The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Commerce

a brief for the bourgeois virtues 49tle word “insure,” by the way, has caused much mischief in the last hundredyears. It embodies a lawyerly view that the only way to “insure” such-andsucha social result is to make still another law, instead of depending on selforganizingsystems like markets and morals, or for that matter common-lawdecisions of courts. The economists point out, in any case, that many publicgoods get provided as spillovers from self-interested action, as when aprivate police force in a building discourages crime even out on the street,or when a billboard on the highway advertising a restaurant serves as a vividpointer to the downtown, or when educated people raise the tone of publicdiscourse, when they do.And “collective action to sustain the infrastructure of civil society . . .heavily dependent on governmental protection and support” does notinsure that good public goods get provided. 120 It insures merely that thePutins get more power over our lives. After all, Selznick’s main point, andmine, and Ridley’s, and Adam Smith’s, is that without virtue the machineryof neither the market nor the government works for our good. That is whywe preach. Let us therefore turn to preaching the civic and bourgeoisvirtues.I am puzzled when my friends on the right preach freedom for the ownerof an assault weapon loaded with dum-dum shells hung on a rack in hisHummer, but then preach, too, intrusions by the government into that sameman’s sexual practices or his taste in recreational drugs or the care of hisbrain-damaged wife. But I am also puzzled when my friends on the leftpreach still more power for a government that has in its time shot Kentuckystrikers and electrocuted Italian anarchists and jailed Muslim radicals withouttrial.Selznick and other capitalism-skeptics do not sufficiently acknowledgethat market societies like seventeenth-century Holland provided voluntarilyfor universities and churches and opera houses, and invented the socialsafety net. As Sen points out, “The contribution of economic growth has tobe judged not merely by the increase in private incomes, but also by theexpansion of social services (including, in many cases, social safety nets)that economic growth may make possible.” 121 The Catholic church’s charity,the model for the clerisy’s theory of a social gospel, had until then gonemainly to keep abbots supplied with the better wines.Nor do the capitalism-skeptics acknowledge what is statistically true, asI have said, that the “public goods” so uncritically praised by the center left