But the word “amateur” in both of our languages comes from Latin amare, to love. I have no complaint at all about people loving economics or any other serious study of the economy, such as economic sociology or economic history or political economy. I have since age 19. I was a socialist at that point, and believed that a supervising state was the way to help the poor. As I slowly became a professional, and learned about the economy and about the state, I changed my opinion of how to help the poor. Yet I am a lover.

But like you I have many other subjects and activities, loved but unprofessional. As to subjects, when I was a kid I loved astronomy—until I realized that astronomy is applied physics and physics is applied mathematics. Yet much later I read a college textbook on astronomy and became very interested in the comparison with economic science, which I had by then pretty much mastered. I was a “master” at economics, but merely a ”lover” of astronomy. And recently I’ve taken it up again, watching transfixed the lectures from the Teaching Company about lensing by dark matter and the evolution of the universe.

As for activities, I was during the folk music revival of the 1960s an enthusiastic if utterly incompetent guitarist and singer. My college friend Hal was a brilliant guitarist from New York, personally acquainted with people like the professionals Joan Baez and Bob Dylan. But professionally Hal became a professor of law.

And I was for decades a long distance runner. But I was utterly incompetent, the slowest jogger in world history—unlike my friend in academic life, Gary, who has been a world-ranked long-distance runner at every age from his 20s to his 80s. But even Gary, like Hal in folk guitar, in his beloved running is an amateur, a lover only, being in his paid profession an economist and academic administrator.

We do both. Amateurism is splendid, part of a full human life, possible in a rich modern world in which such amateur, hobby, unprofessional interests can be pursued so thoroughly, if incompetently. My friend the great literary critic Wayne Booth (1922-2005) wrote a book called For the Love of It: Amateuring and Its Rivals (1999). Wayne defended there, for example, his incompetent playing of the cello. He took it up when an adult, too late to become very good at it. Wayne was not being falsely modest. I have another friend who played regularly in a quartet with him, and attested to the incompetence.

Why, Wayne asked, do people engage in amateurism in a world that values professionalism so very much, and even pays a lot for the best of it? His answer, and mine, is his title, “for the love of it.” For the love of the Beautiful Game and the Beautiful Painting, even if we are not Pelé or Tarsila do Amaral, we kick a ball or wield a brush, and watch with love their best, thanks to markets in the age of mechanical reproduction.

To live in such an age is a privilege and a glory.

Weekly column in Folha de São Paulo, Brazil
Translated into Portuguese for the newspaper.

A startling new book, published under the auspices of the American Psychological Association, edited and largely written by Christopher Peterson and Martin E. P. Seligman, Character Strengths and Virtues: A Handbook and Classification (2004), lends empirical support to the Seven, at any rate within the European tradition in which they were theorized. It seeks, as the philosopher Peter Danielson says in another connection, the “ethical genome.”[1] In 644 big-format text pages, using 2300 citations to the technical literature in clinical and social psychology and related fields, the 40 drafters of the chapters (which Peterson and Seligman then rewrote) present a “manual of the sanities,” that is, the “positive psychology” of healthy people. Studying sanity is an idea that the psychologist members the board for the Values in Action Institute of the Mayerson Foundation, which sponsored the volume, such as Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi (remember: “CHICK-sent-me-high) and Howard Gardner, have been especially known for.

Peterson, Seligman, and the others detect 24 “ strengths of character,” on the basis of ten criteria, not all of which are satisfied for every strength (about half of the 24 do satisfy all ten). A character strength:

Ten Criteria for Twenty-Four Strengths of Character

A character strength:

• contributes to the good life, as for example:

  • Curiosity

  • Social Intelligence

• is valued in its own right:

  • Integrity

  • Humility

• does not diminish other people:

  • Kindness

  • Hope

  • Perspective

• does not have an admirable opposite:

  • Persistence

  • Appreciation of Beauty and Excellence

  • Gratitude

• can be assessed (that is, observed):

  • Vitality

  • Fairness

  • Leadership

  • Persistence

• is embodied in human exemplars:

  • Love

  • Spirituality

  • Creativity

• shows sometimes in children as prodigies:

  • Love of Learning

  • Self-Regulation

• shows sometimes in total absence:

  • Humor

  • Open-Mindedness

  • Bravery

• finds support in human institutions:

  • Forgiveness and Mercy

  • Citizenship

Source: Peterson and Seligman 2004, pp. 29-30 and throughout.

The ten criteria on the left side are on their face useful reflections on the virtues. Yet if they were merely speculative the exercise would be much less interesting. The authors, however, take seriously the matching of the criteria with the psychological literature, quantitative and qualitative. In other words the 24 strengths of character not mere assertions but findings, summarizing a gigantic scientific literature.

The 24 species of strengths are clustered into the encompassing genuses of: Courage, Humanity, Justice, and so forth—that is to say precisely the “virtues [,] . . . the core characteristics valued by philosophers and religious thinkers.”[2] The authors number them as six rather than seven, but this is mainly because they lump Hope and Faith together in one virtue named Transcendence, that is, “strengths that forge connections to the larger universe and provide meaning.”[3] Five of these “High Six” virtues they identify lay down with ease on the classical Seven—Transcendence [that is, Faith and Hope], Courage, Humanity [that is, Love, which appears in their classification as a “character strength” within what they view as the wider virtue], Justice, Temperance.

The only lack of fit is their genus of Wisdom-and-Knowledge, which is not Prudence seen as practical wisdom, Aristotle’s phronēsis, but intellectual strengths of character, namely, creativity, curiosity, open-mindedness, love of learning, and perspective. These are desirable strengths, surely. But in the classical definitions they would not be virtues at all, but aptitudes ethically indifferent—such as having a high percentage of fast-twitch muscles, the better to run a record mile or from the police. Or they would be sub-species of Prudence, not a genus substituting for it. Or perhaps they would be subspecies of Love of learning and or of Hope for a touch of the transcendent in art and science. Aquinas in fact did not believe that such “habits,” as he calls them, are properly classified as virtues.[4]

The psychologists instead put their version of what they call “Prudence” under the cardinal virtue of Temperance, and define it narrowly as “being careful about one’s choices; not taking risks.” This is a tiny part of the wider classical or Aquinian or Smithian concept of Prudence, and is in fact more naturally placed under Temperance. It’s the virtue of Proper Caution. Psychologists are likely to identify such a thing as “not taking risks” with what they call “impulse control,” which is rather easy to measure in experiments and questionnaires, and can even be found in a part of the brain. The drafting author of the chapter directly on Prudence, Nick Haslam, spends two pages worrying about such a reduction.

But in the classical definitions it is Temperance, not Prudence, which is the virtue of controlling impulses. Haslam, as revised by Peterson and Seligman, states flatly that “Aristotle does not . . . equate phronēsis with. . . impulse control,” which is correct. Aristotle and Plato and the rest had another word for self-control, sophrosynē [from sophron, sober], which Cicero translated as temperantia.[5] Prudence in the classical definitions is intellectual and calculative, like Justice, not emotion-controlling, like Temperance and Courage. Prudence belongs with the intellectual virtues, not with Temperance, and indeed could be said, as all writers from Plato to Adam Smith did say, to be the chief of the intellectual virtues.

Having criticized the Peterson and Seligman psychologists on this score I should admit the great truth of a theme underlying their work: that emotion and intellect are intertwined, not always to be distinguished—the book has four citations to Antonio Damasio’s thinking on the matter; though none to Martha Nussbaum’s. But that is precisely why, as the team asserts and as Aristotle, Aquinas, Adam Smith, Martha Nussbaum, and Deirdre McCloskey also assert, the virtues do make a coherent system, and not merely a fungible list of Good Things You Might Want to Get Hold Of.

Aquinas’ definition of Prudence, for example, is that Prudence is “any virtue which causes good in reason’s consideration.”[6] Prudence deals “rightly with those things that are for the sake of the end.” It is “reason rightly deliberating, judging, and commanding.” “There can be no moral virtue without prudence.”[7] Prudence as know-how, that is, figures in the exercise of any virtue. It should not be sorted away as a minor aspect of Temperance.

But I also agree with Peterson, Seligman, and their collaborators that the exact sorting of strengths into the wider virtues is not very important to their project, since their empirical work goes on always at the level of “strengths” or at the still lower level of “situational themes.”

Yet the sorting is important for my own project, namely, finding how the classical virtues lie down on capitalism. The team appears to me to have sorted mistakenly here, mainly because it has not looked carefully enough into the meaning in Western ethical history of “Prudence” as against “Wisdom” and “Temperance.” That’s no great sin in a splendid book and project. After all, even a well-regulated team of over 40 people can’t do everything, and they are to be congratulated for their just and prudent gestures towards the history of ethics.

One side of the problem, I would argue, is that the authors have confused phronēsis, practical wisdom, with sophia, theoretical wisdom. This at any rate is the way Aristotle typically used sophia, as supreme and scientific knowledge. According to Liddell and Scott, earlier sophia refers in fact to “skill” or indeed “practical wisdom.” You could contrast phronēsis instead with episteme, the usual Greek word for knowledge.[8] But anyway phronēsis is devalued by the prestige of theory. Aquinas did not think theoretical, speculativus wisdom was a virtue at all, but a gift of the Holy Spirit, though he himself possessed the gift to a miraculous degree. Aquinas distinguished for example the theoretical “knowledge” of chastity, the kind, say, a philosopher might have, from the prudential “knowledge by connaturality” that a truly chaste person has in her life.[9]

The definition of wisdom given in Chapter 2, “Universal Virtue? Lessons from History,” drafted by Katherine Dahlsgaard, depends revealingly on a German source, namely, certain researchers at the Berlin Max Planck Institute. It is “revealing” because as I’ve noted all Germanic languages except English have difficulty in translating Latin prudentia = Greek phronēsis. The Berliner Max Planckers speak of wisdom as “good judgment and advice about important but uncertain matters of life.”[10] Yes. But this is precisely phronēsis, or Latin practical prudentia, not Germanic Weisheit or wisdom, which mixes the practical and the theoretical. The Dutch word for philosophy is wijsbegeerte, wis[dom] desire, a calque on the Greek literal meaning, “love of theoretical wisdom.” English/French/Latin “prudence” is not Aristotle’s theoretical sophia, which Cicero translated as scientia and sapientia. Phronēsis /prudentia/prudence is a knowledge of means, not of ends, good judgment in practical matters, not a command of theories.

The Dahslgaard-drafted chapter quotes the Yale psychologist R. J. Sternberg (1998), another prominent psychologist on the board of the Values in Action Institute. Sternberg writes about one of his three sorts of intelligence: wisdom “is involved when practical intelligence is applied to . . . a balance of various self-interests . . . with the interests of others.”[11] Sternberg is here precisely not speaking of scientia or sapientia but of prudentia mixed with justitia. Note that he even uses the phrase which translates Aristotle’s phronēsis: “practical wisdom.”

And so later in the book, the Peterson-Seligman book repeatedly elides theoretical wisdom and practical prudence. The Haslam-drafted chapter on Prudence does a better job sometimes, because he has evidently troubled to read Aristotle, if not perhaps Aquinas. But even Haslam gets entangled in sophia, maybe because he was saddled with the group’s too-wide definition of “Wisdom.” [12]

The group have also, on the other border of the word “prudence,” as I said, confused prudence with temperance. Haslam in particular seems to struggle honorably with it. The confusion is important because most of the psychological measures of Prudence mix it with other virtues. Thus the five-factor model of personality traits developed by Costa and McCrae speaks of “conscientiousness” as a prime trait. It is said to be made up of classically prudential facets such as “competence, order, and deliberation,” but then also Justice, in “dutifulness,” Hope, in “achievement striving,” and Temperance, in “self-discipline.”[13]

Haslam himself says that “Prudence therefore implies a balance and harmony . . . . play[ing] a mediating role, . . . ensuring that hope is tempered by realism.”[14] This is Temperance, not Prudence. Or rather, as his unconscious use of “tempered” suggests, it is an amalgam of the know-how to plan and the will-power to carry out the plan. The one is Prudence, the other Temperance. Haslam speaks of “the components of prudence having to do with balance,” but immediately admits that they “fall under Aristotle’s concept of moderation”—sophrosynē is the world Aristotle used for the virtue; and to metron, the [golden] mean, for the corresponding method.

The ethical tradition of the West, in short, would shuffle some of the character strengths the psychologists have examined under other heading. In particular it would place under a virtue of Prudence some of the strengths now under “Wisdom and Knowledge,” such as open-mindedness, love of learning, and perspective, and under “Humanity” the strength called “social intelligence” and under “Justice” the strength called “leadership.” It would rename the strength now called “prudence” as “caution,” or “impulse control,” and leave it under “Temperance,” where it appears to belong.

But no matter. What is anyway striking is that a group of modern clinical and social psychologists, using largely Western evidence, have on the whole confirmed what ur-Westerners such as Aristotle and especially Aquinas discerned by other means: that the virtues among we Westerners (at least) are these particular Seven, and that they work as a system in the best of our lives and the best of our communities.

The philosopher John M. Doris has challenged such systems, calling them the theory of “globalism,” the notion that people “have” characters, “robust traits or evaluatively integrated personality structures.”[15] He points out the impressive body of evidence from experimental psychology that people are in fact highly sensitive to situation—that an ordinary Ukrainian can be made into an extermination-camp guard reasonably easily. He notes, too, that non-Western societies, such as the Japanese, “interpret behavior more in terms of situations and much less in terms of personal dispositions than is typical in the West.”[16] Doris’ book is a model of philosophical psychology, even more thorough, if such a thing can be imagined, than Peterson and Seligman, at any rate per person. But in the end he admits that our ethical stories in our culture and our notions of Courage and Faith are important for ethical judgment. He thinks that being realistic about the stories and the notions, noting how fragile and specifically Western the notion of character is, “tuning down” our virtues, will make us better.[17] Could be, and at any rate a philosophical psychology is one way to find out.

[1] Danielson, personal conversation January 2005. Danielson runs at the University of British Columbia an amazing inquiry into what people actually think about the virtues.

[2] Peterson and Seligman, Character Strengths and Virtues, 2004, p. 13.

[3] Peterson and Selgiman, Character Strengths and Virtues, 2004, p. 30.

[4] Aquinas, Treatise on the Virtues (Summa theologiae), c. 1270, IaIIae, ques. 57, art. 1.

[5] Haslam in Peterson and Seligman, Character Strengths and Virtues, 2004, p. 480; Cicero, On Duties, I. xxvii, 93.

[6] Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, c. 1270, Ia IIae, c. 1270, q. 61, art. 3 and 4. These are pages 112 and 113 in John Oesterle, St. Thomas Aquinas: Treatise on the Virtues (which consists of Ia IIae, questions 49-67).

[7] Aquinas, Summa Theologiae Ia IIae, c. 1270, q. 58, art. 4; Oesterle, p. 86. Also Ia IIae, q. 65, a. 2; Oesterle, p. 143.

[8] As do Jonsen and Toulmin, Casuistry, 1988, pp. 58-74.

[9] Cited in Novak, Business as a Calling, 1996, p. 2.

[10] Quoted in Peterson and Seligman, Character Strengths and Virtues, 2004, p. 39.

[11] Peterson and Seligman, Character Strengths and Virtues, 2004, p. 39. The other two of his dimensions are analytic and creative intelligence. Sternberg by the way suffered from test anxiety as a child and has become an eloquent spokesman against one-dimensional theories of intelligence.

[12] Sarah Broadie accepts her co-editor Christopher Rowe’s translation of “wisdom” unmodified as the word for phronēsis. But she makes clear that it is practical not theoretical, as the Philosopher himself said (Broadie, “Philosophical Introduction,”2002, p. 46).

[13] Haslam, “Prudence,” in Peterson and Seligman, p. 482.

[14] Haslam, “Prudence,” in Peterson and Seligman, p. 480, italics supplied.

[15] Doris, Lack of Character, 2002, p. 114.

[16] Doris, Lack of Character, 2002, p. 105.

[17] Doris, Lack of Character, 2002, p. 169. This is the last page—a short book, in which nonetheless Doris makes use of fully 750 items of bibliography, ranging from thorough use of Lifton on the Nazis to Conrad on Lord Jim.

The principal ends of human acts are God, self, and others, since we do whatever we do for the sake of one of these.

Aquinas, Summa Theologia, Ia IIae, q. 73,

art. 9, objection 3, “I answer that.”.

[O]ur life consists in this achieving of a pure relationship between ourselves and the living universe about us. This is how I `save my soul.’ . . . [If you view] love as the supreme, the only emotion worth living for, then you will write an immoral novel. Because . . . . all emotions go to the achieving of a living relationship.

D. H. Lawrence, pp. 128-29.

The “moral universe within” has been described for 2500 years in the West, then, in terms of the Seven Virtues, containing hundreds of particular virtue, among which are the virtues for a bourgeois life:

The Seven Virtues

In ethical space the bottom is the realm of the Profane, where Prudence and Temperance rule, the top the realm of the Sacred—of spiritual Love, and Faith and Hope. Moving from bottom to top is moving from self-disciplining virtues whose main object is the Self through altruistic virtues whose main object is Others (Love of humans; Justice) to the transcendent virtues whose main object is God or Physics or the Nation. That is, bottom to top is the axis of wider and wider ethical objects.[1]

The essentially transcendent virtues of Faith and Hope, I have noted, are essentially verbal. The others can be silently yet fully expressed. Prudence and Justice are calculative and intellectual. They have been thought since Plato and the writers of footnotes to Plato to be the most characteristically human of virtues. Prudence or Justice could be seen in a god-haunted society as gifts or laws from the Creator to Man: “for which cause /Among the beasts no mate for thee was found.” Animals were “dumb” in both senses.

By the grace of Darwin, however, we now see the calculative virtues in the least human of beings, in ants justly sacrificing themselves for the queen, or dandelions prudently working the cracks in the sidewalk. The terminology is figurative, note the scientists, a human attribution, not Nature’s own way of putting it. But that is what we are discussing: human figures of speech. Natural history has taught us in the past three centuries to realize that the lion is not actually “courageous,” ever, but merely prudent in avoiding elephants and just in acknowledging the pride’s hierarchy. Courage and Temperance are emotion-controlling and will-disciplining, and therefore, we now realize, human. Faith, Hope, and Love, above all, provide ends for a human life. The rest are means, and prudence is not the highest, God-given Rationality but the lowest evolved strategies of these.

The triad of Temperance-Justice-Prudence near the bottom and middle is cool and classical, and therefore recommended itself to theorists of the bourgeoisie such as David Hume and Adam Smith. The others at the top and edges are warm and Romantic, and came into their own in the 19^th century. Hume called Temperance-Justice-Prudence the “artificial” virtues, necessary for the artful making of any community whatever. They were of particular interest to men who had seen or vividly imagined communities collapsing in the tumult of religious war and dynastic ambition, of Jesuit and Presbyter, of Habsburg and Bourbon and Stuart. Hume and Smith both, for example, had witnessed the Jacobite rising of 1745, and with nothing like sympathy—they were not wild Highlanders, and certainly not Catholics, but lowland Scots of a deist or atheistic bent who had made their peace with Englishry.

“Enthusiasm” was in the 18^th century a term of abuse. Let us confine our discussion, most of the philosophes of France and Scotland agreed, to the cool, dignified, essential, and “artificial” virtues. Hume was using the categories and argument of Pufendorf, defending natural law against the intellectual and political chaos of the early 17^th century. The categories became part of European classicism in the 17^th and 18^th centuries, reacting to the rhetorical charms of the Renaissance and the rhetorical excesses of the Reformation and Counter-reformation.

The other, “natural” virtues of Courage, Love, Hope, and Faith impart warmth and meaning to an artfully made community. Sometimes too much warmth and meaning. The Scottish followers of Hutcheson admitted Love, as benevolence, and admitted Courage, as enterprise, but rather off to the side of their main concerns. They certainly had no patience with Hope and Faith, and Hume was fierce against their religious forms, “celibacy, fasting, and the other monkish virtues.” Imparting warmth and meaning was decidedly not what the Scots of the Enlightenment had in mind. That is a Romantic project, and these are not Romantics.

That Adam Smith was a virtue ethicist for a commercial age is pretty plain. He escaped, as Hume did not entirely, from the “prison,” as Hayek puts it, of the Greek categories physei (natural) and thesei (artificial). He emphasized a third category, the social interaction neither rock-like nor painting-like, the invisible hand.[2] Hayek observes that the 18^th-century learned the third category from the appalling Dr. Mandeville. But Smith used it to support rather than attack conventional ethics.

Smith made his virtue-ethic purposes clearest at the end of his life, in a Part VI added to The Theory of Moral Sentiments 31 years after its first publication. Section I of the new Part is an encomium on The Prudent Man. Section II is an analysis of love in an expanding circle outward from self to country. It concludes with a criticism of going still higher, to the faith and hope in transcendence that had been so troublesome to the Scotland of his grandfathers:

The administration of the great system of the universe, however, the care of the universal happiness of all rational and sensible beings, is the business of God and not of man. To man is allotted a much humbler department, but one more suitable to the weakness of his powers, and the narrowness of his comprehension: the care of his own happiness, of that of his family, his friends, his country. That he is occupied in contemplating the sublime can never be an excuse for neglecting the more humble department. . . . The most sublime speculation of the contemplative philosopher can scarce compensate the neglect of the smallest active duty.[3]

One can hear him including the theologian or other advocate for the Transcendent in that phrase “contemplative philosopher.” Compare Hume’s “ divinity or school metaphysics.”

And then Smith embarks on a concluding, climactic Section III, “Of Self-Command,” the master virtue in his book. “The man who acts according to the rules of perfect prudence, of strict justice, and of proper benevolence [love, that is] may be said to be perfectly virtuous.” That accounts for three of the seven virtues: Prudence, Justice, and Love. But suppose he knows he should so act, but can’t bring himself to it? “The most perfect knowledge, if it is not supported by the most perfect self-command, will not always enable him to do his duty.” “Extravagant fear and furious anger,” to take one sort of passion, “[are] often difficult to restrain even for a single moment.” The “command” of fear and anger was called by the ancients “fortitude, manhood, and strength of mind,” which is to say Courage. “The love of ease, of pleasure, of applause, and other selfish gratifications . . . often mislead us.” The command of these the ancients called “temperance, decency, modesty, and moderation,” that is to say, Temperance.[4]

So: in Smith there are the five virtues, of Prudence, Justice, Love, Courage, Temperance. There is no room for Faith and Hope.

But this will not do. Alasdair MacIntyre—his name and Glasgow birthplace are not irrelevant, nor is his youthful Communism or his mature Catholicism—argues that the artificial and all the natural virtues including Faith and Hope are to be taken together:

The virtues that we need, if we are to develop from our initial animal condition into that of independent rational agents [viz., prudence, temperance, and justice], and the virtues that we need, if we are to confront and respond to vulnerability and disability both in ourselves [courage, hope] and in others [love, faith], belong to one and the same set of [seven] virtues, the distinctive virtues of dependent rational animals.[5]

All three regions of the diagram are drawn on for a full life. The Romantics after the 18^th century understood this. The Christians before the 18^th century did, too.

In particular, Prudence Only will not be a life worth living. As Ellen Charry observes, “the gratification of being a part of a larger reality [Tillich’s ‘the courage to be a part of’] that gives each experience a purpose beyond its momentary accomplishment buffers the soul against life’s disappointments.”[6] For “ye have your closes,/And all must die.”

It is an obvious secular truth, too. Enjoy the White Sox game, by all means, in the present—the ballgame, the show, the peanuts, the crackerjack, in the lower region of Prudence, sheer Utility. Live as Nature’s son, not her bastard. But enjoy also your own little son’s delight in being there with his father, at the middle region of Love. And at the higher regions take joy in “being part of a larger reality,” Baseball or American Fatherhood or the Democratic Tradition.

* * * *

The seven virtues illuminate other ethical systems. William Schweiker, for example, quotes with approval Tzvetan Todorov’s characterization of humanists, believing that “freedom exists and that it is precious, but at the same time . . . [appreciating] the benefit of shared values [such as Hope and Faith], life with others [such as Love and Justice], and a self that is held responsible for its actions” [showing Temperance, Prudence, and moral Courage].

The philosopher Harry Frankfurt starts with the usual definition of “virtue” as “altruism,” confined to the middle region of the diagram. The ethical object at the bottom is a self, I have noted, and at the top is a transcendent; in the middle the object of ethics is other people. Like Susan Wolf writing about her obnoxious moral saints, Frankfurt uses terms like “morality,” “moral principles,” and “moral philosophy” as though they did not include either the self or the transcendent as objects of ethical action.

Such a definition appears to be a convention in mainstream, Kant-derived ethical philosophy. “Morality is most particularly concerned with how our attitudes and our actions,” Frankfurt writes, “should take into account . . . other people.”[7] Well, not in the view of Aristotle or the other virtue ethicists. Morality among them is about the good life for a human, which requires a character of prudence and temperance towards oneself, and faith, hope, and higher love towards the transcendent. And it requires justice and courage and lower love on behalf of other people—the Scots called it “benevolence.” Thus ethos, character. Robinson Crusoe on his island can be said to have had a good or bad ethical life, even before Friday. So virtue ethics.

But Frankfurt comes to the same view in the end, concluding that love must have a transcendent object for a human life to have a point. “A person may legitimately be devoted to ideals—for instance, aesthetic, cultural, or religious ideals—whose authority for him is independent of the desiderata with which moral principles are distinctively concerned; and he may pursue these nonmoral ideals without having his personal interests in mind at all.”[8] The ideal of the transcendent, such as God or Baseball, are independent of altruism. The transcendent is defined as “nonmoral,” namely, having in mind the self-interest of Prudence and Temperance. Frankfurt is saying that the transcendent, and in particular a notion of Love which includes what Christians would call agape, is necessary for a fully human life. In this way the ethics of the Enlightenment is sacralized.

He could have got to the conclusion by way of virtue ethics with less heavy lifting. “What we care about, what is important to us, and what we love” give point to a life, says Frankfurt. But these, I note, are Faith, Hope, and Charity.[9] I expect that Frankfurt is well aware of all this, and is engaging in a crafty figure of argument necessary in a corner of the academic world dominated by Kant. He shares with Wolf and many other modern philosophers the job of clambering out of the rationalist hole that Kant dug so diligently.

Frankfurt here seems to be marshaling a reductio ad absurdum, to show that Kantianism or for that matter utilitarianism do not give a coherent account of an ethical life. The ethical life cannot in fact to be reduced, Frankfurt is saying, to formulas for deciding ethical dilemmas, formulas applicable to any rational creature as such. On the contrary, “it requires us . . . to understand what it is we ourselves really care about.”[10] It depends on ethos, on agape and philia, on character, on moral sentiments, on a philosophical anthropology and psychology, on being a particular woman in Chicago at a particular time, with particular loves and faiths and hopes. As Philippa Foot put it, Kant went wrong in not realizing that “the evaluation of human action depends . . . on essential features of specifically human life.”[11]

In fact, as I have noted, the Kantian program is self-contradictory, which among Kantians is judged the deadly sin. The character of ourselves that we care about, a caring denied in pure rationalism, is what makes a Kantian moralist—or for that matter, if he reaches beyond ice-cream hedonism, what makes a utilitarian moralist. You have to want to be good. You have to care about what Frankfurt calls “ideals” and I and the rest of the Western ethical tradition call “transcendentals.” Only then will you have an interest in following, say, the categorical imperative or the true happiness of all people in your dealings with others. The ethical-theorizing “constructed self” that the social psychologist Timothy Wilson speaks of wants to work with the ethical-behaving “adaptive unconscious.” Being good, in Frankfurt’s account and in mine, is a consequence of “what we regard as important to ourselves,” not itself derivable from Kantian or utilitarian maxims.[12]

* * * *

arryh

Left to right in the diagram exhibits the gendered character of the virtues, masculine and feminine in the conventional tales. That is, left-right expresses the gender of the ethical actor. Women of course are supposed conventionally to think of the world from the perspective of right-side Love, or its corresponding vices, such as envy and jealousy. Men are supposed to think of the world from the perspective of left-side Courage, or cowardice, vainglory, self-absorption, and so forth.

Another name for the right side in the diagram is “connection”; and for the left, “autonomy.” Knight believed that even ordinary desires could be reduced “in astonishingly large measure to the desire to be like other people, and the desire to be different.”[13] Tillich called them “participation” and “individualization,” and noted that there is a “courage to be as a part,” that is, to participate. Michael Ignatieff called the one side “connection and rootedness” and the other side “freedom”: “a potential contradiction. . . arises between our need for social solidarity and our need for freedom.” We have rights, which is good, allowing us to achieve our left-side projects of hope and courage regulated by justice. But we need “love, respect, honor, dignity, solidarity with others,” Ignatieff notes, on the other, upper-right-hand side, and these cannot be compelled by law.[14] Hence Hume’s vocabulary of “natural” as against “artificial,” law-enforced virtues.

Whether or not men in general do actually fall on the left, autonomous side, the male non-Scottish, non-virtue-ethics ethical philosophers of the 18^th century certainly did. The Kantian and Benthamite men, for example, are just that, men deciding ethical issues without regard to connection, men fiercely autonomous, adults always in their primes, rational beings never dependent. So they believed. They are as the feminists put it with irritation and amusement “separative selves.”

The third fresh option in 17^th- and 18^th-century ethical philosophy, contractarianism, is likewise gendered. A Hobbesian/Lockean/ Rousseauian “contract” is not the usual metaphor with which women describe their lives. Rather: love, caring, obligations of affection, “a view of the self as relational.”[15] Women in fact find themselves with children and parents and friends and husbands and lovers to take care of. Men seem to think of such connections as optional, wholly contractual, even as relationships of exchange. Thus Marcel Mauss, a leading male anthropologist of the early 20^th century, encouraged people to think of the gift, too, as a sort of exchange.

The feminists such as Carol Gilligan and Virginia Held resist. Annette Baier, following them, observes that not all male ethical philosophers take the side of autonomy. She gives passing grades on the matter to Aristotle (connection in the polis), Marx (class), Mill (progressive sympathy), and MacIntyre (dependent rational animals, and practices), and then she studies Hume from the feminine, connective perspective in detail. Hume is, she argues, “uncannily womanly” in emphasizing the role of sympathy as against higher law, having others to share experiences with, and the love of children as the exemplum for ethical theory. She finds in Hume a stress on “the inescapable mutual vulnerability and mutual enrichment . . . [of] the human conditions. . . [which] make[s] autonomy not even an ideal.”[16]

A socialist like Paul Tillich would have viewed the right side of Love, Temperance, Justice, and Faith as commendably anti-capitalist, as against the left-side enterprise of Courage, Prudence, and Hope. Capitalism is, after all, the system supporting the virtue of enterprise, and that is the left-side virtues—though I have emphasized that in fact even capitalism depends of the loving right side, too. Tillich among others would have quarreled with placing Courage only on the left, masculine side.[17]

The pioneering feminist economist/philosopher Julie Nelson would argue that any left-right, top-bottom has the danger of privileging one over the other. Any one over any other. I’ve said why I think all the virtues work in any serious ethical life. So I am not saying that Hope and Faith are superior to Prudence and Temperance, or that Love trumps Courage every time. Nelson would use positive and negative versions of each virtue, deconstructing the geometry of a “top” thought superior to a bottom, or a “left” sinister.[18] So Love of others can be negative as love of others only, without sufficient self-love: self-abnegation, the womanly sin.[19]

And indeed the placement of the virtues in the diagram is that of mythical convention, not God’s truth, or even science’s. Thus upper-and-right pertains to the past, lower-and-left to the future: well . . . perhaps. The four virtues in bold are the signature virtues of the mythically ancient social classes: warrior (Courage, daring), peasant (Love, loyalty), merchant (Prudence, know how), and priest/brahmin (Temperance, wisdom). More mythical convention. But that is how we talk.

* * * *

There is no reason why the number of sins should equal the number of virtues, though of course in Western tradition, thanks to Pope Gregory, there are also seven, and deadly. In modern English they are Lust, Gluttony, Avarice, Anger, Envy, Sloth—that is, Acedia, from Greek, spiritual sloth, a lack of Hope, replacing “Sadness” in the 17^th century— and mastering above all Pride.[20] They can be paired off by social class, Pride being the characteristic sin of the rich, such as the Florida woman in her mink who on TV in 2004 while clinging to her husband said about the poor, “We aren’t losers.” Acedia is the corresponding sin of the poor and hopeless. Avarice-Gluttony are again sins of the rich and Envy-Anger of the poor, similarly paired. And Lust, after the Fall, is ubiquitous.

Sin or vice, I have argued, is the notable lack of any one or more of the virtues, and so the seven virtues lead to seven single lacks, Imprudence, Injustice, Intemperance, and so forth. But as Hursthouse notes, “although our list of generally recognized virtue terms is, I think, quite short, our list of vice terms is remarkably—and usefully—long.”[21] She notes that the list far exceeds the number of rules that Kantians imagine might be formulated to summarize ethical ideas. The list of vices shows how we actually reason ethically. We call people names. Hursthouse instances “irresponsible, feckless, lazy, inconsiderate, uncooperative, harsh, intolerant, indiscreet, incautious, unenterprising, pusillanimous, feeble, hypocritical, self-indulgent, materialistic, grasping, short-sighted, . . . and on and on.”

Take down your Roget’s International Thesaurus, the Third Edition of 1962, for example. Virtue itself (category number 978) takes up about half a column of words; the two opposites that follow, Vice (979) and Wrongdoing (980) take up two full columns. Asceticism (989), Temperance (990), Fasting (993), and Sobriety (995) fit handily into about two columns, interlarded with seven and a half columns on Intemperance, Gluttony, and Intoxication (which by itself accounts for 5½ columns). Respect (962) has a column of words, followed by two and half columns on Disrespect, Contempt, and Ridicule. Courage (891), in two columns, is surrounded by Anxiety, Fear, Cowardice (888-889) and Rashness, totaling six and a half columns. Cut the six-and-a-half in half to allow for Roget’s habit of alternating opposites and it still works out to 3.25 pusillanimous vices to every virtue of Courage.

The richness of our vocabulary of abuse comes from the stories and images that ground ethical thinking. We remember Billy in kindergarten who would not lovingly and justly cooperate, and he becomes our exemplar for the lack of those qualities. Judas Iscariot becomes the exemplar of intemperance and faithlessness.

If there are seven virtues and if the lack of any combination constitutes a vice, then the combinatorial mathematics implies that there would be. . . let me see, 7 items taken 6 at a time plus 7 taken 5 at a time plus 7 taken 4 at a time. . . exactly 126 vices. I jest. Seriously, there’s no guarantee that every language has a word for any random failure, such as a lack of Faith, Justice, and Prudence in the presence of the other four, Love, Hope, Courage, and Temperance. A man like this would have no rootedness or identity, would not give people respect, or even their due, and would be careless and uncalculating. Yet he would be affectionate, brightly hopeful about something turning up, courageous over present fears, and modest in his needs. Not a Mr. McCawber, precisely. But it’s Arthur Miller’s Willy Loman to a T. The play lets us reflect, then, about this uncategorized vice.

Such a system for reflection has behind it a library of philosophizing, which is one reason for taking seriously the particular septet. Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, Aquinas, and at the very end, before Kant, Adam Smith, and now the women and men exploring virtue ethics, did not merely copy each other. They built on each other’s thought a great engine of analysis.

