Lost

A French schoolmaster and statistician, Louis Maggiolo, proposed, in the 1870s, to track the rise of literacy in France using, as an index, the signature on marriage documents. Signatures by the married couple or by their representatives were required from the 1670s, when Colbert, under Louis XIV, reformed the state administration of civil affairs – births, marriages, deaths. Now, there are many problems, as various historians have acknowledged, with using the signature as an index of literacy. For instance, we are projecting schooling that joins together reading and writing onto a period in which it wasn’t necessarily the case that they were taught in conjunction – it was for instance not uncommon for women to know how to read, but not how to write. And a signature can also be learned as a gesture, or a drawing, without the performer knowing how the letter signs really connect up. However, the very requirement tells us something about the changing relation between the state and its subjects. Literacy, on one level, was imposed by the state as an instrument of order and control. I’m less concerned about the rich uncles of the marriage certificate – the poem, the novel, the essay – than I am about the gradual awakening of the third life – the life of media, of reading, of visual, aural and print culture. Not as a rarity, but as an intrusion into both the private and public spheres (if we can use those terms to designate spaces in semi-literate societies).

I’m thinking of the everyday encounter with signs that label parts of the world. Imagine: once, the world for the vast majority of Europeans was criss-crossed by songlines; gradually, that world becomes shadowed by real signs, images, arrows, text.

I think about this a lot in Atlanta. I drive a lot in Atlanta. And as I just got married in Rockdale County, Georgia, in the presence of fifty witnesses, I have done a load of driving and a load of getting lost – the two have sort of merged in my experience – and I want to purge this storm of roads and directions and misdirections, to drain it from my blood.

Metro Atlanta is folded, spindled and mutilated among hillsides, obscure creeks, and mucho forestry. From the side of Stone Mountain, the bald granite peak that juts up a thousand or so feet in Dekalb county, you can see Atlanta skyscrapers rise apparently from a jungle on the horizon, so deep and extensive is the arboreal cover. But the trees cover the houses, shopping centers, roads, and business of a couple million people. The sheer mass of the people is a key to Atlanta’s chief business, which, for a long time, was growth itself – selling cheap houses to in-coming, and developing subdivisions out of farm and wasteland. And when you develop farm and wasteland, you have to have roads, plenty of roads. Because the in-comers have to incomes, which means they have to drive to work, such is the tear-bent nature of things in this part of the world, and they have to drive home. And because they have to drive, they have cars, and because they have cars, stores, pawn shops, Army-Navy stores, Chinese restaurants and a million Waffle houses spring up about five to ten miles from wherever you sit yourself down.

Literacy and transportation go hand in hand. For the roads, which are dumped on the landscape like God’s own spoiled spaghetti, clumping here and there and everywhere among the sea of trees, must be labeled somehow.

The first labels honored the developers, the only honor they would ever experience in their fishy lives, and various real or imagined flora, fauna, or sites. Then the old name streets are broken up by new developments that want to gloss off the old names and thus produce variations on them – here a Rockbridge Road, NE, there a Rockbridge Drive, NE, there a N. Rockbridge road, NE, there a S, Rockbridge Road, NE, ad infinitum. Then the state comes in and dubs certain of these roads parts of the greater Georgia Highway system, giving them numbers. Then the locals persist in hanging names on streets that have long shucked those names and assumed other ones. And finally, in the age of the GPS, the nautical grid of directions, all the southeasts and northwests, become ever more important in driving and hence in the way directions are disseminated, while left and right as cues become subordinate or quaint.

Into this soup there came a man – me – fresh from the streets and signage of Paris. Signage that was set up to lead a million tourists to a thousand monuments. Signage that forms its own dense culture, signage that sings of obscure histories, what with a plaque on every other building. This man, faced with a dark night in Lawrenceville, lost all sense of whether he was traveling east or west, north or south. On some days, he would miss every turn, and spend a good fifteen minutes going back and forth on a road, looking for the key to get into some parking lot.

