The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Commerce

38 apologyallow themselves to be treated like serfs rather than merchants they becomeserfs rather than merchants. Witness Russian history, except for the hopefulepisodes 1801–1812, 1905–1914, and 1989–2003.Modern economic growth and modern ethical improvement I wouldclaim—the claim is controversial, and needs to be proven—are a consequenceof personal freedom in places like Amsterdam in 1568, London in1689, Philadelphia in 1776. Such commercial places viewed freedom as relieffrom an oppressive government that would restrict if it could thought andexpression, shut down the newspapers, monopolize the early modernequivalents of TV stations.Men and women of commerce came to believe in a Lockean right of selfownership,on the analogy with other ownership. The Swiss-French politicalphilosopher of early nineteenth-century liberalism, Benjamin Constant,called it “modern” freedom. “Ancient” freedom was rather the collectiveautonomy of the community, and the right of individuals to participate inits politics. The ancients “admitted as compatible with this collective freedomthe complete subjection of the individual to the authority of the community....Amongthe Spartans, Therpandrus could not add a string to hislyre without causing offense to the ephors. ...The individual was . ..subservientto the supremacy of the social body [even] in Athens.” 87Why, for example, did Japan, which in the mid-eighteenth century was inso many other ways ready for economic growth, wait another hundred yearsto embark on it, only after humiliations by Western powers? Because,I would claim—this is not a controversial claim—the shogunate restrictedaccess to foreign thought and expression, closing Japan to most foreign contact.The turmoil of ideas in the West was forbidden under the Tokugawashogunate. The initial impetus was fear of Christianization. By a law of 1635any Japanese who came back from abroad was executed, which permanentlystranded many thousands of Japanese in places all over Southeast Asia. 88Foreign trade therefore was a mere 1 or 2 percent of national income, whichmade internal control easy. The shogunate exercised a monopoly of gunpowderand anyway a dominance over the numerous lesser daimyo—somethinglike half of the income of the lesser lords was wasted in compulsoryattendance at the court at Edo. For 264 years the government faced littlecompetition, and after the suppression of the Shimabara revolt in 1638 andbefore the disintegration of Tokugawa power in the 1860s in the face ofWestern challenge, no competition at all. The closing of the country was