The genius of America in the early 19th century, Tocqueville thought, was that it pursued "productive industry" without a descent into lethal materialism. Behind America's balancing act, the pioneering French social thinker noted, lay a common set of civic virtues that celebrated not merely hard work but also thrift, integrity, self-reliance and modesty – virtues that grew out of the pervasiveness of religion.

Some 75 years later, sociologist Max Weber dubbed the qualities that Tocqueville observed the "Protestant ethic" and considered them the cornerstone of successful capitalism. Like Tocqueville, Weber saw that ethic most fully realized in America, where it pervaded the society. Preached by luminaries like Benjamin Franklin, taught in public schools, embodied in popular novels, repeated in self-improvement books and transmitted to immigrants, that ethic undergirded and promoted America's economic success.

What would Tocqueville or Weber think of America today? In place of thrift, they would find a nation of debtors, staggering beneath loans obtained under false pretenses. In place of a steady, patient accumulation of wealth, they would find bankers and financiers with such a short-term perspective that they never pause to consider the consequences or risks of selling securities they don't understand. In place of a country where all a man asks of government is "not to be disturbed in his toil," as Tocqueville put it, they would find a nation of rent-seekers demanding government subsidies to purchase homes, start new ventures or bail out old ones.

They would find what Tocqueville described as the "fatal circle" of materialism – the cycle of acquisition and gratification that drives people back to ever more frenetic acquisition and that ultimately undermines prosperous democracies.

And they would understand why. After flourishing for three centuries in America, the Protestant ethic began to disintegrate, with key elements slowly disappearing from modern American society, vanishing from schools, business, popular culture, and leaving us with an economic system unmoored from the restraints of civic virtue.

Not even Adam Smith – who was a moral philosopher, after all – imagined capitalism operating in such an ethical vacuum. Bailout plans, new regulatory schemes and monetary policy moves won't be enough to spur a robust, long-term revival of American economic opportunity without some renewal of what was once understood as the work ethic – not just hard work but also a set of accompanying virtues, whose crucial role in the development and sustaining of free markets too few now recall.

Steven Malanga is the senior editor of City Journal, from whose summer issue this is adapted.