Re-Evaluating the Bourgeoisie: A Parallel between Deirdre McCloskey and Sergio Ricossa

This paper compares Deirdre McCloskey’s reading of the “bourgeois reevaluation” with Sergio Ricossa’s. Italian economist Sergio Ricossa was – like McCloskey – schooled in the neoclassical, formalistic tradition, but in time drifted toward a more “Austrian” approach, as he was influenced by the work of F.A. Hayek. Like McCloskey, in a number of works Ricossa aimed to vindicate the bourgeoisie, placing what McCloskey would later call “the bourgeois deal” at the source of modern economic growth. Ricossa and McCloskey were not connected, nor friends. Yet they both arrived at re-evaluating the bourgeoisie, explicitly linking their liberalism to the historical role played by a specific class. This paper will look at their respective paths, which in some respects are parallel, and will show how their common appreciation of the Bourgeois Era went hand-in-hand with libertarianism as a political philosophy and with a strong appreciation of the Bourgeois Era in history. In the last few years, Deirdre N. McCloskey has brought together the two main research programs of her life – economic history and rhetoric – in her grandiose Bourgeois Trilogy. Besides being a tour de force in economic history (McCloskey 2006; 2010; and 2016a), the three volumes are a profound inquiry into the way in which we talked and still talk about economic matters in the West, a crucial factor in making the industrial revolution, and modern economic growth, possible. In a sense, McCloskey’s trilogy, and more generally her later works, can be seen as a bold attempt to regain legitimacy for the word “bourgeoisie.” This term is tainted and typically used as a pejorative term for the middle class. Indeed, right from the beginning: “the French aristocracy … used the term pejoratively to imply that merchants who traded for profit and employed others to work for them were money-grubbing exploiters whose values… made for dull conformity” (Lowes 2006, 24). After “the failed revolutions in Europe during the hectic year of 1848”, writes McCloskey, “a new and virulent detestation of the bourgeoisie infected the artists, intellectuals, journalists, professionals, and bureaucrats – the ‘clerisy.’” In the face of this phenomenon, “to revalue” the bourgeoisie (McCloskey 2016a, xvi) is openly a goal McCloskey set for herself. She wants “to remake a word of contempt into a word of honor” (McCloskey 2006, 87). This paper points to a surprising likeness that could help us understand the many facets of the McCloskeyian “bourgeois re-evaluation” in the context of a broader classical liberal perspective. In 1980, Italian economist Sergio Ricossa (1927 – 2016 and therefore 15 years older than McCloskey) published a pamphlet by the title Straborghese, which more or less translates as Über-Bourgeois (Ricossa [1980] 2016). A cursory glimpse of the historical circumstances of Italy at the time suggests that Ricossa might have used the term to be intellectually provocative. Christian-Democrat leader and former prime minister Aldo Moro (1916 – 1978) was kidnapped and killed by the Red Brigades in 1978, Marxist terrorism was a real threat at the time, and the Italian Communist party was about to overtake the Italian Christian Democratic Party, gaining 33 percent of the votes in the 1984 European elections. “Conservative” or “classical liberal” voices were never so weak and marginalized. Not exactly the most welcoming environment for a paean to the bourgeoisie. Still, Ricossa – who actually was a child of the working class, rather than the scion of a bourgeois family – wanted to provide less a polemic than a sketch of the bourgeoisie which, as in McCloskey’s case, fit a narrative of the historical triumph of the market economy. His book begins with a quotation from Luigi Einaudi (1874 – 1961), the economist and later president of the Italian Republic revered by Italian classical liberals as one of their masters. “[S]‌uch is the unspeakable confusion of ideas engendered by the term ‘bourgeois’ that it is necessary to exclude it from the lexicon of whoever abstains from deceiving the reader” (Einaudi 1944). The word was so much tainted that classical liberals should avoid using it, Einaudi believed in 1944. In 1980, in spite of the Red Brigades being a real threat to liberal democracy in Italy, Ricossa begged to differ and proposed to refashion liberalism in “bourgeois” clothes. While Ricossa’s pamphlet is not a match to McCloskey’s work in terms of its historical depth and scholarly erudition, I do maintain this reevaluation of the bourgeoisie entails a degree of intellectual symmetry: it shows a “sensibility” that resembles McCloskey’s. Both of them were schooled in neo-classical economics but moved toward the Austrian school; both of them appreciated the importance of classical liberal ideas in opening the door to the Industrial Revolution or, to use McCloskey’s term, the “great enrichment;” both of them ended up subscribing to some version of libertarianism. These are not features exclusive to Ricossa and McCloskey. Yet, unlike others, they specifically endorsed a “bourgeois re-evaluation.” I am not claiming that Ricossa “anticipated” McCloskey’s argument in any sense. Yet I find it worth noting that two authors associated with an enthusiastic re-evaluation of the bourgeoisie have followed a similar scientific trajectory. I will provide two brief sketches of their biographies, underlining their commonalities, including the fact that they valued literary style and rhetoric. They were not acquaintances (though Ricossa, who was 15 years older than McCloskey, was aware and appreciative of McCloskey’s works on the rhetoric of economics). I will then focus on their understanding of the bourgeoisie and its impact: in particular, of their view of the culture that underpins the bourgeoisie.