4 THE BIRTH OF CAPITALISM

A Glorious Accident

Where does the Miracle come from? Oddly enough, given how much it’s been studied and how recent it is, no one really knows. Or, to be more accurate, no one can really agree. There is no shortage of theories, but consensus remains remarkably elusive. And often, when scholars try to synthesize all the scholarship, they throw their hands up in consternation. Joel Mokyr begins his daunting A Culture of Growth: The Origins of the Modern Economy recounting the sudden explosion of prosperity that began in Europe in the 1700s and has been spreading, in fits and starts, around the globe ever since. “The results were inescapable: nearly everywhere on the planet men and women lived longer, ate better, enjoyed more leisure, and had access to resources and delights that previously had been reserved for the very rich and powerful, or more commonly, had been utterly unknown.”1

The names for this event vary. Some call it the Great Enrichment or the Great Divergence. I prefer the Miracle for a fairly straightforward reason. Miracles defy explanation. Nearly all scholars agree that the Miracle began in the West, but there’s precious little agreement on why it happened there.2 In his afterword to the third edition of the European Miracle, Eric Jones surveys the intellectual cacophony around the question of why modernity happened and, with a mix of exasperation and jest, writes: “Perhaps there was something supernatural about Europe’s rise after all.”3

Alas, there’s no God in this book, and so that explanation is unavailable to us.4

The next best explanation for modernity is: England did it. There’s a great deal to recommend this theory of the case. Indeed, if you’re using “where” figuratively, then the origins of capitalism and the Miracle remain a mystery. But if you literally mean “where,” then we know the answer to that question: England.

“We are still experiencing the aftereffects of an astonishing event,” writes Daniel Hannan in his brilliant, unavoidably provocative, and widely misunderstood book, Inventing Freedom: How the English-Speaking Peoples Made the Modern World. “The inhabitants of a damp island at the western tip of the Eurasian landmass stumbled upon the idea that the government ought to be subject to the law, not the other way around. The rule of law created security of property and contract, which in turn led to industrialization and modern capitalism. For the first time in the history of the species, a system grew up that, on the whole, rewarded production better than predation.”5

The original working title of this book was The Tribe of Liberty. The reason I liked that title is that Hannan’s view is the one I hold nearest to my heart. And for this and other reasons, the idea that liberty was born as a cultural quirk of an obscure people deserves a bit more explication than some of the other theories of where modernity comes from.

A vast sea of literature, dogma, doctrine, and social science has been dedicated to the question of “Why England?”

They can all be summarized with a single statement: England was weird. When I say “weird,” I do not mean it with a hint of insult. It was gloriously, wonderfully, fantastically weird. Monty Python is weird. My father was weird. Marriage is weird. Most of the joyful and precious things in life are weird, and it is the weirdness that makes them joyful and precious.

Why for the first time ever did this weirdness manifest itself? Daniel Hannan identifies five widely agreed-upon crucial factors:

1. The development of a nation-state. One needs a certain amount of cohesiveness and order to let the Miracle emerge. And that only comes from a regime that can “apply laws more or less uniformly to a population bound together by a sense of shared identity.”

2. Closely related to this is a healthy civil society full of competing and complementary institutions that serve to root the society and serve as a counterbalance to the arbitrary power of the state or crown. The sovereignty of the individual as a cultural artifact is deeply rooted in, and at least partly derived from, the role of mediating institutions. As Alexis de Tocqueville observed, “The spirit of individuality is the basis of the English character. Association is a means of achieving things unattainable by isolated effort….What better example of association than the union of individuals who form the club, or almost any civil or political association or corporation?”

3. Island geography. The importance of being an island is not obvious at first. But it was crucial for two reasons. First, islands have natural protections from foreign invaders. This allowed for England to be less militarized than other nations. War was for the most part reserved for fending off foreign invaders. The Anglo distrust of standing armies is a direct product of this accidental arrangement. Second, and very much related, this made political absolutism less necessary. Kings evolve absolute powers for the same reason “stationary bandits” are welcomed by victimized peasants: to protect the populace from foreign threats. The lack of an absolute ruler not only gave space for civil society and competing power centers to develop, it prevented the king from claiming that he “owned” the country (the people and their stuff), as was common elsewhere.

4. Religious pluralism. This strikes me as incontrovertible insofar as religious hegemony in general deters innovation, which, until very recently, was seen as a kind of heresy or apostasy. Prior to the Reformation, religion wasn’t a separate sphere of life from work and family. Even laboring differently was seen as a threat to the established order. More on this in a moment.

5. Last, and Hannan argues most important, common law: “a unique legal system that made the state subject to the people rather than the reverse.”6

It’s a good list, and Hannan makes a good case for it. But we still have the problem of English weirdness. By that I mean, if modernity arises only once and in one place, it is almost impossible to know for sure why it happened there. The scientific method would require a true test, and none is available. If modernity happened someplace else, say Japan, we could compare and contrast and distill the commonalities and come up with a testable hypothesis.

There is one objection to this point: the Netherlands, a great merchant republic, which competes with England as the birthplace of the modern corporation. Perhaps unfairly, I am giving short shrift to the Dutch. The problem is that the two nations were deeply enmeshed in each other’s cultures, even when they were at war with each other. Indeed, I think you could make a good case that neither would have become capitalist without the other. It’s a bit like the problem of identifying the first state. No one has identified a “pristine state,” i.e., one that arises all on its own. Instead, archaeologists and anthropologists can only locate “competitive states”: states that emerge in order to compete with or resist some other state. This captures the dynamic between England and Holland.7 I have no doubt that some partisans of the Dutch would make the case that the Netherlands pulled England into the Miracle, not the other way around. And I am open to that argument. But from the evidence I’ve seen, the causality works more the other way around, despite numerous Dutch contributions. It’s like two great basketball players who become better because of their competition with each other.

Regardless, the spillover from England and the Netherlands to the rest of Europe was rapid in the eighteenth century, again because of virtuous competitive pressure. But also because of the shared cultural assumptions and institutions of Christian Western Europe (Russia is a different matter). “The ‘demonstration effect,’ ” writes Ralph Raico, “that has been a constant element in European progress—and which could exist precisely because Europe was a decentralized system of competing jurisdictions—helped spread the liberal politics that brought prosperity to the towns that first ventured to experiment with them.”8

As Hannan recounts in loving and patriotic detail, the roots of English democracy stretch deep into antiquity. Sources dating back to at least the 600s show that the English had a social compact between ruler and ruled, one which organically evolved in England long before any of the rules were written down. Kings met with other lords and other leaders out in the open and promised to uphold their duties as a servant of their people. The Roman historian Tacitus noted 2,000 years ago that this was a common practice among Germanic tribes as well. But only England held on to it, perhaps because being an island nation protected it from the wars that wiped out such traditions elsewhere.

