The text below is an excerpt from Bourgeois Equality: How Ideas, Not Capital or Institutions, Enriched the World, the third volume of Deirdre McCloskey’s trilogy on the ethical and historical origins of modern prosperity.

And there are doubts from the right, too. Some students of the economy, such as Robert Gordon, Lawrence Summers, Edward Gordon, Erik Brynjolfsson, Andrew McFee, Edmund Phelps, Edward E. Gordon, Jeffrey Sachs, Laurence Kotlikoff, and Tyler Cowen, have argued that countries in the position of the United States, on the frontier of betterment, are facing a slowdown, with a skill shortage, and that technological unemployment will be the result.¹ Maybe. The economists would acknowledge that in the past couple of centuries numerous other learned commentators have predicted similar slowdowns—such as the Keynesian economists in the late 1930s and the 1940s, confident in their theory of “stagnationism”—only to find their predictions once again falsified by the continuing Great Enrichment.² The classical economists of the first three-quarters of the nineteenth century, Marx included, expected landlords, or in Marx’s case capitalists, to engorge the national product. In a cartoon cover of the National Review by Thomas Reis, a supercool little Karl Marx with a Starbucks coffee in his hand and an MP3 player in his ear sports a T-shirt inscribed, “Still Wrong.”³ Right.

Marx supposed that wages would fall and yet profits would also fall and yet technological betterments would also happen. Such an accounting, the left-Keynesian and eventually Maoist economist Joan Robinson used to point out, is impossible. At least one, the wages or the profits, has to rise if technological betterment is happening, as it so plainly did. In the event, what rose were wages on raw labor and the return to human capital, owned by the wage-earners, not the bosses. The return to physical capital was higher than a riskless return on British or American government bonds, in order to compensate for the risk in holding the capital (such as being made obsolete by betterment—think of your computer, obsolete in four years). But the return on physical capital was anyway held down, I just noted, by competition among the proliferating capitalists, to its level of 10 percent. Imagine if real wages had experienced a similar history of stagnation since 1800. Instead they increased by a factor of twenty or thirty or one hundred.

Startlingly, the learned economists from the right of politics join their colleagues from the left in predicting that machines will cause low wages. They haven’t yet. But soon. Tyler Cowen, for example, an economist I admire, spends many pages of his book Average Is Over (2013) describing breathlessly “the increasing productivity of intelligent machines,” such as those used for dating services. Your fate is determined, he says, by how you answer the technological-unemployment question: “Are you good at working with intelligent machines or not? . . . This is the wave that will lift or that will dump you.”⁴ He concedes that “it was true in the great Industrial Revolution of the nineteenth century and it is true now: machines do not put us all out of work, as eventually machines will create jobs.”⁵ I italicize the words amazing in an economist of Cowen’s ability. Not “all” jobs, he concedes. Well, actually, machines have put no one out of work who can move to another job, and on balance not anyway the bulk of workers, as you can see in the absence, 1848 to the present, of a rising reserve army of unemployed. The other italicized locution, “create jobs,” is regularly a sign of a slot theory of labor supply and demand, which no economist since J. R. Hicks published The Theory of Wages in 1932 has believed. A job is a voluntary deal between a worker and a boss. It is the opportunity, not the job, that is “created” by a newly invented machine. Government can “create jobs” only by taxing some deal to subsidize another, with no net gain unless the government is wiser about trading opportunities than people in trade.

On the preceding page Cowen had characterized some things as “scarce” (high-quality labor with unique skills, for example) and others as “not scarce” (unskilled labor). It is a meaningless locution in economics. It ‘s like saying that gold is scarce but water is not. No: they have a relative price, that is all. Both are scarce, in the sense that neither is free of opportunity cost, and it is meaningless to compare them, or apples and oranges, by the ounce, something Cowen teaches his students in Economics 1 during the third week of the course. And in any case the economics and the history says that in the long run unskilled and skilled people are substitutes. The unskilled benefit as much—more when the standard of genuine comfort is applied to rich and poor. Remember Robert Frost choosing at the margin between teaching and farming, which keeps the wage in each occupation within hailing distance of the other. And if goods and services are provided by machines we will still have “jobs,” that is, ways of spending our time that other people will pay for—deciding what to buy, for example, or who to vote for or what is to be done or what machines to invent next, which cannot in its nature be eliminated by mechanization.

Later Cowen gives a chart of labor’s income as a share of the total, showing an alarming fall since the 1970s. “If there is one picture that sums up the dilemma of our contemporary economy, it that one.”⁶ But the chart is what we used to call a Time-magazine chart—it cuts off the top and bottom in order to exaggerate a relatively slight change. How alarming is the decline? It is a decline in Bureau of Labor Statistics numbers from 63 percent to 61 percent—a decline of labor’s share by two percentage points of national income. On this Cowen erects his terrifying case that “average is over.”

Something is driving intelligent economists out of their economic minds. Perhaps it is the short run, the first act. Before they have well lost their minds, some of them acknowledge what has been true of every economy since the beginning, that “jobs”—that is, opportunities for mutually advantageous exchange—adjust to the skills available. Better tools or better skills make for higher income in total. But if not, the economy finds something to do with the badly skilled. The principle is called comparative advantage, one of the few nonobvious propositions in economics.

Of course, if one raises wages artificially, by union or by statute, unemployment will result. The argument one hears from, say, Paul Krugman—that raising wages is good for the company because workers will work harder as a result—seems implausible, considering that the company in such a case would already have raised wages, for its own good. And working harder worsens the conditions of work. Both the company and the workers suffer. Cowen notes that one can observe “labor market troubles of the young” “in many countries.”⁷ Yes, one observes such troubles in Egypt and South Africa even more than in France and the United States, which suggests that laws protecting the employment of favored classes (old people, for instance, or government-approved union members, often grotesquely favored in poor countries), not the advanced machine tools of advanced economies, imitated in poor countries, are what is causing the troubles.

Joel Mokyr, a deep student of the history of technology, has recently offered some persuasive Whiggish assurances on the matter of slowdown, observing that by now the sciences behind biology and computers and the study of materials promise gigantic enrichment.⁸ And Patrizio Pagano and Massimo Sbracia argue that failures of previous stagnationisms—proposed after every major recession, they observe—failed not so much in not anticipating wholly new technology as in not grasping the further rewards of existing technology, such as, now, computers.⁹ As Macaulay asked in 1830, “On what principle is it that, when we see nothing but betterment behind us, we are to expect nothing but deterioration before us?”¹⁰ He continued:

If we were to prophesy that in the year 1930 a population of fifty million, better fed, clad, and lodged than the English of our time, will cover these islands, that Sussex and Huntingdonshire will be wealthier than the wealthiest parts of the West Riding of Yorkshire now are, that machines constructed on principles yet undiscovered will be in every house, many people would think us insane.¹¹

Whiggish and bourgeois and progress-minded and vulgarly pro-betterment though Macaulay was, he was in his prediction exactly right, even as to the British population in 1930. If one includes the recently separated Republic of Ireland, he was off by less than 2 percent.

And even the pessimistic, anti-Whiggish economists—”gloomsters,” the headline writers call them—would not deny that we have before us fifty or a hundred years in which now middling and poor countries such as South Africa and Brazil and Haiti and Bangladesh will catch up to what is already, in the rich countries, a stunningly successful level of average real income. Edward Phelps, among the pessimists, believes that many rich countries lack dynamism.¹² But nowadays China and India, making up 37 percent of world population, have become more free-market than they once were, and therefore are quickly catching up, growing with notable dynamism at upward of 7 to 12 percent per person per year. All the economists who have looked into the evidence agree that the average real income per person in the world is rising faster than ever before.¹³ The result will be a gigantic increase in the number of scientists, designers, writers, musicians, engineers, entrepreneurs, and ordinary businesspeople devising betterments which spill over to the now rich countries allegedly lacking in dynamism. Unless one believes in mercantilist/business-school fashion that a country must “compete” to prosper from world betterment, even the leaky boats of the Phelpsian undynamic countries will rise.

To appreciate what will happen in the world’s economy over the next fifty or a hundred years it’s a good idea to pause to learn the “Rule of 72.” The rule is that something (such as income) growing at 1 percent per year will double in seventy-two years. The fact is not obvious without calculation. It just happens to be true. You can confirm it by taking out your calculator and multiplying 1.01 by itself seventy-two times. It follows that if the something grows twice as fast, at 2 percent instead of 1 percent, that something will double, of course, in half the time, thirty-six years—as a runner going twice as fast will arrive at the mile marker in half the time. Similarly, something growing at 3 percent a year will double in a third of the time, or twenty-four years. And so forth. The general formula, then, says something growing at N percent per year doubles in 72/N years. The approximation gets less exact for higher growth rates—clearly something growing at 72 percent per year won’t double in a year—but for the growth rates we’re considering, it’s accurate enough.¹⁴

Consider some Rule-of-72 calculations. At 7 percent per year a real income will double in 72 divided by 7 years, or a little over 10 years; at 12 percent it will double in about 6 years. Even at the modest 4 percent per year per person that the World Bank implausibly reckons China will experience out to 2030 the result will be a populace almost twice as rich.¹⁵ The specialists on China’s economy Dwight Perkins and Thomas Rawski (2008) reckon a 6 to 8 percent annual growth out to 2025, by which time the average Chinese person will have a 1960s-U.S. standard of living.

China and India during their socialist experiments of the 1950s through the 1970s were so badly managed that there was a great deal of ground to be made up merely by letting people open shops and factories where and when they wanted to, without approval from the authorities. As Perkins pointed out in 1995, “When China stopped suppressing such activity, . . . shops, restaurants and many other service units popped up everywhere . . . [because] Chinese . . . had not forgotten how to trade or run a small business.”¹⁶ No genetic argument can be put forward that implies that Chinese or Indians or Africans or Latin Americans should do worse than Europeans permanently. The environmental limit can reasonably be expected to be overcome by serious environmentalists implementing serious technologies, such as carbon capture and nuclear power (India in 2014 bought ten nuclear reactors from Russia). No limit to fast world growth of per-person income is close at hand—not in your lifetime, or even that of your great-grandchildren. Then, in the year 2100, with everyone pretty rich, and hundreds of times more scientists and entrepreneurs working on improvements in solar power and methane burning, we can reconsider the limits to growth.

§

The environmental limit, which worries even the middle of the political spectrum, is often inferred from a use of merely mathematical arguments, which are identically true but scientifically irrelevant. “After all,” it is said, “nothing can grow forever” when the practical limit is scores of times larger than the present level. The actual carrying capacity of the earth, as one can judge from such densely populated place as Holland or Java, is on the order of a hundred billion people, not the ten or eleven billion at which it will soon peak and then start falling in response to rising per-person incomes. “After all, resources are finite,” the doubters continue, when what is a “resource,” as Julian Simon showed, is ever changing in response to human ingenuity.¹⁷ Bauxite ore was once useless dirt, but became valuable for making aluminum. Rare earths were not economically rare until they came to be used for computer batteries. Valuable whale oil became almost useless (and saved the whales) compared with the newly exploited oil from the ground. Black rock from the ground called “coal” was rediscovered many centuries ago in Europe and known two thousand years earlier in China to be useful for heating houses and making glass. Underground water inaccessible with old drilling techniques suddenly became minable, and its large if limited amount is soon to be supplemented, as it already is in some arid places, by ingenuity in finding ways to desalinate sea water cheaply, powered as in Western Australia by wind and sun. The man in the street thinks that countries are rich because of “resources,” in which case Japan and Hong Kong would be poor and the Russian Federation and the Democratic Republic of te Congo rich. In a modern economy in which people on farms are 2 percent of population, presently used resources earn 5 percent or less of national income, and do not determine much of its level.

The environmental limit looks to be solved by the ingenuity that caused the Great Enrichment in the first place. It will not be solved by some of the stranger anti-economic suggestions, such as Eating Local. As Robert Wuetherick asks, “What will be next? 100-mile-sourced medicines? 100-mile-sourced ideas? 100-mile-sourced economic history?”¹⁸ Some of the more unreasonable environmentalists in this line have campaigned against genetically modified bananas delivering vitamin A, an innovation that could save seven hundred thousand children’s lives each year and prevent three hundred thousand cases of blindness.¹⁹

Yet reasonable environmentalists have for decades been solving problems such as smog caused by soft coal for heating, or intelligence-reducing emissions from cars using lead-enhanced fuels, and will continue their virtuous labors with the hearty approval of us economists and calculators. After all, the goal is not growth-regardless, in the style of the North Carolina legislature in 2014 requiring science to be revised to make rising ocean levels appear less threatening or the governor of Florida issuing instructions that the phrase “global warming” be banished from official documents. The goal is ethical trade-tested betterment, such as making poor people rich, which has happened, or reducing inequality in essentials, which has also happened. Making people dangerously ill with bad air (or for that matter denying children life-saving genetically modified crops) is not ethical, or bettering. Nor is it something “the corporations” want. Nike and Toyota, unlike some governments with their local monopoly of violence, do not want to sicken or kill us.