Plus, I had the songline of my family – a family who has existed in this part of the world for a long time, now, and done many deeds, and had many adventures –singing in his consciousness, and sometimes on the phone, when I called up my brothers or sister and asked for directions. My friend Dave thought this was funny, and then he thought it was exasperating – to hear me, utterly lost, take a cell phone (a cell phone! So much have I become embourgeoisified since landing in the New World!) in hand and call my brother and hear him sing me across the private monuments of Stone Mountain to the arthritic flow of traffic on I 20.

But surely the impulse to sing the lines of family force across the landscape is merely buried under maps and GPS-es. And under those family lines, there is the great dying, and the Conquista, and our history – that is, the things that have exploded like big joke cigars in the face of humanity – as a planetary culture.

narcissism of the learned

The narcissism of humankind

In his Lectures on Psychoanalysis, Freud noted:

‘Mankind had to endure two injuries to its self love brought about by science in the course of time. The first was when it learned that the earth was not the center of the universe, but a tiny little corner in an unimaginably vast universe. This is attached to the name of Copernicus, although Alexandrian science had already expressed something similar. Then came the second, when biological research denied man’s supposed creaturely privilege, showing that he was descended from the animal kingdom and was ineradicably of an animal nature. This transvaluation occurred in our time under the influence of Charles Darwin, Wallace and their successors, but not without the strongest resistance of contemporaries. The third and most sensible wound to the human quest for grandeur has been experienced through today’s psychological research, which shows the ego that it is not even the master in its own house, but merely depends on messages from what occurs in unconsciously in the mental life.”

Freud recurs in other passages in his work to this historical insight, which, by a ruse that he understood well, posits a monumental injury to the narcissism of mankind whiles at the same time aggrandizing the narcissism of the scientist, and especially, in this case, of that ‘psychological’ investigator named Freud. The gesture that both maims and names is, in fact, always monumental: narcissism is an affair of compromised erections of just this sort.

The trope, it must be said, is certainly not original with Freud. In fact, it was already part of the repertory of early modern natural philosophy. Pascal’s thinking reed has been bent by the wind that blows from the infinite spaces upon this all too cornerpocket world; and in Fontenelle’s Dialogues on the Plurality of Worlds, the moral derived from both Copernicus and Colombus’s discovery of whole worlds unknown to Europeans (for Freud’s “mankind” is eminently European) is neatly presented to Fontenelle’s student, the Marquise – who at first rejects it with the charming hauteur (more charming, perhaps, in a dialogue such as this than when she ordered about the servants, as Marguerite de la Mésangêre no doubt did) of one who lives in full possession of her ancien regime rank and privileges.

On the fifth evening, however, infinity enters the drama, for it is on this evening that Fontenelle explains the system of vortices that are grossly presented by solar systems without measure, and planets and hypothetically inhabitants of planets without measure, until the Marquise feels the world shrinking under her, under the pleasant night sky of Normandy. The dialogue at this point does something interesting. “But, she took it up again, here we have made the universe so large that I lose myself in it, I don’t know where I am, I am no longer anything. What! Everything is divided into vortices, thrown confusedly one among the other? Each star would be the center of a vortices perhaps as great as that where we are?” As the Marquise expresses it, Fontenelle’s vision gives her a ‘perspective’ that is ‘so long that vision cannot make out the end of it”. Such a vision of infinity reduces all her ambitions and sense of herself, while providing her with an excellent excuse to be lazy: “I imagine that my laziness will profit from my new lights, and when someone reproaches my indolence, I will respond, oh, but if you only knew about the fixed stars!”

Fontenelle, however, sees this infinitely as freeing:

“As for me, I said, all this puts me at my ease. When the heaven was only this blue vault, where the stars were nailed, the universe seemed to me to be small and narrow. I felt something like an oppression. Now that we have given infinitely more extension and depth to that vault, in dividing it up among thousand and thousands of vortices, it seems to me that I breath with more liberty, and that I am entered into a more extensive atmosphere; and assuredly the universe has a completely other magnificence.”

And yet, what does this freedom amount to? To the Marquise’s jest, Fontenelle replies that the problem isn’t about human glory: rather, “for myself, … I am frustrated that I can’t derive any use from the knowledge that I have.”