Hursthouse argues, following Gary Watson and Neera Badhwar, that “we believe the virtues form some sort of unity.”[22] To put it in an economist’s terms, the separate virtues are complements; or to put it statistically, they are not independent. That is, we are startled when on some occasion a bad man behaves well, apparently, and tend to doubt the claim that he did in fact behave well on this occasion. And we expect good men never to behave badly. So as academics we are surprised when a “good” economist behaves badly in other ways, a Nobel laureate at the University of Chicago expressing a virulent homophobia, for example. At least we are a little surprised.

[1] Aquinas Summa Theologiae, c. 1270, Iae-Ia Q. 96, art. 3; and Q. 54 art. 2, to which he refers, quoted in Lisska, Aquinas’s Theory of Natural Law, 1996, p. 285.

[2] See the discussion of this in Rudi Keller, On Language Change, 1990, for example p. 46.

[3] Smith, Moral Sentiments, 1790, p. 237.

[4] Smith, Moral Sentiments, 1790, same place and page following. Compare pp. 268f, 271. He has a confusing discussion on p. 189 (an older section) in which he analyses Prudence as Temperance plus Wisdom, Sophia. But in the passage I quote he is adhering to Aquinian divisions.

[5] MacIntyre, Dependent Rational Animals, 1999, p. 5; compare p. 155f.

[6] Charry, “Happiness,” 2004, p. 28.

[7] Frankfurt, Reasons of Love,2004, p. 7.

[8] Frankfurt, Reasons of Love, 2004, p. 8.

[9] Frankfurt, Reasons of Love,, p. 11.

[10] Frankfurt, Reasons of Love,, p. 28.

[11] Foot, Natural Goodness, 2001, p. 14.

[12] The phrase from Frankfurt, Reasons of Love, is from p. 29.

[13] Knight 1922, in Knight 1935, p. 22.

[14] Ignatieff, Needs of Strangers, 1984, pp. 17, 15.

[15] Held, Feminist Morality, 1993, p. 62.

[16] Baier, Moral Prejudices 1994, pp. 53, 62f.

[17] Tillich, Courage to Be, 1952, pp. 86-96

[18] Nelson, Feminism, Objectivity, 1996, pp. 10-19, 28-34, 45.

[19] Nelson, Feminism, Objectivity, 1996, p. 136.

[20] http://deadlysins.com/sins/history.html is amusing. Luxuria, Gula, Tristia, Avaritia, Ira, Invidia, Superbia are specified in St. Gregory’s Moralia in Job, XXXI cap. xlv. The sin ‘Tristia’ was later replaced by ‘Accidia’, or Sloth, or Despair (Wenzel (1967), 38).

[21] Hursthouse, Virtue Ethics, 1999, p. 41.

[22] Hursthouse, Virtue Ethics, 1999, p. 155,

For a century and a half afterwards it was the city hall, the Stadhuis. Its main room, judged one of the architectural jewels of Europe, was named De Burgerzaal, the [full, voting] citizens’ hall. The hall and its building were designed on strict Vetruvian principles, an outsized Palladian villa, but built for the bourgeois citizens of Amsterdam rather than for an outsizedly rich duke of Capra or Vicenzo. The historian Pieter Geyl calls it “a real citizen’s palace.”[2]

Larger than the great New Church next door (“new” in 1385), contemporaries spoke of a contest between secular and ecclesiastical power. The alternative proposal for celebrating the peace was to supply the Church with a magnificent new tower. The church-improving proposal was rejected, and the New Church to this day lacks a proper tower. The Stadhuis served no royal or religious purpose, no celebration of aristocratic or peasant/Christian virtues.

At the four corners of the building’s principal roof façades, front and rear, were placed four large bronze statues, whose plaster casts were later put up in De Burgerzaal as well. The statues and casts may still be seen. They do not celebrate Greed (Is Good) or Avarice (Above All). On the contrary, they celebrate as was usual in Dutch civic tradition on the front façade Justice with her scales (Rechtvaardigheid: “right-skill”) and Prudence with her mirror. The prudence-word is actually Voorzichtigheid, foresight, which again reflects the difficulty of rendering Prudentia in Germanic languages except English. Similar ornaments placed in 1441 on the Ducal Palace at that older mercantile republic, Venice, are identified in Latin: Justitia preeminent, Prudentia, Temperantia, and Fortitudo, with Charitas.[3]

To get the Pagan Four entire the Stadhuis celebrates, as was not usual in Holland until then, Temperance (Matigheid) and Vigilance—the original architect intended the fourth virtue to be, as classically, Courage, but his successor for some reason made the substitution. Perhaps he thought vigilance (Waakzaamheid: watchfulness) less belligerent than martial courage (Moed) in a new—though as it turned out brief—time of peace. In any event Amsterdam at the height of its success as a bourgeois republic spoke like Venice insistently of a balanced set of virtues.

And in fact it spoke of the pagan four, not merely of gain, gain, and gain—though gain, which is to say Prudence, figures, too, with that fourth of the bronze statues, and inside and outside with reliefs and inlays celebrating the world-girdling commerce of the city. The wily Venetians were less candid in their celebration of gain.

Likewise at one end of De Burgerzaal the entrance to the Magistrate’s Court is surmounted by Death and Retribution aiding Justice in trampling the sins of Greed, personified by King Midas, and Envy. The upper bourgeois are to eschew greed, and so they are to give to charities, for example, as they did with an open hand. In exchange the lower orders are not to envy the upper. Earthly possessions represented in the frieze and arch are restrained by the harness of Temperance and the sword of Justice, with Hercules’ lion skin and club to complete with Courage the three non-Prudential pagan virtues.

And on and on. As Blair Hoxby put it, the “decorative scheme [of the Stadhuis] was probably the most sustained exposition of mercantile ideals in the language of emblems, allegory, and classical allusion extant anywhere in the world.”[4] It all sounds impossibly preachy. Surely “content,” and “morals” in illustration of folk proverbs, cannot be the subject of Serious Art. Surely, like us, Dutch people must have thought of Art as being for Art’s Sake, yes? The MoMA rules, right?

No. Dutch people in the early 17^th century read much of their art ethically: Rembrandt, Hals, Vermeer. That is why they had the century before stripped their churches of the lovely papist ornaments accumulated over centuries in one of the richest quarters of Europe. No non-Protestant messages, please. Images were ethically charged, and were not viewed as objects for Art’s sake alone. True, sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.[5] But the “genre” paintings so characteristic of the Golden Age in the Netherlands, like the conceits of metaphysical poetry in early 17^th-century England and Milton’s “typologies” (a theological term for parallels and anticipations of history), were often heavily and ethically metaphorical. As R. H. Fuchs observed in explaining such a sensibility, arising out of a Protestant duty to read and understand God’s texts oneself, “Had not Christ himself spoken in parables?”[6]

The theme of the four virtues honored by the city hall is repeated, in case you missed it, in the little room known in English as the Tribunal. A wooden public scaffold to where the fated victim was to adjourn would have been set up just outside the room, on the Dam Square. The judges handing down the sentence of death faced a large statue of Justice with sword and blindfold and another of Prudence with a self-reflecting mirror, as on the front façade. Opposite his side the condemned prisoner faced elaborate bas reliefs of Love and, again, Justice and Prudence. Left to right he could read, if he had been classically educated, sculptures showing a Greek father who lovingly volunteered to be punished in his son’s stead; then Solomon’s prudent judgment; and finally a Roman father, an early Brutus, who justly executed his own sons for treason. In other words, to repeat, in its icons the first bourgeois society in northern Europe dealt in the virtues of love, prudence, and justice as much as in rye and nutmeg. So we do still, though we have become embarrassed to say so.

As the Dutch of the Golden Age grasped, the ancient notion that Courage, Temperance, and Justice could not flourish in a commercial society is wrong. Prudence, it was always realized, could flourish among city folk, certainly, which made too much of it suspect in a hero. A coldly maximizing merchant is no Achilles. Remember that Odysseus was a trifle suspect on this score. One is not shocked to find Dante, no friend of commerce, assigning Odysseus, as a false counselor, to the next to the lowest of nine levels of Inferno, the place for those committing Simple Fraud (also in that 8^th level, a little higher up, are astrologers and magicians, that is, in modern terms, economic forecasters).

Yet the Courage to venture on the largest bourgeois building in Europe, the Temperance to stick to the plans once formed, the Justice to enforce business contracts on the delivery time of Norwegian lumber propping it up, all these are virtues withal. From the English side—the English were just then learning to restrain their penchant for noble gestures—Sir William Temple commenting on the Dutch Republic in 1673 contrasted the aristocratic soldier with the bourgeois trader:

One intends to make his fortune suddenly by his courage. . . the other slower, but surer, by craft. . . . This makes the first frank and generous, and [inclined to] throw away upon his pleasures what has been gotten in one danger, and may either be lost or repaired in the next. The other wary and frugal, and loath to part with in a day what he has been laboring [on] for a year, and has not hopes to recover but by the same paces of diligence and time.[7]

Temple uses throughout the chapter, sometimes acknowledged, the nobility-admiring turns of Tacitus concerning the Germans, among them the alleged ancestors of the Dutch. Here for example Temple shadows Germania 24: the noble Germans “will stake their personal liberty on a last decisive throw” of the dice, though Temple’s rhetorical purpose is the opposite of Tacitus’. Of course Temple (or Tacitus, for that matter) is not to be taken as simply conveying facts to the page. But the opinion about the lack of nobility among the early modern Dutch was general, and foreigners accustomed to government by aristocrats therefore laughed at them—though Temple points out that the governing class, the rentier regents, were in fact bred up to government rather like an aristocracy.[8]

“Rather like”—but a real aristocrat, like the Earl of Leicester who had been assigned ninety years earlier to meddle in Dutch politics, would sneer at the “Sovereign Lords Miller and Cheeseman” with whom they had to deal.[9] “Many foreigners,” noted the liberal Huizinga in 1935, “believed that the policies of the United Provinces had but the one aim of flattering the greed of avaricious merchants.” Well, yes: so the aristocrats have always believed about trade-enhancing policies. But “these very policies also benefited the country as a whole.”[10]

The “pagan” virtues, when taken out of their heroic or Hellenic context, are after all merely human, good for business, good for life: the courage to venture, the prudence to venture aright, the temperance and justice to keep balance in doing so. The mother of a handicapped child, the manager of a company facing bankruptcy, the ordinary person rising daily to work in an ordinary job for her son or his daughter, need to be courageous, temperate, just, and prudent, “the better fortitude / Of patience and heroic martyrdom / Unsung.” St. Thomas’s teacher, St. Albert the Great, summarized Cicero’s claim that every virtuous act has all four: “For the knowledge required argues for prudence; the strength to act resolutely argues for courage; moderation argues for temperance; and correctness argues for justice.”[11]

In On Duties (c. 44 BC) Cicero had declared that the Four pagan virtues constitute a man’s honestas, there meaning simply “rectitude, moral worthiness.”[12] But in Latin honestas also meant “honor” in the aristocratic sense, that that is, reputation, as does exclusively its reconstructed root *honos without suffix and the usual honōs (genitive honōris) or simply honor. The Romans used rather the original of our “sincere,” originally meaning “pure,” for what we now call “honest.” Sinceritas was not highly esteemed in a shame culture of aristocrats, and in fact this particular form is not attested before Augustus. At Rome and in its offshoots ethical goodness was what was worthy of esteem in a man of honor. “To live honorably” is the modern English translation of the advice in Justinian’s treatise on Roman law in 533 AD, honeste vivere, not our modern “live honestly.”[13] Truth-telling was distinctly secondary to this notion of honestas. Think of the haughty virtues, the dignitas, of an English lord or of a Mafia don.

Othello’s repeatedly addressing “honest Iago” (1.3.298, 2.3.160) and “my friend, your husband, honest, honest Iago” at 5.2.162 just before he discovers Iago’s lies are therefore not quite so crude cases of dramatic irony as appears to us now. In Othello as most usually in Shakespeare the word means chiefly “honorable,” as men still speak in jest of the purity of an “honest” woman. This sense with reference to women is also very common in Shakespeare—8 times for example in Othello about Desdemona (”I do not think but Desdemona’s honest,” 3.3.230).

Thus 5.1.32, “O brave Iago, honest and just / That hast such a noble sense of thy friend’s wrong.” Iago is here characterized as a warrior, brave and noble as a warrior should be, though as it will turn out having neither integrity nor justice. In Othello the word is used 25 times about dishonorable Iago, 9 of these by Iago about himself and 14 about Iago by the tragically misled Othello. The play mentions honest/honesty fully 53 times—as against only 5 times in Macbeth, 10 in Lear, 16 in Hamlet, or 29 even in Winter’s Tale, all of which like most of Shakespeare are centrally concerned with honor and falsity.[14] In 1713 Shaftesbury was still using “honest” to mean “honorable, virtuous.” He inquired “What honesty or virtue is, considered by itself,” and concluded piously that “it is impossible for an atheist to be virtuous, or share any real degree of honesty, or merit.”[15]

The same happens in French — honnête has an obsolete sense of “civil, courteous”; and honnêteté an obsolete sense of “virtue, decency.” Now it means truth telling. It happens, too, in Germanic languages with an entirely different root word. The usual Dutch or German words for “honesty” mean now truth-telling, but in olden days, as in Latin-derived languages before the rise of the bourgeoisie, meant noble honor. In modern Dutch eerlijkheid means simply honesty. Eerlijkheid duurt ‘t langst, “honesty lasts the longest,” that is, “honesty is the best policy.” But it arises, as does “honesty” in French and English, from honor words in a very different society. The Dutch element eer itself still today means simply honor, eerbaarheid chastity, eergevoel [= “honor feeling”] “sense of honor,” eren “to honor or revere” as in Dutch hymns to de Heer. And erezaak “a point of honor”; even old eerverlies, “corruption of blood lines.”

The OED notes that in English “honest” in sense 1a, meaning “held in honor” or “respectable,” from honestas by way of French, was obsolete after 1692. This is just about the time that England became as bourgeois as the Dutch Republic. The Bank of England in imitation of Dutch models was founded in 1694, for example; and the nation acquired like the Netherlands a public debt. The last citation of the meaning “commendable,” sense 2a, is Pope’s Iliad of 1715-20, though still in use, as we have seen, in 1732. That is just about the time England and Europe generally had its first fully capitalist financial crash. Financial crashes I have noted characterize capitalism precisely because a market society depends on the honesty of strangers, in the modern sense. The meaning of honesty as our usage of “sincere,” says the OED, is “the prevailing modern sense,” sense 3c, though used occasionally this way from Middle English. In Othello the two senses of it, honorable and sincere, mingle.[16]

It is no surprise that in a commercial democracy such as ours the word “honesty” has come to signify instead our master virtue, the egalitarian and bourgeois equivalent of an aristocratic and anti-commercial “honor.” John Casey is astonished that honor “today . . . finds almost no place in the thought of moral philosophers,” though it was central in the Renaissance and before.[17] But that is because it has been replaced by “honesty,” which in a bourgeois society plays an identical social role. In The Stones of Venice (1851-53) John Ruskin remarks after a long disquisition on the origin of virtue lists, “It is curious that in none of these [Italian] lists do we find either Honesty or Industry ranked as a virtue, except in the Venetian one.”[18] Surely it is not so very curious, considering the frankly bourgeois and busy character of the Venetian Republic at its height, and the honor-obsessed cultures of contemporary feudal societies like France or England. As Ruskin notes, later the virtue of “Industry, in Northern [that is, proto-bourgeois French, German, Dutch, English] art and Northern morality, assumes a principal place.”

** * * *

The Japanese constitution was imposed in 1946 by Douglas MacArthur on his charges. In the course of her remarkable work on the linguistics of Japanese politics (1991, 2001, a­nd especially 2002) Kyoko Inoue has noted that the English phrase “individual dignity” (as in Article 23, “Marriage shall rest upon . . . individual dignity and essential equality of the sexes”) was quite innocently translated by the Japanese Diet ratifying the constitution as jinkaku.

The word was a Meiji Restoration coinage jin [individual] + kaku [rank], used in westernizing (specifically French-imitating) legal reforms in the late 19^th century for “legal personality,” as in corporate law. One might also translate it as “standing,” as in “having standing to sue.” But the root kaku means “rank” in a sense of Justice that would have seemed completely ordinary to a 17^th-century Frenchman or a 5^th-century Greek. The dignity of an emperor or a samurai or a mid-20^th-century free male Japanese comes from his rank, not from his humanity shared with commoners, women, slaves, Koreans.

Until the 1970s, when in the junior high school textbooks that Inoue takes as representative jinkaku began to be replaced by more egalitarian words meaning “humanity,” ethical discourse in Japan had trouble digesting the emphatically non-hierarchical notion of “dignity” entailed in radical Christian and then radical bourgeois and finally radical democratic talk in the West. Indeed the two Japanese intellectuals Inoue discusses as beginning in the 1920s to drain jinkaku of its hierarchical meaning were among the 1 percent of the population professing Christianity. As Robert Bellah notes, in Japan “Christians played a role out of all proportion to their numbers in the cause of social reform in the period before World War II.”[19]

In an aristocratic and hierarchical society of status and shame the four pagan virtues lead up to honor = the courage, justice, and faith to take the front rank in the line of battle. In our bourgeois and egalitarian society of contract and guilt they lead up to honesty = the courage, justice, and faith to be reliable in making a deal.

* * * *

The ethical bourgeois can be seen in his enemies. Consider Jean-Paul Sartre, who remained a fellow traveler long after Khrushchev’s destalinization speech, long after the Hungarian Revolution, long after the disappointments of actually existing socialism. “The philosopher of liberty,” Raymond Aron wrote, “never managed, or resigned himself, to see communism as it is. He never diagnosed Soviet totalitarianism, the cancer of the century, and he never condemned it as such.”[20] In his youth and in his age he was, with Simone de Beauvoir and that generation of French intellectuals, unthinkingly anti-bourgeois. It is ironic, by the way, that Sartre and Beauvoir both used metaphors of market dealings in describing their “open” relationship—well. . . open for Sartre—and the sexual ideal of free men and women.

The ethical content of Sartre’s early work such as Being and Nothingness has been brilliantly drawn out by Ronald Santoni, in his 1995 book Bad Faith, Good Faith, and Authenticity in Sartre’s Early Philosophy. Santoni sees the passage from “bad faith” (mauvaise foi) to Heideggerian “authenticity” as ethical—this against the popular parody of existentialism as amoral, a Valley-Girl “Whatever.” Bad faith is lying to oneself. Good faith attempts at least not to lie. The third and most noble state, authenticity, ascends to a still higher level, accepting the ambiguities and ethical responsibilities of a full life.

But Sartre seems to be importing a specifically political concern into his ethical thinking. Good faith, or sincerity, is (hélas, Sartre would add) a bourgeois virtue, that is to say, a virtue the capitalist system would honor, at least in its preachments. Bad faith would in this way of looking at it be the manner of life of the very worst of the bourgeoisie. In writing of good faith Sartre is considering, with distaste, the project of liberalism, by a European definition of the word, which tries to imagine and bring into being a Good Capitalism. Santoni observes that Sartre spends very few pages on good faith but entire books on bad. Perhaps the explanation for his brevity is that good faith is precisely the best project—but withal he strongly feels an ethically inadequate project—of the detested bourgeoisie.

The pro-bourgeois theorists, on the contrary, would claim that the best of capitalism is good faith, which in Santoni’s words “pre-reflectively accepts rather than flees human reality. In short, it is self-acceptance as freedom.” Sartre seems to be suggesting: “Yes, good faith is the best from a bad lot. It is the best from les bourgeois, and therefore still very bad. What one should aspire to is authenticity, an altogether unbourgeois condition.” This political concern would perhaps explain what Santoni calls “Sartre’s baffling counterintuitive claim that good faith [or ‘sincerity,’ for that matter] shares the project and goal of bad faith.”[21] Faith is bourgeois. If I’ve got this right, Sartre would fit also into the dogmatic secularism of French intellectuals at the time, against Foi of a churchly sort. No foi, thank you, good or bad: we’re French leftists.

The true best, that third thing above the plane of mere faith whether good or bad, is authenticity, that “self-recovery” or “deliverance.” It is an aristocratic virtue, which would recommended it to the Marxist clerisy of Sartre’s time. But in political theory it follows from the Revolution. Neither Sartre nor Santoni say this in so many words. Sartre claims that a cowardly reaction to the anxiety of being and nonbeing is the source of inauthenticity. But my point is that the bad-faith vs. good faith yielding finally to authenticity fits the dialectic structure of the philosophical argument and fits, too, Sartre’s political beliefs.

Sartre’s Revolution is to be led by philosophers. In this interpretation Sartre accords a glorious place to the clerisy, that embodiment of “reflection,” to use the Sartrean vocabulary, because the clerisy leads humanity, with a self-consciously grasped “willed choice.” One is tempted to note cynically: What other class would elevate a sheer intellectual activity to world-changing? And what other class would accord orthodoxy, upright opinion, such power?

In 1955 Simone de Beauvoir defended the Stalinist orthodoxy that she and Jean-Paul espoused in this way: “Truth is one, error is many. It is therefore no coincidence if the right wing claims to be pluralist.”[22] The clerisy alone can experience a “radical conversion”—note the revolutionary rhetoric here—maintaining nonetheless “ambiguity.” Ambiguity, understand, is not a bad thing in such a theology, so long as the proper clerisy is in attedance to interpret the signs. The blessed confusion gives the clerisy, whether secular or religious, its leading role in the state. Ambiguity therefore is beloved of Sartre.

The clerisy is uniquely positioned, says Sartre, to accept responsibility and moral agency. One is here inclined to call the preacher of ethical responsibility to account for “the cruel, duplicitous stratagems employed by the polygamist Sartre in [sexual] love,” as Santoni puts it. Or to wonder how an advocate of moral agency could so long admire Communist tyrannies.[23] The worst of bourgeois society, bad faith, Sartre claimed, is a flight from freedom, adopting for example the absurd conventions of French bourgeois society. Bourgeois good faith might be admitted as a stage “laying the foundation” for authenticity, as in orthodox Communist thought the success of the bourgeoisie lays the foundation for the revolution and for communism.

But that hopelessly bourgeois good faith or sincerity, Sartre is saying, is in the end impossible. One cannot possibly, contrary to what Santoni hopes, “rescue good faith from the controlling tentacles of bad faith” (p. xxxix). The liberal project, which is Santoni’s and mine but of course not Sartre’s, is ethically impossible. Sincerity, in Sartre’s puzzling words, is a “phenomenon of bad faith.” Only a faux-aristocratic authenticity is possible, for a select few.

Sartre was wrong. The bourgeois project is on balance good and has in large part succeeded. The Other, such as the working class, Sartre claims, is “menaced” by capitalism (Santoni’s word, p. xxxvi). I don’t believe so. That particular Other has for one thing become bourgeois. And the remaining proletariat, and other Others, such as The Woman, became free and prosperous within capitalism, as well as ethically complete. The goal of a society in which ”each-for-itself affirms and promotes the freedom of the Other” (Santoni again) is a good description of what bourgeois capitalism has in sober fact accomplished.

* * * *

In Book IX of The Spirit of the Laws, chps. 1-5, Judith Shklar observed, “Montesquieu attributed all the commercial virtues to citizens [of Athens]. . . . Frugality, prudence, honesty, caution, these are the commercial traits of character, and a democratic republic needs them especially.”[24] Beyond these, commerce uses the cardinal virtues, too. As Aquinas and every theorist of the virtues through Smith concluded, the pagan and civic and “natural” Four are an almost complete account—perhaps the masculine side of a complete account—of even the bourgeois virtues:

The Four Pagan Virtues

JUSTICE - [social balance] - Gandhi

COURAGE - (Aristocrat/Hero) - Achilles

TEMPERANCE - [individual balance] - (Priest/ Philosopher) - Socrates, Jane Austen

PRUDENCE - (Bourgeois/Businessperson) - (Max U, Practical Wisdom, Rationality) - Ben Franklin

[1] For the following: Kraaij, Royal Palace, 1997, pp. 10, 12, 14, 23, 42-47; Huisken, Royal Palace, 1996, pp. 22-23; Goossens, Treasure Wrought, 1996, pp. 16-17, 22, 28.

[2] Geyl, Netherlands, 1936, p. 540.

[3] Rosand, Myths of Venice, 2001, p. 97.

[4] Hoxby, Mammon’s Music, 2002, p. 107.

[5] Eddy de Jongh, who started the business of reading moral messages in paintings like a text, has some second thoughts in Jongh, 1987. In the same volume Eric Sluijter mounts a brilliant assault on the didactic hypothesis.

[6] Fuchs, Dutch Painting, 1978, p. .

[7] Temple, Observations, 1673, IV, p. 92; “not” and “hopes”: sic.

[8] Temple, Observations, 1673, IV, p. 84.

[9] Huizinga, “Dutch Civilization,” 1941, p. 20; Israel, Dutch Republic, p. 222.

[10] Huizinga, “Spirit of the Netherlands,” 1935, p. 31.

[11] Quoted in Houser, “Virtue of Courage,” 2002, p. 306.

[12] Cicero, On Duties, 44 BC, I, 61.

[13] Justinian, Institutes, 533 BC, p. 1, section 1.1.

[14] Complete, scannable texts are given at http://www-tech.mit.edu/ Shakespeare/.

[15] Shaftesbury, Characteristics, 1713, Vol. II, p. 4. Compare p. 8: “honest or moral character.”

[16] For example Shakespeare, Othello, Act 1, scene 3, lines 283, 293, 382; and 2.1.198; 2.3.6, 125, 160, 230, 249, 309-315; 3.1.20-21, 38; 3.2.5; 3.3.105-107, 123, 130, 134, 158, 229, 247, 262, 380-389, 417, 438; 5.1.32; 5.79, 155, 161 (in the Oxford edition given in Greenblatt, ed, The Norton Shakespeare).

[17] Casey, Pagan Virtue, 1990, p. 83.

[18] Ruskin, Stones of Venice, 1851-53, Vol. II, Chp. VIII, “The Ducal Palace,” para. LXIV, p. 328.

[19] Bellah, Imagining Japan, 2003, p. 42.

[20] Aron, Memoirs, 1983, p. 330.

[21] Santoni, Bad Faith, Good Faith, 1995, p. xvi-xvii.

[22] Quoted in Todorov Hope and Memory, 2000, p. 35.

[23] Santoni, Bad Faith, Good Faith, 1990, p. 187.

[24] Shklar, “Montesquieu,” 1990, p. 268.

The classical virtue ethicists believed they had spotted the seams in the universe, the essence of Prudence or the substance of Justice. In re-using their words now, in an expanding universe, we do not have such ambitions. The ethical, we believe, is local, not universal, knowledge. It is contingent and fallible, not universal and necessary. “It is a contingent fact,” writes Hursthouse, “that we can, individually, flourish or achieve eudaimonia, contingent that we can do so in the same way as each other, and contingent that we can do so all together, not at each other’s expense.”[2]

Such a notion of the ethical, Kant would have said with a sneer, is only anthropological or psychological or historical, not pure and rational. Alasdair MacIntyre characterizes the monistic tradition of Hobbes, Bentham, and Kant as asserting without much evidence, or on the evidence, as MacIntyre notes, of a misunderstanding of how geometry proceeds, that “there is a way of founding adequately the first principle or principles of right action by appeal to considerations which they take to be equally available at the commencement of enquiry to every rational person as such.”[3] Any rational person just knows that we “must” imitate Euclid in method and “must” come to the Categorical Imperative in substance. There’s no grounding to the “must” in the Grundlegung.

And the method assumes its conclusion in another way, too: that we are discussing a person possessing practical wisdom already. No need to learn to cut cloth on the bias by watching one’s mother, to take batting practice, to run marathons. No need to grow in practical or ethical experience. The representation of Right lies deep in the soul of everyone, says Kant, even of the most delicate child, an axiom, an assumption. One is reminded of the joke about a physicist and an economist on a desert island finding a can of beans. They only lack a can opener. The physicist says, “Let’s build a fire and heat the can. By the laws of physics, it will explode, and that way we can get into the beans.” The economist says, “What a messy solution! I have a much neater one, which uses the laws of academic economics. First step: assume as an axiom that we have a can-opener. . . .”

The ethics of the virtues asks insistently of the universalizers, though always politely: “Do you have a reason for seeking The Universal? What guidance, when all is said, can such a priori generalities give to actual lives?” Talk of the local, contingent, non-universal virtues has the virtue at least of preserving how we actually talk, and therefore might help us talk—and behave. And there is a worry in the actual behavior of people who, as Alasdair MacIntyre puts it, “identify what are in fact their partial and particular causes too easily and too completely with the cause of some universal principle.” “They usually behave,” he notes, “worse than they would otherwise do.”[4]

Factually speaking, as Alan Wolfe found in his surveys and interviews about American ethical views in the 1990s, “virtue,” singular, as a word means little to ordinary Americans, except to arouse annoyance at the conservative churches and their recent obsession with sex, sex, sex. But to Wolfe’s Americans the particular named virtues, plural, mean a great deal, provoking calm yet committed discussion. Americans admire especially, for example, loyalty, that blend of faith, love, justice, and temperance, and honesty—courage, justice, and faith; and in a broader sense a bourgeois blend of all the virtues.[5]

The way we actually talk does not depend on the Golden Rule or the categorical imperative or even the vaguer maxim of maximizing utility, at least not much. It depends on the particular virtues, straight from the Girl Scout Handbook, on the testaments old and new, and on the songs, poems, stories, family histories, and public dramatizations which give them life. Go and learn the commentary.

But the virtues do not work one-by-one. Murdoch observed that

as we deepen our notions of the virtues we introduce relationship and hierarchy. Courage, which seemed at first to be something on its own, a sort of specialized daring of the spirit, is now seen to be a particular operation of wisdom [including what I am calling Prudence] and love. We come to distinguish a self-assertive ferocity from the kind of courage which would enable a man coolly to choose the labor camp rather than the easy compromise with the tyrant. It would be impossible to have one virtue unless it were a very trivial one such as thrift.[6]

Or unless it were in fact a vice. Mary Midgley speaks of the treacherous Iago in the play: “Iago’s envy . . . . has taken him over. It swallows up every other motive. . . . All attempts at inward balance have ceased . . . . There are no more conflicts.”[7] Iago lacks temperance: “I do hate [Othello], as I do hell’s pains,” he says in the first scene, using a proverbial exaggeration, though also an ironic foreshadowing of his ultimate destination. As an economist would say, he is “specialized” in one or two virtues, showing courage in venturing and prudence in completing his somewhat haphazard plan against Othello but showing none of that inward balance in acknowledgement of the conflict between one virtue and another that would make room in a good person for Love or Justice or Hope: namely, Temperance.

You are moved to hate the boss who passed you over in favor of some insipid Cassio, and for all you know slept with your spouse. But you draw back from hatred, anger, envy, with a mild reflection that after all it would be unjust to indulge your feelings, or that after all the Lord has laid down that “Vengeance is mine,” not thine. Iago, however, courageously and unbalancedly does not draw back. His “motiveless malignity,” as Coleridge put it, arises from his character, not from the “motives” he offers, now one, now another, “the mere fictions of his own restless nature, distempered by a keen sense of his intellectual superiority, and haunted by the love of exerting power, on those especially who are his superiors in practical and moral excellence.” [8] Iago’s sin, like most sin, originates in the master sin of pride.

Likewise in Paradise Lost Satan declares courageously and single-virtuedly, “so farewell hope, and with hope farewell fear, / Farewell remorse: all good to me is lost; / Evil be thou my good.” Of course it’s not so simple as he claims. In seeing with Stanley Fish how Milton works one should remember that theologically speaking Satan must be wrong about almost everything of importance.[9] C. S. Lewis writes: “What we see in Satan is the horrible co-existence of a subtle and incessant intellectual activity with an incapacity to understand anything.”[10] Satan is not just a liar, “with calumnious Art/ Of counterfeited truth.” He is an idiot savant of unbalanced virtù.

Satan is not some Other to God, a force of pure Evil as against pure Good. We must rid ourselves, wrote Lewis in the midst of the Second War, “of the absurd fancy that devils are engaged in the disinterested pursuit of something called Evil (the capital is essential).”[11] Devils have goals like our own—honor, affection, nourishment, dominion—and being like us creatures (that is, created by God) have the usual virtues and vices. Their chief lord is shown by Milton as gloriously courageous, accepting as great a share of hazard as of honor. I have noted that his courage has mislead romantics from William Blake to Jack London into imagining that Satan is admirable even in Milton’s secret heart. London took the proud words of Milton’s Satan as his personal motto: “To reign is worth ambition, though in hell: / Better to reign in hell, than serve in heaven.”[12]

Courage, in other words, is a virtue, but in a bad man or a fallen angel or a CEO gone off the ethical rails it is a virtue uncompleted by other virtues, such as Temperance or Justice or Love. Iago is courageous and, especially, prudent, but intemperate and, especially, unjust and unloving. The result is unchecked Envy and Hatred.

The classical and now revived analysis of virtues involves such balance and completion among the incommensurate virtues. The virtues cannot simply be added up into one sovereign Good, using that handy pocket-sized card. Aristotle or any typical recent Aristotelian, as Alan Ryan puts it, “approaches human nature more as a biologist than a mathematician, willing to recognize a variety of goods and ills [which suit different kinds of being] and a variety of ways of life which promote” the goods and ward off the ills.[13] That’s right: the long experiment in ethics of emulating Descartes and Newton, with their mathematical axioms and rigid proofs, has failed. We neo-Aristotelians want to try instead to emulate Darwin, Mayr, and Gould, with their biological classifications and their stories.

That is to say: Being good—lower-case g, no single Platonic ideal—always involves alloyed virtues, tin with copper, each a distinct element, to yield the more durable bronze. In fact Sin—Evil being Sin institutionalized—merely is some one or two virtues unalloyed with the rest. St. Gregory the Great classified the sins into the Seven Deadly ones. In matters of money an excess of virtuous Prudence unalloyed is sinful Greed, and its character is the miser. In matters of the body an excess of Love is Gluttony or Lust, and its character is the sybarite. Sin is a condition. Sins, plural, are acts. In Christian terms, sin is distance from God. Sins push one further away.

To think of sin or evil as a unified essence of its own, a contagion easily spotted in the very face of the person “infected” by it, is a Romantic and suburban Manichaeism according to which most of us believe ourselves to be—for all our admitted weaknesses, you see—on the good and light side of the Force. As Sartre once noted, “Manichaeism conceals a deep-seated attraction towards Evil. . . a curiosity fascinated. . . . In Berlin I knew a Protestant in whom sexual desire took the form of indignation. The sight of women in bathing suits aroused him to fury; he willingly encouraged that fury and passed his time at swimming pools.”[14]

On account of our after-knowledge of its evil fruit we are now rather more ravished, if we allow ourselves, by Triumph des Willen, Leni Riefenstahl’s film celebrating will-and-art politics in 1934 Germany. Listen to one Archibald Q. Stanton, a lay viewer of the film in 2002, about what he calls this “Feel Good Movie of the Century”: “Set aside your preconceptions, notions of political correctness, kick back with some nachos and enjoy the spectacle, pageantry, patriotism and just plain ole unmitigated evil of a bygone era.”[15] We cannot pretend to be much superior to Mr. Stanton, having ourselves felt the sexiness of evil, with or without nachos. We thrill to horror movies like Jaws or Friday the Thirteenth. It is therefore erotic as well as comforting to imagine Evil, though very interesting, as a rare case and therefore mainly irrelevant: Hitler or Darth Vader or Osama bin Laden.

