The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Commerce

a brief for the bourgeois virtues 9Romantics in favor of unbalanced love and courage, by an apotheosisamong Benthamites of prudence only and among Kantians of reason as justiceand temperance only. The vision of a balanced ethical system wasfurther spoiled by an enthusiastic belief in antimarket versions of faith andhope among the new evangelicals, religious and secular. John Stuart Millcontained in his life most of these early nineteenth-century strains ofthought (except the important one of evangelical Christianity), embodyingmany of the shifting faiths of his age. A lot changed in the mind of Europefrom the Lisbon Earthquake to the June Days, from 1755 to 1848.Nonetheless until those June Days most artists and intellectuals, the newclerisy, accepted capitalism, well before much of its material fruit was evident.J. S. Mill in the first edition of his Principles of Political Economy in 1848and Daniel Defoe and Thomas Paine and Thomas Macaulay and VictorHugo and Alessandro Manzoni had associated free markets with liberalismand with the new freedoms of 1689, 1776, 1789, and 1830.By 1848, materiallyand politically speaking, capitalism had in practice triumphed, at least inEurope and its offshoots. It was beginning—just beginning—to uplift thewretched of the earth. Macaulay wrote in 1830:If we were to prophesy that in the year 1930 a population of fifty millions, betterfed, clad, and lodged than the English of our time, will cover these islands;that Sussex and Huntingdonshire will be wealthier than the wealthiest parts ofthe West Riding of Yorkshire now are,...that machines constructed on principlesyet undiscovered will be in every house . . . many people would think usinsane. ...Ifany person had told the Parliament which met in perplexity andterror after the crash in 1720 that in 1830 the wealth of England would surpassall their wildest dreams, ...that London would be twice as large and twice aspopulous, and that nevertheless the rate of mortality would have diminished toone half of what it was then, ...that stage coaches would run from London toYork in twenty-four hours, that men would be in the habit of sailing withoutwind, and would be beginning to ride without horses, our ancestors would havegiven as much credit to the prediction as they gave to Gulliver’s Travels. Yet theprediction would have been true. 15Yet after 1848, or a little before, the European clerisy formed up into antibourgeoisgaggles of bohemians and turned to complaining about the bourgeoisvirtues that had nourished them. Marx at the dawn observed that a“small section of the ruling class cuts itself adrift, and joins the revolutionaryclass,” as, for example, Engels and especially he himself had. 16 It was not such asmall section. What César Graña described as the “modern literary irritability”