The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Commerce

298 chapter 25Sartre is considering, with distaste, the project of liberalism, by a Europeandefinition of the word, which tries to imagine and bring into being a goodcapitalism. Santoni observes that Sartre spends very few pages on goodfaith, but entire books on bad. Perhaps the explanation for his brevity is thatgood faith is precisely the best project—but withal he strongly feels an ethicallyinadequate project—of the detested bourgeoisie.The probourgeois theorists, on the contrary, would claim that the best ofcapitalism is good faith, which in Santoni’s words “pre-reflectively acceptsrather than flees human reality. In short, it is self-acceptance as freedom.”Sartre seems to be suggesting “Yes, good faith is the best from a bad lot. It isthe best from les bourgeois, and therefore still very bad. What one shouldaspire to is authenticity, an altogether unbourgeois condition.” This politicalconcern would perhaps explain what Santoni calls “Sartre’s bafflingcounterintuitive claim that good faith [or ‘sincerity,’ for that matter] sharesthe project and goal of bad faith.” 21 Faith is bourgeois. If I’ve got this right,Sartre would fit also into the dogmatic secularism of French intellectuals atthe time, against foi of a churchly sort. No foi, thank you, good or bad: we’reFrench leftists.The true best, that third thing above the plane of mere faith whethergood or bad, is authenticity, that “self-recovery” or “deliverance.” It is anaristocratic virtue, which would recommended it to the Marxist clerisy ofSartre’s time. But in political theory it follows from the Revolution. NeitherSartre nor Santoni says this in so many words. Sartre claims that a cowardlyreaction to the anxiety of being and nonbeing is the source of inauthenticity.But my point is that the bad faith vs. good faith yielding finally toauthenticity fits the dialectic structure of the philosophical argument andfits, too, Sartre’s political beliefs.Sartre’s Revolution is to be led by philosophers. In this interpretationSartre accords a glorious place to the clerisy, that embodiment of “reflection,”to use the Sartrean vocabulary, because the clerisy leads humanity,with a self-consciously grasped “willed choice.” One is tempted to note cynically:What other class would elevate a sheer intellectual activity to worldchanging?And what other class would accord orthodoxy, upright opinion,such power?In 1955 Simone de Beauvoir defended the Stalinist orthodoxy that sheand Jean-Paul espoused in this way: “Truth is one, error is many. It is thereforeno coincidence if the right wing claims to be pluralist.” 22 The clerisy