The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Commerce

dropping the virtues, 1532–1958 373Europeans in the early modern times when this atheoretical attitudetoward the virtues got underway had not literally forgotten the Platonicroot of the Good, or the Aristotelian branches. After all, they read Latin well,and sometimes Greek, and were raised on Cicero, that clear-headed popularizer.Until the seventeenth century, in fact, and aside from the Italianbooks of Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio, Ariosto, and Tasso, with Frenchromances, there was in Europe not a great deal in the way of non-Latin ornon-Greek literature to be read. The readers were anyway Christianssteeped in the pagan and theological virtues, 4 + 3 = 7. Until the twentiethcentury the prestige of the classical languages kept the books analyzing thepagan virtues alive, as until the twentieth century the prestige of Christianitykept the books analyzing the theological virtues alive. Every literate personfrom Machiavelli to Bertrand Russell knew the seven virtues and waseven acquainted to some degree with the body of reflection that supportedtheir system. Adam Smith, a late writer in the tradition, stands four-squareon five of them—trimmed, as I said, of faith and hope.What appears to have intervened rather is not sheer ignorance but adropping of the system as a system, replaced by a new habit of making upvirtues on the spot out of social theories or social graces. The authority ofthe Philosopher and of the Divine Doctor was challenged. The New Sciences,certainly, encouraged Europeans to retheorize the social and philosophicalworld as Galileo, Descartes, and Newton had retheorized thephysical. Every self-respecting theorist became his own Aristotle or Aquinas.Perhaps too the new practice has to do with traditions of medievalcourtly love or Renaissance courtliness. Social grace (Castiglione’s sprezzatura)or nonchalance (disinvoltura) of a distinctly non-Stoic and non-Christian sort becomes at court the master virtue. 11Take Jane Austen. Austen was an ethical writer, very far from an easy aestheticismthat says there is no such thing as a moral or an immoral marriage,that marriages are simply well or badly arranged. Remove ethical evaluationfrom an Austen novel and you have removed its movement. All her novels aretales of ethical development. And ethics for whom? Surely for the class ofmiddling landed wealth she came from and which she described, you mightsay. Her books are in fact notably undescriptive of these lives—the servantspresent in modest numbers around every character, for example, are nevergiven voice and are indeed hardly ever mentioned; nor the children. A roomor a country prospect is never fully characterized in the way of a Scott. She is