The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Commerce

ourgeois economists against love 121The point is that Smith got it right and the later economists and calculatorshave got it wrong. You can’t run on prudence and profit alone a familyor a church or a community or even—and this is the surprising point—a capitalist economy. In far away Japan some decades before Smith oneMiyake Shunro (also known as Miyake Sekian), the director of a newlyformed academy for 90 bourgeois students in the merchant city of Osaka,gave his inaugural address on the theme. Tetsuo Najita explains that inMiyake’s discussion a profit is “nothing other than an extension of humanreason....Indeed,merchants should not even think of their occupation asbeing profit seeking but as the ethical acting out of the moral principle of‘righteousness’ [gi]. When righteousness is acted out in the objective world,Miyake went on, ‘profit’ emerges effortlessly and ‘of its own accord’ withoutpassionate disturbances.” 13 In 1726 Japan, as only a little less urgently inEurope at the time, the task was to elevate the status of merchants, the lowestof the four classes of the Tokugawa regime. The elevation entailed leveling.In Europe the priesthood of all believers cast doubt on God-given hierarchyin general, and yielded the radical egalitarianism of, say, Smith orKant, with precursors a century before in the literal Levelers. One’s positionin the great chain of being came to be seen as a matter of nurture, not ofnature. Thus Smith in that egalitarian year of 1776:The difference of natural talents in different men is, in reality, much less than weare aware of....The difference between ...a philosopher and a common streetporter, for example, seems to arise not so much from nature, as from habit, custom,and education....[F]or the first six or eight years of their existence ...neithertheir parents nor their playfellows could perceive any remarkable difference.. . . [T]hey come to be employed in very different occupations . ..till at last thevanity of the philosopher is willing to acknowledge scarce any resemblance. ...By nature a philosopher is not in genius and disposition half so different from astreet porter as a mastiff is from a greyhound. 14Similarly in Japan, Conrad Totman notes, the seventeenth and especiallythe eighteenth century witnessed a nascent if minority “belief in universalhuman potential” and a “defense of callings other than rulership.” The merchant’sson Itō Jinsai (1627–1705) declared in 1683 that “all men are equallymen.” Another scholarly merchant’s son, Nishikawa Joken (1648–1724),wrote even more startlingly, “When all is said and done, there is no ultimateprinciple that establishes superior and inferior among human beings: the