There is a music here – a counterpoint between the meditation on vanity that runs through the moralist tradition and the new idea of utility that is beginning to run through the Enlightened order as people like Fontenelle conceived it. We can here, under the banter in Fontenelle’s dialogue, the rustle of a whole new, but as yet unborn, system. That order requires the abasement of the ego of the old order. Sooner or later the Marquise must be stripped of her superstitions in order to be clothed with the cold glory of philosophy – which, in Fontenelle’s sense, applies both to the method of discovery and the development of the instruments that make it possible. This is more than the displacement of the ancients – by making the world small and the mind large, a certain social perspective opens up: one in which science, commerce and politics will emerge as the inevitable institutions of ordinary life.

the rich are the welfare class (reminder)

With the talk of cutting this deficit, this big bellied government, forswearing the candy bars, etc., I find it screamingly funny that big government's most astonishing expression of scale was the frenzied welfare program that went by various acronyms like TALF. It was managed by the Federal Reserve, in conjunction with the policies of the Department of Treasury. Here's a bloomberg story from last year, which picked at the surface of big government action:

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But that story didn't really include other programs, your little one day or 21 day loans, that pumped the lending of the Fed towards the 9 trillion limit. Of course we have since learned that the details were even more astonishing - that is, if we take extraordinary care and shift through the news reports. For instance, on July 6, 2011, we learn all about the sweetness showered upon Goldman Sachs (which is inexplicable, as GS has consistently maintained they were just fine in 2008).

"Goldman Sachs & Co., a unit of the most profitable bank in Wall Street history, took $15 billion from the U.S. Federal Reserve on Dec. 9, 2008, the biggest single loan from a lending program whose details have been secret until today.

The program, which peaked at $80 billion in loans outstanding, was known as the Fed’s single-tranche open-market operations, or ST OMO. It made 28-day loans to units of 19 banks between March 7, 2008, and Dec. 30, 2008. Bloomberg reported on ST OMO in May, after the Fed released incomplete records on the program. In response to a subsequent Freedom of Information Act request for details, the central bank disclosed borrower names, amounts borrowed and interest rates.

ST OMO is the last known Fed crisis lending program to have its details made public. The central bank resisted previous FOIA requests on emergency lending for more than two years, disclosing details in March of its oldest loan facility, the discount window, only after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled it had to. When Congress mandated the December 2010 release of data on special initiatives the Fed created in its unprecedented $3.5 trillion response to the 2007-2009 collapse in credit markets, ST OMO -- an expansion of a longstanding program -- wasn’t included.



“The Fed has come a long way over a long period of time as far as transparency,” said Raymond W. Stone, managing director and economist with Stone & McCarthy Research Associates in Princeton, New Jersey. “They thought counterparties might be harmed, but now so much time has passed that the information is not as sensitive anymore.”

Primary Dealers

The 19 borrowers from the program are known as primary dealers, which are designated to trade government securities directly with Federal Reserve Bank of New York. They bid at auctions for ST OMO’s cash. While the rates they paid generally tracked the federal funds rate, the rate for some dipped as low as 0.01 percent in December 2008."

It is funny that we note that union members drive foreign cars and go na na na, and yet we never ever note that the private sector, and especially big banks, hedgefunds and other financial institutions, are the biggest welfare leeches in history, and continue to be, even as they decry 'big government." But how many people read the Bloomburg dispatch to understand what happened in 2008? I would guess maybe a couple thousand. Delay long enough, and you can make history disappear into a memory hole even when you become 'transparent" with your records.



What happened in the 2007-2010 period was a pilfering of government resources on an unprecedented scale by the predatory class. They are are now demanding cuts in the services that support the non-predatory class, or else they will pout. We can easily see through the comedy of this. And we can make it known. But who has any interest in doing so? Not the Dems. Not the Republicans. Not the media. Not the Fed. Not private enterprise. Not the 'neo-liberal' bloggers. Only cranks, simps, and the misbegotten. My people.

literacy: shall we eat the book?

"Moreover he said unto me, Son of man, eat that thou findest; eat this roll, and go speak unto the house of Israel.
So I opened my mouth, and he caused me to eat that roll.
And he said unto me, Son of man, cause thy belly to eat, and fill thy bowels with this roll that I give thee. Then did I eat it; and it was in my mouth as honey for sweetness.
And he said unto me, Son of man, go, get thee unto the house of Israel, and speak with my words unto them."


