The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Commerce

Deirdre Nansen

University of Chicago Press, Mar 15, 2010 - Business & Economics - 636 pages

First in The Bourgeois Era trilogy. “A significant contribution to the study of the moral basis of economic life and thought . . . her vision is original.” —Jonathan S. Feinstein, Journal of Economic Literature

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’s “bobos”—all have been, and still are, framed as being responsible for everything from financial to moral poverty, world wars, and spiritual desuetude. Countering these centuries of assumptions and unexamined thinking is Deirdre McCloskey’s The Bourgeois Virtues, a magnum opus that offers 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 her erudition and sheer scope of knowledge. 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. 

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 a surprising page-turner.

Contents

• A Brief for the Bourgeois Virtues: 1
• Appeal: 55
• Love: 89
• Faith and Hope: 149
• Prudence and Justice: 251
• Part V Systematizing the SevenVirtues: 301
• Part III The Bourgeois Uses of the Virtues: 405
• The unfinished case for the bourgeois virtues: 509
• Notes: 515
• Works Cited: 557
• Index: 589

Popular passages

Page 8 - If we were to prophesy that in the year 1930 a population of fifty millions, better fed, clad and lodged than the English of our time, will cover these islands, that Sussex and Huntingdonshire will be wealthier than the wealthiest parts of the...

About the author

Deirdre N. McCloskey is distinguished professor of economics, history, English, and communication at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Among her many books are Crossing: A Memoir and If You’re So Smart: The Narrative of Economic Expertise, both published by the University of Chicago Press.

Bibliographic information

• Title: The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Commerce
• Author: Deirdre Nansen
• Edition: unabridged
• Publisher: University of Chicago Press, 2010
• ISBN: 0226556670, 9780226556673
• Length: 636 pages
• Subjects: Business & Economics / Economic History; Business & Economics / Free Enterprise & Capitalism; History / Social History; Philosophy / Ethics & Moral Philosophy; Philosophy / Social; Political Science / Political Ideologies / Capitalism