Mr. Poor Richard, but how does the use of Industry and Frugality as symbols help Ben Franklin in promoting republican virtues?
Upon opening his stationary shop, Franklin begins to consider character as a communicative codification, which like credit can be positively or negatively developed. As a tradesman, he not only takes care to actually be industrious and frugal in his work, but additionally to appear so:
I dressed plainly; I was seen at no Places of idle Diversion; I was seen at no Places of idle Diversion… and to show that I was not above my Business, I sometimes brought home the Paper I purchas’d at the Stores, thro’ the Streets on a Wheelbarrow.
He then claims that the esteem he gains, being perceived to be an industrious young man, increases the solicitation of his business. The rhetoric of his own image as semiological substance is remediated as an economic unit, which can be instrumental in furthering his business in life. Positive instrumentality of virtuous behavior is not sufficient; that instrumentality has to be communicated in a clear manner— a purchased newspaper to show that he is participating as a consumer in the commerce of the community and its conveyance through the streets on a workman’s tool to show that he is indeed at work in the production of the commerce of the community.
In his reading of The Education of Henry Adams, Hayden White posits a semiological substructure to narrative from which the author’s ideological discourse emanates. Adams’ deferring, equivocating narrative mode is itself a performance of the ideological discourse of representing a historical self which had become emptied of life and personalization. Franklin’s ideological discourse not only inheres itself in the semiological substructure, it knowingly exhibits this substructure as valuable representation of the ideology in action—a republic in performance.
Franklin recodes the language of the republic into a social semiology whereby visible activity, the public display of a represented self, becomes a kind of living text by which he is to be read and interpretively received. And the controlled constructing of a personal self folds into the central intent of telling one’s story—of writing an autobiography—where one chooses to include certain elements and exclude others to the benefit of presenting a particular representation of one’s history.
Franklin’s Autobiography is exactly that, a self-story sensitive to the reducibility of character to a core representation. And the moral ambiguity of communicating an ethical system by means of an apparent and perhaps fictitious core representation is not, according to Franklin, supposed to limit a moral ethos by the aesthetic criterion. There is no sense that he was merely pretending a republic. Rather, the mode of fictitious representation, which entrenches an aesthetic criterion by the protocol of its artistry, is meant to remediate aesthetic representation as another tool for promoting the virtues of a republic.
The Autobiography was, as I have noted, a work addressed to futurity, intended to promote in that futurity the values necessary for the perpetuation of a citizenry uncorrupted and in good governance. And the conceptualization of positive aesthetic representation as instrument in promoting—despite the patent dissimulation of its ‘author’—that necessary virtue system in the population of the immediate present is a process further represented in the Almanacs.
Friday, May 15, 2009
Thursday, May 14, 2009
Catechism on American Wealth: How it Works and Why to Read Ben Franklin, IV
Mr. Poor Richard, but how does the use of Industry and Frugality as symbols help Ben Franklin?
Thomas Jefferson recounted a moment in which Franklin presented the propriety of his aesthetic system in parallel to the semiology of the Republic’s founding. Noticing Jefferson’s annoyance at having some expressions in his Declaration of Independence mangled or removed by the editing body of the first Continental Congress, Franklin told him of an incident, which taught him to avoid drafting papers to be reviewed by a public body:
"When I was a journeyman printer, one of my companions, an apprentice Hatter, having served out his time, was about to open shop for himself, his first concern was to have a handsome signboard, with a proper inscription. He composed it in these words ‘John Thompson, Hatter, makes and sells hats for ready money,’ with the figure of a hat subjoined. But he thought he would submit it to his friends for their amendments. The first he shewed it to thought the word ‘Hatter’ tautologous, because followed by the words ‘makes hats’ which shew he was a Hatter. It was struck out. The next observed that the word ‘makes’ might as well be omitted, because his customers would not care who made the hats. If good and to their mind, they would buy by whomsoever made. He struck it out. A third said he thought the words ‘for ready money’ were useless as it was not the custom of the place to sell on credit. Every one who purchases expected to pay. They were parted with, and the inscription now stood, ‘John Thompson sells hats.’ ‘Sells hats says his next friend? Why nobody will expect you to give them away. What then is the use of that word? It was stricken out, and ‘hats’ followed it,—the rather as there was one painted on the board. So his inscription was reduced ultimately to ‘John Thompson’ with the figure of a hat subjoined."