Louis Maggiolo was a French schoolmaster who headed an inquiry, in the 1870s, into the history of schooling and literacy in France. Literacy is a hard item to mold into a statistic: what is it? How do you prove you have it? Maggiolo ended up using the signature as an index of literacy. From the statistical point of view, then, one seeks out documents that have been signed. Testaments. Births. Deaths. And especially marriages. In this inquiry, less attention is paid to an equally interesting sociological fact: the increase in the occasions for signing. Maggiolo plotted the rise of literacy in France using 1686 as a base, when the laws concerning marriage were changed to require that the spouses either sign or have someone sign for them the official marriage documents. Maggiolo did not ask himself why, suddenly, the state needed this process. When Maggiolo’s work was, to an extent, rediscovered in the 1970s by Annales historians – Vovelle, Furet and Ozouf, etc. – it was used to make some broad generalizations about the rise of literate culture. Furet and Ozouf, neo-liberal historians who were in revolt against Marxist historiography, used Maggiolo’s work to claim that the Revolution was a great step backwards in the rise of literacy, and that, further, it was not state schools which cultivated literacy, but …. Well, here they become vague as to just how people learn to read and write. Vovelle used the Maggiolo ‘line’ – dividing the more literate Northern France from the less literate Southern – to explore Southern lagging. The signatures have been used, as well, to picture the gender differences in literacy. As one would expect, men become literate first before women – with the difference in the ratio of literate men to women being larger in the country than the city.

Beneath the statistics, however, one finds a number of ethnographic ambiguities. Signatures, after all, as all agree, aren’t really a sign of literacy. In fact, as Lawrence Stone pointed out in 1969, our contemporary conception of writing and reading as being a unified skill set does not reflect the state of education in the pre-modern and early modern era. There were many woman who read but could not write. There were many men who had learned to write a few things – who had learned a writing routine – but could neither write beyond it, nor read.

The controversies over the ethnography of literacy that took place in the 70s seemed to have little effect on the historiography of literacy, even as historiography was, supposedly, awakening to the ordinary life of the people. That controversy involved the opposition of two theses: on the one hand, a thesis going back to Plato and revived by Jack Goody, which was that writing is a technology that creates vast social changes – for instance, by creating tools to enforce a hierarchical order – versus a pragmatic school that claimed that writing has no predictable cultural effect – rather, as it is embedded in different situations, it produces different changes, or none at all. Maurice Bloch wrote a study of a particular writing system in Madagascar that made this point: Astrology and Writing in Madagascar, which he reprinted in How we think they think – a beautifully Austinian title for a book.

The writing system Bloch explores is derived from the Arabic traders who once had posts along the Madagascar coast. These traders were driven from the island in a long campaign by the Portugese in the 16th century, but their cultural legacy survived, at least in terms of Islam and an Arabic writing system that was jimmied into Malagasay, the language of the Antairnoro and Antambahaoka groups who lived on the Southeastern part of the Island. Oddly, the writing system remained there, instead of in the North, where the Arabic trading posts had been.

However, Bloch’s description of the use and spread of this writing system makes it clear that – from his viewpoint – writing did not mark a sociological rupture with orality. If it is a technique, as Goody claims, it is not a technique that creates a whole new social order.

Bloch, it seems to me, is actually modifying, not annihilating Goody’s point. For one thing, literacy – as we have pointed out – is a multiple skill set. For another thing, like all techniques, it is a set of affordances. To say that it is a technology really is to say that it provides opportunities for this or that kind of technical practice. Bloch points out that the Antairnoro Islamic community was not centered around the Qu’ran. In fact, it was not a religion of the book, but a religion in which writing flows into charms, spells and forecasts.

“The Qur'an is replaced by a series of sacred manuscripts called Sorabe, or "great writings". This is a series of books kept and copied by the scribe aristocracy of the Antaimoro and Antambahaoka.
These books have often been described (Julien 1929 and 1933; Deschamps and Manes 1959). Some are old, although their precise date is uncertain; others are more recent. There are two kinds of works. First are contemporary chronicles and historical works dealing with the mythical origins of "Arabic" peoples of the south-east. It is these Sorabe which have been studied most often (eg, Ferrand 1891; Julien 1929 and 1933). Second, and equally common, are works on the related subjects of medicine, geomancy, divination
and asrtrology. These latter are of particular significance here because these sciences are what gave the possessors of writing such prestige in all pre-colonial Madagascar.”

