The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Commerce

14 apologyIII.Probatio A: Modern Capitalism Makes Us RicherThe first generations of professional historians, chiefly Catholic intellectualsand German nationalists allied with Romantic litterateurs, had claimedthat all things French and English and Enlightened and Revolutionary aredirty. They argued that people in olden times were innocent and good, andthat a market-absent purity is to be found in the medieval history of DasVolk. Since 1900, though, historians have found reason to doubt their GermanDoktorvaters. They have found markets and maximizing in the thirteenthas much as in the twentieth century.Most of what we are taught in school about the economy of traditionalEurope turns out to be wrong, because it is inspired by the earlier, anticapitalisttale. Max Weber in 1905, beginning the revision, declared that greed is“not in the least identical with capitalism, and still less with its spirit.” “Itshould be taught in the kindergarten of cultural history that this naïve ideaof capitalism must be given up once and for all.” The lust for gold “has beencommon to all sorts and conditions of men at all times and in all countriesof the earth.” 27I mean by “capitalism” merely private property and free labor withoutcentral planning, regulated by the rule of law and by an ethical consensus.Above all modern capitalism encourages innovation. Joel Mokyr hasemphasized the institutions of modern Europe that prevented the sins ofenvy or of anger or injustice from killing innovation. 28None of the features of such a “capitalism,” however, were entirelyunknown, or even very rare before 1800 or 1600 or 1453, in Aleppo or Timbuktuor Tlatelolco. Encouragement to innovation is certainly not uniqueto modern capitalism, or to modern Europe. Otherwise we would not havewoven clothing and tossed pottery—though nowadays the encouragementto innovation is very great, bordering on lunacy. Long-distance trade carriedMayan obsidian to Oklahoma and Baltic amber to Egypt. Large-scaleenterprise and sophisticated financial markets, too, can be found in MingChina and fourth-century Athens. One could get rich in ancient Romewithout inspiring retaliation by the state. Official governmental sympathyto profit making is less common outside of bourgeois Europe, but it is notunheard of in Phoenicia and Bombay.“Capitalism existed,” declared Weber, “in China, India, Babylon, in theclassic world, and in the Middle Ages.” 29 The historical anthropologist Jack