The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Commerce

the pagan-ethical bourgeois 299alone can experience a “radical conversion”—note the revolutionary rhetorichere—maintaining nonetheless “ambiguity.” Ambiguity, understand, isnot a bad thing in such a theology, so long as the proper clerisy is in attendanceto interpret the signs. The blessed confusion gives the clerisy, whethersecular or religious, its leading role in the state. Ambiguity therefore isbeloved of Sartre.The clerisy is uniquely positioned, says Sartre, to accept responsibilityand moral agency. One is here inclined to call the preacher of ethicalresponsibility to account for “the cruel, duplicitous stratagems employed bythe polygamist Sartre in [sexual] love,” as Santoni puts it. Or to wonder howan advocate of moral agency could so long admire Communist tyrannies. 23Bad faith, Sartre claimed, is a flight from freedom, adopting, for example,the absurd conventions of French bourgeois society. Bourgeois good faithmight be admitted as a stage “laying the foundation” for authenticity, as inorthodox Communist thought the success of the bourgeoisie lays the foundationfor the revolution and for Communism.But that hopelessly bourgeois good faith or sincerity, Sartre is saying, isin the end impossible. One cannot possibly, contrary to what Santoni hopes,“rescue good faith from the controlling tentacles of bad faith” (p. xxxix).The liberal project, which is Santoni’s and mine but of course not Sartre’s,is ethically impossible. Sincerity, in Sartre’s puzzling words, is a “phenomenonof bad faith.” Only a faux-aristocratic authenticity is possible, for aselect few.Sartre was wrong. The bourgeois project is on balance good and has inlarge part succeeded. The Other, such as the working class, Sartre claims, is“menaced” by capitalism (Santoni’s word, p. xxxvi). I don’t believe so. Thatparticular Other has for one thing become bourgeois. And the remainingproletariat, and other Others, such as women, became free and prosperouswithin capitalism, as well as ethically complete. The goal of a society inwhich “each-for-itself affirms and promotes the freedom of the Other”(Santoni again) is a good description of what bourgeois capitalism has insober fact accomplished.In book 9 of The Spirit of the Laws, chapters 1–5, Judith Shklar observed,“Montesquieuattributed all the commercial virtues to citizens [of Athens]. ...Frugality, prudence, honesty, caution, these are the commercial traits of