The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Commerce

love and the bourgeoisie 131You can’t run human groups on Prudence Only, not well. And “well”means not merely prudently and profitably—though the Iowa City/Schaumburg/Granville monetary gain is not trivial, Gemeinschaft in aid ofGesellschaft, J. P. Morgan’s test of character in aid of smart loaning. Buthumans want more. Depending on Prudence Only makes it harder toachieve a transcendent, sacred goal such as communal love or social justiceor scientific progress. And such a transcendent goal, I repeat, is necessary tomake the prudence have a point.On the other hand, when I moved back to Chicago from Iowa City andlater from Granville, I noted also a rise in the richness of the gemeinschaftlichattachments I could form in the big city: thirty Episcopal churcheswithin easy driving distance instead of four or five; seventy ethnic groups inbulk instead of two; twenty Irish pubs instead of one. Iowa City is a littlejewel, and so is Granville on an even smaller scale. But they are little, SMAsof perhaps 100,000 all told in Iowa, 20,000 in Ohio, as against millionswithin a similar travel time in Chicago.Tönnies, with many sociologists since, predicted that the big places suchas Chicago would be soulless. He and the others have claimed that over timethe soulless Gesellschaft replaces cozy Gemeinschaft. What is wrong in Tönniesis just what is wrong with most German social thought in the nineteenthcentury, a belief in historicism before the facts had been ascertainedby professional historians—although professional history, too, was anineteenth-century German planting, which bore its fruit in the twentiethcentury outside Germany. True, a big city has of course more businesslikeGesellschaft—admittedly or splendidly depending on how you feel about“unnatural” human projects. But it has more Gemeinschaft, too,more lovinghuman connection, and that in enormous bulk. In consequence it hasmore of that third thing, the invisible-hand specialization that makes for arich life. A big city has more of everything. That’s why there are so manypeople there.The historian Wilfred McClay praises another historian, Thomas Bender,for arguing that “the most influential of all sociological dualisms—Gemeinschaftand Gesellschaft—[is] to be understood, not as designating strictlydiscrete and sequential phases in the evolution of human social relations,but as signifying two kinds of relations that, particularly in a modern society,coexist and contend with each other.” McClay observes that “one benefitof this approach is that it helps us account for the ways that premodern,