Dear Professor Gunning:

I agree with your distinction between the first inventors of capitalism 
and its adopters.  The adopters have an easier time of it.  Yet if a 
lack of individualism is such a strong obstacle in 1300 or 1700, why not 
in 2007 in China and India?  And I am worried by the concept of 
"prerequisites," for which see the old essays by Alexander Gerschenkron 
on the subject long ago.  He pointed out that humans have a way of 
finding substitutes (a most economic concept) for alleged 
prerequisites.  Thus the Russians used large scale to economize on very 
scarce entrepreneurship there. 

But again the point about individualism may be correct: see the 
historical anthropologists Alan Macfaralane's long series of books 
making the argument in detail, especially about England, in more detail 
than Depak could make in a short volume as an outsider to historical 
scholarship, of course (no blame in that, I emphasize as an outsider to 
most of the literatures I use!)

As to habits of the heart and the virtues, I'm afraid you'll have to 
read The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Commerce (cheap on 
amazon.com even for the hardback!) to get the full picture.  Here's a 
riff from it that might help:

The newspapers restrict "ethics" to business practice, usually corrupt, 
and "morality" to sexual behavior, often scandalous.  I opt for the 
ordinary, non-newspaper usage that takes "morality" to be a synonym for 
"ethics," which is to say the patterns of character in a good person.  
True, the words have become entangled in the Red vs. Blue states and 
their culture wars.  The left once embraced situational ethics and the 
right favored a moral majority.  Now the Christian and progressive left 
wonders at the ethics of capital punishment and the Christian and neocon 
right wonders at moral decline.  But at the outset let us have peace. 

                "Ethics" is the system of the virtues.  A "virtue" is a 
habit of the heart, a stable disposition, a settled state of character, 
a durable, educated characteristic of someone to exercise her will to be 
good.  The definition would be circular if "good" just meant the same 
thing as "virtuous."  But it's more complicated than that.  Alasdair 
MacIntyre's famous definition is: "a virtue is an acquired human quality 
the possession of which tends to enable us to achieve those goods which 
are internal to practices and the lack of which effectively prevents us 
from achieving such goods." 

                A virtue is at the linguistic level something about 
which you can coherently say "you should practice X"--courage, love, 
prudence, temperance, justice, faith, hope, for example.  Beauty is 
therefore not a virtue in this sense of "exercising ones will."  One 
cannot say, "You should be beautiful" and make much sense, short of the 
extreme makeover.  Neat, clean, well turned out--yes.  But not 
"beautiful." 

At the simplest level people have two conventional and opposed remarks 
they make nowadays when the word "ethics" comes up.  One is the fatherly 
assertion that ethics can be reduced to a list of rules, such as the Ten 
Commandments.  Let us post the Sacred List, they say, in our courthouses 
and high schools, and watch its good effects.  In a more sophisticated 
form the fatherly approach is a natural-law theory that, say, 
homosexuality is bad, because unnatural.

In contrast, the other remark that people make reflects the motherly 
assertion that ethics is after all particular to this family or that 
person.  Let's get along with each other and not be too strict.  Bring 
out the jello and the lemonade.  In its sophisticated form the motherly 
approach is a cultural relativist theory that, say, female circumcision 
and the forced marriage of 11-year old girls is all right--because it is 
their custom. The "virtue-ethic" parallel to such college-freshman 
commandments or college-sophomore relativism is the vocabulary of the 
hero and of the saint. 

Regards,

Deirdre McCloskey