J. R. Maddicott, author of the authoritative Origins of the English Parliament, 924-1327, draws a line from the early Germanic “Witans” of England to the Magna Carta and to British democracy today: “Substituting ‘earls’ for ‘ealdormen’ and ‘barons’ for ‘thegns,’ we are not so very far from the general look of an early parliament.”9 He later says that “in other parts of the West, the Germanic and Carolingian legislative tradition died out in the tenth century. Its energetic preservation and promotion in England was quite exceptional….We need not baulk at the notion of English exceptionalism.”10

Oxford University medieval historian James Campbell agrees. “That representative institutions have their roots in the dark-age and medieval past is not an anachronistic view; rather it is fully demonstrable,” he writes. “It does indeed look as if the history of constitutional liberty has important beginnings in Anglo-Saxon England.”11

The formal mechanisms of democracy are not the only anatomical features of democracy that can be traced to Old Blighty. Feudalism in England was significantly different from feudalism in Western Europe and extremely different from feudalism in Eastern Europe, Russia, China, and the rest of the world.

In most feudal societies, kinship rules basically made the concept of private property, particularly private land, unthinkable. In peasant societies (Alan Macfarlane’s term), the serfs worked the land for a host of reasons and, contra Marx, they didn’t all have to do with economic exploitation. They had more to do with ancient and tribal attachments to specific plots of dirt. This was their land to work because this was where their ancestors had worked and where their ancestors were buried.

Peasants in most of Europe didn’t leave their land to their children, because it wasn’t their land to dispose of. They were more like sharecroppers. In Eastern Europe, peasants had views of ownership similar to the Native Americans. They were intergenerational caretakers of the soil, and “ownership” was better understood as an eternal lease. But in England, MacFarlane found that the individual right of landowners to “alienate” their property—i.e., sell it or leave it to people other than their children—was already deeply rooted in English common law by the beginning of the 1500s.12 Marx and Engels claim in The Communist Manifesto that capitalism “has torn away from the family its sentimental veil, and has reduced the family relation to a mere money relation.”13 But as Francis Fukuyama observes, that was demonstrably untrue in England. Centuries before the emergence of Marx’s hated bourgeoisie, the English were treating “family” land as just another commodity. Fukuyama cites a study of land transfers in one English district; only 15 percent of transfers went to the owner’s family during his lifetime, and 10 percent at death.14 In other words, farmers could sell their land to strangers. And as early as the twelfth century, “English villeins (tenants legally tied to their lands) were buying, selling, and leasing property without the permission of their lords.”15 In other words, private property was an ancient custom in England, predating legal and philosophical justifications for it, sometimes by centuries.

Another, related advantage stemmed from the fact that hereditary castes—a near universal institution around the world—were weirdly weak in England. “On the Continent, seigniorial [baronial] justice was common,” Hannan writes. “The great magnates were the law on their own estates. But England, before the Normans came [in 1066], had no feudal aristocracy. It had its great men, as all warrior societies had, and many of them held large estates, though these tended to be fragmented across many counties. But the great men never constituted a hereditary caste with legal privileges—such as, to cite the most notorious example from Europe, exemption from taxation. They were as subject to the law of the land as anyone else.”16 In other words, feudal lords, while extremely powerful on their own lands, were not so powerful that they could serve as absolute monarchs in their little mini-states.

I think Hannan might overstate the point, but the core truth remains. Aristocracy worked differently in England. Hannan attributes this to the fact that, in Europe, Roman law was the norm, while in England it was something of an alien imposition that never took deep root in the soil.17 Roman law, like Napoleonic law, is “deductive”: Lawmakers determine a principle, write it down, and impose it on the society. Common law is an emergent property, bubbling up from the society itself.

Common law evolved case by case, which is why some call it judge-made law. “Common law,” writes Hannan, “is thus empirical rather than conceptual: it concerns itself with actual judgments that have been handed down in real cases, and then asks whether they need to be modified in the light of different circumstances in a new case.”18 And English common law recognized the rights of all Englishmen, which made all the difference.

I don’t want to get bogged down in the history of the Magna Carta, but it’s worth noting that the Magna Carta (the Brits don’t say “the” as we do, by the way; they simply say “Magna Carta”) came after the development of formal institutions of common law. In the late twelfth century, Henry II created a system of circuit courts and even a central court of appeals. When the Magna Carta was struck a half century later, it recognized this development, creating a written precedent for the future. Likewise, the Magna Carta’s requirement that the king rule in consultation in “common counsel of the realm” was a nod to more ancient traditions while at the same time a new, incalculably valuable precedent for the creation of a formal parliamentary system.

There are numerous other cultural idiosyncrasies that define English weirdness—or, if you prefer, exceptionalism. The right to petition authorities for redress, the rights of the individual, an almost obsessive concern with just taxation, and numerous other concepts we tend to think of in high-flown philosophical or legal terms have deep roots in English custom. They emerged not as formal deductive law but through local trial and error over countless generations.

In subsequent chapters, I will refer often to the “Lockean Revolution” to describe the gift we inherited from the Founding era of both England’s Glorious Revolution and the American Revolution. But as I will explain, the problem with the term “Lockean Revolution” is that it makes it sound like the extended order of liberty was purely a kind of legalistic creation crafted by lawyers and philosophers like Locke. The truth is it developed and evolved organically over a millennium before Locke did us all the great service of writing some of it down. Just as the Magna Carta locked in certain principles in 1215, Locke and the American founders did something very similar.

The colonists at the time of the American founding saw themselves for the most part as English. They brought their weird cultural biases with them, and their argument with the crown was an extension of the Whiggish fight for liberty that defined English history for a thousand years. As Winston Churchill observed in his History of the English-Speaking Peoples, “The Declaration [of Independence] was in the main a restatement of the principles which had animated the Whig struggle against the later Stuarts and the English Revolution of 1688.”19

Just as Martin Luther King Jr. used America’s best ideals to make the case for a richer liberty in America, the Founders invoked England’s highest principles to make the case for their liberties in the New World. Jefferson’s rough draft of the Declaration included the line “We might have been a free and great people together,” but it was cut from the final version.20 Still, the Declaration drips with a sense of familial betrayal:

We have warned them from time to time of attempts by their legislature to extend an unwarrantable jurisdiction over us. We have reminded them of the circumstances of our emigration and settlement here. We have appealed to their native justice and magnanimity, and we have conjured them by the ties of our common kindred to disavow these usurpations, which would inevitably interrupt our connections and correspondence.21

That line about the “circumstances of our emigration and settlement here” is a reference to the fact that so many of the original colonists crossed the ocean in search of religious liberties that had been denied to them at home. Indeed, as important as the issue of unjust taxation was to the Founders, the cause of religious liberty served as a vital motivation as well. The Church of England had in the years leading up to the Revolution tried to impose an official faith in the colonies and even install American bishops, arousing a wellspring of vestigial Puritan rage. “The American Revolution was, at least in part, the result of a spasm of religious intolerance,” writes Hannan. “That this spasm should have engendered the first truly secular state on earth, one in which all religions might compete on even terms, is close to miraculous.”22

The reason I bring this up is that I think we often fail to see the Constitution in the proper light. The profound (though at times insufficient) legal authority we invest in it tends to obscure the cultural authority of the document. And so we talk about it in formalistic terms. Section one says this, section two says that, and so on. The Whiggish legal historians, naturally, see history as a book in which each page is filled with new legal documents. But these documents almost always are lagging indicators, validations of cultural advances.

