The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Commerce

2 apologyVolkswagen, all of them, used slave labor, with impunity. The bourgeoisbankers of Switzerland stored gold for the Nazis. Many a businessman is anethical shell or worse. Even the virtues of the bourgeoisie, Lord knows, donot lead straight to heaven.But the assaults on the alleged vices of the bourgeoisie and capitalismafter 1848 made an impossible Best into the enemy of an actual Good. Theyled in the twentieth century to some versions of hell. In the twenty-first century,please—dear Lord, please—let us avoid another visit to hell.I don’t much care how “capitalism” is defined, so long as it is not defineda priori to mean vice incarnate. The prejudging definition was favored byRousseau—though he did not literally use the word “capitalism,” still to becoined—and by Proudhon, Marx, Bakunin, Kropotkin, Luxembourg,Veblen, Goldman, Polanyi, Sartre. Less obviously the same definition wasused by their opponents Bentham, Ricardo, Rand, Friedman, Becker. All ofthem, left and right, defined commercial society at the outset to be bad byany standard higher than successful greed.Such a definition makes pointless an inquiry into the good and bad ofmodern commercial society. I think this is what economists like DouglassNorth, looking recently into the history of institutions, have been seeing:that there’s something going on from 1500 to the present beyond maximumutility on a narrow definition. That is what the middle ground of socialthinking in the past three centuries, with which I associate myself, hasbelieved: Montesquieu, Smith, Tocqueville, Keynes, Aron, Hirschman. Ifmodern capitalism is defined to be the same thing as Greed—“the restlessnever-ending process of profit-making alone ...,this boundless greed afterriches,” as Marx put it in chapter 1 of Capital, drawing on an anticommercialtheme originating in Aristotle—then that settles it, before looking at theevidence.There’s no evidence, actually, that greed or miserliness or self-interestwas new in the sixteenth or the nineteenth or any other century. Auri sacrafames, “for gold the infamous hunger,” is from The Aeneid, book 3, line 57,not from Benjamin Franklin or Advertising Age. The propensity to truck andbarter is human nature. Commerce is not some evil product of recent manufacture.Commercial behavior is one of the world’s oldest professions. Wehave documentation of it from the earliest cuneiform writing, in clay businessletters from Kish or Ashur offering compliments to your lovely wifeand making a deal for copper from Anatolia or lapis lazuli from