The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Commerce

16the good of courageI am preaching, as everyone should, in favor of “virtue.” I commend it toyou. But in its etymology it contains a worry: “virtue” is constructed inLatin from vir, “adult male human.” 1 True, even in Roman times virtus hadwidened beyond “manliness” to include pretty much what we mean by itnow. But as late as Tacitus around AD 100 it was still the normal word formanly valor on the battlefield. One of the bizarre features of the Germani,Tacitus wrote, is that their women were valorous in this sense: “The [German]woman should not think herself exempted from valor [virtute],” sincewomen accompanied their men to the battlefield, as cheerleaders and sometimesas active participants. A woman’s “virtue” in the male and modernsense among the Romans was pudicitia, “modesty, purity.” 2In non-Christianizing works through the Renaissance the Latin wordand its Romance derivatives kept this whiff of the men’s locker room.Machiavelli especially had in mind men, and violent, proud ones, notwomen, when he praised the virtù of the prince or of a republic. Thus Milton’sSatan in Paradise Lost, back from his mission to Eden, addresses thehosts of hell: “Thrones, dominions, princedoms, virtues, powers.” 3 Whatmade Il Principe so scandalous for centuries after its posthumous publicationis that in a religious age it praised no feminine virtue. In all his writingsMachiavelli associated Christianity with effeminacy, and with states thatfailed. In return the men of the Roman Church kept his writings on theindex of forbidden books from 1559 until 1850.In modern Italian virtù has lost its association with men. The historianCarlo Ginzburg thinks that Machiavelli’s usage was in its breadth idiosyncratic,