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.
If you access ‘Pompeii and politics’ you will find a vast amount of evidence of the vitality of representative government in a typical Roman town. So when Henrich on page 315 writes ‘Before the Church arrives, the estimated probability of developing ANY [ my emphasis] form of representative government is zero- making pre-Christian Europe just like everywhere else in the world’ one can only gasp. He cannot use ANY if he ignores the Roman republic but even ignoring that one can look at local Roman politics in the cities which had their own constitutions.
What Henrich has done in the accompanying chart is to ASSUME that the growth of representative governments in urban areas of Europe correlates with the existence of the Church. The chart shows a steady rise of representative government so that ninety per cent of urban areas have ‘representative government’ by 1200 (forty per cent by 1000 when cities hardly exist and secular government only emerges in Italy c. 1100). He does not provide any evidence for this and he does not even offer a definition of representative government (which was lost in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries anyway as many Italian towns fell under single family rule). But Henrich appears to assume that the growth of representative government is linear and progressive and then takes the line back to the moment when representative government on the chart becomes zero ( and one assumes from his sentence that it remains zero throughout the previous Roman centuries).
As he is a professor at Harvard, he has one of the best classics departments in the world on his doorstep. so they could have told him all about representative governments in the coloniae and municipia of Rome cities. Henrich’s is an extraordinary way of presenting an academic argument. I can’t understand why, if he wants to chart ‘representative governments’, he does not start with some basic texts on Roman and medieval urban life and he can see the rise and collapse of different forms of government over the centuries. Urbanisation in European history is very complex and certainly not a story of linear progress!