The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Commerce

142 chapter 9one another, leaving them frightened and alone.” 9 They worry that “the firstlanguage of America,” individualism, “may have grown cancerous.” 10 Theygive aesthetic and moral meaning to their everyday lives as social scientistsby detecting through traditional forms of scrutiny of their neighbors a“weakening of the traditional forms of life that gave aesthetic and moralmeaning to everyday living.” 11Everyone believes it. Everyone does, that is, except the historians whohave actually looked at the comparative evidence. Except them, everyonebelieves in “the extreme fragmentation of the modern world.” 12 After warningabout the misleading nostalgia for a “romantic vision of one big happyfamily,” Folbre retails the usual critique of modernity based on it. “Socialcritics like Karl Polanyi,” she writes, “have long warned that the growth ofmarket-like behavior . . . might encourage selfish calculation.” So they have,but with not much evidence. “Economic development seems to lead to adecline in the importance of close personal relations.” I don’t think so; ifanything, it seems to lead to the opposite. “Our culture has almost certainlybecome more materialistic.” By comparison with Roman civilization ormedieval European civilization? I don’t think so. “Adam Smith believed thatwe would become ...more civilized. I haven’t seen much evidence of this.” 13You haven’t? Not in the rights of women, the extent of higher education, thenumber of books published, the attendance at museums and orchestra hallsworldwide? Such pessimism appears to have more to do with the alienationof academics from the society around them than with the historical or sociologicalfacts.Intellectually speaking the claim of “fragmentation,” I say, descends fromGerman suspicion of French Enlightenment, which around 1800 emerged asRomance, and later in the century was intellectualized as the particularlyGerman theme in professional folklore, history, anthropology, theology, andat last sociology. One finds many central-European intellectuals and theirfollowers early in the twentieth century repeating what they learned aboutthe modern world’s lack of solidarity from Marx, Weber, and the rest,accented by the passing bells of 1914–1918: thus Karl Mannheim, MartinHeidegger, Karl Polanyi, Arnold Hauser, Herbert Marcuse, TheodorAdorno, Max Horkheimer, and many others after the Great War declaringthemselves to be hollow men.The German sociologist and Fascist enthusiast Hans Freyer (1887–1969)wrote in 1923 that “we feel ourselves to be unconfirmed, lacking in meaning,