The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Commerce

on not being spooked by the word “bourgeois” 85for American exceptionalism. The very phrase “American exceptionalism,”it appears, arose in the 1920s in discussions among Communists as to whyAmerica did not respond to socialism in a manner comparable withEurope. 16 The exceptionalisms are founding myths.The Dutch were not in fact exceptional in character, merely a little earlycompared to the English or the French and a little late compared with theFlorentines and Venetians. The Low Countries north and south were theearliest northern European regions to be thoroughly citified. 17 In 1467Charles, Duke of Burgundy, ruled over a town-rich region, matched only bynorthern Italy. In 1600 the northern Netherlands had nineteen cities of over10,000 population, as against only six in a Britain five or six times larger intotal population. 18 One in four Dutch northerners, Jan de Vries reckons,lived in towns of 10,000 or larger in 1600, one in five in the Spanish Netherlands,that is, Belgium. Only one in seventeen Englishmen did. 19 The LowCountries were the first bourgeois society in the north. Bourgeois, I say—topreserve the comparison with other societies, such as our own.That is one reason to keep the word “bourgeois.” It does not have tomean “egotistical wretch.” God or nature or Humpty Dumpty does notdetermine what words mean. We do. “Bourgeois” can mean, if we wish touse words this way—and can get over being spooked by Marx—“citydweller practicing an honored profession or owning a business or functioningat a managerial level in someone else’s enterprise, including governmentaland non-profit enterprises.”Such a person faces a particular set of ethical problems. He has the anxiousethical task of learning how to be a counselor yet self-prudent, a salesmanyet other-loving, a boss yet just, a bureaucrat yet courageous, ascientist yet faithful. Schama is right to emphasize the ethical tensions ofcapitalism. But the Dutch are merely an early instance, as the Venetians andFlorentines and Genoese were still earlier, with the Hanseatic League inattendance, and Osakans and Singaporeans later, of a by-now worldwidesocial class and a by-now worldwide ethical problem, namely, the tensionsof bourgeoisness ascendant. Avoiding the very word in fear of itshistorical-materialist accretions doesn’t help. The way to refute historicalmaterialism is to examine the material and spiritual facts, as Schama does.Avoiding the b-word is no help.Still, why not bow to the common prejudice and use instead “middle class”or “middling sort” or “the managerial/professional/upper-bureaucratic/