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, (more…)

Montesquieu, Voltaire. English/Dutch model spreads. French imitate a bourgeois atmosphere established early in 18th century, which nourished Smith as well. Anti-Rousseau, precursor of the Romantic anti-Kism (Berlin, Edmund Wilson)

Smith serves as an emblem of a peculiarly 18th-century project, the making of an ethic for a commercial society. The seen-to-be protected actual bourgeois behavior from the usual attacks from govt and aristocracy and populism, at least until socialism regnant in 29th century. In an early essay, which he did not carry into editions of (more…)

Smith was mainly an ethical philosopher. The recent literature from Knud Haakonssen (1981) through Charles Griswold (1999) and Samuel Fleischacker (2004, pp. xv, 48-54) says so, against the claim by the economists, believed for a long time, that he was mainly an economist in the modern, anti-ethical sense. The taking of ethics out of Smith (more…)

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 (more…)

But it is bourgeois virtues as a system and as a whole that is good. A simplified version of bourgeois virtues takes Prudence as all. Re-Use virtue table here. The passions, however, played against the virtues, and not merely against the interests; it was not merely a balance of Interests that tamed the passions. Not (more…)

A case can be made that a flourishing human life must show seven virtues. Not eight. Not one. But seven. The case in favor of four of them, the “pagan” or “aristocratic” virtues of courage, justice, temperance, and prudence, was made by Plato and Aristotle and Cicero. In the early 13th century St. Albert the (more…)