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{"id":18838,"date":"2017-04-28T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2017-04-28T00:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/leithart.level2d.com\/?p=561"},"modified":"2017-04-28T00:00:00","modified_gmt":"2017-04-28T00:00:00","slug":"commerce-and-its-discontents","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/leithart\/2017\/04\/commerce-and-its-discontents\/","title":{"rendered":"Commerce and Its Discontents"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

C<\/span>harles Taylor (Modern Social Imaginaries<\/em><\/a>) observes that one of the great boasts of modernization has been to pacify war-mongering noblemen\u2014to turn swords, if not to ploughshares, at least to shares: \u201cthe transition to the commercial stage was understood as having effected the great internal pacification of modern states. This society dethroned war as the highest human activity and put in its place production. It was hostile to the older codes of warrior honor, and it tended toward a certain leveling.\u201d<\/p>\n

Not everyone approved, and not all the opposition came from the military classes: \u201cWith the coming of a commercial society, it seemed that greatness, heroism, and full-hearted dedication to a nonutilitarian cause were in danger of atrophy, even of disappearing from the world. One form this worry took was the concern about men, following the ethos of polite society, becoming \u2018effeminate,\u2019 losing their manly virtues, which was an important recurring theme in the eighteenth century. At the most primitive level, this could emerge in a rebellion of upper-class rowdies against the polite conventions of the age; at a slightly higher level perhaps, in the return of duelling in eighteenth-century England.\u201d<\/p>\n

One response was to advocate \u201cthe ethic of civic humanism as a rival to the ethos of commercial society, or perhaps as a compensation for the dangers\u2014of enervation, corruption, loss of liberty\u2014that this modern form brought with it.\u201d Taylor sees another expression of the same anxiety in the \u201cfierce denunciation of the modern moral order and everything it stands for, as we see with Nietzsche,\u201d whose popularity \u201cshows that his devastating critique still speaks to many people today. The modern order, though entrenched, perhaps even because entrenched, still awakens much resistance.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"