The immediate purpose of the anecdote seems to have been to console Jefferson for the depredations enacted upon his draft by the members of the Congress. But the narrative of the anecdote is structured in such a way that the figures standing in for the members of Congress—the editing body of John Thompson’s signboard—are not represented as vituperative or irrational. Each friend’s censure is conjoined to an appropriate reason and, as the various elements of the signboard are struck out according to their reasons, the rationale of reduction seems increasingly self-evident. When the sign is finally reduced to ‘John Thompson’ with a figure of hat, there is no sense that Thompson regrets his friends’ reductionism. The passage indeed suggests that all other elements to the sign were either peripheral or tautological to the communicative nugget of a name and an image, and that that nugget alone was sufficient to the sign’s communicative purpose.
The communicative rationale of the sign’s aesthetic ethos judges propriety according the most evidentiary elements of a given expression. The most evidentiary, the clearest expression, is encoded as most functional kind of communication, and therefore as most proper.
The reduction of a semiological construct to the most evidentiary elements is reorganized in The Advice to a Young Tradesman as Franklin reduces the credit of a man to the image that the man’s creditors might receive of him, remarking that the ever extraordinarily perceptive creditor will hear the “Sound of [one’s] Hammer at Five in the Morning or Nine at Night” and be lenient about one’s debt, but will see one at the billiard table or one’s wife with better clothes the creditor’s wife and will send for his money the next day. The received interpretation of the most evidentiary image of one’s character constitutes the rubric by which one’s credit is determined. The cultivation of evidentiary image acquires an economic importance.
It is with similar stress upon the instrumentation of the most evidential aspects of his public image—literally a semiology of his self in order to create a positive social value—that Franklin’s self’s story, the Autobiography, repeatedly concerns itself with reputation and self-representation.
Thomas Jefferson recounted a moment in which Franklin presented the propriety of his aesthetic system in parallel to the semiology of the Republic’s founding. Noticing Jefferson’s annoyance at having some expressions in his Declaration of Independence mangled or removed by the editing body of the first Continental Congress, Franklin told him of an incident, which taught him to avoid drafting papers to be reviewed by a public body:
"When I was a journeyman printer, one of my companions, an apprentice Hatter, having served out his time, was about to open shop for himself, his first concern was to have a handsome signboard, with a proper inscription. He composed it in these words ‘John Thompson, Hatter, makes and sells hats for ready money,’ with the figure of a hat subjoined. But he thought he would submit it to his friends for their amendments. The first he shewed it to thought the word ‘Hatter’ tautologous, because followed by the words ‘makes hats’ which shew he was a Hatter. It was struck out. The next observed that the word ‘makes’ might as well be omitted, because his customers would not care who made the hats. If good and to their mind, they would buy by whomsoever made. He struck it out. A third said he thought the words ‘for ready money’ were useless as it was not the custom of the place to sell on credit. Every one who purchases expected to pay. They were parted with, and the inscription now stood, ‘John Thompson sells hats.’ ‘Sells hats says his next friend? Why nobody will expect you to give them away. What then is the use of that word? It was stricken out, and ‘hats’ followed it,—the rather as there was one painted on the board. So his inscription was reduced ultimately to ‘John Thompson’ with the figure of a hat subjoined."
The immediate purpose of the anecdote seems to have been to console Jefferson for the depredations enacted upon his draft by the members of the Congress. But the narrative of the anecdote is structured in such a way that the figures standing in for the members of Congress—the editing body of John Thompson’s signboard—are not represented as vituperative or irrational. Each friend’s censure is conjoined to an appropriate reason and, as the various elements of the signboard are struck out according to their reasons, the rationale of reduction seems increasingly self-evident. When the sign is finally reduced to ‘John Thompson’ with a figure of hat, there is no sense that Thompson regrets his friends’ reductionism. The passage indeed suggests that all other elements to the sign were either peripheral or tautological to the communicative nugget of a name and an image, and that that nugget alone was sufficient to the sign’s communicative purpose.
The communicative rationale of the sign’s aesthetic ethos judges propriety according the most evidentiary elements of a given expression. The most evidentiary, the clearest expression, is encoded as most functional kind of communication, and therefore as most proper.
The reduction of a semiological construct to the most evidentiary elements is reorganized in The Advice to a Young Tradesman as Franklin reduces the credit of a man to the image that the man’s creditors might receive of him, remarking that the ever extraordinarily perceptive creditor will hear the “Sound of [one’s] Hammer at Five in the Morning or Nine at Night” and be lenient about one’s debt, but will see one at the billiard table or one’s wife with better clothes the creditor’s wife and will send for his money the next day. The received interpretation of the most evidentiary image of one’s character constitutes the rubric by which one’s credit is determined. The cultivation of evidentiary image acquires an economic importance.
