©Deirdre Nansen McCloskey | COPYRIGHTED MATERIAL


On The Bourgeois Era, and Articles Relevant to It

"Bourgeois virtues" is not a crazy contradiction in terms. Economists nowadays are slowly recognizing that virtues underlie a market economy. And economic historians have long understood so, in the lives of Quakers and the vital few. Yet what the social sciences have not recognized is that a market economy can actually produce virtues, and some of the best: prudence and courage and hope called "enterprise," for example. We are stuck viewing virtues only as those of soldiers and saints. We need a re-orientation to suit a world in which we are all now bourgeois.

The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Commerce (The Bourgeois Era, vol. 1)

Are capitalism, globalization, and the middle class evil? A good many artists and intellectuals in the West since 1848 have thought so. Deirdre McCloskey, an internationally known economist, historian, and critic, shows why they have been mistaken. In her recently published book The Bourgeois Virtues ... [continues]

According to Matt Ridley of the Wall Street Journal it is
"an exhaustive philosophical treatise on virtue ethics, and a very fine one, too. Ms. McCloskey is spectacularly well read. She can pull an apposite quotation not only from her heroes, such as Adam Smith and Thomas Aquinas, but also from Thucydides and Machiavelli, or from the anthropologist Ruth Bendict and the contemporary philosopher Alistair MacIntyre, or (for that matter) from the movies 'Groundhog Day' and 'Shane.' What is more, she writes with wonderful ease. . . . The book radiates intelligence and insight and will illuminate my thinking for years to come" [July 22, 2006]. View this article in its entirety.

Related documents in Prudentia's archives:

[Continued from above]: Are capitalism, globalization, and the middle class evil? A good many artists and intellectuals in the West since 1848 have thought so. Deirdre McCloskey, an internationally known economist, historian, and critic, shows why they have been mistaken. In her recently published book The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Commerce (University of Chicago Press, 2006) she puts forward a new approach to commercial life, neither country-club arrogance or centralizing imprudence. Prudence came to be viewed around 1800 as an all purpose ethical guide. Yet the new commercial economy then flourishing required in fact a full set of "bourgeois virtues." McCloskey argues that these are simply the virtues exercised in a commercial society — love and courage, prudence and justice, hope and faith and temperance. A critic from the inside of modern economics and its reduction of virtues to one, McCloskey participates in the revival of an Aristotelian and rhetorical social science — without giving up mathematics and number. Her talk ranges from Adam Smith to Babbitt, Plato to Death of a Salesman.

Bourgeois Dignity: Why Economics Can't Explain the Modern World (The Bourgeois Era, vol. 2)

The big economic story of our times is not the Great Recession. It is how China and India began to embrace neoliberal ideas of economics and attributed a sense of dignity and liberty to the bourgeoisie they had denied for so long. The result was an explosion in economic growth and proof that economic change depends less on foreign trade, investment, or material causes, and a whole lot more on ideas and what people believe.... [continues]

"Deirdre McCloksey is a maverick, and in more ways than one. A classically trained economist ... she broke ranks in 1985 with The Rhetoric of Economics, which mocked the pretensions of economists to scientific objectivity. What the profession needed was less hightfalutin' mathematics and more emphasis on persuasion, stories, rhetoric ... She is also, by her own avowal, 'a tough urban girl who can take it as well as dish it out.' And dish it out she does."
—New York Times Book Review

Related documents in Prudentia's archives:


[Continued from above]

Or so says Deirdre N. McCloskey in Bourgeois Dignity, a fiercely contrarian history that wages a similar argument about economics in the West. Here she turns her attention to seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Europe to reconsider the birth of the industrial revolution and the rise of capitalism. According to McCloskey, our modern world was not the product of new markets and innovations, but rather the result of shifting opinions about them. During this time, talk of private property, commerce, and even the bourgeoisie itself radically altered, becoming far more approving and flying in the face of prejudices several millennia old. The wealth of nations, then, didn't grow so dramatically because of economic factors: it grew because rhetoric about markets and free enterprise finally became enthusiastic and encouraging of their inherent dignity.

An utterly fascinating sequel to her critically acclaimed book The Bourgeois Virtues, Bourgeois Dignity is a feast of intellectual riches from one of our most spirited and ambitious historians — a work that will forever change our understanding of how the power of persuasion shapes our economic lives.