Ethical questions are then corralled off as transfixing oddities. They are not how in the next minute or so you treat your husband or the clerk at the store or your fellow driver on the Kennedy Expressway. They are about how you decide, after consulting newspaper editorials and presidential commissions, the exceptional Bill-Moyers/ Charlie-Rose issues of abortion and cloning and bombing and other titanic wrongs and rights.

The problem for such a modern, secular, post-Holocaust, and Romantic view, in other words, is the banality of evil. As the philosopher John Doris puts it, in his book arguing that situations matter more than the character assumed in virtue ethics, “It takes a lot of people to kill . . . 6 million . . . human beings, and there just aren’t enough monsters to go around. Unfortunately, it does not take a monster to do monstrous things.”[16] Doris cites the famous experiment by Stanley Milgram in 1960-63, in which ordinary citizens of New Haven were persuade to (as they believed) torture other people to extreme pain and death.[17]

The ordinariness of the Germans—and let it be noted, the Austrians and Poles and Hungarians among others—who served as Hitler’s willing executioners, for example, disappears if we are looking for some Essence of Evil. Albert Speer, Hitler’s official architect and from 1942 minister of production, was a very saint of Prudence Only, an echt efficiency expert. But he was merely a more extreme version of ordinary Germans. He resembled ordinary Dutch and French people watching placidly out the window at Jews and Gypsies, homosexuals and socialists, being marched efficiently away. Compare ordinary Swedes trading peacefully with Hitler. Or ordinary Danes working with their usual efficiency in Hitler’s war machine. Or ordinary Swiss accommodating the banking needs of Nazi officials. Or, when it comes to that, ordinary Britons and Americans supporting their governments’ refusal to accept Jewish immigrants.

If we search always for the titanic we miss the banal evil, the unbalanced, uncompleted virtues, of our own, small, ordinary, local lives. In suburbia nowadays the very words “evil” and “sin” are taboo, except on Sunday mornings and then not in the sermon but only in the older hymns and rituals—and for special occasions in the rhetoric of conservative politicians. The Oxford English Dictionary notes dryly that evil as “the antithesis of good” is “now little used.” “Deliver us from evil,” you say in prayer—but you certainly do not mean your participation in the institutions of sin. You in such a pageant are (surely) a sweet old Dr. Jeckyl, and far away and far below is some terrifying, alien, evil, and above all rare Mr. Hyde.

In the view of virtue ethicists from Aristotle to Annette Baier, on the contrary, we are all capable of sin, and get into it daily. This is the secular meaning of the Abrahamic conviction that we are born in sin. It is the Greek and Christian sense of tragedy persisting in our culture—opposed recently by an Evangelical enthusiasm for a Rapture in which we, at least, will be saved. Sin in the Greek and orthodox Christian view is not radically foreign, something Satan made me do just this once, or something that only satanic people from the red or the blue states do, Anthony Hopkins playing Dr. Hannibal Lecter. Compare in this connection, by the way, Dr. Faustus, Dr. Frankenstein, Dr. Strangelove, Dr. Roger Chillingworth the learned if evil physician, husband to Hester Prynne of The Scarlet Letter; or, in Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper,” the “scientific” Dr. John X, the scorning and confining husband, and Dr. Y, the wife’s complicit brother—thus are the learned honored in Protestant Europe.

Anyway, sin is domestic. We actual, suburban humans are imperfect. We do not have for example perfect Temperance. We chicken out, overindulge, harden our hearts, can’t think it through, remain confusedly ignorant. And so a courageous gesture with our SUV at 70 miles per hour on the Kennedy Expressway, a banal, unremarkable aggression against a too-slow driver, a mini-heroic act, will once in while produce a looming, ramifying catastrophe.

The need for balance in the virtues, lest they be specialized into sin, is tragic. In Democracy and Social Ethics (1902) Jane Addams spoke autobiographically, as a woman would, about the conflict between the “family claim” which kept her from going to Smith College as she had planned and the “social claim” which later drove her life: “The collision of interests, each of which has a real moral basis and a right to its own place in life, is bound to be more or less tragic. It is the struggle between two claims, the destruction of either of which would bring ruin to ethical life.”[18]

“Most merciful God, we confess that we have sinned against you, in thought, word, and deed, by what we have done, and by what we have left undone.” We are to confess our ordinary inability to balance our virtues in a world of scarcity, failing to exercise for example a properly Christian, cheek-turning love towards someone who has hurt us. Justice alone is not enough. Justice alone, unbalanced, will morph into the sin of Anger. One must have Love, and Courage and Temperance and the rest.

Bishop Butler in 1725 viewed Temperance as the crux, as one would naturally in an 18^th century very conscious of its progress over the chaos of religious war. Self-interest was a matter of Prudence and Courage, benevolence of Love and Justice. But neither could flourish without Temperance restraining the passions.

Men daily, hourly sacrifice the greatest known interest to fancy, inquisitiveness, love or hatred, any vagrant inclination. The thing to be lamented is not that men have so great a regard to their own good or interest [even] in the present world, for they have not enough.[19]

“The greatest known interest” is eternal salvation. But in Butler’s way of arguing it could be any great secular end, too. The problem is to control passion, to balance virtues, as Temperance does.

“The existence of inborn tendencies to evil,” Midgley writes, “need not puzzle us too much. It only means that our good tendencies are not complete or infallible.”[20] Philippa Foot calls vice a “natural defect” in a living thing, as a tiger would be defective without teeth or an oak tree without leaves and a human without love or locomotion. For example, people who habitually free ride on the efforts of others “are just as defective as those who have defective hearing, sight, or powers of locomotion.”[21] But perfection is as rare in ethics as in body.

As St. Augustine and later Aquinas thought of it, sin is not a thing in itself but an absence, a hole in the fabric.[22] The holes are original and ordinary. Or as Milton thought of it, sin is not a thing in itself, since after all nothing but God exists. It is rather a mistaken love for and loyalty to the imagined holes—again ordinary, for God loves and respects us so much that He gave us the free will to make such a mistake, to make nonentities our gods. And after loss of Eden we do.[23]

* * * *

Justice, the giving of dues, said St. Augustine, is the social parallel to Temperance. Temperance speaks of inner, Justice of outer weather.

Temperance is the management of the self, Justice the management of society. The one is a balance of passions, the other a balance of citizens. “Just as a man is well-ordered in himself by virtue [namely, Temperance],” says Aquinas, “so too is he well-ordered to his neighbors [by Justice].”[24] As John Rawls noted, justice is the characteristic virtue of institutions, and of the people running them. Justice is the characteristically social virtue among strangers, because as Aristotle observed, “if men are friends, there is no need of justice between them,” which is to say that from someone who loves you as he loves himself you have no need to claim your due.[25]

What is due depends. Before the Protestant and egalitarian and bourgeois sentiments of the 18^th century in Northwestern Europe flowered into a passion for equality a just balance meant what we and the reactionaries would now call “order.” The ordines, the classes, of Roman society were enforced by law and by the customs of the ancestors with bewildering precision, such as the details of seating at the games, the senatorial ordo in front, knights next, plebs in the back. And this was just. Justinian’s Institutes of 533 begins by defining justice as “the constant and perpetual will to acknowledge the right of each.”[26] But “right” [iūs] varied with social condition. And this was just.

Pliny the Younger declared that nothing is more unequal than equality itself. Shocking injustices as we now believe they are such as slavery or pedophilia could therefore survive millennia of ethical scrutiny, or rather a blithe lack of scrutiny. Thus too the inequality of women; or of children subject to a pater familias; or more recently the inequality of homosexuals abused by law and custom in Germanic countries; or of black bodies swinging in the Southern breeze; or of young black or Hispanic men imprisoned for selling coke to suburbanites slumming.

Humans have shown repeatedly that they can imagine almost any injustice—at any rate an injustice by the most elevated egalitarian standards of bourgeois Europe—as fit, decorous, natural, what we do, nothing-to-be-done-about-it-anyway; in a word, as “just.” Consider the Germans of the Third Reich, or the Germans rehearsing for the Third Reich in East Africa in 1904. Consider Hotel Rwanda. We have shown ourselves capable of imposing almost any indignity on Iraqis or Tutsis or barbaroi or any inferior.

Dignitas in Latin is from an Indo-European base *dek- meaning “receive, be fitting,” from which also decus (ornament) > decōrus (proper) > decorous. What is decorous depends in a hierarchical society of course on the dignity of rank. It is the free adult male Roman citizen, not a slave or woman or child, for whom it is dulce et decorum to die for the fatherland. Aristotle declares that “justice between master and slave and between father and child is not the same as absolute and political justice. . . . A chattel is . . . a part of oneself.”[27] Well, of course. An ancilla, a female household slave (from which we get the word “ancillary”), was recommended by ancient ethical writers as a sexual object useful for preventing real adultery. Never mind her admitted humanness. Galen the doctor warns an owner not to hit slaves with his fist, to avoid injury to his—the owner’s—fist. Wait until the passion subsides, he counsels, then apply the rod of justice. Never mind the slave’s humanness.

One waxes indignant about past slavery. But the point here is that its justice was until the late 18^th century entirely unquestioned. Souls in such a view are of course equal before God, the “of course” applying for example to Greek and Roman stoicism, and to the Abrahamic religions of the Near East. It does not seem to apply to Hinduism, where a higher rank in the orders of the world must be earned in successive incarnations. Little wonder that over the millennia the castes of India have been sociologically hardy. The equality before God that distinguishes monotheism from rank-preserving polytheism is ancient.[28]

But as Samuel Fleischacker points out, {a} this-world egalitarianism was not imagined until Rousseau and especially Adam Smith. Equality of souls did not imply anything like equality of condition in this life.[29] On the contrary, fallen man must take up his burden as God’s test. The poor are to be relieved because charity is a Christian duty and a Jewish mitzvah, not because the poor servant is entitled to a comfortable life. Until the bourgeois ethicists of the late 18^th century, whose new policy was carried out in the 19^th century, every stoic, Jewish, Christian, and Moslem society placidly accepted slavery, on the principle for example of rendering unto Caesar in this life what is Caesar’s. And rendering unto quite a few other people, too: my lord, my master, my owner, my boss, my priest, my husband, my father, my older brother.

And until the bourgeois ethicists of the late 19^th century, whose new policy was carried out in the 20^th century, almost every society enforced the subordination of women, on the principle for example that a woman is an imperfect man. And until the bourgeois ethicists of the late 20^th century, whose new policy is being carried out in the 21^st century, Christian societies among others adopted the persecution of homosexuals, on the principle for example that anything that causes anxiety to young heterosexual men is to be assaulted. Whatever the conception of justice, an orderly ancient one or a Protestant modern one, Justice is the virtue of treating with respect whomever should be treated with respect. The rule of Justice is: no dissing. It is not a rule of Prudence or Love or any of the other virtues.

Bourgeois societies from ancient Jerusalem to modern Hong Kong have been notably, if never perfectly, free. This is because two people doing business must deal with each other, not overawe or submit to each other. So bourgeois society developed a historically unique notion of justice. Samuel Fleischacker in recent books has noted that Adam Smith, the theorists of bourgeois virtues, was a radical egalitarian, quite unimpressed with the claims of philosophers (say) to superiority over street porters.[30] An old notion has survived scrutiny: 18^th-century liberal philosophers did abandon an appeal to status in favor of an appeal to contract, and the European society surrounding the philosophers was changing this way, too. So Henry Maine said in 1861, and Tocqueville, too, in The Ancien Régime and the French Revolution.

By contrast, everyone in Elizabethan England believed in a great chain of being from God through kings to lords to masters to apprentices to women to slaves. You can see it vividly in Shakespeare. David Cannadine argues that in Britain “the Elizabethan world picture did not die with the Elizabethans.”[31] By now in America only certain members of the Country Club believe it. Whether we like it or not we liberals, and even we radicals and conservatives in our less bloody-minded moods, are entangled in a bourgeois conception of justice.

[1] Williams, Moral Luck, 1981, p. x.

[2] Hursthouse, Virtue Ethics, 1999, p. 22.

[3] MacIntyre, Whose Justice, 1988, p. 175, italics supplied.

[4] MacIntyre, After Virtue, 1981, p. 206.

[5] Wolfe, Moral Freedom, 2001, pp. 21, 23ff.

[6] Murdoch, “Sovereignty of Good,” 1967, p. 95.

[7] Midgley, Wickedness, 1984, p. 147. Othello, I. i. line 154.

[8] Coleridge Omniana (1812), quoted at http:// www. clicknotes. com/othello/ motiveless.html.

[9] Fish, How Milton Works, throughout, for example pp. 47, 57. 92.

[10] Lewis, “Satan,” 1942, p. 200

[11] Lewis, Screwtape Letters, 1943, p. xi.

[12] Milton, Paradise Lost, 1667, Book IV, lines 108-110; Book I, lines 262-263. London’s use of Milton: James Dickey, “Introduction” to his edition of The Call of the Wild, White Fang, and Other Stories (1961), quoted in Gary Kinder, ed., Jack London, The Sea Wolf, Modern Library 2000, p. 293.

[13] Ryan, “Human Nature,” 1987, p. 218.

[14] Sartre, Anti-Semite, 1944, p. 46f.

[15] http://us.imdb.com/title/tt0025913/

[16] Doris, Lack of Character, 2002, p. 54.

[17] Doris, Lack of Character, 2002, pp. 39-51 and throughout.

[18] Quoted in Elshtain, “Adams, Jane,” 1995, p. 14.

[19] Butler, Fifteen Sermons, 1725, Preface, p. 352.

[20] Midgeley, Wickedness, 1984, p. 14.

[21] Foot, Natural Goodness, 2001, pp. 16, 116.

[22] Aquinas, Summa contra gentiles, c. 1259-1264, III: 7.

[23] Midgley, Wickedness, 1984, p. 14.

[24] Aquinas, Disputed Questions, 1269-72, “The Cardinal Virtues,” Art. 1, p. 106.

[25] Aristotle, Nic. Ethics, c. 330 BC, VIII, 1, 4 (1155b).

[26] Justinian, Institutes, 533 AD, p. 1, “Iustitia est constans et perpetua voluntas ius suum cuique tribunes.”

[27] Aristotle, Nic. Ethics, c. 330 BC, V, vi, 8 (1134b).

[28] Sacks, 2002, Dignity of Difference, p. 92.

[29] Fleischhacker, Short History, 2004b, p. 2 and throughout.

[30] Fleischacker, Short History, 2004b, and “Economics and the Ordinary,” 2004c.

[31] Cannadine, Class in Britain, 1998, p. 167.

Malthus undertook to explain for the first time why the enrichment of the poor had not happened by then, and why, according to the logic of the newly invented and previously optimistic political economy, even a modest enrichment would not happen ever, especially with the Poor Law subsidizing poverty, unless people adopted what he called “preventive checks” on population growth, what came to be called “birth control.”^[1] Even these, he said, would not do all that much for the average person. In the first, 1798 edition of An Essay on the Principle of Population (later editions were less pessimistic, but it is the first edition that has for two centuries ruled people’s minds) Malthus claimed that what had kept people poor since the caves was not divine malevolence or royal extraction but human sexual intemperance and irremediable economic scarcity—which is to say, original sin and loss of Eden and all our woe.^[2]

Up to 1798 the Malthus of the first edition was correct. Zero-sum ruled. As Malthus’s inspiration, Joseph Townsend, had put it twelve years earlier, “In the progress of society it will be found that some must want; and then the only question will be this: Who is most worthy to suffer cold and hunger, the prodigal or the provident?”^[3] Townsend argued on the basis of animal models (which later inspired Darwin by way of Malthus) that “the quantity of food . . . regulates the numbers of the human species.” And the quantity of food, as some modern Malthusians still believe, was strictly limited. The “principle of population,” as it was known among the classical economists of the early nineteenth century, had kept most of our ancestors since the caves living on that $3 a day, and many on less. In the slums of Edo or Calcutta they slept on mats in the street. People wandered the veldt or the outback or the jungle. They were hungry, crowded into tenements in Naples or Glasgow or Guangdong. They lay sick for weeks on a straw cot. They died young, ignorant though clever, violent if strong.

The average income seldom pushed much above $3 a day, and always temporarily, because betterment had come slowly, not at the frenetic pace after 1800. Here some betterer would devise a new use of iron or of Roman roads, there another could devise a new use of coal or of accounting. But the betterments were too small to wrench incomes up and—startlingly—to wrench birth rates down. Again and again, then, population growth and the consequent diminishing of returns were given time to overwhelm the too-slow accumulation of new ideas. As the economic historians Nico Voigtländer and Hans-Joachim Voth put it recently:

In a Malthusian economy the race between technology and population size is the turtle against the hare—technological change can almost never rise fast enough to overcome the deleterious effects of population growth. The same logic applies for institutional improvements. They, too, can improve the mapping from resources to output, just like technological advances—but it is highly unlikely that institutional improvements outpaced the ability of human populations to grow.^[4]

They observe that before 1800 the average rate of betterment was never higher than half a percent per year, and according to the economist Oded Galor more like one-tenth of one percent, yielding at best a rise of 64 percent per century.^[5] But populations could grow at 3 percent per year, which is 1,800 percent per century. The turtle didn’t stand a chance.

In engineering lingo, the $3 a day—plus or minus $2, say—was a “homeostatic equilibrium” and worked the way your thermostat does. Average income in olden days might occasionally rise a little above $3, as it did in Holland and Britain during their commercial thrusts of the early modern era, or in many places worldwide when potatoes from the New World were suddenly introduced. But soon the rise would lead women to have more children, and more of the children would survive to have children themselves. In Ireland at the time Malthus was writing, for example, such a rise in population was happening, fueled by Ireland’s (in fact) nourishing diet of milk and potatoes. At length the Famine of 1845–1850 descended.^[6]

What the Malthus of 1798 could not have known, considering the frailty of social statistics in his time, is that the falling birth rate in France betokened a demographic transition to smaller family sizes; or, indeed, that in Britain itself the recent rapid population growth, without sharply falling wages, had already betokened quick enough betterment through new ideas for sawmills and seed drills and colonizing overseas to offset diminishing returns.

The usual story had been that the supply of labor grew too fast, that when wages rose so did birth rates, and then in a generation or two, according to the Malthusian logic of entry to an ecological niche in a world of diminishing returns, the real wage would be pushed down again to subsistence, to $5 or $3 or even $1 a day. Predator-prey relationships work that way. If foxes can freely enter a place temporarily abundant in rabbits, the foxes will eventually kill and eat so many rabbits that the return on hunting falls and the new, overlarge, fattened population of foxes gets pushed back to its former level by starvation and, especially, by infertility.^[7]

So it was with people preying on the land, or on one unreliable crop, such as potatoes in Ireland: “The praties they grow small over here. / We dig them in the fall / And eat them skin and all / Over here.” Perhaps British incompetence, and long-standing British malice in protecting British interests against Irish competition, worsened an Gorta Mór, the Great Hunger. But there is no doubt that with Irish fertility unrestrained—the original Malthusian sin—population had exceeded the carrying capacity of Ireland. The crop had done poorly many times before, as early as 1739. Mokyr and Ó Gráda have shown that up to 1845, a 50 percent failure of the potato crop had usually meant merely that the pigs starved (which is why highlanders, who were mainly herders, survived dearth better than lowlanders wholly dependent on field crops: if the highlanders’ crops they ate or sold failed, their pigs or cattle were a store of value, and of food). In the Great Hunger, though, the crop failure was 90 percent, and the people starved too.^[8] In the late 1840s one million out of Ireland’s eight million souls died of starvation and disease. Another million—especially those with the money to do so, or relatives established abroad—escaped to Boston or Liverpool, to Canada or Chile. Irish population has never recovered its level in 1845, unless you include the tens of millions of Irish descendants in land-rich places abroad, such as my father’s family. Malthus was confirmed.

Diminishing returns on labor applied to fixed land would always be immiserizing, said the Malthus of 1798. The notion was taken up with grim enthusiasm by other classical economists, such as David Ricardo and Karl Marx. True, Malthus in later editions, beginning in 1803, as the historian of economic thought Ross Emmett has argued, believed that a rational restraint on procreation could permit some modest growth of income. “Biology could never be conquered,” Emmett writes, “but within the right institutional context, reason could interrupt its career.” For a time, that is. But the classical economists came to believe that there would soon be an end to conquering, a “stationary state.” As Anthony Waterman puts it, “Malthus’ first [1798] Essay made land scarcity central, and so began a century-long mutation of ‘political economy,’ the optimistic science of wealth, to ‘economics,’ the pessimistic science of scarcity.”^[9]

And in historical fact, diminishing returns in a nonglobalized world had been in the past powerfully immiserizing, in just such a simple Malthusian way. When the population of Europe rose by a factor of two between 1000 and 1350 CE, real wage fell by a third. (Remember that in the shorter period since Malthus the population has not merely doubled but grown by a factor of seven.) After the Black Death of 1348–1350 and its recurrences, which drove the population in many places down by a third or a half, real wages of farm laborers doubled. But when, by 1600, population recovered, European real wages again collapsed, to half their previous peak.^[10] Dante’s time and, after two centuries of rise and one of heavy fall, Shakespeare’s time were two low points in how much bread the wage of an ordinary European could buy. Think of India and China in their worst eras, with coolies pulling rickshaws, the way porters in Italy and England once carried the rich in sedan chairs.^[11]

The only hope, said Malthus, and that a faint one, was to keep population down by restraining reproduction, the preventive checks, an exercise of reason in the right institutional context, about which Emmett notes Malthus was a tiny bit hopeful. A grim form of state-enforced preventive checks, far from Malthus’s preferences in the matter, became in the 1960s the policy of India and China, I have noted, inspired by eugenic ideas hatched in Germany, Britain, and the United States in the late nineteenth century and implemented wholesale in Scandinavia and Germany and some U.S. states by fascists and progressives in the 1930s. Yet with fixed land and turtle-slow technological change such preventive checks could not in the long run help all that much. No wonder the classical economists were pessimistic about the prospects for a significant betterment in the human condition. “No possible form of society,” Malthus had written gloomily in 1798, “could prevent the almost constant action of misery upon a great part of mankind, if in a state of inequality, and upon all, if all were equal.”^[12]

No wonder, too, that Malthus-out-of-Townsend was the inspiration for Darwin’s brutally accurate theory of natural selection. Plants and animals have no way of applying “reason” to interrupt the career of nature. Their rate of betterment, being slow and biological rather than quick and social, is never frenetic enough to overcome the immiserizing force of diminishing returns after entry into a niche. Therefore adult coots (Fulica atra) have evolved to grow impatient after a few days with their large broods, and to drown the weaker chicks, leaving two or three out of the eight or so hatched.^[13] Preventive checks. Humans do the same, as one can see from the imbalances in many poor countries between surviving girls as against boys. Drown the infant girls.

An alternative mechanism of homeostasis (Greek: “identical position”), tending to the same, sad, $3-a-day conclusion, posited that larger populations made for denser settlements, which by overcoming fixed costs of movement made for cheaper transport, which had the unhappy side effect of spreading disease.^[14] Smallpox was spread by such densities of humans and of their domestic animals, as later was the White Plague of tuberculosis. Look at ebola in 2014, leaping from country to country by airplane. The Black Death may be another case in point. It arose in densely populated China, or perhaps among the Mongols further north and west, spreading during the 1330s throughout the Chinese Empire and undermining the prestige of the Mongols ruling there. By 1348 it spread widely in Europe, killing, as in China and intermediate points, more than a third of the population and shaking the social order.^[15] The Black Death, by Malthusian logic, sharply raised the real wage all over Eurasia. And in dense places the recurrences of the plague, which ended in northern Europe only around 1700, kept people fearfully off balance. The economic historian Guido Alfani argues that Italy continued to be hit by plague even after 1700, in the countryside as much as in the towns, at the moment that northwestern Europe was beginning to prosper a little.^[16]

The other mechanism keeping the poor in poverty was class violence, such as Rousseau adumbrated in his seminal attack in 1754 on private property. Half a century later, Malthus, though a friend of private property, viewed property as characteristic of the uneven distribution of income in a “civilized,” that is, an arable-crop, society.^[17] Although bands of hunters-gatherers and independent-minded herder/highlanders might escape lordship, arable farmers in their dense and fixed populations in the lowlands could not. If you followed the plow you followed the local lord, perforce. Marshall Sahlins and other anthropologists have long observed that compared to an arable farmer a hunter-gatherer typically had an easier life, at least in the Holocene, after the ice, and in warm places. He worked fewer hours a week for his food than someone tied down to the abundance of crops. The abundance, according to the logic of lordship, went to priests and knights and other people able to make good with sword and horse their claim to ownership of the land. It did not go to most of our ancestors, the poor.^[18] The philosopher Gerald Gaus notes the consequence, namely, “the extraordinarily rapid displacement over most of the world of small-scale egalitarian culture with agricultural-based states and empires that were hierarchically organized. This political development almost reversed, in the blink of an eye, the egalitarian culture in which humans evolved.”^[19]

Farmers were ideal victims for any specialist in violence who happened along, expropriating any surplus over $3-a-day bare subsistence.^[20] That a temporary surplus in the ripening fields was easy to detect added to the hazards of immobility.^[21] Land-based nomads on horses, such as the Mongols, led by a Mongolian Genghis or a Turco-Mongolian Tamerlane, preyed on farmers such as the Iranians or the Chinese or the Russians, becoming their long-term khans.^[22] Sea-based nomads or pirates likewise went where the money was, as did the mysterious Sea Peoples of the late second millennium BCE in the eastern Mediterranean, or the Vikings two millennia later in the North Sea and the Baltic and beyond, or the well-organized descendants of the Vikings, the Normans, who ranged even further afield. In short, if diminishing returns or disease-breeding density didn’t do the sad trick of keeping most of us at $3 a day, violent hierarchy did.

§

Why during the long, long run before 1800 did ordinary people do no better? Because, considering the stately pace of betterment before the Great Enrichment, the Malthusian, homeostatic equilibrium was about $3 a day. Until 1750 or 1850, and even later in the poorest places, the Reverend Malthus of the first Essay looks sadly wise.

[1] Lepenies 2014 shows that Malthus’s logic, and elevation of the logic to a “natural law,” was taken from another anti-poor-law pamphlet by Joseph Townsend thirteen years earlier.

[2] Ross Emmett and Anthony Waterman set me straight on the differences between Malthus Mark I and Malthus Mark II.

[3] Quoted in Lepenies 2014, p. 450.

[4] Voigtländer and Voth.

[5] Galor 2005.

[6] On the excellence of potatoes with milk, see Cook 2013.

[7] Startlingly, Townsend articulated exactly such a model in 1786 (Lepenies 2014).

[8] Mokyr 1983 and Ó Gráda 2010.

[9] Waterman 2012, p. 425.

[10] G. Clark 2007a, Table 4 and Figure 10.

[11] G. Clark 2007a, Figure 8.

[12] Malthus 1798, Chapter 2, end.

[13] Attenborough 1998.

[14] McGuire and Coelho 2011 is an excellent recent treatment of a large literature using such an argument.

[15] Haensch et al. 2010. In 2015 it was claimed by students of the matter that the Plague was spread from Central Asia not by flea-bearing rats but by, of all things, flea-bearing gerbils.

[16] Alfani 2013, for example on p. 427.

[17] Ross Emmett emphasizes Malthus’s notions here, Emmett n.d., p. 3.

[18] Sahlins 1972 (2004).

[19] Gaus 2013, p. 13.

[20] Olson 1993 is the seminal paper. Thus Scott 2009, and for a West African example, from my beloved colleague the late James Searing, Searing 2002.

[21] Mayshar, Moav, and Neeman 2011.

[22] Weatherford 2004; Perdue 2005, Hellie 2003, McNeill 1964, Lattimore 1940.

“When I was young,” said Clovis, “my mother taught me the difference between good and evil—only I’ve forgotten it.”

“You’ve forgotten the difference between good and evil?” gasped the princess.

“Well, she taught me three ways of cooking lobster. You can’t remember everything.”

Saki (Hector Hugh Monro),

Quoted in The Wit and Wisdom of Quentin Crisp.

An ethic of the virtues gives a guide. It does not solve every ethical problem slam-bang, which as Rosalind Hursthouse notes is no special problem—because after all neither does any other serious ethical theory. [1] Even as straightforward an ethical theory as “follow the 613 commandments of the Torah,” Hillel’s count, has not proven to be slam-bang, not even close.

Deciding whether a certain act “would be the object of choice of all rational beings” (as Hursthouse summarizes Kant) or “maximizes happiness” (as one might summarize Hume, Bentham) or “would be chosen at the social contract” (Ockham, Suarez, Hobbes, Locke, Rawls, Nozick) is no less difficult than deciding whether the act entails cowardice or hatred or injustice. Ethics after virtue is commonly more difficult to apply, not less. The stories of our culture give us models for acting courageously or lovingly or justly. The virtue-words with stories attached appear anyway to be how humans reason ethically. “A [Greek] tragedy,” Martha Nussbaum declared, “does not display the dilemmas of its characters as pre-articulated; it shows them as searching for the morally salient; and it forces us, as interpreters, to be similarly active.”[2]

The point applies to less elevated stories than Orestes and Antigone. In my 30s and 40s I used to jog long distances. I did not then tell myself Kantian or utilitarian ethical reasonings, though neither was entirely irrelevant, I suppose. The Kantian duty to step out the door on a cold morning or the utilitarian reasoning that after all it was good for me did help, a little. Kant’s maxim would not acknowledge any pleasure in the run, and Bentham’s calculation would not acknowledge any identity in it. Virtue ethics combines the two. The unity of ethical thinking was torn apart by the analysts of the 18^th century. (I really cannot, though, even at a stretch, see a contractarian motive in a lone daily run. The fact casts light on a fault of contractarianism such as Nozick’s, namely, that it reduces ethics to the improvement of other people, ignoring self improvement, and ignoring also the Transcendent—unless we think, as monotheists in fact do, of making covenants with God.)

To actually keep putting one foot in front of another I told myself, as we do, little character stories, of Pheidippides running from Athens to Sparta, say, or of the game of making it to the next bridge, or of my identity imagined and actual. I was in a sense fooling myself, though aware. I learned from running how to make a change from a very overweight smoker to a somewhat overweight non-smoker. In my fifth decade, that is, I learned that the combination of temperance plus courage we call Persistence can achieve with small steps quite a lot. As they say in Alcoholics Anonymous, choose not to drink one day, or one hour, at a time. Beginnen is ondernemen, the Dutch say. Literally, “to begin is to undertake”— a journey of a thousand miles.

I had of course “known” such an obvious truth long before in the intellectual sense sufficient for Kantian or Benthamite reasoning. But to little good for weight control. That’s what’s wrong with Kantian or Benthamite reasoning. It is reasoning, not a cause for action. “Moral knowledge, unlike mathematical knowledge,“ Hursthouse notes, “cannot be acquired merely by attending lectures and is [therefore] not characteristically to be found in people too young to have much experience of life. A normative ethics should not aim to provide a decision procedure which any reasonably clever adolescent could apply,” like the chain rule for derivatives.[3] But an adolescent’s head is of course filled with stories and characters to imitate, for good or evil.

Both Kant and Bentham were sweet but notably inexperienced men. As Mill said of Bentham, “He was a boy to the last.”[4] Kant and Bentham had seen little of life. Neither of them had been married or had run a business or had carried a spear in the phalanx. Both of them supposed, with Socrates—who I have to admit had had all these experiences of life—that knowledge of the good is enough for the will to achieve it. I am not against sweet, inexperienced, and unmarried men. After all, my hero Adam Smith was one. One of my other heroes, Aquinas, was another. But, unlike Kant or Bentham, Adam Smith managed somehow to restrain the impulse to theorize much beyond human life as actually lived. And Aquinas surpassed in intellectual flexibility and a sense of lived life many a neo-Thomist.

The running so to speak changed my character to long, slow distance. I stopped thinking of my economic scholarship as a matter of the next article and started to think of it as a marathon. “Running,” said Sir Roger Bannister to the BBC cameras on the 50^th anniversary of his first breaking the four-minute mile, “is only a metaphor for life.” A certain kind of life, actually. And your life becomes a metaphor for running itself. I applied the narrative of running to other parts of my life, such as slowly, slowly acquiring small Latin and less Greek, or learning to read a smattering of difficult books in the humanities. Reading The Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals, you see, is like a marathon, or at least like a run from Iowa City to the Lake McBride Dam and back.

Guides to ethical life, to repeat, are achieved mainly through story and example. As Robert Hariman puts it:

What to do? One typical [modern] response is to look for rules: what would any rational person do in this situation? . . . . There was another approach familiar to the classical thinkers, however, which was to look to exemplars: how have other individuals managed situations such as this one? The attention given to the particular wise person—the phronimos—is not merely a heuristic device. . . . Prudential theory [which is Hariman’s name for the Ciceronian program of virtue ethics in action] requires a bifocal perspective that alternates between impersonal norms and individual circumstances, a perspective that is similar to the reading strategy for understanding a persuasive text.[5]

Hariman is here referring to the fruitful notion of the rhetorician Richard Lanham that we should “toggle”—Lanham was using the computer term—between surface and depth, rhetoric and philosophy, practice and theory.[6]

The theoretical precepts are not useless. In baseball: “Keep your eye on the ball.” In writing: “Don’t overload your sentences.” But they are like a coach offering commentary, not the achievement itself. There are no formulas, or else such activities would not be valuable arts. They would be mere skills, easily acquired by anyone, like typing or using econometrics.[7]

Indeed, coaching itself has no formulas, or else great coaches would be a dime a dozen.[8] Ted Williams’ book, The Science of Hitting, offers precepts for life as much as for “the single most difficult thing to do in sport”—hitting a major-league fastball.[9] To achieve in hitting you need to witness and then to imitate Williams’ swing, among the wonders of mid-20^th-century sports. But you need to do it, and keep doing it, supported by a boy’s myth of excellence. It was a story Williams told to himself, a story of his ethical character, not a decision-making formula. The story kept him at batting practice until his hands bled.

The character thus formed I say applies to more than baseball. In 1995 at a conference organized by the rhetorician Herbert Simons I heard a paper by Linda Brodkey about teaching writing called “Writing on the Bias.” Brodkey told how she learned to write by watching her mother sew. Her mother was a gifted seamstress and could cut cloth “on the bias” to give a dress a graceful drape. The daughter learned to write—and she writes well—by translating the virtues of dressmaking into the virtues of writing.[10]

Likewise I learned how to do academic tasks—actually any task—by watching my mother do carpentry or sewing or cooking or learning Greek irregular verbs, witnessing the virtues of hope and courage operating in them. Try learning to sew or write or hit a major league fastball by following the Categorical Imperative, or the Greatest Happiness of the Greatest Number. Try learning with those ideas to be “good” in any sense. They don’t work.