It is with similar stress upon the instrumentation of the most evidential aspects of his public image—literally a semiology of his self in order to create a positive social value—that Franklin’s self’s story, the Autobiography, repeatedly concerns itself with reputation and self-representation.
Catechism on American Wealth: How it Works and Why to Read Ben Franklin, III
Mr. Poor Richard, why are industry and frugality so goddamn important to this bloke?
The last Almanac prepared by Franklin and published for the year 1758 is the source for his most widely reprinted writings (more than even the Autobiography), variously printed as “preliminary Address prefixed to the “Pennsylvania Almanack for 1758,” “Father Abraham’s Speech,” “Way to Wealth,” “La Science du Bonhomme Richard,” et al. It introduces a new persona, Father Abraham, whose messianic invective against improper taxation, laziness, and profligacy quotes extensively, if not entirely, from Poor Richard’s maxims.
Franklin leaves the business of almanacs with an almanac saturated, page after page (the sermon was printed alongside the twelve months), with a rhetorical constellation of Franklin’s collected aphorisms of virtuous commercialism. And the core message, as the Advice to a Young Tradesman, Written by an Old One—again addressed to futurity (a young tradesman)—boils it down, “depends chiefly on two Words, INDUSTRY and FRUGALITY.”
One might conceptualize the argumentation behind centralizing these two words as core virtues by following their semantic content along a plausible meaning. We can take industry to denote production increased in time and frugality to denote preservation of resources over time. The former contracts time, in that more gets done in less time, while the latter expands time, in that less lasts for longer periods. Both, in their own way (one as a management of output, the other as a management of input), are controls of time. Time, we might conclude, becomes an ethical construct in the frame of a virtue system, which determines merit and demerit according to one’s use of time. We have concluded a general theme from a few contents in the text and could presume that the passage is operating according to principles of republican virtue, but the semantic layout of the passage is only half its argumentation.
Franklin breaks the code so effortlessly that we might overlook the fact that he does not identify ‘INDUSTRY and FRUGALITY’ as virtues, but as ‘Words.’ The semiological aspect of the virtues—their presence as signs—reorients the virtue system of time control into the realm of language. Franklin’s ideology of the republic is reorganized from the what, or content, to what Hayden White might call the how that what is conveyed: The ideology of Franklin’s virtue system, of industry in frugality, is inhered in even the rhetorical structures used to convey that system—the very words and the simple style of their arrangement.
In a letter to his brother, Franklin correlates the style of his brother’s ballad, which he judges to be good, with the virtues that the ballad is supposed to foster, and again we see our two words:
"I like your ballad, and think it well adapted for your purpose of discountenancing expensive foppery, and encouraging industry and frugality. If you can get it generally sung in your country, it may probably have a good deal of the effect you hope and expect from it."
The letter then suggests that a more common tune, one that a “country girl in the heart of Massachusets” might compose, will allow the song to disseminate with greater reach and its instructive purposes to work themselves more effectively throughout the population. The ethical value of the ballad is measured by the aesthetic decisions which might render it simple and therefore effective, itself industrious or frugal.
The language of the republic, its management of a system of signs, its semiology, enacts and by its communicability legitimates the larger theoretical system of the polity.
The last Almanac prepared by Franklin and published for the year 1758 is the source for his most widely reprinted writings (more than even the Autobiography), variously printed as “preliminary Address prefixed to the “Pennsylvania Almanack for 1758,” “Father Abraham’s Speech,” “Way to Wealth,” “La Science du Bonhomme Richard,” et al. It introduces a new persona, Father Abraham, whose messianic invective against improper taxation, laziness, and profligacy quotes extensively, if not entirely, from Poor Richard’s maxims.
Franklin leaves the business of almanacs with an almanac saturated, page after page (the sermon was printed alongside the twelve months), with a rhetorical constellation of Franklin’s collected aphorisms of virtuous commercialism. And the core message, as the Advice to a Young Tradesman, Written by an Old One—again addressed to futurity (a young tradesman)—boils it down, “depends chiefly on two Words, INDUSTRY and FRUGALITY.”
One might conceptualize the argumentation behind centralizing these two words as core virtues by following their semantic content along a plausible meaning. We can take industry to denote production increased in time and frugality to denote preservation of resources over time. The former contracts time, in that more gets done in less time, while the latter expands time, in that less lasts for longer periods. Both, in their own way (one as a management of output, the other as a management of input), are controls of time. Time, we might conclude, becomes an ethical construct in the frame of a virtue system, which determines merit and demerit according to one’s use of time. We have concluded a general theme from a few contents in the text and could presume that the passage is operating according to principles of republican virtue, but the semantic layout of the passage is only half its argumentation.
