Virtue and Domination

The concept of virtue is a problem in America's critical period. Historians of the 'republican' school emphasise its importance as a civic ideal: the virtuous republic vigilant against the threat of corruption, to both leaders and the whole community. But this seems inaccurate when we see how little concerned leaders like Washington were with encouraging virtue (and fighting corruption) among ordinary people. Perhaps we should instead see virtue as a particular quality that an elite saw in themselves, inaccessible to the majority.

In Dialiectic of Enlightenment, Adorno and Horkheimer discuss the episode when Odysseus has himself tied to his ship's mast by his crew, so he can listen to the Sirens' song without being lured to his death. Their interpretation seems to offer a model for an elite bourgeois concept of virtue in the Age of Revolutions:

The other possibility Odysseus, the seigneur who allows the others to labor for themselves, reserves to himself. He listens, but while bound impotently to the mast; the greater the temptation the more he has his bonds tightened - just as later the burghers would deny themselves happiness all the more doggedly as it drew closer to them with the growth of their own power... [H]is men, who do not listen, know only the song's danger but not its beauty, and leave him at the mast in order to save him and themselves. They reproduce the oppressor's life together with their own, and the oppressor is no longer able to escape his social role. [p.34]