The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Commerce

358 chapter 32A strange but powerful support for antimonism is Machiavelli. Berlinelsewhere argues persuasively that Machiavelli’s originality—what alarmspeople about him nearly five centuries after his death—is precisely hisuncovering of “an insoluble dilemma, the planting of a permanent questionmark . . . that ends equally ultimate, equally sacred, may contradict eachother, that entire systems of value may come into collision without possibilityof rational arbitration.” 17 The prudence and justice of the paganvirtues, which Machiavelli admired, may conflict with love and faith of theChristian virtues, which he regarded with contempt. I wonder if the beliefthat virtues could not conflict is as ancient as Berlin implies. Perhaps it isonly a certain kind of Christian who believes that rational arbitration alwaysworks. Greek tragedy accepts the conflict, for example.It’s an Italian sensibility. If you and your friend are not playing the samelanguage game, you will of course come to different evaluations, as Italiansare always aware and usually calm about. The Italian film La meglio gioventù(2003) tells of the love that binds friends and family despite differences.Nicola becomes a progressive psychiatrist; his brother Matteo joins the policein the fraught times of the Red Brigade. Giulia involves herself in violent revolution;her sister in law Giovanna becomes a judge volunteering to putdown the Mafia in Sicily. These are insoluble dilemmas, radically differentforms of life. Yet without possibility of rational arbitration between theirviews, the Italians in the film keep faith, lotsverbondenheid. It is a grace thatis often hard for theoretically equipped Americans, blue or red, to practice.Sen has traced the surprising influence of this bit of Italian grace fromAntonio Gramsci to Piero Sraffa to Ludwig Wittgenstein in the Cambridge of1929 down to ordinary language philosophy in the 1950s. 18 GiacomoLeopardi, the early Romantic poet, shows often the usual displaced religiosityin his Romantic yearning for L’infinito. But he acknowledges too—indeed,states as an axiom of his reflections on life here below—that “the world is aleague of scoundrels against men of good will.” 19 Such talk is impossible fromEnglish transcendental monists like Coleridge and Wordsworth, or Shelleyand Keats, according to whom truth is beauty, beauty truth, recollected intranquility. Byron and Browning on the other hand talk like Leopardi, andoften. But Byron and Browning, after all, were honorary Italians.Ordinary, nontheoretical Americans understand the Italian point withoutphilosophical instruction. The clerisy notes with puzzlement thatAmericans for instance are both liberal and republican, committed to both