How the City Air Made Us Free: The Self-Governing Medieval City and the Bourgeoisie Revaluation

Abstract

The Great Enrichment of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries involved unprecedented increases in standards of living across Europe and its offshoots. (Conservatively, the increases were generally by a factor of between 30 and 45.) Deirdre McCloskey (2006, 2010, 2016) argues that by far the most important contributor to the Great Enrichment was “a rhetorical and ethical change causing the proliferation of ingenious ideas for betterment” (2016, p. 151). This rhetorical and ethical change was, to her mind, a product of “egalitarian accidents of 1517-1789” (p. 152). Alternatively, McCloskey heavily discounts the contribution of improved institutions. I argue that McCloskey’s characterization of the emergence of a bourgeois ethics and dignity as exogenous to the institutional environments is not convincing. Rather, I argue that the constitutional development of the self-governing medieval city was a necessary condition for the ethical and rhetorical change that McCloskey emphasizes. Furthermore, a bourgeois ethics and dignity were likely emerging in European cities as early as the twelfth century as the results of constitutional bargains. Given that literacy was largely confined to the clergy during the High Middle Ages, a paucity of pre-modern evidence for this emergence is not surprising.