The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Commerce

3on not being spooked by the word“bourgeois”It does not seem on its face such a terrible way to live. It does not seeminconsistent with the virtues. Yet the very word “bourgeois” has been for along time, I repeat, an embarrassment. In 1935 the Dutch historian JohanHuizinga noted that “in the nineteenth century, ‘bourgeois’ became themost pejorative term of all, particularly in the mouths of socialists andartists, and later even of fascists.” 1We should try to redeem the word, and through it rediscover a virtuousmiddle class. In actual fact middle-class people have not been monsters.Their sworn enemies, from Lenin to Pol Pot, Abimael Guzman, and OsamaBin Laden, commonly have been. Middle-class virtuousness arises notmerely when an occasional saintly bourgeoise overcomes the entailments ofher social position and joins the Communist Party. A bourgeois social position,if properly tutored by education, draws out the virtues.But the trouble is that “bourgeois” is used by the left to evoke the allegedethical bankruptcy of the middle class. On some tongues it has come tomean “bossy, greedy, selfish, vulgar, sexist, patriarchal, fascist, snobbish, elitist,common, American, Midwestern, small-town, philistine, ignorant, uneducated,unethical, conventional, self-satisfied, uncharitable, hypocritical,imperialistic, undemocratic, militaristic, authoritarian, materialistic, andinegalitarian.” The word therefore makes nonleftists uneasy. They worrythat they are accepting in the word some nasty conclusions in no way obviouslycorrect about owners and managers of the means of production.The uneasiness of nonleftists, or of others merely puzzled by a phrasesuch as “the bourgeois virtues,” shows up in Simon Schama’s book, The