The rich countries decided to take seriously the threat to the ozone layer from air-conditioning fluid and hair spray (hair spray!), led by Margaret Thatcher the Conservative British prime minister (and a big user of hair spray) , and now the ozone gaps at the poles are getting smaller. Waterways, which were open sewers until the development of effective waste treatment at the end of the nineteenth century, are in rich countries largely cleaned up.²⁰ Levels of particulate matter from burning coal for house heating in American cities in the 1930s and 1940s—American income per head then was as I have noted about the same as Brazilian income now—were comparable to those in present-day poor countries, and fell by the late twentieth century to an eighth of their previous level. In 1912–1913 a poor and therefore smoky Chicago was smothered in suspended particulates 50 percent higher than those in 58 poor Chinese cities in 1980–1993.²¹ Since the use of soft coal in British cities was banned in 1954 and then more rigorously in 1968, the Royal Courts of Justice in now-rich London have been scrubbed to return to their original white stone facing. Little but rich Denmark spends a good deal of its riches on avoiding carbon-based fuel and is prominent, for example, in the world market in windmills.²² As the libertarian columnist at the Chicago Tribune, Steve Chapman, reported: “Since 1980, carbon monoxide pollution in America has been cut by 83 percent, lead by 91 percent, and sulfur dioxide by 78 percent. But total economic output per person, adjusted for inflation, has risen by 77 percent. We’ve gotten greener and healthier as we’ve gotten richer.”²³ If we care about the environment, then, let us become prudently and temperately rich. Then we can do some good.

What, then, about the polluting poor countries? Rising real income per person at such heady rates as 6 or 12 percent per year, with the level quadrupling in a generation, is understandably popular with ordinary Chinese and Indian people. Yet when their incomes went up, the formerly poor, such as the Danes and the Australians and the British, came to value the environment more. Sometimes, true, they have valued it irrationally, as for example by stopping nuclear power, which has made dirty old coal the fastest growing source of energy worldwide.²⁴ Yet China, bettering but still very poor, has now a vigorous environmental movement—a movement against coal, not against nuclear power—with numerous riots substituting for democracy. In a nervous response to the movement, and maybe even because it is good for people, the Chinese government in January 2014 started requiring fifteen thousand factories to report their air and water pollution in real time, and to release the results to the public.²⁵ If they actually do so (don’t hold your breath; and when visiting Beijing, do), the Chinese standard of transparency in pollution control will be higher than in the United States. Also in 2014 China signed an agreement with the United States to work seriously on restraining the release of atmospheric carbon. China is now at a stage of industrialization similar to England’s in the 1870s or the United States’s in the 1890s, during which sulfur-laden coal smoke rising from Birmingham, Warwickshire or from Birmingham, Alabama was viewed not an occasion for rioting but as a good sign. In the 1940s, when my grandparents would drive to Chicago around the southern edge of Lake Michigan, they would note with pleasure the smoke rising from US Steel in Gary, Indiana—an improvement, they implied, over the shuttered mills of the 1930s.

Oil supply, too, is no long-term limit, as the failures of limits-to-growth predictions from the 1960s to the present have shown, and as fracked gas in Pennsylvania and oil sands in Alberta and deep discoveries in the Falklands/Malvinas seas and in the Australian outback are showing again, whenever the price of oil rises. The rhetorical triumph of fossil fuel over nuclear power has, to be sure, worsened global warming. But this too can be overcome (some reasonable people have argued) by realizing that even Chernobyl, incompetently managed by the USSR, resulted in few fatalities (a onetime event of fifty-six direct fatalities and a few thousand shortened lives, it is claimed, which is two or three orders of magnitude smaller than the coal-caused deaths in the same region yearly). Fukushima resulted in still fewer fatalities, and Three Mile Island, unless you believe conspiracy theories on the left, none. We can return to an improved nuclear power—or, if you are optimistic, and understandably resistant to the evidence about nuclear power, and determined to stay spooked about the One Big Disaster, which French nuclear engineering has obviated—you can wait for clean coal, on which Southern Illinois University is feverishly working.²⁶ The present engineering is clear. France, with 80 percent nuclear power for its electricity, the cheapest in Europe, has one-fifth the carbon pollution of neighboring, coal-fed-if-green-obsessed Germany. In any case, however you come down on nuclear power, on what principle is it that, when we see nothing but betterment behind us, we are to expect nothing but deterioration before us?

Consider more Rule-of-72 calculations: If we take 9 percent as the combined annual per-person growth rate in the 37 percent of world population living in China and India, the rest of the world could have literally zero growth per person and yet the world’s average growth per year of real income per person would be 0.37 × 9, or 3.3 percent, which is a little faster even than during the great postwar boom of 1950–1972. If the rest of the world were to grow merely at the subdued rates of 1973–2003 (namely, 1.56 percent per person per year conventionally measured, without allowance for improved quality), the world result, factoring in the Chinese and Indian marvels, would be (if the population share held up) (0.37 × 9.0) + (0.63 × 1.56), or 4.3 percent per year, the highest in history.²⁷ A rather lower sustained growth rate worldwide of, say, 4 percent per year per person would result in a doubling of the material welfare of the world’s average person within a short generation (72/4 = 18 years), with economies of scale in world invention kicking up the rate in addition. In two such generations, just thirty-six years, that would mean a quadrupling, which would raise the average real income in the world to the levels attained in 2012 in the United States, a country that for well over a century has sustained the world’s highest per-person income of any place larger than Norway. Pretty good. And it will be good for solving many if not all of the problems in the environment and in the society.

§

The resulting spiritual change, as I have noted, has been and will be as impressive as the material change. At the level of the purpose of a human life it is the more important outcome. For what is a man profited, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul? The sacred and meaning-giving virtues of hope, faith, and transcendent love for science or baseball or medicine or God are enabled by our riches in our present lives to bulk larger than the profane and practical virtues of prudence and temperance necessary among people living in extreme poverty. True, in our modern times even unworthy uses of our higher income—eating more Fritos, watching more reality TV—are better physically than in ancient times starving in beggary by the West Gate. Look again at falling death rates worldwide. But one would hope that the Great Enrichment would be used for higher purposes.

And, on the most hard-minded criteria, it has been, and will be. Enrichment leads to enrichment, not loss of one’s own soul. The American journalist and essayist H. L. Mencken, no softie, noted in 1917 à propos of Sister Carrie’s good fortune, that “with the rise from want to security, from fear to ease, comes an awakening of the finer perceptions, a widening of the sympathies, a gradual unfolding of the delicate flower called personality, an increased capacity for loving and living.”²⁸ Nor was the University of Iowa economist Frank Knight a softie, yet he too spoke in 1923 about such an increased capacity: “As the standard of living rises, the economic interests of people are transferred more and more out of the sphere of fundamental needs into that of aesthetic and social gratification and pure experimentation.”²⁹ And no blame attaches.

Know also a remarkable likelihood in our future. Begin with the sober scientific fact that sub-Saharan Africa has great genetic diversity, at any rate by the standard of the narrow genetic endowment of the ancestors of the rest of us, the small part of the race of Homo sapiens that left Mother Africa in dribs and drabs after about 70,000 BCE.³⁰ The lower diversity outside Africa comes from what geneticists call the founder effect, that is, the dying out of genetic lines in an isolated small group, such as those that ventured into west Asia and then beyond. The founder effect is merely a consequence of the small samples dribbling out, as against the big sample of the Homo-sapiens folk that stayed put in Africa. Any gene-influenced ability is therefore going to have more African extremes. The naturally tallest people and the naturally shortest people, for example, are in sub-Saharan Africa. The naturally quickest long-distance runners are in East Africa. The best basketball players descend from West Africans. In other words, below the Sahara the top end of the distribution of human abilities—physical and intellectual and artistic—is unusually thick. (Yet even in Africa the genetic variability in the Homo-sapiens race appears to have been thinned repeatedly before the time of the modest emigrations, by population crashes, such as when the super volcano Toba in Sumatra went off, suggestively also around 70,000 BCE.³¹ It reduced our Homo-sapiens ancestors to a few thousand—a close call.)

The thickness of sub-Saharan abilities at the high end of the distribution is a mere consequence of the mathematics. Greater diversity, which is to say in technical terms, higher variance, means that unusual abilities at both ends of the distribution, high and low, are more common. Exactly how much more depends on technical measures of genetic difference and their expression. The effect could be small or large depending on such measures and on the social relevance of the particular gene expression.

The high end is what matters for high culture. Sub-Saharan Africa, now at last leaning toward liberal democracy, has entered on the blade of the hockey stick, growing since 2001 in per-person real income by over 4 percent per year—doubling that is, every eighteen years. A prominent Nigerian investment manager working in London, Ayo Salami, expects an ideological shift among African leaders in favor of private trading as the generation of the deeply socialist anticolonialists born in the 1940s dies out.³² The 6- to 10-percent growth rate available to poor economies that wholeheartedly adopt liberalism will then do its work and yield educational opportunities for Africans now denied them.

The upshot? Genetic diversity in a rich Africa will yield a crop of geniuses unprecedented in world history. In a century or so the leading scientists and artists in the world will be black—at any rate if the diversity is as large in gene expression and social relevance as it is in, say, height or running ability. Today a Mozart in Nigeria follows the plow; a Bashō in Mozambique was recruited as a boy soldier; a Tagore in East Africa tends his father’s cattle; a Jane Austen in Congo spends her illiterate days carrying water and washing clothes. “Full many a gem of purest ray serene / The dark unfathom’d caves of ocean bear.”

§

We should expect during the next hundred years, then, a world spiritual change enabled by much higher real incomes. In fifty-four years at that conservative 4 percent per year, world income per person will rise by a factor of about eight—that is, 700 percent. The figure is not much below the factor of ten and the percentage of 900 by which conventionally measured income averaged over the rich and poor parts of the world has risen in the span of the fully four half-centuries since 1800. The growth rate will probably be higher than such a calculation assumes, when the increasing returns from discoveries shared worldwide is allowed for, and when more and more countries see the Chinese and especially the Indian light of liberty and dignity for the bourgeoisie, first lit in Holland and then in Britain. In fifty years, in other words, if tyrants, robbers, militarists, populists, Maoists, and the less thoughtful among socialists, regulators, end-state egalitarians, Bakuninite anarchists, and environmentalists do not break it, the businesslike blade of the hockey stick will have eliminated the worst of human ignorance and poverty, the malaria-crippled, soldier-raped, zero-schooling lives of the poorest among us. By the middle of our twenty-first century it will have resulted in a big bang of world culture, with sub-Saharan Africa by the early twenty-second century in the lead.

Notes

1. Robert Gordon 2012; Summers 2014; E. E. Gordon; Brynjolfsson and McFee 2014; Phelps 2013; Edward Gordon 2013; Sachs and Kotlikoff 2012; Cowen 2011, 2013.

2. Fogel 2005.

3. National Review, May 19, 2014.

4. Cowen 2013, pp. 4, 6.

5. Cowen 2013, p.20.

6. Cowen 2013, p. 39.

7. Cowen 2013, p. 3.

8. Mokyr 2013, 2014.

9. Pagano and Sbracia 2014; compare again Fogel 2005.

10. Macaulay 1830 (1881), pp. 186, 187.

11. Macaulay 1830 (1881), p. 185.

12. Phelps 2013, pp. viii, x, 14, 15, 21, and throughout.

13. Population shares from Maddison 2007, p. 378.

14. I realize that a Rule of 69 would be a little more accurate for continuous as against periodic (that is, annual or quarterly) compounding, and that perfectly accurate continuous compounding would involve e = 2.718281. . . . But 72 has lots of integer divisors, is pretty accurate except at very high (for example, 30 percent) interest rates, and is honored by history.

15. Wall Street Journal, October 7, 2013, p. A14.

16. Quoted in Brandt, Ma, and Rawski 2014, p. 99.

17. Simon 1981 (1996).

18. Wuetherick, personal communication, January 26, 2014.

19. Independent, June 17, 2014, p. 9.

20. Troesken 2014.

21. Barreca, Clay, and Tarr 2014, p. 5, table 1 (p. 37). I can remember my father shoveling coal in the basement of our apartment in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1947, and my mother can remember trying to keep clothing and windowsills clean in the face of coal heating.

22. The Danish philosopher of science Hans Siggaaurd Jensen tells me in a personal communication that windmills are designed with three vanes mainly because farmers have always used three vanes—one vane is from an engineering point of view more efficient.

23. Chapman 2014.

24. Stone 2013.

25. Denyer 2014.

26. Stone 2013, quoting studies following Chernobyl. One student of the matter concludes that “losses arising from Chernobyl were not of sufficient magnitude and the event was so long ago that the accident should not be definitive in decisions about investment in new reactors” (Simmons 2011, p. 12). Cleanup workers at Fukushima have no discernible rise in disease. See Rivkin 2013.

27. Maddison 2007, p. 383. I am aware that China and India should be removed from the 1973–2003 rate to make the hypothetical exact, which would make it a trifle lower—say, 4 percent. But 4 percent is still, as I say, unprecedented.

28. Mencken 1917 (2006), p. 63.

29. Knight 1923 (1997), p. 137.

30. For example, “The migration of modern humans out of Africa resulted in a population bottleneck [in the small bands of humans migrating] and a concomitant loss of genetic diversity”(Campbell and Tishkoff 2008); “all systems show greater gene diversity in Africans than in either Europeans or Asians” (Jorde et al. 2000, abstract). There is, they say, “a marked founder effect associated with the expansion out of Africa.”

