Virtue capitalists: The rise and fall of the professional class in the Anglophone world, 1870–2008HannahForsyth, (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2023. pp. 317. 12 figs. ISBN: 9781009206488, Hbk $110)

Hannah Forsyth's Virtue capitalists is the sort of book that changes how you see the world. It has three parts, covering the development of the professional middle classes in ‘Anglophone’ countries – principally England, the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand – across the ‘long nineteenth century’ from 1870 to the 2008 Global Financial Crisis (GFC). Part one argues that the development of the professions was inextricable from a British invasion of indigenous legal, social, economic, and cultural structures, with colonial economies administered and protected by the new class of white-collar workers. As the professions grew, they developed standards to regulate membership and sell their value to the rest of society. Although ‛concealed beneath layers of rationality and claims to expertise’ (p. 27), professionals were capitalists. ‘Merit’ was their key store of value and investment, with the professions sharing a commitment to hard work, achievement, integrity, prudence, and temperance. These virtues, centring on merit, structured the hierarchies for each profession and became entwined with capitalism at large, so that soon merit was the ruler by which all were judged. In addition to concealing professionals’ self-enrichment, these hierarchies were also methods of exclusion and were used to justify inequalities for others on the basis of gender, race, and class. The centrality of professional virtue for the colonial economies helped to cement these inequalities in Anglophone society and gave capitalism and colonialism an air of rationality and respectability that has been, as we know, hard to shake. Part two examines the development of the welfare state in Anglophone countries from the end of WWII to the stagflation crisis in 1975. Professionals established a new world in their own virtuous image, with post-war reconstruction making explicit the connection between professional experts and the modern state. Logics of full employment necessitated educational and healthcare investment in human capital, which was used to support capitalism against the threat of communist revolution. Professionals were ‘angels of the state’, whether they worked for the government or not, as their professional work ‛affirmed, demonstrated and brought rational government into being’ (p. 168). The consolidation of class interests – demonstrated skilfully through the 1957–61 professional engineers conciliation and arbitration case – also accrued wealth and status to professionals through claims that their work was virtuous and responsible for post-war prosperity. After this peak of the ‘professional-managerial’ class, part three covers two crises in the professions’ claims of virtue. First was the global challenge to the racial and gender inequalities that the professions had codified into Anglophone capitalism. Teachers, social workers, doctors, journalists, accountants, and engineers all went through their own crisis of confidence, with some inspired by decolonization and civil rights movements, whilst others were desperate to hold onto the authority they held when they ruled the world. The second ‘crisis’ was the twin emergence of neoliberalism and managerial capitalism, where management became a set of skills separate from, but applicable to, any profession. This led to the ‘moral deskilling’ of most professions, with managers introducing audit and risk management technologies, and professionals no longer trusted to adequately perform their work. Discarding the old professional virtues as quaint and old-fashioned, management became associated with a tough, showy, hyper-masculinity that valued only ‘success’. Forsyth leaves us in a rather depressing world where two opposing, self-interested forces – professionals and managers – are battling for ‛technocratic power’ rather than affecting any meaningful progress in the challenges we face in the twenty-first century (p. 257). The strength of Virtue capitalists lies in the compelling, well-researched narrative of both professional work and Anglophone capitalism. For those interested in class history, it illuminates the way the professional middle class performed their work, and how they used (general and specific) virtues for material gain. Professional virtue, as Forsyth argues, was not simply ideological, but was a material foundation through which wealth, status, and class solidarity were achieved. For those interested in the history of capitalism, this book reveals a core facet of the Anglophone capitalist project. Capitalism, as Forsyth states, was imbued with professional virtue, which was used to justify and obscure both self-interest and exploitation. This book is ambitious. It is theoretically sophisticated, and grounded in a comprehensive historiography. I am certainly convinced that this is a transnational story, that the long nineteenth century is an appropriate scope, and that there is, necessarily, a class history that intersects with race and gender themes. However, to do it all in 250 pages is perhaps too much to ask of anyone. For example, whilst Forsyth is clearly aware of the gendered and racialized dimensions of professional virtue, they are, at times, not given the attention they deserve. I was also left with questions about the professions’ class solidarity. The book is as much about what draws different professions apart as what binds them together, and whilst the allegiance is clear between, say, ‘corporate’ professions such as law and accounting, the extent to which accountants and teachers were united in their class solidarity remains unclear. Studying a particular country within a transnational frame may have allowed these elements, and their contextual specificities, to ‘breathe’ more. I mention these quibbles simply in the spirit of defining new areas that we, as a research community, could develop further. Ultimately, this is an important, field-defining work, one that will maintain its relevance for many years to come.

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