Liturgical Services and Business Fortunes 315
relationships with the scholar-gentry and the ofβicials under the cloak of
Confucian benevolence.^84 They had earned respect in Confucian society
not solely because of their wealth, but also because of their willingness to
play down proβit-seeking, their ability to create wealth and use it for the
common good, and their orientation toward the service of others. In this
way, proβit maximization was reconciled to Confucian ethics.
As merchants were endowed with resources and a capacity to
get things done, it was only natural that they should have assumed a
leadership role in setting and fulβilling social goals.^85 All this worked to
strike a balance between a Confucian culture that stressed ethics and a
merchant culture that emphasized proβit-maximization. It also allowed
the merchants to move comfortably between the two cultural zones.
- Ibid., p. 93.
- A paraphrase of A.B. Trowbridge’s remarks in Leonard Silk and David Vogel,
Ethics and Proϔits: The Crisis of Conϔidence in American Business (New York:
Simon and Schuster, 1976), p. 12.