Sketches the 17th- and 18th-century Geneva’s contribution to Western political economy, commencing with Calvinist government and concluding with subjection to French Louisianan oligarchy and Rousseau’s utopianism.
To Weber as to Marx, the Reformation was the first bourgeois revolution, foreshadowing capitalism. Lüthy dismisses Weber’s thesis of Calvinist Protestantism promoting capitalism, showing predestination is not pivotal to Calvin and simplistic definitions obscure more than they clarify: it’s survives only because succeeding scholars couldn’t agree definitions either. The Reformation was evidently a milestone in the progression from the medieval to the modern world, and Calvinist views indeed underpinned northwestern Europe; but this was just one of many conditions, also to include money (specie) from the new world, emigration (especially Huguenot) within Europe prompted by the Counterreformation, the rise of banking, and the maturation of medieval republican city-states. Is it not also evident that the Counterreformation stifled what would have happened in Catholic countries, especially as Spain and Italy were the more advanced economies?
Calvinism was important for manifesting reformist Christianity most clearly independent of politics and statecraft. The connection to economics is less fear of predestinarian uncertainty and more release of fears of other men, of social stricture. The Reformation destroyed social hierarchy more than it shaped individual values. Calvin broke the hold of usury by common sense: wealthy lenders have richer men as clients, demonstrating the borrower is not always and evidently prey. The rule of equity (i.e., the golden rule) guides proper lending, Calvin observed in overturning Aristotelian view that money (interest) does not engender money. Protestant lenders were no different from Catholics for example in maritime credit, bills of currency exchange. Ironically classical Greece alone among the ancients employed a productive credit system, to support the agricultural regions near the poleis.
Neither the French monarchy nor the country’s national church fits comfortably into the common dynastic vs national schema. France’s centralizing tendencies were most evident in the Academy Francaise (i.e., control of language), which produced clarity over fuller participation in the Enlightenment. Louis XV’s reign completed his predecessor’s making aristocratic and heritable bourgeois office completely dependent on the throne. The constitution of society was economic and social, not only political – a regime in the full sense of the word. The French economy amounted to starveling producers and consumers exempt from tax; there were regional exceptions in Brittany, Normandy, and Languedoc that proved the rule. Quesnay’s primary concern was distribution of ‘net product’ of agriculture (i.e., primary produce) among the royalist entourage: Louis XV’s era was an age of unbounded, reckless enthusiasm not the edge of the abyss. The rise of the Atlantic trade from 1760 undermined the specifics of physiocratic economics, and Quesnay lacked the tooling of the modern discipline, but he was not wrong in his assessment of the country’s dynamics. By contrast, Turgot changed men’s minds in their understanding of the state’s role in the economy.
Rousseau sought to understand the act by which a people is a people, but compromised by proposing the tyrannical general will. Having posited society corrupts natural man, he could not allow for civic order which protects individual rights. In fairness, he saw the Greek city-state as a model; his eloquence raised its applicability to large, modern nations – and led directly to 20th-century tyrannies. In his own time, Genevan democrats (‘populists’) brought the general will to Louis XV’s France, foreshadowing Mirabeau and Robespierre.
In France, finance was the preserve of Catholic royalist administrators, banking was open to all, that is to Protestants. The former traded with Spain, the latter with faster-growing England. Absolute monarchy and public credit were discovered by Necker to be incompatible, and in the late 18th century the latter won. The Protestants retained the anti-dogmatic attitudes of 17th-century emigres to Geneva, mixed with the Enlightenment’s freethinking, critical reasoning, and sovereignty of conscience. But in the storm of the Revolution, the Catholic Church proved a shelter against the radicals, whereas the Protestant churches lacked institutional bulwark: liberalism was first to succumb.
NB: the example of Genevan oligarchies sacrificing Calvinist self-governance to Catholic Paris is relevant to 21st-century USARFU (p. 260)