Bourgeois Deeds: How Capitalism Made Modernity 1700-1848

Two projects after Austen to be completed here:
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Wright’s old Middle-Class Culture in Elizabethan England (1935) is surely still correct in claiming that the education of the English bourgeoisie during the 16^th and 17^th centuries, the scholarly and even scientific habits that Deborah Harkness (2007) has recently emphasized, made the “sudden” emergence of a literate and confident class late in the 17^th and early in the 18^th century less surprising.

The B character even of aristocratic talk in Britain in the age of the man’s modern suit (use Hollander). A good case, if not the hardest, would be the Navy. “How I made money on her,” says an Austen character, an admiral speaking of a frigate he once captained.

(Hold the anti-bourgeois themes of Disraeli, Dickens, Flaubert, et alii until Vol 3.)

“The gospel of work, one of the most significant articles of the bourgeois dogma,” Louis Wright declared long ago, “was promulgated with great earnestness during the period of Puritan supremacy and paved the way for the later apotheosis of business, which has colored the entire outlook of the modern world” (Wright 1935 p. 656). He offers little evidence of this himself, and what matters here is how the society in general felt about work. No doubt a merchant urged himself and his fellows to work at accounts and correspondence into the night. But as long as a gentleman is defined to have no avocation at all, except rattling swords and composing sonnets, the turn has not been reached.

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The elevation of the middle class—to the degree that Victoria herself behaved so:
Davidoff and Hall here, Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English Middle Class, 1780-1850 (1987)

Dror Wahrman, Imagining the Middle Class: The Political Representation of Class in Britain. C. 1780-1840

And Perkin et alii.

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A good thing or bad, this triumph of bourgeois virtues?

“The postclassical world,” as Berry understands Smith, “is irretrievably a world of strangers.”³⁵⁵ Berry’s reply to communitarians such as Alasdair, MacIntyre, Charles Taylor, and Michael Walzer, with their nostalgia for civic humanism, is essentially, “Too bad.” “We must look to the public realm for rules . . . and to the private for virtue.” One can sympathize with Berry’s position, noting the horrors that modern “moral communities of citizens” such as under fascism or communism or nationalism have perpetrated. Berry (and old Adam Smith) have a lively appreciation of the corruptions possible, ranging from such mild misuses of public activism as imperial preferences and protection all the way up to the aestheticization of the public sphere in the fascist state.

But I have another reply: that we do in a commercial world bump regularly against strangers, but the strangers become friends. To my friends (as indeed they are) the communitarians I say: your ends are achieved precisely by commerce.

Henry Maine a century and a half ago made the still-sound argument that cases of fraud imply the existence of a general trust: “if colossal examples of dishonesty occur, there is no surer conclusion than that scrupulous honesty is displayed in the average of the transactions.”³⁵⁶ The muckrakers are liable to draw the opposite, and erroneous, conclusion: that a fraud is typical of the whole barrel. Arthur Miller remarked on his play, All My Sons (1947, two years before Death of a Salesman), “If the . . . play was Marxist, it was Marxism of a strange hue. Joe Keller is arraigned by his son for a willfully unethical use of his economic position; and this, as the Russians said when they removed the play from their stages, bespeaks an assumption that the norm of capitalist behavior is ethical.”³⁵⁷

The growth of the market, I would argue, promotes virtue, not vice. Most intellectuals think the opposite: that it erodes virtue. And yet we all take happily what the market gives—polite, accommodating, energetic, enterprising, risk-taking, trustworthy people; not bad people. Sir William Temple attributed the honesty of Dutch merchants in the 17^th century “not so much [to] . . . a principle of conscience or morality, as from a custom or habit introduced by the necessity of trade among them, which depends as much upon common-honesty, as war does upon discipline.”³⁵⁸ In the Bulgaria of socialism the department stores had a policeman on every floor—not to prevent theft but to stop the customers from attacking the arrogant and incompetent staff charged with selling goods that at once fell apart. The way a salesperson in an American store greets customers makes the point: “How can I help you?” The phrase startles foreigners. It is an instance in miniature of the bourgeois virtues.