Franklin breaks the code so effortlessly that we might overlook the fact that he does not identify ‘INDUSTRY and FRUGALITY’ as virtues, but as ‘Words.’ The semiological aspect of the virtues—their presence as signs—reorients the virtue system of time control into the realm of language. Franklin’s ideology of the republic is reorganized from the what, or content, to what Hayden White might call the how that what is conveyed: The ideology of Franklin’s virtue system, of industry in frugality, is inhered in even the rhetorical structures used to convey that system—the very words and the simple style of their arrangement.
In a letter to his brother, Franklin correlates the style of his brother’s ballad, which he judges to be good, with the virtues that the ballad is supposed to foster, and again we see our two words:
"I like your ballad, and think it well adapted for your purpose of discountenancing expensive foppery, and encouraging industry and frugality. If you can get it generally sung in your country, it may probably have a good deal of the effect you hope and expect from it."
The letter then suggests that a more common tune, one that a “country girl in the heart of Massachusets” might compose, will allow the song to disseminate with greater reach and its instructive purposes to work themselves more effectively throughout the population. The ethical value of the ballad is measured by the aesthetic decisions which might render it simple and therefore effective, itself industrious or frugal.
The language of the republic, its management of a system of signs, its semiology, enacts and by its communicability legitimates the larger theoretical system of the polity.
Catechism on American Wealth: How it Works and Why to Read Ben Franklin, II.V
Mr. Poor Richard, what do you mean when you say that America sought to create a virtue system by contrasting its theory of continuity based on creative responses to contingency to the traditionalism and customary continuity of its monarchic, English forebear?
It is certainly an oversimplification to suggest that the American political crisis was simply a revolutionary inveighing of the despotic activity of King George III. The detested Stamp Act, for example, was introduced and ratified by George Grenville and the Whig coalition of 1763, and the leaders of what would become the American revolutionary movement knew this. The King, in so far as the colonialists understood him to be embodiment of a dysfunctional political system, was held in contempt for being neither able to adequately control his newly received empire (after the Peace of Paris), nor able to stave the corrupting of the political system by interests inimical to notions of English liberty and right, to the colonialists in America claiming that liberty and those rights, and in the end even to himself and his empire. “The heart,” as Pocock puts it, “of the American problem for Britain was less the maintenance of imperial control than the preservation of essentially English institutions which the claims of empire were calling in question.” Cf. Steven Watson, The Reign of George III, 1760–1815. (London 1960), 182-85; Pocock, “Political thought in the English-speaking Atlantic, 1760-1790, Part 1: The imperial crisis,” The Varieties of British political thought, 1500-1800, ed. J.G.A. Pocock (Cambridge 1993), 278; Pocock, “Political thought in the English-speaking Atlantic, 1760-1790, Part 2: Empire, revolution and the end of early modernity,” Ibid., 283-317; and Franklin’s note in the Autobiography (Part I, written 1771), excerpted from an editorial in the Pennsylvania Gazette, October 9, 1729: “by the Dictates of Reason there should be a mutual Dependence between the Governor and the Governed, and that to make any Governour independent of his People, would be dangerous, and destructive of their Liberties, and the ready Way to establish Tyranny… Their happy Mother Country will perhaps observe with Pleasure, that tho’ her gallant Cocks and matchless Dogs abate their native Fire and Intrepidity when transported to a Foreign Clime (as the common Notion is) yet her S O N S in the remotest Part of the Earth, and even to the third and fourth Descent, still retain that ardent Spirit of Liberty, and that undaunted Courage in the Defence of it, which has in every Age so gloriously distinguished B R I T O N S and E N G L I S H M E N from all the Rest of Mankind.” Autobiography, 50-51. In revolutionary rhetoric, in other words, the king became an easily contemptible symbol of a dysfunctional political system although the true menace had always been the dysfunctional political system, which the kingship represented.