We build our characters story by story. In the romantic comedy written and directed by Harold Ramis, Groundhog Day (1993), the Bill Murray character, a self-centered jerk of a TV weatherman, is condemned to relive his February 2 of 1992 over and over and over again. At first he sins deliciously, indulging in table-fuls of food for example, three hot fudge sundaes, a big stack of pancakes, a plate full of bacon. “Don’t you worry about love handles?” Not if after the intemperance the clock is always turned back to a new 6:00 am of the very same Groundhog Day, to the same bright chatter of a wake-up show predicting c-o-l-d in Punxsutawney, PA. Phil’s motto is to eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow will be today all over again.

He is the only person on the scene who remembers all his yester-todays. So by reliving the day he can correct each false move in achieving pleasure, as in his attempted seduction of his TV colleague, the Andie MacDowell character. He learns for instance that she always orders sweet vermouth on ice with a twist of lemon and always toasts to world peace. He therefore can craftily ingratiate himself by anticipating just these, getting better and better at concupiscent “love,” for his pleasure late on the day. Tomorrow won’t do, because it never dawns. The seduction fails, of course, because McDowell is pure. It is a romantic comedy.

After many hundreds of iterations of his February 2, having indulged every sin, he enters a dark night of the soul, killing himself in every conceivable way. One time he kidnaps the groundhog-of-honor and drives off the edge of a quarry. But to no avail. The curse of waking up again and again on the same February 2 in the same bed-and-breakfast hangs on, and he repeats yet again the day he knows to perfection. He knows the exact second at which the waiter will drop the tray of dishes or where exactly the slush-filled hole is located in the street or the identities and histories of every single actor in the little drama on the Nth day of its run. He has the time—all the time—to learn French, ice-sculpting, pop piano, dazzling by evening his colleagues who knew the Phil of the day before as a talentless piece of TV talent.

But having tried to make his pleasures of lust and gluttony into his gods, and having reached despair, he begins to shift, to grow in character. “I am a god,” he says at the midpoint, puzzled, “not the God, I think,” an angel, perhaps, able by repetition to know every way to prevent unhappy accidents. That he now gives a damn is evidence of his ethical growth. Phil arranges for example to arrive every morning as a little boy falls out of a tree, exactly in time to catch him, the ungrateful brat. “Maybe God is just someone who’s been around for a long time.” Yet he discovers, too, the limited power of an angel-not-God. Despite repeated shots at that same February 2 he is not in fact able to save the life of an old derelict fated then to die. By such spiritual exercises Phil’s character evolves, gradually. Bill Murray’s craft is on display here, as when he conveys even failed acting, the Phil character playing a role mechanically to some end not consistent with true character. Virtue is character, not rational maxims or parlor tricks of good-deed doing—“when someone’s watching you,” Tom Lehrer warbled long ago.

Phil becomes truly virtuous. By experimenting on a big scale he discovers, in other words, the best life for a human, the ethical laws of our nature. “There is not,” said Shaftesbury, “the least degree of certainty wanting. . . concerning the preferableness of the mental pleasures [in Phil’s case, mastery of French] over the sensual [three hot fudge sundaes]. . . and even of the sensual accompanied by good affection and under a temperate and right use [jazz piano] to those which are no ways restrained” [plotting to seduce the MacDowell character].[11] Phil discovers the balanced virtues of Love and Courage and the rest, and even a Humility quite inconceivable in Phil the Jerk.

He is able for the first time to love in the higher sense, that is, to care for someone for her own sake instead of merging hers into his own utility. MacDowell therefore falls for him, he is redeemed by love, the curse is broken, a February 3^rd dawns, and they live happily ever after. I said it was a romantic comedy.

The conventions of the genre in a secular age make it impossible for him to find God in the last reel, but the story otherwise persuades. People really do prefer to be virtuous rather than vicious. Exiled tyrants like the late Edi Amin of Uganda, retired in luxury in Saudi Arabia, believe to the end of their days that what they did for their people was good—eating them, for example. Plato’s (or Socrates’) error was only in believing that sheer intellectual information about The Good would suffice. Plato was correct that if we know, really know, virtue, on our pulse, after thousands of repetitions of Groundhog Day, then we will prefer it to evil.[12] Satan’s facile formula, “Evil be thou my good,” doesn’t work in human lives any more than in angelic lives.

The movie asserts that, regrettably, most of us need experience, quite a lot of it, to become ethically educated, to be led out of lives of big and little evils. If we have the short lives of the pre-industrial world, for example, there’s no second, third, fourth act in which to set aside alcohol or violence, acquisitiveness or cruelty, in favor of the [really] good life. Seneca made this point. For many of us it takes fully three score years and ten to get even close to the ethical life. Or it takes many good movies. Unsurprisingly, there opened in early 2004 an Italian remake of the Groundhog Day plot, called È già ieri, “it’s still yesterday,” and an Adam Sandler vehicle with a similar theme, 50 First Dates. There’s a TV movie on the theme called Christmas Every Day (1996). Over and over and over again.

Or good autobiographies. Anyway inspiring stories in our culture, if we haven’t the wit to see it in our own lives. Hursthouse observes that “we do not always act as ‘autonomous,’ utterly self-determining agents,” the way the masculinist version of ethical reflection supposes. We “often seek moral guidance from people we think are morally better than ourselves,” or at any rate have gone through annealing experiences we think relevant to our own lives.[13] In a womanly way we are fascinated by ethical stories, finding them in literature, in autobiography, in gossip.

It is a fault in Hursthouse’s philosophically sophisticated exposition of virtue ethics that she does not acknowledge the river of narrative in which humans swim. She argues persuasively that an adolescent cannot be wholly ethical, that the writing of a complete ethical Code Napoléon is an unattainable goal, that in short an educated judgment must be exercised.[14] Yet how then are we to grow into such ethical wisdom? Breadth of actual life experience is clearly relevant, though commonly not sufficient. But so is breadth of hearing and watching and reading the images and stories of our culture.

A story: The prison-hardened gangbanger and thief Carl Upchurch had been in solitary confinement at the federal penitentiary of Lewisburg, Pennsylvania for two months before he noticed the little paperback book propping up one leg of the table. “I pulled it out, excited to have found something to alleviate the monotony. I turned it over and stared at the cover in disgust. It was Shakespeare’s sonnets.” He put it back. But his time in solitary was long, and “after three more days of staring at gray, I pulled it out again, muttering that Shakespeare was better than nothing.”

I don’t pretend that Shakespeare and I immediately connected. I must have read those damn sonnets twenty times before they started to make sense. . . . I had almost always been contemptuous of intellect. That book of sonnets didn’t just change my opinion—it quite literally changed my mind. . . . I wanted to ask for more books, but I didn’t have a clue where to start. At least I knew that Shakespeare had written other stuff besides the sonnets, so I requested anything else they had by him. I . . . started plowing my way through thirty-eight plays and some other poetry. . . . Caught up in the first flush of literary exploration, I was pretty impressed with myself. In retrospect, it was lucky I was in the cell alone. . . . [The] guys would have burst my bubble mercilessly.[15]

He burst it often enough himself, in further explosions of macho violence. But gradually he emerged, through what he calls “de-niggerization.” Story by story he remade his character. For example this very tough guy wept his way through Les Misérables.

Religious ritual, which seems so idiotic to the secular mind, has the same feel as Carl’s Nth chance to go straight or Phil’s Nth repetition of Groundhog Day. The words and motions of the mass give the faithful repeated chances to get it right. At the Nth repetition of “this is my blood, the cup of salvation” you for the first time grasp, really grasp, the meaning of redemption through Christ’s sacrifice. Well . . . part of it at any rate.

* * * *

If Kantianism, and its vulgar British cousin, utilitarianism, did not in fact provide guides to an ethical life, they do provide cool poses to assume, neat stories the man espousing them can tell himself.

The utilitarian can pose as Practical, a numbers man. I have said why I think this modern myth of Practical Prudence is sometimes phony or dangerous. But when the issue is in fact a matter of numbers, and the fix is not in, the Practical Man is a useful guy to have around. He can tell you very properly that this particular design of a highway off-ramp implies a certain value of human life, whether or not you are comfortable with such numbers. Grow up, he says. Face facts. If we spend thousands of dollars investigating each airline fatality and only scores of dollars investigating each highway fatality the result will be less safety. The economist says, “Shift some money from airline to highway investigations.” When you want to be practical and consistent and not waste money, the utilitarian should be listened to. Really.

The uses of Kantianism are more spiritual. The ideal Kantian is, as Iris Murdoch put it, a combination of Romantic and Puritan, a man who chooses never to stoop, but always does his duty. Compare Alexander Gerschenkron. Gerschenkron was, surprisingly to those like me who knew him only superficially, a believing Christian. But he was also the best, my boy, the bravest. Kant helps bourgeois men without a god feel nonetheless proud of who they are.

In the Groundwork Kant denied such ethical pride to women, almost explicitly: “there are many persons who are so sympathetically constituted that, without any further motive of vanity or self-interest, they find an inner pleasure in spreading joy around them. . . . In such a case an action of this kind, however dutiful and amiable it may be, has nevertheless no true moral worth.”[16] This is the kind of analysis, in which womanly people cannot be virtuous, that annoyed Carol Gilligan. “How recognizable, how familiar to us, is the man so beautifully portrayed in the Grundlegung,” Murdoch writes. He is

with us still, free, independent, lonely, powerful, responsible, brave, the hero of so many novels and books of moral philosophy. . . . He is the offspring of the age of science, confidently rational and yet increasingly aware of his alienation. . . . He has the virtue which [the bourgeois men of] the age requires and admires, courage. [17]

How noble, how glorious, above all how manly to face damnation without illusions. I called it “secular stoicism,” that god-absent virtù. Murdoch notes that from Kant to Nietzsche is “not such a very long step,” and thence to existentialism and “the Anglo-Saxon ethical doctrines [of ethics, in the early 20^th century, ‘emotivism’ in particular,] which in some ways closely resemble it.” The central doctrine of secular stoicism is that ethics is not a matter of the nature of imperfect human beings, much less of transcendent ethical realism, and certainly not of God. The post-Kantian secular stoic believes that ethics is merely a matter of steady, manly, secular, human will. “In fact Kant’s man,” Murdoch observes, “had already received a glorious incarnation nearly a century earlier in the work of Milton: his proper name is Lucifer.”[18]

[1] Hursthouse, “Virtue Theory and Abortion,” 1991, p. 224, and her comparison of virtue theory with Kantian and utilitarian theories at pp. 217-219.

[2] Nussbaum, Fragility of Goodness, 1986, p. 14.

[3] Hursthouse, Virtue Ethics, 1999, pp. 18, 59. Notice that Hursthouse uses “moral” and “ethical” as synonyms.

[4] Mill, “The Mind and Character of Jeremy Bentham,” 1838, p. 317.

[5] Hariman, “Theory Without Modernity,” 2003, p. 7.

[6] Lanham, Electronic Word, 1993, p, 79ff.

[7] McCloskey, If You’re So Smart, 1990.

[8] A point made by the economist Gary Walton in Beyond Winning, 1991.

[9] Williams and Underwood 1986 (1970), Science of Hitting, p. 7.

[10] Brodkey, “Writing,” 1994.

[11] Shaftesbury, Characteristics 1713 (1732), VoL. II, p. 99.

[12] Compare McDowell, “Virtues and Reason,” 1979, pp. 144-147.

[13] Hursthouse, Virtue Ethics, 1999, p. 35.

[14] Hursthouse, Virtue Ethics, 1999, pp. 60, 39ff, 57f.

[15] Upchurch, Convicted in the Womb, 1996, pp. 81-84

[16] Kant, Grounding, 1785, Ellington trans., p. 398.

[17] Murdoch, “Sovereignty of Good,” 1967, p. 80.

[18] Murdoch, “Sovereignty of Good,” 1967, p. 80.

We also discussed Javier Milei, regulation, artificial intelligence, cryptocurrencies, and central banks.

The video opens with Portuguese human dubbing. To hear our original conversation in English, select Settings → Audio track → English (United States).

Watch the interview here

Thus Kant, with a pocket-sized, 3 inch-by-5 inch card inscribed: “Imagine the action you propose to take would be elevated to a general rule for all society.” Or Rawls: “Imagine you are a risk-averse person making rules for society behind a veil of ignorance about your own location in the society.” Such meta-rules are as applicable to creatures on a planet circling Proxima Centauri as to us humans.

From its beginnings in Plato’s writings ethical monism did not work very well. As Aristotle said—he apologized for thus refuting his teacher—“it is not easy to see how knowing the same Ideal Good will help a weaver, . . . or how anybody will be a better physician or general for having contemplated the absolute Ideal.”[1] The neo-Aristotelian and anti-Kantian turn in recent ethical philosophy can be put this way: it’s no good talking like Plato or Kant of The Ultimate when most of the ethical issues we face are matters of practice as a weaver or a physician or a mother. Or to put it more strongly, as people like Alasdair MacIntyre and Richard Rorty and Stanley Fish do, the Ultimate never comes up.

In the preface to his Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals (1785) Kant declared “the ground of obligation must be looked for, not in the nature of man nor in the circumstances of the world in which he is placed, but solely a priori in the concepts of pure reason.”[2] We are to study how people are supposed to behave without reference to their psychologies or their customs or their histories.

He offers in the Groundwork only two reasons for this on-its-face bizarre assertion about the proper method of ethics—which on Kant’s authority was then followed scrupulously for nearly two centuries by ethical philosophers in the West. First, he says, there is and should be a division of labor between theorizers and observers “if we are to know how much pure reason can accomplish.” He means that we are to set aside actual human culture, in the manner so to speak of a controlled experiment. And second, “morals themselves remain exposed to corruption of all sorts as long as this guiding thread is lacking, this ultimate norm.”[3]

A virtue ethicist is moved to respond, a trifle impatiently: “Why, dear Immanuel, `must’ a division of labor govern ethical philosophy, why `must’ there be an ultimate norm, why does it seem plausible to you that we will be corrupted by a lack of such a norm, why `must’ duty be derived as though by geometric proof from an axiom of a hypothetically `pure’ Rational Creature, who never was a child, never had a mother or father, never walked the actual streets of an actual Königsberg?” Kant in the Groundwork suggested no reply, or merely the Platonic/Cartesian reply that we “must” turn our minds to an ideal rather than to the “merely” ordinary. In The Critique of Practical Reason the method is defended as separating “ought” from “is,” following Hume in this. But why would it seem plausible that “ought”-sentences would have no contact with “is”-sentences? They do{n’t} in life.

Kant entirely separated ethics from anthropology and psychology, indeed from any empirical claim whatsoever. Ethics in his view was to take place in its own realm. After him therefore ethical thinking in the West was haunted by the fear that to justify ethics in actual humans is to fall prey to a “naturalistic fallacy,” as G. E. Moore came to call it in attacking Bentham, Mill, and Sidgwick for their utilitarianism. One ought not to derive an Ought from an Is, an ethical precept from a factual statement. Thus, “free trade is desirable because it causes happiness in humans as they actually are” is an error.[4] A fallacy. Illusion.

“When we run over libraries persuaded of these principles, what havoc must we make?” Hume asked in the peroration of An Inquiry Concerning Human Understanding (1748):

If we take in our hand any volume; of divinity or school metaphysics, for instance, let us ask, Does it contain any abstract reasoning concerning quantity or number? No. Does it contain any experimental reasoning concerning matter of fact and existence? No. Commit it then to the flames: for it can contain nothing but sophistry and illusion.[5]

No theology; no natural law; no ethics. We are to have only mathematics on the one hand and on the other the “sciences”—though in the wide, non-post-1850-English sense, that is, systematic studies of the world, human or natural: Wissenschaften.

But no philosophy either, whether academic or worldly, is to survive the flames. It does not seem to have occurred to Hume that his Inquiry would be among the first to go, and shortly thereafter his theoretical essays on economics advocating free trade. Nor does it seem to have occurred very often to the philosophers in Kant’s train that in saying “You ought not to derive Ought from Is” they were engaging in a natural human ethical activity.[6] Nor does it seem to have occurred to them that a Greek-admiring ethics or the Roman equivalent of morality would lack point unless based on philosophical psychology (ethos) or philosophical anthropology (mos).

Kant helped create the glorious yet mischievous utopianism of the Enlightenment project; but by fiat, not by reasoning. He had one implicit reason, though not mentioned in the Groundwork, which must as ordinary politics be given weight. It is that we “must” strip social status from ethics. Universal, unparticular Reason, he seemed to reason, would apply to a miller as much as to a marquis. Writing in a world of 1785 in which status most oppressively ruled, the egalitarian axiom of Kant, and of Bentham and Smith and Locke and Richard Hooker and John Knox and for that matter St. Thomas of Aquino, St. Augustine of Hippo, and Jesus of Nazareth, was revolutionary stuff. “A man’s a man for a’ that” is an explosive idea.

I say it had been foreshadowed in soul-focused religions, especially in Protestantism and it appears in Early-Church Christianity, such as in the democratic governance of John Knox’s Presbyterianism or Calvin’s Geneva, or among the still more radical Congregationalists or Quakers or Baptists—who in some eras would let even women preach—or among the Lutheran Pietists of Kant’s ancestry. As it was put at the dawn by a Presbyterian soldier, “I am sure there was no man born marked of God above another, for none comes into the world with a saddle on his back, neither any booted and spurred to ride him.”[7]

Kant’s notion that status is an accident but that the human duty to Reason is an essence echoes his own absolutist king, Frederick the Great. Frederick wrote an Anti-Macchiavel in 1740, published in French under Voltaire’s auspices at the Hague in the same year that Frederick ascended the throne. It was the year Kant entered university as a student at the former Prussian capital. Kant’s own book on ethics was published in his old age, a year before the end of Frederick’s long reign. In the Anti-Macchiavel Frederick forswears personal gain from kingship, thus contradicting as he imagined Machiavelli’s supposedly self-profiting prince. He declares famously that “the ruler is far from being the arbitrary master of his people; he is indeed, nothing other than the first servant.”[8] In 1842 Thomas Macaulay the Liberal noted sarcastically that Frederick had nonetheless “studiously kept up the old distinction between the nobles and the community. In speculation, he was a French philosopher, but in action, a German prince.”[9]

In 1785, aged 61, and with increasing rigor as he grew older, Kant scornfully rejected an “anthropological” approach to ethics. Kant was not scornful of anthropology itself as a subject. Indeed, he taught it every Saturday morning in term, as Manfred Kuehn tells us in his recent, splendid biography.[10] But Kant thought it was to be impaled on Hume’s Fork to include facts of actual human life in ethical philosophy. Hume’s Enquiry concerning Human Understanding, Kant said, had awakened him from his dogmatic slumber. But, oddly, he did not appear to know of Hume’s other, ethical treatise, of human nature.[11]

For instance Kant rejected as a maxim of a true and therefore universal ethics the “honor” (Ehre) that, as Kuehn notes, “may even have been more important to the citizens of the larger towns and cities of Prussia” than to the literal and Ehre-regarding aristocracy. Thus Kant’s father was of the honorable guild of harness makers, if poor, and Kant himself of the honorable guild of scholars.[12] Kant appealed rather to an egalitarian psychology reminiscent I repeat of the Pietism of his parents—Kuehn, though, does not think that Pietism was the source. “Honor is something entirely conventional,” Kant wrote. “By contrast, the representation of right lies deep in the soul of everyone, even of the most delicate child.”[13] Find the maxim within the soul and we can construct a pure, ultimate, non-anthropological universal ethic.

There was another, personal reason for Kant’s fascination with ethical maxims and his increasing rigor in hedging them off from the life world. This was his intimate friendship from age 41 to age 62 with Joseph Green, an English trader in timber, fruit, and spices, a Hull man who lived most of his adult life in Königsberg. Kant had many friends within the bourgeoisie of the city, as did Adam Smith at the same time in Glasgow and Edinburgh. The parallels between Kant/Green and Smith/Hume are striking; and Mr. Green was in fact a conduit for Humean ideas to Kant. As the Kant scholar Lewis White Beck expressed it in his brilliant parody of 1979, an alleged manuscript of Boswell’s account of a (non-existent) visit to the Königsberg group in 1785, “Dr. Smith had told me of an English merchant here resident, a Mr. Green, a man of prudence & virtue.”[14]

Green was “the most intimate friend Kant ever had.”[15] Like Kant a lifelong bachelor, Green spent every afternoon and early evening for twenty-one years in Kant’s company, supplying the philosopher with detailed criticism. The criticism, Kuehn notes, seems to have resulted in a comparative lucidity in Kant’s writing style, lost after Green’s death in 1786. Kant’s writings during the friendship contained “many phrases and idioms . . . that can be traced back to the language of merchants, such as `borrowing,’ `capital’,’ and so forth.”[16] One might guess that Kant refused offers from the universities at Erlangen and Jena in 1769-70 in part because his special friend of by then three years standing was attached by business to Königsberg. Kant did mention his “very wide circle of acquaintances and friends” in the letter awkwardly taking back an initial acceptance of the offer from Erlangen.[17] He also declined a call to Halle in 1778.

Green’s influence on Kant was psychologically profound and philosophically important. According to Kuehn, Green’s example transformed Kant’s character. Mr. Green was above all a “Man of the Clock,” the title of a comedy in 1765 by the famous progressive Königsberg playwright and member of their set, one of Kant’s followers and later his benefactor, Theodor Hippel, spoofing Green.

Mr. Green was not difficult to spoof. Kuehn recounts that Kant and Green had arranged one day to take a carriage ride together the next morning at exactly 8:00 in the morning. Kant was a little late. He had not yet become the Professor Kant by whose comings and goings one could adjust one’s watch. Yet Green, true to his maxim of following the clock, set off in the carriage anyway. Passing Kant hurrying along the road towards the house, he drove past him, “with Kant vigorously signaling for him to stop.” He did this not because he was angry at Kant’s tardiness but merely because “it was against Green’s maxim” to deviate from any prudent plan.[18] In the play Hippel has his Green character declare, “I do not get up because I have slept enough, but because it is 6:00 a.m. I go to eat not because I am hungry, but because the clock has struck 12:00.”[19]

The case shows vividly the force of a bourgeois and even a specifically English and non-conformist version of Reason in the Enlightenment. Besides Kant and his English merchant and Smith and his Scottish ones there is Voltaire, who himself made a fortune in finance before he was 30—he added to it throughout his life, and died one of the richest commoners in Europe—and the English merchant to whom he dedicated in 1732 his play Zaïre.

In Hippel’s play an academic character, based it seems on Kant as he was in 1765, age 41, before Green took entire charge, complains that in his own, non-bourgeois work prudence and plan cannot rule: “A dissertation . . . is not a bank draft. With such work one cannot keep hours.” Kuehn remarks that “little by little [Kant] learned to write philosophy like a bank draft,” until in the year before Green’s death he produced The Groundwork:

Green’s effect on Kant cannot be overestimated. . . . [Kant] gave up playing cards to please Green. His visits to the theatre became rarer, and late in life they ceased almost altogether. Green was completely tone deaf. . . . Kant, “at least in his early years” [wrote a contributor to the memorial lectures for Kant in 1804] “listened to good music with pleasure.” He gave up that custom as well. . . . The elegant Magister [that is, a German academic before his professorship] with somewhat irregular and unpredictable lifestyle changed into a man of principle with an exceedingly predictable way of life. He became more and more like Green. . . . The days of the whirlpool of social diversions were coming to an end—not suddenly, but slowly: maxim by maxim. . . . Kant’s view of maxims, as necessary for building character [“morals themselves remain exposed to corruption of all sorts as long as this guiding thread is lacking, this ultimate norm”], was, at least in part, indebted to Green’s way of life. It was not an accident that in the lectures on anthropology in which Kant spoke of maxims, he often claimed that the English had the most solid understanding. He himself relied on the judgment of his English friend.[20]

The Kantian tradition in ethical philosophy, then, begins with a monomania for Prudence Only—a Prudence worthy of Jeremy Bentham and the modern economists. In a not charming sense it is bourgeois. That such intemperate lunacy lies at the heart of the modern and anti-Aristotelian theory of ethics should perhaps give pause.

Bernard Williams, another of the pioneering virtue ethicists since the 1950s, concluded that “The resources of most modern moral philosophy are not well adjusted to the modern world.” “Its prevailing fault, in all its styles, is to impose on ethical life some immensely simple model,” such as Contract behind a veil of ignorance, Rationality as European bourgeois men might define it, or Utility, which seems so measurable.[21] An intellectual revolution was initiated 1690 through 1785, dethroning the thick, storied, pagan-Christian account of the virtues, plural, and erecting one or another universal monism in their place. Reason was to become a new monotheism, demanding sacrifice and promising salvation in return, either here below or in the Good Society by and by.

It was an admirable effort, courageous and prudent and hopeful, worth the attempt. Perhaps it had something to do with the rise of the bourgeoisie, uneasy in a system of the virtues which had classically talked of heroes and saints. It certainly had to do with the contractarian idea so obvious to the bourgeois that, in the words of Richard Rumbold (the Presbyterian soldier I mentioned) before he faced the hangman in 1685, “the king having. . . power enough to make him great; the people also as much property as to make them happy; they being, as it were, contracted to one another.”[22] No saddles and spurs. And the scientific revolution must have made ethicists strive for a similar rethinking.

Yet on the whole, except as I say as a historically contingent rhetorical tool of liberals against status, Locke’s or Kant’s or Bentham’s system have failed. They succeeded negatively as a political expedient, thank God. But afterwards they failed positively as an ethical guide. They have not given us guides to action and they have not matched how we live.

[1] Aristotle, Nic. Ethics, c. 330 BC, I, vi, 16 (1097a).

[2] Kant, Grounding, 1785, Ellington trans., p. 56 f.

[3] Kant, Grounding, 1785, p. 57.

[4] See Lisska 1996, pp. 57, 73.

[5] Hume 1748, last page, his italics.

[6] Compare Putnam, Realism, 1990, p. 115; and discussion in McCloskey, Knowledge and Persuasion, 1994, p. 277 and p. 95ff.

[7] Richard Rumbold, speech on the gallows, Edinburgh, 1685, from The World’s Famous Orations. Great Britain: I. (710–1777). 1906. In full at http://www. bartleby. com /268/3/15.html.

[8] Frederick II, Anti-Machiavel, 1740, Chp. 1.

[9] Macaulay, “Frederic the Great,” 1842, p. 188.

[10] Kuehn, Kant, 2001, p. 272.

[11] Pluhar, “Translator’s Introduction,” 1987, p. xxxi, note 8.

[12] Kuehn, Kant, 2001, p. 281; compare pp. 27, 43.

[13] Quoted in Kuehn, Kant, 2001, p. 43.

[14] I am such an incompetent scholar of Kant and of Boswell that on finding this on the internet I believed for a day or so that it was genuine.

[15] Kuehn, Kant, 2001, p. 157.

[16] Kuehn, Kant, 2001, p. 241.

[17] Kuehn, Kant, 2001, p. 163.

[18] Kuehn, Kant, 2001, p. 155.

[19] Kuehn, Kant, 2001, p. 155.

[20] Kuehn, Kant, 2001, p. 156.

[21] Williams, Ethics 1985, pp. 197, 127.

[22] Rumbold’s speech on the gallows: http://www. bartleby. com/268/3/15.html

I also recommend the old classics, such as The Wealth of Nations, translated into Portuguese and first published a few months before the U.S. Declaration of Independence, or anything by Frédéric Bastiat (1801–1850), originally in French, or Carl Menger’s Grundsätze der Volkswirtschaftslehre (1871), or Philip Wicksteed’s The Common Sense of Political Economy (1910), or Joan Robinson’s Exercises in Economic Analysis (1960) (brilliant, but a strange one; she devolved into a Maoist Marxist).

Suppose you want to learn to think like a real economist. I advise Mariana Mazzucato and Thomas Piketty and many others who call themselves economists to stop what they’re doing and study the modern classics in what we called at the University of Chicago “price theory.” Arranged from most elementary to most advanced, they are:

• Paul Heyne, The Economic Way of Thinking. Very elementary but entirely sound. Updated by Pete Boettke and David Prychitko.

• Armen Alchian and William Allen, edited by Jerry Jordan, Universal Economics. An updating of the undergraduate textbook by Alchian and Allen. It covers “macroeconomics,” too. Available free on the Liberty Fund website.

• Thomas Sowell, Basic Economics. Sowell is a senior fellow at the conservative Hoover Institution.

• David Friedman, Price Theory: An Intermediate Text. David is Milton Friedman’s son, a Ph.D. physicist. It’s available free on his website.

• Steven Landsburg, Price Theory and Applications. Like Friedman, he also writes brilliant popular books on economics. His Ph.D. is in mathematics.

• “Donald” McCloskey, The Applied Theory of Price. A PDF is available at Deirdre McCloskey’s website. Deirdre is Donald’s smarter sister. The book has hundreds of problems, in the style of an engineering text.

• George Stigler, The Theory of Price, in four editions, not all the same. Amusingly written by a great economist.

• Milton Friedman, Price Theory. Soberly written by an even greater economist.

• Gary Becker, Economic Theory. Another sober and great one.

• Sonia Jaffe, Robert Minton, Casey B. Mulligan, and Kevin M. Murphy, Chicago Price Theory, Second Edition.

A somewhat different route to becoming a real economist is to read what is called “Austrian” economics, descended from Carl Menger. The Chicagoans tend to be more mathematical, the Austrians more philosophical. Taken together, they teach what is right about a liberal economy.

I don’t know my way around it as well as I do Chicago. I came to Austrian economics late. But start with Boettke and David Prychitko’s updating of Heyne, above. And then read anything by them, and Israel Kirzner, Don Lavoie, Walter Block, Donald Boudreaux, Ludwig Lachmann, and of course Friedrich Hayek and Ludwig Mises, and back to Menger. Mises’ Human Action is good if you ignore his methodological ruminations. His books of the 1920s, Liberalism and Socialism, are brilliant.

Get to it. Become a real economist.

Weekly column in Folha de São Paulo, Brazil
Translated into Portuguese for the newspaper.

“Prudence” seems a reasonable long-period average of such words. The Germanic languages less frenchified than English cannot translate exactly the English/ French/ Latin word “prudence,” lost in connotation among foresight [Dutch voorzichtigheid], caution [omzichtigheid], policy [beleid], good sense [verstandigheid], knowledge, saving, caretaking, management, calculating. In Dutch a possible translation of prudence is the neologisms berekendheid, “calculating-ity”; or, worse, berekenendheid, “be-reckoning-ness.” Neither is recorded in compendious Dutch dictionaries.

Prudence is not academic knowledge, sophia or scientia, praised by the philosophers from Socrates to the Great Books as a knowledge of ends. The claim that philosophers such as themselves gain a special knowledge of ends—phronēsis or prudentia means “practical knowledge of means,” the sense, writes Gadamer, “of what is possible, what is correct, here and now”—will seem optimistic to anyone who knows many philosophers, worldly or Academic.[1] As Aristotle observed, “if [the Platonic idea of The Good] were so potent an aid, it is improbable that all the professors of the arts and sciences should not know it,” as they appear not to.[2]

Prudence as practical know-how is a virtue. This was once a commonplace, in Aristotle, for example, the obligation to self-development, or in Aquinas the obligation to use God’s gifts. The Christian version is reformulated in 1673 by Joseph Pufendorf of Leipzig, Heidelberg, and Lund thus:

It seems superfluous to invent an obligation of self-love. Yet. . . . man is not born for himself alone; the end for which he has been endowed by his Creator with such excellent gifts is that he may celebrate His glory and be a fit member of human society. He is therefore bound so to conduct himself as not to permit the Creator’s gifts to perish for lack of use. . . .[3]

Thus Comus tempting the Lady in 1634 argues that from niggardliness in using God’s gifts “Th’All-giver would be unthanked, would be unpraised/ Not half his riches known . . ./ And we should . . . live like Nature’s bastards, not her sons.”

One can detect in Pufendorf’s “it seems superfluous” a hint of the modern substitution of prudence as mere behavior for prudence as an ethical obligation. We have been inclined for some centuries now in the West to relegate prudence to an amoral world of “mere” self-interest—especially so since around 1800, with the “separation of spheres” into a male market and a female home. “By allocating selflessness to women,” notes Joan Williams, “domesticity helped legitimate self-interest as the appropriate motivation for men.”[4] Or in Stephanie Coontz’ formulation, “Men learn their roles and values best in places women cannot go.”[5]

The inclination to demoralize Prudence is not simply stupid, though it has had some bad outcomes. Wise philosophers such as Michael Oakeshott have erected systems on the distinction between “prudential” (or “enterprise”) associations such as business firms on the one hand and “moral” associations on the other such as families. I am saying that in this matter Oakeshott was mistaken. It may be that such a distinction is the typically modern ethical mistake, the mistaken assumption that homely Gemeinschaft is the exclusive site of virtue and that businesslike Gesellschaft is an ethical nullity. It is certainly Machiavelli’s and Hobbes’ mistake.

“The virtues nowadays thought of [as] especially worthy to be called moral virtues,” writes Philippa Foot, “are often contrasted with prudence.” But she shows this is wrong. “A reasonable modicum of self-interest” is also an “Aristotelian [necessity] for human beings.”[6] It is not surprising to find women criticizing a separation of spheres that makes prudence into a masculine realm of action and the rest of the virtues into a cloistered virtue. The theologian Ellen Charry notes that “happiness” has come to mean “prudent utility,” what she calls “a state of mild euphoria.” The modern supporters of such a view, such as Peter Singer or Shalom Asch, “would say that the ‘things other than happiness’ “ are indeed more important, because “happiness, having been privatized, is thought to be self-serving.”

This attitude is socially disastrous, because on its terms there is no reason for people to want to contribute to the common good, since they assume that it will not make them happy. . . . Seeking happiness, which ancient philosophy recognized to be a universal and proper desire, now opposes being good. Concern for the loss of civility, the triumph of “autonomous individualism” so bemoaned in recent sociology—as in the writings of Robert Bellah—is partly the result of an assumed enmity between goodness and happiness.[7]

This is the crucial difference between a virtue ethics that focuses on the good life and a neo-Kantian, academic ethical philosophy that focuses on good intentions towards other people—leaving mysterious the desire to do such good deeds in the first place. Virtue ethics, by contrast with neo-Kantian ethics, attends also to the self and the transcendent, giving a reason to seek goodness. Kant himself was in 1785 more to the point: “act to use humanity, both in your own person and in the person of every other, . . . as an end.”[8]

Among moderns before virtue ethics, in other words, only an habitual disposition to take care of others was construed as “virtue,” and then for its intentions rather than for its practical effect. Having such other-directed good intentions in one’s heart was said to be virtuous. This is pure Kant, not merely neo-Kantian, and evangelical Protestant, too. The intentions are virtuous even if when carried out, as in high-rise public housing along the Dan Ryan Expressway, or the war on drugs brought onto the streets of Watts and East LA, or the First and Second Iraq Wars, they do not quite deliver. And surely, we in European culture have been saying for a long while, knowing how to take care of oneself is hardly a virtue?