One notices that Bloch uses the word “book” rather imprecisely. What makes these things physically books? What makes a book a book? For instance, Western books are surrounded with taboos concerning their reproduction that have grown up since the early modern era. Those taboos do not suppose that the reproduction changes the meaning – on the contrary, they suppose that the meaning is held in the copy, which makes it a product that is both reproducible and subject to an extension of the laws of property having to do with goods in which the use value adheres to the uniqueness of the good. Is the same set of properties attributed to the material of the book, or does the meaning change in being copied?

Goody’s thesis, I think, can be modified to accommodate different senses of how writing operates – and in fact he modified it to accommodate what he called “restricted literacy’, in which a certain class or sex is given control of the reading/writing technique.

However, besides books there are other forms of writing and reading. Bloch grants them a major role in the formation of the Imerina kingdom in Madagascar:

There is sufficient evidence to say that before the coming of the British missionaries and the introduction of European script, a certain amount of the business of government was carried out in writing in Arabic script, either by administrators who were themselves literate, or by the ones who used Antaimoro scribes. These scribes had the dual roles of diviner-astrologers and secretaries. The importance of these Antaimoros should not be ignored in understanding how the Merina were able to hold together and administer a kingdom considerably larger than the British Isles."

Yet Bloch’s essay turns away from this point to argue against Goody, for in the end the basic cognitive tools of the Merina were, he argues, unchanged in the transition from orality to literacy – or, rather, orality and literacy were intertwined so that it is a mistake to categorically separate out one from the other. Bloch’s argument rests on a notion of seriousness: how serious is a belief? What is the index of its seriousness? He claims that the beliefs that would have been derived from writing as a technique – for instance, an organization and ordering of spatial and cosmological norms represented in writing – are, in ordinary life, felt otherwise. In fact, the astrology that was organized via a writing system is so modified in its application to everyday life by oral sources that, in essence, it has not changed the order of ordinary life. Or as Bloch sums it up in another essay in his book: “I show how the introduction of literacy into Madagascar has merely meant that a new and better tool became available, but that it was used to do the same things as oratory and other specialized language uses had done before.” [152]

And yet, is this what Bloch really showed?

Marriage

Sorry for being so dilatory about posting. I'm getting married, people. Over the next two weeks, I will be pretty hit and miss here. But maybe I'll just put up song links!

Analysing vulgarisation: when a fact is a clue

When Fontenelle wrote the Dialogues on the plurality of worlds, he was working in the libertine tradition of Cyrano de Bergerac and in the heretic tradition of Bruno.

By his own account, he was bringing the new philosophy down from the level of abstraction (and mathematics) in which it was couched, in order to make it understandable for those, for instance, adored novels such as the Princess de Cleves.

And on the account of historians who study the early enlightenment, Fontenelle was a ‘vulgarizer’ or ‘popularizer’ – terms which have been applied to him at least since Emma Marie Sioli’s book on Fontenelle in 1910. In order to answer the question of motive and audience, historians often have recourse to a sort of warmed over classical economics explanation – it is the consumer that did it. That is, there was a ‘demand’ for books on natural philosophy. Sometimes this is expanded into the idea that there was, somehow, more leisure for reading. Or it is mixed with the idea that this consumer class of readers was female. The latter actually does suggest something a bit more sociologically complex, since it links the demand story to education. Women were excluded from academies and colleges of the type that were open to males of a certain class. But they were not illiterate. And so, if we take the demand story a step further, we could link it to the way knowledge was manufactured, and where it was manufactured.
In other words, we can step out of the magic wand model, in which demand is waved in the air, and things simply appear, into another world in which demand is mediated through the division of labor, and division of labor is mediated by organizational settings.