31. Pritchard et al. 1999, pp. 1795, 1797.

32. Personal communication at HedgePo’s Global CIO Summit, Gleneagles, Scotland, October 23, 2014.

Yet in each of the forty-odd recessions since 1785, big or small, the real income of the poor and of the average wage earner was higher after the recession than it had been at the peak of the previous boom. In the three dozen or so ordinary recessions the previous peak was exceeded after the trough in about two years. Unhappily, it was not the case everywhere after the Great Recession of 2008. In the 1930s it had been even less so, disastrously, in the mismanaged recoveries from the Great Depression, especially in gold-obsessed France, Switzerland, and the United States. But in the Great Recession, despite the Schadenfreude expressed on the left, still echoing in such circles, the growth of real incomes did not stop permanently, even in the already developed and therefore necessarily slower-growing countries. Merely two years after the 2008 peak, real per-person income in the United States, for example, had grown beyond the peak (though not for the young, considering the job protections arranged by and for the middle-aged).¹ In the world as a whole, real income per person was fully 10 percent higher by 2011 than before the world crisis.² It had begun to exceed the 2008 peak by 2009. Here are some of the larger or more interesting countries arrayed by the years they took to match or exceed their previous peak in real per-person income (the peak being for most countries 2008, but 2006 for many of the worst performers):

§

The eminent Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm (1917–2012) gave in 2011 the conventional left-wing analysis of the Great Recession. In the peroration of a book republishing some of his essays, Hobsbawm decried how “the unlimited and increasingly high-tech economic growth in the pursuit of unsustainable profit produces global wealth, but at the cost of an increasingly dispensable factor of production, human labor, and, one might add, of the globe’s natural resources.”³

The details of his rhetoric—tacking on a concern for “the globe’s natural resources” with a “one might add”—show him, as Hobsbawm would have affirmed, to be an old leftist. He stopped being a dues-paying if unorthodox member of the Communist Party of Great Britain only a few months before it dissolved itself, in 1991. The “one might add” suggests a wariness toward the recent environmentalist modulation of the left, a modulation, as he suspiciously observed elsewhere in the same essay, “on a much more middle-class basis.” The environmentalist, anticorporatist, antiglobalist, usually middle-class radicals exemplified by the Occupy movement and its Spanish model, Los Indignatos, were, he wrote, “anti-capitalist, though without any clear idea of capitalism.” “It was almost impossible to identify what they proposed to substitute for it. This may explain a revival of what looks like Bakuninite anarchism.”⁴ From an Old Communist, “Bakuninite” is not a compliment.

But the main point of Hobsbawm’s sentence is to cast doubt on the Great Enrichment. The left after Marx and Engels has always been, as Hobsbawm himself was in all his writings, strangely alarmed by economic growth. They have been alarmed even though economic growth was what in historical fact enriched the poor, not the nationalizing policies of the old Labourites and of the Communist Party, or for that matter the war-making policies of the Conservative Party and of the fascists, or the redistributive policies of the Liberal Democrats and of the populists. The radical left and the traditionalist right see economic growth as a vine smothering the world, a monopolistic kudzu, bringing on the cultural triumph of the West. (The traditionalist right glories in the cultural triumph of the West, at any rate if the rightist is a Thatcherite Westerner.) The hard-left Indian writer Pankaj Mishra lists in parallel with Hobsbawm the usual antigrowth claims: “the cultural homogeneity, or the other Trojan viruses—uneven development, environmental degradation—built into the West’s operating software. . . . [And] the harshest aspects of American-style capitalism: the truncation of public services, de-unionization, the fragmenting and lumpenization of urban working classes, plus the ruthless suppression of the rural poor.”⁵ Thus Mahatma Gandhi admired the foot-treadle sewing machine but viewed it as one of the few good innovations. No electricity or flush toilets. Stop growth now.

The antigrowth left, with the antigrowth right, is mistaken. (It does not mistake, though, that the fruits of the Great Enrichment have made the proletariat into a petty bourgeoisie, lamentably uninterested in revolution, and in its vulgar way now able to enjoy the goods and services formerly available only to the better sort of people. And it has made the poor into department-store and now Walmart customers, lamentably uninterested in making their women spin their yarn and weave it into cloth by hand.) Growth’s “high-tech” feature, in Hobsbawm’s way of putting it, makes certain laborers “dispensable,” true—which is to say that people move from wretched assembly-line jobs at Ford near Detroit or at Volvo near Gothenburg to better jobs standing in a white coat monitoring robots, at the higher wages made possible by the higher tech. Or, mainly, they move to jobs outside the auto industry, the real rewards of which are now higher because people can buy the radically cheaper stuff made by the robots.

And if their new jobs are not higher paying it may be because the United Automobile Workers of America or the IF Metall union of Sweden had been able to extract monopoly profits from the company and therefore from consumers. Robert Reich, a reliable source of sweetly leftish errors of facts and ethics, declares that “the decline in unionization [of private companies] directly correlates with the decline of the portion of income going to the middle class.”⁶ But paying selected workers on the auto assembly line more than they can earn elsewhere, at the expense of other, sometimes poorer, workers buying autos, is hardly a formula for raising up the working class, or for that matter the middle class.

Walter Reuther, president of the United Auto Workers long ago, replied to a young manager enthusiastic about robots on the assembly line, “Tell me, those wonderful new robots—will they go out and buy cars from your company?” Reuther’s, and Reich’s, argument, though well intentioned, is fallacious, the “productionist” fallacy: trickle up. Employees of the auto companies are a trivial share of the auto-buying public. You can’t create prosperity merely by buying from your own employer, hoisting yourself up by your bootstraps. The left’s trickle-up economics is as illogical as is the right’s trickle-down version.

The robots themselves are made by people who buy cars. Compared with horses, cars themselves are “robots.” Yet the advent of cars did not produce mass unemployment because of insufficient demand for the output of blacksmiths and horse traders. Fundamentally, all tools—a blast furnace and a spinning jenny, or for that matter an Acheulean hand ax or a Mycenaean chariot wheel—are “robots,” that is, contrivances that make labor more productive. Reich listed in 2014 the usual lineup of villains allegedly driving down American wages: “Automation, followed by computers, software, robotics, computer-controlled machine tools and widespread digitization, further eroded jobs and wages.”⁷ No they didn’t. They raised real wages, correctly measured, according to the common sense that a human supplied with a better tool can produce more. If Rosie the Riveter gets better tongs to insert the rivets she gets higher wages, because employers have to compete for the now more productive worker, and can give her children more to eat. If everyone gets better tools they move out of old jobs and produce more for everybody in their new jobs with the new tools.

After all, the point of an economy is production for consumption, not protection of existing jobs using old tools—horses, candles, hand-controlled drill presses. Any contrivance substitutes for raw labor, as does the cactus spine that the Galapagos finches use to dig grubs out of tree bark. The finches use “robots.” In Afrikaans the word “robot” means what it means elsewhere, following its coinage from Czech (the original meaning is “required work”). But it is also the normal Afrikaans word for “traffic light.” The traffic light substitutes for the labor of a policeman with white gloves on a pedestal. And such substitutions are good, in the third act, for workers as a whole, not bad.

In the literal second act of Ibsen’s Pillars of Society (1877), one of the pillars, Karsten Bernick, the owner of a shipyard in Norway, scolds his foreman, Aune:

BERNICK. You don’t know how to work with the new machines I had installed—or, better, you won’t work with them. . . . Progress has to come from me, or it won’t come at all.

AUNE. I also want progress, Mr. Bernick.

BERNICK. Yes, for your own narrow faction, for the working class. . . .

AUNE. What right do technology and capitalism have to introduce all these new inventions before society’s trained a generation in how to use them? . . . I can’t stand seeing one good workingman after another turned out to go hungry, all on account of these machines.

BERNICK. Hm. When printing was invented, a lot of scribes went hungry.

AUNE. How’d you like it, Mr. Bernick, if you’d been a scribe at the time?⁸

Aune articulates the program on the left to educate an entire generation of people to work with all conceivable robots before any are installed and tried. He believes the future can be laid down because we already know how it will turn out. Aune’s program would stop the enrichment of the working class (the “narrow faction” constituting 90 percent of Norwegian society, then as now). By contrast, Bernick articulates the program on the right to let the bourgeoisie install whatever labor-abridging device it wishes and afterward train the workers, a bet on progress without quite knowing how it will turn out. In society’s third act Bernick’s has turned out to be the better program, because we pay the Bernicks to have such ideas, punishing them with bankruptcy when they are wrong. The Bernicks push for an unknowable future, which in the event has been massively good for the workers.

And indeed in the literal fourth act of the play an ethically renovated Bernick meets with gratifying cooperation from Aune:

BERNICK. I gave you too little time. [The ship under repair] needs a more careful job.

AUNE. Will do, Mr. Bernick. And with the new machines!

BERNICK. That’s the way. But take special care and pains with it now. There’s a lot with us that could stand some careful, painstaking renovation.⁹

It’s a happy ending, a trifle twee. But after all the new machines are in fact necessary for the happy result of enriching the workingmen.

§

The business profit that the left abhors—”in the pursuit of unsustainable profit,” said Hobsbawm—is indeed temporary, “unsustainable.” That’s good, not bad, and is the reason why profits on American industrial capital fell from their “unsustainable” levels of about 15 percent per year after World War II, when the United States was the only big industrial economy left standing, down to a normal level of about 10 percent per year on the capital sum invested from the 1960s on, a level typical since industrialization began two and a half centuries ago. The reward for venturing, for example, on robotization—that is, toolmaking—has been eroded time and again, I say again, by competition driving down the rewards to the inventors of weaving machines and rolling mills and assembly lines, and leaving the fruits for the rest of us in much cheaper clothes and girders and automobiles measured by the labor time to buy them.

The left speaks as though such competition among capitalists for the dollar of the worker-consumer, keeping down profits on capital, is a bad idea. From both the socialist left and the nationalist right the feeling seems to be that competition by businesspeople vying to give you what you want is the same thing as competition by violence. The feeling misleads. Marshall Field of Chicago formulated the motto of his department store as “Give the lady what she wants.” Giving the lady what she wants in a manner better than Goldblatt’s or Carson, Pirie, Scott is not an act of violence. It is an act of seduction, a form of love, admittedly a self-interested form. Harry Gordon Selfridge, trained in Chicago by Field, continued after 1909 the seduction in his London store, becoming rich by competing for the love of the ladies with his new business plan, driving down the price of glamour.¹⁰

In The Ladies’ Paradise (1882–1883), set in fictional 1864–1869, Zola makes a central character out of the perfected department store, a betterment dating from the 1850s, such as Le Bon Marché (“the good deal,” still on offer). The owner of the bettering store, M. Octave Mouret, is describing to a Baron Hartmann (= Haussmann) how he is driving the old-fashioned sellers of fabrics out of business. The implied author uses a cup of anticapitalism (from the author of Germinal), a dose of misogyny, a pinch of regional prejudice, and a soupçon of anti-Semitism. (The passage, however, is from the pen also of the defender of Captain Dreyfus; it is in free indirect style, and cannot be taken as a straightforward report on the opinions of Zola himself.) Mouret boasts, “Why, we can sell what we like when we know how to sell! There lies our triumph.” The implied author continues:

And with his southern spirit, he showed the new business at work. . . . From counter to counter the customer found herself . . . yielding to her longing for the useless and the pretty. . . . Right at the summit appeared the exploitation of woman. . . . It was woman that they were continually catching . . . yielding at first to reasonable purchases for the household, then tempted by their coquetry, then devoured. . . . Through the very gracefulness of his gallantry, Mouret thus allowed to appear the brutality of a Jew. . . .

“Once have the woman on your side,” whispered he to the baron, and laughing loudly, “you could sell the very world.”¹¹

Unlike Balzac or Dickens or many other of the clerisy, Zola was not anticapitalist out of mere ignorance about how trade-tested betterment worked. In his laboriously gathered notes for The Ladies’ Paradise (he spent a month wandering in Le Bon Marché and its competitors overhearing conversations and interviewing its staff) he wrote, “A department store [smashes] all the small commerce of a neighborhood . . . but I would not weep for them, on the contrary: for I want to show the triumph of modern activity,” of which Zola in his rational optimism by 1882 approved. The local drapers, like the local hardware stores facing Menards and Home Depot, “are no longer of their age, too bad for them!”¹² And good for the consumer.

The sociologist Georg Simmel—about the economy often more penetrating than his contemporary Max Weber—noted in 1908 that “usually, the poisonous, divisive, destructive effects of competition are stressed” (though it is creative destruction):

But, in addition. . . . competition compels the wooer who has a co-wooer, . . . to go out to the wooed, come close to him, establish ties with him. . . . To be sure, this often happens at the price of the competitor’s own dignity and of the objective value of his product [that is, by driving down the price]. . . . [Yet] it achieves what usually only love can do: the divination of the innermost wishes of the other, even before he himself becomes aware of them. . . . Modern competition is described as the fight of all against all, but at the same time it is the fight of all for all.¹³

Notes

1. See Measuring Worth.

2. Short 2012, especially his chart “Real GDP per Capita Percent Off High,” extrapolated into 2013; and for international comparisons, 2008–2012, http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.PCAP.CD.

3. Hobsbawm 2011, p. 419 (the last page). I knew Hobsbawm a little when we were colleagues in the Department of History at Birkbeck College back in 1975–1976, and I have long admired his historical scholarship, without always agreeing with it.

4. Hobsbawm 2011, p. 417.

5. Mishra 2011, p. 12.

6. Reich 2014.

7. Reich 2014.

8. Ibsen 1877 (1965), p. 43.

9. Ibsen 1877 (1965), p. 117.

10. Postrel has written the book on glamour (2013).

11. Zola 1882–1883 (1992), pp. 68–70.

12. Quoted in Kristin Ross’s introduction to Zola 1882–1883 (1992), pp. xi–xii; the italics are Zola’s.

13. Simmel 1908 (1955), pp. 61–62; his italics.

Widening inequality still hampers upward mobility. That’s simply because the ladder is far longer now. The distance between its bottom and top rungs, and between every rung along the way, is far greater. Anyone ascending it at the same speed as before will necessarily make less progress upward.¹

Reich is mistaken. Horwitz summarizes the results of a study by Julia Isaacs on individual mobility 1969–2005: “82% of children of the bottom 20% in 1969 had [real] incomes in 2000 that were higher than what their parents had in 1969. The median [real] income of those children of the poor of 1969 was double that of their parents.”² There is no doubt that the children and grandchildren of the English coal miners of 1937, whom Orwell describes “traveling” underground, bent over double walking a mile or more to get to the coal face, at which point they started to get paid, are much better off than their fathers or grandfathers. There is no doubt that the children and granchildren of the Dust Bowl refugees in California are. Steinbeck chronicled in The Grapes of Wrath their worst and terrible times. A few years later many of the Okies got jobs in the war industries, and many of their children went to university. Some became university professors who think that the poor are getting poorer.

