What are the Bourgeois Virtues?

I recently read The Bourgeois Virtues by Deirdre McCloskey. This is the first work of her Bourgeois series, that I hope to read and write about over the coming year. The scope of her work is vast and I certainly can not do the work full justice here. I will say that it was an excellent read and I strongly suggest it. Thankfully, despite being such a huge book, copies are quite cheap online.

McCloskey begins with a lengthy introduction in which she describes the reactions to her wanting to write a book about bourgeois virtues. People would laugh. After all – a bourgeois is nothing but a capitalist, and capitalism is nothing but greed, so they say.

Not McCloskey. She argues several things across the book. I will outline the basic arguments now and then delve into them in some greater detail in a moment. She argues that capitalism is good for us: makes us richer and allows us to live longer. Capitalism also gives us the space and encouragement to develop the classical virtues as described by St Thomas Aquinas. Therefore, anti-capitalism is bad for us: physically and "spiritually". The book is huge – 616 pages in all. As such, the scope of topics covered in it is very large indeed. I can not hope to cover all of it in this one article, so I will focus on introducing the bourgeois virtues themselves and why they are needed.

I was keen to read that McCloskey was approaching the problem as a polymath:

To tell the Adam-Smithian story of bourgeois virtues required schooling in ethics, theology, classics, poetry, sociology, social psychology, literary history, art history, intellectual history, philosophy and twenty other fields

Indeed, a polymath approach will be necessary for such a large and complex task – and I applaud her for it.

The central argument spread out across this massive work is that the seven virtues are necessary for a good bourgeois society. These virtues stem from Christianity, although McCloskey does a more global analysis to show the same concepts can be found in world religions. At any rate, the names and definitions will be used from Christianity, specifically St Thomas Aquinas. Aquinas defines the following virtues:

First McCloskey looks at love. Here she is not talking about romantic love, eros, but rather a more charitable agape. Concern with those around us. How would this manifest? In a bourgeois society we could imagine neighbours who are all concerned with each others' wellbeing; or shopkeepers all at the same market looking out for one another. A friendly relationship between business owner and customer; a friendly relationship between employer and employee. This isn't some sort of socialist-anarchist fantasy but something that is very real. Some places have it more than others, unfortunately. Some neighbourhoods are "nice" compared with others. What do the not-so-nice neighbourhoods lack? They are ostensibly not bourgeois and lack this virtue.

Businesses that practice a bourgeois virtue of love towards their workers respect them for their labour. Unfortunately what we might call managerial capitalism has tried to do away with this approach. It tries to turn employees into cookie-cutter replacements of one another. When I was managing in nightclubs I always tried my best to not do that. In a way, it's insane to not respect the skills and labour of your employees – they are responsible for the basic service that your customers come for!

McCloskey next turns her attentions to faith. Faith is about integrity and identity. A bourgeois society doesn't just persist forever and ever, like a clockwork machine. It can degenerate. It's as much about the culture, behaviour and virtue of the citizens as it is about any governmental economic policy. Let's say we have a bourgeois society – how do we keep it alive?

By faith. By having faith in ourselves as a bourgeois, and passing on these values to the next generation. We hope to maintain a culture that has faith in itself – a culture that has faith that if it continues to act as it does, continues to hold dear what it does, it can persist for the betterment of everyone involved.

Hope is like faith, but while faith is about preservation, hope is about growth. Hope is what allows us to continue to develop. The entrepreneur hopes his invention will sell and make him rich. I hope that by exercising and eating healthy I will live longer. We hope for a better future. Without hope we give way to sloth. When sloth enters a culture it can only diminish from there. Resources are consumed, never to be replenished. The standards of living slip for everyone.

Staying industrious is not merely some mechanical thing that humans can do over and over and over without any second thought. It is difficult to wake up at five every morning and go out into the frost to tend the fields. Certainly we wouldn't do that if we had no hope for betterment to come from it.

Next McCloskey tackles courage. Courage is often seen as a very masculine virtue – something that we find no shortage of in the ancient Greek texts and many other foundational myths. Men going out to conquer great evils, or to defend a homeland. At any rate, there could (and probably) will come times when the bourgeois society needs to be defended. Great men with great courage will be needed if it is to survive.

Nevertheless, this isn't the only kind of courage that McCloskey is thinking of. Just like our entrepreneur needs faith he also needs courage. To put himself out there, to metaphorically go where no man has gone before requires great courage. Inevitably all new inventions, businesses and so on will be met by critical people asking why we need whatever the entrepreneur has brought before us. Sometimes, they are right, sometimes, they are wrong. Whether right or wrong, without courage, that new business or invention will never get anywhere.

The next virtue is prudence. Prudence is about practical knowledge – about a way of going about day-to-day business in a savvy way. A very simple example might be not selling goods at a loss. Prudence helps temper courage. With an excess of courage and no prudence we might invest heavily in whatever comes our way with no sense of risk – of course, why wouldn't we! We are so bold and great, success is sure to come. Sometimes it might. Most of the time we would probably lose a lot of money. Prudence helps us mitigate these sorts of risks.

I think it is easy to see how prudence is essential for a bourgeois society. Without it, everyone is going to quickly jettison their wealth on malinvestments that will never justify their expense. We need to be prudent to persist, economically speaking.

Justice is the last of the virtues. Justice might be one of the most important bourgeois virtues. A bourgeois society is based on trust it is often said, but trust in what. Trust in justice. In order for a bourgeois society to persist, each must be able to trust that all others are following a similar understanding of justice.

Justice is very broad. Of course, it does apply with regards to crime. We require systems of justice to punish criminals and to compensate those that have had such crimes committed against them. But that's not what we are primarily thinking of. Instead, we are thinking about lenders who can trust that money will be paid back, we think of customers who can trust they will get what they pay for. High trust between everyone, even strangers, is essential for a bourgeois society to take hold.

Now, for today I only want to cover the virtues themselves and why they are needed for a bourgeois society. I hope to cover soon some more topics from the book such as, why would we want to be a bourgeois society at all and what causes the bourgeois virtues to disappear. Until then, think about how these bourgeois virtues would be able to benefit you if they were widespread.