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    The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Commerce
    The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Commerce
    The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Commerce
    Ebook964 pages24 hours

    The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Commerce

    By Deirdre Nansen McCloskey

    3.5/5

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    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, 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.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherUniversity of Chicago Press
    Release dateMar 15, 2010
    ISBN9780226556673
    The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Commerce

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    3.5/5

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    • 4/5
      A classic apology for the view that private property, free labor, free trade, and prudent calculation are the source of most ethical good in modern society. This is a beautifully written paean to the virtues of capitalism.
    • 3/5
      This is a long and wordy book. The idea is to counter the assumption, common among academics, that the merchant, businessman and tradesman is without honor and virtue. It is, according to the author, the first of 4 volumes, although after the first I cannot imagine what is left to say in the next three. McCloskey’s heros are Adam Smith and Aquinas, and she is avowedly Episcopalian, professing a faith in God and the church. Much of her argument is against the project of Kant, endeavoring to put ethics on a foundation of pure reason, or against Bentham, basing ethics on utility. She argues instead for the seven ancient virtues, prudence chief among the virtues for businessmen, and argues that capitalism institutes a respect for these virtues. Almost every chapter of the book addresses a different author, and seems to be a refutation their arguments, sometimes to the detriment of the flow of the argument overall. The style is breezy, easy to read, but with annoying name-dropping references to the thought of this person or that, without explication of what she takes that thought to be. The best summary of the ideas is a quote from Michael Novak at the end: “Commerce requires attention to small losses and small gains; teaches care, discipline, frugality, clear accounting, providential forethought, and respect for regular reckonings; instructs in courtesy; softens the barbaric instincts and demands attention to manners; teaches fidelity to contracts, honesty in fair dealings, and concern for one’s moral reputation.”

      1 person found this helpful

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