servants, peasants, craftsmen and interloping male suitors act’, whereas ‘upper class male householders . . . are’, and tend to find their form of choice in the non-narrative genre of the portrait. See ‘Soldiers and Enigmatic Girls: The Politics of Dutch Domestic Realism, 1650–1672’, Representations 58 (1997), p. 55.
31 Joseph A. Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy, New York 1975 (1942), pp. 137, 128. In a similar vein, Weber evoked Carlyle’s definition of the age of Cromwell as ‘the last of our heroisms’ (Weber, Protestant Ethic, p. 37).
32 On the relationship between adventure-mentality and the capitalist spirit, see Michael Nerlich, The Ideology of Adventure: Studies in Modern Consciousness, 1100–1750, Minnesota 1987 (1977), and the first two sections of the next chapter.
33 Elizabeth Gaskell, North and South, New York/London 2005 (1855), p. 60.
34 Karl Marx, Capital, vol. I, Harmondsworth 1990 (1867), pp. 739, 742.
35 On Mann and the bourgeoisie, besides Lukács’s numerous essays, see Alberto Asor Rosa’s ‘Thomas Mann o dell’ambiguità borghese’, Contropiano 2: 68 and 3: 68. If there is one specific moment when the idea of a book on the bourgeois first crossed my mind, it was over forty years ago, reading Asor’s essays; the book was then begun in earnest in 1999–2000, during a year at the Wissenschaftskolleg in Berlin.
36 Koselleck, ‘ Begriffgeschichte and Social History’, p. 86.
37 Ibid., p. 78.
38 Groethuysen, Origines I, p. xi.
39 Emile Benveniste, ‘Remarks on the Function of Language in Freudian Theory’, in Problems in General Linguistics, Oxford, OH, 1971 (1966), p. 71 (emphasis added).
40 Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There, Harmondsworth 1998 (1872), p. 186.
41 John H. Davis, The Guggenheims, 1848–1988: An American Epic, New York 1988, p. 221.
42 Antonio Gramsci, Quaderni del carcere, Torino 1975, p. 1519.
43 Having been ‘the first class in history to achieve economic pre-eminence without aspiring to political rule’, writes Hannah Arendt, the bourgeoisie achieved its ‘political emancipation’ in the course of ‘the imperialist period (1886–1914)’. Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, New York 1994 (1948), p. 123.
44 Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy, p. 138.
45 ‘The Antinomies of Antonio Gramsci’, New Left Review I/100 (November–December 1976), p. 30.
46 In common use, the term ‘hegemony’ covers two domains that are historically and logically distinct: the hegemony of one capitalist state over other capitalist states, and that of one social class over other social classes; or in short, international and national hegemony. Britain and the United States have been the only cases of international hegemony so far; but of course there have been many cases of national bourgeois classes variously exercising their hegemony at home. My argument in this paragraph and in ‘Fog’ has to do with the specific values I associate to British and American national hegemony; how these values relate to those that foster international hegemony is a very interesting question, just not the one addressed here.
47 Tellingly, the most representative story-tellers of the two cultures—Dickens and Spielberg—have both specialized in stories that appeal to children as much as to adults.
48 Thomas Mann, Stories of Three Decades, New York 1936, p. 506.
1. ADVENTURE, ENTERPRISE, FORTUNA
The beginning is known: a father warns his son against abandoning the ‘middle state’—equally free from ‘the labour and suffering of the mechanick part of mankind’, and ‘the pride, luxury, ambition and envy of the upper part’—to become one of those who go ‘abroad upon adventures, to rise by enterprise’.1 Adventures, and enterprise: together. Because adventure, in Robinson Crusoe (1719), means more than the ‘strange surprising’ occurrences—Shipwreck . . . Pyrates . . . un-inhabited Island . . . the Great River of Oroonoque . . .—of the book’s title-page; when Robinson, in his second voyage, carries on board ‘a small adventure’2 the term indicates, not a type of event, but a form of capital. In early modern German, writes Michael Nerlich, ‘adventure’ belonged to the ‘common terminology of trade’, where it indicated ‘the sense of risk (which was also called angst)’.3 And then, quoting a study by Bruno Kuske: ‘A distinction was made between aventiure trade and the sale to known customers. Aventiure trade covered those cases in which the merchant set off with his goods without knowing exactly which market he would find for them.’
Adventure as a risky investment: Defoe’s novel is a monument to the idea, and to its association with ‘the dynamic tendency of capitalism . . . never really to maintain the status quo’.4 But it’s a capitalism of a particular kind, that which appeals to the young Robinson Crusoe: as in the case of Weber’s ‘capitalist adventurer’, what captures his imagination are activities ‘of an irrational and speculative character, or directed to acquisition by force’.5 Acquisition by force is clearly the story of the island (and of the slave plantation before it); and as for irrationality, Robinson’s frequent acknowledgments of his ‘wild and indigested notion’ and ‘foolish inclination of wandring’6 is fully in line with Weber’s typology. In this perspective, the first part of Robinson Crusoe is a perfect illustration of the adventure-mentality of early modern long-distance trade, with its ‘risks that [were] not just high, but incalculable, and, as such, beyond the horizon of rational capitalist enterprise.’7
Beyond the horizon . . . In his legendary lecture at the Biblioteca Hertziana, in Rome, in 1929, Aby Warburg devoted an entire panel to the moody goddess of sea trade—Fortuna—claiming that early Renaissance humanism had finally overcome the old mistrust of her fickleness. Though he recalled the overlap between Fortuna as ‘chance’, ‘wealth’, and ‘storm wind’ (the Italian fortunale), Warburg presented a series of images in which Fortuna was progressively losing its demonic traits; most memorably, in Giovanni Rucellai’s coat of arms she was ‘standing in a ship and acting as its mast, gripping the yard in her left hand and the lower end of a swelling sail in her right.’8 This image, Warburg went on, had been the answer given by Rucellai himself ‘to his own momentous question: Have human reason and practical intelligence any power against the accidents of fate, against Fortune?’ In that age ‘of growing mastery of the seas’, the reply had been in the affirmative: Fortune had become ‘calculable and subject to laws’, and, as a result, the old ‘merchant venturer’ had himself turned into the more rational figure of the ‘merchant explorer’.9 It’s the same thesis independently advanced by Margaret Cohen in The Novel and the Sea: if we think of Robinson as ‘a crafty navigator’, she writes, his story ceases to be a cautionary tale against ‘high-risk activities’, and becomes instead a reflection on ‘how to undertake them with the best chance of success’.10 No longer irrationally ‘pre’-modern, the young Robinson Crusoe is the genuine beginning of the world of today.
