The good person behaving well: Rethinking the rhetoric of virtue

Abstract

Important historical changes in public virtue are chronicled in a seemingly unlikely source, etiquette manuals. A careful consideration of these texts reveals that public virtue has been historically exteriorized, from an original sense of foundational values, to an intermediary sense of public appearances, to a postmodern condition in which public virtue is merely another “means of persuasion.” I describe the historically grounded meanings of “virtue” that appear in etiquette manuals, and then explore the implications of this historical reconfiguration of virtue for public discourse.