The good news. The idea for this blog came from my son Scott. What that means is that my contributions to thinking about the Pro Commerce world will be continued after I die. Only two other people have indicated a deep enough understanding of the issue that I can be confident that this vital thread of human thought is kept alive. My son clearly understands and is contributing actively.
Clearly love and commerce are connected. The Romantic era coincides exactly with the beginning of industrial commerce.
The roots of industrial commerce are most closely connected to Holland in the 1600’s and the conquest of England in 1689. Whatever was fermenting in the following century in England was seen by Adam Smith in the 1770’s and by Alexander Hamilton by the 1780’s. The explosion of Industrial commerce came with Wedgwood’s marketing of chinaware, English agricultural improvements that freed labor to leave the farm and the first mobile steam engines.
This was the same time the Romantic era emerged. I identify it with Goethe and Wordsworth, both in the 1780’s. The Romantic era, to me, comprised a rebellion against Enlightenment and a focus on feminine sensitivity to emotion, to Platonic views of the original world behind our world and to individual connections to nature. The American wild West, individual hero and our founding documents are permeated with Romanticism.
Romanticism brought with it the modern notion of ‘love’. ‘Love’, in this sense, refers to unbridled passion between two people, maybe sexually driven but not sexually relieved. Not a big subject in an era when nearly all marriages were arranged and marriage was always between two families. We see Romeo and Juliet as a tragic ‘love’ defeated by blind family loyalty. Viewers for the first two hundred years saw it a rebellious youth defying their families for vanity and selfishness.
‘Love’ relates, since the beginning of the Romantic era, to intense passion, particularly focused on the elevation of women to sanctity and totally internal emotions found in self driven individuals. None of this relates to the era of tribal life and strict social hierarchy the existed prior to Romanticism.
(Continued tomorrow)