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And Franklin shows the ethic flourishing on the margins. Auden said in 1940,

Out of the noise and horror, the
Opinions of artillery . . . /
. . . the smell
Of poor opponents roasting, out
Of LUTHER'S faith and MONTAIGNE'S doubt,
. . .
Emerged a new Anthropos, an
Empiric, Economic Man,
The urban, prudent, and inventive,
Profit his rational incentive
And Work his whole exercitus,
The individual let loose
To guard himself, at liberty
To starve or be forgotten, free
To feel in splendid isolation
Or drive himself about creation
In the closed cab of Occupation.

W. H. Auden, "New Year Letter
(January 1, 1940)," Part Three, p. 184

In far Philadelphia Benjamin Franklin lived a bourgeois life on which Auden looked back with amusement, and which Smith would have praised. A century ago Max Weber made the point by using the Franklin of the Autobiography as the very type of secularized Calvinist, embodying the spirit of capitalism. About the same time D. H. Lawrence thought he recognized in Franklin what he hated most, the man of bourgeois society, "the sharp little man. . . . The pattern American, this dry, moral, utilitarian little democrat." "Dry." Well. It might be said that Lawrence, possessed of a worse sense of humor even than many others of his fellow modernists in literature, was not well equipped to read Franklin. Fifty years earlier Charles Baudelaire (who cannot be accused of lacking a sense of humor) had assailed Franklin as "the inventor of the ethics of the shop-counter, the hero of an age dedicated to materialism."

Franklin was to be sure a successful businessman. But Work was not his whole practice, and he did not in fact drive about creation/ In the closed cab of Occupation. Lawrence is only one of the numerous British mis-underestimators of Franklin: consider Auden as quoted; and surprisingly Alasdair MacIntyre, who has spent most of his career in the United States yet nonetheless relies on Lawrence's anti-bourgeois and anti-American reading of the Autobiography. Baudelaire had asserted that "civilized man finds himself confined within the narrow limits of his specialty . . . . [and] has invented the doctrine of Progress to console himself for his surrender and decay; while primitive man, a feared and respected husband, a warrior obliged to personal valor, . . . comes closer to the fringes of the Ideal." I think not, and neither did Benjamin Franklin.

Franklin was a great, indeed after age 42 a full-time, negotiator and projector for public purposes unrelated to business ambition, though learning early to "put myself as much as I could out of sight." He explains the tactic prudentially, as men did in those first days of a Godless world: "The present little sacrifice of your vanity will afterwards be amply repaid." That he uses such prudential rhetoric of cost and benefit does not mean he was in fact the monster of Prudence Only that Baudelaire and Lawrence imagined. For projecting paving, street lighting, the lending library, the hospital, the university, the fire department, and a self-improving discussion group for Philadelphia, a private postal service, the American Philosophical Society, and the American Foreign Service for the colonies and the new nation, and bifocals, lightning rods, bourgeois virtues, and the theory of electricity for the world at large he says he was amply "repaid." But in what coin? Honor; good repute; the good of his community — motives that a warrior obliged to personal honor would recognize.

The metaphor of being "repaid" for a present sacrifice as though a loan at interest typifies Franklin's businesslike manner of theorizing, and has misled anti-business readers of his Autobiography. Character in his theory — but not I am claiming in his actual behavior — is a capital project, to be built at present sacrifice for future repayment. The theory was a commonplace. It suffered after 1848 from assaults by socialists and, later, Freudians who had other notions of what made character, such as ownership of the means of production or a grasp of the reality principle. Crusoe enlarged his spiritual capital stock. Franklin recommends building good character on personal prudential grounds, as Smith recommends the free disposition of capital and labor on social prudential grounds (though usually accompanied I have noted by a Scots rant on the dignity of freedom for its own sake, a rant less necessary in Pennsylvania). "I had therefore a tolerable character to begin the world with, I valued it properly, and determined to preserve it" as he preserved the capital in his printing business. Even in Franklin's rhetoric a successful bourgeois does not rely entirely on Prudence. It shows in the tension between a short- and long-run prudence. Franklin speaks of his friend William Coleman, "then a merchant's clerk, about my age, who had the coolest clearest head, the best heart, and the exactest morals, of almost any man I ever met with. He became afterwards a merchant of great note, and one of our provincial judges." Do well by doing good. The tests Franklin here applies would be agreeable to Smith's Impartial Spectator or his encomium to the Merchant of Glasgow: beyond mere short-run worldly success but not inconsistent with it, either.

