Thrift

In Benjamin Franklin — An American Life (Walter Isaacson), thrift is treated as a frugal virtue and a quietly contrarian one. Kyle’s own note crystallizes the book’s defense: “thrift can only be effectively belittled in times of luxury.” The romantic (D.H. Lawrence) and academic (Weber) attacks on Franklin land on the moralizing “Poor Richard” persona, the book argues, not on Franklin the man — and the book insists on that distinction.

Thrift is bound up with Franklin’s larger social vision: an America built not on aristocratic birth-hierarchies but on “a proud middling people, a class of frugal and industrious shopkeepers and tradesmen.” His “Frugality” maxim — “Make no expense but to do good to others or yourself; i.e., waste nothing” — sits among his thirteen virtues. The book closes the thread by noting that the Great Depression “reminded people that the virtues of industry and frugality… did not deserve to be diminished as trivial or mundane.”

Context: Thrift — careful management of resources and avoidance of waste — was a cornerstone of Benjamin Franklin’s Poor Richard’s Almanack and his “Way to Wealth,” and became a defining strand of the American bourgeois work ethic later analyzed by Max Weber.

Where this appears

• Benjamin Franklin — An American Life — defended against romantic and luxury-era dismissal; “thrift can only be effectively belittled in times of luxury”; tied to Franklin’s vision of a “frugal and industrious” middling class.