speak of a "transformation in thinking," a "new understanding," "the language of rights," and "the logic of the argument." But then they fail to reflect on how this points to the primacy of liberal ideas advanced by people like John Locke and Adam Smith.
"If McCloskey is right about the rhetorical appeal of liberal ideas promoting bourgeois ethics, as I think she is, then we must wonder what it is about evolved human nature that makes such ideas rhetorically appealing. Generally, McCloskey scorns evolutionary science in explaining social and economic history, because she fears that this falls into a crude social Darwinism, scientific racism, and eugenic materialism, which she sees, for example, in Gregory Clark's explanation of the British Industrial Revolution as arising from "survival of the richest" (Bourgeois Dignity, 266-95).
"McCloskey also says, however, that her argument can be put into "evolutionary terms," because "I am arguing that the meme 'trade-tested-betterments are good' had reproductive success, and further, that on the success of the idea depended the material success of the modern world" (BE, 521-22). This would be a case of cultural evolution, of the sort studied by evolutionary scientists like Robert Boyd, Peter Richerson, and Joseph Henrich. Eva Jablonka and Marion Lamb have shown that in evolutionary history there are four systems of inheritance: genetic, epigenetic, behavioral, and symbolic. Of these four, the first three are manifest among nonhuman animals. Symbolic evolution is the one uniquely human line of evolutionary inheritance, which includes the whole realm of conceptual ideas and rhetorical persuasion. What McCloskey identifies as the Bourgeois Revaluation in liberalism belongs to human symbolic evolution."
Ver mais"If McCloskey is right about the rhetorical appeal of liberal ideas promoting bourgeois ethics, as I think she is, then we must wonder what it is about evolved human nature that makes such ideas rhetorically appealing. Generally, McCloskey scorns evolutionary science in explaining social and economic history, because she fears that this falls into a crude social Darwinism, scientific racism, and eugenic materialism, which she sees, for example, in Gregory Clark's explanation of the British Industrial Revolution as arising from "survival of the richest" (Bourgeois Dignity, 266-95).
"McCloskey also says, however, that her argument can be put into "evolutionary terms," because "I am arguing that the meme 'trade-tested-betterments are good' had reproductive success, and further, that on the success of the idea depended the material success of the modern world" (BE, 521-22). This would be a case of cultural evolution, of the sort studied by evolutionary scientists like Robert Boyd, Peter Richerson, and Joseph Henrich. Eva Jablonka and Marion Lamb have shown that in evolutionary history there are four systems of inheritance: genetic, epigenetic, behavioral, and symbolic. Of these four, the first three are manifest among nonhuman animals. Symbolic evolution is the one uniquely human line of evolutionary inheritance, which includes the whole realm of conceptual ideas and rhetorical persuasion. What McCloskey identifies as the Bourgeois Revaluation in liberalism belongs to human symbolic evolution."
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