After staking so much for so long on the effective operation of self-interest rightly understood, political scientists, political theorists, politicians themselves have begun to call for a renewed appreciation of the place of virtue in the citizenry's moral and political life. The roles virtue is invited to play are manifold, and the politics that underlies this renewed interest in such virtue is diverse. The cultivation of virtue – moral virtue, civic virtue, private virtue, public virtue – is praised both as an intrinsic good that might animate the citizen's public and private endeavors and as a means to the better securing of the most basic political end: “the preservation of the community and its way of life.” Some of those striving to bring virtue back into political argument have only minimal quarrels with the status quo, adapting their proposals to a modern polity understood to function primarily on the basis of self-interest and the satisfaction of material desires. Others, however, espouse a more transformative politics of virtue – one that would recall the modern polity to Aristotelian principles of government – or at the very least, to a political program in which the cultivation of the virtues, public or private, moral or civic, would play a far greater role than the one accorded it in the current Western incarnations of liberal democracy.

The possibility and desirability of implementing any of these agendas is rightly a matter of some debate, mostly within the academy, but also, in attenuated tones, without. Two issues figure most prominently in this discussion. The first concerns the compatibility of wealth and virtue.