The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Commerce

370 chapter 34Bacon’s text in fact gives no hint of viewing Aristotle or Aquinas or anyoneelse as his ethical guide. He never mentions them and never gives analysessimilar to theirs. He needed no study but what accrued to him by naturalwit. His “refinement” in ethics is behavioral, in the manner of Machiavellior Hobbes, not philosophical: this is how to succeed in life, “success” measuredby proud titles, the Lord Chancellor’s mace and the correspondingopportunity to solicit bribes. I do not know why these hard men of the seventeenthcentury were so unwilling to build on the ethical tradition of theWest. Perhaps they wished merely to put away everything the Middle Agestook from the classical world, rather like the scientific contempt for religioustradition in our own times.It’s no hot news to observe that Machiavelli was the pioneer in such anew ethics. Ethics in Aristotle or Aquinas or Adam Smith concerns whatpeople are and how they act, tested against a higher standard of the good ofthe polis or the approach to God or the simple and obvious system of naturalliberty. Ethics in The Prince, by contrast, concerns the will of the prince.There is no other test. The test is so to speak aesthetic, the prince as artist ofthe state. The book is a manual for painting a “successful” state, successmeasured by the fulfillment of the prince’s artistic will. What do you wishto paint, young master? Here, let me show you the techniques. Hold thebrush thus.Isaiah Berlin sees Machiavelli as a hinge in Western thought, as realizingsuddenly in his consideration of l’arte del stato, statecraft, that Christian orany other comprehensive system of ethics is one thing and Prudence Onlyis another. Machiavelli is followed centuries later by a wider movementmaking the same argument, Romanticism, with its turning of everything,including politics, into Art.The historian Carlo Ginzburg has developed some startling evidence forthis claim about Machiavelli. 2 He notes that the phrase usually translatedsimply as “politics” in Il Principe is in fact as I said “the art of the state.”What of it? This: Aquinas had noted in his commentary on Aristotle’sPolitics, which did have to do with the art of a polis, that the Latin translationfrom the Greek has two words in play: agere, to do, as against facere,tomake. These relate to the Greek praxis/phronēsis for the doing-word andpoesis/techne for the making-word. Aquinas (who did not read Greek, by theway) preferred agere, “to do”—precisely because it related to ethics. Art, ars,techne, poesis, “the making of objects,” the Divine Doctor noted, does not