The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Commerce

the pagan-ethical bourgeois 297the West. Indeed the two Japanese intellectuals Inoue discusses as beginningin the 1920s to drain jinkaku of its hierarchical meaning were among the1 percent of the population professing Christianity. As Robert Bellah notes,in Japan “Christians played a role out of all proportion to their numbers inthe cause of social reform in the period before World War II.” 19In an aristocratic and hierarchical society of status and shame, the fourpagan virtues lead up to honor = the courage, justice, and faith to take thefront rank in the line of battle. In our bourgeois and egalitarian society ofcontract and guilt, they lead up to honesty = the courage, justice, and faithto be reliable in making a deal.The ethical bourgeois can be seen in his enemies. Consider Jean-Paul Sartre,who remained a fellow traveler long after Khrushchev’s destalinizationspeech, long after the Hungarian Revolution, long after the disappointmentsof actually existing socialism. “The philosopher of liberty,” RaymondAron wrote, “never managed, or resigned himself, to see communism as itis. He never diagnosed Soviet totalitarianism, the cancer of the century, andhe never condemned it as such.” 20 In his youth and in his age he was, withSimone de Beauvoir and that generation of French intellectuals, unthinkinglyantibourgeois. It is ironic, by the way, that Sartre and Beauvoir bothused metaphors of market dealings in describing their “open” relationship—well...open for Sartre—and the sexual ideal of free men andwomen.The ethical content of Sartre’s early work such as Being and Nothingnesshas been brilliantly drawn out by Ronald Santoni, in his 1995 book Bad Faith,Good Faith, and Authenticity in Sartre’s Early Philosophy. Santoni sees thepassage from “bad faith” (mauvaise foi) to Heideggerian “authenticity” asethical—this against the popular parody of existentialism as amoral, a ValleyGirl “Whatever.” Bad faith is lying to oneself. Good faith attempts at least notto lie. The third and most noble state, authenticity, ascends to a still higherlevel, accepting the ambiguities and ethical responsibilities of a full life.But Sartre seems to be importing a specifically political concern into hisethical thinking. Good faith, or sincerity, is (hélas, Sartre would add) a bourgeoisvirtue, that is to say, a virtue the capitalist system would honor, at leastin its preachments. In this way of looking at it, bad faith would be the mannerof life of the very worst of the bourgeoisie. In writing of good faith,