The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Commerce

anachronistic courage in the bourgeoisie 215Most of us in modern democracies therefore have forgotten what an“aristocracy” literally is. American university students believe “upper class”is merely a fancy word for “rich.” European and especially British studentshave less difficulty understanding caste-like classes. The young Americansbegin to understand if they are urged to think of European “class” as equivalentto American “color.”Most Americans therefore think of the Kennedys as “aristocrats,” thoughthe older ones are only two or three generations from proletarian origins—Senator Edward’s grandfather Kennedy grew up poor—and none are professionalsoldiers. It’s a metaphor. Professors and artists since the latenineteenth century have preened themselves as a “new aristocracy,” thoughof merit (they modestly say) rather than of birth, as though there were sucha thing. Such a category mistake among democrats would have puzzled aRenaissance duke with a nine-hundred-year-old name.When in the sixteenth century the new Dutch Republic threw off Spanishand other dukes and kings, its aristocracy lost the mechanisms ofrefreshment by new ennoblements. The aristocratic rump, now an entirelyclosed class, remained somewhat influential in the affairs of the republic,though continuing to shrink. But no one in the Netherlands mistook thenouveau-riche merchant class, the regents, with a training in accountingand classical languages, for literal aristocrats, with a training in violence andleadership.Income had nothing to do with it, and still doesn’t. There persists inplaces like Holland and Sweden, now five or more centuries after the sanguinarydeeds that elevated it, an aristocracy consisting of a few folk livingin modernized castles behind hedges. Though democrats now, they stillpossess the self-confidence of hereditary rulers, often taking up militarycareers. My friend the economist Axel Leijonhvufvud (literally, “lion head”)comes from such a family, ranking high in the Swedish aristocracy, adescendent of Norse kings. It causes an American peasant of Norwegiandescent like me to swoon.We all need to be courageous in life. But even our physical courage cannotbe merely aristocratic virtù, if we wish to stay out of jail. It cannot beHomeric or even old Roman, certainly not olde-tyme as filtered through thestories from Homer to Hollywood. “How much longer,” asked John StuartMill in 1869, “is one form of society and life to content itself with the moralitymade for another?” 8 It is my main concern here. We ordinary, unarmed