The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Commerce

44good workBenjamin Hunnicutt argues in his books on the work obsession of Americans,giving substance to Herbert Marcuse’s claims, that long hours—whichHunnicutt thinks have not much fallen since the 1930s—are connected toour great Need-Love for commodities, the “New Economic Gospel of Consumption,”new in the 1920s. “The job,” Hunnicutt writes, “resembles a secularreligion, promising personal identity, salvation, purpose and direction,community, and a way for those who believe truly and simply in ‘hard work’to make sense out of the confusion of life.” 1Even in work-mad America and Japan, Hunnicutt is mistaken about thehours worked, because people now start work later in life and add on manyyears of retirement at the end, which the life chances in the good old days didnot permit. 2 But he’s right about the making of the job into an idol. It’s a specificallybourgeois sin, because only the bourgeoisie thinks of work as a calling.But it is also, balanced and in moderation, a bourgeois virtue. Laborareest orare, to work is to pray, said the Benedictine monks of Monte Cassinoin the sixth century, showing in the very phrase a break with the classicalworld’s contempt for manual labor. In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuriesin the Greek Orthodox world “painting became a holy and highlyrespected mode of fulfilling the requirement of manual labor prescribed forall monks.” 3 Max Weber claimed that Tibetan and Christian monks represent“the first human being who lives rationally, who works methodicallyand by rational means toward a goal,” namely a religious goal. 4Whether or not that is so, the social theorists in thirteenth-centuryEurope, and specifically the learned Franciscan and Dominican friars at the