On the Decline of the Genteel Virtues

This innovative book proposes that what we think of as "e;moral conscience"e; is essentially the exercise of reflective judgment on the goods and ends arising in interpersonal relations, and that such judgment constitutes a form of taste. Through an historical survey Mitchell shows that the constant pendant to taste was an educational and cultural ideal, namely, that of the gentleman, whether he was an ancient Greek citizen-soldier, Roman magistrate, Confucian scholar-bureaucrat, Renaissance courtier, or Victorian grandee.  Mitchell argues that it was neither an ethical doctrine nor methodology that provided the high cultures with moral and political leadership, but rather an elite social order. While the gentry in the traditional sense no longer exists, it nevertheless made significant historical contributions, and insofar as we are concerned to understand the present state of human affairs, we need to grasp the nature and import of said contributions. 

Chapter 1: Introduction: On the Ethos of Good Taste or Gentility.- 1. 1. The Antimony of Taste.- 1. 2.The Ethos of Gentility.- 1.3. The Historical origins of the Antimony of Taste.- 1.4. The Relation of Taste to Virtue.- Chapter 2: On the Origins of Aristocracy.- 2.1. The Conquest Theory.- 2. 2. Commercialization.- 2.3. Aristocratic Humanism.- 2.4. Ascetic Supernaturalism.- 2. 5. Hedonistic Materialism.- 2.6. Taking Custom Seriously.- Chapter 3:  The Ethos of Gentility in Greco-Roman Antiquity.- 3.1.Ancient Greece: From Warrior-Aristocrat to Citizen-Soldier.- 3.2. Aristotle on the Ideal of the Kalokagthos.- 3.3. Aristotle on the To Kalon.- 3.4. Aristotle on Phronesis.- 3.5. Aristotle’s Genteel Republic.- 3.6. Aristotle and the Idea of Taste.- 3.7.The Downfall of the Classical City-State.- 3.8.The Nobilitas of Republican Rome.- 3.9. Cicero’s Ethic for the Nobile.- Chapter 4: The Ethos of Gentility in Early Confucianism.- 4.1.The Decline of Feudalism in Ancient China.- 4.2. The Confucian Junzi.- 4.3.Confucian Virtue Ethics.- 4.4.Good Taste and the Confucian Notion of Li.- Chapter 5: The Ethos of Gentility from the Italian Renaissance to Victorian England.- 5.1. Castiglione and The Book of the Courtier.- 5.2.Gracian and The Art of Worldly Wisdom.- 5.3.The French Moralists.- 5.4.The English Gentleman.- 5.5. Shaftesbury and the Commonwealth of Taste.- 5.6. Burke’s Defense of the Gentry.- 5.7. J. S. Mill on the Replacement of Aristocracy by Meritocracy.- Chapter 6: American Meritocracy and the Rise of Specialized Elites.- 6.1.The Colonial Gentry.- 6.2.James Fenimore Cooper on the Democratic Gentleman.- 6.3. Dye and Zeigler on American Elitism.- 6.4. From Status Group to Social Class.- 6.5. From University to Multiversity.- Chapter 7: Conservatism and the Genteel Heritage.- 71. Max Weber on Bureaucracy.- 7.2. Talcott Parsons on Collegiality.- 7.3. Deliberative Democracy vs. Monocratic Bureaucracy.- 7.4.The Genteel Political Tradition.- 7.5. Good Taste as the Principle of Gentility.- 7.6. The Moral Nobility of the Gentleman.- 7.7. The Gentleman as Cultural Conservationist .- 7.8.The Genteel Legacy.