His book of 1771 counsels his son, soon to be alienated by his father's anti-monarchic politics. The book was not finished until much later and was first published only in 18***. Franklin — like Smith in his book of 1776 counseling the nation — speaks of prudence more than he speaks of love, esteem, or solidarity. If you ignore Franklin's actions, and his other writings, as economists have ignored The Theory of Moral Sentiments , you might infer that only prudence mattered. Certainly Lawrence drew such an inference. f

The Prudence-Alone reading is not of course entirely unjustified by the text. Franklin for example always gives a prudential excuse for goodwill, as though he expected his readers to be cynical about earnest claims of love. "These friends were afterwards of great use to me, as I occasionally was to some of them." It took Romance and evangelicalism among the intelligentsia of Europe to bring Love back into repute. But a manly self-regard in Franklin's circle is in fact hedged by it. Franklin in his youth was much impressed by the cynicism of Mandeville's claim that vice was just as good as virtue for keeping society prosperous, but he abandoned such views after a larger experience of life. The friends whom he claims in the Autobiography to be merely useful "continued their regard for me as long as they lived." Such constancy bespeaks not a friendship of interest or amusement, which in Franklin's rhetoric is easiest to justify, but Aristotle's third and highest friendship, for the friend's own sake, which plays no official part in his rhetoric. Of a spendthrift friend he says, "He owed me about 27 pounds, . . . a great sum out of my small earnings [above the average annual income at the time, to give an idea of the great size of the debt: think of $50,000 nowadays]. I loved him notwithstanding, for he had many amiable qualities." Almost for his own sake. But Franklin cannot in 1771, standing a little to the side of an explicitly Christian framework for ethics, quite admit that he simply loved the rogue. He claims instead that after all his friend was amusing.

Again: in urging other printers (in Franklin's day, of course, virtually publishers) to keep their presses clear of libel and personal abuse he ends as usual with an argument from narrow prudence: the printers "may see by my example, that such a course of conduct will not on the whole be injurious to their interests." Yet Franklin's discourse here as elsewhere is seldom wholly prudential, no more than Smith's was. Like Smith thundering at violations of natural right when freedom of employment or of investment is blocked, Franklin thunders at printers filling their newspapers with private altercations, which "pollute their presses and disgrace their profession." This is not the discourse of a consistent Benthamite, cool, without moralizing, intent on Prudence without appeals to justice or love.

Still, as I have argued, Smith and Franklin do put their ethical talk in businesslike terms likely to appeal to eighteenth-century men before the Sentimental Revolution. Franklin like Smith claims to care more for the consequences of ethical behavior than for its purity of intention. A pure intention is secular grace, much valued by Kant and ethicists following in his train. Good will would, said Kant, "sparkle like a jewel in its own right, as something that has its full worth in itself. Usefulness or fruitlessness can neither diminish nor augment this worth." A good will is unwarranted by works, a free gift of God, suited to religions of the messiah from Christianity to environmentalism and the animal rights movement. However bad the unintended consequences in this world, a pure soul and good intentions promise a reward in another world, if only an imagined world of Duty.

Franklin and Smith would agree only at the level of Sunday preaching (which they did not disdain, though not rigorous in attendance). What matters on Monday (as the Dutch economist Arjo Klamer puts it) is the Impartial Spectator shaping a good character for future use. Or indeed (to think prudentially but in the short run) what matters for business from Monday to Saturday is the Spectator, impartial or not. Franklin scandalizes a Christian of his own time, or a secular but ethically serious humanist of our own time, in making his famous little joke about his pride: "I added humility to my list. . . . I cannot boast of much success in acquiring the reality of this virtue; but I had a good deal with regard to the appearance of it" (Claude-Anne Lopez remarked once that Franklin will lack a full biography until someone with a sense of humor attempts it).

Sincerity, that virtue most admired by Romantics, does not figure much in Franklin, or in Smith. True, the seventh of Franklin's thirteen virtues to guide daily life is exactly "Sincerity," but he gives it a narrow and pre-Romantic range: "Use no hurtful deceit. Think innocently and justly; and, if you speak, speak accordingly." This is not the sincerity of Goethe or Shelley, the hero unburdening his soul. It is not Lawrences' "Sincerity," written explicitly in parallel with Franklin's by a late Romantic anti-bourgeois: "Remember that I am I, and that the other man is not me." Franklin's sincerity is again defended as prudential and social: "I grew convinced that truth, sincerity and integrity in dealings between man and man, were of the utmost importance to the felicity of life."

