The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Commerce

the very word “bourgeois” 73the Continent had a higher tone, and therefore priestly claims. A famous radicalpoem of Holland in the 1930s, written on a slow news day by such ajournalist—Jan Gresshof; he was fired for printing the poem in hisnewspaper—speaks of the conservative wing of his colleagues of the clerisy,“de dominee, de dokter, de notaris,” the minister, the doctor, the lawyernotary,who together strolled complacently on Arnhem’s town square of anevening. “There is nothing left on earth for them to learn, / They are perfectand complete, / Old liberals, distrustful and healthy.” 11Whether conservative or radical they are the experts, of whom HarryTruman said, “An expert is someone who doesn’t want to learn anythingnew, because then he wouldn’t be an expert.” They are the chattering artistsand the preaching intellectuals, too, experts in arts and ideas—though theaverage artist or professor after 1930s radicalism would be appalled to beclassed with de dominee, de dokter, de notaris. That is the historical paradox,and the main worry: a class genetically part of the bourgeoisie, and before1848 sympathetic to it, has in its radicalism for a century and a half damned. . . the bourgeoisie.The third part of the middle class is the petite bourgeoisie, the lowermiddleclass, the owner of the corner grocery store, the lower-middle manager,in former times the small but not subsistence farmer. Most Americans,as Europeans did not, put the upper-working class in the bourgeoisie, andinvited them into the bourgeois fraternal societies: the head clerk in theoffice, the electrician, the freight conductor, the chief sawyer. 12In his book The Radical Middle Class: Populist Democracy and theQuestion of Capitalism in Progressive Era Portland, Oregon (2003) RobertJohnston argues that the lower-middle class has been tagged wrongly withthe label of reaction. His Portland heroes such as Harry Lane, a U.S. senatorwho defended Joe Hill and voted against American entry into the Great War,or Lora Little, editor and an activist against conventional medicine, had allof them a touch of the clerisy. You can’t be an advocate without being easywith pen or speech. But they were advocates for the small proprietor againstthe expert, and did not join in the Progressive and bildungsbürgertumlichenthusiasm for top-down social engineering. Lane, for example, was eloquentagainst the Bureau of Indian Affairs. Johnston’s middle-class radicalswanted the little man and his wife to run things.They were more hostile to the upper-middle class, the “moneyed interest”above them, than to the blue-collar workers below them, from whom