The Royal Palace on the Dam Square in Amsterdam began its life in 1648 not as a monument to royalty—Holland was officially a republic until Napoleon—but to the burgerlijk virtues that had triumphed in war and commerce over Spain during the Eighty Years War.[1] It was raised on the mud by the Amstel on a forest of Norwegian logs, proverbially 13,659 of them. So precise were these bourgeois. Dutch school children learn it as 1 followed by 365 followed by 9. It was among the largest non-ecclesiastical buildings in Europe, the eighth wonder of the world, as Christian Huygens, the Dutch Sir Philip Sidney, and Joost van den Vondel, the Dutch Shakespeare, both proudly claimed. It was completed in 1665.
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 17th 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 17th-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 8th 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 19th 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 17th-century Frenchman or a 5th-century Greek. The dignity of an emperor or a samurai or a mid-20th-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
The text above is an excerpt from The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Commerce, the first volume of Deirdre McCloskey’s trilogy on the ethical and historical origins of modern prosperity.
[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.