Yes, it is. And so is the correlated carefulness in “helping” others. The Love or Justice moving us to help others is a vice, not a virtue, when unalloyed with Prudence. The good Samaritan who ignorantly if unintentionally kills the person he is trying to help is properly held responsible in law. Knowing that one must put out a candle before leaving the room is a good thing, even if you didn’t mean to burn the place down, even if your intentions were pure, even if it was your own room to dispose of. The school of Plato defined prudence [phronēsis] as “the ability which by itself is productive of human happiness; the knowledge of what is good and bad; the knowledge that produces happiness; the disposition by which we judge what is to be done and what is not to be done.”[9]

Aquinas declares that “any virtue which causes good in reason’s consideration is called prudence,” and observes that Prudence “belongs to reason essentially whereas the other three virtues [viz., courage, temperance, and justice]. . . apply reason to passions.”[10] And elsewhere he says, “One needs to deal rightly with those things that are for the sake of the end [finis], and this can only come about through reason rightly deliberating, judging, and commanding, which is the function of prudence. . . . Hence there can be no moral virtue without prudence.”[11] Or still elsewhere, the job of such practical reason is “to ponder things which must be done. . . but it is through prudence that reason is able to command well.”[12]

It is the executive function. Executive, not technical. In his book urging an Aquinian ethic on economics, Andrew Yuengert points out that the adjusting of means to ultimate ends that is “prudence” is not merely the adjusting of means to intermediate ends of “technique.”[13] In Rosalind Hursthouse’s textbook of virtue ethics the word “prudence” is rare. But the equivalent phrase, “practical wisdom,” occurs repeatedly, because reason must rightly deliberate about any virtue if the intended act of justice or temperance or faith is to do the job.

Prudence is so to speak the grammar of the virtues. Robert Hariman writes that it “fulfills an executive function in respect to human flourishing.”[14] Some faithful Roman Catholic who believes imprudently—that is, unwisely in practical terms—that going to mass regularly suffices for resurrection at the Last Judgment is making a dreadful mistake. A Federal judge who believe himself a just man fails in his project if he is ignorant of the law, or if he entertains a theory of it that no one else regards as just.

Amélie Oksenberg Rorty neatly encapsulates the Aristotle behind Aquinas as requiring that “the virtuous person perform the right action in the right way at the right time on the right objects.” [15] Clearly, such a person must be a phrónimos, a person of practical reasoning, “really knowing what one is doing, being aware of the circumstances and consequences of one’s actions, with the right conception of the sort of action one is performing.”[16] He is, Aristotle said, “able to deliberate well about what is good and advantageous to himself”[17]

A person notably lacking in prudence is, we say, a loose cannon. Think of the nautical image, Jack-Aubrey style: an iron cannon weighing two tons gets loose from its lashings and hurtles with thirty feet of momentum towards the battened porthole on the other side of a man-o’-war lurching with every wave deep to port and then to starboard in a force 9 gale off Cherbourg. Of course prudence is a virtue. Try living in a ship or a family or a polis, or for that matter as a Crusoe on a desert island, without it.

Prudence fits for example all of Alasdair MacIntyre’s requirements for a virtue: “an acquired human quality the possession and exercise of which tends to enable us to achieve those goods which are internal to practices [such as statecraft].” A virtue is acquirable in part only, since people are admitted as having from early childhood varying gifts for common sense, as for lovingness or even justice-giving. MacIntyre himself accords “practical reasoning” (that is, prudence) the status of a virtue when it is understood as a “capacity for judgment . . . in knowing how to select among the relevant stack of maxims and how to apply them in particular situations. Cardinal Pole possessed it [in statecraft]; Mary Tudor did not.”[18] Sir Thomas More said that Pole, a 16^th-century Englishman loyal to the Pope, was as learned as he was noble and as virtuous as he was learned.

Imagine a community filled with imprudent people, Mary Tudors in bulk, and you’ll see the social virtuousness of prudence. The imagining is not hard. A community of school children would fit the bill, as in The Lord of the Flies, or a community of adolescents such as the Latin Lords. Or indeed—and this is a crucial point—a community of moral saints would fit, too, if “moral” is taken to mean “improving the welfare of others or of society as a whole” without considering one’s own flourishing. There is a private virtue in prudence, too.

The exclusively public, social, altruistic definition of “virtue” is implicitly adopted by Susan Wolf in her essay mentioned, “Moral Saints.”[19] The implicit definition introduces a flaw into her case. In the style of many Anglophone philosophers she leaves out privately self-interested Prudence as a virtue, and so lets her moral saints behave badly towards themselves.

This is not good. And indeed showing its badness is Wolf’s point, by a reductio. It’s the Jewish-mother version of goodness: “Oh, don’t bother to replace the bulb. I’ll just sit here in the dark.” But the mother, after all, is God’s creature, too, and benevolence therefore should include a just benevolence towards herself. Being wholly altruistic, and disregarding the claims of that person also in the room called Self, about whose needs the very Self is ordinarily best informed, is making the same mistake as being wholly selfish, disregarding the claims of that person called Other. In both cases the mistake is to ignore someone.

Oddly, selflessness—note the word—is unjust, inegalitarian. “There is a manifest negligence in men of their real happiness or interest in the present world,” said Bishop Butler in 1725. People are “as often unjust to themselves as to others.”[20] The more optimistic Earl of Shaftesbury took in 1713 an evolutionary line to arrive at praise for Prudence:

the affection toward private or self-good, however selfish it may be esteemed, is in reality not only consistent with public good but in some measure contributing to it. . . [It is] for the good of the species in general. . . . So far as being blamable in any sense, . . it must be acknowledged absolutely necessary to constitute a creature good. . . . No one would doubt to pronounce so if he saw a man who minded not any precipices which lay in his way, nor made any distinction of food, diet, clothing or whatever else related to his health and being.[21]

Just as humility is not self-abnegation, prudence is not self-centeredness.

As Michael Stocker puts it, “modern ethical theories would prevent each of us from loving, caring for, and valuing ourself.”[22] Max U does not value Max the man. He values himself and others and ice cream only for its utility-producing capacity. Not for his sweet, or his not-so-sweet, self. Such an ethical universe is not merely imperfect. It is, Stocker concludes, “devoid of all people.”

No wonder we agree so readily with Wolf in finding her sort of moral saint obnoxious. They are unjust towards themselves, monsters of altruism. No wonder actual monks and nuns watch carefully for prideful and imprudent excesses in their mortifications of the flesh. No wonder Gandhi makes us more than uncomfortable. George Orwell noted that Gandhi was literally, and on three occasions, willing for his wife and children to die rather than eat animal food. He exhibited an inability to love friends and family in particular, exclusively, as against the for-all-we-know-perfectly-sincere Universal Love he exhibited to an unusual degree. Thus too Erasmus complains about saintly Socrates that he was “a man completely deaf to all human sentiment“ and Gregory Vlastos notes Socrates’ “frigidity.”[23] The average moderately good human being,” writes Orwell, is not “a failed saint.” To be like Gandhi or Socrates, as admirable as they are in some dimensions, is to miss part of humanity, the caring for oneself and for one’s best beloved. Sainthood, too, like tobacco and alcohol, Orwell affirms, “is also a thing that human beings must avoid.”[24]

We labor to teach our children and adolescents and our dogs and, yes, ourselves the practical wisdom that keeps them and us from injuring or impoverishing or failing to develop themselves and others and ourselves. In the selling of retirement homes the salespeople speak of the “Benjamin-Franklin close.”[25] The salesperson lists with the older person the costs and benefits, or the balance sheet, of buying into the Scottsdale Royale Retirement Community. It has been found that people now old, who have lived through the Great Depression or the War or are just old and well off, are focused, not unreasonably, on Prudence. Provide, provide. To close the deal the salesperson has to acknowledge in the style of an imagined Franklin—it is not the real Ben, by the way—that life is a calculation.

The selling technique here is not some improper trick. An imprudent person, someone who doesn’t know the value of money and how to keep accounts, is a menace to his friends and family, and to his own developed self. And certainly he is a menace to his need in old age to provide, provide. He may be chivalrous in some sense, courageous and temperate and just, even great-souled, as Aristotle wished, or loving, as did St. Paul. Yet without prudence he is a particular kind of fool, not virtuous as a whole. He is tragically or comically flawed, as most of us are, more or less, short of King Arthur or Cardinal Pole.

* * * *

Catalunya, around Barcelona, politically in Spain but culturally autonomous, and having its own language and literature distinct from Castillian, is in its own view a nation of sensible businesspeople enchained by fate these many centuries to a government of aristocratic madmen in Madrid. Catalunya praises above all the virtues seny [“SEHN-yuh”], the local version of prudence. The great Catalan historian Jaume Vicens Vives (1910-1960) declared famously that his region evinced seny, prudence or common sense, combined with rauxa [”RAU-shah”], passion or madness, the two “punts cardinals del temperament català.”[26]

In medieval times, when Barcelona was the chief port of the Western Mediterranean and Catalan was the lingua franca of the Christian fleets, a Catalan poet could think of no higher praise of his beloved than that she was “plena de seny,” full of common sense. Robert Hughes tells of a Catalan country priest anxious to get to dinner rushing out another wooden Jesus whose feet could be kissed when the line of worshippers in front of the first one, brought in earlier with all slow solemnity, looked to the priest inefficiently long. “Perhaps only in Catalunya,” Hughes observes, “the first industrial region of Spain, could time-and-motion study be so quickly and instinctively applied to piety.”[27] It’s seny, as against the Castillian lack of it.

Consider, for example, that noble Castillian, Don Quixote de la Mancha. His Courage is unquestionable, though exercised against phantasms, as when he meets a cart filled with actors and takes it to be Death and company. “The knight’s spirit mounted with the belief there was some new and perilous adventure presenting itself.” And he is of course exacting in Justice, too—his lady Dulcinea del Toboso, in sober fact a milkmaid, must always receive her just due, as surely will by way of just revenge any foul giant or contemptuous knight who balks at acknowledging her excellence. Thus in a gesture to knightly manners in the cowboy myth the Walter Brennan/Judge Roy Bean character in The Westerner (1940) extracts obeisance to posters of Lillie Langtry put up behind his bar. And the Don is disciplined by Temperance, his cowboy-like willingness to live a hard life: “labor, unease, and arms alone were designed and made for those the world calls knights errant,” he declares, willing with the other Shanes of the world to bed down rough in the barn, weapon at the ready.

Sancho Panza is a peasant or a bourgeois (one imagines that he must have had Catalan blood)—anyway, a practical man, pleno de seny, a man of prudence, ready with proverbial wisdom, ever articulating profane value: “I renounce the governorship of the promised isle [which glory the Don supposes throughout is Sancho’s true goal], and all I want in payment . . . is . . . the recipe for that marvelous liquor. . . . worth more than two reals an ounce”; or, lovingly, “the well-being of a single [self-appointed] knight errant is worth more than all the enchantments . . . on earth.” Don Quixote, whose mind is on higher things, hushes him, as he does always when prudence breaks in—though even a knight errant feels practical wisdom somehow necessary, as he shows by offering crack-pot rationalizations for his adventures, prudence within a world of madness.

No seny.[28]

* * * *

Because aristocratic and slave-owning members of city states first discussed the pagan virtues systematically, the pagan four of Courage, Temperance, Justice, and Prudence are often supposed to be especially suited to the ancient polis, and irrelevant therefore to the sick hurry of modern life. But the supposition cuts economics off from virtue, which is a mistake.

In view of the highly commercial character of Greek culture from at the latest the 7^th century on, the anti-commercial construal of the Greek-labeled virtues seems strange. After all, the urns from which we learn so many details of Greekness contained olive oil bound in profit for a startling array of places, from Phoenicia’s strand to where the Atlantic raves outside the western straits. The old idea that the aristocracy of Greece and the senatorial class of Rome was nobly landholding, and wouldn’t think of lending money at interest or investing in a scheme of apartment building for profit, is of course nonsense.[29] Athens and Rome were great commercial empires. When Aristotle is struggling to make justice fit his formula for virtue as a mean between deficiency and excess he turns with enthusiasm to the marketplace for examples.[30] As Thomas Carney observes, “The history of antiquity resounds with the sanguinary achievements of Aryan warrior elites. But it was the despised Levantines, Arameans [for example Jesus of Nazareth], Syrians, and Greeklings who constituted the economic heroes of antiquity.”[31]

The aristocracy, however entangled in the economy, affected to disdain it. Plato’s Socrates declares in The Republic that “the more men value money-making, the less they value virtue.”[32] Aristotle says of retail trade that it is “justly to be censured, because the gain in which is results is not natural made, but is made at the expense of other men.”[33] By “natural made” he means grown from plants and animals. Aristotle is exhibiting here a hardy physiocracy that views only agriculture as “productive.” Late in the Politics he says that that, of course, “the life of mechanics and shopkeepers . . . is ignoble and inimical to goodness.”[34] In 44 BC Cicero declares to his son Marcus that “trade, if petty, is to be considered vulgar; but if wholesale and on a large scale. . . it is not to be greatly criticized. . . . But of all the gainful occupations none is better than cultivation of the soil, none more fruitful, none more sweet, none more appropriate to a free man.”[35]

It was such aristocratic, or wannabe-aristocratic, snobbishness about urban production in the ancient world, rehearsed in the Hellenic revival of 19^th-century divines and schoolmasters, that made the three non-Prudence pagan virtues of Justice, Temperance, and Courage seem non-bourgeois virtues, thankfully not seared with trade, bleared, smeared with toil. After all, toil was for slaves and women, and trade for ill-bred shopkeepers. Free men of landed wealth, the leisured citizens of the polis, or the boys at Eton and Rugby, were to do the great-souled stuff.

For all their actual immersion in a market economy the two founts of virtue-talk in Athens—Plato the literal aristocrat and his graduate student Aristotle, the son of a physician in the Macedonian court and himself tutor to royal Alexander—did not view businesspeople as capable of true virtue. Julius Caesar likewise attributes the bravery of the Belgians to their distance from cultivation and refinement and to their lack of commerce with merchants whose goods tend to the effeminization of the spirit (ad animos effeminandos). Seneca the stoic in a commercial Rome was contemptuous of the idea that businessmen could have honor, though it is among his many self-contradictions that he was born into an extremely rich family and himself lent money at interest.

Businesspeople in this aristocratic view, I have noted, did not have the moral luck to be in a position to show their mettle. The Homeric, the Political, and even the Stoic versions of pagan virtue were explicitly anti-bourgeois. A hero or a landed gentleman or a philosopher unmoved (apathes) by earthly desires should be hostile towards any suggestion of pleonexia (excess, greed). The founder of stoicism, Zeno of Citium [335-263 BC ], was it appears the son of a Phoenician businessman, which is perhaps why he took a little broader view, though nonetheless anti-bourgeois. The dual heroes of Roman stoicism were a Greek slave and a Roman emperor, in their luck as differing as could be. Aristotle did not even admit that the citizen-soldier’s feats were real courage. The hoplite “seems to face dangers because of the penalties imposed by the laws and the reproaches they would otherwise incur”—so unlike, one might retort sarcastically, the Homeric Hero obsessing about his reputation.[36]

The exclusion of commercial prudence from the highest virtues becomes absurd in the late Roman Republic and early Empire, and caused endless theological difficulties in the Christian Empire, especially in the West, and in medieval Europe. It still haunts our talk of virtue.

[1] Gadamer, Truth and Method, 1965, p. xxxviii.

[2] Aristotle, Nic. Ethics, c. 330 BC, I. vi. 15 (1097a), Rackham trans.

[3] Pufendorf, On the Duty of Man, 1673, Bk. I, Chp. 5, “On duty to oneself,” p. 46.

[4] Williams, “Virtue,” 1995, p. 707.

[5] Coontz, Way We Never Were, 1992, p. 60.

[6] Foot, Natural Goodness, 2001, p. 17.

[7] Charry, “Happiness,” 2004, p. 21.

[8] Kant, Grounding, 1785, James Ellington translation.

[9] Plato, Definitions, c. 350 BC, Stephanus 411d, p. 1679.

[10] Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, c. 1270, Ia IIae, c. 1270, q. 61, art. 3 and a. 4. These are pages 112 and 113 in John Oesterle, trans., St. Thomas Aquinas: Treatise on the Virtues (which consists of Ia IIae, questions 49-67), under “Aquinas” in the works cited.

[11] Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, c. 1270, Ia IIae, c. 1270, q. 58, art. 4; Oesterle, p. 86. Also Ia IIae, q. 65, a. 2; Oesterle, trans., under “Aquinas,” p. 143.

[12] Aquinas, Disputed Questions, 1269-73, “The Cardinal Virtues” Art. 1, p. 109.

[13] Yuengert, Boundaries, 2004, p. 13.

[14] Hariman, “Preface,” 2003, p. viii.

[15] Amélie Rorty, “Contemplation in Aristotle’s Ethics,” 1980, p. 380.

[16] Aquinas, Treatise on the Virtues, c. 1270, q. LXI, art. 3, 4.

[17] Aristotle, Nic. Ethics, c. 330 BC, VI, 5.

[18] MacIntyre, After Virtue, 1981, pp. 178, 207-08.

[19] Wolf, “Moral Saints, 1982, p. 80, line 7, “improving the welfare of others or of society as a whole,” among many other places (four times on p. 80, for example; on p. 81; p. 85, middle; taken back on p. 93, top, but then, “This approach seems unlikely to succeed.”

[20] Butler, Fifteen Sermons, 1725, Sermon I, p. 371.

[21] Shaftesbury, Characteristics 1713 (1732), Vol. II, p. 13f. The evolutionary cast of the book is notable. For example, again, Vol. II, p. 18, “if the affection be . . . [an] advantage to the society. . . this must necessarily constitute what we call equity and right.”

[22] Stocker, “Schizophrenia,” 1976, p. 72.

[23] Quoted in Hariman, “Radical Sociality,” 1999, p. 10.

[24] Orwell, “Reflections on Gandhi,” 1949, p. 1353.

[25] I am indebted to Robin Rapp for this example.

[26] I am indebted to Eduard Bonet for this punt.

[27] Hughes, Barcelona, 1992, p. 26.

[28] Don Quixote. 1604/1614, trans. Cohen Part II, xi, p. 534; Part I, Chp. xiii, p. 96; Sancho: Part I, x, p. 81; Part II, xi, p. 533. Compare George Borrow in 1843 (The Bible in Spain, Preface): “you may draw the last cuarto from a Spaniard [or at any rate a Castillian], provided you will concede to him the title of cavalier, and rich man, for the old leaven still works as powerfully as in the time of the first Philip.”

[29] For example, Andreau, Banking and Business in the Roman World, 1987, p. 13: “Although it was fashionable to deplore moneylending for interest, the Greek and Latin elite members—in these periods at least—appear to have been at great pains to conceal their investments.”

[30] Aristotle, Nic. Ethics, c. 330 BC, V, v, passim; compare V, ii, 13.

[31] Carney, The Shape of the Past, 1975, p. 197, quoted in Crossan, Historical Jesus, 1991, p. 55.

[32] Plato, Republic, c. 360 BC, 550E.

[33] Aristotle, Politics, c. 330 BC, Barker trans., end of 1258a, p. 28.

[34] Aristotle, Politics, c. 330 BC, Barker trans., 1338b, p. 301.

[35] Cicero, On Duties, 44 BC, 1.150-151.

[36] Aristotle, Nic. Ethics, quoted in R. E. Houser, “The Virtue of Courage,” 2002, p. 305.

In 1922 Sinclair Lewis savagely spoofed in six pages the morning drive to his real estate office by George Babbitt, a manly head filled with boyish tales of Courage:

To George F. Babbitt, as to most prosperous [male] citizens of Zenith, his motor car was poetry and tragedy, love and heroism. . . . The office was his pirate ship but the car his perilous excursion ashore. . . . Babbitt . . . devoted himself to the game of beating trolley cars to the corner. . . a rare game, and valiant. . . . [Even parking his car] was a virile adventure masterfully executed.[1]

Lewis for all his cruelty and intellectual snobbery was on target. He regularly was on target in mimicking attitudes and language he was making fun of. The characters who speak woodenly in Lewis are his alter-egos, the intellectuals. It is rightly said that Lewis was himself entangled in those risible bourgeois values. Modern male writers, especially American male writers, allow themselves aristocratic poses, but are highly amused by other people taking them.

Twenty years after Babbitt James Thurber (ditto for his class values) was still making fun of the bourgeois man’s dreams of glory, to always be the best, my boy, the bravest:

“We’re going through!” . . . . “We can’t make it, sir! It’s spoiling for a hurricane, if you ask me.” “I’m not asking you, Lieutenant Berg,” said the Commander. “Throw on the power lights! Rev her up to 8500! We’re going through!” The pounding of the cylinders increased: ta-pocketa-pocketa-pocketa-pocketa-pocketa. . . .

“Not so fast! You’re driving too fast!” said Mrs. Mitty. “What are you driving so fast for?”

“Hmm?” said Walter Mitty. He looked at his wife, in the seat beside him, with shocked astonishment.[2]

Such fantasies motivate business and military and political leaders as much as their calculations of profit and loss. Frank Knight writing in 1923 on the ethics of competition claimed that “The competitive economic order must be partly responsible for making emulation and rivalry the outstanding quality of the character of the Western peoples who have adopted and developed it.” He contrasts it with “the religious ideals to which the Western world has continued to render lip-service—a contrast resulting in fundamental dualism in our thought and culture.”[3]

The historical sociology here is perhaps a bit dubious. Knight was the first American translator of Max Weber, and one can see the Weberian influence. Competitiveness after all is no less the life of Afghani tribesmen and other decidedly non-bourgeois types. And bourgeois life is in fact largely a matter of cooperation, not competition: thus the Kiwanis-Club mentality that Lewis spoofed; or the cooperation c. 1700 of traders in lumber and tobacco across oceans in the Atlantic. The philosopher Jennifer Jackson asks how a capitalist life can be reconciled with moral virtues. The two temptations to vice in such a life, she supposes, are the encouragement of intemperance in consumption and the “avid competitiveness” of the businessperson, “the seeming unremitting need to be doing others down.”[4] One would like to know the society of men, capitalist or not, that did not exhibit an unremitting need to do others down. Or, while we’re on the point, one would like to know too the society of men or women that did not exhibit intemperance in consumption. As a system capitalism in modern times is the greatest triumph of cooperation ever. The play of competitiveness in the souls of businessmen does not seem to be essentially bourgeois. It reflects the jousting values of an aristocracy, or more accurately a neo-pseudo-aristocracy, and to the male roles governed in fantasy by them

But Knight observes acutely that “economic activity is at the same time a means of want-satisfaction, an agency for want- and character-formation, a field of creative self-expression, and a competitive sport. While men are `playing the game’ of business, they are also molding their own and other personalities.”[5] Joseph Schumpeter had given in 1912 a similarly sociologized analysis of why capitalists played the game, a step beyond the naïve assumption in Marx and Veblen and many more recent critics of the bourgeoisie that “endless accumulation” is the game. Accumulation, Schumpeter said, was for social status, not only for itself. “For itself” businesspeople “delight in ventures,” “exercising one’s energy and ingenuity.” And the macho “will to conquer,” “akin to sport,” is motivating, too. Yes—though none of these is peculiarly capitalistic, and only for the first, status-taking motive “is private property as the result of entrepreneurial activity an essential factor in making it operative.”[6] At the funeral games of Hector, too, the men raced, exercising their energy and skill, and proudly won, and nobly lost.

Yet Schumpeter, too, was influenced by Weber, and thence by Marx. He writes in 1942 that “capitalist civilization is rationalistic, and anti-heroic. . . . The ideology that glorifies the idea of fighting for fighting’s sake and of victory for victory’s sake understandably withers in the office among all the columns of figures.”[7] I don’t think so: the younger Schumpeter had it more right. It is not the case that the industrial and commercial bourgeoisie dislikes a “warrior ideology that conflicts with its `rational’ utilitarianism.” It was not the case that bourgeois Europe had gone beyond aristocratic values in 1914. Rather the contrary: the bourgeoisie had been re-animated by heroic values. And still.

An aristocratic myth, in other words, still animates the men of the middle class. It peaked in the Greatest Generation, who grew up reading the boys’ books of a fading Romance. Alexander Gerschenkron (1904-1978) was a Russian émigré professing economics at Harvard 1948-1975, famously learned in two dozen languages, a student of Shakespeare, of statistics, of chess problems, of the Boston Red Sox, an expert in Russian and many other histories and literatures. Nicholas Dawidoff, the author too of a best-selling biography of the baseball catcher and spy, Moe Berg, describes his grandfather’s aristocratic and Russian temper as “charging the most ordinary events in his life with conspicuous moment” (ta-pocketa-pocketa-pocketa). Gerschenkron “never wanted to be associated with anything likely” (a rare game and valiant). He “never felt right if he was not feuding with someone” (wanting to swing on one, any one, anything to shatter that superior, simpering composure). “He believed that a gentleman does not say unflattering things out of another man’s hearing” (you wine sack, with a dog’s eyes, with a deer’s heart). “My grandfather was a life-long champion of what he called `French manners’” (extremely well-bred). “You were more generous with a friend than you were with yourself” (fearless, generous). “Any form of self-pity was anathema; he was someone who never wanted to be seen as a victim” (today this strange coming left me still a man. Give me my guns). “Over and over again he had to win [his wife’s] favor” (as gentle to a pure woman as King Arthur).

Like a Greek aristocrat in the Iliad, Gerschenkron’s most unbelievable thing was courageous talk. On April 11, 1968, at a tumultuous meeting of the Harvard faculty in the face of a student take-over of University Hall, he gave a twenty-minute oration without notes calling his colleagues to arms—well, at least to action (in a rude society nothing is honorable but war). Always be the best, my boy, the bravest/ and hold your head high above the others. “My grandfather didn’t command armies or lead governments or win pennants,” Dawidoff concludes, “but he was big, big in his qualities.”[8] A bourgeois aristocrat.

Gerschenkron was, as we say, quite a guy. His aristocratic courage looked better than the cowardice of many of his colleagues at the time. The next year he was visiting the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton. A Princeton administrator gave a seminar at the Institute suggesting that the university grant all the demands of the black students. When the Institute fellows pressed him on the point, he burst out in vexation, “Well, after all, the black students have the guns.” Into the stunned silence following this remark Gerschenkron, with more learning than originality, dropped, in his Russian accented basso profundo, “Ven I hear the vord ‘gun,’ I reach for my culture.”

But there can be ethical mischief as well as good in the gendered fantasy of courage. Screwtape explains,

Think of your man [whom we devils are trying to corrupt] as a series of concentric circles, his will being the innermost, his intellect coming next, and finally his fantasy. You can hardly hope, at once, to exclude from all the circles everything that smells of the Enemy [viz., God]: but you must keep on shoving all the virtues outward till they are finally located in the circle of fantasy, and all the desirable qualities [that is, desirable to devils, therefore sins from God’s point of view, for example, pride, covetousness, envy, anger, gluttony] inward into the Will. It is only in so far as [the non-sins, the virtues] reach the will and are there embodied in habits that [they] are really fatal to us [devils].[9]

The CEO who dreams himself an artist of war, a samurai or general, is thereby encouraged not to notice that in the boardroom his actual Will behaves habitually in the service not of real ethical courage, in taking a prudent risk, say, or in standing up to the latest accounting trick, but in the service of pride and envy and covetousness.

It is said perhaps in jest that men think of sex every 15 seconds. What is true is that they think of courage every minute of their lives. It’s entailed by their gender identity, and is encouraged by an age nostalgic for aristocratic virtue. Maybe it’s biological, but certainly the biology can be muffled or amplified by social arrangements—by the laws of wife beating, for example, or the stories we tell. Women, it is said, dream of love, men of courage. The bourgeois men dream themselves back to cowboys and knights, to Horatius at the bridge, to the plains of Ilium, to tall Hector, breaker of horses, to Odysseus the resourceful, and to swift-footed Achilles, son of Peleus, and his aristocratic rage.

* * * *

Yet the best among the best, hoi tōn aristōn aristoi, must show a balance of virtues. Courage isn’t enough, even for a fulltime hero. Even noble Gunnar of Njal’s Saga violates the temperate, just, and prudent rules worked out in Iceland for the resolution of blood feuds. He carries on killing, with disastrous results.[10] Philippa Foot wrote that “nobody can get on well if he lacks courage, and does not have some measure of temperance and wisdom, while communities where justice and charity are lacking are apt to be wretched places to live, as Russia was under the Stalinist terror, or Sicily under the Mafia.”[11]

You need all the pagan virtues in play—prudence (what Foot calls wisdom) and courage and temperance and justice. Even an institution specialized in Courage, such as an army or a fire department or a police force, must exercise the other virtues, too. “A man who places honor only in successful violence,” wrote Dr. Johnson of the Western Islands of Scotland, “is a very troublesome and pernicious animal in time of peace.”[12] It was the problem of the late Roman Republic, as of many disordered times, that Roman men sought aristocratic glory in violence rather than bourgeois wealth in peace. The Danny Glover character in Lethal Weapons inquires of the Mel Gibson character, also a policeman, “You ever met anyone you didn’t kill?” A courageous institution or society or person lacking Temperance and Justice and Prudence will not last, or work.

So at least we wish. We need a criterion for the virtue of virtues, an answer, not necessarily a simple one, to the question, “Why is this a virtue.” It is not the case, as opponents of virtue ethics sometimes believe, that an answer has to reduce virtue ethics to duties or to utility. Edmund Pincoffs has suggested that could we decide which characteristics are virtues by asking whether we could approach or flee the person having them.[13] The moral philosopher Hursthouse identifies four ends, in two dimensions, survival/flourishing and individual/group: the mere survival of the individual or of the group, or the flourishing of the individual or of the group.[14]

Alasdair MacIntyre is one among the male philosophers, such as Bernard Williams and John McDowell, who have contributed to virtue ethics. His answer to the question is a “social teleology.” You test virtue X by asking how X contributes to the purpose, end, telos of the society, what Knight called “the moral habitability of the world.”[15] The ancient theorists of the virtues applauded that balance and completion of virtues, worth having of course in a little community. What sort of person suits best the telos of democratic Athens or republican Rome? Well, of course a person having the four virtues Courage, Temperance, Justice, and Prudence. Jean Bethke Elshtain puts Aristotle in the post-heroic camp. She too uses the movie Shane as an example: in the end Shane himself must leave, she writes, because “he is as out of place in the placid, settled kingdom of a tamed town on the American frontier as was Achilles’ gory glory in Aristotle’s list of civic virtues.”[16]

Unfortunately, as Elshtain well understands, the question about the virtue of virtues can’t really be answered as it typically was before the game was spoiled by Machiavelli and Hobbes. The old question and the then-obvious answer was in effect, “What does a society need to be virtuous? Well, that’s obvious: a throng of virtuous chaps.” The new social sciences of the 18^th century came to realize, a century or two after the Terrifying Italian and the Angry Englishman had first said it, that social virtue, and certainly virtù sociale, does not require personal virtue in every one of a society’s citizens, or perhaps in any of them. A self-interested mob of corporate raiding, asset-stripping Gordon Gekkos might result for example in a rich economy, thank you very much.

The ancients and medievals by contrast argued about politics in a less social-scientific way. They were less aware that what is true of individuals might not turn out to be true of a group composed of such individuals. As Isaiah Berlin put it, Machiavelli’s juxtaposition of the private, Christian world of personal virtues and the public, pagan world of political virtù raised for the first time a disturbing question:

What reasons we have for supposing that justice and mercy, humility and virtù, happiness and knowledge, glory and liberty, magnificence and sanctity, will always coincide, or indeed be compatible at all? . . . Machiavelli . . . undermines one major assumption of Western thought: namely that somewhere in the past or the future, in this world or the next . . . there is to be found the final solution to the question of how men should live. . . . The very search for it becomes not merely Utopian in practice, but conceptually incoherent.[17]

In Plato’s Republic the balance within the individual called Temperance is taken as a parallel, even a cause, for the balance within the polis called Justice. “And isn’t he moderate because of the friendly and harmonious relations between these same parts?” asks Socrates. Glaucon replies (and Socrates evidently approves), “[Temperance] is surely nothing other than that, both in the city and in the individual.”[18] In Aristotle’s Politics it was an explicit principle, says Sir Earnest Barker in his gloss, “that what is true of the felicity of individuals is also true of communities.”[19]

Well, no, sadly, it is not. But set aside for a long while the problem that Plato and his graduate student Aristotle were perhaps overenthusiastic for the parallel between individual and civic virtue. Set aside that a later tradition known as Civic Humanism or Civic Republicanism looking back to the polis has the same problem. It has the problem, namely, that virtue in each person is strictly speaking neither necessary nor sufficient for the virtue of and certainly not for the survival of the whole community.

I will never fully resolve the social/private dilemma. At least I am in good company—for example, the company of all social observers since the dilemma first became clear in the 18^th century. Alasdair MacIntyre, to pick a modern example, argues persuasively in his “social teleology” that “the essential function of the virtues is clear. Without them, without justice, courage, and truthfulness, practices could not resist the corrupting power of institutions.”[20] Think of a scientist who is not committed to telling truth, or a judge not committed to justice. Yet one can argue—people have—that institutions like competitive pressures in science or the procedures for recalling judges will result in social virtues regardless of the dishonesty of scientists and the corruption of judges. It may be. Smith, Tocqueville, and Marx each had invisible-hand explanations of why good or bad in people can lead to bad or good in the system. But observe that they held on to their non-invisible-hand indignations, about mercantilists corrupting the British state or intendants over-centralizing pre-Revolutionary France or Mr. Moneybags engorging the national income.

The dilemma is that private good is neither necessary nor sufficient for public good. The dilemma shows among the American Founding Fathers, as David Prindle among others has noted. John Adams doubted “whether there is public Virtue enough to support a Republic”; yet James Madison expected political competition, like economic competition, to make it “more difficult for unworthy candidates to practice with success the vicious arts by which elections are too often carried.”[21] Adams stands for a civic republicanism depending on individual virtue, Madison for a liberalism depending on constitutional structures. Either individual virtue is necessary for the polity to thrive, or else ingenious structures can offset the passions with the interests.

Set aside for the present book, that is, the potentially paradoxical details of “social teleology.” I will return to it in Bourgeois Towns: How a Capitalist Ethic Grew in the Dutch and English Lands, 1600-1800. I hope. At least we can agree, following Aristotle, that person-by-person the whole set of pagan virtues is desirable for the telos of the person herself: “No one wou­­ld call a man happy [makarion] who had no particle of courage, temperance, justice, or wisdom.”[22] You are not going to be a fully realized woman if in your mad Courage you lack Temperance and Justice and Prudence. You are going to be swept with animal passions. The jails are filled with people of undoubted physical Courage. Their problem is that they have been too courageous, Thelma-and-Louise-style, Bonnie-and-Clyde-style, willing to take risks that non-criminals will not or cannot take.

* * * *

The virtues are distinct. An ethic that elevates manly Courage to the only virtue will speak of suicide bombers as “cowardly,” since there is only one unified anti-virtue if there is only one unified virtue. If you have only one word for the Good Man you are led to unhelpful locutions. Adolf Hitler was not merely “crazy,” or in pursuit of some unanalyzable goal of “Evil.” A man with personal courage beyond doubt, and charming and witty in company, what he lacked in the end were the rest of the pagan four. Having one of them is not enough.

