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some notes for Chapter 9: Bourgeois Life Came to be Philosophized around 1700

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What was odd was precisely the philosophizing of bourgeois virtues, including its representation in literature, such as in the novel (its very existence as a genre: its focus on individual ethical development as against picaresque adventures in a haunted world [Quixote as the ironic stage on the verge of the novel] of an unchanging hero, Odyseus to Dante — Bunyan's Christian and Milton's Adam is a new case), in the essay, and in drama. Bourgeois virtues were thus becoming the ideology of the age. True, Romanticism reversed it, elevating heroic and saintly virtues in imagination just as they were disappearing in fact. But that is another story.

What is special about the German Ocean is the development there of bourgeois ideology. Places that traded for their grain instead of growing it, like Venice, which for centuries had the cheapest bread in Europe, developed distinctively bourgeois way of thinking. Venice was ruled by a quasi-aristocracy out of a total population of 100,000, the 500 men of the leading families who were permitted political careers. But they did without kings. The Florentine republic, by contrast, ended with a prince. In the Dutch Republic before 1795, similarly, a tiny oligarchy — some 2000 men, perhaps a smaller group than the 1 ¼ percent of the Venetian adult men — ran the country. But again without a monarch, absolute or constitutional. By a powerful analogy after the principle had been articulated, in the 19th century and 20th the shopkeepers and then the working men and then even women and blacks became generals and politicians.

The theorizing is crucial. Markets and capitalism could flourish without any resulting change in the governing theory. A privileged Communist Party still runs China. That businesspeople are making cloth and profits does not automatically lead to an honoring of their lives, or a shift of political power. You can watch a long, long lag of honor behind accomplishment in Europe, as in the very the gradual shift of the word "gentleman" in English from "a properly idle landowner entitled to carry and use a sword" to "a polite and sweet-tempered fellow, probably a businessman." The OED does not even in the Supplement of 1933 admit the democratic use except as "contemptuous or humorous." The difference between England and America then is seen in sense 2 in the second Merriam-Webster's unabridged (1934), "a man of refined manners" or at the limit, sense 4, "a man, irrespective of condition; — used esp. in pl. , in addressing men in popular assemblies." Robert Bellah notes that the lag was especially long in Japan, which in the 18th century had an economy as developed as England's in most respects:

Late Tokogawa Japan was already capitalist in the sense that it had a well-developed market economy. . . . Merchants and later large-scale capitalists wielded significant influence in both Tokugawa and Meiji Japan, yet I would argue that the dominant value system gave them little legitimacy as independent claimants to power. . . . [During the 1880s] if one manufactured toothpicks it was "for the sake of the emperor," hardly the basis of a self-respecting claim to independence on the part of the capitalist class.

The notable development in the 18th century was a theorizing of the bourgeois virtues. Again it began as all this does in the Netherlands. The Dutch Republic developed a theory of bourgeois rule decades before it had occurred to, say, English people that they could behead an anointed king.

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The history of Dutch painting is once more the most accessible evidence. The arts as the arts always do contained a social philosophy, implied if not ponderously preached. The Dutch case falls towards the ponderous end. The numerous portraits of shooters and civic guards and boards of alms-houses (though only P percent of a late 17th-century collection: most Golden-Age paintings were landscapes and still-lives to decorate the walls in a gray climate) celebrate The Rulers, and the rulers were bourgeois.

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Dutch writers were thinking of these matters early, too.

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The virtues were to be balanced, not one taken for all. Virtues were seen as necessary for a commercial society. Alessandro Manzoni was a late example of a pro-bourgeois novelist {examples from I Promessi Sposi in detail}. The heroic role was taken by prudence; the ideal was, to use Austen's favorite word, an "amiable" society.

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And the philosophers. Albert Hirschman's Passions and the Interests inaugurated the study of bourgeois theorizing c. 1700-1776. Quoting one Ricard: "Commerce attaches [men] one to another through mutual utility. Through commerce the moral and physical passions are superseded by interest. . . . Commerce has a special character which distinguishes it from all other professions. It affects the feelings of men so strongly that it makes him who was proud and haughty suddenly turn supple, bending and serviceable. Through commerce, man learns to deliberate, to be honest, to acquire manners, to be prudent and reserved in both talk and action. Sensing the necessity to be wise and honest in order to succeed, he flees vice, or at least his demeanor exhibits decency and seriousness so as not to arouse any adverse judgement [sic] on the part of present and future acquaintances; he would not dare make a spectacle of himself for fear of damaging his credit standing and thus society may well avoid a scandal which it might otherwise have to deplore" (Hirschman, 1982, p. 1465).

English freedom and commerce were seen by Frenchmen such as Montesquieu and Voltaire as ideal.

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"Individual" and "society" arise as words c. 1700.

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Secularization:

Willey notes, "The distaste of the eighteenth century for all violent forms of religious emotion was profound and lasting. The lesson of the seventeenth century has burnt deeply into its soul. 'There is not,' says Addison, 'a more melancholy object than a man who has his head turned with religious enthusiasm'."

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Urbanization:

The coffee houses and theatres of the cities were where bourgeois virtues were theorized. Reactionaries like the Scotsman Andrew Fletcher in 1703 or the Englishman Robert Southey in 1830 railed against the cities, crammed with the bourgeoisie and their workers. Anti-capitalist proto-romantics around mid-century like Rousseau and Goldsmith praised the countryside, in ways conventional in philosophy and poetry since the Greeks. Fletcher asked, "Can their be a greater disorder in human affairs" than "the exercise [in cities] of a sedentary and unmanly trade?" (quoted in Herman p. 42; Fletcher had a few years before helped bankrupt the middle class of Scotland in the Darien Scheme, to start a Scottish empire in, of all places, Panama).