The usual way of talking about poverty relies on the percentage distribution of income, staring fixedly for example at an official-sounding but relative “poverty line.” As the progressive Australian economist Peter Saunders observes, however, such a definition of poverty “automatically shift upwards whenever the real incomes [and hence the poverty line] are rising.”³ The poor are always with us, but merely by definition, the opposite of the Lake Wobegon effect—it’s not that all the children are above average, but that there is a bottom fifth or tenth or whatever, always, in any distribution whatsoever. Of course.

It’s not higher math. The philosopher Harry Frankfurt noted long ago that “calculating the size of an equal share [of income in the style of poverty lines or Gini coefficients] is plainly much easier than determining how much a person needs in order to have enough”—”much easier,” as in dividing GDP by population and reporting with irritation that some people earn, or get, more.⁴ It is the simplified ethics of the schoolyard, or dividing a cake among friends: “That’s unfair.”

But as Frankfurt also noted, inequality is in itself ethically irrelevant: “Economic equality is not, as such, of particular moral importance.” In ethical truth we wish to raise up the poor to “enough” for them to function in a democratic society and to have full human lives. It doesn’t matter ethically whether the poor have the same number of diamond bracelets and Porsche automobiles as do owners of hedge funds. It does, however, matter ethically whether they have the same opportunities to vote or to learn to read or to have a roof over their heads. The Illinois state consitution of 1970 embodied the confusion between the condition of the working class and the gap between rich and poor, claiming in its preamble that it seeks to “eliminate poverty and inequality.”⁵ We had better focus directly on what we actually want to achieve, which is equal sustenance and dignity, eliminating poverty, acquiring for all people what the economist Amartya Sen and the philosopher Martha Nussbaum call capabilities.⁶ The size of the Gini coefficient or the share of the bottom 10 percent is irrelevant to the noble and ethically relevant and actually attainable purpose of raising the poor to a condition of dignity, Frankfurt’s “enough.”

The Liberal Lady Glencora Palliser (née M’Cluskie) in Anthony Trollope’s political novel Phineas Finn (1867–1868) declares, “Making men and women all equal. That I take to be the gist of our political theory,” as against the Conservative delight in rank and privilege. But one of the novel’s radicals in the Cobden-Bright-Mill mold (“Joshua Monk”) sees the ethical point more clearly, and replies to her: “Equality is an ugly word, and frightens,” as indeed it had long frightened the political class in Britain, traumatized by wild French declarations for égalité, and by the example of American egalitarianism (well . . . egalitarianism for male, straight, white, Anglo, middle-aged, high-income, nonimmigrant, New England mainline Protestants). The motive of the true Liberal, Monk continues, should not be equality but “the wish of every honest [that is, honorable] man . . . to assist in lifting up those below him.”⁷ Such an ethical goal was to be achieved, Monk the libertarian liberal would argue, not by direct programs of redistribution, nor by regulation, nor by trade unions, but by free trade and rights for women and tax-financed education—and in the event above all by the Great Enrichment, which finally in the late nineteenth century started sending real wages sharply up, Europe-wide. The absolute condition of the poor has been raised overwhelmingly more by the Great Enrichment than by regulation or redistribution. As the economic historians Ian Gazeley and Andrew Newell concluded in their 2010 study of “the reduction, almost to elimination, of absolute poverty among working households in Britain between 1904 and 1937”: “The elimination of grinding poverty among working families was almost complete by the late thirties, well before the Welfare State.” Their chart 2 exhibits weekly income distributions in 1886 prices at 1886, 1906, 1938, and 1960, showing the disappearance of the inflation-adjusted classic line of misery for British workers, “’round about a pound a week.”⁸

Yet the left works overtime, out of the best of motives, to rescue its ethically irrelevant focus on Gini coefficients and the relative poverty line. A recent example of the leftish labor is the book by a French economist I have mentioned, Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century (translated 2014), which was greeted with squeals of delight by the American and British left, and rapidly rose to number one on the New York Times best-seller list. Piketty claims that relative poverty is what matters, whether or not the poorest improve. “Just as we’ve been saying!” the left cried. “Eliminate poverty and inequality.”

Much of the research on the economics of inequality stumbles on this simple ethical point, focusing on measures of relative inequality such as the Gini coefficient rather than on measures of the absolute welfare of the poor, on inequality rather than poverty, having elided the two. Speaking of the legal philosopher Ronald Dworkin’s egalitarianism, Frankfurt observed that Dworkin in fact, and ethically, “cares principally about the [absolute] value of people’s lives, but he mistakenly represents himself as caring principally about the relative magnitudes of their economic assets.”⁹ Dworkin and the left commonly miss the ethical point, which is the liberal, Joshua Monk one of lifting up the poor. By redistribution? By equality in diamond bracelets? By codes for buildings or unions for trades? No: by the dramatic increase in the size of the pie, which has historically brought the poor to 90 or 95 percent of “enough,” as against the small percent of enough attainable by redistribution without enlarging the pie. The economic historian Robert Margo noted in 1993 that before the Civil Rights Act “blacks could not aspire to high-paying white collar jobs” because of discrimination. Yet African Americans had prepared themselves, by their own efforts, up from slavery, to perform in such jobs if given a chance. “Middle-class blacks owe their success in large part to themselves,” and to the increasingly educated and productive society they lived in. “What if the black labor force, poised on the eve of the Civil Rights Movement, was just as illiterate, impoverished, rural, and Southern as when Lincoln freed the slaves? . . . Would we have as large a black middle class as we do today? Plainly not.”¹⁰

Piketty is alarmed by what he claims is the force of interest on inherited wealth causing inequality to increase. In 2014 he declared to the BBC’s Evan Davis in an interview that “money tends to reproduce itself.” Yet his own data suggest that only in the United States and the United Kingdom (with Canada) has inequality of wealth increased recently—a puzzle if money tends to reproduce itself, always, as a general law governed by his Ricardo-plus-Marx inequality-producing accumulation of financial capital, Piketty’s master algebra of r > g. Inequality in fact goes up and down in great waves, 1800 to the present, which also doesn’t figure in such a tale. Once a Piketty-wave starts it would, according to his logic, never stop, which means we should have been overwhelmed by an inequality-tsunami in 1800 CE or 1000 CE or for that matter 2000 BCE.

Nor does Piketty acknowledge entrepreneurial profit, the trade-tested betterment that through the Bourgeois Deal has made the poor rich. He focuses on the evil of rich people having seven Rolex watches by mere inheritance. Liliane Bettencourt, heiress to the L’Oréal fortune, in 2014 the wealthiest woman in the world, who “has never worked a day in her life, saw her fortune grow exactly as fast as that of [the admittedly bettering] Bill Gates.” Ugh. Which is the sum of Piketty’s ethical analysis.

The Australian economists Geoffrey Brennan, Gordon Menzies, and Michael Munger make a similar argument in a recent paper, written in advance of Piketty’s book, that inheritance inter vivos of human capital is bound to exacerbate Gini-coefficient inequality because “for the first time in human history richer parents are having fewer children. . . . Even if the increased opulence continues, it will be concentrated in fewer and fewer hands.”¹¹ The rich will send their one boy, intensively tutored in French and mathematics, to Sydney Grammar School and on to Harvard. The poor will dissipate what little they have among their supposedly numerous children.

Yet if on account of Adam Smith’s hoped-for “universal opulence which extends itself to the lowest ranks of the people” all have access to excellent education—which is a proper subject for social policy—and if the poor are so rich (because the Great Enrichment) that they too have fewer children, which is the case, then the tendency to rising variance will be attenuated.¹² The economist Tyler Cowen reminds me, further, that “low” birth rates also include zero children, which would make lines die out—as indeed they often did, even in royal families, well nourished. Nonexistent children, such as those of Grand Duke of Florence Gian Gastone de’ Medici in 1737, can’t inherit either financial or human capital.

And the effect of inherited wealth on children is commonly to remove their ambition, as one can witness daily on Rodeo Drive, or in Bettencourt’s daughter. Laziness from being rich too early is a powerful equalizer. Imagine if you had inherited ten million dollars at age eighteen, before your character was fully formed. It would have been an ethical disaster, as it regularly is for the children of the rich. However many diamond bracelets they have, most rich children don’t bother to suffer through, say, a PhD in economics. Why bother? David Rockefeller did, to be sure (University of Chicago, 1940), but his grandfather was unusually lucky in transmitting a poor boy’s values and a life-long philanthropist’s tastes to his son and then to his six John-Junior-begotten grandchildren. We prosperous parents of the Great Enrichment can properly worry about our children’s and especially our grandchildren’s incentives to undertake such efforts as a PhD, or serious entrepreneurship, or for that matter serious charity (Bettencourt’s charitable foundation, by contrast with the Rockefellers’, is comically niggardly, endowed with only one-half of 1 percent of her wealth).

And it is commonly the case, contrary to the focus of Piketty and of Brennan, Menzies, and Munger on inheritance, that the people with more money got their more by being more productive, for the benefit of us all—getting that PhD, for example, or being excellent makers of automobiles or excellent writers of novels or excellent throwers of touchdown passes or excellent providers of cell phones, such as Carlos Slim of Mexico (with a little boost, it may be, from corrupting the Mexican parliament). That Frank Sinatra became richer than most of his fans was not an ethical scandal. The “Wilt Chamberlain” example devised by the philosopher Robert Nozick says that if we pay voluntarily to get the benefit of clever CEOs or gifted athletes there is no further ethical issue.¹³ The unusually high rewards to the Frank Sinatras and Jamie Dimons and Wilt Chamberlains come from the much wider trading during the age of globalization and of mechanical reproduction, not from theft.¹⁴

For the poor in the countries that have allowed the ethical change to happen, Frankfurt’s “enough” has largely come to pass. “Largely,” I say, and much more than alternative systems have allowed. I do not say “completely” or “as much as every honest person would wish.” But I have noted that the contrast between the condition of the working class in the United States and in such avowedly social-democratic countries as the Netherlands or Sweden is not in fact large, despite what you have heard from journalists and politicians who have not seriously looked into the actual statistics or have not seriously experienced more than one country. The social safety net is, in practice, rather similar among rich countries. But in any event the safety net, with or without holes, is not the main lifter of the poor in the United States, the Netherlands, Switzerland, Japan, Sweden, or the others. The way to the lift is the Great Enrichment.

Boudreaux noted that a literal billionaire who participated in a seminar of his didn’t look much different from an “impoverished” graduate student giving a paper about Gini coefficients. “In many of the basic elements of life, nearly every American is as well off as Mr. Bucks [his pseudonym for the billionaire]. If wealth differences between billionaires and ordinary Americans are barely visible in the most routine aspects of daily life, then to suffer distress over a Gini coefficient is to unwisely elevate ethereal abstraction over palpable reality.”¹⁵ Mr. Bucks undoubtedly had more houses and more Rolls Royces than the graduate student. One may ask, though, the cheeky but always relevant question: So what?

People are actually and ethically looking for a standard of what is enough for a dignified life in a given society. How much dough is enough? To the Dust Bowl refugees the minstrel Woody Guthrie sang, “California’s a garden of Eden, / A paradise to live in or see. / But believe it or not / You won’t find it so hot / If you ain’t got the do re mi.” You need the dough in the do re mi to buy the roof and the toilet and the food at California prices. Therefore Peter Saunders and others such as Horwitz and the theorists of capabilities propose to look at the goods poor people can buy and the rights they have. They ask: What’s enough? Saunders determined “the items that are widely regarded as essential in today’s [Australian] society,” such as a telephone, a washing machine [thus the Washing Line], a separate bed for each child.¹⁶ The “widely regarded” in his study comes from an opinion poll of Australians. If things go well by such a measure the level of Australian poverty can possibly fall. With an ever-rising relative poverty line it can never fall, which is nice for pessimists but silly as science or policy. If one uses a Gini coefficient, the measure of inequality becomes the level of diamond-encrusted-watch owning, excesses that are annoying and blameworthy but ethically irrelevant so far as state compulsion is concerned. After all, many private actions are blameworthy without triggering justifiable interference by the state—listening to NPR without pledging, or failing once again to go to the gym, or not eating your vegetables. Measuring rather the goods poor people can buy and the rights they have, public policy (that is, state compulsion) can focus on what actually matters to dignity, such as making schools work well, improving medical care, ending the War on Drugs, preventing voter suppression, changing the trade union–determined building code so that apartments can be built that the poor can occupy in a dignified way at a low rent.

Using Saunders’s survey, for example, between 2006 and 2010 (which includes the world’s Great Recession years, though at the time Australia was having a mining boom selling to China), the average number of items, out of the twenty-four the Australian public viewed as “essential,” that were absent in single-parent households fell from 3.6 to 2.9. If things had got worse, with the number of absent essentials rising to 6.9 instead of falling to 2.9, Australians would have a justifiable basis for alarm, and some indication of what to do about it.

