The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Commerce

76 chapter 2make that work honorable for their men. The bourgeois men were worriedabout their lack of aristocratic standing. Women’s production, the pride ofFrench style, perfectly illustrated later by Coco Chanel, and still later in ourNew World versions by Julia Child or Martha Stewart, was supposed to ariseonly from their devotion to consumption: les doigts de fée, the “fairy fingers,”of the woman “constituted an extension of her ‘natural’ feminine attributesrather than incursion into the [male, market, bourgeois] world.” 20 Herswasn’t real work, though a fine, fine thing, you understand.The economist Everett Hagen saw the high valuation of work as arisingfrom the status anxieties of (male) English Dissenters and Lowland Scots inseventeenth- and eighteenth-century Britain and of impoverished samuraiand prosperous merchants in late Tokugawa Japan. An aristocrat is the dukeof so-and-so regardless of whether or not he has a go from time to time atsoldiering or at estate management. The very word “aristocrat,” by the way,is a French Revolutionary coinage, out of the older and classical “aristocracy”and “aristocratic.” Homo ludens, the species of “playing man,” is anaristocratic or a peasant ideal of a life, weekends of aristocratic hunting anddrinking chronicled in a novel by Woodhouse, or equally alcoholic weekendsof proletarian soccer rioting in Amsterdam by yobs from Millwall orSheffield United. Carefree. The aristocrat or proletarian is often portrayedin bourgeois fiction, which is most fiction, as unworried. At least that’s howit looks to a bourgeois worried about the next deal or the next deadline.The proletarian or peasant sometimes feels driven to his work by thelash. He would rather not. And even when he exercises the proud excellenceof a Silas in New Hampshire c. 1915 making a load of hay—“He bundlesevery forkful in its place, / And tags and numbers it for future reference, /So he can find and easily dislodge it / In the unloading”—he is merely thehired man.The bourgeois dream is different—to “be my own boss,” he says, workingharder than when bossed by others. The owner-managers of Americanrestaurants or American farms earn low pay per hour because they value sohighly their busy autonomy on the job, 5:00 in the morning to 11:00 at night.In 2003 Robert Johnston pointed out that, after a long decline, the rate ofself-employment in the American economy was growing. He quoted GeorgeSteinmetz and Erik Wright on its emotional significance: “At least a quarterof the total labor force, and a third of the male labor force, either is or hasbeen self-employed.” 21