For a century and a half the artists and intellectuals of Europe
have scorned the bourgeoisie. And for a millennium and a half the
philosophers and theologians of Europe have scorned the
marketplace. The bourgeois life, capitalism, Mencken's "booboisie,"
and David Brooks' "bobos" all have been, and still are, framed as
responsible for everything from financial and moral poverty to
world wars and spiritual desuetude. Countering these centuries of
assumptions and unexamined thinking is Deirdre N. McCloskey's "The
Bourgeois Virtues", a magnum opus offering a radical view:
capitalism is good for us. McCloskey's sweeping, charming, and even
humorous survey of ethical thought and economic realities - from
Plato to Barbara Ehrenreich - overturns every assumption we have
about being bourgeois. Can you be virtuous and bourgeois? Do
markets improve ethics? Has capitalism made us better as well as
richer? Yes, yes, and yes, argues McCloskey, who takes on centuries
of capitalism's critics with astonishing erudition and range of
reference. Applying a new tradition of "virtue ethics" to our lives
in modern economies, she affirms American capitalism without
ignoring its faults and celebrates the bourgeois lives we actually
live, without supposing that they must be lives without ethical
foundations. High Noon, Kant, Bill Murray, the modern novel, Van
Gogh, and, of course, economics and the economy all come into play
in a book that can only be described as a monumental project and a
life's work. "The Bourgeois Virtues" is nothing less than a
dazzling reinterpretation of Western intellectual history, a
dead-serious reply to the critics of capitalism - and surprising
entertainment as well.
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