history of capitalism, politics and Australian Indigenous History. She was an Australian Research Council Discovery Early Career Researcher Award (DECRA) Fellow 2017-2019.
Forsyth is the author of A History of the Modern Australian University.
She applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Virtue Capitalists: The Rise and Fall of the Professional Class in the Anglophone World, 1870–2008, and reported the following:
Virtue Capitalists is about the capitalisation - investment for profitable return, in this case for both social and economic profit - of middle-class morality in the making of the professional class. Page 99 is not a bad place to see this, in fact. In the proofs, at least (this was written before the final copy was released), page 99 is the last page of chapter two, entitled 'Achieving Class'. It sums up the importance of merit. This is what made the professionals an ‘achieving class’, in that their class status was attained, rather than a matter of birth - though the chapter shows that merit also privileged certain things, including race and gender characteristics. Page 99 refers to a fictional character I had drawn on from an allegorical newspaper story, a ‘quack’ who made his wealth from a patent medicine called ‘Methuselah Mixture’ made from rhubarb and magnesium. Merit, page 99 shows, meant that in the system the professional class were bringing into being, this character’s commercial acumen would be subordinated to his honest application of expertise.Learn more about Virtue Capitalists at the Cambridge University Press website.
Readers opening Virtue Capitalists to page 99 will therefore get a fairly reasonable sense of the 'rise' of the professional class, but no idea at all about its 'fall'. The hierarchies we can see emerging on page 99 were forged in an Anglo world that was also ordered by race and gender distinctions. Later chapters of the book show that after decolonisation began to raise new questions about the hierarchies that had structured much of the twentieth century, each profession had something of a moral crisis. Seeking in each instance to re-consider the moral order of their profession, members of each occupation helped a rising managerial class dismantle their old-fashioned sense of 'character' and build systems for monitoring and evaluating virtuous behaviour. Risk and quality management, and the endless audit trails that followed, produced a kind of moral deskilling amidst a new ethic that success was now the only virtue that mattered.
Our experiences in workplaces, in politics and the public sphere affirm the consequences. Managerial priorities sometimes conflict with professional values. This is linked to a gender war, where one side characterises increasingly feminised professional expertise as 'nanny-ish', holding back a more masculine drive to entrepreneurship. This in turn contributes to toxic political conflict over the application of professional judgement to major, even existential, threats like climate change. It is a kind of class conflict, I argue - but not one leading to anything generative.
--Marshal Zeringue
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