With the Naivete of One Who Is in Love

"How beastly the bourgeois is!" D.H. Lawrence wrote, summing up the attitude of generations of artists and intellectuals. "Let him meet a new emotion, let him be faced with another man's need, / let him come home to a bit of moral difficulty, let life face him with a new demand on his understanding / and then watch him go soggy, like a wet meringue." This kind of vitriolic contempt for the commercial middle classes has been a mainstay of modern literature at least since Flaubert, who wrote that "the whole dream of democracy is to raise the proletarian to the level of stupidity attained by the bourgeois." Indeed, after a century and a half of abuse, the very word bourgeois has become a pejorative. When Luis Bunuel titles a film "The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie," the joke is self-evident.

In her surpassingly odd new book, "The Bourgeois Virtues" (University of Chicago Press, 588 pages, $32.50), the economist Deirdre McCloskey rides out, Don Quixote-like, to defend the honor of this slandered class. The name of capitalism, she points out, was long held in dishonor by those who believed in the triumph of socialism. Yet history has shown that it is capitalism, with all its injustices, that does the best job of improving the lot of the average man. The word bourgeois, which names the human being who creates and is created by capitalism, is overdue for a similar rehabilitation.

It is clear to unbiased eyes that the achievements of liberal bourgeois societies since the 18th century - the American and French revolutions, universal suffrage, women's liberation, modern medicine and technology - are cause for admiration, not hatred. At the very least, we must ask, what other ruling class has done better? To put the question in concrete terms: Who would rather live as an ordinary member of a tribe of hunter-gatherers or a medieval theocracy than a bourgeois democracy? Today's middle classes, Ms. McCloskey insists,

are better humans [than their ancestors], because they in their billions have acquired the scope to become so and because market societies encourage art and science and religion to flourish and because anyway a life in careers and deal making and companies and marketplaces is not the worst life for a full human being.

The historical achievements of the bourgeoisie, however, do not quite answer the question about its virtues or lack thereof. After all, the premise of capitalism is precisely that it makes virtue a matter of indifference. "Thus every Part was full of Vice, / Yet the whole Mass a Paradise," Bernard Mandeville wrote in "The Fable of the Bees," an early and much-reviled statement of the power of the market. Modern political philosophy, starting with Hobbes, similarly evacuates all notions of virtue from its construction of the ideal state, preferring instead to reckon on man's baser and more consistent instincts, fear and greed.

It is this denigration of virtue, of any human goal other than self-preservation and self-aggrandizement, that has made so many modern writers take up arms against the bourgeois order. Bourgeois life, its critics have argued, shuns all the passions and ideals that make human beings great. It produces, not Aristotle's great-souled man, but Lawrence's wet meringue.And there is at least some degree of truth in this indictment. The only way to counter it is to show that the bourgeois and liberal ideal is not purely process-oriented but has a positive content; that it demands and encourages its own set of virtues, different from those of the classical hero or Christian saint, but admirable in their own right.

This is the argument that Ms. Mc-Closkey's title seems to promise. Yet the farther one reads in "The Bourgeois Virtues," the less trustworthy a champion Ms. McCloskey seems. The problem lies not simply in her writing style - which is headlong, hyperbolic, and arch - or the organization of her book, which is so free-associative as to seem like a product of attention-deficit disorder. The reader of "The Bourgeois Virtues" will find, in no particular or der: epigraphs from bad poems written by Ms. McCloskey's aged mother; personal attacks on her professional enemies, including Paul Samuelson and Richard Posner; chapter-length reviews of books she happens to have read recently; a plot summary of the movie "Groundhog Day"; jerry-built charts and diagrams with titles like "The Three Topoi of Ethics" and "Good Is Also an Asymptote, Not an Achievement"; a weirdly frequent recourse to the etymologies of Dutch words, suggesting that the author has recently spent time in the Netherlands; a private slang full of terms like "Max U," "P Only" and "The Transcendent Two"; and undergraduate-style dismissals of Plato and Kant ("Why, dear Immanuel, 'must' a division of labor govern ethical philosophy?").

The reason for Ms. McCloskey's failings, however, is not discreditable. As an academic economist, she writes, her whole career has been spent analyzing human beings as rational, selfish, utility-maximizing agents. Now she realizes, all of a sudden, that in fact we are ethical beings driven by deeply held transcendent beliefs. Even more exciting, there are creatures known as philosophers who have been discussing those beliefs for thousands of years! Ms. McCloskey's naivete and excitability in writing about virtue are exactly those of a new convert, or a person in love - witness the way she greedily strips every text that happens to cross her path, from a magazine article to "Persuasion," for evidence of the importance of virtue. (Ms. Mc-Closkey is even, it seems, a literal convert, who has recently embraced Episcopalianism under the middlebrow aegis of C.S. Lewis.)

Alas, Ms. McCloskey's enthusiasm, untempered by expertise or discipline, gives her only a very limited insight into the problem of the bourgeois virtues. The most she can establish is that the classic seven virtues - justice, temperance, prudence, and so on - all admit of being exercised in a commercial society. But the deeper challenges of bourgeois ethics never seem to occur to her. Is it not true that our society, like every society, perhaps, encourages certain virtues - prudence, temperance - at the expense of others - love, faith? How should a vague concept like virtue guide us in the face of the concrete challenges posed by capitalism? For instance, what does bourgeois ethics advise an insurance claims-adjuster to do when her company's policy tells her to refuse a patient life-saving medical care on the grounds of cost? Does prudence in this case trump love?

It is telling that real-life moral problems like these make no appearance in "The Bourgeois Virtues." Any honest praise of bourgeois society must come to terms with its serious shortcomings, which are not less real because they are less severe than the shortcomings of communism or feudalism. Likewise, genuine understanding of bourgeois virtue, which does exist, must acknowledge the limits of that virtue, and even give a hearing to its righteous enemies. Ms. McCloskey promises that this big book is going to be followed by no fewer than three sequels, illustrating and refining her ideas. But based on the evidence of "The Bourgeois Virtues," those ideas have already been stretched as far as they can go, and then some.