And it is fine for historians, lawyers, and lawmakers to see the past through the legal prism of the present. It is, in fact, essential for lawyers and lawmakers to look at the text and textual history of the Constitution. But the Constitution is not simply a machine on parchment or an instruction manual for the government. It is an expression of a specific culture at a specific time. And that culture comes from somewhere. Specifically, it comes from England. Patrick Henry at the Virginia ratifying convention of 1788 spoke glowing of their “glorious forefathers of Great Britain” who “made liberty the foundation of every thing.”23

Numerous Latin American countries have constitutions based on the American model, but they have struggled to re-create America’s political and economic successes because culture matters—a lot. Not for nothing did Alexis de Tocqueville describe the American as “the Englishman left to himself.”24

For a certain group of intellectuals on the right and, to a lesser extent, on the left, the Constitution is the wellspring of the American order. From one perspective, this is undoubtedly true. The Constitution provides guardrails for our society in all the formal and legal ways you can think of (even if those guardrails have, over time, succumbed to entropy, thanks to a lack of care in their upkeep). But the Constitution is a cultural and psychological artifact as well. It informs the way we think about government, rights, and civil society. Our tendency to take things for granted rusts all that glitters eventually. So when we say, “I can do this because the Constitution gives me the right to do this,” it seems perfectly natural, but it is actually one of the most radical things a human can say.

Like the Magna Carta that came before it, one of the greatest services the Constitution provides is that it is simply written down. As Ernest Gellner has noted, humans have a tendency to sacralize texts. That is precisely what Americans have done with the Constitution, thank goodness.

Barack Obama said in his Farewell Address:

Our Constitution is a remarkable, beautiful gift. But it’s really just a piece of parchment. It has no power on its own. We, the people, give it power—with our participation, and the choices we make. Whether or not we stand up for our freedoms. Whether or not we respect and enforce the rule of law. America is no fragile thing. But the gains of our long journey to freedom are not assured.25

Many of my fellow conservatives were angered by this, and given Barack Obama’s remarkable, yoga master-like flexibility in interpreting constitutional text, I can understand why. But on its face, Obama’s claim was right. The Constitution only has real power if the people give it power. James Madison noted as much when he fretted that “parchment barriers” are often inadequate against “the encroaching spirit of power.”26 The real power of the Constitution is to be found not in it but in us. The Constitution is a paper manifestation of a deeper cultural commitment to liberty and limited government, in the same way a marriage certificate is a physical and legalistic representation of something far deeper, mysterious, and complicated. When the marriage fails, the marriage certificate won’t save it. And when the American people lose their love of liberty, the Constitution will not save us either.

What made the American founding such an amazing one-of-a-kind event was that it took the weirdness of one obscure successful tribe, culled from its cultural peculiarities universal principles, and then wrote them down. The Founders had enormous help from John Locke, who did much of the intellectual groundwork in support of the Glorious Revolution a hundred years earlier. And they also had help from Montesquieu and the Philosophes and many others, including Cicero. The text needed to be amended over time to make those principles more universal, but the basic cultural inheritance was amplified by the intellectuals and statesmen, and their work in turn reinforced the culture.

Having made the case, however briefly (or tediously) that America’s love of liberty is in fact a cultural artifact bequeathed to us from England, let me now claw it back—at least somewhat. The problem with this tale, and many like it, is that it is what Rudyard Kipling would call a “just-so” story. A just-so story in anthropology is a form of post hoc fallacy that says because B follows A and C follows B, therefore A caused B and B caused C.

Though he tries to deny it, Hannan is offering an updated—and often compelling—version of the Whig interpretation of history, as famously formulated by the historian Herbert Butterfield in his conveniently titled 1931 book, The Whig Interpretation of History. Butterfield criticized previous generations of British historians who described world history as if it were an unfolding novel whose plot and conclusion were knowable to all. The heroes of the tale were lovers of liberty, the villains the forces of absolutism and arbitrary power. Their story was the tale of the inevitable victory of British liberal values.

As Butterfield put it, there is a lamentable “tendency in many historians to write on the side of Protestants and Whigs, to praise revolutions provided they have been successful, to emphasize certain principles of progress in the past and to produce a story which is the ratification if not the glorification of the present.” He adds:

The whig historian can draw lines through certain events…and if he is not careful he begins to forget that this line is merely a mental trick of his; he comes to imagine that it represents something like a line of causation. The total result of this method is to impose a certain form upon the whole historical story, and to produce a scheme of general history which is bound to converge beautifully upon the present—all demonstrating throughout the ages the workings of an obvious principle of progress.27

Teleology, the great sin of historians, is the idea that there is a purpose to things and events—a grand plan that we are all working under. Providence is, of course, the most famous teleological claim: “It’s all God’s plan.” Prior to the Enlightenment, this was pretty much every Westerner’s theory of everything. The great Enlightenment thinkers threw out religion as the driver of history, but they thought they spied a different prime mover: progress, and later History with a capital H. Mankind was ineluctably getting freer and better. Different philosophers debated how this “progress” worked and why it was inevitable.

Ultimately, teleology is an antidote to despair and nihilism. Just as we as individual humans want to believe there’s a point to our own personal lives, we also want to believe there’s a point to everyone else’s. Indeed, unless you fancy yourself a messiah or prophet of some kind, you pretty much have to believe that there’s an external, metaphysical purpose to life for everyone if you believe in such a thing for yourself.

The reason I raise the issue of teleology is to illuminate the fact that if there is a purpose to economic and political evolution, we can no more prove its existence than we can prove God’s. It requires a leap of faith. Maybe this is all God’s plan. Or maybe the universe has a purpose.

Or, maybe, history, like life, is just one damn thing after another.^*

At countless moments in English history things could have gone very differently. The fact that the “good” forces won does not mean they were destined to. The Gunpowder Plot, in which a group of English Catholics tried to assassinate King James I by blowing up the House of Lords during a royal address, failed, thus saving England from a very different fate. But it didn’t fail because of the English love of liberty. It failed because one person with knowledge of the scheme to reduce Parliament to rubble and return Catholicism to England sent a letter exposing the plot.28 Whether Henry VIII broke with the Catholic Church so he could bed Anne Boleyn or because he wanted a wife to produce a male heir, the fact is that if Catherine of Aragon, his first wife, had been able to provide Henry VIII with a son, or perhaps even if Anne Boleyn had had lower standards and agreed to be his mistress, England might have stayed a Catholic nation.

It is fine and dandy to pan the river of “Germanic” history to sift out the republican and democratic nuggets as proof England was destined to usher in the era of liberty. But I don’t think it is a gross overstatement to suggest that one can find counterexamples in the historical record.29

None of this is to say that Hannan—a friend of mine—is wrong. It is to say that he was right when he said the English “stumbled” into modernity. The tradition of English liberty was a flame that could have been extinguished if the winds of history had shifted slightly at any one of a thousand different moments. We are fortunate that circumstances worked out the way they did. But at the most fundamental level, if you take providence or some other teleological theory of the purpose of history out of the equation, modernity happened in England by accident.