It is certainly an oversimplification to suggest that the American political crisis was simply a revolutionary inveighing of the despotic activity of King George III. The detested Stamp Act, for example, was introduced and ratified by George Grenville and the Whig coalition of 1763, and the leaders of what would become the American revolutionary movement knew this. The King, in so far as the colonialists understood him to be embodiment of a dysfunctional political system, was held in contempt for being neither able to adequately control his newly received empire (after the Peace of Paris), nor able to stave the corrupting of the political system by interests inimical to notions of English liberty and right, to the colonialists in America claiming that liberty and those rights, and in the end even to himself and his empire. “The heart,” as Pocock puts it, “of the American problem for Britain was less the maintenance of imperial control than the preservation of essentially English institutions which the claims of empire were calling in question.” Cf. Steven Watson, The Reign of George III, 1760–1815. (London 1960), 182-85; Pocock, “Political thought in the English-speaking Atlantic, 1760-1790, Part 1: The imperial crisis,” The Varieties of British political thought, 1500-1800, ed. J.G.A. Pocock (Cambridge 1993), 278; Pocock, “Political thought in the English-speaking Atlantic, 1760-1790, Part 2: Empire, revolution and the end of early modernity,” Ibid., 283-317; and Franklin’s note in the Autobiography (Part I, written 1771), excerpted from an editorial in the Pennsylvania Gazette, October 9, 1729: “by the Dictates of Reason there should be a mutual Dependence between the Governor and the Governed, and that to make any Governour independent of his People, would be dangerous, and destructive of their Liberties, and the ready Way to establish Tyranny… Their happy Mother Country will perhaps observe with Pleasure, that tho’ her gallant Cocks and matchless Dogs abate their native Fire and Intrepidity when transported to a Foreign Clime (as the common Notion is) yet her S O N S in the remotest Part of the Earth, and even to the third and fourth Descent, still retain that ardent Spirit of Liberty, and that undaunted Courage in the Defence of it, which has in every Age so gloriously distinguished B R I T O N S and E N G L I S H M E N from all the Rest of Mankind.” Autobiography, 50-51. In revolutionary rhetoric, in other words, the king became an easily contemptible symbol of a dysfunctional political system although the true menace had always been the dysfunctional political system, which the kingship represented.
Catechism on American Wealth: How it Works and Why to Read Ben Franklin, II
Mr. Poor Richard, what's the point of creating a virtue system for the future and why the need to check corruption?
Addressing the first part of the Autobiography primarily to his son, but subsequently to a general future as suggested by the intended patrilineal extension of its virtuous education to ‘Posterity,’ Franklin frames his self-education as model “fit to be imitated” by a readership in futurity.
Reinhart Koselleck remarks that a revolution can be legitimated as “a coefficient of movement, mobilizing history in terms of the prevailing prospect of the future.” A revolution can conceptualize the propriety of its present actions by the vision of an intended future necessitating the actions of that revolution to bring that future into being. The inverted reflexivity of the argument keeps the present working for the future in so far as the actions of the present have a purpose to a proposed goal perpetually on the horizon.
Franklin, though not articulating his goal in revolutionary terms, immediately organizes the structure of his educative self-story according to the possibility of readers to come and the prospected need the lives of those readers will have for a fundamental morality. Such stress on the cultivation of virtue as a public good is a concern that came about alongside theories of balanced power and greater emphasis on moral personality within political processes.
If the model of monarchy was to be rejected, as it was by mid-eighteenth century American revolutionaries, on the premise that it was corrupt, it followed that the new political system must check corruption. And, if a new system would invest the populace with greater political agency, it would have to rely on the virtue of its citizens. It is worth saying the obvious: Preventing corruption consisted of promoting virtue. And the popularly instructive is what early readers of the Autobiography ask for more of:
Some Time since there fell into my Hands… an Account of the Parentage and Life of thyself, directed to thy Son ending in the Year 1730 with which there were Notes likewise in thy writing, a Copy of which I enclose in Hopes it may be a means if thou continuedst it up to a later period… a Work which would be useful and entertaining not only to a few, but to millions.
That the ‘rising People’ might need a virtuous education premises an otherwise corruptible state for which the proper remedy is a civic education. Pocock traces the moral requisites inhered in republican self-theorization as active historical progress by identifying the crises, which greater historical agency imparts.
To have a government perfected in personal participation and citizenship resulted in a perpetually corruptible political system as occasioned by the perpetual corruptibility of personalities in society. Pocock indicates that, “Corruption, which threatened the civic bases of personality, was irremediable except by personal virtue itself, and therefore must very soon become irreversible if action was not taken in time.” The emphasis on the immanence of agency in time is a feature of republicanism, which determines its political successes and failures according to the active, participatory agency of its citizenry. And, in its American manifestation, it did so by contrasting its theory of continuity based on creative responses to contingency to the traditionalism and customary continuity of its monarchic, English forebear.
