The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Commerce

288 chapter 24not imagined until Rousseau and especially Adam Smith. Equality of soulsdid not imply anything like equality of condition in this life. 29 On the contrary,fallen man must take up his burden as God’s test. The poor are to berelieved because charity is a Christian duty and a Jewish mitzvah, notbecause the poor servant is entitled to a comfortable life. Until the bourgeoisethicists of the late eighteenth century, whose new policy was carriedout in the nineteenth century, every Stoic, Jewish, Christian, and Muslimsociety placidly accepted slavery, on the principle, for example, of renderingunto Caesar in this life what is Caesar’s. And rendering unto quite a fewother people, too: my lord, my master, my owner, my boss, my priest, myhusband, my father, my older brother.And until the bourgeois ethicists of the late nineteenth century, whose newpolicy was carried out in the twentieth century, almost every society enforcedthe subordination of women, on the principle, for example, that a womanis an imperfect man. And until the bourgeois ethicists of the late twentiethcentury, whose new policy is being carried out in the twenty-first century,Christian societies among others adopted the persecution of homosexuals,on the principle, for example, that anything that causes anxiety to youngheterosexual men is to be assaulted. Whatever the conception of justice,an orderly ancient one or a Protestant modern one, justice is the virtue oftreating with respect whomever should be treated with respect. The rule ofjustice is: no dissing. It is not a rule of prudence or love or any of the othervirtues.Bourgeois societies from ancient Jerusalem to modern Hong Kong havebeen notably, if never perfectly, free. This is because two people doing businessmust deal with each other, not overawe or submit to each other. Sobourgeois society developed a historically unique notion of justice. SamuelFleischacker in recent books has noted that Adam Smith, the theorist ofbourgeois virtues, was a radical egalitarian, quite unimpressed with theclaims of philosophers (say) to superiority over street porters. 30 An oldnotion has survived scrutiny: eighteenth-century liberal philosophers didabandon an appeal to status in favor of an appeal to contract, and the Europeansociety surrounding the philosophers was changing this way, too. SoHenry Maine said in 1861, and Tocqueville, too, in The Ancien Régime andthe French Revolution.By contrast, everyone in Elizabethan England believed in a great chain ofbeing from God through kings to lords to masters to apprentices to women