The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Commerce

80 chapter 3Embarrassment of Riches: An Interpretation of Dutch Culture in the GoldenAge (1987). On page 6 he announces his ambition to “rescue the Netherlandsfrom its ancient stereotype as quintessentially bourgeois.” He has in mindHuizinga, and behind him the irritated assessments of the place by aristocraticforeigners, starting with Philip II’s Duke of Alva and Elizabeth’s Earlof Leicester.Using the word “bourgeois,” Schama writes, perpetuates “the deadeningcliché that tells us at once too much and not enough....The result is a kindof depressing historical perennialism by which the Dutch, being bourgeois,were whatever the modern mind supposes bourgeois to be,” which is to say,bossy, greedy, selfish, vulgar, etc. He therefore wants another word for hisbeloved Nederlanders. “At the center of the Dutch world,” he declares, “wasa burgher, not a bourgeois.” Rousseau in 1762 put it similarly, distinguishinga citoyen from a bourgeois. 2That is, Schama wants a word uncorrupted by the sneers of the left,beginning with Rousseau. Schama wants to honor the northern-lowlandishtownspeople of the seventeenth century without implying that they were“bourgeois” in the corrupted sense of the word. “The burgher was a citizenfirst,” you see,“and Homo economicus second....Ifany one obsession linkedtogether the [burgerij’s] concerns . . . it was the moral ambiguity of good fortune,”that embarrassment of riches.The word “bourgeois” in its Marxist dress is to be rejected because it hasbecome merely a synonym for Homo economicus, the man of untroubledselfishness which by now left and right agree in believing is the essence ofmiddle-class life. The bourgeois in this belief is a machine for making (as itis always put) endless profit—profit by blessed invention if you are of theright, or profit by damned exploitation if you are of the left.Early in the last long chapter in the book, Schama lets himself go. The word“bourgeois, after all, belongs to the classifying vocabulary of nineteenthcenturyand twentieth-century materialist social science that assumed systemsof belief to be appendages of social power. Those frameworks of culturalanalysis are notorious for their reductive insistence on a social continuumthat extends from the division of labor to the destination of the soul.” 3Schama can’t bring himself to utter the word “Marxist.” Ideas are not tobe reduced to Marxist social class. “If my view is somewhat idealist, theopposite view is often unreflectingly materialistic.” 4 Schama is right to rejectthe theory shared by left and right in which, for example, the “realism” of