Bourgeois Blues

Donald N. McCloskey from the May 1993 issue

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But over the past two centuries the hostility to the money-grubbing class has become frantic. After a brief flirtation with pro-bourgeois writing in the 18th century (Daniel Defoe is the high point; Voltaire admired the English and bourgeois virtues; Jane Austen, late, admired at least the marriage market), literature sinks into a sustained sneer. The novel begins as the epic of the bourgeoisie but becomes with Balzac and Dickens an anti-epic, a Dunciad of the middle classes. German romantics and French statists and English evangelicals in the early 19th century were bourgeois by origin but did not like it, not one bit. Overwhelmingly the French men of letters who barked at the bourgeoisie were the sons of lawyers and businessmen. So too were German men of letters, such as Marx and Engels. The American progressives, advocating a secularized but nonetheless Christian ideal for public policy, were the sons and daughters of Protestant ministers, bourgeois all.

It's a puzzle. In his astonishing Bohemian Versus Bourgeois: French Society and the French Man of Letters in the Nineteenth Century, Cesar Grana asks, "What is it in the spiritual scene of modern society that may account for such intellectual touchiness, willfulness, and bitterness" among the intelligentsia against the bourgeoisie? His answer was what has since been called the "aporia of the Enlightenment project," namely, the conflict between freedom and rationalism in modern life. The bourgeoisie is seen by intellectuals such as Dickens, Weber, and Freud as the embodiment of rationalism.

Grana is probably correct. An impatience with calculation has been the mark of the romantic since Herder. Don Quixote's idiotic schemes in aid of chivalry are precisely uncalculated, irrational but noble.

The modern men Grana writes about, however, have been mistaken all this time. They mistook bourgeois life, the way a rebellious son mistakes the life of his father. The life of the bourgeoisie is not routine but creation, as Marx and Engels said. What has raised income per head in the rich countries by a factor of at least 12 since the 18th century is originality backed by commercial courage, not science. Dickens was mistaken to think that Facts alone are wanted in the life of manufacturing. Manufacturing depends on enterprise and single-mindedness far from cooly rational.

Weber was mistaken to think that the modern state embodies principles of rationality in bureaucracy. Anyone who thinks that a large, modern bureaucracy runs "like an army" cannot have experienced either a large, modern bureaucracy or an army. Freud was mistaken to claim that modern life forces a choice between the reality principle and eroticism. A businessperson without an erotic drive (suitably sublimated) achieves nothing.

This lack of insight by the intelligentsia into business life is odd. It reminds one, I repeat, of an adolescent boy sneering at his father: Remarkable how the old fellow matured between my 16th and 22nd birthdays. The European novel contains hardly a single rounded and accurate portrait of a businessman (Thomas Buddenbrook is an exception). The businessman is almost always a cardboard fool, unless he proves in the end to evince aristocratic or Christian virtues. Intellectuals in the West have had a tin ear for business and its values. Thus Arthur Hugh Clough in 1862, "The Latest Decalogue": "Thou shalt have one God only; who / Would be at the expense of two?" and so on in the vein of a clever adolescent down to "Thou shalt not steal; an empty feat,/ When it's so lucrative to cheat. / ...Thou shalt not covet, but tradition / Approves all forms of competition."

Economics, as the science of business, has been similarly spurned since 1848, leading to more adolescent sneering at what the lad does not quite grasp. (Lad, not lass: Portraits of bourgeois women in literature are numerous and accurate from the hands of women novelists–or even from men, Defoe's Moll Flanders [ranging from whore to noblewoman, but always enterprising] or Flaubert's Madame Bovary or James's portrait of a lady, down to Brian Moore's Mary Dunne or Judith Hearne. It is bourgeois men on the job whom novelists have failed to grasp.) Early in the 19th century, writers like Macaulay or Manzoni read and understood economics and applied it intelligently. Manzoni's novel The Betrothed (last edition, 1840) contains an entire chapter on the unhappy effects during a famine of imposing price controls (un prezzo giusto).

But after 1848 the intellectuals construed economics as the faculty of Reason, arrayed against the Freedom they loved, a misunderstanding encouraged by the talk of "iron laws" among classical economists. Or else they portrayed businesspeople as mere con men (thus Twain and Howells). By the late 19th century economics had dropped out of the conversation entirely. No intellectual since 1890 has been ashamed to be ignorant about the economy or economics. It is a rare English professor– David Lodge, for example, in Nice Work–who can see the businessperson as anything other than The Other.

A change is overdue. To admire the bourgeois virtues is not to buy into Reaganism or the Me Decade. Greed is a bourgeois vice, though not unknown among other classes. But the market and capitalism produce more virtue than vice. We must encourage capitalism, it being the hope for the poor of the world and being in any case what we are, but our capitalism need not be hedonistic or monadic, and certainly not unethical. An aristocratic, country-club capitalism, well satisfied with itself, or a peasant, grasping capitalism, hating itself, are both lacking in the virtues. And neither works. They lead to monopoly and economic failure, alienation and revolution. We need a capitalism that nurtures communities of good townsfolk in South-Central L.A. as much as in Iowa City. We encourage it by talking seriously about the bourgeois virtues.

Being ashamed of being bourgeois has for two centuries amounted to being ashamed of America. The sneers at Ben Franklin like Baudelaire and D. H. Lawrence were notorious as antidemocrats and anti-Americans. Charles Dickens hated the United States as much as he hated businessmen. But America is not the only bourgeois society: Germany is, too, though one that in its intellectual circles wishes it was not; Italians are famous townsfolk; and China, having for centuries cities larger than anywhere else, must have a bourgeois tradition counter to the peasant or aristocrat.

We live not in a global village but in a global town, and have for a long time. A myth of recency has made the virtues arising from town markets seem those of a shameful parvenu. In economic history dependent on Marx, such as Weber's General Economic History (1923) or Karl Polanyi's The Great Transformation (1944), the market is seen as a novelty. From this historical mistake arose the 19th-century fairy tales of lost paradise for aristocrats or peasants. It has taken a century of professional history to correct the mistake.

Medieval men bought and sold everything from grain to bishoprics. The Vikings were traders, too. Greece and Rome were business empires. The city of Jerico dates to 8000 B.C. The emerging truth is that we have lived in a world market for centuries, a market run by the bourgeoisie. It is time we recognized the fact and started cultivating those bourgeois virtues, of which we are to witness a new flowering.