The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Commerce

7bourgeois economists against loveAh, yes. Bourgeois virtues. Remember them? At this juncture the male, prudent,scientific, economistic, and materialist stoic breaks into indignantrhetorical questions: “Who cares about sweetness? ‘Sour’ tastes fine to me.Point, schmoit. What possibly could love have to do with the hard world ofa commercial economy? Let’s get practical here. Can’t we do just fine in aworld of bourgeois business without love? Isn’t that the, uh, point of economics?Isn’t love something for weekends and the Home?” Or as Yeats saidin 1909, “The Catholic Church created a system only possible for saints....Its definition of the good was narrow, but it did not set out to make shopkeepers.”1Economics since its invention as a system of thought in the eighteenthcentury has tried to “economize on love,” that is, to get along without it, thatis, to justify shopkeepers far removed from saintly or poetic love. Economicshas elevated prudence, an androgynous virtue counted good in bothmen and women as stereotypically viewed, into the only spring of action.Tracing it back to Epicurus, Alfred North Whitehead complained in 1938that “this basis for philosophical understanding is analogous to an endeavorto elucidate the sociology of modern civilization as wholly derivative fromthe traffic signals on the main roads. The motions of the cars are conditionedby these signals. But the signals are not the reason for the traffic.” 2The way most economists do their job is to ask, Where’s the prudence?“The rudimentary hardheadedness attributed to them by modern economics,”as Sen puts it, is the only virtue in the economist’s world. 3 When in the1960s I wanted to show that Victorian Britain did not fail economically I used