Or three out of four. When in 1937 Winston Churchill praised Mussolini as having “amazing qualities of courage, comprehension, self-control, and perseverance”—that is, Courage, Prudence, Temperance, and Courage again, with Faith—he was praising, as an aristocrat raised at Harrow and Sandhurst would, an almost balanced set of the pagan virtues. Churchill said once that if had been an Italian he would have become a Fascist. Yet presumably even he found the Justice of Italian fascism a trifle deficient.[23]

In other words, Courage needs other virtues to be a virtue. Temperance, for example, self-control. From Achilles the berserk warrior to Tony Soprano the New Jersey mob boss, any society needs its men to exercise “impulse control.” The problem with men, especially young men, is the excess of Courage. Cardiff City’s football hooligans are of all social standings, including at least one millionaire and one former professional footballer. The lads who on the day of the game mob the Swan and Anchor, surrounded by British police on the alert, are not always young and unemployed. What they share is an addiction to courageous violence, admittedly more common among young men with time on their hands than old men with jobs. What Eric Hoffer called true believers are the young, courageous men who make up the storm troopers in every violent upheaval, good or bad.

Perhaps it’s biological. In any case the virtù of young males requires elaborate socialization to check and channel. In East Africa not long ago a group of young male elephants, orphaned by poachers, engaged in what can only be described as gang banging. There is film of one particularly bold teenager tossing clumps of grass and mud at a rhinoceros, over and over again, challenging him to unequal battle. The teenagers became a nuisance also to the humans in the neighborhood, and the problem was solved at last by laboriously moving the worst offenders hundreds of miles into a herd led by mature female elephants, as elephant herds are. The boys stopped their Rebel-Without-a-Cause behavior and became temperate members of the elephantine community. Doubtless they were happy, too, makarioi, and well favored, flourishing, eudaimonikoi.

Temperance itself is not an unalloyed good. “In some people,” Foot reminds us, “temperance is not a virtue, but is rather connected with timidity or with a grudging attitude in the acceptance of good things.”[24] A related sin is literal hopelessness, “acedia,” spiritual sloth, not caring. It is the second-to-the-worst in the deadly list. The virtue of Temperance in Christian thinkers like Aquinas is not about mortification of the flesh, but on the contrary the moderate yet relishing use of a world charged with the grandeur of God. The characters in Grant Wood’s painting American Gothic seem on one reading to show an excess of Temperance. Only the wisp of hair over her right shoulder betrays the woman’s passion.

Paul Dombey in Dickens’ first anti-bourgeois novel, Dombey and Son, published in installments between the year of the Repeal of the Corn Laws and the revolutionary year of 1848,

was not a man of whom it could properly be said that he was ever startled, or shocked; but he certainly had a sense within him, that if his wife should sicken and decay . . . he would find a something gone from among his plate and furniture . . . which . . . could not be lost without sincere regret. Though it would be a cool, business-like, gentlemanly, self-possessed regret, no doubt. [25]

In truth, Mrs. Dombey’s status in law, like that of any bourgeois woman in England in 1848, was little better than his plate or furniture. As we expect from the passage, Dombey is in for a lesson about letting one’s life be ruled by Temperance and Prudence without Courage or Justice, and especially without Dickens’ favored virtue, a secular and sentimental version of Christian Love.

The point is that to last like bronze the virtues must be alloyed with each other. A personality governed wholly by temperance is bad, as is one governed wholly by courage, or wholly by justice. It’s the “wholly” that’s the problem. Imagine how dangerous it would be to be in a platoon filled with Medal-of-Honor types or how tiresome to be in a nunnery filled with Mother-Teresa types. As Susan Wolf puts it, “if the moral saint is devoting all his time to feeding the hungry . . . then necessarily he is not reading Victorian novels, playing the oboe, or improving his backhand. . . . A life in which none of these possible aspects of character is developed may seem a life strangely barren.” [26]

[1] Lewis, Babbitt, 1922, Chapter III.

[2] Thurber, “Secret Life,” first paragraph.

[3] Knight, “Ethics of Competition,” 1923, p. 39; compare p. 59.

[4] Jackson 1996, p. 80.

[5] Knight, “Ethics of Competition,” 1923, p. 39, his italics.

[6] Schumpter, Theory, 1912, p. 93f.

[7] Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism, 1942, Chp. XI, pp. 127f.

[8] Dawidoff, Fly Swatter, pp. 12, 13, 15, 42, 91, 313-320, 336.

[9] Lewis, Screwtape Letters, 1942, p. 31.

[10] As Byock observes, Viking Age, 2001, p. 229.

[11] Foot, “Virtues and Vices,“ 1978, pp. 2-3.

[12] Johnson, Journey, 1775, p. 99, punctuation modernized.

[13] Pincoffs, Quandaries, 1986, p. 78.

[14] Hursthouse, Virtue Ethics, 1999, p.p. 198-202.

[15] Knight, “Ethics and the Economic,” 1922, p. 30.

[16] MacIntyre, After Virtue, 1981, p. 183. Elshtain, Women and War, 1987, pp. 52-56.

[17] Berlin, “The Originality of Machiavelli,” 1953, in Against the Current, pp. 72, 76.

[18] Plato, c. 360 BC, The Republic, IV, Stephanus 442c-d, p. 1074.

[19] Aristotle, Politics, c. 330 BC, VII. i, §11, p. 281.

[20] MacIntyre, After Virtue, 1981, p. 181.

[21] Prindle, Politics and Economics, 2003, pp. 98, 70.

[22] Aristotle, Politics, c. 330 BC, VII. i, §4 (1323a), p. 280.

[23] David Cannadine, Aspects of Aristocracy, 1994, p. 159; Vinen, History in Fragments, 2000, p. 159.

[24] Foot, “Virtues and Vices,” 1978, p. 18.

[25] Dickens, Dombey and Son, 1848, p. 54.

[26] Wolf, “Moral Saints,” 1982, p. 81.

Think about it the next time you want to pass another law coercing people, backed by the guns of the state.

The trouble is that putting guns to heads is easier. Louis XIV didn’t need to persuade his subjects, or anyone else. He cast into all his cannons Ultima ratio regum, “The last argument of kings.” It’s easier.

Yet the ease corrupts the holder of the gun. In 1887 Lord Acton (1834-1902), a British Catholic and notably liberal historian, wrote a letter to a U.S. bishop arguing against papal infallibility. He wrote, “Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.”

It shows daily. In both of our countries the disgraceful history of slavery makes the point. Enslavers such as our U.S. Thomas Jefferson thought of themselves as good masters. But physical mastery over anyone does corrupt. The labor of Tom’s 200 slaves, some of them his own children, supplied his French wines and his fine books on liberal philosophy. Tom was able to set aside “All men are created equal.”

And even the notable liberal Lord Acton, like many British Catholics at the time, such as another hero of mine, John Henry Cardinal Newman, approved of the slaveholding South in the Civil War, and thought slavery, like imperialism, not so very bad.

Wow. These sad facts illustrate Acton’s next sentence in his letter, that “All great men are bad.” They are tempted by their very greatness to abuse their hold on others. Even one of my all-time heroes, John Stuart Mill, who wrote eloquently in 1859 On Liberty, for 35 years, down to 1858, earned his daily bread in his job devising coercive laws for the rule over the darkies of the Subcontinent by the East India Company. Shades of Jefferson.

At the least, then, physical power corrupts people to shocking hypocrisy. That’s the least of it. The husband who beats his wife thinks of himself as a fine fellow. My colleague at Cato, Marian Tupy, has written a brilliant account of how the Communist Party of South Africa treated the liberals also trying to end apartheid. The Party was perfectly willing to do armed violence while pretending to honor the sweet persuasion advocated by the liberals. Some liberals believed the Party’s lie. Lenin is said to have called such people, who abounded from 1917 to 1989, “useful idiots.”

The same cynical corruption occurred in the Spanish Civil War. The Communist Party claimed to support, against Franco, the Loyalist socialists and anarchists, while in fact murdering them to gain power itself. The experience of narrowly missing becoming a victim of the Party’s lying gave George Orwell material for Animal Farm.

Conversation is the heart of a liberal society, what the great economist and philosopher Frank Knight called “government by discussion.”

Coercion ends the conversation and therefore destroys a liberal society. An authoritarian father, or an infallible pope, says, “Because I say so.”

With guns, it is so.

Until 1800, though, such a hell was what everybody except a handful of nobles and priests and merchants expected, year after terrible year. We have achieved over the past two centuries for ordinary people worldwide, materially speaking, unevenly, for the first time, a pretty good purgatory.^[1] The whole world’s average income, for example, now approaches that of present-day Brazil, or of the United States in 1941. Since 1800, in other words, and especially since 1900, the goods and services available to the average human being, and the scope for a full human life, have startlingly expanded.^[2] The event justifies its label, “the Great Enrichment.”

Never in material terms had anything so Great as the Enrichment occurred—never to the mass of a population, not in the glory of Greece or the grandeur of Rome, not in ancient Egypt or medieval China. Startlingly, Brazil is now better off, on average, than the metropolises of the mightiest world empires before 1939. In the many and burgeoning very rich countries, such as Sweden or the United States, the value of goods and services made, earned, and consumed per person, without allowing for the radically improved quality of most goods and many services (cleaner food, better medicine), is three or four times higher even than the historically unprecedented world average.

Some Swedes and some Americans are still poor. But most aren’t. The extremely high average has overwhelmed inequality so far as the standard of genuine comfort is concerned. It gives to the rich, the middling, and the poor alike a roof over their heads, plentiful food and clothing, long life expectancy, reasonable hours of work, literacy, dignity—all of which were prospects and satisfactions denied to most humans until well after 1800. The signs are good that if we keep our wits about us we can, within a few generations, achieve for everyone on earth the riches of Sweden and America. All the formerly poor can enjoy bourgeois incomes and can pursue, if they wish, the spiritual enrichment that such an income permits. We’re on the way to a pretty good material paradise.

Look at the numbers.^[3] Average daily expenditures by Haitians and Afghans, expressed in present-day U.S. prices at “purchasing power parity”—and so allowing for inflation and the relevant exchange rates among currencies—are well below $3 a day, which before 1800 was what the average human more or less everywhere expected to make, earn, and consume.^[4] So it had been, always, back to the caves. Imagine living each day on the cost, spread over all your activities, of a half gallon of milk. If you’ve been to Liberia or Afghanistan it’s not hard to imagine. Today, after two centuries of increase, recently accelerating, the world figure, an average that includes even the extraordinarily poor Liberians and Afghans, has arrived at an unprecedented $33 a day—roughly, I say, the Brazilian level.^[5]

Like all the figures, the $3 and the $33 are corrected, I emphasize, for exchange rates and inflation. They are expressed, as the economists put it, in “real” terms, and therefore are comparable—or comparable enough for the scientific point being made here. The figures are supposed to include (however imperfectly when applied to earlier economies) not only what you buy in the marketplace but whatever goods and services you make or grow for yourself.^[6] No one should put faith in the second or third digits of such an estimate, which may variously under- and overestimate the value of homework, care work, the environment, better health, and better quality of goods. But for the economic and historical science attempted here the great alteration of the first digit suffices. It is stunning.

Since 1800 the ability of humans to feed and clothe and educate themselves, even as the number of humans increased by an astonishing factor of seven, has risen, per human, by an even more astonishing factor of ten. Do the math, then, of total production. We humans now produce and consume seventy—7 × 10—times more goods and services worldwide than in 1800. Some people view this figure with alarm and speak of environmental degradation. But the news is mainly good. With seventy times more production, no wonder we can cultivate new economies of scale and reap their benefits through free trade. And no wonder we can harness the ingenuity of the larger population to get better antibiotics and better automobiles. No wonder we can clean up the air and the water, and turn forests into nature preserves.

In the best-run countries, such as France or Japan or Finland, all of which not so long ago were $3-a-day poor, real income per person, conventionally measured, has by now increased to roughly $100 a day. Income has risen, that is, not by 30 percent but by a factor of thirty (I will repeat the point until you feel it on your pulse), which is to say many hundreds of percent. It is not a doubling or a tripling of the material scope of a human life. Such routine increases, desirable as they are, have occurred many times before in world history, only to fall back again to $3 a day when the good times passed. Income now is thirty to one hundred times more than our ancestors could manage, and no falling back about it. The OECD, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, a club of reasonably well-off free-trade democracies with average earnings of about $100 a day per person, has now thirty-four members, containing nearly one-sixth of the world’s population.^[7] To be overprecise about the fifth-grade arithmetic involved, a factor of thirty for income growth in the OECD countries from 1800 to the present means a rise of 2,900 percent. Think conservatively of the Enrichment, if you wish, and call the increase merely 2,000 or 1,500 percent. Any such order of magnitude of enrichment justifies the word “great.”

The Enrichment since 1800 shows in all the evidence. (It better, if it’s so Great.) Real per-person income in Brazil is now, I repeat, about the same as it was in the world-beating United States in 1941, or in the still-recovering postwar Britain in 1959.^[8] Two centuries ago fully four out of five U.S. adults worked to grow food for their families and for the remaining nonagricultural fifth. Now a single American farmer feeds three hundred people. Since 1800 worldwide life expectancy at birth has doubled. World literacy is tending toward 100 percent. On Indian TV in 2014 an optimistic advertisement noted that for every adult illiterate in that bettering if still very poor country there are seven little children who can read a story. The scope of human life has widened, and bids fair to go on widening. All the instruments agree that most humans are massively better off now than their ancestors were two centuries ago.^[9]

You will perhaps doubt that the Great Enrichment happened, or that it was so great, or that it will continue—or doubt that it is justified, in view of environmental decay and consumerist excess. But the evidence, regarded without prejudice, is overwhelming. From about 1800 to the present the world’s economy did something good, which looks to be permanent and looks to be justified. If contrary to the evidence we cling to our prejudices about economic history—our view that the Industrial Revolution was impoverishing, or that the Great Enrichment was an irremediable environmental disaster, or that Europe is rich only because of poverty in the Third World, or that the new rich are always getting relatively richer, or that after all any enrichment is vulgar—we will mistake how we got here and will give mistaken advice on how to move forward. We will betray the remaining poor of the world.

The prejudices, which is to say our justifying discourses, would not matter if the issue were divergent judgments about, say, the latest ice cream flavors from Ben and Jerry’s. We could then, in the easygoing American phrase, “agree to disagree.” Chocolate Therapy versus AmeriCone Dream. Whatever. But the judgment about whether the System has worked for ordinary people, and why or why not, is too important to leave to personal fancy or to prideful skepticism or to a political identity adopted in late adolescence, never to be reconsidered in the light of new evidence or mature understanding, reaffirmed daily by the particular group of shouters and sneerers we tune into on cable TV. If we are to help the remaining poor of the world, as ethically speaking we should, the political judgment needs to be made soberly and scientifically.

The Great Enrichment is the most important secular event since the invention of agriculture. It has restarted history. It will end poverty, as for a good part of humankind it already has. Surprisingly, though, economists and historians from left or right or center can’t explain it. Perhaps their sciences and their politics need revision.

§

Our great-great-great-great-great-great-grandparents were very poor, which had in turn been the lot of their ancestors since time out of mind. In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou return unto the ground; for out of it wast thou taken. The good old days, in other words, were for ordinary people horrible to a degree that is hard now for residents of $80-a-day countries such as Italy or New Zealand to appreciate. The historian David Gilmour notes that from 1375 to 1795 the great city of Florence experienced famine prices every five years or so.^[10] In 1879 the French literary historian Hippolyte Taine expressed the horror in a vivid metaphor: “The people are like a man walking through a pond with water up to his chin. . . . Old-fashioned charity and newfangled humanity try to help him out, but the water is too high. Until the level falls and the pond finds an outlet, the wretched man can only snatch an occasional gulp of air and at every instant he runs the risk of drowning.”^[11] The British writer and literary historian Graham Robb, who quotes Taine, details the poverty of parts of rural France even in the improving nineteenth century. Over the winter in Burgundy the vineyard men hibernated, and not merely figuratively. An official reported in 1844 that “these vigorous men will now spend their days in bed, packing their bodies tightly together in order to stay warm and to eat less food.”^[12] Robb remarks that in French agriculture in the nineteenth century “slowness was not an attempt to savor the moment.” Economists have long recognized that the world’s poorest agriculturalists often run out of energy before they run out of money, the more so when they are afflicted by malaria and tuberculosis and other debilitating diseases.^[13] The ploughman homeward plods his weary way. “A ploughman who took hours to reach a field,” writes Robb, “was not necessarily admiring the effect of morning mist. . . . He was trying to make a small amount of strength last for the working day, like a cartload of manure spread over a large field.” Even in fast-enriching Sweden, whose economy grew after the liberalization of the 1860s faster than any economy except Japan’s, the novelist Vilhelm Moberg remarked of his childhood around 1900 in the countryside that he could bring to mind only the long summers. In winter “the children in a smallholder’s cabin . . . were too badly clothed to stand the cold. . . . Life in winter was quite literally shut in: we dozed by the open fire and slept through many hours of the [very long Scandinavian] night: it was, for children, a quiet vegetating in the darkness under the low cabin.”^[14]

The Australian poet and cultural-literary critic Clive James struck the right note. During the nineteenth century tuberculosis afflicted the poor especially, but also the middle and upper classes. The aristocrat Alexis de Tocqueville, for example, died of it in 1859, as in 1850 had his bourgeois-liberal ally Frédéric Bastiat.^[15] The working-class poet John Keats died of it too, in 1821, age twenty-five, before his pen had gleaned his teeming brain. James wrote, “Today’s young tourists of a literary bent, when they pass, on the Spanish Steps in Rome, the window of [Keats’s] last resting place, are being granted insight into the fearful realities of a world without antibiotics.” (In 1943 the recently invented penicillin was two years away from being widely available for civilian use. My own kidneys bear the damage from the only alternative, sulfa drugs, of which the correct dose for an injured infant was poorly understood.) To grasp “the suddenness and randomness of God’s wrath” in former times, James writes, we need to get inside the lives of our ancestors, “a trick of the mind . . . by which we can imagine how it must have felt when the only possible way to view reality without the benefit of religious faith was to despair.”^[16] In 1917 in a backwater of a definitely enriching Sweden, the potato crop failed and some of the poorer people starved to death.^[17]

So it was from the beginning to 1800, and in most places for many a painful year thereafter. In the opening lines of Christ Stopped at Eboli (1945), the painter, doctor, and writer Carlo Levi described the poverty he saw when he was banished by the fascist state in 1935–1936 to a pair of villages in far southern Italy—”that other world, hedged in by custom and sorrow, cut off from History and the State, eternally patient, . . . that land without comfort or solace, where the peasant lives out his motionless civilization on barren ground in remote poverty, and in the presence of death.”^[18]

It was an ancient and terrible business, as it is still in Chad and Bangladesh, and on the homeless streets of Chicago and Amsterdam, too. For nearly all of humanity’s time on earth the average amount of food and education and antibiotics and the rest per person stayed at subsistence, at $1 or $3 or $5 a day expressed in today’s prices, or in exceptional times, briefly, $6 or $8 a day. Thus it had been, in 1800, during the two thousand or so centuries since the mitochondrial Eve (and about the same span, approximate contemporary, as has recently been discovered, since her good friend the Y-chromosome Adam^[19]). Or during the thousand or so centuries since the invention of full language. Or during the hundred or so centuries since the invention of agriculture. Or during the eight or so centuries since commerce had revived in the West. Or during the three or so centuries since Europeans had ventured by sea to Africa and India and the New World. Pick whatever period down to 1800 you want. For a long, long time nothing much happened to the economic misery of the average Jill.

She and her friend Jack could perhaps trap or purchase a little meat to go with their bread, or pick nuts to go with their grubs, but they lived in a wretched little hovel, or a tent, or a cave. Poor people (and some not-so-poor people) lived in literal caves even in France and Italy until well after World War II, for example at Matera in the arch of Italy’s foot. Jill before 1800 had two sets of clothing at most, or a string skirt. In the Jericho of Pre-Pottery Neolithic times, around 10,000 BCE, 40 percent of the burials were of infants or children.^[20] In ancient Rome, on the 50-50 bet that a Jill survived to age fifteen, she could expect then to live on to age fifty-two—as against eighty-five for the same bet now.^[21] Nowadays in rich countries, and in many very poor countries, almost all of a woman’s children survive to the fifteen-year-old starting line. In ancient Rome, by contrast, a third of Jill’s numerous children died before their first birthdays.

It had ever been so, as it is now in rural Ethiopia (one of the African cradles of Homo sapiens). Real income might go up for a while. In the richest parts of China and Europe in their most prosperous times it might rise for a while to $6 or $8 a day.^[22] But as my mother’s generation puts it, “even $7 a day is no bag of bluebirds.” And then it would revert to $3 a day.

The old imperialist vision of China and India as always and anciently and particularly overrun with starvelings is a recent back-projection. The back-projectiing had unhappy consequences during the 1960s and 1970s in the eugenic excesses of the family-limitation movement and of the Chinese single-child policy.^[23] The historian Niall Ferguson, for example, favors the back-projection, despite recent work by historians such as Takeshi Hamashita and Christopher A. Bayly showing that trade in the Chinese seas and the Indian Ocean was large, and that in the eighteenth century the lands around them were prospering.^[24] For most of history a dense population such as that in the lower Yangtze Valley or the lower Rhine or the lower Ganges signaled that a place was doing comparatively well in aggregate—albeit less wonderfully well for the Jack or Jill at the bottom of the ruck. The Ganges Plain, for example, was rich around 1600, at the height of the Mughal Empire, when the economic historians Stephen Broadberry and Bishnupriya Gupta reckon it reached 61.5 percent of the British GDP per capita—admitting that British real income was then at one of its lowest points.^[25] But in most eras the people of north India were $3- or $1-a-day poor on average, as were all the other commoners on the planet since the beginning. The economic historian Bozhong Li makes a case that the Netherlands and the lower Yangtze were qualitatively comparable in 1800, though he does not in the paper venture on direct comparisons of incomes.^[26] In a paper with Jan Luiten van Zanden, though, he concludes that by 1800 Dutch real income per person was double that of this richest of Chinese regions.^[27]

Doubling or even tripling was possible, then, an instance of (Adam) Smithian growth, as the economic historians put it, coming up to the world-beating standard of Holland in 1800. But the vastly greater enrichment since 1800, a growth by factors of ten or thirty or one hundred, was out of the question. One hundred percent, yes, maybe 200 percent, if you were in the Scottish Highlands and reformed your society to match the habits of Holland. But 9,900 percent? Never.

You can tell the same story on a smaller geographical scale about what is now Belgium and the Netherlands. In 1568 the Low Countries were rich by the miserable standards of Europe, which is why Philip II of Spain wanted to go on taxing the place. Tax revenues from his Dutch- and French-speaking subjects thereabouts sometimes exceeded his silver revenues from the New World (though neither was enough to prevent the European hegemon from engaging in controlled defaults on numerous occasions, so uncertain were the fortunes of Spanish wars^[28]). Two and a half centuries later, by 1820, the Netherlands was still the richest place in the world, with Britain only recently equaling it, while the southern part of the Low Countries (what was shortly to become Belgium) was smartly industrializing—but still at merely $6 or $8 a day. It meant ample bread but not much meat. Secondhand clothing if you were poor. Untreatable disease. Some education, but for most people not beyond a little reading of the Bible or the latest scandal sheet. Few books, few panes of glass, few shoes, horses, chairs—all expensive in hours of labor to get. No bag of bluebirds.

You would not want $3 a day, or $7, even if everyone around you had the same. When people can vote with their feet to escape it, they do. Most North Koreans who can, do. The Nigerian men selling handbags on the streets of Venice (Vu cumprà? “Wanna buy?”) have done so most courageously. More descendants of the people in Carlo Levi’s pair of mezzogiorno towns, Aliano and Grassano, now live in Argentina than in their home district of Lucania.^[29] Levi’s people, residing in the middle of the Italian foot, had heard the improbable boast of the city of Eboli (over to the west, on the shin of the Italian leg) that Christ had stopped there (Cristo si è fermato a Eboli). The hopeless Lucanese in the 1930s remodeled the boast into a bitter antijoke. Yes, Christ had stopped in Eboli—but he had gone no further, not bothering to take the branch line east to visit Lucania. Levi, who as an Italian and Jew and antifascist had little patience with the widespread modern notion of the State as benevolent savior, writes:

None of the pioneers of Western civilization brought here his sense of the passage of time, his deification of the State or that ceaseless activity which feeds upon itself [thus the Great Enrichment]. No one has come to this land except as an enemy, a conqueror, or a visitor devoid of understanding.^[30]

[1] When I use the phrase “pretty good” here, as I will often do again often, I am referring to the Ohio State political scientist John Mueller’s lucid book Capitalism, Democracy, and Ralph’s Pretty Good Grocery (1999), which in turn refers to the comically modest marketing in Garrison Keillor’s hometown of Lake Wobegon. For example, “If you can’t find it at Ralph’s Pretty Good Grocery, you can probably get along without it.”

[2] The figures are Angus Maddison’s estimate of world income before 1800 in 1990 prices, brought up by me to the prices of 2010 or so. Maddison 2001, appendix B, table 21, p. 264.

[3] I use throughout for recent times the readily available figures of real income per person in U.S.-equivalent prices from the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and the so-called Penn Tables (devised by Alan Heston and colleagues at the University of Pennsylvania). The Penn Tables are conceptually the best, but in truth there is little at stake in the choice among the three. Roughly speaking—which suffices for present purposes—they tell the same story. For example, for 2012 the World Bank and for 2010 the IMF both put Brazilian real GDP at about $33 a head per day, 24 percent of the U.S. level in the corresponding year (and equal, as I have noted, to the average for the world). For 2010 the Penn Tables put it at $27 a head, or 21 percent of the their estimate of the U.S. level. A difference between 24 and 21 percent does not change any conclusion here or elsewhere in the book. We are dealing throughout with rough figures of how much people make, earn, and consume. The three sets of estimates (and a fourth, from the CIA, giving much the same results) are conveniently gathered (for 2011/2012) at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(PPP)_per_capita.

[4] “Make, earn, and consume” because in a correct accounting (but see note 53) the figures would show that what an economy produces is the same to the last cent as what its people earn as income and what they consume, whether in the marketplace, in homework, or in leisure. The figures are from the IMF and World Bank, in 2010. Gregory Clark (2009) argues that Maddison’s figure of a little over a dollar a day in 1800 is too low for subsistence.

[5] “World,” CIA World Factbook, April 10, 2013.

[6] The economic historian Stefano Fenoaltea and the economist Philipp Lepenies have both pointed out to me recently that for short-run reasons of policy at the time, the concept of national product used by Simon Kuznets, the deviser of the modern program of income measurement, and eventually by Maddison, did not go beyond trading figures, that is, what people could buy. Homework is mostly ignored. It is a major error for the long run (as Kuznets and other students of the matter realized), since production in the home of, say, made clothing and processed food was a large part of consumption in earlier times, as was at all times the care industry for children, husbands, and parents (as the economist Nancy Folbre has persuasively argued). The money value of sheer leisure—the merry beggar singing careless by the highway—is ignored as well. That last item at least might be equal in ancient and in modern times, and its value would rise along with the opportunity cost in making goods and services (but see de Vries 2008; Voth 1998). On the other hand, much of modern consumption is understated in the same figures—the quality point I make below. Let us hope the errors offset. But not to worry, and if to worry, not to worry too much: errors at such magnitudes do not matter for anything I say here, because we are concerned with orders of (very great) magnitude. Any factor of 10 or 30 or 100 will do.

[7] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Organisation_for_Economic_Co-operation_and_Development Indicators.

[8] In Maddison’s tables, which seem best for the purpose, Brazilian GDP per person in 2001, deflated to 1990 international Geary-Khamis dollars, was $5,570 (Maddison 2007, table 4c, p. 522). From Index Mundi, which collected its numbers from the annual CIA Factbook (http://www.indexmundi.com/brazil/gdp_real_growth_rate.html), one can reckon from the ratio of Brazil’s real per-capita income in 2010 to that in 2000/2002 that the Maddisonian figure for 2010 would have been about $8,021. One looks through Maddison’s tables, then, for the United Kingdom (table 1c, p. 441) and for the United States (table 2c, p. 466) to find the years in which they achieved the 2010 Brazilian level. Other methods I have tried do not yield believable results. Having visited Brazil four times briefly over the past few decades (though wholly ignorant of Portuguese), I am an Expert on Brazil; and having lived in England for a few months as a teenager in 1959 (Woodbine cigarettes, pints and quarts of Ludlow beer), and having been a small child in the United Statesin the 1940s (radio drama, penny candy), I can attest that the present result seems about right.

[9] For example, the OECD’s instruments, overlapping with mine, agree. See van Zanden et al., eds. 2014.

[10] Gilmour 2011, p. 20.

[11] Quoted in Robb 2007, p. 84.

[12] Robb 2007, p. 78.

[13] For recent expositions, see Fogel 2004; Floud et al. 2011. But on Fogel, see de Vries 2008, pp. 117–120. A judicious survey is Kelly and Ó Gráda 2012.

[14] Quoted from Moburg’s memoir in Brown 2008, pp. 9–10.

[15] Examine Wikipedia’s astonishing “List of Tuberculosis Cases” at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_tuberculosis_cases (the editors, to be sure, plead for “citations to reliable sources”). Beyond those mentioned in the text: Burns, Schiller, Scott, Balzac, Chopin, John C. Calhoun, nearly the entire Brontë family, Delacroix, Thoreau, Napoleon II, Robert Louis Stevenson, John Ruskin, Chekhov, and Orwell.

[16] James 2007, pp. 350, 352.

[17] Brown 2008, p. 16, the year corrected by Myllyntaus and Tarnaala 1998, p. 36.

[18] Levi 1945.

[19] Poznik et al. 2013, p. 565.

[20] Mithen 2003, p. 60.

[21] Parkin 1992.

[22] Goldstone 2009 is an excellent guide to the recent scholarship, for example pp. 80–81. I have depended on Goldstone’s little book, and look forward to a big one he is writing.

[23] Connelly 2008, chap. 4.

[24] Hamashita 2007 and Bayly 2004.

[25] Broadberry and Gupta 2012, Table 12.

[26] Li 2011.

[27] Li and van Zanden 2012.

[28] Drelichman and Voth 2014.

[29] Gilmour 2011, p. 319.

[30] Levi 1945, p. 3.

All the more did they authorize themselves to master and manhandle apparently “feminine” men. These taciturn, tough, pagan, fishing, hunting, boxing, misogynistic, Boy Scouting, anti-mollycoddle, and above all Courageous men became increasingly obsessed with homosexuals, especially gay men, and most especially flamboyantly talkative, effeminate gay men. Recent scholarship on gender history in the United States, summarized by John D’Emilio and Estelle Friedman, has located an “early-twentieth-century crisis in middle-class male gender identity.” [1] The story is paralleled in Britain after the trials of Oscar Wilde (1895) and in Germany after the scandal of Philipp von Eulenburg (1906); though in America the turn against homosexuality took a more violent character. Fag bashing is an especially American sport.

No one before the late 19^th century thought of same-sex affection as defining a whole class of human beings. Homosexual acts even in culturally backward America were never, after the totalitarianism of the early Puritans, viewed with enough distaste to evoke the Biblical penalty—the penalty in Leviticus [18: 22 and 20:13] is, of course, death, as it is there for other appalling crimes, such as cursing your parents or committing adultery [20:9-10]. Abraham Lincoln, it now seems somewhat plausible, was gay; Walt Whitman was without any doubt. Nobody cared much. In fact during the most of 19^th century homosexual acts in America were ignored, until the turn after the Civil War to purity in the Comstock Law and the like, putting the United States in the van of anti-sex countries. Consenting sodomy was not against the law in New York state until the 1890s. Until 2003 it was illegal in Texas. We have emerged from one hundred years of virulent homophobia, comparable to a similar episode in the 13^th century. St. Thomas was in this matter conventional, ranking homosexual acts just below murder.[2] As John Boswell shows in detail, the 13^th century was a local maximum of such attitudes, and Aquinas was going along with them, illogically.[3] Likewise the modern hysteria about unnatural acts.

Public attributions of passive homosexuality in Western societies were shaming always, at any rate for an adult. See for example Catullus 57’s smirking commentary on the sex life of Julius Caesar. But to be ashamed of an active role was something new in the late 19^th century. Wilde was led into the first of his three disastrous trials by a manly desire to challenge for this reason the Marquis of Queensbury, a wretchedly bad choice of sparring partner. In France at about the same time Marcel Proust, though notoriously gay, was ashamed of it, and in order to defend what he imagined was his good name against the charge of unusual tastes engaged repeatedly in courageous if stylized dueling with pistols. No one was ever hurt. Compare bucks in spring. He went to lengths in Remembrance of Things Past (1913) to recast the good loving by a man as love for a woman (“Albert”  “Albertine”), which unfortunately, as he explained to an indignant André Gide, left all the bad loving to the many homosexual characters in the novel.

In France, however, homophobia was merely a matter of social shame, and of occasional high-handedness by police and judges, not of explicit legal sanction. The sole exception was the law passed under the Vichy government, repealed in 1982, raising the legal age of consent to 21 for homosexual liaisons; for heterosexuals it was 15. As Scott Gunther puts it, French law, unlike American or British or German, simply did not mention homosexuality.[4] The French have long been amused by the Anglo-Saxon, Dutch, and German fixation on queers, just as the northerners have long been amused by the French and Italian fixation on being cuckolded.[5] In Shakespeare the balance is “Latin” in this matter, obsessed with cuckoldry yet relaxed about homoeroticism.

Simon Schama notes in the Dutch Republic a startling outbreak in 1740-2 of “a hysterical persecution of homosexuals in a culture that had virtually no history of witchhunts of any kind since the Anabaptists had swung on the gallows two hundred years before.”[6] The laws under which some hundreds of prosecutions were brought in these few years, resulting in some score of executions, dated to the same 1530s, with extensions in 1570. In the Golden Age prosecutions were rare. Schama suggests that up to 1740, during a long time of peace—which is not how one would characterize the earlier Golden Age—“there were time and space for the Dutch to brood over their own identity and the unsettling discrepancy between a heroic past and a prosaic future.”

In Britain the modern law criminalizing male homosexual acts under which Wilde was prosecuted was passed only in bourgeois and long-peaceful 1885, the Labouchère amendment, and was not seriously used for ten years. In America, as typically, the initiative was local, not national, and therefore varied greatly, though it started at about the same time, the 1880s. Something about those 1880s.

It took decades during the very late 19^th and early 20^th centuries for modern gender hysteria to build in the northern countries, though this time the Netherlands was not a part of it. Michael Quinn’s startling Same-Sex Dynamics Among Nineteenth-Century Americans: A Mormon Example (1996) establishes that even Mormon leaders who came to maturity in the 19^th century “looked upon sodomy as less serious than other sexual sins.”[7] A focused faith that God hates fags, the laserlike focus on merely two of the hundreds of prohibitions in Leviticus, took hold even in conservative American Christianity only in the mid- and especially the late-20^th century.

It’s puzzling, this anxiety about homosexuality. Why did a bourgeois Courage seem to require such an angry reaction to the encroachment of The (Alleged) Feminine? The change becoming so apparent around 1900 and building thereafter was sometimes said to have happened because modern life for the bourgeois man allowed too little scope for his physical courage. That is, the men just had to land violent hands on women and gay men because the women and their gay brothers had taken away the other opportunities for manly play, such as gun play. In any event that’s what real American men like Owen Wister and Zane Grey and Jack London and Teddy Roosevelt seemed to be hinting in their gun-happy, feminine-excluding fictions.