The postmodern French philosopher worshipped on the left, Michel Foucault (1926–1984), provides unlikely support for such thinking. Daniel Zamora, a Belgian sociologist, in an interview about his 2014 book Critiquer Foucault (Criticizing Foucault) reports that

Foucault himself met with [the conservative French economist Lionel] Stoléru several times when Stoléru was a technical advisor on the staff of [the right-wing French president] Valéry Giscard D’Estaing. An important argument runs through [Stoléru’s] work and directly attracted Foucault’s attention: in the spirit of [Milton] Friedman, it draws a distinction between a policy that seeks equality (socialism) and a policy that simply aims to eliminate poverty without challenging disparities (liberalism). . . . [Stoléru wrote:] “I believe the distinction between absolute poverty and relative poverty is in fact the distinction between capitalism and socialism.”

Indeed. Solving absolute poverty came in fact from the Great Enrichment, and attempting to solve a logically insoluble relative poverty resulted in slow growth and the encouragement of an insatiable envy.

The result is general. Despite the clamor about poverty lines and Gini coefficients, nowhere in the past few decades except in war-of-all-against-all countries such as Somalia have conditions measured by a correct standard of “enough” worsened, even in notably unequal places such as Brazil, South Africa, Chile, China, or the United States. They have got better.

Notes

1. Reich 2014.

2. Isaacs 2007, quoted in Horwitz 2013, p. 7.

3. Saunders 2013, p. 214.

4. Frankfurt 1987, pp. 23–24.

5. ilga.gov/commission/lrb/conent.htm.

6. Sen 1985; Nussbaum and Sen 1993.

7. Trollope 1867–1868, vol. 1, pp. 126, 128.

8. Gazeley and Newell 2010, abstract, p. 19, chart 2 (p. 17).

9. Frankfurt 1987, p. 34; my italics.

10. Margo 1993, pp. 68, 65, 69.

11. Brennan, Menzies, and Munger 2013.

12. Smith 1776, 1.1.10, p. 22.

13. Nozick 1974, p. 164.

14. Benjamin 1936.

15. Boudreaux 2001.

16. Saunders 2013, pp. 213, 215.

José and Marie are 3-year-old twins. Marie is playing with a doll, which José would like to take and throw repeatedly across the room. Just for the hell of it. He says, “Gimme!” Marie says, “No!” He turns to Mommy and says, “Mommy, make Marie give it to me!” Mommy says, “No, José. That’s Marie’s doll.” José is about to simply grab the doll, but another way occurs to him: “Marie, I’ll give you my truck to play with if you give me your doll to play with.” Marie agrees, and the play goes on peacefully.

That is to say, one citizen stealing from another is bad. Appealing to the state to steal from one citizen to give to another is also bad. What’s good? Voluntary exchange.

Every Wednesday from 12:00 to 12:30 the U.K. Prime Minister has to answer questions from other members of Parliament. If he dodges a question, the members shout or laugh derisively. It’s glorious, from the place, with all its loony British traditions, that gave us our liberties.

Sometimes the questions are grave deliberations on policy for the nation, such as whether the U.K. should join the USA in bombing Iran. But when I was listening last night, it struck me that the great bulk of the questions are like José appealing to Mommy to take from Marie and give to him. The member of Parliament from Durnford will ask—always addressing the Speaker of the House to avoid direct insults and confrontations—“Mr. Speaker, will the Prime Minister order his Minister of Transport to give Durnford a new highway?” or “Mr. Speaker, will the Prime Minister arrange tariff protection to prevent U.K. people from buying from foreigners what we make in Durnford?” To get the money for the new road, someone needs to be coerced to pay the taxes. To get the protection against competition, someone needs to be coerced not to buy abroad.

Now, of course, the appeals to the coercive powers of His Majesty’s Government arise from democracy. The members of Parliament are elected, and want to keep their jobs. The voters, like 3-year-olds, expect their elected member to get them favors from the Government. Marie’s doll.

On November 3, 1774, the great quasi-liberal conservative member of Parliament, Edmund Burke, delivered his immortal “Speech to the Electors of Bristol.” He was responding to a claim by his opponent in an election that a representative ought to be, as the members at Question Time themselves show themselves mainly to be, mere servants of the self-interested opinions of their voters. Burke declared, “Your representative owes you, not his industry only, but his judgment; and he betrays, instead of serving you, if he sacrifices it to your opinion. . . . Parliament is a deliberative assembly of one nation, with one interest, that of the whole; where not local purposes, not local prejudices, ought to guide, but the general good, resulting from the general reason of the whole.”

How can we reconcile democracy with liberalism? Grow up. Become ethical adults, not 3-year-olds. Stop expecting everything from the state. Stop appealing to Mommy for anything but justice as she sees it. Not Marie’s doll.

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

Since 1776, there has been a 3,000% explosion in the average real income per person in the world.

Nothing earlier came remotely close.

It was caused not by the usual suspects of investment or exploitation, but by liberty inspiring a flowering of human creativity—in the arts and sciences, and in the economy.

Though Brazilians and many other Latin Americans are uneasily aware that their economies lag some, and sometimes a lot, the Great Enrichment is nonetheless evident everywhere from the Border to Tierra del Fuego, from Santiago in Chile to Recife in Brazil.

The Latin Lag can be overcome. Brazil, like much of Latin America, needs essential liberalism to do it.

Check out my new book, Liberdade: 100 Conversation Starters on Liberalism, Latin America, and Brazil

The capitalist achievement does not typically consist in providing more silk stockings for queens but in bringing them within the reach of factory girls in return for steadily decreasing amounts of effort. . . . The capitalist process, not by coincidence but by virtue of its mechanism, progressively raises the standard of life of the masses.¹

By now Schumpeter’s point is still more obviously correct. The “mechanism” he had in mind is the entry of fresh entrepreneurs, driving the labor-hour price of things down, down, down, to the annoyance of the first betterers, who would rather have patent monopolies, such as Thomas Edison persistently sought.

W. Michael Cox and Richard Alm in 1999 documented the driving down, and recently Donald Boudreaux has reprised their argument using various catalogues from Sears, Roebuck (a company itself overtaken by the entry of entrepreneurs from Target, Walmart, Best Buy, Home Depot, Nordstrom’s Rack, and other betterers, but in 1956 still dominant): “Sears’ lowest-priced no-frost refrigerator-freezer in 1956,” notes Boudreaux, “had 9.6 cubic feet of space, and sold for $219.95 (in 1956 dollars).”

Because the typical production-line worker back then earned $1.89 per hour (in 1956 dollars), an average American in the mid-1950s had to toil 116 hours to buy this refrigerator-freezer. Today, Home Depot sells a similar refrigerator-freezer for $298 (in 2013 dollars). Earning $20.14 per hour, an average American worker today works 15 hours to buy that appliance.²

That’s 116 hours versus merely 15, an 87 percent decline in the real cost of living by work. The widespread notion that times were better for ordinary Americans in the 1950s than they are now could use some fact checking.

Yes, the rich got richer, 1800 to the present—they too spend less to buy a much better color television now than they did in 1975, and get a much better commute in their chauffeur-driven vehicle now than in 1800. But so did the poor get richer, much richer, at first in the late nineteenth century in such pioneering countries as Britain and France, and then in a wider world. Even in 1776 Adam Smith could claim that because of the elaborate division of labor and the trade that accompanied it “the very meanest person in a civilized country” had the advantage of “the easy and simple manner in which he is commonly accommodated”:

Compared, indeed, with the more extravagant luxury of the great, his accommodation must no doubt appear extremely simple and easy; and yet it may be true, perhaps, that the accommodation of an European prince does not always so much exceed that of an industrious and frugal peasant, as the accommodation of the latter exceeds that of many an African king, the absolute master of the lives and liberties of ten thousand naked savages.³

Smith knew next to nothing about African kings, and one may doubt the literal truth of the comparison in 1776 (it had become a common figure of argument after the Age of Exploration, used for example by John Locke). But the Great Enrichment made it true.

The subsequent enrichment of the very meanest person in Scotland was, I have frequently noted, 9,900 percent. It can only be explained by vastly greater productivity per worker, which is to say by a startling speeding up since 1800 of trade-tested betterment. (The figure of 9,900 percent derives from the fifth-grade arithmetic I mentioned earlier. A factor of 100, if expressed as a percentage change over the base, is calculated as 100 minus the base of 1 [in the year 1800], which is by the subtraction 99, divided by the same base, 1, but then multiplied by 100 to get it into per hundred terms, that is, [(100 – 1)/1] × 100 percent, or 9,900 percent. The exactitude of the 9,900 percent is silly: we do not know such a figure even to two significant digits. Its non-silly import, though, and the reason I’ll keep using it, is that we have in fact benefited mightily from a very large percentage increase of productivity over the base in 1800.)

One thousand percent, 5,000 percent, 10,000 percent—take your pick. It is anyway orders of magnitude of uplift that cannot be explained by little uplifts from improved static efficiency or little uplifts by reductions of worker exploitation. The Great Enrichment did not happen because of union demands or government regulation or routine exploitations or routine investments. Such routines, about which so much politics of left and right turns (“Raise the minimum wage!” “Protect the investing class!”), can’t deliver 9,900 percent, whether one-by-one or in combination. If they could, the Great Enrichment would have happened earlier and elsewhere, since thrift and exploitation and investment, and for that matter occasional outbreaks of democratic demands for higher wages, are routine in human history.

The uplifting since 1800, in other words, was distinctly positive-sum, a free lunch, the sort of event the management theorist Mary Parker Follett dubbed in 1925 a win-win. She elsewhere said that the best democracy is not the rule of the majority but a search for agreement.⁴ The easiest way of finding agreement is to find a win-win deal, which economists call “Pareto improving.” The deals were possible because of radically new ideas, such as the betterments of steam and steel or of fertilizer and antibiotics or of voting and education—betterments, and voting and education, not encouraged in an old world long in the grip of an anxious and arrogant elite able to enforce its self-protectionisms. The economic and political betterments, and the intellectual children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren of the betterments, were imagined, produced, financed, tested, and sold by the middle class.

It didn’t happen, I repeat, because of elite science.⁵ As Ó Gráda put it recently, “The foremost inventor-entrepreneurs of the Industrial Revolution were of rather modest, artisanal origins.”⁶ Elite science made us richer only quite late in economic history, long after 1900. And anyway the eventual successes of useful science itself came from a Scottish equality and a resulting Great Enrichment that gave British design engineers and German organic chemists from modest backgrounds a shot at fame and riches. Without liberty and dignity for ordinary people the anxious elite would have suppressed commercial improvements, such as Wedgwood’s pottery (Wedgwood despised patents, and only had one) or Edison’s movie camera (his patent on movies, among the fully 1,093 he acquired, was partly overturned only in 1902, and for good in 1917), which in the event were brought within the reach of factory girls in return for steadily decreasing amounts of effort.

The Great Enrichment after 1800 came from human creativity unleashed by liberty and dignity for ordinary people, through trade-tested betterment resting on a new equality in the eyes of others, and spread by the overturning of monopoly in competition. On the supply side, the creativity of ordinary people now able to become extraordinary was released. On the demand side, the tastes of ordinary people were indulged, in cheap watches and Model T Fords and no-press shirts. The philosopher Karl Popper called the trade-oriented novelty of the modern world the “open society,” and the politico-economic theorists Douglass North, John Wallis, and Barry Weingast call it the “open-access” society.⁷ The ORDO liberals of pre- and postwar Germany called it “a competitive order” or a “social market economy” (which, however, they believed required a strong government to keep it from descending into monopolies, as indeed it had in Germany).⁸ Whatever it is called, such a society, thronging with free conversations easily joined, made for a creativity that disturbed the rules of the game—rules designed, unsurprisingly, by the elite in favor of the old rich. The open economy created numerous nouveaux riches, such as James Watt and Robert Fulton. Both eventually failed to protect their monopolies. Fernand Braudel argued to the contrary that capitalism was inherently and permanently monopolistic. But les nouveaux hommes were themselves competed against by still newer rich, to the benefit, in the third act, of us all, à la Schumpeter and Nordhaus. A patent or copyright monopoly, to be sure, must be broken for the poor to benefit. But aside from overlawyered definitions of so-called intellectual property, for the most part it has been.⁹

The mechanism that raised up the poor is not a trickle down of expenditures from rich people. One hears such an argument from the right—even, alas, from Adam Smith on a rare bad day, in one of merely two uses in his published writings of the phrase “invisible hand.”¹⁰ One hears too a Keynesian form of trickle up from the left, as from the well-meaning Robert Reich in the Nation magazine: “If consumers don’t have adequate purchasing power, businesses have no incentive to expand or hire additional workers [note Reich’s desideratum: jobs]. Because the rich spend a smaller proportion of their incomes than the middle class and the poor, it stands to reason that as a larger and larger share of the nation’s total income goes to the top, consumer demand is dampened.”¹¹

Reich’s reasoning supposes that the point of an economy is jobs, jobs, jobs, and that spending assures jobs. The writer Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry calls such a view “productionist,” as against “creativist,” and admits (as I do) that in the very short run it is true.¹² The economy in the short run is indeed a treadmill of production and consumption that can stop running if whacked with a sledgehammer, as for example the Greek economy was in 2015 when the banks were closed. In a year of mass unemployment caused by great whackings—1933 in the United States and Germany, for example—the Keynesian trickle up from expenditure is correct. By all means, dig holes and fill them up and then dig them again, and pay the diggers/fillers with newly printed currency. (On the other hand, estimates of the “multiplier” on government expenditure even in 1933 have come in at below 1.0.) But in a more typical year of mismatched jobs and skills, the Keynesian argument is incorrect. Nor is it correct from peak to peak of the business cycle, for which only a creativist view makes economic sense. In the long run we get better off only by betterment, not by spending.¹³ If spending worked, we could enrich ourselves endlessly by printing money and handing it out in steadily increasing sums to those high-spending poor—an unlimited miracle achieved merely by printing little portraits of George Washington. In nonmiraculous economies, during the long run and even in most of the short run, spending on an auto or TV has an opportunity cost of spending on food or education. There is no free lunch springing from a trickle down (as the Republicans say), or a trickle up (as the Democrats say), from mere spending. We get better by getting smarter, only, not by miraculous trickles up or down.