The ingredients for liberty and prosperity have existed on earth for thousands of years, sloshing around, occasionally bumping into each other, and offering a glimpse to a better path. Religious toleration, restraints on monarchy, private property, the sovereignty of the individual, pluralistic institutions, scientific innovation, the rule of law—all of these things can be found, piecemeal, across the ages. The Chinese were pathbreaking scientific (and bureaucratic) innovators, but they couldn’t relinquish their political monopoly and eventually snuffed out technological progress in the name of imperial hegemony.30 Private property, likewise, existed in one form or another in countless societies,31 but it alone was not enough absent the other necessary ingredients, and without those ingredients private property was often snuffed out. Prosperity itself wasn’t unknown before the Miracle. But it was always a short-lived and local phenomenon.

To understand how miraculous the Miracle really is, we should take a moment and look more closely at some of the more well-known competing theories about why the Great Enrichment happened, including the complicated role of Protestantism—real and imagined—as well as the scientific revolution, slavery, imperialism, and other materialist factors.

The Protestant origin story of the Miracle takes several forms on its own and informs other theories as well.

The first and most straightforward theory, famously introduced by the sociologist Max Weber in his Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, published in Germany in 1905 (and in English in 1930), holds that Protestantism, particularly certain Puritan sects like the Calvinists, created new habits of the heart that gave birth to capitalism. The simple version of this story goes like this: The “other-worldly” Catholic cared little about material things in this life and was content to live a materially impoverished life, working as little as he or she needed to. Meanwhile, Weber argued, Protestants believed in accumulating wealth.32 The Puritan, powered by the doctrine of predestination, moved his sights to this world, believing that material success was proof of virtue and a sign that one had been selected for reward in the next life. Hard work was a way to give glory to God. But economic success was achieved not just through hard work but by demonstrating honest dealings, piety (of course), and thriftiness (“The summum bonum of this ethic [is] the earning of more and more money…Acquisition…[is] the ultimate purpose of life,” explained Weber, in a passage casting Benjamin Franklin as the poster boy for Protestant industriousness).33 As Joyce Appleby summarizes Weber’s argument, “Protestant preachers produced great personal anxiety by emphasizing everyone’s tenuous grip on salvation.”34 In turn, this “promoted an interest in Providence in which believers scrutinized [economic] events for clues to divine intentions…[which] turned prosperity into evidence of God’s favor.”35 In other words, acting as if you’re blessed might actually be a sign you’re blessed—the theological version of “fake it until you make it.”

Let’s put a pin in this theory and what it actually means for a moment. While Weber published his theory in the first decade of the twentieth century, the idea that capitalism depends on “thrift” or the accumulation of capital through savings was central to the bulk of Marxist thought in the nineteenth century. Marx believed that capitalism was, at its core, simply the exploitation of labor. All wealth and value, according to Marx, is created by the workers. All profit that does not go to the workers is essentially theft. Since all value is captured by labor, any “surplus value” collected by the owners of capital is, by definition, exploitative. The businessman or inventor who risks his own money to build and staff a factory is not adding value; he is subtracting value from the workers. Indeed, the money he used to buy the land and the materials is really just “dead labor.”

Marx is still seen by many as a forward-thinking visionary. But the truth is Marx was a romantic popularizer of ancient biases against money and finance, or “usury” (and, to a very large extent, Jews). “To a degree rarely appreciated, [Marx] merely recast the traditional Christian stigmatization of moneymaking into a new vocabulary and reiterated the ancient suspicion against those who used money to make money,” writes historian Jerry Z. Muller. “In his concept of capitalism as ‘exploitation’ Marx returned to the very old idea that money is fundamentally unproductive, that only those who live by the sweat of their brow truly produce, and that therefore not only interest, but profit itself, is always ill-gotten.”36

This idea that excess capital or “surplus value” fueled capitalism is essential for numerous Marxist—and Marxish—explanations for its triumph. They all rest on a psychological desire among the enemies of capitalism, starting with Jean-Jacques Rousseau, to claim that capitalism was born in some kind of original sin. Some writers want slavery to be capitalism’s original sin in order to exaggerate the crime of slavery (and to justify calls for reparations) and/or to delegitimize capitalism. But slavery requires no such exaggeration. Its evil stands on its own right. Similarly, claims that the West got rich by pillaging foreign lands amount to an effort to pad the indictment against imperialism. These theories all share the psychological assumption that capitalism marked a wrong turn in humanity’s past. And they often drive people to make patently ridiculous claims. “Without slavery you have no cotton, without cotton you cannot have modern industry,” Marx wrote. “It is slavery which has given their value to the colonies, it is the colonies which have created the commerce of the world, it is the commerce of the world which is the essential condition of the great industry.”37 Never mind that the Japanese dependence on silk from China was at least as great as England’s demand for cotton, yet Japan did not become a capitalist country until after World War II. The idea that the cheap cotton made possible by slavery jump-started capitalism, most recently revived by Harvard’s Sven Beckert, overlooks the fact that the price of cotton didn’t increase appreciably after slavery in the United States was abolished. In fact, in the 1870s, it was 42 percent lower than the pre-Civil War price.38

Deirdre McCloskey surveys the research and finds the evidence to support such claims somewhere between nonexistent and meager. Yes, of course enormous profits were made from both slavery and empire, but neither “created” capitalism, and the profits were ultimately incidental in the grand scheme of things. Moreover, if capitalism is dependent on the sort of mass-scale exploitation implicit in slavery and imperialism, why did capitalism take so long to materialize? The ancient Chinese, Persians, Romans, and Aztecs all had empires and slaves, yet none were capitalist. Why has capitalism survived the demise of slavery and the age of empire? Why are traditional and anti-capitalist societies more likely to maintain the institution of slavery in one form or another? If capitalism relies on exploitation, why have Westerners gotten so much richer and enjoy such an abundance of leisure time?

The claim that thrift—i.e., increased savings from profit creating the capital necessary for industrial investment—led to the rise of capitalism falls apart once you realize that it gets the causality backward: Capital accumulation is not the engine of capitalism, it is the by-product of it. Indeed, thrift is hardly a Western or Christian invention, never mind a Protestant one. People have saved or otherwise been careful with their money since money was invented.39 But absent a market system, what someone could do with their money is extremely limited.

Other materialist theories about the origins of capitalism, some quite interesting and important, ultimately fail to satisfy the question “Where does the Miracle come from?” The relative autonomy of European city-states and principalities surely encouraged freedom and served as tributaries that led to eventual dam breaking. Sure, British and European geography was no doubt essential to Europe’s political development, but the idea that capitalism was inevitable because of Europe’s rivers and temperate climate is the ultimate just-so story.

