The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Commerce

wage slavery 471anything but dishonoring. The historically antiwork attitude may have beenwhat prevented classical Mediterranean civilization or medieval Chinesesociety from industrializing. The Afrikaners of 1910 had no experience ofwork and no respect for it, which determined their policies toward hardworkingXhosa peasants and hard-working Jewish immigrants. Nowadays itis a problem for many poor societies. Women and slaves work. Real mensmoke.Englishmen in the seventeenth century, for example, had no conceptionof dignity beyond what the sociologists call “ascription,” that is, rank. Theresult is that seventeenth-century science used gentlemanly status as a warrantfor believability. William Petty (1623–1687), one of the founders of theEnglish Royal Society, spoke of a gentleman as someone who had “suchestate, real and personal, as whereby he is able to subsist without the practiceof any mercenary employments.” 9 Only a gentleman could have honor,which was only gradually coming to mean our “honesty.”A gentleman was precisely someone without an occupation. The contemporaryFrench phrase was l’honnête homme, the “honorable” man being onewho did not work. The early twentieth-century irony about this conventionis to call a bum a “gentleman of the road,” as earlier a highwayman was a“gentleman of the highway.” Such a man is very willing to brawl, but not tobe seen to work even at that. Thus the Prince Hal of Henry IV drinks andwhores away the days and nights with Falstaff through parts 1 and 2, and weare indulgently amused. We look for virtue in this romanticizing of idleness,on the circular argument that an idle man is a sort of gentleman and thereforemust be virtuous. Prince Hal explains, and Shakespeare in his protobourgeoisway was recommending, that princes need this common touch.Down to the nineteenth century, with fading echoes even now, thephrase “a gentleman of business” was considered an absurdity, a flat contradiction.The economist David Ricardo wrote in 1817 that a remission of rentto farmers from their landlords “would only enable some farmers to live likegentlemen.” 10 He feared that having an income without work would corruptactive men of business: “gentlemen” were nonworkers. Dickens reasonedsimilarly. He portrayed gentlemen without occupations as parasites. 11 Yethis heroes, all of them crypto-gentlemen, achieve success not by workingbut by inheriting. He had a conservative’s nostalgia for a simpler time whenthe rich were charitable and the poor unspoilt and income came down on agentleman like a gentle rain.