The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Commerce

needing virtues 399some counsel more prudent [sōphronesteron, lit. more temperately, moresoberly]. 19The Melians demurred and the Athenians besieged them.The Athenian envoys were articulating a bracing, tough-minded philosophyof value, attractive to übermenchen and especially überherren everywhere.A lot of intellectual men really like it. In the 1950s it reached a sort ofclimax among intellectual men, especially American professors and writersworried about the masculinity of intellectual work. It reduces in Benthamitestyle all other so-called virtues to one, prudence—with a nicely machocourage in attendance. Prudence rules.If one takes the courageous, realpolitik view, the theory of numero uno,the belief that nice guys finish last, then prudence in turn reduces to power.It reduces, that is, to the will of the strong. It is aristocracy in action. If onetakes on the other hand a more Enlightened, universalist and utopian view,then prudence reduces to utility, that is, to the summed wills of everyone. Itis peasantry in action. If one takes finally a more Scientific, eugenic, justthe-factsview, then prudence reduces to selection, that is, to the summedwills of nobody. In the first two cases it is will that counts, not mutuality oraffection or other merely bourgeois sentiments. In the third it is nature’sown will. The strong do what they can. And so in the next winter after thedialogue the Athenians broke through the walls of Melos, executed all themen, and sold all the women and children into slavery.The political rhetorician Robert Hariman has noted that “realism” inpolitics is not a stance outside of ethics, as it claims to be, but is on the contrarythe adoption of a very particular ethos. Realists in international relationsfollowing George Kennan and Hans Morgenthau, such as HenryKissinger, like to think of themselves as tough guys dealing with reality. Asthe philosopher James Rachels put it, one reason so many people adopt “psychologicalegoism”—the realistic notion that after all everyone is selfish—despite overwhelming evidence that it is factually wrong, and logicallyincoherent besides, is that it “appears to be a hardheaded, deflationary attitudetoward human pretensions.” 20 It’s a pose, and a masculine one at that.The guys get the pose from the Machiavellian line in Western culture,and before Machiavelli from the Melian Dialogue, or the stories of King Saulpersecuting David. “Real peace,” they say proudly, “will be the down-toearthproduct of the real world, manufactured by realistic, calculating