Even taking the calumnies of the clerks against the bourgeoisie at face value, an ethics of greed for the almighty dollar is not the worst. It is better, for example, than an ethics of slaughter with patrician swords or plebeian pikes. Dr. Johnson said, “There are few ways in which a man can be more innocently employed than in getting money.” Commenting on Johnson’s remark, Hirschman notes that “The very contempt in which economic activities were held led to the conviction, in spite of much evidence to the contrary, that they could not possibly have much potential in any area of human endeavor and were incapable of causing either good or evil.³⁵⁹” The “evidence to the contrary” was not so great in 1775. Adam Smith at the time saw only a modest growth arising from peaceful specialization.

Donald Trump offends. But for all the jealous criticism he has provoked he is not a thief. He did not get his billions from aristocratic cattle raids, acclaimed in bardic glory. He made, as he put it in his first book, deals, all of them voluntary. He did not use a .38 or a broadsword to get people to agree. He bought the Commodore Hotel low and sold it high because Penn Central, Hyatt Hotels, and the New York City Board of Estimate—and behind them the voters and hotel guests (and, let it be admitted, the powers and potentates)—put the old place at a low value and the new place, trumped up, at a high value. Trump earned a suitably fat profit for seeing that a hotel in a low-value use could be moved into a high-value use. An omniscient central planner would have ordered the same move. Market capitalism can be seen as the most altruistic of systems, each capitalist working to help a customer, for pay. Trump does well by doing good.

Thomas Buddenbrook becomes the head of the family and “The thirst for action, for power and success, the longing to force fortune to her knees, sprang up quick and passionate in his eyes.”³⁶⁰ But success at bourgeois occupations is success in mutually advantageous deals, deals in which Thomas delights, not the successful slaughter or double dealing recounted in the literature of aristocrats or peasants. Greece even in Homer’s time was a commercial society, and one sees a trace of the merchant in the emplotment of Odysseus’ wanderings, “. . . and unbent sails/ There, where down cloudy cliffs, through sheets of foam,/ Shy traffickers, the dark Iberians come;/ And on the beach undid his corded bales.” But the character shows few townly virtues.

And even from a strictly individual point of view the bourgeois virtues, though not those of Achilles or Jesus, are not ethical zeroes. The honesty of a society of merchants in fact goes beyond what would be strictly self-interested in a society of rats, as one can see in that much-maligned model of the mercantile society, the small Midwestern city. A reputation for fair dealing is necessary for a roofer whose trade is limited to a city of 50,000. One bad roof and he is ruined. A professor at the University of Iowa refused to tell at a cocktail party the name of a roofer in Iowa City who had at first done a bad job (he redid the job free, at his own instigation) because the roofer would be ruined in town if his name got out in this connection. The professor’s behavior itself shows that ethical habits of selfish origin can harden into ethical convictions, the way a child grows from fear of punishment towards servicing an internal master. A rat would have told the name of the roofer, to improve the story. After all, the professor’s own reputation in business was not at stake.

The motto of the Buddenbrook family was “My son, attend with zeal to thy business by day; but do none that hinders thee from thy sleep at night.”³⁶¹ It is the bourgeois’ pride to be “a fair-dealing merchant,” with “quiet, tenacious industry,” to “make concessions and show consideration.” to have “assured and elegant bearing, . . . tact and winning manners,” a “liberal, tolerant strain,” with “sociability and ease, and . . . remarkable power of decision at a division” in the town Assembly, “a man of action,” making “quick decision upon the advantageous course,” “a strong and practical-minded man, with definite impulses after power and conquest,” but by no evil means.³⁶² “Men walked the streets proud of their irreproachable reputation as business men.”³⁶³ Is it evil to hope that “one can be a great man, even in a small place; a Caesar even in a little commercial town on the Baltic”? What is wrong with “the dream of preserving an ancient name, an old family, an old business”?³⁶⁴

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Frenk {?Frank?]