Paine’s Common Sense inveighs the British Crown and the entire concept of kingship as brutish and completely antithetical to rational political organization. But it does so with an attendant remediation of good to immediate agency:
The present winter is worth an age if rightly employed, but if lost or neglected the whole continent will partake of the misfortune; and there is no punishment which that man doth not deserve, be he who, or what, or where he will, that may be the means of sacrificing a season so precious and useful.
The imperative to political action would alone not qualify the passage as republican. Rather, the republican tendency to conceive of the immediate moment as the contraction of a historical age—incurred by the greater responsibility to history essential to republican theorizing of time and agency—by industrious activity impregnates Paine’s revolutionary moment with the import of an age: “The present winter is worth an age if rightly employed.”
If a republic is contingent upon the activity of men and women to—as Franklin put it—“keep it,” all political activity must receive and do its work in the operative timescale of tighter, more meaningful, historical time. And that time must be dedicated to certain virtues which would keep it moving along and which Franklin increasingly condensed to two: Industry and Frugality.
Addressing the first part of the Autobiography primarily to his son, but subsequently to a general future as suggested by the intended patrilineal extension of its virtuous education to ‘Posterity,’ Franklin frames his self-education as model “fit to be imitated” by a readership in futurity.
Reinhart Koselleck remarks that a revolution can be legitimated as “a coefficient of movement, mobilizing history in terms of the prevailing prospect of the future.” A revolution can conceptualize the propriety of its present actions by the vision of an intended future necessitating the actions of that revolution to bring that future into being. The inverted reflexivity of the argument keeps the present working for the future in so far as the actions of the present have a purpose to a proposed goal perpetually on the horizon.
Franklin, though not articulating his goal in revolutionary terms, immediately organizes the structure of his educative self-story according to the possibility of readers to come and the prospected need the lives of those readers will have for a fundamental morality. Such stress on the cultivation of virtue as a public good is a concern that came about alongside theories of balanced power and greater emphasis on moral personality within political processes.
If the model of monarchy was to be rejected, as it was by mid-eighteenth century American revolutionaries, on the premise that it was corrupt, it followed that the new political system must check corruption. And, if a new system would invest the populace with greater political agency, it would have to rely on the virtue of its citizens. It is worth saying the obvious: Preventing corruption consisted of promoting virtue. And the popularly instructive is what early readers of the Autobiography ask for more of:
Some Time since there fell into my Hands… an Account of the Parentage and Life of thyself, directed to thy Son ending in the Year 1730 with which there were Notes likewise in thy writing, a Copy of which I enclose in Hopes it may be a means if thou continuedst it up to a later period… a Work which would be useful and entertaining not only to a few, but to millions.
That the ‘rising People’ might need a virtuous education premises an otherwise corruptible state for which the proper remedy is a civic education. Pocock traces the moral requisites inhered in republican self-theorization as active historical progress by identifying the crises, which greater historical agency imparts.
To have a government perfected in personal participation and citizenship resulted in a perpetually corruptible political system as occasioned by the perpetual corruptibility of personalities in society. Pocock indicates that, “Corruption, which threatened the civic bases of personality, was irremediable except by personal virtue itself, and therefore must very soon become irreversible if action was not taken in time.” The emphasis on the immanence of agency in time is a feature of republicanism, which determines its political successes and failures according to the active, participatory agency of its citizenry. And, in its American manifestation, it did so by contrasting its theory of continuity based on creative responses to contingency to the traditionalism and customary continuity of its monarchic, English forebear.
Paine’s Common Sense inveighs the British Crown and the entire concept of kingship as brutish and completely antithetical to rational political organization. But it does so with an attendant remediation of good to immediate agency:
The present winter is worth an age if rightly employed, but if lost or neglected the whole continent will partake of the misfortune; and there is no punishment which that man doth not deserve, be he who, or what, or where he will, that may be the means of sacrificing a season so precious and useful.
The imperative to political action would alone not qualify the passage as republican. Rather, the republican tendency to conceive of the immediate moment as the contraction of a historical age—incurred by the greater responsibility to history essential to republican theorizing of time and agency—by industrious activity impregnates Paine’s revolutionary moment with the import of an age: “The present winter is worth an age if rightly employed.”
If a republic is contingent upon the activity of men and women to—as Franklin put it—“keep it,” all political activity must receive and do its work in the operative timescale of tighter, more meaningful, historical time. And that time must be dedicated to certain virtues which would keep it moving along and which Franklin increasingly condensed to two: Industry and Frugality.
