The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Commerce

the rich 485profit making. 11 He criticizes, in a figure of argument going back to Aristotle,“thosewho accumulate possessions without end and without measure.” 12The Greek word is apeiros, without limit. It finds echo in modern characterizationsof capitalism from the left, the myth of Kapitalismus I mentionedearlier—an allegedly new propensity to accumulate for accumulation’s sakewithout limit. The Greek to apeiron, the unlimited (greed), is the verymeaning of “capitalism” in Marx and others, such as R. H. Tawney, amongMarx’s followers.Thomassin instances “those who hoard huge quantities of wheat in orderto sell at what to them is the opportune moment.” They foolishly think“they are doing nothing ...against divine law, because, as they imagine, theydo no harm.” By contrast, wrote Thomassin, “if no one acquired . . . morethan he needed for his maintenance [that is, did not hoard wheat] ...therewould be no destitute in the world at all.” In other words, as Father Maurinsaid, “people would become better / if they stopped trying to be better off.”Plato and Aristotle, incidentally, were not especially interested in the causesof such destitution, since that, until the eighteenth century, was a concernto slaves, not aristocrats.The Thomassin-Maurin argument is especially Christian, arising froma monkish vision of poverty as a result of greed in a world of postlapsarianlimits. It finds expression in the late nineteenth-century writings of theProtestant social-gospel movement and in the parallel doubts about freemarketcapitalism among progressive and conservative Roman Catholics.“Christianity is pre-eminently the religion of slaves,” and the slaves favorredistributing the loot. But there is a different, liberal Christian traditionof the urban friars, such as Aquinas. “Albert the Great and [his student, St.]Thomas,” writes Lester K. Little, “brought about the emancipation ofChristian merchants.” They were not commending unlimited greed, but apurposeful buying low and selling high. “The honest merchant, for allthese writers, was a man deserving of the profit he made, for they consideredit as payment for his labor (quasi stipendium laboris).” 13 Profit paidfor alertness.A modern economist, with the Scholastic theologians, notes that buyingwheat at a low price to sell at a high price is helpful to those who sell at thelow price and to those who buy at the high price. Thomassin, who after alllived in an increasingly commercial age, realized this was true. The arbitragewould “benefit those who would otherwise fall into great necessity,” that is,