The Schumpeterian mechanism is the long-run one of open competition of betterments among the temporarily rich in Riverside orange groves and Manchester cotton mills and Chicago apartment developments and Swedish furniture stores that radically cheapens food and clothing and housing and furniture. It has nothing to do with trickling. Such openness to competition after 1800, and the cooperation that betterments require, made the economies that adopted it startlingly more productive, creating ten times, thirty times, a hundred times more goods and services, and to the poorest among us.

§

Even in the already-advanced countries in recent decades there has been no complete stagnation of real incomes for ordinary people. You will have heard that “wages are flat” or that “the middle class is shrinking.” But you also know that you should not believe everything you read in the papers.¹⁴ This is not to say that no one in rich countries such as the United States is unskilled, addicted, badly parented, discriminated against, or simply horribly unlucky. George Packer’s recent The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America (2013) and Barbara Ehrenreich’s earlier Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America (2001) carry on a long and distinguished tradition of telling the bourgeoisie about the poor, going back to James Agee and Walker Evans’s Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1944), George Orwell’s The Road to Wigan Pier (1937), Jack London’s The People of the Abyss (1903), Jacob Riis’s How the Other Half Lives: Studies among the Tenements of New York (1890), and, the fount of such writings, Friedrich Engels’s The Condition of the Working Class in England (1845).

They are not making it up. Anyone who reads such books is wrenched out of a comfortable ignorance about the other half. The wrenching comes also in fictional form, from John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath (1939) or James T. Farrell’s Studs Lonigan (1932–1935) or Richard Wright’s Native Son (1940) or, in Europe, among the many observers of the Two Nations since the beginning of such a sensibility in the 1840s, Émile Zola’s Germinal (1885), which made many of us into socialists. The wrenching is salutary. It is said that Winston Churchill, scion of the aristocracy, believed that most English poor people lived in rose-covered cottages. He couldn’t imagine back-to-backs in Salford, with the communal outhouse at the end of the row. Wake up, Winston.

But waking up does not imply despairing, or proposing the overthrow of the System, if the System is in fact over the long run enriching the poor, or at any rate enriching the poor better than those other systems that have been tried from time to time. Righteous, if inexpensive, indignation inspired by survivor’s guilt about alleged “victims” of something called “capitalism,” and envious anger at the silly consumption by the rich, does not invariably yield betterment for the poor. Remarks such as “there are still poor people” or “some people have more power than others,” though claiming the ethical high-ground for the speaker, are neither deep nor clever. Repeating them, or nodding wisely at their repetition, or buying Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century to display on your coffee table, does not make you a good person. You are a good person if you actually help the poor. Open a business. Invest in a grocery store in an urban food desert. Invent a new battery. Vote for better schools. Adopt a Pakistani orphan. Volunteer to feed people at Grace Church on Saturday mornings. The offering of counterproductive policies, or the making of indignant declarations to your husband after finishing an article in the Sunday New York Times Magazine, does not help the poor.

The economy and society of the United States are not in fact unwinding, and people are in fact getting by better than they did before. The children of the sharecropping families in Hale County, Alabama whom Agee and Evans objectified, to the lasting resentment of the older members of the families, are doing pretty well, earning money, many of their children going to college.¹⁵ That even over the long run there remain some poor people does not mean that the system is not working for the poor, so long as the condition of the poor is continuing to improve, as it is, contrary to the newspaper stories and the pessimistic books, and so long as the percentage of the desperately poor is heading toward zero, as it is nationally in the United States, and worldwide. That people still sometimes die in hospitals does not mean that medicine is to be replaced by witch doctors, so long as death rates are falling and so long as the death rate would not fall under the care of the witch doctors.

And poverty is indeed falling, even recently, even in already rich countries. If income is correctly measured to include better working conditions, more years of education, better health care, longer retirement years, larger transfers such as Social Security and Medicaid, and above all the rising quality of the larger number of goods, the real income of the poor has risen, if at a slower pace than in the 1950s—which followed the wretched time-outs of the Great Depression and World War II.¹⁶ The economist Angus Deaton notes that “once the rebuilding is done [as it was fully in, say, 1970], new growth relies on inventing new ways of doing things and putting them into practice, and this turning over of virgin soil is harder than replowing an old furrow.”¹⁷ In 2013 the economists Donald Boudreaux and Mark Perry noted that “according to the Bureau of Economic Analysis, spending by households on many of modern life’s ‘basics’—food at home, automobiles, clothing and footwear, household furnishings and equipment, and housing and utilities—fell from 53 percent of disposable income in 1950 to 44 percent in 1970 to 32 percent today.” It is a point that the economic historian Robert Fogel had made in 1999 for a longer span.¹⁸ The economist Steven Horwitz summarizes the facts on labor-hours required to buy a color TV or an automobile, and notes that “these data do not capture . . . the change in quality. . . . The 1973 TV was at most 25 inches, with poor resolution, probably no remote control, weak sound, and generally nothing like its 2013 descendant. . . . Getting 100,000 miles out of a car in the 1970s was cause for celebration. Not getting 100,000 miles out of a car today is cause to think you bought a lemon.”¹⁹

Nor in the United States are the poor getting poorer. Horwitz observes that “looking at various data on consumption, from Census Bureau surveys of what the poor have in their homes to the labor time required to purchase a variety of consumer goods, makes clear that poor Americans are living better now than ever before. In fact, poor Americans today live better, by these measures, than did their middle class counterparts in the 1970s.”²⁰ In the summer of 1976 an associate professor of economics at the University of Chicago had no air conditioning in his apartment.²¹ Nowadays many quite poor Chicagoans have it. The terrible heat wave in Chicago of July 1995 killed over seven hundred people, mainly low-income.²² Yet earlier heat waves in 1936 and 1948, before air conditioning was at all common, had probably killed many more.²³ The 2003 heat wave in non–air conditioned France killed 14,800 people, and 70,000 Europe-wide. Imagine what the London heat wave in June 1858 did.

Notes

1. Schumpeter 1942 (1950), pp. 67–68.

2. Boudreaux 2013.

3. Smith 1776, 1.1.11.

4. Professor Eduard Bonet of Escuela Superior de Administración y Dirección de Empresas, Barcelona, drew my attention to Follett’s point about democracy.

5. Here I diverge, reluctantly, from Margaret Jacob’s view (for instance in Jacob 2014), which Mokyr follows.

6. Ó Gráda 2014, p. 8.

7. I am indebted to Marlies Mueller for reminding me of Popper’s usage.

8. See the lucid treatment in Wagner 1994. The capitalization and italicization of ORDO refers to the title of a yearbook published from 1948 by the Freiburg (Germany) School of economists recommending Ordnungspolitik, “order policy.”

9. Bell 2014; and Boldrin and Levine 2008.

10. Smith 1759 (1790), p. 184.

11. Reich 2014.

12. Gobry 2014.

13. That was the point of my early supply-side essay about British economic growth in the late nineteenth century, McCloskey 1970.

14. See for example Lawrence 2015.; and for Canada Grubel 2025, making the point that mobility through the quintiles changes the picture dramatically.

15. Whitford 2005.

16. Boudreaux and Perry 2013.

17. Deaton 2013, p. 231.

18. Fogel 1999, p. 190.

19. Horwitz 2013, p. 11 of the working paper, now published as Horwitz 2015.

20. Horwitz 2013, p. 2 of the working paper.

21. Horwitz’s table 4 reports the percentage of poor households with various appliances: in 1971, 32 percent of such households had air conditioners; in 2005, 86 percent did.

22. Klinenberg 2003.

23. Barreca et al. 2013 show the large effect in the United States of air conditioning in reducing excess mortality during heat waves.

The rest of the economists—yes, even the economists—do not believe that supply and demand work pretty much as you might expect, even if you never studied economics. They believe, on the contrary, that many, many “imperfections” make the economy work extremely badly—so badly that wise economists from USP need to step in to offset the stupid way that markets of supply and demand work. They say that there are permanent monopolies, great external effects, strong tendencies to mass unemployment. The list goes on and on. I once compiled a list and, with little trouble, could think of fully 108 “imperfections” imagined on the blackboard by economists and anti-economists. The trouble is that the economists from USP, or MIT or the LSE, and certainly not the anti-economists, haven’t troubled to give the slightest evidence that the imperfections are important. They merely snort indignantly that it’s just obvious that they are big.

Like fundamentalists, yes?

Well, why do I, after 84 years on this planet (on September 11, thanks), most of it spent thinking about the evidence on how economies work, disagree with the numerous non-believers?

For one thing, as a resident of an economy, I live daily inside a massive experiment proving that it does work pretty much as supply and demand says. So do you live inside it. São Paulo is an enormous city. It exhausts me to drive across it. Yet somehow every day when you go to get a morning coffee, there it is. When you want to buy a new shirt, there it is. If you had the misfortune to live in a country that so strongly denies market forces that it makes them illegal, such as North Korea or the old Soviet Union, this would not be the case. The Soviets made endless jokes about it not being the case.

For another, as an economic historian, I know, and can show you massive evidence, that liberated people become amazingly creative and then make themselves and everyone else amazingly rich. It has happened from 1776 to the present, I’ve told you frequently, to the extent of 25 thousand percent, for the first time in history. In a century or so, if the economists and politicians don’t intervene, everyone will be twice as rich as the average Swiss person now. I mean Africa. I mean everywhere.

For another, as an economist of a mathematical and philosophical bent, I have a vision of the economy as an enormous spontaneous order, like the Portuguese language or the history of art or even the pattern of your own sweet life.

It’s lovely. Let it work.

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

I find the world is full of people who think that their dependence on others is decreasing, or that they would be better off if they were more self-sufficient, or that technological progress has brought no improvement in the standard of living, or that the world is steadily deteriorating, or that the exchange of things and ideas is a superfluous irrelevance.^[1]

Such pessimism is favored perhaps by our genetic inheritance of sharp attention to dangers.^[2] It certainly sells books and TV shows and newspapers. News is by definition mostly bad, and modern media tell of disasters from all the wide world. Romanticizing the good old days, compared with which our latter days look so shabby, has been standard since the Romantic movement, and anyway was a conventional trope among the Greeks and Hebrews and Hindus celebrating an age of gold. Science fiction and horror fiction, offshoots of Romanticism, have tended since their invention in the nineteenth century to predict dystopias, reflecting the pessimism about the disturbing betterment current at the time. Consider Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus (1816), H. G. Wells’s The Time Machine (1895), John Wyndham’s The Day of the Triffids (1951), or Matt Damon and Jodie Foster in Elysium (2013). It is a rare science-fiction writer, a Robert Heinlein or an Ursula K. Le Guin, who does not see the future as a version of scientific mischance or class struggle or imperial fascism or, most recently, environmental catastrophe.

But look around at the material betterments since 1800 in such places as your own room, located in a high-rise unbuildable before the 1880s with a condominium agreement first invented in Puerto Rico in 1958:

All this. And note how all of it arose over the past two centuries only, in a trade-testing economy.

It did not arise from the government or from unions, as fine as such institutions are in other ways. I do earnestly believe that government “has a role,” as my friends on the left relentlessly put it to me. For example, I admire the Civil Rights Act of 1964, especially its overturning of legal segregation, and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, overturning voter suppression. And as for unions, I belonged when I was seventeen to the National Maritime Union, and now in old age I belong enthusiastically—reacting to the union-busting folly of our local version of bureaucracy run mad in the “administrative university”—to a union for professors at the University of Illinois at Chicago, affiliated with the American Federation of Teachers, AFL-CIO. You gotta go down and join the union. I’m a union maid.

But I do not imagine that expanding the government or joining the union will radically improve the material condition of my people, rich or poor. That would be mistaken economics and mistaken history. The enrichment came mainly from bourgeois liberty and creativity unbridled, not from piling up constraints on voluntary deals or from redistributing what income we get from the deals. Wages and working conditions, after such shocking enrichment, are in fact determined largely by supply and demand, not by regulations passed by Congress or by struggles on the picket line. All boats do rise. Professors and artists and child-care workers, whose productivity has not increased for millennia, benefit from being substitutes in the long run for farmers and truck drivers and medical doctors, whose productivity during the Great Enrichment has risen enormously. A professor with an antique technology of chalk-and-talk could have instead entered farming or medicine, which means that she must earn, roughly at least, what such utterly transformed jobs earn. The professor cannot earn in equilibrium one-tenth, say, of what farmers earn, not because it would be unfair but because she could move, as the poet Robert Frost did in the early twentieth century, between farming and teaching. A ten-to-one differential is not sustainable if a sufficient number of people can move. Such reasoning was Adam Smith’s chief analytic contribution to the emerging political economy of the eighteenth century.

If such an economic analysis were not roughly true in the world, one could not explain why Walmart employees, not unionized, make conservatively measured twenty times what the average South Asian employee makes. The explanation is obviously not solidarity forever or bargaining skill, or the more stringent regulatory constraints that Walmart faces in the United States. Walmart would not be in business if the legally required minimum wage were thirty times what it earned from hiring a laborer, no more than it would if the minimum wage were raised to $300 an hour. The gap between the United States and South Asia arises not from acts of Congress but from the economist’s “marginal productivity theory,” the commercial demand for labor determined by how much money for the employers the average employee produces in an extra hour of work. Marginal, or for that matter total, productivity depends on how fully an economy has been able to take advantage of bourgeois betterment. Trade-testing of new ideas, not government-regulating or union-joining, did it.