When La Bruyère makes his cutting remark about Fontenelle’s appeal to the “bourgeoisie’ and the ‘provincials’, his idea is that the bel-esprit vulgarization is a matter of cheapening cultural goods, and distributing them among people who don’t know any better. Although one might turn the tables on this characterization – for even as La Bruyère wrote in the confidence that he knew the eternal place of the Ville and the Court, the centralizing politics of Louis XIV and Colbert were producing changes that would quickly undermine the place of those two eternities – his assumption is used even now in defining popularization.

In Marie-Francoise Mortureux’s essay on the formal linguistic properties of ‘vulgarization’ – which the French prefer to popularization – she quotes a definition proposed by Jacobi and Shninn: ‘… to consider the results of research, the objects of knowledge produced by science and to identify the strategies of actors in view of assuring their diffusion among peers and outside the circle of specialists.”

Mortureux makes a sharp eyed assessment of the implications of this definition, among which is the fact that “the evaluation of its effects does not give us any institutional procedure (contrary to teaching beginning classes, and even continual [educational] formation).”

In Gadda’s mystery, That Awful Mess on the Via Merulana, his police detective, Francesco Ingravallo, thinks, privately, that the usual police procedure of matching an effect to a cause is, in fact, a misunderstanding of our causal cosmos:

“He sustained, among other things, that unforeseen catastrophes are never the consequence or the effect, if you prefer, of a single motive, of a cause singular; but they are rather like a whirlpool, a cyclonic point of depression in the consciousness of the world, towards which a whole multitude of converging causes have contributed.”

I belong to the Ingravallian sect myself, and take it that in examining the unforeseen catastrophes that dot the weather system of history, one has to look for points of depression or attraction in which multiple causes are involved. In understanding the production of knowledge outside of the institutionalization of its assessment – in other words, being ‘well informed’ – we have to look at a more complex picture then is given to us by the idea of the ‘rise’ of such and such a class and the ‘demand’ for such and such a commodity. This is my rule of thumb in studying the formation of character under capitalism. We have to be on watch, then, for changes in unexpected regions, of which we have only, in retrospect, blurry pictures taken by, as it were, our satellites, our witnesses, our writers, our surveyors working on quite opposite premises for purposes of their own. We have to understand the fact as a clue – and thus always half imaginary.

– Using this method, surely, surely, on those starry nights in that parc belonging to the country estate in Normandy where Fontenelle teases and instructs and is gently rebuffed by his ravishing hostess, the blonde marquise de G***., what is happening, unbeknownst to both players, is the development of one of those depressions in the weather system of the ancien regime.

division of labor and the writer

In describing the ‘workshop’ of the bel-esprit, La Bruyère is, unconsciously, positioning the writer, the quintessentializing writer, within the factory system. It is a rather fascinating coincidence that a decade after Fontenelle is satirized for being a mere producer, with a p.r. advance man and a bag of rhetorical tricks, we have accounts, for the first time, of how skilled labor – for instance, in the making of ships or watches – can be distributed among workmen so as to make the ships and watches more precise and the output speedier. In the light of that development, La Bruyère’s Characters already looks retrospectively obsolete. Or rather, it looks like an ideological investment in the obsolete: in a classical steady state political economy and order, founded ultimately on preserving Nemesis as the limit of growth.

Addison and Steele were exactly the kind of atelier writers that La Bruyère was warning against. They were very consciously writing for the ‘bourgeoisie’, or the commercial class; they were both involved in Whiggish commercial schemes; and they included, in the Spectator, certain remarks in defense of free trade and commerce that were the exact negation of the ideal monarchical order which underlies La Bruyère’s idea of both the writer and of the plurality of characters.

In this respect, I would like to read the remarks about the character of the bel esprit against Number 232 of the Spectator, which appeared on November 26, 1711. It is still a scholarly puzzle as to who exactly wrote this number – although nobody disputes that the ideas behind it belonged to Richard Steele’s friend, Henry Martyn, one of the obscure who issued a pamphlet defending the East India trade in terms that would have done Adam Smith proud. In other words, one of those figures who always seem to precede more important figures, as though a different sun ruled the sphere of intelligence, where shadows precede substance.

