The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of CommerceFor 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, 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 a surprising page-turner. |
From inside the book
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Page viii
... Truth 184 Such “theological” virtues—faith, hope, and love—show themselves even in some economists, and in any good scientist. 15 Economic Theology 195 Economics needs a theology. In fact, it already is a theology. Part 3 20 Part 4 21 ...
... Truth 184 Such “theological” virtues—faith, hope, and love—show themselves even in some economists, and in any good scientist. 15 Economic Theology 195 Economics needs a theology. In fact, it already is a theology. Part 3 20 Part 4 21 ...
Page x
... truth. The two depend on each other and on the characters we shape in our stories. Ethical Realism 332 The ethical is “real,” all right. Against Reduction 337 Kantianism assumes that identity is already formed, and utilitarianism ...
... truth. The two depend on each other and on the characters we shape in our stories. Ethical Realism 332 The ethical is “real,” all right. Against Reduction 337 Kantianism assumes that identity is already formed, and utilitarianism ...
Page xvi
... Truth.” Chapter 29, “Ethical Realism,” appeared in part in Uskali Mäki, ed., Fact and Fiction in Economics: Models, Realism, and Social Construction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). And scattered bits in Reason. Stanley ...
... Truth.” Chapter 29, “Ethical Realism,” appeared in part in Uskali Mäki, ed., Fact and Fiction in Economics: Models, Realism, and Social Construction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). And scattered bits in Reason. Stanley ...
Page 5
... truth?” asked jesting Pilate. Stay, I beg you, for an answer, the apology. In the early 1990s, a month before the presentation of a crude version of the answer to the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, the secretary of the ...
... truth?” asked jesting Pilate. Stay, I beg you, for an answer, the apology. In the early 1990s, a month before the presentation of a crude version of the answer to the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, the secretary of the ...
Page 13
... truth they have often been mistaken. As both would say, to be sure, the hypocrites flourish, everywhere, and our former days were glorious indeed. Yet bourgeois creativity has enriched the world. The sky has not in fact fallen. The ...
... truth they have often been mistaken. As both would say, to be sure, the hypocrites flourish, everywhere, and our former days were glorious indeed. Yet bourgeois creativity has enriched the world. The sky has not in fact fallen. The ...
Contents
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 |
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A. N. Wilson actual Adam Smith American Annette Baier Aquinas argues aristocratic Aristotle Aristotle’s behavior believe Bentham bourgeois virtues bourgeoisie C. S. Lewis called capitalism capitalist chap character Christian claim clerisy Comte-Sponville courage culture Dutch economic economist English Europe European example fact French friends God’s Gogh Greek honor human humility Hursthouse imagined intellectual Iris Murdoch Isaiah Berlin justice Kant Kantian Knight labor liberal lives Machiavelli man’s matter means merely Michael Novak modern moral Murdoch notes Novak novel Nozick one’s pagan virtues peasant percent person philosopher Plato political poor profane prudence quoted reason religion religious rhetoric rich Robert Nozick Roman sacred Schama seven virtues social society solidarity speak stories Summa Theologiae temperance theological theory There’s thing tion tradition transcendent truth University utilitarian virtue ethics wealth Western women word writes wrote
Popular passages
Page 264 - If we take in our hand any volume; of divinity or school metaphysics, for instance; let us ask, Does it contain any abstract reasoning concerning quantity or number'} No. Does it contain any experimental reasoning concerning matter of fact and existence? No. Commit it then to the flames: for it can contain nothing but sophistry and illusion.
Page 477 - There are few ways in which a man can be more innocently employed than in getting money.
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...
Page 94 - To MY DEAR AND LOVING HUSBAND If ever two were one, then surely we. If ever man were loved by wife, then thee; If ever wife was happy in a man, Compare with me, ye women, if you can.
Page 120 - The difference of natural talents in different men is, in reality, much less than we are aware of ; and the very different genius which appears to distinguish men of different professions, when grown up to maturity, is not upon many occasions so much the cause, as the effect of the division of labour. The...
Page 192 - But in the midst of doubt, in the collapse of creeds, there is one thing I do not doubt, that no man who lives in the same world with most of us can doubt, and that is that the faith is true and adorable which leads a soldier to throw away his life in obedience to a blindly accepted duty, in a cause which he little understands, in a plan of campaign of which he has no notion, under tactics of which he does not see the use.
Page 160 - To be modern is to find ourselves in an environment that promises us adventure, power, joy, growth, transformation of ourselves and the world — and, at the same time, that threatens to destroy everything we have, everything we know, everything we are.
Page 164 - Then would I bear it, clench myself, and die, Steeled by the sense of ire unmerited; Half-eased in that a Powerfuller than I Had willed and meted me the tears I shed. But not so. How arrives it joy lies slain, And why unblooms the best hope ever sown? — Crass Casualty obstructs the sun and rain, And dicing Time for gladness casts a moan. . . . These purblind Doomsters had as readily strown Blisses about my pilgrimage as pain.