In Europe between the Wars, Richard Vinen notes, “political styles become more aggressively masculine.” “In spite of, or perhaps because of, the enfranchisement of women. . . . uniforms and clenched fists dominated demonstrations, and speeches were about ‘struggle,’ ‘battle,’ and ‘the enemy’.”[8] Dating the gender crisis as late as the 1930s, George Chauncey links it to the Depression: “As many men lost their jobs, their status as breadwinners and their sense of mastery over their own futures, the central tenets undergirding their gender status, were threatened.”[9] But in some advanced male imaginations, as I’ve said, homophobia or gynephobia constituting the dark matter to Courage appears a good deal earlier. Before 1914 one can see already for example in Roosevelt the elder and in the strange death of Liberal England the masculinization of political rhetoric and the appeal to military metaphors of struggle—that is, to Kampf.

Wilde’s conviction and jailing for gross indecency in 1895 was a turning point among educated English speakers in the matter of homosexuality, a model application of the Labouchère amendment. The very word “homosexuality” was just becoming known. It appears to date from 1869; though the first quotation in the Oxford English Dictionary is 1897. Only with Wilde, argues Alan Sinfield, were effeminacy, arty tastes, love of other men, and those acts of gross indecency bundled together in the bourgeois mind and viewed by straights as horribly dishonorable. For decades afterwards in England the euphemism for sodomy was “unspeakables of the Oscar Wilde sort.” That was the phrase for example in E. M. Forster’s posthumously published coming-out novel, Maurice, written in 1914.[10] “All these years [since the trials of 1895],” Wilde’s eldest son Cyril, once wrote to his brother Vyvyan,

my great incentive has been to wipe that stain away; to retrieve, if may be, by some action of mine, a name no longer honored in the land. . . . The more I thought of this, the more convinced I became that, first and foremost, I must be a man. There was to be no cry of decadent artist, of effeminate aesthete, of weak-kneed degenerate. . . . [I wish] nothing better than to end in honorable battle for King and Country.[11]

On May 9, 1915 King and Country arranged to wipe away the stain.

Or curing the sickness. The eagerness of American, British, and German doctors after the 1870s to get into the business of social engineering, a half-century in advance of their total victories in drug and licensing laws, played a role in the strange rise of homophobia. Lucy Ann Lodbell, who in the 1850s passed as Reverend Joseph Lodbell without arousing the interest of the legal or medical authorities, and wrote a memoir, was by 1883 reclassified as mentally ill, justifying incarceration in a madhouse. “It is reasonable to consider true sexual perversion,” wrote one Dr. “Wise” about the Reverend’s case, “as always a pathological condition and a peculiar manifestation of insanity.”[12] The turn against same-sex intimacy—intimacy practiced among males in armies and navies always and praised in Hellenizing and Romantic literature through Walt Whitman and A. E. Housman—led to a succession of laws prohibiting gender deviation, something like a men’s version of the women’s push for Prohibition, with likewise a reign of terror half-enforcing the laws.

D’Emilio and Friedman note that the medicalization of homosexuality worked two ways. Especially in a purity-minded America fearful of contagion from immigrants and blacks and other untouchables, it made people think that the unspeakable of the Oscar Wilde sort was a disease that could be spread by contact, or perhaps “recruitment,” as to a fraternity. Why do young men become gay? Because the parties are better.

Yet at the same time medicalization encouraged Americans to think that homosexuality was an inherited identity rather than a vicious moral failing. Thus Kinsey’s research from the late 1930s on. Certainly the psychiatrists, whose American branch dropped homosexuality as an “illness” only in 1973, though not finally in all versions of the illness until 1986, deserve full credit for a long and manly history of torturing homosexuals. For transsexuals the American, Canadian, and British psychiatrists are still at it, bless ‘em, at, for example, the Clarke Institute in Toronto, named after a famous Canadian eugenicist, and at Johns Hopkins University Hospital, and especially the rat psychologists and psychoanalysts among them.

As the second European war approached the fear of the feminine climaxed. In Britain in the twenty years of increasing state power after 1931 prosecutions under Section 11 of the Criminal Law Amendment Act of 1885 quintupled. In the 1930s the Nazi state was using with enthusiasm the notorious Paragraph 175—inherited by the German Empire in 1875 from the unusually harsh Prussian code. The Bolsheviks at first legalized homosexuality, in accord with their progressive ideas. But by 1934 they had decided it was just another sign of bourgeois decadence, and did what they usually did with bourgeois decadents.[13]

Alan Turing, the British mathematician of the computer and breaker of the German military code was homosexual. He was fictionalized as heterosexual, by the way, in the movie Enigma: compare Proust’s technique. In 1952, just before the strange business of legal ramifications for private acts began its long unraveling, Turing was sentenced by a court to take female hormones. He reckoned gaily that the sentence was better than the judge’s alternative of prison; or, as he did not say, the psychiatrists’ of electric shock therapy or lobotomy.[14]

During the early 20^th century in American culture as in other Germanic countries one can see the gynephobic and homophobic hysteria of a bourgeois Courage spreading like an oil slick. In the first lines of The Sea Wolf (1904) Humphrey van Weyden, the narrator and victim, introduced as an effete writer of essays on “Poe’s place in American literature” for The Atlantic, “scarcely knows where to begin.” His last name means in Dutch “of the meadows,” van der weyden, and in London’s time evoked the racial degeneration of the Eastern, Hudson-Valley Dutch “aristocracy”—such as Roosevelt [“rose field”]. Van Weyden is a derivative writer, and starts an evident pansy, says Jack London of the West, quite another breed of man-writer, short of saying it.

The scene of the sinking ferry which opens the book is dense with gender anxiety. London spends a page recurring to Van Weyden hearing the “screaming bedlam of women.” So when Van Weyden is swept away by the tide ripping out of the straits from San Francisco Bay, he himself recalls, “I shrieked aloud as the women had shrieked.” The Cockney cook from a fatefully passing ship who helps fish him out is “weakly pretty, almost effeminate,” as Cockneys apparently always are. In a transvestite gesture he gives some of his clothes to Van Weyden, who recalls, “I shrank from his hand, my flesh revolted”—whether from the taint of the “hereditary servility” of the Cockney Race or from “his effeminate features” is unclear.

And yet the Cockney assigns effeminacy to Van Weyden himself, a literary gentleman, unproletarian: “you’ve got a bloomin’ soft skin, that you ‘ave, more like a lydy’s than any I know of.” When the captain Wolf Larsen appears it is with a great noise of “not namby-pamby oaths,” of which Van Weyden writes with ladylike delicacy, “It should not be necessary to state, at least to my friends, that I was shocked.” The first words Larsen says to Van Weyden are, “You’re a preacher, aren’t you?” The world of women, preachers, and homosexuals recedes as the schooner Ghost speeds towards the seal-hunting grounds and a masculine rebirth.

The novel ends with the formerly effete Van Weyden jerry-rigging an entire ship—“I did it! I did it! With my own hands I did it!”—and being swooned over by Maud Brewster (“My man”). The former aesthete queer, practically a woman for God’s sake, is redeemed for the manly cult of Courage.[15]

Again, in Dashiell Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon, first published in 1929, Joel Cairo, whose very name evokes myths of the love of boys in Araby, is introduced in a page of effeminizing clichés. He was “small-boned,” “his black coat, cut right to narrow shoulders, flared a little over slightly plump hips,” he “came towards Spade with short, mincing, bobbing steps. The fragrance of chypre came with him.” He spoke “in a high-pitched thin voice, and sat down. He sat down primly, crossing his ankles. . . and began to draw off his yellow gloves. . . . Diamonds twinkled on the second and fourth fingers of his left hand . . . . His hands were soft and well cared for.” Cairo pulls out a little gun to frisk Spade: “His dark eyes were humid and bashful and very earnest.” It’s hard to imagine anyone but Peter Lorre in the movie role.

“He lifted Spade’s coat-tail and looked under it. Holding the pistol close to Spade’s back, he put his right hand around Spade’s side and patted his chest,” a mistake in the world of tough heterosexual men: Spade disarms Cairo with a swift turn, and then, for the insult, calmly knocks him out. In the novel (not in the movie) Cairo when he wakes demands with powder-puff indignation, “Why did you strike after I was disarmed?” “‘Sorry,’ Spade said, and grinned wolfishly.”[16] Compare the courageous and intemperate Wolf Larsen. Jack London’s friends called him “Wolf,” and his mansion in California was the Wolf House.[17] All the villains in The Maltese Falcon are queer, which Hammett’s editor tried get him to change. Hammett wouldn’t.[18]

Such passages are impossible in 19^th-century literature in English before Wilde, even in the working-class dime novels and penny dreadfuls, or indeed nowadays outside of the club comedian’s homophobia in search of an easy laugh. In 19^th-century American fiction, for example, crossdressing and the like are common enough—recall Jo in Little Women; or Huck Finn trying to pass in drag­­—but are not particularly sexualized or scorned.

The dime novels referred to gender bending with a calmness that startles the modern reader. Deadwood Dick and pals, male and female, jumped with abandon into and out of drag.[19] The Adventures of Buffalo Bill around 1882 in Beadle’s Boy’s Library of Sport, Story and adventure, Chapter XVIII, “A Clever Disguise,” claims that our hero captured a road agent by posing as a girl rider. “Buffalo Billy got the reward for his capture, and a medal from the company, and he certainly deserved all that he received for his daring exploit in the guise of a young girl, and a pretty one too, the boys said he made, for he had no mustache then, his complexion was perfect, though bronzed, and his waist was as small as a woman’s.”[20] The actual Wild Bill Hickok, too, it appears, was notably androgynous in behavior. But the book taking special, disdainful note of Hickok’s queerness is not contemporary. It looks back from the gender-anxious date of 1930.[21]

Something special, in other words, happens in the half-century of middle-class but tough-guy fiction in America after Owen Wister and Jack London. The fictional shift is especially American, not French or British, though I understand that Argentina at the same time independently developed in Spanish a similar tough-guy fiction.

In The Sun Also Rises (1926) Hemingway’s narrator and alter ego is a figure of ethical seriousness, practicing his American bourgeois ethic in which one pays the price, working for the one true sentence. He observes “a crowd of young men,” homosexuals, coming into a Parisian dance hall, and almost permits his fears to arouse his manly skill at boxing:

I could see their hands and newly washed, wavy hair in the light from the door. The policeman standing by the door looked at me and smiled. . . . I was very angry. Somehow they always made me angry. I know they are supposed to be amusing, and you should be tolerant, but I wanted to swing on one, any one, anything to shatter that superior, simpering composure.[22]

Hemingway was always interested in gender roles, and was sophisticated for his time about homosexuality. He was even sophisticated about transvestism and transsexuality, which was extremely unusual. Aside from the implied transsexuality in his novels, especially his posthumous last, his mother dressed him quite late in girl’s clothing and in the 1920s and 1930s the works of the pioneering sexologist Havelock Ellis were among his favorite books. It seems like something out of his novels, but is true, that his youngest son Dr. Gregory Hemingway—though well after his father’s death—became Gloria.[23] The narrator’s homophobia in The Sun Also Rises towards “the crowd of young men” cannot simply be assigned to the author. But Hemingway was representing a reaction common then even among sophisticated American men.

The violent fear of being approached by homosexuals is strange when you think about it. What exactly is the big, strong, heterosexual man so terrified of? It’s the talk of the effeminate homosexuals that seems to arouse the violence, just as for white men in America it was the talk of blacks or the talk of women. Or the talk of trade union organizers—in The Grapes of Wrath it is the agitators, the talkers such as Jim Casy the ex-preacher, whom the growers’ cops swing on.

In The Naked and the Dead (1948) Norman Mailer’s alter ego jokes to his Harvard classmates in fictional 1941, “You know when nothing else is left I’m going to become a fairy, not a goddamn little nance, you understand”—one imagines college juniors swinging drunkenly, anxiously on a talkative little nance behind Copley Square—“but a nice upright pillar of the community, live on green lawns. Bisexual. Never a dull moment, man or woman, it’s all the same to you, exciting.”[24] Compare Cary Grant playing Cole Porter in 1946, just before even a little gentle, veiled jesting about homosexuality became taboo in Hollywood. The Motion Picture Code had already in 1934 forbidden anything more explicit. Published casting directories for American stage and film in the first decades of the 20^th century had routine categories for “nance” or “pansy” actors. Edward Everett Horton, for example, backed up Fred Astaire in The Gay Divorcee (1934), Top Hat (1936), and Shall We Dance (1937), apparently in order to make the less-than-macho Astaire believable as a leading man.

The fear that femininity would take over, emasculating the bourgeois man, a fear to be resisted by boxing or going fishing or watching bull fights or even indulging an occasional urge to swing on the talkative less-than-macho men, or by manhandling women, is a theme in every Hemingway novel from The Sun Also Rises (1926) to the very posthumous The Garden of Eden (1986, drafted 1948-1958). Though, I repeat, considering how he toyed always with gender-crossing themes, Papa is not quite so simple as this. Kathy Willingham argues ingeniously for example that the woman Brett Ashley in The Sun Also Rises is not merely a fearful man-eater, as contemporary critics uniformly said, but a matador, the most admired man in Hemingway’s mythology—pretty and small and coy and dressed in smooth silks, taunting the bull.[25] She’s not called “Mary” or “Jane,” after all, but the highly gender-ambiguous “Brett.” But if Hemingway’s gender talk is not quite so simple-minded as it first appears, it encompasses the simplicity, and the swinging on them, too.

The white male bourgeoisie seemed to fear an improbable alliance among women and gays and blacks, who had all of them before the 1960s been nicely silenced. In Ralph Ellison’s The Invisible Man (1952) the black hero, a mild and studious boy, is saved from the machinations of his (black) college president and the president’s (white) tycoon trustees by the . . . wait for it . . . homosexual son of the last tycoon.

[1] D’Emilio and Freedman, Intimate Matters, 1997, p. v.

[2] Aquinas, Summa contra gentiles, c. 1259-1264, Book III, part 2, Chp. 122

[3] Boswell, Christianity, 1980, Chp. 10, and esp. Chp. 11, pp. 318-30 on Aquinas.

[4] Gunther, La Construction, 1995.

[5] Vinen, History in Fragments, 2000, pp. 116-118, 114.

[6] Schama, Embarrassment, 1987, p. 601. The next quotation is from p. 605.

[7] Quinn, Same-Sex Dynamics, 1996, p. 367.

[8] Vinen, History in Fragments, 2000, p. 154.

[9] Chauncy, Gay New York, 1994, p. 353.

[10] Sinfield, Wilde Century, 1994, pp. 3, 140.

[11] Vyvyan Holland, Son of Oscar Wilde (1954), quoted in Sinfield, The Wilde Century, p. 126.

[12] D’Emilio and Freedman, Sexual Matters, 1997, pp. 124, 129.

[13] Vinen, History in Fragments, 2000, p. 117,

[14] Hodges, Alan Turing, 1983, pp. 458, 462, 471.

[15] London, Sea Wolf, 1904, pp. 3, 7, 9, 12, 14, 17, 20, 280; “I did it,” p. 274.’ “My man,” p. 280.

[16] Hammett, Maltese Falcon, 1929, Chps. IV and V (pp. 46-47, 49-50, 53).

[17] Dickey, notes in Hammett, Maltese Falcon, 1929 (1984), p. 293.

[18] Pierpont, “Tough Guy,” 2002, p. 70

[19] Brown, “Reading the West,” in Brown, Reading, 1997, p. 38.

[20] Vol. 1, No. 1, Chapter XVIII, “Stanford’s Dime Novel and Story Paper Collection, http://www-sul.stanford. edu/depts/ dp/pennies/home.html.

[21] Quinn, Same-Sex Dynamics, 1996, p. 35, quoting Stuart Henry, Conquering Our Great American Plains,1930: Hickok “seemed effeminate,” “feminine,” “sissy,” pp. 271, 275-276, 288.

[22] Hemingway, Sun Also Rises, 1926, p. 28.

[23] Willingham, “Sun Hasn’t Set,” 2002, p. 42 and Wagner-Martin, “The Romance of Desire,” 2002, p. 54.

[24] Mailer, Naked and the Dead, 1948, p. 340.

[25] Willingham, “Sun Hasn’t Set,” 2002, throughout.

It’s easy to answer the question about chemistry or ancient Greek or any settled science. If you ask an astronomer what to read to learn some astronomy, she’ll have no problem. “Pick up any university textbook for the first course in astronomy.” Actually, I did that decades ago, inspired by a friend who had done so. He was better at math than I was, and his daughter later won a Nobel in astronomy. I had been a fan of astronomy as a child, until I learned it was applied physics and physics was applied mathematics. As an adult economist, though, I was less frightened by the mathematics, which anyway isn’t much in that first-year textbook.

But there’s a problem with economics, even first-year economics. Economics isn’t settled.

That’s not all bad, or a disgraceful scandal in the science. Obviously, for one thing, economics involves issues of ethics about which humans disagree. For another, the disagreeing, talking, loving, hating of humans are not as simple to think about as are point masses in physics. An economist once pointed out that physics would be radically different, and less settled even about point masses, if atoms could converse with each other.

And a science that is entirely settled is intellectually dead, in the way optics in physics has been for centuries now. Elementary physics at the level of F = ma is settled, and therefore any old physics book can instruct you in it. At the frontiers of physics the issues are far from settled, in a way that reminds one of economics. The biggest scandal among several in modern physics, as any candid physicist can tell you, is that 95 percent of the energy and matter in the universe is “dark,” the word being a way of saying “Damned if I know what the hell it is.” Ninety-five percent.

The embarrassments in economics are comparable. We do not have a settled theory of business cycles or a settled theory of economic growth or a settled theory of how well government works.

So I can’t quite say, “Pick up any university textbook for the first course in economics.” Most teachers of economics in Brazil are statists for sure, and often Marxists, and the books they will recommend will teach you to be a statist, or a Marxist. Mazzucato is an example. Most such teachers in France are math-mad, always statist, and teach you to be so, and never understand actual economics. Piketty is an example.

What to read, then? Well, my own books. Ha, ha. But seriously, you can learn a lot from Why Liberalism Works, or from two books by Art Carden and me. Or from reading this column religiously. All highly recommended.

But I could give you a reading list of others, and I will next time.

Meanwhile, don’t read most popular “economics.” That’s like reading physics before Galileo and Newton.

Beauvoir articulates the process whereby women, by agreeing to live in comfort inside the fantasies of men, put themselves in a permanently false position. . . . [M]en are forever feeling betrayed, not supported, . . . because when fantasy is governing perception, the truth appears as a blasphemy. . . . Woman as Object may be spared the heavy burden carried by primary Subjects only by suffering the dishonor of constant two-way self-betrayal. . . . [She] often meekly accept[s] every form of raw deal in punishment for representing falsity and weakness.

Simone de Beauvoir,” 1999, p. 84.

Jane Tompkins argues that one enemy is language itself: “Westerns treat salesmen and politicians, people whose business is language, with contempt.”^[1] This is the case even though the occupation of the implied reader of the westerns is in fact a man who earns his living in talk-work. The comical Rebel in the movie of Shane boasts loudly, drunkenly, with a courage lacking temperance; and we know, Tompkins observes, that he is doomed (in the book from which the movie derived he is less central and his lack of taciturnity is less emphasized). “It’s Shane,” she writes, “the man who clips out words between clenched teeth, who will take out the hired gunman.”[2]

Taciturnity is not noticeable in Homeric heroes. After all, they are Hellenes, addicted to persuasive talk. The index of speeches in Stanley Lombardo’s translation of the Iliad contains about six hundred items, and these not mere bright quips (“A crippled newsie took them away from him”) but full-blown exercises in persuasion, about 25 per book, a long interlude of yammering every 30 lines or so.^[3] The knights of the Round Table, according to Mallory, yammered a good deal, too. Maybe it is specifically Roman, and romanizing, revived in a particular sort of haut-bourgeois gentleman in the 19^th century, to demand as it were laconic behavior from our heroes.

Mary Beth Rose suggested that a new and bourgeois and even feminine “heroism of endurance” takes the place in early modern times of the aristocratic heroism of action.^[4] She notes, with Norbert Elias, that the nation state required a monopoly of violence. Just as the cow towns of Kansas disarmed their cowboys, the Tudors and Valois disarmed their barons. In Milton’s Paradise Regained (published 1671), Rose observes, Christ is not the venturing warrior of Book VI in Paradise Lost but a hero of taciturnity. His victories against Satan tempting him in the wilderness consist of not engaging in speech-making, as at the end of Book I, in three lines of in effect a Valley-Girl “Whatever” dismissing a loquacious 25-line appeal by Satan to “talk at least.” After Christ’s brevity Milton himself adds an amazing half-line: “He added not” (I, 497), embodying Christ’s noble—that is, Roman—unwillingness to talk. Satan, the great talker and venturer-forth, is thoroughly puzzled: “What dost thou in this world?” (IV, 372, emphasis supplied); and elsewhere:

Perplexed and troubled at his bad success

The Tempter stood, nor had what to reply,

Discovered in his fraud, thrown from his hope,

So oft, and the persuasive rhetoric

That sleeked his tongue, and won so much on Eve,

So little here, nay lost.^[5]

Milton, eloquent for the Commonwealth and English poetry, here disdains rhetoric, joining in this many 17^th-century men of ideas and letters, from Bacon attacking metaphors with metaphors—thus too Descartes, Pascal, Hobbes, Spinoza—to Newton spinning one eloquent hypothesis after another while declaring “Hypotheses non fingo,” I do not [deign merely to] spin hypotheses.

By the end of the 18^th century, in for example The Magic Flute, taciturnity has been raised to the very essence of masculinity. The one and only test of the opera’s hero to join the men’s club of Freemasonry is to keep quiet in the face of temptations from loquacious women. No heroic action; no swordplay: just endure like a tight-lipped Roman man. Mozart’s librettist stresses over and over that silence is Tamino’s badge of heroism, one which his comically talkative, less-than-aristocratic sidekick Papageno fails repeatedly to display. Tamino is a prince of the blood, again emphasized. By contrast a man of mere commerce must talk if he is to do business.

Shane a century and a half after Mozart still looks longingly back to an imagined aristocracy of taciturn and non-commercial Romans. E. Countryman and E. von Heussen-Countryman note that the movie “renders commerce problematic.” The lone knight Shane himself is willing to join the farmer Joe Starrett, a Cincinnatus finally driven to take down his weapons, in a stirring scene of stump-removing, “bonding on Joe’s ground, literally.” But it is honest, wordless toil—direct production for subsistence, not the schemes and weaselwords and endless bargaining of Ryker and his capitalist gang.^[6]

To Ryker’s suggestion early on in the movie that Shane join the commercial side the knight replies, No deals. Jack Schaefer’s novel of 1949 is on some points less anti-capitalist than George Stevens’ movie of 1953. The offer from Ryker to Shane comes later in the novel than in the movie, in Chapter 12 out of sixteen, and therefore is less temptingly corrupt: Shane has long since become a Lancelot for the homesteaders. Starrett in the novel is more persistent than in the movie about his economic schemes for the farm and as a petit bourgeois man is more critical of the Ryker figure. Ryker, by the way, is called “Fletcher” in the novel. One wonders if the Dutch word rijker, “richer,” spelled in handwriting exactly ryker, is being evoked by some sly script doctor of recent Dutch ancestry. Anyway, Ryker engages, says Starrett, in “poor business” and is “wasteful,” the sort of prudential talk that would be read with pleasure by an American bourgeois in 1949. ^[7] Compare John D. McDonald’s detective novels, with their obeisance to the businesslike.

Middlemen are featured in both novel and movie. The owner of the saloon and general store is a Good Bourgeois. But there are bad ones, too. The novel has a five-page scene of the aristocratic Shane and the aristocrat/peasant Starrett outwitting “a peddler or trader” who tries to overcharge for a new plow. The peddler in cruder novels would have had a Jewish name or would have been from the East, or both.

Shane is uninterested in becoming permanently a laborer for wages, or what is perhaps more to the point an adulterous Lancelot to Marion Starrett’s Queen Guinevere. In the end he rides on to further knight errantry—he tells Joey: “A man has to be what he is”—leaving the peasantry in possession. So do the surviving three in the Japanese cowboy movie, Seven Samurai (1954), based, the director Kurasawa said, on American westerns such as Shane. So do the surviving three in the American remake returning the favor to Kurasawa, with American cowboys/samurai, The Magnificent Seven (1960). The director of Shane, George Stevens (it was his only western), once declared outright that his hero had overtones of medieval knighthood.

All the westerns had it, as for example Stanley Kramer’s High Noon (1952). The bourgeoisie pursues Prudence-Only, economic goals, to “keep the town decent, keep it growing,” as the Thomas Mitchell character puts it emphatically. In Mitchell’s fluent, climactic speech in the church he argues—we are surprised by the argument, considering the conventions of the genre—not that a man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do, which is the aristocratic, ducal formula, but that investors from the northern part of the state are thinking of investing in the town, and therefore to keep things quiet and commercial the Gary-Cooper character, the outgoing sheriff, should leave town without dueling with the villains.

The Gary-Cooper sheriff cannot then or at any other point in the movie find much eloquence to explain his knightly duty to stay and fight—not to the church people, not to a bourgeois town, not even to his new Quaker wife, the Grace-Kelly character. His wife does fight in the end, lethally. In the Cold War we all needed to, even Quakers. Contrast the reversal of such roles before anticommunism took hold. The John Wayne of Angel and the Badman (1947) becomes finally a pacifist under his wife’s influence. In 1947, after all, Americans were still laying down their weapons. Thomas Dewey, confident of victory in the 1948 elections, nobly refrained from using the anti-Communist card, which swiftly thereafter developed in American politics into the only winning card.^[8] Though it is complicated: High Noon was designed as an anti-McCarthyite movie, inspiring right-wing replies from John Wayne.

But like noble Tamino and noble Shane, Gary Cooper scorns using the persuasive words. He is not a politician. It is revealing that High Noon is the favorite movie of U. S. presidents, measured by actual showings at the White House (Clinton saw it 30 times). The Gary-Cooper/President figure is an employee of the bourgeoisie but he is quite different from them, as are the taciturn hired swords/guns in Seven Samurai and The Magnificent Seven, impoverished aristocrats. The folklorist John Lomax had set the tone in 1910, as the Western myth was becoming bourgeois and respectable: “Dauntless, reckless, as gentle to a pure woman as King Arthur, [the cowboy] is truly a knight of the twentieth century.”^[9] That “reckless” should worry Americans. Anyway, not a capitalist.

* * * *

For the self-dubbed knights of the bourgeois world the other enemies, aside from the talk-talk capitalists, were those tiresome, Bible-reading, church-going, water drinking, talk-talk women. As Peter French notes, “Women do a lion’s share of the talking in westerns,” and gain no honor for it.[10] Tompkins observes that the female lead in the 1957 version of The Gunfight at O.K. Coral, the Jo Van Fleet character, is merely an absorber of dishonor to purify the male lovers in preparation for battle, Burt Lancaster as Wyatt Earp and Kirk Douglas as Doc Holliday. “Her [pacific] words are always in vain, they are chaff, less than nothing, another sign of her degradation.”[11] Words and women, say the cowboys, are a lethal combination. Guns first, talk later.

The sentiment is old, right from the beginning of the modern story of emancipation alternating with reaction. The Magic Flute, again, is relentlessly misogynistic on this score. The gendering of aristocratic nostalgia could not be more explicit in the scripting of low-born Papageno’s failure as a man, except as one of inferior appetites. Papageno is unable to meet the Masonic/Shane standard of being “steadfast, tolerant, and discreet”: at one point he blurts out, startlingly, “Ich wollt’, ich wär ein Mädchen”: “I wish I were a girl.” Later he asks Tamino plaintively, “Can I not be quiet when I must? Yes! When it comes to business [Unternehmen, undertakings], I’m a man.”[12] But he’s not. Compare Sancho Panza—though the non-aristocratic character in Mozart carries no hint of anti-aristocratic irony, and Sancho in 1614 certainly has nothing feminine about him. By 1791 the gender world of Europe had shifted.

A century later it had shifted again. American literature after 1900 embodies a bourgeois and masculinist reaction to female religiosity and female rights. You can see it in the Westerns, the hard-boiled detective stories, the literary imitations of journalistic pith: Zane Gray, Dashiell Hammett, Ernest Hemingway. “I don’t like eloquence,” says Hammett’s first hardboiled hero in 1924, the Continental Op (operative, that is, for the Continental Detective Agency). “If it isn’t effective enough to pierce your hide, it’s tiresome; and if its effective enough, then it muddles your thoughts.” An anti-rhetorical rhetoric was the imagined tough-guy’s way of eluding, as Claudia Roth Pierpont puts it, “the feminine imperative against which Hammett defined himself: the tireless urging to feel, to connect, to talk, talk, talk.”[13]

Talk, talk, talk is an American black imperative, too, against an aristocratic Roman and bourgeois American ideal of taciturnity. In Ralph Ellison or Zora Neale Hurston the men are very Attic Greeks in their eloquence, “big picture talkers . . . using a side of the world for a canvas.” In Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937) Jamie complains about her husband Jody off being the mayor: “You’se always off talkin’.” He replies, “Ah told you in de very first beginnin’ dat Ah aimed tuh be uh big voice. You oughta be glad, ‘cause dat makes uh big woman outa you.”[14] Women form in the book, until they get their own voices, a Greek chorus to the men’s eloquence.

Talk of prohibition and the vote for women—never mind blacks—stuck in the craws of a lot of American men, as had earlier the domestication of the bourgeois male, subordinate to the angel in house. “For most of the nineteenth century,” Tompkins notes, “the two places women could call their own in the social structure were the church and the home. The Western contains neither. . . . [M]en gravitated in imagination towards a womanless milieu.”[15]

Think of Teddy Roosevelt, the fragile (and “aristocratic”) child who adopts the strenuous Western life with grim manliness. After his first wife and his mother died suddenly in the same week he took his sorrowful exercises far away from home and church, a New-York Dutchman in Dakota with other splendid fellows shooting everything that moved. Roosevelt had been in fact a Harvard classmate of Owen Wister—The Virginian, 1902, is dedicated to Roosevelt. H. W. Brands writes that Roosevelt’s “great good luck was to come of age when America had a particular weakness for romantic heroes.”

Roosevelt was a prolific writer about his self-created romances, like his younger contemporary Winston Churchill. Churchill was of course an actual aristocrat, first cousin of the 9^th Duke of Marlborough, nephew of the 6^th Earl of Airlie, witnessing with dismay in Britain, as T. R did in America, the decline of “a small and serious ruling class.”[16] Roosevelt wrote a six-volume The Winning of the West (1889-96), which with Henry Jackson Turner’s presidential address to the American Historical Association at the Chicago World’s Fair of 1893 helped set the tone of nostalgia for a lost frontier of real men. Roosevelt’s history of the American navy of John Paul Jones and Oliver Hazard Perry remained a classic for decades. In the second year of his presidency a fourteen-volume oeuvres completes appeared—fourteen thick and self-authored volumes, not merely bureaucratic papers written by others. He was a man of many words. He wrote about ten letters a day, 150,000 in total, while Holmes, whom he appointed to the Supreme Court, managed a mere 10,000. A war-mongerer, then a peace-maker, a threatener, then a deal maker, a strike settler, Roosevelt talked, talked, talked from whatever pulpit he could command.[17]

Literary men of action early in the 20^th century, especially in America before Hemingway masculinized American fiction, were caught uneasily between feminine words and masculine action, speaking softly but wanting to be known for carrying a big stick. William Carlos Williams writes in 1913:

First he said:

It is the woman in us

That makes us writeLet us acknowledge it—

Men would be silent.

We are not men

Therefore we can speak

And be conscious

of the two sides.

Unbent by the sensual

As befits accuracy.[18]

“Male poets born in the Gilded Age,” writes Guy Rotella about Robert Frost, who masculinized American poetic style, “confronted . . . a business-dominated society [judging] their chosen work not to be work at all, and certainly not manly work.”[19] About the same time, quoting an imagined manifesto for The Writer in Death in Venice (1912), Thomas Mann wrote: “We poets . . . . may be heroic after our fashion, disciplined warriors of our craft, yet are we all like women, for we exult in passion, and love is still our desire—our craving and our shame.”[20]

In the minds of literary men less subtle than Frost or Mann, such as Teddy Roosevelt, the non-work work was all supposed to come out gloriously in the end, this quasi-manly, poetic yammering leading to undeniably manly violence, women cheering from the castle window, like a knightly tale of olden times, the splendid little wars of imperialism, the white man’s burden, the charge up San Juan Hill—successful of course, with the bold colonel on horseback surviving, like a boy’s game. All four of Roosevelt’s sons served in France—as did the sons, I’ve noted, of British ducal families: noblesse oblige—and one got the Croix de Guerre.

The ageing Roosevelt was crushed when his youngest son, beloved, troublesome Quentin, met his fate somewhere among the clouds. Is this what war is like, a courageous son actually dying? In August of 1918, still three months from Armistice, he wrote, “It is rather awful to know that he paid for his life, and that my other sons may pay for their lives, to try to put in practice what I preached.” TR’s luck held, though. His other sons survived the War, and he himself died in 1919, before the apparent failure of the Peace had devalued the romantic sacrifice.[21]

After 1916, after Verdun and the Somme, the highbrows at least had started to doubt the old lie. Middle-brow culture held onto it. As you go up the stairs to the reading room of Harvard’s Widener Library you come on the landing to a gigantic, Rubenesque double mural painted by John Singer Sargent a little before his death in 1925. One panel is inscribed, “They crossed the sea crusaders keen to help the nations battling in a righteous cause”; the other, “Happy those who with a glowing faith in one embrace clasped death and victory.” Sweet and proper is it to die for the fatherland.

The romance of the Homeric hero spreads in American literature in TR’s time. It has roots of course as far back as Cooper’s Leatherstocking Tales (1823-1841). Think of Daniel Day Lewis’ luscious performance in The Last of the Mohicans. It persists to the present in the middle- and low-brow reading of bourgeois men. Early in Zane Grey’s Riders of the Purple Sage (1912: it has since then never been out of print) Bern Venters rejects the voluble peacemaking by Jane Withersteen, and demands she return his guns, after a gunslinger who happens along has saved him from a humiliating beating: “Hush! Talk to me no more of mercy or religion—after today. Today this strange coming of [the gunslinger] left me still a man, and now I’ll die a man! . . . Give me my guns.” Venters disarms the woman by stopping her talk. Quoting the passage Tompkins remarks, “In Venters, American men are taking their manhood back from the Christian women who have been holding them in thrall.”[22] With words.

[1] Tompkins, West of Everything, 1992, p. ***

[2] Tompkins, West of Everything, 1992, p. ***

[3] Homer, Iliad, Lombardo trans., 1997, pp. 506-513.

[4] Rose, Gender and Heroism, 2002, pp. xii.

[5] Milton, Paradise Regained, 1671, IV, 1-7.

[6] Tompkins, West of Everything, 1992, p. 51, 52. Countryman and von Heussen-Countryman, Shane, 1999, pp. 15, 17.

[7] Schaefer, Shane, 1949, pp. 72-73, 82

[8] Richard Fried, “Operation Polecat,” 2002 and “Voting Against the Hammer and Sickle,” 2003.