§

The English colonists in North America at first lived on $2 a day. The historical reconstruction of the Plimouth Plantation in southeastern Massachusetts shows how the settlers lived in the 1620s—drafty, unplastered walls, without glass windows, enclosing the sole room on the ground floor, and up a ladder to a sleeping loft. Six people lived there (in northern Europe typically there were also cows in the back for additional heat, and smell). The mother had one skirt for Sunday and one or two for the rest of the week. The newcomers faced disease, often fatal, in the first, “seasoning” generation, and smallpox and dysentery were ongoing threats, especially to children. The television series Colonial House in 2004 showed people trying to live in the way of pioneers in Maine in 1628, to similar effect. It was no bag of bluebirds. (True, in America, as was not the case among most Europeans at the time, there was from the beginning usually sufficient food, though still reliant on the harvest. Smith was right to note in 1776 of the English colonies that “a dearth has never been known there.”^[3])

Yet by 2011 the average resident of the United States consumed, correcting for inflation, $132 a day, sixty-six times more housing, food, education, furniture than in 1620—a betterment of 6,500 percent. Such a figure is conservatively measured, not allowing for the better quality of today’s goods and services. The rise is a great deal larger per person if you adjust for the better quality of modern medicine (antibiotics, painless dentistry) and travel (cars, airplanes) and lighting (incandescent bulbs and now LEDs) and knowledge (philosophy and literature, physical science and, yes, economics). Such bettering would yield, according again to the always useful economist William Nordhaus, a factor as high as the rough yet justifiable figure at the upper end of the possibilities I keep mentioning, a factor of 100.^[4] Thomas Babington Macaulay (1800–1859), with a longer perspective than his depressed contemporaries the classical economists, remarked in his History of England from the Accession of James the Second (1848):

It is now the [Romantic] fashion to place the Golden Age of England in times when noblemen were destitute of comforts the want of which would be intolerable to a modern footman, . . . when to have a clean shirt once a week was a privilege reserved for the higher class of gentry, . . . when men died faster in the lanes of our towns than they now die on the coast of Guiana [thus seasoning illness]. We too shall, in our turn, be outstripped. . . . It may well be, in the twentieth century . . . that laboring men may be as little used to dine without meat as they now are to eat rye bread; that sanitary police and medical discoveries may have added several more years [try thirty more, Tom] to the average length of human life; that numerous comforts and luxuries which are now unknown, or confined to a few, may be within the reach of every diligent and thrifty working man.^[5]

In the reign of Marx and materialism, 1890–1980, it was the fashion to deprecate Macaulay as hopelessly optimistic about progress. In the same extraordinary year of 1848 in which Macaulay published the first volume of his History, John Stuart Mill published the first edition of his Political Economy, in which he predicted merely modest betterment, modest in view of diminishing returns and the principle of population. Even in its last edition, 1871, when the betterment was becoming obvious, Mill did not modify his restrained and un-Macaulayite enthusiasm for the twentieth century to come. But Macaulay, not Mill, was more correct in his predictions, and his post-dictions. The anti-Whig-history pessimists, from Mill to Herbert Butterfield, were mistaken (as Butterfield himself eventually conceded, becoming himself a Whig historian). Fernand Braudel, the soft-left French historian of “capitalism,” observed that even the rich in olden times suffered a world in which “heating was still poor, ventilation derisory.”^[6] In a rich modern economy even quite poor people have access to vaccination, air conditioning, automobiles, reliable birth control, the Internet, and flush toilets. The aristocrats attending on the very Sun King himself at Versailles in 1715 had access instead to smallpox, hand-held fans and open windows, bumpy carriages, leaky condoms, a small list of censored books, and relieving themselves in the staircases of Le Palais.

You are doubtful still. Open, then, your own closet. Compare it with the volume and quality of clothing possessed by even the richest woman in Plimouth in 1620, or for that matter the above-average woman in Amsterdam in 1800, or all but the extremely well-off in London in 1900 (if you doubt that last, watch the 1999 BBC’s series 1900 House; or while in London visit for a view of eighteenth-century life the Dennis Severs House for its family of Huguenot-descended silk weavers).

Further, a good deal of our present flow of income in the rising number of rich countries goes into consumer durables (as the economists call them), things that yield services over time rather than being, like pizza or movie tickets or copies of the Printer’s Row Journal, used up in a day or a week or a year. The very fact of our massive expenditure on consumer durables betokens an enriched population, which can invest in long-lived items such as cars and granite kitchen counters instead of hustling to get today’s food and drink. Look around at your bedroom. The $2,000 Tempur-Pedic mattress and the $500 Bose clock radio beside it contain together as much productive power as the entire average yearly income of a person in Ghana or Pakistan or Kyrgyzstan.

The point is stronger still, since the average age of U.S. consumer durables of your house, except for the house itself, is merely a little over four years. Every four and a half years the automobile or the coat or the Bose is, on average, bought again, even though many of the “old” items have no secondhand market to offset the cost of novelty. Such churning of consumer durables is not peculiar to the United States. In Japan the tiny living spaces are refurnished frequently, and the unfashionable furnishings, such as working color TVs and entire bedrooms sets, are left at the curb to be picked up by junk men specialized in the trade.^[7] Your mattress and the Bose together could pay for every fourth year of a Pakistani income. Select a few other items—a fridge, say, or that bedroom set, and you’re set for many, many years of Pakistani life. At a higher income, at say the world’s and Brazil’s average of $33 dollars a day, if you sold your $220,000 average American house (supposing you owned it clear of a mortgage) and took a small apartment or a shack in a favela in Rio you could live on that sale alone for fully eighteen years of leisure at the US average income in 1941, playing soccer barefoot on the beach at Copacabana.

§

In other words, modern economic growth emerged only in the last couple of centuries out of 1,500 centuries, or out of 500, or 100, or 10, or 5. A Malthusian could only predict—from the sevenfold increase of world population 1800 to the present—a homeostatic reversion to $3-a-day misery, or worse. Some still do, while trumpeting their status as Scientists devoted to facts. Our beloved friends the environmentalists and our less-beloved friends the population-control mavens cling to the Malthus of 1798 as their guide.

They have been gravely mistaken. Just about the time that Malthus so persuasively explained it, the old Malthusian constraint, luckily for us, began to dissolve.^[8] Nowadays, and contrary to a Malthusian belief still widely credited, having more humans on the planet is good for the rest of us.^[9] The whole of humankind, and no European imperium or class exploitation about it, broke decisively with the homeostatic equilibrium of being poor and sick. Trade-tested betterment exploded.

[1] Ridley 2010, p. 8.

[2] Adrian Bowyer of the RepRap Project suggested the survival point to me.

[3] Smith 1776, 1.2.

[4] The factor of 100 is argued in a little more detail in Bourgeois Dignity, pp. 54–59, using Nordhaus on lighting and his suggested extrapolations (Nordhaus 1996). Fouquet and Pearson (2011) confirm Nordhaus on lighting.

[5] Macaulay 1848, end of chap. 3. Tom G. Palmer drew my attention to the passage.

[6] Braudel 1967 (1973), p. 235. And yet rich Romans had floor heating, denied to rich Europeans until recently.

[7] Bailey 1999.

[8] See, for example, Kenny 2011, Kenny n.d.

[9] Simon 1981 (1996).

Since 1776, there has been a 3,000% explosion in the average real income per person in the world.

Nothing earlier came remotely close.

It was caused not by the usual suspects of investment or exploitation, but by liberty inspiring a flowering of human creativity—in the arts and sciences, and in the economy.

Though Brazilians and many other Latin Americans are uneasily aware that their economies lag some, and sometimes a lot, the Great Enrichment is nonetheless evident everywhere from the Border to Tierra del Fuego, from Santiago in Chile to Recife in Brazil.

The Latin Lag can be overcome. Brazil, like much of Latin America, needs essential liberalism to do it.

Check out my new book, Liberdade: 100 Conversation Starters on Liberalism, Latin America, and Brazil

The betterment stands in human history as that Great Enrichment, the most important secular event since we first domesticated squash and chickens and wheat and horses. The Enrichment has been and will continue to be more important historically than the rise and fall of empires or the class struggle in all hitherto existing societies. Such perennial fascinations of historians, entranced by the realpolitik that accompanies empires rising and classes struggling, had little to do with our enrichment. Empire did not enrich Britain. America’s success did not depend on slavery. Power did not lead to plenty, and exploitation was not plenty’s engine.

The real engine was the expanding ideology of liberty and dignity that inspired the proliferating schemes of betterment by and for the common people. Liberty and dignity for ordinary projectors yielded the Bourgeois Deal: “You accord to me, a bourgeois projector, the liberty and dignity to try out my schemes in voluntary trade, and let me keep the profits, if I get any, in the first act—though I accept, reluctantly, that others will compete with me in the second act. In exchange, in the third act of a new, positive-sum drama, the bourgeois betterment provided by me (and by those pesky, low-quality, price-spoiling competitors) will make you all rich.” And it did.

The ideology supporting the Bourgeois Deal displaced that of the Aristocratic Deal: “You honor me, an aristocrat by natural inequality, and give me the liberty to extract rents from you in the first act, and in the second and in all subsequent acts. I forbid you under penalty of death to seek competitive ‘protection.’ By the third act of the zero-sum drama, if you have behaved yourself, and have pulled your forelock or made your curtsey as I ride by, I will not at least have slaughtered you.” It was extortion, not protection. As an economic historian put it, reacting in 1971 to the claim by an economic theorist that feudal lords had offered “protection” to peasants, “The possibility that the main, if not the only, danger against which the peasant very frequently was in need of protection was the very lord is not mentioned.”^[1]

The bourgeois, voluntary, egalitarian, bettering ideology writ across a society is recent, and therefore cannot be put down to ancient risings of empires and strugglings of classes, or to biological evolution on a scale of centuries. We did not become rich at the time of the rise of trade, which is paleolithically ancient, or upon the establishment of towns and the agricultural state and the legal protection of real property, which are less ancient but nonetheless many millennia old, or in long times of peace, which has characterized life in economically stagnant places as much as in Europe 1815–1914. An ideological change did it, and recently. In northwestern Europe the strange idea grew up that aristocracy (the rule of the best by descent) and theocracy (the rule of priests) and even plutocracy (the rule of the present rich) were all nasty. What replaced them in people’s ideology, slowly, was the rule of the better technique, allowing free entry to compete with the monopolies that the aristocrats or the plutocrats had arranged under the aegis of a captured government. The new ideology in places like Britain and Belgium around 1800 favored a “betterocracy,” or, if you want the pure Greek, a “kaluterocracy.”

The profit going to the betterers was promptly undermined, unless governmental monopolies and governmental protectionism intervened. The economist William Nordhaus has calculated that betterers nowadays earn in profit only 2 or 3 percent of the social value of their inventions.^[2] If you are Sam Walton bettering the retail trade in the matters of inventory control and purchasing contracts, the 2 percent yields a great deal of money. But 98 percent at the cost of 2 percent is nonetheless a pretty good deal for the rest of us. The gain from macadamized roads or vulcanized rubber, then modern universities, structural concrete, and detergent, and then the airplane and the transistor, enriched even the poorest among us.

The new ideology of kaluterocracy spread quickly. In modern conditions of communication (invented by the bourgeoisie, with helpful inputs from secret police eager to read their gentlemen’s mail), quickness rules. As Gaus put it, summarizing the work since 1985 by Peter J. Richerson and Robert Boyd and other proponents of group-level evolution (which was until the 1980s considered rank scientific heresy), “Group-beneficial norms can spread much more quickly within a group via copying or imitation; major cultural changes can occur within 200 years (or indeed considerably less).”^[3] And they did, starting in Holland in the sixteenth century and spreading to England in the eighteenth, and now, two hundred years on, spreading to China and India.

For example, the lower end of the world’s present income distribution, the bottom billion out of seven, as Ó Gráda has documented, has seen a dramatic decline of famine.^[4] In the European Middle Ages a killing famine in the favored south of England came every ten years or so.^[5] The last widespread, killing famine in southern England was 1597, in northern England 1623, in Scotland the 1690s, in France 1710, in Germany, Scandinavia, and Switzerland 1770–1772, in Ireland the late 1840s, in Finland 1866–1868.^[6]

The upper middle of the present-day seven billion—perhaps two billion, double the population of the world in 1800—live in countries in the mold of Greece or Taiwan or Israel. The average income of such places exceeds $80 a day, which is to say two and a half times the present world average, and twenty-six times the world average in 1800. Hans Rosling, a Swedish professor of public health, calls $80 “the Washing Line,” because at that level a household can have an electric washing machine, freeing women from exhausting wash days.^[7] Deborah Fallows reports on a study of material aspirations among the upper bourgeoisie in China: “In the 1950s and 1960s . . . a watch, a bicycle, and a sewing machine. In the 1970s and 1980s . . . a color television, a fridge, and a washing machine. . . . By the late 1990s . . . foreign holidays, . . . computers and cars, and [the wherewithal] to buy their own houses.”^[8] In 1943 in Lansing, Michigan, my mother, a young middle-class woman, would wash the family’s clothing by hand down in the basement, using tubs with washboards. My grandfather, an electrical contractor, was dismayed and bought her a small electric washing machine. One of Donna Leon’s mystery novels set in Venice portrays chief inspector Guido Brunetti in 2012 noting to the department secretary, Signorina Elettra, that people in olden days were miserable: “They’d probably give you anything you asked for,” he declares, “in exchange for a washing machine.” Signorina Elettra laughs in agreement: “I’d give you anything. . . . I suspect that most people—at least the women—would willingly renounce their right to vote in exchange for a washing machine.”^[9]

And the higher, electric-drying end of present-day incomes, over $120 a day, enjoyed now by about half a billion people worldwide, a group growing rapidly each year in number and in share of the world population, and set to become in a few generations the typical human, supports a flourishing life of loft apartments, art museums, higher education, adventure holidays, spiritual exercises, Donna Leon mystery novels, and all the ennobling and not-so-ennobling goods and services of a modern bourgeois town.

