The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Commerce

the anxieties of bourgeois virtues 507called significantly Christian, who ends in a madhouse, and in Tom’s onlyson and heir, called Hanno, who is like his “aristocratic” mother musicobsessed,and who dies at fifteen, ending the hopes for the firm. 24In 1944 Sartre claimed with some justice that “most members of the middleclass and most Christians are not authentic.” The word “authenticity” is amaster term in Sartre, taken from Heidegger, meaning that les bourgeoiswithout authenticity “refuse to live up to their middle-class or Christian conditionfully and that they always conceal certain parts of themselves fromthemselves.” 25 As Ruth Benedict observed at about the same troubled time,“Men who have accepted a system of values by which to live cannot withoutcourting inefficiency and chaos keep for long a fenced-off portion of theirlives where they think and behave according to a contrary set of values.” 26I quoted Aristotle’s sneering remark that the bourgeoisie have lives“ignoble and inimical to goodness/excellence.” Aristotle’s reasoning is thatthe polis required “men who are absolutely just, and not men who aremerely just in relation to some particular standard,” that is, their own particularbottom line, which is no justice at all. 27 In this he is correct. AdamSmith argued on similar grounds that landlords, not merchants, were thebest representatives of the whole community. Prudence Only is not an idealconstitution. But Smith, unlike Aristotle, knew and loved actual bourgeoispeople. And so he knew, as the Western clerisy hostile to the bourgeoisiedoes not, that a good society can be founded on actually existing bourgeoisvirtues. Forgetting Smith in a commercial society has orphaned the virtues.It is the ethical tragedy of the modern West.What then are the bourgeois virtues? You ask me to preach. I’ll preach to thee.The leading bourgeois virtue is the Prudence to buy low and sell high.I admit it. There. But it is also the prudence to trade rather than to invade,to calculate the consequences, to pursue the good with competence—Herbert Hoover, for example, energetically rescuing many Europeans fromstarvation after 1918.Another bourgeois virtue is the Temperance to save and accumulate, ofcourse. But it is also the temperance to educate oneself in business and inlife, to listen to the customer humbly, to resist the temptations to cheat, toask quietly whether there might be a compromise here—Eleanor Rooseveltnegotiating the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights in 1948.