[9] Lomax, Cowboy Songs, 1910, p. ***

[10] French, Cowboy Metaphysics, 1997, p. 32.

[11] Tompkins, “Me and My Shadow,” 1987 (2001), p. 2141.

[12] Mozart, The Magic Flute, 1791, Act Two, scenes II and XIX.

[13] Peirpont, “Tough Guy,” 2002, p. 68.

[14] Hurston, Their Eyes, 1937, pp. 85, 74.

[15] Tompkins, West of Everything, 1992, p. 44.

[16] Cannadine, Aspects, 1994, p. 157.

[17] Holmes numbers are given in Alschuler, Law Without Values, 2000, p. 39.

[18] Williams, “Transitional,” The Tempers, 1913, at http://www.english. uiuc.edu/ maps/ poets/s_z/williams/ additionalpoems.htm

[19] Rotella, “Synonymous with Kept,” 2001, p. 242, with elisions.

[20] Mann, Death in Venice, 1912, p. 72.

[21] Brands, TR, 1997, pp. 32, xi-xii, 797-799, 802, 812; Dalton, Theodore Roosevelt, p. 504; Cannadine, Aspects, 1994, p. 157.

[22] Tompkins, West of Everything, 1992, p. 33.

I was there to help celebrate the 50th anniversary of Universidade Estadual Paulista, a splendid and balanced occasion. On the same morning, the first day of the two, a couple of liberals gave speeches justifying liberalism, and then three leftists gave speeches justifying economic leftism. Most economics in universities in Brazil is leftist, including post-Keynesianism and Marxism.

But, you know, a large number of young people in Brazil lean toward liberalism, real, classical liberalism, not Bolsonaro’s Partido Liberal. The second day, before my overnight flight back to Washington, I stopped in at the annual meeting of Students for Liberty and gave a little talk. The drive to get to the meeting was long. I experienced again the immense size of São Paulo.

Then, after another long drive, I met for an hour or so with my colleagues at Folha. I had not been to their building before. I was impressed by the intellectual quality of the journalists who chatted with me, for example, about the stress on newspaper journalism from the internet and now from AI. You don’t know how lucky you Paulistas are that Folha, unlike many newspapers worldwide after the height of print journalism sixty or a hundred years ago, is financially healthy.

Earlier the same day I had a long, lovely lunch at a fine restaurant serving Brazilian haute cuisine with two dear friends, Ramon and Ana. The last time I saw them both in São Paulo, something like a decade ago, it was just before Carnival, and we went one evening to a samba school in a high-school gymnasium. It was a wild, crazy, gloriously Brazilian experience.

Ramon is an economist, an Argentinian who fled the generals there and has spent the rest of his career in Brazil. Ramon and I share an interest in economic methodology and the history of the science. Ana is a professor of linguistics who works on one of the fascinating native languages of Brazil. Being a big fan of linguistics, I love talking to her, too.

Ramon and Ana are moderate leftists. We disagree respectfully. Ramon is accustomed to my liberalism from our long acquaintance and was not surprised at my liberal opinions. Ana knows me less well. So when I would say things like, “The big danger is the government armed with guns, not the corporations like Folha armed with advertising,” she disagreed.

“What about the rich owners of corporations taking over the government?”

“Good point. Let’s stop it and be democratic. But the rich have always done so, haven’t they?”

“Sure.”

Respectful, real conversation. We need much more of it across ideologies. When Ramon and Ana come to Washington and stay with me, we’ll do it. And talk about economic methodology and native Brazilian languages, too.

. . . I am not a king, have laid no kingdoms waste. . . .

Should I not hear, as I lie down in dust,

The horns of glory blowing above my burial? . . . .

Tell me, as I lie down, that I was courageous.

Blow horns of victory now . . . .

Conrad Aiken, “Tetélestai”

Collected Poems, 2^nd ed.

Oxford University Press, Cpp. 296, 298

We talked of war. JOHNSON: “Every man thinks meanly of himself for not having been a soldier, or not having been at sea. . . . The impression is universal: yet it is strange.” . . . . Such was his cool reflection in his study; but whenever he was warmed . . . he, like other philosophers, whose minds are impregnated with poetical fancy, caught the common enthusiasm for splendid renown.

Boswell’s Life, 1778, aetat. 69

Modern Library ed., II, p. 191-192

When the old tales of Western Courage got written down their values were already antique. This is another problem with the Western and masculinist focus on gut-checks and violence; a problem, that is, beyond its actual, sociological antiqueness. The accounts of it that throng our Western culture are phony from the start.

After all, it is mainly the civilized—the “citizen-ized,” those of high standing living in town—who can read and write, and can record the alleged deeds, not the illiterate and rural aristocracy itself, which leaves such stuff to priests and bards and especially to posterity. The writings of the civilized Mediterranean had of course audiences mainly non-aristocratic, the Many of the Greek city states and the plebs of the Roman Republic. And yet the writings taught in the schools to the boys patrician or plebeian represented as I have noted an archaic, physically Courageous, wholly aristocratic virtue. For the Greeks it was Homer and for the Romans it was translations and then imitations of Homer such as Ennius and Virgil. Cicero was a lawyer, not a soldier. Yet he told his brother that his “childhood dream” was expressed in the lines from The Iliad, Glaucus telling what his father had said to him in sending him off to Troy, “Always be the best [aristeuein, compare “aristocratic”], my boy, the bravest.”[1]

Which is to say that our cultural vocabulary for the chief pagan virtue in the West isn’t fresh news from the front, any front. The vocabulary of Courageous heroism is sociologically inauthentic, reworked over centuries, belated, secondary, not based, as historians say, on primary sources. Homer was imagining a warrior society long gone, about five centuries gone. He himself lived in an eastern Aegean culture radically less knightly and more workaday than the one he imagined. “The resulting picture,” writes Hanson, “is an amalgam-mosaic spanning five hundred years. . . ; it may not reflect an actual historical society at all.”[2]

So usually. A little after Homer wrote, in the 6^th century BC, a redactor in the style of Deuteronomy looked back on Joshua the berserk nomad marching up to the walls of Jericho back, far, far back, in the 13^th century BC, a little before Troy fell. The mythical Aeneas, counting from the actual date of the fall of Troy, would have died more than a thousand years before he was imagined by Virgil as a model of archaic piety. Beowulf of the Spear Danes lived if he did centuries before his literate cousins in far-off Saxon England set down a version of his tale. Geoffrey of Monmouth in the 12^th century crafted the knightly stories, and in the 15^th Thomas Malory perfected them, about a King Arthur who flourished, if ever, perhaps in Wales around 540 AD.

The Icelandic sagas prove the rule, at its edges. The historical Gunnar was killed in a siege of his house about (perhaps exactly) 990 AD and his ally Njal burned in a similar siege about 1011 (the site can be visited still). But the saga-writer, though he creates in the Hemingwayesque restraint of saga prose an impression of reporting from the scene, was looking back on the events from 1275 or so, from an Iceland thoroughly Christianized and commercial. The Icelandic sagas “must be thought of as historical novels rather than histories,” R. I. Page warns. “Their authenticity must be continually questioned. The Viking historian must feed on more austere fare.”[3] Some think that the sagas can be fed on still, as documents of an oral tradition carrying fact. To the contrary, Jesse Byock points out, the “bookprosist” view of the sagas was to some degree a result of 19th-century Icelandic nationalism eager to see the century and a half of saga-writing not as merely the writing down of traditions but as “one of the most powerful literary moments in recorded history,” in the words of the leader of this view. [4] Compare the 200-year dispute over the authorship of Homer.

The stories of Joshua or King Arthur are still more clearly “historical novels.” The days of yore are doubly so:

Miniver cursed the commonplace

And eyed a khaki suit with loathing;

He missed the mediaeval grace

Of iron clothing.

Nor of course do we post-mediaevals live in societies led by literal aristocracies of fighting men. So why, one might ask, should we go on being governed in our ethics by aristocratic virtues characteristic of such men? True: only Walpole among 18^th-century prime ministers of England was without literally aristocratic blood on a mother’s or a father’s side.[5] And, true: the last British cabinet still having a majority of aristocrats was surprisingly late, Gladstone’s of 1892. Thirty years later in Bonar Law’s there were still equal numbers of aristocrats and commoners. Thatcher’s of 1979 still contained nearly a quarter from the “landed establishment,” though some quite recently recruited to it. But even in that class-haunted nation it is by now a good while since real aristocrats mattered. Harold Macmillan’s cabinet of 1957, it was said, had more “old Estonians” (émigré politicians) than old Etonians.[6]

Centuries earlier the English and then the Scottish aristocrats had stopped their Homeric bloodletting and had turned to farming, court masques, and the gaming table. The proportion of violent deaths for males over age fifteen in English ducal families—“the king’s brothers,” so the very top of the social order—is an astonishing one half for the cohort born 1330-1479, dying courageously in the Hundred Years War and the Wars of the Roses. It falls to about a fifth for those born under the Tudors and Stuarts, then to about one in twenty for those born under the Hanoverians, fighting in the ethically-restrained wars of the 18^th century. The mortality rate from war comes back, startlingly, to its medieval levels for sons of dukes of an age to serve in World Wars I and II. So compelling is the faith in an aristocratic Courage; and so ethically unrestrained is modern war. [7]

Most of us in modern democracies therefore have forgotten what an “aristocracy” literally is. American university students believe “upper class” is merely a fancy word for “rich.” European and especially British students have less difficulty understanding caste-like classes. The young Americans begin to understand if they are urged to think of European “class” as equivalent to American “color.”

Most Americans therefore think of the Kennedys as “aristocrats,” though the older one’s are only two or three generations from proletarian origins—Senator Edward’s grandfather Kennedy grew up poor—and none are professional soldiers. It’s a metaphor. Professors and artists since the late 19^th century have preened themselves as a “new aristocracy,” though of merit (they modestly say) rather than of birth, as though there were such a thing. Such a category mistake among democrats would have puzzled a Renaissance duke with a 900-year old name.

When in the 16^th century the new Dutch Republic threw off Spanish and other dukes and kings, its aristocracy lost the mechanisms of refreshment by new ennoblements. The aristocratic rump, now an entirely closed class, remained somewhat influential in the affairs of the Republic, though continuing to shrink. But no one in the Netherlands mistook the nouveau-riche merchant class, the regents, with a training in accounting and classical languages, for literal aristocrats, with a training in violence and leadership.

Income had nothing to do with it, and still doesn’t. There persists in places like Holland and Sweden, now five or so centuries after the sanguinary deeds that elevated it, an aristocracy consisting of a few folk living in modernized castles behind hedges. Though democrats now, they still possess the self-confidence of hereditary rulers, often taking up military careers. My friend the economist Axel Leijonhvufvud (literally, “lion head”) comes from such a family, ranking high in the Swedish aristocracy, a descendent of Norse kings. It causes an American peasant of Norwegian descent like me to swoon.

We all need to be Courageous in life. But even our physical courage cannot be merely aristocratic virtù, if we wish to stay out of jail. It cannot be Homeric or even old Roman, certainly not olde-tyme as filtered through the stories from Homer to Hollywood. “How much longer,” asked John Stuart Mill in 1869, “is one form of society and life to content itself with the morality made for another?”[8] It is my main concern here. We ordinary, unarmed citizens in the West, as against our fellows who volunteer to fight as imitation aristocrats at Srebrenica or the Somme or the local crime-or-fire scene, are urban and democratic and liberated and pacified and bourgeois and even female now. Perhaps we should acknowledge the fact.

* * * *

That is, the word and ideology of Courage has been corrupted. Bourgeois men have adopted instead the mythical histories of knights and cowboys as their definition of masculinity. Stories help construct identities and, as William Reddy argues, even emotions.[9] We, and especially the men among us, keep turning, turning over in our minds aristocratic stories of virtue in the line of the Iliad. You would think that bourgeois men of Europe or Japan or America were actual Kings of Ithaca, or of Engelond varray, parfit, gentil knights.

Take the professions of arms c. 1800 in England. England was to be sure “une nation de boutiquiers,” in Napoleon’s well-worn phrase (well-worn even before Napoleon: I quoted Adam Smith’s use of it in 1776). Yet Napoleon was the son of a businessman and bureaucrat, and himself a genius of Prudence. He was affecting to scorn the other bourgeois nation that at last defeated him. The British Navy in the age of Lord Nelson, if one looks merely at the origins of the officers, was ordinarily in fact non-aristocratic, Nelson himself the son of a parson, Captain William “Bounty” Bligh the son of a customs officer. The equally eminent Dutch navy of the previous century had been equally egalitarian, drawing its admiraals, its Tromps and van Dorps, from sons of common sailors and of aristocrats, both.

William McNeill observes that navies possess an analogy in merchantmen that armies do not. There is no civilian analogue to an army. The British Navy therefore required habits of mind natural to commercial ventures, such as double care in provisioning a ship before setting sail, or never missing a tide, or manning the pumps with energy in a crisis.[10] Work, work, work. No laying about merely waiting for the wild charge. Like engineers in the Royal Navy under steam, below-decks with the black gang monitoring pressure gauges, an 18^th-century British naval officer had to know quite a lot and do all sorts of jobs and was therefore permitted to be less than genteel—a non-aristocratic Scot, for example. Being Jack Aubrey is not just a matter of aristocratic Courage.

Indeed, as Jack is always saying, it is a matter, too, of bourgeois profit from prizes. Captain Wentworth in Jane Austen’s Persuasion (1818) reminisces about the sloop Asp: “I knew that we should either go to the bottom together, or that she would be the making of me.” And then his frigate: “those were pleasant days when I had the Laconia! How fast I made money in her!”[11]

But England expected its sailors, whether of bourgeois origin or not, to do their duty, which was defined peasant-wise for the men and aristocratically for the officers. Not bourgeois-ly. Admiral Lord Nelson died at Trafalgar because he chose, as was his nouveau-noble duty, to stand on the quarter deck in full view of French snipers, with medals flashing in the smoke. Those are the traditions of brave men at sea, as a post-aristocratic Lord Jim ruefully apprehended. Jane Austen’s ideal potential husband, acknowledged to be in want of a wife, is a naval officer, honorable off-stage doubtless in a very gallant way, though never so lofty as an actual aristocrat. Two of Jane’s much-beloved brothers ended as admirals; another was for a time in the army. Even bourgeois Carthage would literally crucify admirals and generals who came home empty handed. The Dutch behavior at Srebrenica would have earned British admirals in the nation of shopkeepers courts martial and speedy executions—“to encourage the others,” as Voltaire described the execution in 1757 of a British admiral for not doing his utmost.

The Army of the Duke of Wellington was even more rigidly tied to aristocratic myth, and unlike the Navy was sociologically speaking an aristocratic preserve. The echt-aristocratic officers at Waterloo were expected to sit nobly on their horses and face decapitating cannon fire while their peasant or proletarian soldiers were permitted—no, ordered—to lie down.

John Keegan points out that by the time of the Napoleonic Wars the Army officers, unlike their Homeric or medieval models, were not supposed to engage directly in slaughter. The sailors still did, with cutlasses issued in a crisis indifferently to seamen and admirals. An English captain at Waterloo, doubtless a crack shot of deer and grouse, spotted a French common soldier climbing into the farmyard he was under orders to defend, and “instantly desired Sergeant Graham, whose musket [the captain] was holding, . . . to drop the wood [that the sergeant himself was carrying], take [back] his [musket from the very captain] . . . and shoot the intruder.” Yet the captain would gladly have dueled to the death man-to-man with a French fellow officer. “The only feats of arms worth the name were those conducted between men of gentle birth, either one on one or in nearly (ideally exactly) matched numbers,” like cricket teams.[12]

The point is that bourgeois men still take their models from aristocratic warriors, or cricket teams. By 1914 the British and other European armies had became very different, making the Great War possible. By then the officers, though aristocratic in imagination, were bourgeois in origin. Thorstein Veblen had this point right: that aristocratic values survived in the imaginations of the bourgeoisie.

In her profound study of the rise and fall of the American western Jane Tompkins quotes the inventor of the acceptably middle-class version of the genre, Owen Wister, writing in 1895, seven years before The Virginian: “In personal daring and in skill as to the horse, the knight and the cowboy are nothing but the same Saxon of different environments.” Tompkins notes: “Wister’s identification of the cowpuncher with the Anglo-Saxon knight-at-arms is a way for an upper-class composer-turned-short-story-writer with doubts about his independence to claim a robust masculinity.”[13] The predominately Norman knighthood of England would have been amused by Wister’s concept; and King Arthur was if anything a Celt, not a Saxon.

Wister like his friend and fellow enthusiast for heroism Teddy Roosevelt knew the West as scenery, but could not have known the samurai warriors of his imagination, because they did not exist. His model was not “reality” but the elaborate fictions developed in the workingman’s dime novel. Buffalo Bill, King of the Border Men appeared first in December 1869 as a magazine serial. The author of the Deadwood Dick series, Edward Wheeler, who described his occupation on his letterhead as “Sensational Novelist,” lived in Philadelphia and never ventured much further west than that.[14] Wheeler wrote 33 dime novels from 1877 until his death in 1884, and after his death 97 more novels appeared under his name, petering out finally in 1897. The author of Shane (1949) admitted that when he wrote the novel he “had never been west of Toledo, Ohio.”[15]

The cowboys inspiring the myth early and late did actually make the Long Drive in Texas and Kansas and the Indian Territory briefly in the 1870s and early 1880s before the southern rail lines were extended west, and later herded doggies in the draws as employees of the cattle barons of Wyoming and Montana. There were only some 35,000 of them. The number is uncertain, but anyway it was a very small share of the 17,000, 000 or so Americans working for a wage at the time. The Western cattle industry was some small fraction of 2 percent of national income in 1880. After all, beef was not a very large share of the nation’s expenditure—ask yourself how much even you in your early 21^st-century prosperity spend out of your annual income on the farmer’s share of the proceeds from beef. Only a small part of the beef had seen the Wild West. Corn-fed cattle from Iowa pens, not grass-fed from Montana open ranges, dominated the industry from 1900 at the latest. The workers who took care of the grass-fed cattle were buried in the occupational category at the bottom of the proletariat, farm hands. They were proletarians, not aristocrats. They were commonly teenagers, not men. Upwards of a quarter were people of color.

The bourgeois real-estate men who governed the cow towns kept their boys under strict control, by taking their guns away. Gun control is not a recent idea. The actual gunfight at OK Corral, October 26, 1881, for instance, was about Doc Holliday and the three Earp brothers, as the law in Tombstone, trying to take away the pistols the McLaurys and Clantons were illegally displaying in town.

A classic study of the extent of violence in the cow towns of Kansas discovered that all the murders 1870-1885 came to a mere one-and-a-half per town per trading season, and few of these the outcome of Shane-type duels. [16] It’s hard to duel with pistols to the death when the city fathers have disarmed you. Less than a third of gunshot victims in the non-Hollywood cow towns returned fire. Many were not armed, as for instance the Caldwell wife shot dead in 1884 by her drunken husband. The fictionally terrifying Bat Masterson, for example, killed no one while resident in Dodge City. The cowboy, like the samurai and the knight and the Homeric hero, is a belated fiction.

“Fiction” does not mean “an utterly pointless fantasy without the slightest reference to the actual world,” at least not in the minds of the male audiences for such tales of courage. As Norris Lacy and Geoffrey Ashe observe in The Arthurian Handbook, “Medieval storytellers . . . . and their audiences viewed Arthur’s kingdom rather as people now regard the Wild West. . . . Like the Wild West, [Arthur’s Britain] was a realm of the imagination, but its creators would have denied that they were simply inventing out of nothing.”[17]

The assertion that a fiction is about something that once actually happened is important to the men who read it, as to the men who read Tom Clancy novels about spies and use them to interpret the day’s headlines, or to make their next business deal. In his introduction to an edition of The Ox-Bow Incident (1941) by Walter Van Tilburg Clark, the literary man Clifton Fadiman declared that “we should remember that the background out of which the Western came was once a reality, that there was a Wild West, that gunplay was a habit.”[18]

Not really. The blood spilling out of the dime novels, carried into the mature western novels and then into the western movies, most profusely in the spaghetti westerns at the very end of the genre, was a literary and economic device, not a sociological statistic. The boys and men of the 1870s, and the 1970s, had to be enticed to turn the page, and to buy the next novel in the series, or to go to the movie. “A hundred dead in two chapters,” The Atlantic Monthly sneered in 1879.[19]

On the last page of his first Deadwood Dick novel, set in contemporary (1877) South Dakota, Wheeler—remember, he lived in Philadelphia—adds “a few words to end this o’er true romance of life in the Black Hills.” He reports on the after-plot life of the characters, such as Calamity Jane, Dick’s sometime fiancée and fight mate, who “is still in the Hills.” “And grim and uncommunicative [note this: no talk], there roams through the country of gold a youth in black, at the head of a bold lawless gang of roadriders, who, from his unequaled daring, has won and rightly deserves the name—Deadwood Dick, Prince of the Road.”[20]

As Robin Hood was to feudal lords, so Deadwood Dick and Jesse James and Bonnie and Clyde and other outlaw heroes were to American capitalism. Or they were at least in song and in story. In sociological fact James and his gang were the sons of rich Missouri slaveholders, continuing after the war the guerrilla resistance to Union and abolition they had learned before and during it. The historian James McPherson notes that “the unromantic truth is that Jesse spent much of his ill-gotten gains on fine horseflesh and gambling,” not paying off the mortgage of poor farmers or engaging in other proto-socialist gestures.[21]

It’s unclear what Wheeler meant by claiming his roadrider story was “o’er” true. But despite the reportorial rhetoric, it wasn’t. The men and boys reading the dime novels did not want pure fantasy, science fiction, say, because they wanted to imagine themselves into the fictions, and so the fictions denied their fictionality. The black cowboy, Nate Love, later claimed to be the “real” Deadwood Dick, but this is an instance among many, from James Fenimore Cooper to the urban cowboys of suburban Dallas, of life imitating art.

Some dueling did go on, exceptionally rarely, in the streets of Dodge City. The medieval knights did joust from time to time, though not much, or they would have killed themselves off Monty-Python style. The samurai did refuse on their honor to perform executions in anger, usually. And even in commercial Florence in the 16^th century Cellini the sculptor, no aristocrat, had to the credit of his virtù numerous victims in duels and other affrays. Yet it is not a true history of olden times to portray lethal dueling as how Real Men spent their days, a habit.

Do the math. If a population of male aristocrats engaged in lethal duels on N occasions over some period, by the end, of course, only (1/2)^N would survive. I said “lethal” duels, one-on-one. If such duels happened weekly, for example, as one might infer from watching Gunsmoke on TV, then an aristocracy of 10,000 courageous cowboys would be reduced by the end of a ten-week TV season to merely 10 (very) quick-draw sharpshooters still standing.

You get the point. Fights literally to the death, above once every 18 years or so, it turns out, would overwhelm even pre-industrial birthrates of 4 percent of the existing population in a year. And since people die for other reasons, too, a much less frequent rate of heroic killing—once, say, over an entire career of noble sword-fighting or gunslinging—would destroy the social class that indulged in it. This is why challenges male-on-male in the mammalian world are ceremonial rather than lethal. If bucks actually killed each other each spring at the rates their faux-aggressions seem to promise there would be no species of deer surviving. The same argument in reverse was Darwin’s crucial insight, derived from the economist Malthus, that in a world of scarcity a proliferating class needs to be cut down, somehow; and so it must compete to the death.

Class suicide in fact does seem to characterize gang members in Philadelphia nowadays, who take their models from the television art, and was nearly so of the English dukedom during the Wars of the Roses. The Bishop of Carlisle prophesies accurately in 1399, “the blood of England shall manure the ground / . . . . and this land be called/ The field of Golgotha and dead men’s skulls.”[22] But the mathematics shows that death-defying courage can only in romantic theory be the virtue primarily called upon in any society, except in the emergency services or in a literal military camp, and then only at the rare, looming crisis.

Such a fiction does of course a cultural job. Especially it fueled in an age of democracy the occasional explosions of mass armies, 1861-1865, 1914-1918, 1939-45. In peacetime it gave the over-civilized man of the late Roman Empire or of Enlightened Europe before the Revolution or of late 19^th-century America a way out at least in imagination from under the skirts of women and the domination of priests—and an escape from under an urban, unheroic, international market which took his manhood in a moment’s beastly roaring on the floor of the Bourse.

Like the highwaymen or the Rob Roys of earlier British romance, “Deadwood Dick and [the fictionalized] Jesse James,” writes Bill Brown (agreeing with Michael Denning), “contested the dominant ideology, the encroachment of advanced capitalism. . . . The James brothers achieved iconic status as a force that could interrupt the success of capitalists (the banks) and the institutions of modernization (the train)”—though the hero of the later bourgeois version of the Western initiated by Wister’s The Virginian breaks a strike and protects the owner’s capital, in the style of John Wayne in Red River.[23]

[1] Quoted in Everitt, Cicero, 2001, p. 46. The translation is that of Fagles, 1990, 6: 247 (p. 202), whose “my boy” is not literally in the Greek (VI: 208), but does seem to capture the tone of the passage.

[2] Hanson, Western Way of War, 1989, p. 41.

[3] Page, Chronicles of Vikings, 1995, p. 25.

[4] Byock, Viking Age, 2001, pp. 149-158.

[5] Langford, Polite and Commercial People, p. 34.

[6] Cannadine, Decline and Fall, 1990, Appendix B, p. 711; and discussion pp. 206-222.

[7] Hollingsworth, “A Demographic Study of the British Ducal Families,” 1957, Table 3.

[8] Mill, Subjection of Women, 1869, p. 43.

[9] Reddy, Navigation of Feeling, 2001.

[10] McNeill, Pursuit of Power, 1982, p. 104f.

[11] Austen, Persuasion, 1818, pp. 73, 74.

[12] Keegan, The Face of Battle, 1976 (1978), pp. 190, 322, italics supplied.

[13] Tompkins, West of Everything, 1992, pp. 145, 146.

[14] Bill Brown, Reading the West, 1997, p. 269.

[15] Schaefer, “Interview,” in Schaefer, Shane, ed. J. C. Work, p. 278.

[16] Dykstra, Cattle Towns, 1968, pp. 146, 148, 143.

[17] Lacy and Ashe, The Arthurian Handbook, pp. 3-4.

[18] Fadiman, “Introduction,” 1942, p. vii.

[19] Quoted in Brown, “Reading the West,” 1997, in Brown, Reading, p. 2.

[20] Wheeler, Deadwood Dick, 1877, pp. 357-58.

[21] McPherson, “Confederate Guerrilla,” 2003. p. 21.

[22] Shakespeare, Rich. II 4.1, lines 128, 134-35

[23] Brown, “Reading the West,,” in Brown, Reading, pp. 35, 38, 40.

This transcript was prepared with AI assistance and lightly edited for clarity. Minor inaccuracies may remain.

Interviewer: Hello. My name is Samantha Cacace, and today I’m here with the economist Deirdre McCloskey, who is visiting Boise State on behalf of the Spriggs Family Lecture Series. Professor McCloskey, thank you so much for joining us.

Deirdre McCloskey: I’m extremely pleased to be here.

Interviewer: Thank you. For students who may be new to your work, how would you describe the main idea behind your research?

Deirdre McCloskey: Well, it’s to show how the economy works inside a society and inside politics. I’m a historian as well as an economist, so I try to look at the long-run fate of our lives, our economies, and our societies.

Interviewer: Perfect. Many college students feel uncertain about their economic future. What would you say to students who feel like opportunity is shrinking?

Deirdre McCloskey: I don’t think it is. I think they should not be thinking only of their first job. They should think of their lifetime of work. It’s not true that there is great technological unemployment, or that foreign trade is taking jobs to any substantial degree.

It turns out, by the way, that in an economy like the United States, France, or Britain, one out of seven jobs disappears every year, and always does. It goes away. The company moves away, or it changes its practices. So the job slots come and go, and come and go. We have a much more dynamic economy than some people think, and certainly that worries students.

Interviewer: So you would say that the job pool is inevitable and prone to change over the years.

Deirdre McCloskey: It changes, but we adjust. We move. Think of the oil boom in North Dakota, as an example. It came and went. People moved in and out.

Interviewer: What is one misconception about capitalism or markets that you wish college students understood differently?

Deirdre McCloskey: Well, for one thing, they’re very fearful of large corporations. Large corporations are not saintly. I admit that. But the real danger is from state intervention. It’s from the government. I wish people weren’t so frightened of Amazon and were more frightened of, say, ICE.

Interviewer: You received your BA and PhD from Harvard and taught for many years at the University of Chicago. Both universities are usually regarded as centers of mainstream economics, and yet much of your work goes against the grain of what is taught there.

Deirdre McCloskey: Well, yes, that’s true. I’m like my heroine. There was a great American comedian back in vaudeville and in the movies, back in the ’20s and ’30s, Mae West. She said, “I was Snow White, but I drifted.” And that’s me. I was Snow White. I was a standard economist, at first a Harvard-type economist, a sort of Democrat, large-D. Then I became a Chicago-school economist.

And now, as you’re suggesting, I kept finding things that didn’t seem to work in either of those approaches. So I’ve slowly come to think of my own approach as being humanomics: economics with the humans left in, or indeed humans with the economics left in. I don’t think we need to throw away what we learn from other economics.

Interviewer: What are your central criticisms of orthodox American economics?

Deirdre McCloskey: It has certain techniques that it uses, such as tests of statistical significance. It turns out that a little, teeny test has infected the discipline very much. That’s one thing.

But more important than issues like that is that it’s statist. Many economists believe that if there’s a problem in society, the government should step in to fix it. I think we’ve gone too far on that. We need to draw back and not have such a large state. But I’m afraid most of my economist colleagues don’t agree. They’re wrong, and I’m right.

Interviewer: Good to hear.

[Light laughter]

Interviewer: Do you think that ties into your perspectives on the power of thought and how it folds into prosperity?

Deirdre McCloskey: Well, thought runs the world. Ideas run the world. We’ve been Marxists, all of us, even if we weren’t Marxists, since Marx. Marx said ideas are not important. What matters is the relations of production, and the ideas just float on top of them and are not important. It’s interests that matter, material interests.

I think, of course, material interests do matter and affect how people vote and so on, a little bit. But what people feel in their hearts is much more important. The conceptions, the ideas they have, like about monopoly in the economy or the role of the government, are what determine what actually happens, at least in a free society. In an authoritarian society, it’s the bosses from the top who are telling you what to do. But in a free society, it’s us.

Interviewer: Your work in economic history is largely concerned with economic growth. You call the process the Great Enrichment rather than the Industrial Revolution. Why?

Deirdre McCloskey: Well, it’s not so much what is driving the Industrial Revolution as what it is. It’s an enormous enrichment since around 1776, this anniversary we’re having this very year. It’s an incredible increase in income per head worldwide.

In 1800, the average person got along on $2 a day. I mean $2 a day that you could spend in Boise. Imagine. You wouldn’t have a house. You’d have one suit of clothes, if any. You wouldn’t have enough to eat. You’d die young. Your children would all be dead, et cetera. That’s the life we all came from around 1776.

Now, in the world, the average is not $2 a day, but $50 a day. So it’s an enormous improvement. It’s completely unique. In all of the 300,000 years of human history, it didn’t happen. And now here we are, you and I, the descendants of Italian and Irish peasants. Here we are.

Interviewer: Do you think that ties into how people find their identity within a capitalistic society?

Deirdre McCloskey: Yes. It’s the ideas that mattered. The big idea was what is properly called liberalism. Now, it’s not what we mean by it in the United States. We mean left-wing thinking or socialism or something. That’s not what I mean. It’s the original liberalism of people like Adam Smith. I always cross myself when I mention Adam Smith. And Mary Wollstonecraft and Tom Paine.

Those people in the 1700s said all men are created equal, and women too. This idea of equality, I call it equality of permission in a book of mine that’s coming out in some months. It’s allowing people to do things. Not making equal incomes, not even equal opportunities, because we all vary in our intelligence and our families and our nations, but not adding rules that prevent us from doing what we want, as long as we give everyone else this permission. That’s true, primary liberalism. And that’s what I advocate for.

Interviewer: As a woman, especially going through the ’60s, ’70s, and ’80s, and studying all of these aggressive topics in economics and capitalism, how did you truly find your place?

Deirdre McCloskey: Well, I found my voice by thinking against the grain, by not supposing that just because everyone says it, it’s true. I think that’s crucial for any young person to learn to do.

I don’t mean saying, “Well, everyone’s lying. I’m going to go down this rabbit hole of conspiracy theories.” I mean a kind of sober critical thinking. For example, this idea of statism, that the state should do everything. Well, it hasn’t worked out very well in history, North Korea being a terrible example of a socialist country like that.

You should be an inquirer. You should say, “Now, wait a second. Is that really true? Well, I guess it is. Okay, now, how about this part?” That’s what education is for, after all.

Interviewer: Do you think that ties into your notion of sweet talk?

Deirdre McCloskey: Yes. It is my notion of what rhetoric is and should be. People should have free speech, and we should be trying to persuade each other, not yelling at each other. Not saying, “Oh, you’re a Trump supporter, I hate you,” or, “You’re an anti-Trump person, I hate you,” or, “You’re a Protestant, I hate you,” or, “You’re a Catholic, I hate you.” All the hate stuff should go away.

We should start thinking of a politics of sweet persuasion, where we don’t just sneer at people, but we try to persuade them. In a class just half an hour ago, I was trying to persuade the students that natural monopoly in modern capitalist societies is a minor problem. Most people think it’s a big problem. It’s not. So, sweet talk. Don’t say, “Oh, you’re stupid. You think that.” No, no.

Interviewer: What first step do you think the average Joe, or especially young people, should take in order to practice that sweet-talk notion?

Deirdre McCloskey: Well, they have to know something. They have to try to have wide experiences of life and read a lot. I am quite disturbed, though, about the rabbit holes, as they’re called. People do research on the internet, and they go down these paths that are not good and are dangerous.

I suppose a good rule would be: when you’re doing research, if you find that its outcome is hatred, turn away. If you do research and someone is saying, “Well, Muslims are all terrorists and dangerous, and so we should hate them,” I think one should know, as a person who loves, to move back and say, “No, no, I’m not going to hate you.”

Interviewer: For the students watching this today, and those who are experiencing entrapment in those echo chambers online, what advice or key takeaway do you want them to gain from your research?

Deirdre McCloskey: Well, that there’s a lot of danger in the state, in the government. The government is often not the solution. Suppose the government prevented you from speaking your mind on any number of issues. Wouldn’t that be terrible? So it’s mainly the government that’s the danger.

But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t obey the government, or should start killing people, or anything. We should try to persuade people to become adults. I often call what I advocate adultism: the conviction that a society of free adults with self-respect and respect for others is the kind of society we want.

The trouble is that it is very comfortable to be a child, to have mommy and daddy take care of everything. I want people to accept freedom, and accept a responsible freedom, where they take care of their families and their friends, and their country, for that matter, and act like grown-ups.

Interviewer: Perfect. I think that concludes our conversation. Thank you so much. That was amazing.

Deirdre McCloskey: Nice to talk to you.

Interviewer: You too. Thank you so much for watching. My name is Samantha Cacace. Have a great day.