The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Commerce

the very word “bourgeois” 69male person, a burgher. Benjamin Franklin was “a bourgeois.” And strictlyspeaking in French, though odd-sounding in English, the plural men of themiddle class go by the same word, those bourgeois trading news on theBourse. The female burgheress, singular, adds an e, bourgeoise (boor-zhwaz).Madame Bovary was a bourgeoise, and she and her friends bourgeoises,plural, with again no change in pronunciation. The whole class of suchpeople are of course that appalling bourgeoisie (boor-zhwa-zee), whenceH. L. Mencken’s sneering label, the “booboisie.”Got it.But consider this: in sociological fact you are probably a member of it.You may therefore still be using the word as a term of self-contempt, like thef-word for gays or the n-word for blacks. As Mencken also said, the businessman“is the only man who is forever apologizing for his occupation.” 2After the Second World War the self-scorning of the middle class becamea standard turn among even the non-Marxist clerisy, from C. Wright Mills toBarbara Ehrenreich. Ehrenreich wrote in Fear of Falling: The Inner Life of theMiddle Class (1989) of the bourgeoisie’s “prejudice, delusion, and even, at adeeper level, self-loathing.” 3 She would know about the self-loathing. Herfather started as a copper miner (Ehrenreich was born in Butte) but becamea corporate executive. She herself got a Ph.D. in biology, but was radicalizedby Vietnam. So was I, incidentally, before my Ph.D. in economics took hold.Self-loathing among the bourgeoisie has for a century and a half been asource of trouble. We need to rethink together the word and the social position.Guilt over success in a commercial society is for a victimless crime. Yetthe children of the bourgeoisie seek an identity challenging that of their elders.The clerisy by which the children are taught accuses the middle class ofinauthenticity, and plays on pseudoaristocratic contempt for “middle” construedas “mediocre.” None of this makes very much sense. A commerciallife can be as authentic and virtuous as that of a philosopher or priest. Weneed to recover its wholeness and holiness.A reason to keep here the dishonored word “bourgeois” is to distinguishthe rethinking from the statistical inquiries evoked by “middle class,” or theolder “middling sort.” My focus is not mainly on how large the middle classactually was, numerically speaking, in 1600 or 1800 or now. Places where themiddle class was exceptionally small, such as Russia in 1800, would perhapsbe poor places to study bourgeois virtues. I’m not so sure. Certainly suchplaces are interesting tests by absence. And a bourgeois ideology could I