The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Commerce

a brief for the bourgeois virtues 37profit, the predatory priests, kings, lords, and guilds of Macfarlane’s version,could not regain their grip in Europe for a long while, a grip loosened in theMiddle Ages.“The tendency to form vast homogeneous empire,” writes Macfarlane,“the dream of Charles V, Louis XIV, Napoleon, or Hitler, was neverrealized.” 82 In China anciently and in the Ottoman lands after 1453 and inJapan after 1603 it was. In Europe the land-war struggle between the Hapsburgsand the Bourbons, and then the sea-war struggle between France andfirst the Dutch Republic and then Britain, had no decisive imperial winnersuntil the nationalisms of the nineteenth century. Until then therefore thelong spine of little states in Europe from Northern Italy to Holland, whatGeoffrey Parker called the “Lotharingian axis” after Charlemagne’s grandsonLothar, stayed independent of big national states, though a cockpit of Europeanwarfare.Because European kingdoms and duchies and city-states competed witheach other, McNeill argues, “European rulers and state officials [even] in thenineteenth century did not begin to sop up all of the new forms of wealth,”as elsewhere and earlier such governments had been so skillful at doing. 83Macfarlane quotes the historical sociologist Ernest Gellner on the “thugstates”: “in a multi-state system, it was possible to throttle Civil Society insome places, but not in all of them.” 84Even big states in Europe have until recently been incompetent at taxingand repressing their subjects. Charles V and Philip II sent maraudingarmies into the Low Countries for eighty years but in the end got onlyhalf a loaf. The much-maligned tsarist state was unable in the nineteenthcentury to run even a secret service with ruthlessness. 85 Stalin, after all,was sent to Siberia twice. One wishes the police had in his case done a betterjob.In the twentieth century, though, as a result of the Great War, Westerngovernments got more skilled at violence. They reasserted an encompassingcontrol over people’s wealth and minds that had been routine in the ancientexamples of, say, Egypt, Assyria, Sparta, Ch’in dynasty China, Rome. 86 Weare at present in a race between on the one hand ever freer markets and onthe other hand ever worse tax systems, drug regulations, attorneys general,electronic eavesdropping, regulatory populism, and state-sponsored violence.We must keep our bourgeois wits about us. If we let our wits becomeenchained, we cannot then whine about the loss in body and soul. If people