Catechism on American Wealth: How it Works and Why to Read Ben Franklin, I
Mr. Poor Richard, what's the use of simple language and why did it become an American aesthetic to write clearly and simply?
In an editorial on literary style, printed in The Pennsylvania Gazette, August 2, 1733, Ben Franklin says the following regarding the need for simplicity in written representation:
"To write clearly, not only the most expressive, but the plainest words should be chosen… The Fondness of some Writers for such Words as carry with them an Air of Learning, renders them unintelligible to more than half their Countrymen. If a Man would that his Writings have an Effect on the Generality of Readers, he had better imitate that Gentleman, who would use no Word in his Works that was not well understood by his Cook-maid."
The benefit of simple language is that it travels well. Its mobility is inhered by a broad comprehensibility, which can carry a written pronouncement from city to country in a vocabulary apprehensible to almost any reader. But, beyond portability across space, simplicity and concision additionally afford portability across time. An aphorism in Franklin’s almanacs correlates the transportability of written language across space to space’s attendant axis, time:
“If you would not be forgotten as soon as you are dead and rotten, either write things worth reading, or do things worth the writing.”
The transportability of written language across time becomes a historical issue. Time, as I am using the word here, is shorthand for Franklin’s self-representation as a kind of historiography and the way that such self-representation conceives and conceptualizes its position in time as bearing upon a political system as active history. Time, in this regard, becomes an ethical construction, implicating the relationship of agency to history and the individual to a perceived role in the historical process of their society.
That a society must create and maintain an understanding of its place in history seems self-evident. That an individual, on the other hand, might have activated concepts by which a society could see its history extending into the future is much more interesting. Benjamin Franklin constructed his moral program in terms of transportability to futurity in order to afford that futurity a check on the corruption, which would become the menace to a society in which the integrity of its polity would be based solely upon the activity of its citizens. His two central virtues, industry and frugality, thus became relevant as moral ethos and aesthetic ethos, because together they could build and project the moral credit necessary in a world where the dangers of a shared investment in political contingency would only be remediable by the daily upkeep of a network of active private engagements to a shared futurity.
The republic’s citizenry would have to actively maintain the integrity of that republic and Franklin surfaces as the citizen most concerned with a broad dissemination of the virtues that would maintain and project the republic forward. Through his writings, almanacs and the Autobiography, which is an evidentiary embodiment of the purpose and potential of his virtue system, Franklin conceptualizes a timescale of agential relationship to futurity, both of an individual and a republic, to which communicability would be a founding principle.
In an editorial on literary style, printed in The Pennsylvania Gazette, August 2, 1733, Ben Franklin says the following regarding the need for simplicity in written representation:
"To write clearly, not only the most expressive, but the plainest words should be chosen… The Fondness of some Writers for such Words as carry with them an Air of Learning, renders them unintelligible to more than half their Countrymen. If a Man would that his Writings have an Effect on the Generality of Readers, he had better imitate that Gentleman, who would use no Word in his Works that was not well understood by his Cook-maid."
The benefit of simple language is that it travels well. Its mobility is inhered by a broad comprehensibility, which can carry a written pronouncement from city to country in a vocabulary apprehensible to almost any reader. But, beyond portability across space, simplicity and concision additionally afford portability across time. An aphorism in Franklin’s almanacs correlates the transportability of written language across space to space’s attendant axis, time:
“If you would not be forgotten as soon as you are dead and rotten, either write things worth reading, or do things worth the writing.”
The transportability of written language across time becomes a historical issue. Time, as I am using the word here, is shorthand for Franklin’s self-representation as a kind of historiography and the way that such self-representation conceives and conceptualizes its position in time as bearing upon a political system as active history. Time, in this regard, becomes an ethical construction, implicating the relationship of agency to history and the individual to a perceived role in the historical process of their society.
That a society must create and maintain an understanding of its place in history seems self-evident. That an individual, on the other hand, might have activated concepts by which a society could see its history extending into the future is much more interesting. Benjamin Franklin constructed his moral program in terms of transportability to futurity in order to afford that futurity a check on the corruption, which would become the menace to a society in which the integrity of its polity would be based solely upon the activity of its citizens. His two central virtues, industry and frugality, thus became relevant as moral ethos and aesthetic ethos, because together they could build and project the moral credit necessary in a world where the dangers of a shared investment in political contingency would only be remediable by the daily upkeep of a network of active private engagements to a shared futurity.