The scientific revolution, a miracle in its own right, is obviously a hugely important part of the story. Would the Miracle have happened without Isaac Newton, Francis Bacon, Thomas Edison, and other great scientists and innovators? I’m inclined to say probably not. But that does not mean that the scientific revolution created capitalism. The deeper you look at this argument, the more you can see the cart overtaking the horse. The Islamic world and China had their turns at being at the forefront of science for centuries, and yet the Miracle never materialized in either place. Indeed, for a millennium, England certainly, and arguably the entirety of Western Europe, were backwaters. An alien visiting Earth a thousand years ago would not assume that the peoples of Europe were destined to achieve escape velocity from the norm of human existence.

So what did create it? In order to answer that, we need to circle back to another theory of Protestantism’s role in Western development. This theory holds that Protestantism unleashed the spirit of innovation and liberty. My National Review colleague Charles C. W. Cooke, a Whig imported to our shores from England to do the hard work too few American-born writers will do, argues that Protestantism plays exactly this role. “I have long argued in vague terms that America is a fundamentally ‘Protestant’ society,” he writes, “by which I have absolutely not meant that only Protestants can be good citizens, but rather that the Founders were the product of not just a religiously Protestant inheritance but also of a politically Protestant worldview—and, too, that the two are historically inextricable.

“This is to say,” he continues, “that once a people becomes accustomed to cutting out the middlemen from their path to God, absolution, and salvation, it becomes easier for them to countenance cutting out the middlemen from their path to liberty and the pursuit of happiness as well.”40

To be sure, there’s something to this. Protestantism wouldn’t have spread without the printing press, an innovation that disrupted the Catholic Church’s theological monopoly. Protestantism also breathed new life into the idea that the individual is sovereign. But this overlooks the fact that while Protestantism eliminated the middleman theologically, politically Protestants were just as capable of crushing any deviation from orthodoxy as the most zealous Catholics. After all, early Protestants were not political “moderates.” They did more than their share of witch-hunting. In England in the 1650s and 1660s, the Quakers were horribly brutalized by Anglicans. The Puritans of Salem weren’t exactly a live-and-let-live bunch. In Europe, Lutherans and Calvinists adapted political—i.e., monarchical—absolutism to their theology quite easily, as did the Anglicans of Henry VIII’s England. Frederick the Great was the most gifted absolute monarch of the nineteenth century, and he was raised in Calvinism.

Now let me backpedal a bit. My point here is not to say that the various theories of where the Miracle came from are entirely wrong. My objection is to any argument that singles out one factor and says, “This—and only this—is why it happened.” Nearly all truly complex and important phenomena have multiple mutually dependent factors that lead to their creation. Why did World War II happen? Why are you the way you are? Any attempt to focus on a single discrete mono-causal explanation is folly.

And capitalism is far, far more complicated. The reason I call the emergence of the Miracle a miracle is simply this: No one intended it. No single thing made it happen. It was an unplanned and glorious accident.

Again, consider the crude version of the Weberian thesis. Even if you grant that Protestantism “created” capitalism, you must also acknowledge that this isn’t what Protestants, starting with Luther, had in mind. Martin Luther despised usury in all its forms (no doubt in part because of his virulent anti-Semitism). No seventeenth-century Puritan preacher said, “If you get rich you’ll get into Heaven.” They said, “Behave this way, and it’s more likely that God will find you worthy.” The changes in behavior elicited by this stern and pious instruction were never intended to be a get-rich-quick scheme. That would be the so-called prosperity theology, a very recent creation closely associated with televangelism. (Donald Trump’s “spiritual advisor” Paula White is of this sect.)41

Similarly, the pluralism that made capitalism possible wasn’t a product of some high-minded ideal about how to structure society. The religious tolerance that starts to emerge in Europe after the Peace of Westphalia in 1648 was far less a product of theological changes than it was of political and military exhaustion. The Treaty of Westphalia ended the “wars of religion” in Europe. Those wars, running off and on for more than a century, took an enormous toll on Protestants and Catholics alike. In their wake, as historian C. V. Wedgwood put it, the West began to understand “the essential futility of putting the beliefs of the mind to the judgment of the sword.”42 In other words, Protestants and Catholics alike settled on a modicum of tolerance as “the last policy that remained when it had proved impossible to go on fighting any longer,” in the words of Herbert Butterfield.43 The social space created was an advance in liberty, but that was nobody’s first choice. Rather, it was an accidental by-product of military futility.

If I have to offer my own explanation for where the Miracle comes from, I will second the argument put forth by Deirdre McCloskey in her awe-inspiring multivolume work on the birth of capitalism. Her answer, in brief: The Miracle is an attitude, expressed in new ideas and the rhetoric that accompanies them. “The North Sea economy, and then the Atlantic economy, and then the world economy grew because of changing forms of speech about markets and enterprise and innovation.”44 These new forms of speech made innovation possible by recognizing innovation as a good thing. Innovation dies on the drawing board without a climate that welcomes and rewards it. The Chinese and Arab advantages in technology amounted to little in the long run, because the political and religious climate proved inhospitable to sustain innovation, because innovation disrupts the status quo and undermines the powers that be. The Chinese inventor Bi Sheng, after all, invented printing centuries before Gutenberg.45 The Japanese had guns, but then banned them because they recognized the threat they posed to the aristocracy of the sword-wielding warrior class of the samurai.46

For centuries, Christian—and Protestant!—rulers alike were hostile to innovation for the same reason. For instance, in 1548, Edward VI, Henry VIII’s successor, issued A proclamation against those that doeth innovate…In her paper “ ‘Meddle Not with Them That Are Given to Change’: Innovation as Evil,” Benoît Godin recounts the story of Henry Burton, a Puritan Church of England minister. Burton accused the Church of innovating doctrine against the king’s wishes in two pamphlets in 1636. He was called before the court to defend himself. The court found that Burton, not the Church, was guilty of innovation. They sentenced Burton to prison for life—after cutting off his ears.47 And this was Protestant England, the supposed ancestral homeland of liberty.

But then something happened. “About the end of the seventeenth century,” Joseph Schumpeter writes in Business Cycles: A Theoretical, Historical, and Statistical Analysis of the Capitalist Process, the English political establishment “dropped all systematic hostility to invention. So did public opinion and the scribes.” It was this remarkable, unprecedented, miraculous change in attitudes that made the Miracle possible. The way people talked and thought about how the world worked changed. “The economy is nothing without the words supporting it,” McCloskey writes, “whether conventional wisdom or creative entrepreneurial projects.”48

I am almost wholly convinced by this. For 100,000 years, the great mass of humanity languished in poverty. This great flat line of material misery plodded along unchanged until attitudes changed in England and Holland, not just among intellectuals or aristocrats, but among the common people, particularly the bourgeois—the mostly urban middle and upper middle class of professionals, artisans, craftsmen, merchants, and other laborers who did not till the soil. Prior to that, notions of betterment, innovation, and improvement were seen, literally, as heresy. “Curiositas,” or curiosity, was a sin, and the innovator a heretic.

For millennia vested interests—bureaucrats, aristocrats, guilds, and priests alike—formed coalitions of common interest to stifle innovations. A few examples from Joel Mokyr (by way of McCloskey):

• In 1299, Florence banned bankers from adopting Arabic numerals.

