How the city air made us free: The self-governing medieval city and the bourgeois revaluation

The Great Enrichment of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries involved unprecedented increases in living standards across Europe and its offshoots. I argue that McCloskey’s characterization of the emergence of a bourgeois ethics and dignity as exogenous to the institutional environments is not convincing. Rather, the constitutional development of the selfgoverning medieval city was a necessary condition for the ethical and rhetorical change that McCloskey emphasizes. Furthermore, a bourgeois ethics and dignity were likely emerging in European cities as early as the twelfth century as a result of constitutional bargains. Given that literacy was largely confined to the clergy during the High Middle Ages, a paucity of premodern evidence for this emergence is not surprising.