Franklin's list of virtues does not reflect all the bourgeois virtues he records in the rest of the Autobiography, or for which he was known to the world. Perhaps the list was trimmed in piety towards conventional Christianity. But for whatever reason it misses a good deal of Franklin the bourgeois-not all, for the virtues numbered 2 through 6 out of the 13 are those of an actor in the marketplace, and mainly irrelevant to virtue in a pagan or Christian mode: "Speak not but what may benefit others or yourself"; "Let each Part of your Business have its Time"; "Resolve to perform what you Ought"; "Waste nothing"; "Lose no time." The bourgeois part of the list drives Lawrence, a maker of the new aristocracy of literary modernism, to angry distraction. At virtue number 7, that Sincerity, though, Franklin's list loses its bourgeois cast, ending with "Humility: Imitate Jesus and Socrates," which Franklin admits was a later addition. The list is deistic, not Christian. Nor is it stoic, though Franklin modeled himself on Cicero in some ways, excepting Cicero's unrestrained habit of making jokes at other people's expense. Nothing in it corresponds to the three theological virtues, and only Justice and Temperance of the four pagan virtues.

Among the missing in Franklin's explicit list of virtues are the bourgeois versions of Prudence and Courage: commercial prudence and commercial enterprise. Franklin exhibited these to an unusual degree. It is the point of his book to recommend them to young men who wish to become like him "honest instruments for the management of . . . affairs." As a boy, he said, "I was generally a leader" and had "an early projecting public spirit." Defoe's Essay on Projects, he writes, was an early influence. He became the best printer in the colonies (he modestly implies) and a man of wealth not by following Christian or aristocratic virtues but by following the bourgeois virtues recommended in-surprise-the Old Testament. He quotes Solomon on virtue's reward in this world: "Length of days is in her right hand, and in her left hand riches and honors"; and quotes Solomon on the "calling," the very passage that Weber most emphasized, "Seest thou a man diligent in his calling: he shall stand before kings." Franklin the printer had in his life precisely the satisfaction of recalling days of riches and honors, an American businessman standing literally before kings.

Another bourgeois virtue which Franklin omits from his list, though he (and Smith) practiced it famously, was Amiability. By his own account, he made friends-for-use-and-amusement with astonishing ease: "The Governor, seeming to like my company [though Franklin was at the time a mere teenager], had me frequently to his house"; "I had shown [to a Quaker woman on the boat to Philadelphia as a boy] an obliging readiness to do some little services which impressed her I suppose with a degree of good-will towards me." Franklin's is not a Hobbesian world of defectors in a Prisoner's Dilemma, as intellectuals in ignorance of business practices have imagined the world of business to be, but a world that presumes until supplied definite evidence to the contrary that we are willing to cooperate. (The economist and historian Alexander Field has written a fine book on the theme, arguing that such a premise of cooperation is in fact hard-wired into humans.)

Franklin marshaled cooperation all his life, and was in this an ideal bourgeois. Cooperation, not competition, is the life of capitalism. Intellectuals of course take Amiability, especially in its American version, simply as a false rhetoric, the little con. They believe, and often practice in their own lives, a rule of harshness in business, their own business as scholars and teachers and book reviewers, but also their economic business, when they venture into the agora. It's just business: that's why I, the professor, happily free from the corruptions of the marketplace, feel justified in my own business in being cruel and ruthless and lacking in good humor. The highest value is being tough-again, the quasi-aristocratic turn is especially an obsession of American men and their female imitators, and especially American academic men after the gender anxieties of the early twentieth century. An actual life in business must on the contrary be filled with humor, and must be highly selective with cruelty. Business life is not solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short; or else, Franklin would say when bowing to the new religion of Prudence, it's not good business.

And still another and central bourgeois virtue of Franklin was Address. Franklin was a great persuader in private business or in the salons and coffee houses of Paris and London, though he was not an aristocratic orator (he and Washington were well known for their taciturnity in public assemblies, and for the corresponding weight of their words when they did speak). Here too his life followed Smithian lines, the Smith who placed the faculty of speech along with that of reason at the origins of the propensity to truck and barter.