• At the end of the fifteenth century, scribe guilds of Paris managed to fight off the adoption of the printing press for two decades.

• In 1397, pin manufacturers in Cologne outlawed the use of pin presses.

• In 1561, the city council of Nuremburg made the manufacture and selling of lathes punishable with imprisonment.

• In 1579, the city council of Danzig ordered the secret assassination of the inventor of a ribbon loom—by drowning.

• In the late 1770s, the Strasbourg council barred a local cotton mill from selling its wares in town because it would disrupt the business model of the cloth importers.49

This is an ancient and universal story of elites seeking to protect their privileges and incomes from the gales of change. It is why the emperor of China burned his oceangoing vessels in 1525 and the Turkish caliph banned the printing press in 1729.50 The merchant guilds that dominated much of Europe and the world for the better part of a thousand years endured not because they met economic demand but because they—with the help of the crown and the church—restricted it. They “limited competition and reduced exchange by excluding craftsmen, peasants, women, Jews, foreigners, and the urban proletariat from most profitable branches of commerce,” writes Sheilagh Ogilvie. “Merchant guilds and associations were so widespread and so tenacious not because they efficiently solved economic problems, making everyone better off, but because they efficiently distributed resources to a powerful urban elite, with side benefits for rulers.”51

Hostility to innovation and free trade was grounded in a broader worldview that saw money itself as the root of all evil. From the time of antiquity until the Enlightenment, trade and the pursuit of wealth were considered sinful. “In the city that is most finely governed,” Aristotle wrote, “the citizens should not live a vulgar or a merchant’s way of life, for this sort of way of life is ignoble and contrary to virtue.”52 In his Republic, Plato laid out one vision of an ideal society in which the ruling “guardians” would own no property to avoid tearing “the city in pieces by differing about ‘mine’ and ‘not mine.’ ” He added that “all the classes engaged in retail and wholesale trade…are disparaged and subjected to contempt and insults.” Furthermore in his hypothetical utopian state, only non-citizens would be allowed to indulge in commerce. A citizen who defies the natural order and becomes a merchant should be thrown in jail for “shaming his family.”53

In ancient Rome, “all trade was stigmatized as undignified…the word mercator [merchant] appears as almost a term of abuse,” writes Professor D. C. Earl of the University of Leeds. Cicero noted in the first century B.C. that retail commerce is sordidus [vile] because merchants “would not make any profit unless they lied constantly.”54

Early Christianity expanded this point of view. Jesus himself was clearly hostile to the pursuit of riches. “For where your treasure is,” he proclaimed in his Sermon on the Mount, “there will your heart be also.” And of course he insisted that “it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God.”

The official teaching of the Catholic Church echoed these sentiments for centuries, holding that economics was zero-sum. “The Fathers of the Church adhered to the classical assumption that, since the material wealth of humanity was more or less fixed, the gain of some could only come at a loss to others,” Jerry Z. Muller explains.55 As Saint Augustine put it, “Si unus non perdit, alter non acquirit”—“If one does not lose, the other does not gain.”56

The most evil form of wealth accumulation was the use of money to make money, i.e., usury. Lending money at interest was unnatural, and therefore invidious. “While expertise in exchange is justly blamed since it is not according to nature but involves taking from others,” Aristotle insisted, “usury is most reasonably hated because one’s possessions derive from money itself and not from that for which it was supplied….So of the sorts of business this is the most contrary to nature.”57 Aristotle was right that finance is contrary to the natural order; it is also the driver of incredible prosperity and human betterment.

Despite all this, the case is often made that Christianity gets the credit for the Miracle. And, in broad strokes, I am open to the idea that without Christianity, the Miracle may never have happened. But that is not quite the same argument as Christianity caused the Miracle (and it certainly did not intend it). However, the lesser claim, that Christianity was a necessary ingredient, certainly seems likely.

Jesus said that his followers should render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s, establishing that there were in fact two realms, which Saint Augustine called the “City of Man” and the “City of God.” The City of Man was for temporal rulers, the City of God for ecclesiastical ones. When the Western Roman Empire fell, the Church remained in Rome as a religious authority. This established the principle that the Church would serve as the conscience for the realm. This really was a significant advance, creating one of the first and most important mental divisions of labor in the Western mind. Jesus’s admonition of separating the realm of faith and the realm of rulers was an imperfect arrangement, to be sure, but this distinction served as an important check on the arbitrary rule of kings by introducing the idea that even rulers were answerable to a higher law. This was in marked contrast with Chinese emperors and Islamic sultans. While Christians had to render unto Caesars, Muhammad played the role of both Caesar and Jesus, and the political system he left behind recognized no space between secular and religious authority. Without that space, institutional pluralism and the division of meaning are impossible.

Also, some insist that Christianity—I would argue borrowing from Judaism—invented, or introduced, the idea of individual rights. Larry Siedentop, in his Inventing the Individual: The Origins of Western Liberalism, argues that by the fifteenth century the internal logic of Christianity’s emphasis on the individual conscience had made the Enlightenment all but inevitable.58

Again, maybe. Then again, maybe not. It is quite simply impossible to know. There were certainly countless Christian regimes and movements that were hostile to innovation, individual liberty, and pluralism. Would the Miracle have happened if they had won their battles?

But, again, my aim here is not actually to discredit or rebut any of the serious arguments for why the Miracle happened, because I think many have merit. But all of the material factors are meaningless absent the broader context of culture. Biologists can grow just about anything in a lab, but they can’t grow anything without the right medium.

At the end of the day, it is impossible to authoritatively answer the question of why beyond simply documenting that it happened. Why do certain ideas take hold and others do not? Why did the ideas of a Jewish carpenter in a backwater province of the Roman Empire capture the minds of millions and ultimately conquer the empire itself? The devout Christian can argue because they were true. But, as a sociological question, the only answer is that they just did.

The more important question is: Will it last?

McCloskey is a great optimist about the Miracle’s prospects. I hope that optimism is warranted. But it seems to me axiomatic that an explanation of capitalism’s birth grounded entirely in the power of ideas and words opens itself to a depressing rejoinder: What words and ideas can create, words and ideas can destroy. Whatever we can think ourselves into, we can unthink our way out of. And here we must consider what I believe is the most persuasive theory of why capitalism might be fated to vanish either from the earth or at least from America and the West. To do so, we must first look at the most influential and famous prophecy of capitalism’s demise, made by Karl Marx.

According to Marx the working classes—the “proletariat”—were the sole source of all economic value. The “real” value of any good or service is derived not from the price it fetches in the market, but from the amount of time and effort put into it by the laborer. Hence, under Marx’s “labor theory of value,” when a factory owner sells that product at a profit, that profit is “surplus value” and by its nature exploitative and unjust. Indeed, for Marx, the economic ruling classes were akin to vampires, and his writing is full of bloodsucking imagery (which at the time was often a thinly veiled and occasionally explicit anti-Semitic reference to greedy Jewish moneylenders).

