The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Commerce

the anxieties of bourgeois virtues 505for example, have precisely that mixture of commitment and humane moderation.Nonetheless it is still routine to idealize a pagan or a Christian story of thevirtues and then to sound a lament that in these latter days, alas, no one achievesthe ideal. We live in a vulgar age of iron, or of plastic, it is said, not pagan goldor Christian silver. In the ethical accounting of artists and intellectuals since1848 the townsfolk are perhaps useful, even necessary; but virtuous? The aristocracyand peasantry-proletariat, it is reported by the clerisy, join in disdain forthe merchant, who has neither the martial honor of a knight nor the solidarityof a serf. The bourgeois virtues have been reduced to the single vice of greed.Michael Novak reports on the Roman Catholic nostalgia for an imaginedprecapitalism of guilds and peasants, workers and beloved lords, warmlygreeting each other on Sunday after mass. Catholic social thinkers, he writes,fail to envisage the hundreds of millions of the world’s Catholics who work insmall businesses of their own. They ignore the barbers and beauticians, thetobacco shop owners, the storekeepers, the electrical contractors, the plumbingand heating firms, the bakery owners, the butchers, the restaurateurs, the publishersof ethnic newspapers, the rug merchants, the cabinetmakers, the ownersof jewelry stores, the managers of fast-food restaurants, the ice-cream vendors,the auto mechanics, the proprietors of hardware stores and appliance shops, thetailors, the makers of ecclesiastical candles, the lacemakers. 19He continues his encomium on small business in terms that Montaigne orMontesquieu could have used: “Commerce requires attention to small lossesand small gains; teaches care, discipline, frugality, clear accounting, providentialforethought, and respect for regular reckonings; instructs in courtesy;softens the barbaric instincts and demands attention to manners; teachesfidelity to contracts, honesty in fair dealings, and concern for one’s moral reputation.”20 Novak has the petite bourgeoisie in mind. But I would extend hisencomium to the grande as well, with a rather different set of virtues. Neitherclass is perfect, because we live in an imperfect world. But both are prettygood, as John Mueller would put it—within the limits of original sin, asNovak and I would. And, Novak observes, “these qualities are, of course,ridiculed by artists and aristocrats, the passionate and the wild at heart.”Thomas Mann was surely, as Amos Oz calls him, “the lover, mocker, elegistand immortalizer of the bourgeois age.” 21 In his first successful novel,