The glittering sheen of commerce masks a Janus-faced enigma, that parent of both war and peace, glory and ruin, freedom and despotism, progress and regress, virtue and hedonism. Accused by thinkers throughout the ages of inducing these wide-ranging and contradictory effects, commerce—and its role in conditioning the character of peoples and nations—is the subject of a delightful new Festschrift, Commerce and Character: The Political Economy of the Enlightenment and the American Founding, in honor of Ralph Lerner, the Benjamin Franklin Professor Emeritus of Social Thought at the University of Chicago and a distinguished scholar of political theory and American political thought for over sixty years. Edited by Steven Frankel and John Ray, the volume of essays offers keen interventions in scholarly debates over Enlightenment thinkers’ views on the intersection of commerce and statecraft. Its chapters, however, are also written with a level of clarity and concision that makes their arguments accessible to readers who may be unfamiliar with some of the books cited throughout the volume.
Commerce and Character uses Lerner’s pioneering 1979 article, “Commerce and Character: The Anglo-American as New-Model Man,” as a provocation for a series of essays from leading scholars in modern political thought on enduring themes of political economy that Lerner explores in his original essay. His thesis was that early modern thinkers such as Montesquieu, Smith, and Hamilton defended the idea of the commercial republic as a more plausible alternative to ancient republics grounded in civic virtue and as a more just political arrangement than the political-theological regimes of medieval Christian Europe. The protagonist of the commercial republic was what Lerner calls the “new man of commerce.” This novus homo exemplified the qualities of prudence, sobriety, and thrift, subduing the pretensions of glory, pride, salvation, and the public good extolled in various fashions by the preening aristocrats, kings, and pagan citizens of yesteryear. (One may detect resonances with Albert O. Hirschman’s The Passions and the Interests, though by Lerner’s own admission he deviates from Hirschman’s thesis in some respects.) Carefully drawing attention to the thinkers’ diagnoses of both the merits and limits of commercial society, Lerner concludes the essay by appealing to Alexis de Tocqueville’s cautious endorsement of the commercial republican way of life. This new social order did not merely enable man to tame and channel his baser passions, but it also prompted him to imagine new conceptions of greatness and happiness harmonious with the sweet flow of commerce.
The chief strength of this new volume is the nuance and care with which it examines the challenges commercial society has posed for understanding liberal and republican political thought, statesmanship, the moral texture of social relations, and religion. Commerce and Character thus delivers readers from the ravenous wolves of homo economicus and rational choice theory, two intellectual traditions eager to peel back the ethical and cultural layers of the market participant and narrow his mind to the cold motives of calculation and economic self-interest.
Consequently, the essays escape the tangle of ideology driving contemporary debates over the value of commerce in modern society, resisting Pollyannaish paeans holding that boundless wealth and GDP are always for the better but guarding against romantic notions of a pre-commercial age that subordinated lucre to glory. The book also serves as an instructive addendum to the aforementioned Passions and Interests, which traced the attempt by early modern thinkers, rooted in Machiavellian realism, to redefine the human passions as a productive instrument to preserve and beautify social order. Finally, the volume is a timely, if unintended, intervention in ongoing disputes over tariff policy, injecting much-needed philosophical and historical perspective into the debate over free trade that too often submits to the clutch of quantitative-drenched economists who flaunt supply-and-demand charts but no audible pulse.
Many features that enabled the rise of the commercial republic, including due process, property rights, mixed government, and Christian notions of equality, predated the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
The broader benefit of books such as Commerce and Character is that they stretch the field of vision of the economics discipline. Consider the recent exchange between Gene Callahan in Modern Age and David Hebert, here in Law & Liberty, over the role of economists in assessing tariff policy and conceptions of happiness. Hebert is correct to highlight how empirical evidence furnished by economists can puncture fanciful assumptions behind public policy, such as the conjecture that tariffs have a reliable track record of protecting the domestic steel industry.
But Callahan rightly emphasizes that the conventional economic worldview—which, we should add, thoughtful heterodox economists resist—often holds a cramped and unimaginative understanding of happiness and wealth. Hebert acknowledges that many people, including himself, choose to work in less lucrative jobs because these jobs endow them with a profound sense of meaning. This observation itself confirms the merit of Callahan’s judgment, for it dissolves the sacred tenets of homo economicus by weighing deeper factors essential to man’s happiness that cannot be measured, computed, and instrumentalized. Marx’s superstructure in this formulation is now the base, and his base is now the superstructure.
Cue the rational choice theorist: The decision to forego a higher-paying job for a lower-paying but more meaningful one maximizes individual utility, so Hebert’s example in fact underscores the persuasive power of the economic mindset. This logic is reductive. If happiness exceeds the accumulation of material riches, as Hebert seems to suggest, and if economists acknowledge this guiding principle as well, then they are veiled Aristotelians with judgment rather than scientific quantifiers with measuring sticks.
Because the essays in Commerce and Character embrace this larger view of human flourishing, they are able to take into serious account notions of greatness, political regimes, national identity, moral corruption, imagination, false consciousness, sympathy, patriotism, and family affections in their study of commerce. To wit: John Locke offered a more compelling defense of property than David Hume (Michael Zuckert); Smith and Alexis de Tocqueville envisioned the need to formulate new conceptions of greatness in the commercial republic (Ryan Patrick Hanley); Thomas Jefferson helped create a new national identity that envisaged an empire of liberty released from the grip of artificial hierarchy and privilege (Peter S. Onuf); and Rousseau detected a kind of false consciousness lurking within the commercial republican project (Clifford Orwin).