In Marx’s futuristic fairy tale, the workers of the world would one day in the near future recognize that they were merely wage slaves and, having attained class consciousness, would overthrow their masters, seize the means of production, and live in a new utopian world where they would live very much like modern noble savages, working as much or as little as they wanted in a state of blissful harmony.

There are three things that need to be said about Marx’s romantic vision. First, it truly was romantic, grounded in profound alienation and paranoia about the society he lived in. Second, for all of its pseudo-scientific jargon, Marxism was not a modern, forward-thinking project. Rather, it was a modern-sounding rehabilitation of ancient ideas and sentiments.59 For the Christian, the meek would inherit the earth; for the Marxist, the workers would.

And, third, Marx’s vision was entirely wrong. The idea that the inventor or the entrepreneur creates no value by bringing an idea into the world is ridiculous. According to Marx’s economic analysis, the inventor of a better mousetrap doesn’t create any value; only the workers who put it together do.

But it was Marx’s political or sociological analysis that really missed the mark. To understand why, we need to look to Joseph Schumpeter, one of the great economists of the twentieth century. In Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy (1942), Schumpeter argued that capitalism was ultimately doomed. But not remotely for the reasons Marx had predicted.

“Schumpeter turned Karl Marx on his head,” writes biographer Thomas K. McCraw. “Hateful gangs of parasitic capitalists become, in Schumpeter’s hands, innovative and beneficent entrepreneurs.”60 Schumpeter saw—and explained—earlier than almost anyone that the power of capitalism stemmed in large part from the liberation of, and tolerance for, entrepreneurs. The entrepreneur is the engine of innovation, and innovation is what drives economic growth by finding new opportunities for wealth where mere investors and managers saw only the way we’ve always done things.61

One of Schumpeter’s key insights—and quite radical at the time—was to look at economic actors as entities over time, and economics generally as an evolutionary process. The market is constantly changing, and companies that are monopolies one minute fall prey to innovative firms that render them obsolete the next minute. The driver of that process was what Schumpeter famously called “creative destruction.” Schumpeter applied the same insight to capitalism itself, and concluded that capitalism itself would fall prey to a kind of social analogue to creative destruction.

His analysis is rich and complicated, but I will highlight the three essential components as they relate to my argument.

First, capitalism is relentlessly and unsentimentally rational and efficient. The free market tends to wipe away tradition and ritual in the name of profit. This is a wonderful thing when the traditions and rituals it is corroding are based in bigotry and oppression. But like water seeking its own level, the capitalist tide doesn’t stop at clearing away bad forms of tradition, custom, and sentiment. It carves a path through the social landscape heedless of the social value certain institutions and customs provide. Or, as Schumpeter puts it, capitalism “creates a critical frame of mind which, after having destroyed the moral authority of so many other institutions, in the end turns against its own; the bourgeois finds to his amazement that the rationalist attitude does not stop at the credentials of kings and popes but goes on to attack private property and the whole scheme of bourgeois values.”62

Anyone who has bemoaned the demise of a beloved bookstore or bakery because it was more profitable to build a bank branch understands the point. To the mind of the pure profit maximizer a public park is a waste of space compared to a lucrative parking lot. The rationalist who only seeks perfect economic efficiency sees no reason not to use a church as a stable. Schumpeter called the moral and sentimental attachments that tell us there are more important things than simple efficiency and profit maximization “extra-rational” or “extra-capitalist” commitments. The “extra-” here means outside or above or apart from.

The problem is that, as we’ve seen, the free market needs “extra-rational” customs and traditions to survive. The “capitalist order,” Schumpeter explains, “not only rests on props made of extra-capitalist material but also derives its energy from extra-capitalist patterns of behavior which at the same time it is bound to destroy.”63 As we’ve seen, capitalism emerged from a specific culture and it depends on the habits of the heart that made it possible. Thrift, delayed gratification, and honesty, not to mention the sovereignty of the individual, aren’t products of mere reason but also of extra-rational commitments derived, in the Western context, from Christianity, custom, history, family, patriotism, language, and all of the other ingredients that make up culture and faith. “No institution or practice or belief stands or falls with the theory that is at any time offered in its support,” Schumpeter writes. “Democracy is no exception.”64 Schumpeter is making the same point I made earlier about the Constitution. What sustains the constitutional order is our faith in it—not merely the arguments for it.

Think of it this way: No one is loyal to their family based solely on some theory of family loyalty. The “theory” is downstream of the more important and powerful emotional and instinctual commitments. The same dynamic applies to the political and religious systems we live under.

The second component of Schumpeter’s theory is that capitalism’s relentless assault on tradition and custom creates a market opportunity for intellectuals, lawyers, writers, artists, bureaucrats and other professionals who work with ideas to undermine and ridicule the existing system. They do so for a host of reasons. Some have a largely frivolous, even funny desire to “shock the bourgeoisie!”65 Others, like Marx, have a passionate and radical anger at the real or perceived injustices of modern society.

But there is another, more cynical explanation for why the peddlers of words, symbols, and ideas declare war on the existing system: They have a class interest in doing so. As Joel Mokyr puts it in The Gifts of Athena: Historical Origins of the Knowledge Economy, “Sooner or later in any society the progress of technology will grind to a halt because the forces that used to support innovation become vested interests.” He adds, “In a purely dialectical fashion, technological progress creates the very forces that eventually destroy it.”66

But the reason groups become “vested interests” isn’t solely economic. When I use the term “class interest,” I do not mean the simple pursuit of economic gain, as the Marxist does, or as the public choice economist does. Man lives by more than bread—or profit—alone.

Intellectuals surely have a financial motive in arguing for a system in which intellectuals would run things, but they also have a psychological one. That desire is often the more important one. Marx wanted to be the high priest of a new world order, but he didn’t necessarily want to be rich. We are wired to want to have higher status than others. We are also wired to resent those who we believe have undeservedly higher status than we do. Intellectuals and artistic elites have heaped scorn on other elites—the wealthy, the military, the bourgeois, the Church—for centuries.

Schumpeter’s analysis was deeply influenced by Friedrich Nietzsche’s concept of ressentiment, laid out in his On the Genealogy of Morals. Ressentiment, in Nietzsche’s highly literary telling, is the process by which priests use their skills to redefine the culture’s idea of what is virtuous in order to undermine the power of knights, i.e., the ruling nobility. The knights are non-intellectual men of action who hold more power than the priests, and the priests hate them for it.67 Thus, according to Nietzsche, Christianity elevated the meek and denigrated the powerful (just as Marx lionized labor and demonized entrepreneurs). It’s much more complicated than that—Nietzsche always is—but Schumpeter took this framework and applied it to capitalism over time.

