The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Commerce

acknowledgmentsJoseph Epstein, the editor of the American Scholar in 1994, was helpful andencouraging. My colleagues in the Project on Rhetoric of Inquiry (Poroi) atthe University of Iowa gave me encouragement and instruction over manyyears. In March of 1996 John and Christine Blundell and the Institute for EconomicAffairs in London, where I delivered an early version of the case to MPsand academics, were kind, as was the University of California, Berkeley, Seminarin Economic History in April 1996. Dutch, Italian, Portuguese, Turkish,Greek, Iranian, and other students at Erasmus University of Rotterdam in variouscourses on bourgeois virtues during 1996 and then again during annualtwo-month visits there 2002 to the present have pushed me forward. So havestudents in courses touching on the matter at the University of Illinois atChicago since 1999, as did students at Iowa during the 1990s—such as mygraduate students in the Sunday Seminar and my undergraduates in a businessethics course taught twice, first with Colin Bell. Students and colleaguesat the annual seminar in southern France of EDAMBA (the European DoctoralAssociation in Management and Business Administration) heard theideas at length, as later did two springtime sessions in Barcelona lovinglyscripted by Eduard Bonet at the Escola Superior d’Administració i Direcciód’Empreses. Teaching a graduate English course with Ralph Cintron and WalterBenn Michaels at UIC in 2004 was eye-opening, too.For their generous interest I thank in rough chronological order audiencesat the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, the University ofGroningen, the dean’s seminar on ethics at the Tippie College of Business atthe University of Iowa, the Technical University of Delft, the Free University