The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Commerce

380 chapter 35L. Blum’s Friendship, Altruism, and Morality (1980); Elizabeth Anscombe’s“Modern Moral Philosophy” (1958), and Linda Zagzebski’s Virtues of theMind (1996). That’s it. Ethical inquiries seem often to take place so, innonoverlapping conversations.Even moderns with self-consciously ethical projects, in other words,seem spooked by the history of ethics, and resist reading it. The only bookof Simone Weil that appeared in something like the form she intended, TheNeed for Roots: Prelude to a Declaration of Duties towards Mankind (1943[1949]), was a tract explaining the strange defeat of France and imploringher countrymen to recover their rootedness in the mysticism of work andJesus. It begins with a list of thirteen needs of the soul—a small step or twoaway from a list of virtues: order, liberty, responsibility, equality, hierarchism,honor, punishment, freedom of opinion (a ten-page Rousseauianappeal to introduce censorship in obedience to the general will), risk, privateproperty, collective property, truth (with more censorship, this time a“special court . ..for publicly condemning any avoidable error,” with powersof imprisonment over people like Jacques Maritain saying such sillythings as that the ancients never questioned slavery). 3 The rest of the bookconcerns number 14, the need for taking root, enracinement, expressed astranscendent virtues of love and hope and especially faith approachingGod. (Or expressed as the vice of Romance and anti-Semitism.) In accordwith her distaste for the unmystical St. Thomas Aquinas—“perhaps oninsufficient acquaintance,” T. S. Eliot notes dryly in his preface to the Englishtranslation of 1952—her list has no system and no connection to thetraditions she recommends.Even my beloved Simone Weil. Who in 1928 placed first in the entranceexamination for the Ecole Normale Supérieure—Simone de Beauvoir wassecond that year: two women. The Simone Weil who in preparing for her finalexams in moral philosophy at the Ecole assigned herself to study “thoroughly”Aristotle, Bentham, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche; “carefully” Machiavelli,Hobbes, Leibniz, Bergson, Schelling, Fichte, Hegel, and Lenin; and “systematically”the pre-Socratics, the Sophists, Socrates, Plato, Locke, Hume,Berkeley, Spinoza, and Kant. 4 When applicable, in Greek. Even, I lament,this admirable Weil assembles virtues in Hobbesian style from branchesripped from the tree. Homer nods.The University of Chicago economist and historian Robert Fogel, totake a more recent example, is a great historical scholar of economic and