Joel Mokyr does argue convincingly in his Culture of Growth: The Origins of the Modern Economy, Princeton UP, 2017)that the contribution of an intellectual elite was crucial for the IR. He dates this as important from about 1660. (Mokyr has chapters on Newton and Francis Bacon.) But Henrich seems to assume that WEIRD psychology developed much earlier than this and for the population as a whole.
Whatever, as E.P. Thompson showed in his classic THE Making of the English Working Class, the regimentation of work in the cotton mills and and the dangers of working in the coal mines destroyed the independence and variety of tasks some had experienced as labourers in the open air of the fields. Western individualism (and I would argue that it was partly dependent on the rediscovery of the rich and various texts of the classical authors) certainly was only possible for a small elite. This is so obvious for anyone who knows something of European history and culture which is why I astonished when I began reading my copy of the Weirdest People.
But individual landownership was the key feature of Roman farming, villas, small farms, tenant farmers,etc. This lasted for centuries for much of Europe and gave reasonable standards of living. (I once took part in a field survey around Rome to assess how far Roman farmholdings followed from earlier Etruscan sites post 300BC, and there was a good correlation.) Henrich seems to know nothing about the impact of Roman law and society. (For a start the Romans banned cousin marriage to the fourth degree of consanguinity and a study by the classicist Brent Shaw of 33 recorded marriages showed that none of them were to cousins.) Chris Wickham (q.v.) ,the authority of such things, sees what he calls ‘a caging of the peasantry’ in the ninth -tenth centuries. We do then have some evidence of farming yields improving, more land being taken into cultivation and a slow rise of population allowing the cities of northern Italy, Venice, Pisa and Genoa, to expand as the trading routes opened up again in the Mediterranean.
If you read this book carefully ,it soon unravels. So page 315 attempts to correlate ‘representative government’ in urban areas with exposure to the Church. As ‘representative government ’ is nowhere defined there is an immediate problem. As someone who has studied the cities of northern Italy, they went through phases of representative and non-representative government and usually hostility with their neighbours. (Florence had wars with Pisa, Milan, Siena and the papacy.) The rise of secular representative government in the cities, such as it was, involved lessening the power of the Church. Florence had no problem in declaring war on the Church in 1378.
Bizarrely, p. 315, ‘Before the Church arrives, the estimated probability of developing any form of representative government is zero-making pre-Christian Europe just like everywhere else in the world.’ LOL. How can you work on ‘estimated probabilities’ when we have all the evidence of Roman republicanism, Athenian democracy and the constitutions of elected magistrates in the Roman municipia? One of the discoveries in Pompeii is election graffiti. This sentence highlights the possibility that Henrich thinks: ‘I have this idea that urban society arises (in the eleventh century when the first recorded magistrates are found in Pisa) as the Church becomes more powerful. So the break-up of kinship groups by the Church CAUSES urbanisation (not trade or surplus population as most historians think- I know better than they do). As I have decided that representative government in cities can only take place as a result of the Church, then before Christianity there CANNOT have been representative governments in urban areas. ’ You can see where the logic fails.
I don’t see why he ever needed to go back to the Middle Ages, especially when Henrich clearly knows nothing of the history of Europe, medieval or Roman. I am a mere generalist historian but a first year course in medieval and Roman history would have helped him, I think.