The republic’s citizenry would have to actively maintain the integrity of that republic and Franklin surfaces as the citizen most concerned with a broad dissemination of the virtues that would maintain and project the republic forward. Through his writings, almanacs and the Autobiography, which is an evidentiary embodiment of the purpose and potential of his virtue system, Franklin conceptualizes a timescale of agential relationship to futurity, both of an individual and a republic, to which communicability would be a founding principle.
Saturday, May 2, 2009
Growth of Time and Law in the 17c
David Landes identifies the introduction of the portable timekeeper, watch or clock, as a revolutionary instrument, and the transition from public time to private time that it instantiated in the 17c as a long, revolutionary moment. Increasingly widespread use of the portable timekeeper internalized discipline in time consciousness, as opposed to the obedience to time consciousness that had been maintained by an external imperium, or authority, of time.
In 1370, for example, King Charles V of France issued an ordinance that all public clocks in Paris, including those of the church towers, should be regulated around the timekeeper of the royal palace, the Horloge du Palais. The idea seems to have been that time should emanate from an authority and that that authority in keeping time should be the royal imperium. This was a practical application of the theoretical principle underpinning the monarchic doctrine of traditionalism and immemorial custom.
The idea of an ancient, immemorial English constitution, which was said to have sanctioned a sovereign king, received its unwritten formulation sometime around 1600. By legitimizing its presence as immemorial concretion, the monarchy positioned itself centrally in a timescale of sanctioned perpetuity. Because it had always been it must consequently always be. Pocock argues that, “to describe a timeless existence, a sacred origin or an immemorial continuity, are all ways of conceptualizing the continuous existence of a society.” Continuous existence is indeed legitimated—and with it the chronological anteriority of the monarchy. The monarchy, which theoretically came before time, thus emanates time.
Time is a kind of original property of the monarchy, who alone in claiming ancient ownership of time can claim, by extension, sole rights to contingency and agency in time. In this respect, the monarchy could legitimately militate against the usurpation of time and agency by any other political entity. Within the parameters of such a timescale, the capacity for historical agency indeed is deadened by its dispensability. Historical events, like Marvell’s ‘happy Restauration,’ which I have discussed in an earlier post, will just happen.
Conversely, the appearance of an instrument that could privately claim de facto hold on time was not only associated with a principle of self-regulation, it also brought with it a liberalizing share of legal and political agency for any person that could claim chrono-literacy. John Suckling in 1637:
But as when an authentic watch is shown,
Each man winds up and rectifies his own,
So in our very judgments.
Personal appropriation of accurate, private timekeeping is operatively continuous with the legitimation of common, private adjudication. In the same manner by which each man began to keep his own time, each man began to rectify his own agential relationship to judgment in time.
In 1370, for example, King Charles V of France issued an ordinance that all public clocks in Paris, including those of the church towers, should be regulated around the timekeeper of the royal palace, the Horloge du Palais. The idea seems to have been that time should emanate from an authority and that that authority in keeping time should be the royal imperium. This was a practical application of the theoretical principle underpinning the monarchic doctrine of traditionalism and immemorial custom.
The idea of an ancient, immemorial English constitution, which was said to have sanctioned a sovereign king, received its unwritten formulation sometime around 1600. By legitimizing its presence as immemorial concretion, the monarchy positioned itself centrally in a timescale of sanctioned perpetuity. Because it had always been it must consequently always be. Pocock argues that, “to describe a timeless existence, a sacred origin or an immemorial continuity, are all ways of conceptualizing the continuous existence of a society.” Continuous existence is indeed legitimated—and with it the chronological anteriority of the monarchy. The monarchy, which theoretically came before time, thus emanates time.
Time is a kind of original property of the monarchy, who alone in claiming ancient ownership of time can claim, by extension, sole rights to contingency and agency in time. In this respect, the monarchy could legitimately militate against the usurpation of time and agency by any other political entity. Within the parameters of such a timescale, the capacity for historical agency indeed is deadened by its dispensability. Historical events, like Marvell’s ‘happy Restauration,’ which I have discussed in an earlier post, will just happen.
Conversely, the appearance of an instrument that could privately claim de facto hold on time was not only associated with a principle of self-regulation, it also brought with it a liberalizing share of legal and political agency for any person that could claim chrono-literacy. John Suckling in 1637:
But as when an authentic watch is shown,
Each man winds up and rectifies his own,
So in our very judgments.
Personal appropriation of accurate, private timekeeping is operatively continuous with the legitimation of common, private adjudication. In the same manner by which each man began to keep his own time, each man began to rectify his own agential relationship to judgment in time.
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