This was always so, the quarrel between urban wealth and rural sufficiency ("enough blessed with my country seat," sang Horace in 23 B.C.E.). As Pocock argues, "We can no longer hold that the beginnings of a modern political theory of property are to be found . . . in any simple transition from feudal to bourgeois values. We must think instead of an enduring conflict between two explicitly post-feudal ideals, one agrarian [Jeffersonian, e.g.] and the other commercial, one ancient and the other modern" (p. 109). A jurisprudential notion of citizenship, he claims, undermines the ancient notions: Europeans start to speak of people having "rights" to such things as life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Instead of property merely assuring one a place in the polis it becomes something to be traded on for private, not public, purposes, a counter in an urban game.

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Universalization:

James Q. Wilson is right to stress that the universalization of obligation-or at any rate its notable broadening-is astonishing. Once we cared only about our family or clan. Once "the Apache [or Scottish clansman] would kill without remorse a warrior from another tribe, [but now] the philosopher would feel obliged . . . to spare the life of a sociologist. "The aspiration toward the universal," he declares, "is the chief feature of the moral history of mankind." We care about people far away. The stoics were, in Wilson's phrase, "the first cosmopolitans" in ethics. One would add Christian neo-stoics. It was not membership in a polis or a religion that conferred respect, but mere universal humanness. So the philosophers of the 18th century and the spreading democratic idea. If white male property owners, argues Wilson, felt an obligation to treat The Other well, it became more difficult in consistency to defend slavery or male hegemony or electoral discrimination. So passed the "claim that one was entitled to reserve one's compassion and sense of fairness for one's own kind exclusively."

Wilson argues that the cause was above all the character of the family in Northern Europe, the "European marriage pattern," as the demographers call it. European marriages from as early as Augustine stressed the joining of two souls voluntarily, not from the clan's political needs. Late marriage, for example-necessary when the clan was not to support the couple-meant that the bride was an adult woman rather than a girl. Feminism, the bumper sticker has it, is the radical notion that women are people. Autonomy for women (and slaves and infidels and children and so forth in the pattern of modern freedom) could not flourish if the women were girlish counters in a dynastic struggle.

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The oldest argument in favor of bourgeois virtues is that they are good for business. A roofer in a town of 50,000 who installs a bad roof will not be in business long. The pressures of entry and exit force the bourgeoisie to exhibit virtue. The trouble with such an argument is that pressure is the absence of ethics. A businessperson induced by prospective profits or forced by potential loss to speak honestly to her customers is not behaving out of ethical motives. The reply would be that it does not matter why she is virtuous: anyway, she is. And the rejoinder would be that as soon as the balance of advantage turns to lying, she will.

A deeper argument is that bourgeois life is good for ethics.

The economist Albert Hirschman (who himself speaks of "bourgeois virtue," p. 12) has recounted the career from Montesquieu to Marx of the phrase "doux commerce. " The image of mutual polishing like grains of sand was conventional: the Earl of Shaftesbury had written famously in 1713:

All politeness [his master word] is owing to liberty. We polish one another, and rub off our corners and rough sides by a sort of amicable collision. To restrain this is inevitably to bring a rust upon men's understanding. 'Tis a destroying of civility, good breeding, and even charity itself.

Shaftesbury was here speaking merely of the polishing of wit, but was aware of the wider significance of an open market in ideas and in commodities. In the paragraph preceding, he wrote:

By freedom of conversation this illiberal kind of wit [the gross sort of raillery] will lose its credit. For wit is its own remedy. Liberty and commerce bring it to its true standard. The only danger is the laying of an embargo. The same thing happens here, as in the case of trade. Impositions and restrictions reduce it to a low ebb: nothing is so advantageous to it as a free port

Such arguments became 18th-century commonplaces. William Robertson sixty years after Shaftesbury: "Commerce tends to wear off those prejudices which maintain distinctions and animosity between nations. It softens and polishes the manners of men." George Lillo, in his play at the dawn of bourgeois power, has his ideal of the London merchant, Thorowgood, assert that "as the name of merchant never degrades the gentleman, so by no means does it exclude him." Lillo lays it on thick. In the same scene Thorowgood on exiting instructs his assistant to "look carefully over the files to see whether there are any tradesmen's bills unpaid." One can smile from an aristocratic height at the goody-goody tendencies of bourgeois virtues. But after all, in seriousness, is it not a matter of virtue to pay one's tailor? What kind of person accepts the wares of tradesmen and then refuses to give something in return? No merchant he.

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Christopher Berry argues in the style of Hirschman that

Whereas the premodern view sees a threat to virtue and liberty in the boundless uncontrollability of human bodily desires, modern, Smithian liberalism accommodates those desires. Virtue is largely domesticated or privatized. . . . Understood in this manner neither virtue nor liberty calls for superhuman qualities but are tasks which every human partakes and for which every human is qualified. . . . [T]hey are less exclusive than the classical versions, which are, in comparison, elitist and sexist.

Berry 1992, p. 84.

This is how social teleology is brought into the virtues. The virtues are those of Hume's middling sort, not titanic heroisms. An economy and polity of middling people with middling virtues will suffice.