The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Commerce

faith as identity 157One can show it historically, too. “Far from traditional society being suffusedwith brotherly gemeinschaftlich virtues,” the sociologist Ray Pahl hasconcluded, “the reverse appears to be the case. Counter to what the classicalsociological tradition appears to suggest [Simmel, for example], Aristotelianstyles of friendship [“for the friend’s own sake”] re-emerged with the comingof commercial-industrial society in the eighteenth century....Counterto what is assumed in much modern social theory, it was precisely thespread of market exchange in the eighteenth century that led to the developmentof new benevolent bonds.” 19Pahl believes, rather less persuasively, that friendship between men flourishedunusually in twelfth-century Europe. Peter of Blois declared in the1180s, “Are not my friends my inner self, whom I cherish and who take careof me in a sweet commerce of services, in an identity of affection?” 20 Butwhat is clearer than his medieval evidence from monks and heretics is thatin early modern Europe people were by modern standards extraordinarilyfeckless. Shakespeare’s plots are filled with betrayals—far above the frequencyin Ibsen’s or O’Neill’s, which on the contrary are often grim illustrationsof lotsverbondenheid in a bourgeois society. Even in a Shakespearecomedy everyone is fooling someone else, lying, disguising, dissembling.Stephen Greenblatt traces the theme of perfidy in Shakespeare to his supposedsecret Catholicism, in a world in which exposing such a secret wasfatal. 21 Shakespeare is not alone in portraying an exceptionally shifty worldin England around 1600. Lawrence Stone concluded that “so far as survivingevidence goes, England between 1500 and 1660 was relatively cold, suspiciousand violence prone.” 22Pahl cites the ironically named Boncompagno da Signa, who in hisAmicitia of 1205 paints a similarly grim picture of faithless friends in Italy.One Paolo da Certaldo wrote a Book of Good Practices around 1360 with 388precepts for merchants, among them “test [a purported friend], not oncebut a hundred times,” a sentiment repeated in the same words a half centurylater by Giovanni Morelli, another Florentine businessman and moralist. 23Certaldo quotes a proverb, “He who trusts not, will not be deceived,” andMorelli advises the novice merchant, “Above all, if you wish to have friendsor relationships, make sure you don’t need them. ...Cash...[is] the bestfriend or relative you can have.” 24But Pahl argues, following Allan Silver, that the economistic exchangemodel beloved of tough-guy sociologists and anthropologists in the early