§

In other words, when we economic historians lecture to undergraduates we emphasize an anti-Malthusian message of hope—that average human welfare has shot up startlingly since 1800. A graph of average income over time resembles an ice-hockey stick, with tens of thousands of years spent tracing the long, horizontal handle. Then finally, after 1800, history reached the business end of the hockey stick and shot up the blade. A video by Rosling, “200 Countries, 200 Years, 4 Minutes,” makes the optimistic point, illustrating the transition from misery to hope.

The successful countries are “bourgeois,” whether or not they also have capacious social safety nets, such as universal health care. Contrary to the usual myths of capitalism versus socialism, the United States has, if correctly measured, a social safety net almost as generous as, say, France’s. And “socialist” Sweden even nowadays is bourgeois and “capitalist,” and not much less so than the United States. Sweden allows property and profits. It allocates most goods by unregulated prices. The Swedish government, though busybody by historical standards—as are most governments nowadays—does not own much of the means of production. Unlike socialistic Americans, both Democrats and Republicans, who intervened to save General Motors and Chrysler during their post-2007 troubles, the Swedish government refused to bail out Saab Motors (sold in 2010 by that same GM) when it went bankrupt. Nor did the Swedes object when the Chinese bought both bankrupt Saab and solvent Volvo. All “Swedish” cars are now Chinese. Occupational choice in Sweden is free, though encumbered as it is in the United States by cartels of doctors and electricians. Trade-tested betterment is honored, though heavily regulated, as it is also in the United States. Corruption is low, much lower than in most states of the United States, though with a correspondingly high level of intrusive “transparency” from government looking into private matters.^[10] Inheritance in Sweden is not the admired path to social status, as it also is not in the United States. Like most Americans, most Swedish people live in big towns, though decamping to red-painted shacks in the woods for their long summer vacations. Swedes are honest and bourgeois. And they are, conservatively measured, thirty times richer than their ancestors were in what was in 1800 one of the poorest countries in Europe.^[11]

§

Material growth in goods and services is not the only relevant sign of the Great Enrichment. The word “enrichment” has a highly relevant secondary meaning of spiritual growth.^[12] As the economists Ronald Coase and Ning Wang put it in their peroration to How China Became Capitalist (2013), “When the markets for goods and the market for ideas are together in full swing, each supporting, augmenting, and strengthening the other, human creativity and happiness stand the best chance to prevail, and the material and spiritual civilizations march on firm ground, side by side.”^[13]

Many of the clerisy on the left and on the right lament the mass character of modern society, agreeing for example with the leftish Australian economist Geoffrey Harcourt, who wrote in 1994 that trade-tested betterment has stunted “the Christian (and humanist) virtues of altruism, cooperation, tolerance, compassion.” The conservative German economist Wilhelm Röpke in 1958 claimed similarly that mass democracy and enrichment has made for “a situation in which man can have no spiritual or moral life.”^[14] Tocqueville, Matthew Arnold, and José Ortega y Gasset lead the list of hundreds of members of the clerisy during the past century and a half who have deplored from above the Enrichment’s failure to enrich. But contrary to such talk from left and right, and from above, the ability to seek the virtues of altruism and cooperation and to have a spiritual or moral life have in fact come from the enrichment of the masses. We have more pilgrim souls now. Mass-produced food and mass-produced education have on the whole elevated modern life, not corrupted it.

The economists and especially the economic historians know it, in their quantitative way. For example, illiteracy fell from over 90 percent of the world’s adult population in 1850 to 20 percent in 2000, and by 2010 was down to 13 percent for adult women and 8 percent for adult men.^[15] The fall in illiteracy means that the absolute number of literate people has risen since 1850 by a factor of about forty, some 3,900 percent. The rise exceeds the 900 percent rise in worldwide real income per head when the presently poor countries are included. No wonder there are vastly more visits to art museums (on the order of a hundred million attendees per year) and new book titles published (2.3 million per year, about 30 percent in English^[16]).

Abraham Lincoln’s mother and father were illiterate, yet he became the poet president and his son Robert graduated from Harvard. Such leaping up the social scale by educational enrichment did happen before 1800, occasionally. It is often said that Cardinal Woolsey was the son of a butcher—though it appears in fact that the butcher was also a rich merchant. Thomas Cromwell’s father was a blacksmith—though in fact also a cloth merchant. The Chinese examination system allowed the son of a peasant to rise, occasionally, though the sons of the rich, now as then, were usually better prepared to take the exams.

After 1800, though, such leaping up became more common. Father Andrew Greeley (1929–2013), a mystery novelist and academic sociologist at the University of Illinois at Chicago as well as a priest, noted in The American Catholic: A Social Portrait (1977) that the second- and third-generation descendants of poor Irish and Italians immigrants to the United States by then trailed only Jews in educational attainment. You can confirm it by looking at the last names beginning with Mc- and O’- or ending with -a, -i, -e, or -o in any list of distinguished Americans today. The descendants of ditchdiggers and lumberjacks are now CEOs and senators. Of one hundred U.S. senators in 2014, on a rough survey four had Italian last names, six Jewish, and fifteen Irish.

Adult literacy and years of schooling are combined nowadays to measure the knowledge leg of the three-legged stool of the “human development index.” Technically speaking the index is a geometric average of measures of knowledge, of real income, and of how long people live. All of these elements are rising and some are accelerating. Years of life, for example, have shot up, as I have noted, from an expectation at birth worldwide of less than thirty years in 1800 to fifty-two years in 1960 and to seventy years in 2010, including even very poor places. As a result of declining child mortality and of female control of reproduction, as Rosling shows in another of his amazing videos, birth rates in Bangladesh have fallen almost to replacement levels.^[17]

During the recent period of intense globalization, access to clean water has dramatically improved. The distance to drinkable water is one of the heaviest burdens on the world’s poorest women, together with the hand-washing of clothes, which itself requires reasonably clean water. The women of Levi’s Italian villages in 1936–1937 “stood erect with the stately posture of those accustomed to balancing heavy weights on their heads”—the daily water or the wet clothes.^[18] The carrying of burdens on the head had the cost by age forty or so of agonizing arthritis of the neck. The United Nations’ Millennium Development Goals, set forth in 2000, aimed to “halve, by 2015, the proportion of people without sustainable access to safe drinking-water and basic sanitation.” The goal was achieved five years early. The Modi government of India, elected in 2014, vows to supply toilets and corresponding sewers to the tens of millions of Indians now accustomed to defecating in the open.

Murder rates are down, even in the gun-toting US of A, in the short run since the 1990s and, even more dramatically, in the long run since the 1800s. Murder rates in medieval English villages were higher than in the most violent police districts in today’s United States.^[19] Addiction to alcohol is down too. American men in the early Republic toted their muzzle-loaders in a whiskey-soaked haze. In early modern cities in Europe, beer drinking absorbed from a quarter to a half of the entire crop of grain. The historian Richard Unger reckons that present-day beer consumption per person among Belgians (“among the most avid beer drinkers in the world”) is half that of European city dwellers in the Middle Ages and early modern times.^[20] Think of Monty-Pythonesque peasants and bourgeois, and worse, sword-bearing gentry and aristocrats, stumbling around inebriated all day long. European drinking and drunken brawling before the Great Enrichment makes Joe Six-Pack with his concealed-carry Glock .22 seem a model of temperance. Admittedly, medieval beer guzzling and early American whiskey imbibing had additional reasons in hygiene: alcohol kills germs and parasites in water, and had done so in the West since the earliest times. In the East the making of tea with boiled and thereby sterilized water had a similar latent function. And the worldwide use of silver goblets among the rich likewise killed some germs in the water. Colonial Americans, already pretty rich, extended this last technique, tossing silver coins into their barrels of drinking water; silver coins, too, were the preferred replacement for bone removed by trepanning to relieve pressure on the brain.

Broadening travel is now more common, the jet plane and especially the jumbo jet having reduced the hours of work required to buy a trip. In 1959 we bourgeois Americans went to Europe by sea. The percentage of people with advanced degrees has shot up since the 1960s and is hugely higher now than it ever has been. We live in an age of the artist and scholar and scientist, and can expect much more when China and India and then the rest become rich and educated. The world has now more college graduates, more serious spiritual inquirers, more creative improvers of goods and services, more artists, musicians, professors, journalists, critics, and poets, and above all more appreciators of such arts and sciences and designs and spiritual exercises than all such folk combined in world history up to, say, 1950, and probably up to 1970. And we have more of them in percentage terms, too, since enrichment makes the risk of a life in art easier to venture on, even beyond providing a market for the product. Go to the Third Fridays open house at the Zhou B Art Center on West 35th Street in Chicago and stand amazed (holding a plastic cup filled with not very good white wine) at the number and quality of paintings and sculptures exhibited there. Every big city in North America and Europe has dozens of such centers. Little Fredericton, New Brunswick, has at least one, at which you can listen to folk music and admire painters at work.

Or consider the emergence of a Nature-worshipping environmentalism that would have been viewed as a crazy luxury in the hardscrabble times of 1800 or even of 1933. The economist and student of theology Robert Nelson calls environmentalism the new religion of the West (a West that nonetheless, outside of places like Poland or the United States, imagines itself to be irreligious). He wrote recently that in the twentieth century

secular religions, such as Marxism, the American progressive “gospel of efficiency,” and other forms of “economic religion” were the leading influences on government policies around the world. In economic religion, “efficiency” and “inefficiency” take the place of “good” and “evil.” Towards the end of the century, still another secular religion, environmentalism, challenged the economic gospels—questioning the whole idea of “progress.”^[21]

The economist and think-tank maven Fred L. Smith speaks of “eco-paganism”: “Most environmentalists do not, of course, see themselves as pagans,” he writes. “Yet many do espouse a watered down form of pantheism which elevates nature to near the status of a deity.”^[22] By now the good people of rich and secular places such as Sweden, though contemptuous of the chidish absurdity (as most Swedes believe it to be) of their ancestors’ worship of a Lutheran God, have found their transcendent in the worship of Nature, and spend their Sunday mornings devoutly gathering mushrooms and lingonberries in Nature’s forest.

The Great Income Enrichment, that is, has allowed higher virtues of faith and hope and love, manifested in art and religion and lingonberries, to flourish, yielding a Great Spiritual Enrichment. In Chicago, Columbia College’s arts programs are booming, as is the School of the Art Institute and UIC’s School of Design, and the Music Conservatory of Roosevelt University. Our children, rich by historical standards, have become artists of paint and film, of music and video games. A poster promoting Columbia College pairs the slogan “Live your passion” with a photo of a young man fingering his electric guitar. The harvest is what the anarchist and communist and socialist visionaries in the nineteenth century predicted would happen following the abolition of private property and trade—except that the spiritual enrichment followed from the Great Income Enrichment that arose from property-encouraged and trade-tested betterment, not from their abolition. We are experiencing in the twenty-first century a worldwide explosion of high culture, out of “capitalism.”

[1] Gerschenkron 1971.

[2] Nordhaus 2004.

[3] Gaus 2013, p. 8. Richerson and Boyd 2004.

[4] Ó Gráda 2010.

[5] McCloskey 1976, 1989.

[6] Appleby 1980, p. 643 for Britain and France.

[7] For present-day figures (the “Penn Tables”), see Heston, Summers, and Aten 2012. For 1800, see Maddison. Luxembourg’s half million folk earn on average $252 a day, the highest (Maddison 2007).

[8] Fallows 2010, p. 72.

[9] Leon 2012, p. 171.

[10] As Czarniawska 2013 shows.

[11] Sandberg 1979.

[12] I am indebted to the philosopher Kenneth Stikkers at Southern Illinois University for stressing to me this quasi-pun in the phrase the “Great Enrichment.”

[13] Coase and Wang 2013b, p. 207.

[14] Harcourt 1994, p. 207; Röpke 1958 (1960), p. 8.

[15] http://unesco.org/education/GMR2006/full/chapt8_eng.pdf; https://efareport.wordpress.com/2012/05/31/literacy-rates-are-rising-but-not-fast-enough/.

[16] http://hyperallergic.com/68051/2012-museum-attendance-numbers-show-a-diverse-global-art-scene/; http://worldometers.info/books/.

[17] Rosling 2013.

[18] Levi 1945, p. 30.

[19] Hanawalt 1976.

[20] Unger 2007, p. 132. Actually in 2009 Belgium ranked only twenty-second worldwide, half as avid as the Czech Republic or Venezuela.

[21] Nelson 2013c, p. 1. See Nelson 2013a, 2013b, and 2010.

[22] Smith n.d.

Since 1776, there has been a 3,000% explosion in the average real income per person in the world.

Nothing earlier came remotely close.

It was caused not by the usual suspects of investment or exploitation, but by liberty inspiring a flowering of human creativity—in the arts and sciences, and in the economy.

Though Brazilians and many other Latin Americans are uneasily aware that their economies lag some, and sometimes a lot, the Great Enrichment is nonetheless evident everywhere from the Border to Tierra del Fuego, from Santiago in Chile to Recife in Brazil.

The Latin Lag can be overcome. Brazil, like much of Latin America, needs essential liberalism to do it.

Check out my new book, Liberdade: 100 Conversation Starters on Liberalism, Latin America, and Brazil

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.

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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.