There is one very common—if not quite universal—thing that unites these different kinds of “priests”: They tend to come from the ranks of the bourgeois and the very wealthy themselves. There’s something about growing up prosperous that causes people not only to take prosperity for granted but to resent the prosperous. “It wasn’t the children of auto workers who pulled up the paving stones on the Left Bank in 1968,” writes Deirdre McCloskey. “The most radical environmentalists and anti-globalists nowadays are socialist children of capitalist parents.”68

The third component of Schumpeter’s theory is that, as capitalism creates more and more mass affluence, it creates more and more intellectuals, until they actually become a “new class.” There have always been court intellectuals and artists. But until very recently they made a living by working for the ruling class (which is why so much classical philosophical writing is esoteric; criticism of the rulers had to be in code). As capitalism makes mass education possible, it creates a mass audience, a whole market, for what the intellectuals are selling. And what the intellectuals are selling is resentment of the way things are. This creates a much broader climate of hostility to the social order itself. “For such an atmosphere to develop,” Schumpeter writes, “it is necessary that there be groups whose interest it is to work up and organize resentment, to nurse it, to voice it and to lead it.”69 One cannot watch cable television news, listen to talk radio, read a campus bulletin board about upcoming speakers, or listen to the preening speechifying that comes with every Oscar and Emmy award ceremony and not see that denigrating and undermining the established order is now not only a lucrative calling but a major part of the culture.

James Burnham, the former Communist turned cold-eyed conservative, came to many of the same conclusions in his Managerial Revolution: What Is Happening in the World, published in 1941, a year before Schumpeter’s Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy, albeit from a different perspective. By the time Burnham released Suicide of the West: An Essay on the Meaning and Destiny of Liberalism in 1964, the “New Class” thesis was widely debated across the ideological spectrum. Burnham argued that the overwhelmingly “liberal” (in the progressive sense) New Class intellectuals weren’t simply interested in power but that they were motivated by guilt:

For Western civilization in the present condition of the world, the most important practical consequence of the guilt encysted in the liberal ideology and psyche is this: that the liberal, and the group, nation, or civilization infected by liberal doctrine and values, are morally disarmed before those whom the liberal regards as less well off than himself.70

I think guilt still plays an important role for some people. But I think, a half century later, guilt has mostly given way to anger. Many academics and writers no longer feel guilty about what Western civilization or America has done, because they no longer feel like they belong to it. Many members of the new class today—particularly those called “globalists”—have a post-national attachment to their cosmopolitan class. They see themselves as citizens of the world, sharing more in common with their compatriots in London and Paris than with the fellow citizens who sweep their floors, create small businesses, or simply feel a patriotic attachment to their own nation and culture.

Both Schumpeter and especially Burnham were overly invested in their theory of capitalism’s demise. George Orwell was deeply influenced by Burnham’s writing on the New Class and that fascination was a major inspiration for his novel 1984. But Orwell rightly rejected the idea that a managerial dystopia was inevitable. He astutely identified the problem in Burnham’s worldview. Burnham was in many ways the kind of rationalist Schumpeter had identified. The moral and idealistic commitments that make liberal democracy possible were, for Burnham, an illusion. Everything boiled down to mere contests of power. Burnham, according to Orwell, believed that “power can never be restrained by any ethical or religious code, but only by other power. The nearest possible approach to altruistic behaviour is the perception by a ruling group that it will probably stay in power longer if it behaves decently.”

This obsession with power distorted Burnham’s analysis of politics. Because power was everything, those in power would always remain in power. “It will be seen,” Orwell writes, “that at each point Burnham is predicting a continuation of the thing that is happening. Now the tendency to do this is not simply a bad habit, like inaccuracy or exaggeration, which one can correct by taking thought. It is a major mental disease, and its roots lie partly in cowardice and partly in the worship of power, which is not fully separable from cowardice.”71

Orwell might be a bit too harsh, but he is ultimately correct. If those in power always win, then the Miracle would never have happened. The kings of Europe would have crushed the bourgeois upstarts. Burnham was incredibly insightful about the way power really works in every society, but he failed to appreciate the way the Founders had created a system that recognized the dangers of concentrated power.

Schumpeter’s analysis of social evolution is more subtle and dynamic than Burnham’s, taking into account the complex role psychology plays in every society. But Schumpeter suffered from the same conviction that events were evolving in an inevitable direction in accordance with a process ultimately beyond our control to stop.

If Schumpeter and Burnham were right, the only intelligent course of action would be to surrender to the inevitably of it all and scurry to the “right side of history.” But as I argue in the first pages of this book, I reject that view. Fatalism, not Burnham’s “liberalism,” is the real force driving the suicide of the West. Folding your hands in your lap and saying “Let History take the wheel!” is the fastest route to self-destruction. In other words, Schumpeter and Burnham might be right about capitalism’s doom, but what will make that doom inevitable is taking their word for it. What they offer is not a prophecy but a warning. And that warning is worth heeding.

Taken as a warning, their analysis is incredibly valuable. It is true that a free society will create wealthy and influential classes or interests. And they are right that some of these groups will try to undermine a free society for their own benefit. The way those vested interests sabotage the engine of innovation is with words and ideas. And while they may not be succeeding as much as they would like, no observer of the current political and cultural scene can deny that they are constantly trying. But their victory is not inevitable. If it is true that the Miracle was created by words, that means it can be destroyed by words. But it is also true that the Miracle can be sustained by words. Our civilization, like every civilization, is a conversation. Therefore the demise of our civilization is only inevitable if the people saying and arguing the right things stop talking.

This works both ways. Every conflict ends when one side stops fighting. Usually we think of the loser as the one who accepts defeat. But the truth is that the battle can just as easily be lost if one side declares premature victory.

In our own time, the most famous writer to be accused of that sin is the brilliant scholar Francis Fukuyama. As a young State Department intellectual, Fukuyama wrote a short essay for The National Interest titled “The End of History?” in which he argued that the fall of communism meant the debate over human organization had essentially been settled:

What we may be witnessing is not just the end of the Cold War, or the passing of a particular period of post-war history, but the end of history as such: that is, the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.72

Fukuyama’s argument has been widely misunderstood and caricatured. Despite his reliance on Hegelian philosophy, Fukuyama is less committed to teleology than he is to old-fashioned social science and history. He believed (and still believes) that liberal democratic capitalism is the best possible system for organizing society. The problem is that he took it for granted that the battle was over. His argument was much more plausible in 1989 than it is in 2018, as he has since conceded.

The point here is that the defenders of the Miracle can never get cocky. They can never lay down their rhetorical swords and retreat to their farms. All we can do is defend the principles and ideals that the Miracle made possible in our lifetimes and hand off the project to our children. When we fail to do that, when we do not fill our children with gratitude for their inheritance, they will remain childish in their expectations of what politics and economics can accomplish.

Simply put, cultures that do not cherish their best selves die by their own hand. We protect what we are grateful for. That which we resent, we leave out for the trash man or let rot and decay in the elements, as the termites of human nature gnaw away at it. Ingratitude is the spirit that inebriates us with despair and, in our dark moments, makes suicide seem heroic.

“From whence shall we expect the approach of danger?” asked Abraham Lincoln. “Shall some trans-Atlantic military giant step the earth and crush us at a blow? Never. All the armies of Europe and Asia…could not by force take a drink from the Ohio River or make a track on the Blue Ridge in the trial of a thousand years. No, if destruction be our lot we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of free men we will live forever or die by suicide.”73