The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Commerce

38p & s and the capitalist lifePrudence is the central ethical virtue of the bourgeoisie, in the way thatcourage is of the aristocrat-hero or love is of the peasant-saint. But the pointis that it is not the only one. In Adam Smith’s book about prudence,An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776), heembedded it among the other virtues, such as justice and especially temperance.Smith himself provided the details of the embedding in his onlyother book, The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759). More people nowadaysare reading Smith this way, as an ethical philosopher.If Smith had been also a modern econometrician he would have put it asfollows. Take any sort of willed behavior you wish to understand—broodingon a vote, for example, or birthing children, or buying lunch, or adopting theBessemer process in the making of steel. Call it B. Brooding, buying, borrowing,birthing, bequeathing, bonding, boasting, blessing, bidding, bartering,bargaining, baptizing, banking, baking. It can be put on a scale andmeasured; or perhaps seen to be present or absent. You want to give anaccount of B, a little story about what causes it to happen, with quantitativeweights on the causes if your ambition is scientific rather than philosophical.What the hard men from Machiavelli to Judge Posner are claiming is thatyou can explain B with Prudence Only, the P variables of price, pleasure,payment, pocketbook, purpose, planning, property, profit, prediction, punishment,prison, purchasing, power, practice, in a word, the Profane.Smith and Mill and Keynes and Hirschman and quite a few other economistshave replied that, no, you have forgotten love and courage, justiceand temperance, faith and hope, that is, social Solidarity, the S variable of