The theorizing of a bourgeois life was taking place in America and Scotland, even Naples, rather than in Paris or London (where the Best Theorists more usually held court). It would otherwise seem strange that sociology, economics, jurisprudence (and while we're at it, geology, among the physical science — not the aristocratic physics or astronomy) were first expressed in English by Scots. Hutcheson, Hume, Smith, Ferguson, the law Lord Kames (Henry Home) were hardly country bumpkins unaware of preference and privilege. Smith, the son of a revenue officer, was himself from 1778 a royal appointee collecting the import taxes he had lately deprecated. He had spent six years, though not happily, at Oxford. He was tutor for many years to the Duke of Buccleugh's son on the young man's long Grand Tour. He was fluent in the rhetoric of Your Lordship's most obliging and most humble servant, Adam Smith. Yet Smith and his teachers and friends were not of the Court party and were not surrounded by a world of grandees. Their daily acquaintances were businessmen and lawyers, and very few territorial lords. They were not fashionable people: one could hardly be so in Edinburgh, not to speak of Glasgow or Philadelphia. Smith writes: "Are you in earnest resolved never to barter your liberty for the lordly servitude of a court, but to live free, fearless, and independent? There seems to be one way . . . and perhaps but one. Never enter the place." It was of course ancient advice. Juvenal spoofed the "aged, genial Crispius" as the perfect courtier, "not a citizen able / to speak his mind freely, and stake his life upon the truth./ Therefore Crispius saw many summers, and his eightieth / Solstice, by such weapons safe even in that lofty hall."

Bourgeois, Lowland Scotland or bourgeois, tiny Philadelphia, not the great cosmopolis, was the place of these anti-Crispiuses of the eighteenth century, despite flirtations abroad: "Tho I am happy here," wrote Smith to Andrew Millar from Paris in 1766, "I long passionately to rejoin my old friends. . . . Recommend the same sober way of thinking to Hume. He is light-headed, tell him, when he talks of coming to spend the remainder of his days here [in Paris]." From London a few years before Hume had claimed that "Scotland suits my Fortune best, and is the Seat of my principal Friendships; but it is too narrow a Place for me." Perhaps it was too narrow for Hume, but not for a man who was actually carrying out a theory of the Middle Station, ethical and economic.

Smith was of course just as aware as Hume was of the inconsequence of Scotland beside England and France: "For though learning is cultivated in some degree in almost every part of Europe," he wrote in the first and failed attempt at an Edinburgh Review (1755-56), "it is in France and England only that it is cultivated with such success or reputation as to excite the attention of foreign nations." But is was on just such a margin that one could take seriously the ordinary business of life. As Arthur Herman puts it, "Scottish merchants and capitalists, like their American counterparts, recognized the advantages of a laissez-faire private sector far earlier than the English or the other Europeans" (though I think Herman does not realize that Holland was the pioneer). It was never at the court of the Great King that bourgeois theory could develop: it could develop at commercial Athens not Persepolis; at commercial Florence and Venice, not at Rome or Constantinople; at commercial Amsterdam and Edinburgh, not at Versailles or Westminster or even at The Hague.

The least aristocratic places, more admiring of the middle station, are the Second Cities. They're not always many miles from the cosmopoloi, but they feel it. Think of the aristocratic air among the clerisies of New York or Washington compared to the big shoulders of Chicago, among the artists of modern Amsterdam compared to the rolled-up sleeves of Rotterdam, among the proud bureaucrats of Rome and Madrid against the business people full of saggezza/seny in Milan and Barcelona. The claim is that in such places, away from every pretense of firstness, aristeia, by traditional standards, away from Court or private gallery, the bourgeoisie could theorize in confidence about itself.

The theory thus birthed was one of practical improvement short of utopia, by contrast to the mischievous religious-socialist/apocalyptic-revolutionary view and all our woe. Militant utopian Christianity was the catastrophe of seventeenth-century Europe as militant utopian post-Christianity has been the catastrophe of our times. The bourgeois wants neither — merely improvement, cultivating ones own garden in accord with [?Dr. Pangloss' chastened precept and??? check] Dr. Smith's theory and Dr. Franklin's life.

Additional Notes:

Against the American Grain attacks Franklin and "acquisition"

The Autobiography has had about 400 editions! p. 246. Huang, Nian-Sheng. 1998. "Franklin, Benjamin." Pp. 24-246 in R. W. Fox and J. T. Kloppenberg, eds., A Companion to American Thought. Oxford and Malden: Blackwell.