The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Commerce

humility and truth 191what you have listened to—really listened to, an art of close listening. Austrianeconomics is the natural home for a humanistic approach to the economy,which acknowledges, as economics after Smith mainly has not, thathumans are speaking and listening and interpreting animals. Smith believedthat the propensity to truck and barter was based on the faculty of reason—so much for Max U and the reason half of the Enlightenment project. Buthe added, and believed, “and the faculty of speech,” which is the other, freedomhalf, ignored after his death. 25The habit of listening, really listening in Lavoie’s academic life was strictlyparalleled, that is, by his belief that hermeneutics worked also in the economy.Adam Smith was again wiser than his followers. Smith’s butcherand baker are not merely Max U folk who treat the rest of the world as alamentable constraint on their own willfulness, a sort of vending machine,as I have said. 26 A person in business depends on an imaginative engagementwith the customers and suppliers, to guess what they are thinking,to see the witness in them. The Quakers were good businesspeople. Therigorously humble Amish are well-known as brilliant farmers, within theirself-imposed constraints of no tractors and no electricity. An alert businesswoman“subjects herself to every neighbor.” She listens and learns fromother people and from the world, through that selfless respect for reality.The businesswoman’s goods are difficult of achievement, requiring greatsouledness,but depend also on listening to what people want and the worldwill allow.The business section of the Chicago Tribune has a feature on Mondayscalled “My Biggest Mistake,” in which managers of small businesses confessto this or that expensive failure to answer the witness of reality: not listeningto customers here; not listening to employees there. It is hard to imaginea similar column in a publication directed at the clerisy: “My biggestscientific mistake” in running an experiment on oxidative phosphorylationor “my biggest artistic mistake” in wrapping a building with cellophane. Theclerisy chooses never to stoop. Considering the allegedly modern temptationsto pride in capitalist enterprise it will seem odd to say so, but Lavoiebelieved, as I do, that a capitalist at her pretty-good best is humble. McDonald’soffers a humble meal for working people at half an hour’s minimumwages. Wal-Mart listens closely to what its customers want.