Rhetorical Style and Bourgeois Virtue by Mark Garrett Longaker

Author:Mark Garrett Longaker
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The Pennsylvania State University Press

Private Virtues and Public Benefit

Blair and Smith celebrated the consumer revolution. They believed that rhetorically instilled probity and moderation could save commerce from dishonesty and luxury, and they wanted to protect private institutions from state intervention. Smith placed literary education in civil society because he distrusted government efforts at moral education. Blair imagined two overlapping and institutions within civil society: church and university. Neither regulated by government, both housing free citizens, each instilling the genteel habits of bourgeois association.

Smith advocated privatized higher education because he thought that the state’s university system had created a leeching class of ineffective and useless scholars. Blair wholeheartedly agreed with Smith’s critique of publicly funded higher education: “There is so much good Sense and Truth in your [Smith’s] doctrine about Universities, and it is so fit that your doctrine should be preached to the World.”72 This commitment to private higher education is revealed by Blair’s testimony and by his actions. Like Smith, Blair charged two guineas to attend his lectures. (Evidence indicates that Blair often waived the minimum course fee for indigent students.) The Scottish university system, Edinburgh included, followed the civic tradition of shaping a citizenry for public service. The university’s open admissions policy, its public financing, and the regular governmental intrusion in Edinburgh’s curriculum were all possible because of a widespread civic ideology that placed education within the realm of public affairs.73 In an otherwise public institution dedicated to civic virtue, Blair promoted private education for civil society.

In his sermons, Blair voiced similarly liberal inclinations. He praised the government of Great Britain for permitting freedom of religion. People should be allowed to worship as they please “as long as they infringe not the public tranquility nor disturb the state” (Sermons 4:177). Government “restrains the outrages and crimes which would be subversive of society, secures the property, and defends the lives of its subjects.” No mandated public instruction should be allowed, since government must be restricted to “the actions of men.” Government protects its citizens from “external violence” that encroaches on liberty (Sermons 2:144). At the beginning of his lectures on rhetoric, Blair connected religious moral edification to private literary education, saying, “The powers of Taste and Imagination are calculated to give us of the benignity of our Creator” (Lectures 25).

Blair told his congregation that religious reflection improves the powers of taste and imagination while tempering commercial excess. After “much commerce with the world . . . [one should become] convinced of its vanity. He has seen its most flattering hopes to be fallacious. He has felt its most boasted pleasures to be unsatisfactory” (Sermons 1:309). Inward piety benefits the individual soul and the public polity by infusing private virtues that yield public profits: “order, frugality, and economy.” These “are the necessary supports of every personal virtue . . . the basis on which liberty, independence, and true honour, must arise” (Sermons 1:341). Anyone lacking such dispositions “is held in bondage to the world. . . . From the moment you have allowed yourselves

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