Regarding doux commerce, the essays on the whole paint a compelling portrait of early modern discourse on whether international trade tended to foster peace, with Montesquieu, Smith, Hume, and Thomas Paine endorsing this approach and Hamilton registering a notable dissent. In addition, Lerner’s and Onuf’s contributions shrewdly, if briefly, alert readers to the nuances in this argument. They highlight how the marriage of industrialization and commerce, rather than promoting global peace and stability, has frequently augmented the power of the state, a seductive steroid utilized by leaders to help incite unprecedented military conflict.
Yet there was scant discussion in Commerce and Character of Smith’s and Hume’s awareness of this phenomenon as well, which diminishes the subtle complexity of their views on the subject. Although both thinkers are considered proponents of doux commerce—an interpretation reinforced by the volume’s chapters—they were also alert to the novel features of commercial society, such as a growing industrial base and public debt, that created the devilish incentives to finance and wage war. “The more labour … is employed beyond mere necessaries,” Hume wrote, “the more powerful is any state; since the persons engaged in that labour may easily be converted to the public service.” Smith’s famous observation that the division of labor dissolved man’s “martial spirit” suggested the opposite conclusion but similarly underlined the connection between commerce and war: a commercial and industrial nation rearing docile pin makers and not valorous political animals did not adequately prepare its citizens to defend themselves, thereby rendering the nation weak—and thus prone to attack—unless remedied, at least in part, by other measures (such as, in Smith’s case, modestly funded public education and a standing army). As Maria Pia Paganelli and Reinhard Schumacher have shown, Smith also observed that “merchants and manufacturers” in a commercial nation possessed sufficient amounts of capital to underwrite wars. This is not to mention Smith’s more famous attack on the monopolistic spirit of self-interested merchants that bred national animosities toward foreign rivals. His defense of the older form of the Navigation Acts further suggested his intuition that doux commerce would struggle to calm the tempestuous jealousies between English and Dutch traders.
Like many festschrifts, at times there is a lack of methodological coherence and consistency among the different chapters. Particular essays directly engage with Lerner’s “Anglo-American as New-Model Man,” and others don’t, which occasionally makes for awkward transitions from chapter to chapter. Because the general spirit of the volume smiled favorably upon the ascent of commercial society, even given the authors’ judicious attention to the potential drawbacks of this development, an essay from a harsh critic of modern commerce—say a postliberal or even a Marxist—could have enhanced the flavor of Lerner’s dialectic with his contributors by expanding the terms of debate of the modern bourgeois ethic.
The protagonist of the commercial republic was what Lerner calls the “new man of commerce.” This novus homo exemplified the qualities of prudence, sobriety, and thrift.
The essay that does offer the best direct engagement with Lerner’s thesis, and one that initiates the sharpest disagreement between Lerner and his interlocutors, is Colleen A. Sheehan’s “The Good Republican: Madison’s Model Citizen.” Criticizing Lerner’s belief (as she understands it) that the American Founding was ultimately rooted in Hobbesian premises about the ineradicable nature of the human passions, Sheehan maintains that Madison put forth a vision of a civically conscious citizen who harbored the moral virtue and educational background necessary for republican self-government. Madison’s “model republican citizen” was, like Lerner’s “new man of commerce,” a man of modernity. But, unlike the modern commercial republic, the Madisonian republic in which Sheehan’s model republican citizen lived aspired toward “age-old political ends,” such as public virtue. Framed differently, this citizen embodied the qualities of a statesman, not a shopkeeper, a Pericles, not a Bezos.
Delivering a sharp jab at East Coast Straussian and Deneenite interpretations of the American Founding, Sheehan concludes that the Founding was not a low or vulgar episode but a noble moment capturing the civic republican heartbeat of Madisonian political thought. In response, Lerner questions Sheehan’s premise that Madison’s model republican citizen contravenes Smith’s and Benjamin Franklin’s (and hence Lerner’s) vision of the new man of commerce, noting the latter thinkers’ appreciation of character formation that leapt beyond an appeal to the bourgeois virtues. This zestful exchange was one of the highlights of the volume.
Additionally, a number of essays explicitly or implicitly accept Lerner’s contention, indicated in a footnote to his original essay, that the champions of commercial republics, due to their shared embrace of ordered liberty, sought to “emancipat[e] men from many modes of thought of the past.” This framing—the advocate of commerce in the early modern period, even if grounded in moral sensibilities, desired to liberate profit and self-interest from the thick rust of European custom, prejudice, and monkish superstition—is common among intellectual histories and political theory studies of the emergence of commercial society and capitalism. Yet there are at least two dangers with this Whiggish-tinged framing. First, it can understate the premodern roots of the modern economy. Many features that enabled the rise of the commercial republic, including due process, property rights, mixed government, and Christian notions of equality, as the authors of the essays well know, predated the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
Second, and more dangerously, this pleasing binary between premodern and modern notions of commerce can feed the assumption that such seemingly outdated modes of thought yield little insight into understanding political economy today. Lerner’s concluding essay in response to the contributors flirts with this temptation. Lerner maintains that the proponents of commercial republicanism rightly sought to displace premodern Europe’s older system of opinion and sentiment—the same system, he observes, Edmund Burke defended in his famous quip in Reflections on the Revolution in France lamenting the demise of the age of chivalry and attacking the “sophisters, oeconomists, and calculators” of the late eighteenth century—with an updated system guided by the qualities of the new man of commerce.
Wistful Don Quixotes may not be the answer to contemporary social ills, but the sophisters, economists, and calculators of today—the talking heads, tinkerers, and technocrats—who filled the vacuum left by the downfall of the aristocracy and clergy are certainly not either. The singular artistry of Ralph Lerner’s career demonstrates the resilient truth that the pursuit of the eternal builds the stable philosophical and aesthetic foundation for the restless activities of the sophisters, economists, and calculators—and even, dare we say, for those glitter-coated ventures of the new man of commerce.