Courage, justice, temperance and prudence

'The Bourgeois Virtues,' by Deirdre N. McCloskey Review by JIM HOLT

First Chapter: ‘The Bourgeois Virtues’ Forum: Book News and Reviews

In a riff on capitalism and morals, the maverick economist makes the case for the bourgeois life. Bobos in Paradise The New York Times: July 30, 2006

And what are these “bourgeois virtues”? Thrift? Punctuality? Respectability? Cleanliness? McCloskey has nothing so dismal in mind. Rather, she is talking about the four classical pagan virtues — courage, justice, temperance and prudence — plus the three Christian virtues of faith, hope and love. Especially love. Here is something her fellow economists are incapable of capturing in their arid quotations. “Modern capitalist life is love-saturated,” she declares, as “markets and even the much maligned corporations encourage friendships wider and deeper than the atomism of a full-blown socialist regime or the claustrophobic, murderous atmosphere of a ‘traditional’ village.” We already knew that markets make us rich. But McCloskey wants to convince us that markets are also good for the soul.

Here is where things ought to get interesting. Even fans of capitalism concede that it can have a corrosive effect on morals and community ties. Critics have argued that it fosters consumerism, greed, narcissism, Gesellschaft over Gemeinschaft, anomie, Enron. . . . The bourgeois is a beastly little creature — so say the German Romantics, D. H. Lawrence and, in a rather drier way, Francis Fukuyama. How might these people be proved wrong? The pro-bourgeois case would start with the historical observation that liberal values like tolerance and freedom have been a product of commercial life. It would proceed with the careful marshaling of evidence that capitalism can be ethically beneficient — that, for example, markets generate trust. And who better to construct such a case than a polymath econometric virtuosa like McCloskey?

But instead we get rhetoric. There is polemical hand-waving (“Who says?”; “I think not”; and, most logically decisive, “Point, schmoit”). There is sophomoric sarcasm: Stephen Weinberg, a Nobel laureate in physics, is mocked for his reasoned stand against religion, and the French philosopher André Comte-Sponville is dismissed with stale jokes about Gauloises and Jerry Lewis. Anecdotes masquerade as data: the evidence against the Marxist thesis that work is alienating under capitalism is the author’s perception that Chicago garbagemen seem to enjoy emptying trash bins. McCloskey is contemptuous of scientists like Steven Pinker for trying to explain the origins of virtue along Darwinian lines; yet her dogmatic counterclaim — “Every human is born in sin, and must seek redemption” — doesn’t greatly advance the argument.

And how strong, really, is the correlation between bourgeois virtue and laissez-faire capitalism? Like her friend Milton Friedman, McCloskey would like to see the role of the state much reduced. She says she dreams of “literally one-third to one-fifth of the government we now have.” Yet a social democracy like Sweden, where the state plays a far greater role in society, would seem to be the very soul of bourgeois virtue by many objective standards, with less violence and more solidarity and trust than the United States.

McCloskey probably won’t sway many readers who do not already share her convictions, but for all the book’s flaws one can’t help being impressed by her verve, erudition and fitful brilliance. When she argues that Vincent van Gogh was actually a good bourgeois, or that Jesus, notwithstanding the Sermon on the Mount, was pro-commerce, the rhetorical moves are as deft as the claims are surprising. And who would have imagined that the film “Groundhog Day,” in which the annoyingly smug Bill Murray character comes to see the point of humility and love, epitomizes the process by which virtue is inculcated? But it is a little dispiriting to hear McCloskey announce that this book is merely the first of four (!) projected volumes by her on the subject of virtue and capitalism. Somewhere within this loose, baggy monster there has to be a slim, cogently argued treatise struggling to get out. « Previous Page Jim Holt, a regular contributor to The New Yorker and The New York Times Magazine, is working on a book about the puzzle of existence.