The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Commerce

10 apologyabout bourgeois life, evident in Stendhal, Poe, Baudelaire, Flaubert, and lateDickens, became after the failed revolutions of 1848 a political creed. 17 Thesons of bourgeois fathers became enchanted in the 1840s and 1850s by therevival of secularized faith called nationalism and of secularized hope calledsocialism.In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries they brought Europeanhigh civilization and then its rulers along with them, and afterward thewhole world: thus Mill (in his later years), Marx, Engels, Mazzini, Carlyle,Morris, Ruskin, Chernyshevsky, Renan, Zola, Kropotkin, Bellamy, Tolstoy,Shaw, Hobson, Lenin. Thus the “International” (1871/1888), from the Frenchoriginal: “Arise ye prisoners of starvation, / Arise ye wretched of the earth. /For justice thunders condemnation: / A better world’s in birth.” 18 Or on itsnationalist side in 1841—the poem was in fact an appeal for German unityat a time when nationalism was liberal, not an appeal for the German conquestof Europe—“Deutschland, Deutschland über alles, / Über alles in derWelt.”In its hopeful faith the clerisy—Emerson in 1858 spoke of “the artist, thescholar, and in general the clerisy”—sometimes evoked a nostalgia for thearistocratic virtues of a Europe before the economists and calculators tookcharge. 19 Sometimes it imagined a peasant-cum-proletarian future, aNowhere of postbourgeois virtues. Sometimes both. Baudelaire in 1857quoted with approval Poe’s sour observation in 1849, “The world is infestednow with a new sect of philosophers....They are theBelievers in everythingOld....Their High Priest in the East is Charles Fourier, in the West HoraceGreeley.” 20As George Bernard Shaw noted in 1912, “The first half of the 19th century”despised and pitied the Middle Ages as barbarous, cruel, superstitious, and ignorant....Thesecond half saw no hope for mankind except in the recovery of thefaith, the art, the humanity of the Middle Ages. ...For that was how men felt,and how some of them spoke, in the early days of the Great Conversion, whichproduced, first, such books as the Latter Day Pamphlets of Carlyle, Dickens’ HardTimes, and the tracts and sociological novels of the Christian Socialists, and lateron the Socialist movement which has now spread all over the world. 21For such antibourgeois nostalgias the twentieth century paid thebutcher’s bill. Everywhere except in the United States the payoff from capitalismto the ordinary man came too late to stop the rise of socialist parties.