Henry Martyn made plainer the connection between free trade and the increased productivity that comes from well ordered manufacture – or what Smith was to call division of labour – in his pamphlet on the East Indian trade, but it is likely that many more people, even at the time, read his argument – if not his genuine writing of it – in the Spectator. That the signature of an essay about the dispersion of worker responsibility in the assembling of a product is, even now, in dispute is one of those mysterious communications between logical levels that Derrida loved so much. The text is attributed to a fictional character – Sir Andrew Freeport – who combines the leisure of the nobility in his weekend rural retreat with the commerce of the City, as a merchant. The essay gives voice to Freeport after a scene in which his unnamed companion and Freeport are ‘assaulted’ by beggars as they are going from the city to the country,and buy them off with alms. It is the state of the poor that quickly brings us to the state of the nation:

“But of all Men living, we Merchants, who live by Buying and Selling, ought never to encourage Beggars. The Goods which we export are indeed the Product of the lands, but much the greatest Part of their Value is the Labour of the People: but how much of these People's Labour shall we export whilst we hire them to sit still? The very Alms they receive from us, are the Wages of Idleness. I have often thought that no Man should be permitted to take Relief from the Parish, or to ask it in the Street, till he has first purchased as much as possible of his own Livelihood by the Labour of his own Hands; and then the Publick ought only to be taxed to make good the Deficiency. If this Rule was strictly observed, we should see every where such a Multitude of new Labourers, as would in all probability reduce the Prices of all our Manufactures. It is the very Life of Merchandise to buy cheap and sell dear. The Merchant ought to make his Outset as cheap as possible, that he may find the greater Profit upon his Returns; and nothing will enable him to do this like the Reduction of the Price of Labour upon all our Manufactures.”
Andrew Freeport evidently sees things in terms of a system. The system – capitalism – will accomplish things that are accounted as miracles under the old system: giving the unemployed employment; raising wages while diminishing the cost of labor; and encouraging world trade as a means of exploiting the even cheaper labor available elsewhere to make the nation prosperous. His companion shows some astonishment at these propositions, but Freeport has read his William Petty:

“It may seem, says he, a Paradox, that the Price of Labour should be reduced without an Abatement of Wages, or that Wages can be abated without any Inconvenience to the Labourer, and yet nothing is more certain than that both those Things may happen. The Wages of the Labourers make the greatest Part of the Price of every Thing that is useful; and if in Proportion with the Wages the Prices of all other Things should be abated, every Labourer with less Wages would be still able to purchase as many Necessaries of Life; where then would be the Inconvenience? But the Price of Labour may be reduced by the Addition of more Hands to a Manufacture, and yet the Wages of Persons remain as high as ever. The admirable Sir William Petty2 has given Examples of this in some of his Writings: One of them, as I remember, is that of a Watch, which I shall endeavour to explain so as shall suit my present Purpose. It is certain that a single Watch could not be made so cheap in Proportion by one only Man, as a hundred Watches by a hundred; for as there is vast Variety in the Work, no one Person could equally suit himself to all the Parts of it; the Manufacture would be tedious, and at last but clumsily performed: But if an hundred Watches were to be made by a hundred Men, the Cases may be assigned to one, the Dials to another, the Wheels to another, the Springs to another, and every other Part to a proper Artist; as there would be no need of perplexing any one Person with too much Variety, every one would be able to perform his single Part with greater Skill and Expedition; and the hundred Watches would be finished in one fourth Part of the Time of the first one, and every one of them at one fourth Part of the Cost, tho' the Wages of every Man were equal. The Reduction of the Price of the Manufacture would increase the Demand of it, all the same Hands would be still employed and as well paid. The same Rule will hold in the Clothing, the Shipping, and all the other Trades whatsoever. And thus an Addition of Hands to our Manufactures will only reduce the Price of them; the Labourer will still have as much Wages, and will consequently be enabled to purchase more Conveniencies of Life; so that every Interest in the Nation would receive a Benefit from the Increase of our Working People.”

The watchmaker and the shipbuilder and, indeed, implicitly the writer all fall under this beneficent rule. Technology, which one thinks of as a matter of individual invention, is here given a structure. Although it may seem odd to think of the bel-esprit in correspondence to this vision of the ultimate meta-technology, in fact it is historically accurate.