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The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Commerce Paperback – October 15, 2007

by Deirdre Nansen McCloskey (Author)

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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.

Print length

634 pages
Language

English
Publisher

University of Chicago Press
Publication date

October 15, 2007
Dimensions

6 x 1.5 x 9 inches
ISBN-10

0226556646
ISBN-13

978-0226556642
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About the Author

Deirdre Nansen McCloskey is distinguished professor emerita of economics and of history, and professor emerita of English and of communication, at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ University of Chicago Press; 1st edition (October 15, 2007)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Paperback ‏ : ‎ 634 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0226556646
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0226556642
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 2.08 pounds
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6 x 1.5 x 9 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #659,086 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #315 in Free Enterprise & Capitalism
- #1,392 in Economic History (Books)
- #2,348 in Philosophy of Ethics & Morality

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B Leyden

EXPLAINING THE "GREAT fACT"

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on March 4, 2012

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McCloskey says re why the West suddenly in the past 200 years become rich:
"I claim that the modern world was made by a new, faithful dignity accorded to the bourgeois - in assuming its proper place -and by a new, hopeful liberty - in venturing forth. To assume one's place and to venture: dignity and liberty. "
Dignity and liberty work. By now we should have ceased being shocked by their efficacy. The special development zone of Shenzen, a suburb of Hong Kong went from being a small fishing village to an 8 million soul metropolis in two decades. True, it didn't happen without some nasty rent-seeking by party officials and their friends. But out of such creative destruction are average incomes dramatically raised. Such a feat required a shift in rhetoric: stop jailing millionaires and start admiring them; stop resisting creative destruction and start speaking well of innovation; stop over-regulating markets and start letting people make deals, corrupt or not.

THE OLD VIEW OF THE BOURGEOISIE

Until the view of the bourgeoisie suddenly changed in academic circles in Spain, then in commercial and (some) political circles in Holland and then in Britain and the United States, dignity and liberty for the bougeoisie was viewed as an outrageous absurdity. Of course, the bourgeoisie was contemptible!! In Confucianism the 4th and lowest of the social classes is the merchant, only just on a par with the carriers of night-soil; or in Christianity, the camel having a better chance of passing through the eye of the needle than a rich man entering heaven.
'
Around 1700, for the first time ever, deals to buy spices (or steam engines) low and sell them high were admired. The admiration overturned various anti-bourgeois stereotypes which had so long prevailed ....that deals are dirty and unholy, that the dealers are dangerous and disreputable, and that men of honor - such as the gentry or the priests or the mandarins or the SEC or the FDA - should of course keep them in their place.
Before Britain and Holland, the world had never seen whole-country examples of success from leaving the bourgeoisie free and respected. People looked to apparently successful Venice and took the lesson that the way to wealth was colonies and mercantilist trade. Those who can see order only when there is a conscious ordering mind - socialists, totalitarians...and the like - feared the consequences of giving dignity and freedom to greedy merchants looking only self-interest.
The change in attitude was slow in changing the popular image; in fact, it never did, completely. Nothing different today.

ECONOMICS IS SOMETHING THAT HAPPENS BETWEEN PEOPLE'S EARS

It was a long and complicated cultural task to change perceptions of the merchant, to create what Schumpeter called a "business-respecting civilization. Before 1600, the transcendent (great) man had been limited to the brave hero or saint, or the courtly, imperious nobleman. Shakespeare, writing around 1600 populated his plays with: honorable aristocrats, comical peasants or sweet peasants. The only bourgeois character is the unsavory Shylock in the "Merchant of Venice." The elite in Britain took a century or more after Shakespeare to just begin thinking of commercial activity as OK.

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Jim Myles

Faith and Hope are Rewarded in the End

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on January 23, 2017

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I am not sufficiently well read to appreciate fully McCloskey’s theoretical underpinnings of virtues, which is the focus of the first 400 pages of the book. It is likely that only another scholar would be well acquainted with the host of philosophers, theologians, economists and their positions that she references throughout the book. However, the last part of the book, The Bourgeois Uses of the Virtues, was a satisfying conclusion. I had initially planned on giving this a three star review, but after reading the final section, I think that a four star rating is appropriate.

McCloskey is well read and learned and has a deep academic understanding of ethics and virtues. I tend to support her outlook. My dissatisfaction with the book is due to her writing style. The Wall Street Journal’s review says McCloskey’s, “… style is conversational and lively, sometimes even cheeky, so that even the toughest concepts seem palatable." I found the style to be excessively wordy, which often made reading tedious. It is like trying to have a conversation with a person who will not stop talking (or take a breath). Frequently, she would give a laundry list of people who supported her point or whose reasoning she disputed. This comes across as her being a hammer and the reader being the nail.

I think she errs by identifying certain academics as feminist. However, I understand this due to her background. Ethics and virtues apply to all people regardless of gender, and the validity of any underlying evaluation should not be a function of the evaluator’s gender. This type of identification only adds to the Balkanization of society.

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Daniel H. Cole

Very Disappointing

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on December 21, 2006

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I was very eager to read this book. Deirdre Mccloskey has a great reputation as talented and iconoclastic economist, as well as a gifted writer. One would not know this, however, from reading only her latest book, "The Bourgeois Virtues," which is the first of a planned four-book series.

This book is, simply put, a mess. Ostensibly an apologia for capitalism, organized around various traditional (and not so traditional) moral "virtues," in the tradition of Adam Smith's "The Theory of the Moral Sentiments," McCloskey's book is, in fact, a rambling, confused (or, at least, confusing), idiosyncratic, grandiose and self-serving diary of personal experiences and beliefs, complete with lengthy disquisitions on books, articles, films, poetry and music she either adores or detests. Her erudition is as impressive as it is obvious; she rather hits the reader over the head with it. She can cite more works from different disciplines -- both low-brow and high-brow -- on a single page, than most authors can manage in an entire chapter. At first, the reader is awe-struck by the vastness of her knowledge. Soon, however, the reader's head starts spinning from all the sharp turns and digressions, and fatigue sets in. For a while, one presses on, fighting the fatigue in the vain hope of a pay-off that never comes. Perhaps it will come in book 4 of the series. Now, I don't have a particular short time horizon (or high discount rate), but I'm not waiting until book 4 to find out where all of McCloskey's ruminations lead us.

Surprisingly, the author pays scant attention to economics throughout the book; and when she does mention the subject of her real expertise, the analysis is somewhere between skimpy and non-existent. She identifies herself as a Chicago-school economist, and to prove her bona fides she suggests in the book's executive summary that there is no such thing as a public good (citing as support only Coase's justly famous article about lighthouses in England, despite subsequent work by van Zandt showing that Coase's lighthouses were all heavily subsidized from public coffers). And in strong contrast to Adam Smith, who believed in publicly owned (or crown-owned) parks for purposes of public recreation (as opposed to lands privately-owned for economic production), McCloskey identifies herself as a "free-market environmentalist," who promotes priviatization of our national parks. Admittedly, these concerns reflect my interests as a scholar who works in the area of environmental law and economics. Nevertheless, McCloskey has a great deal of work left to do to explain to the readers why, in her ethical framework, all environmental goods should be private owned (as if they could be) and left exclusively to the work of market forces.

I may be missing something here. Perhaps this really is the most important book since "The Theory of the Moral Sentiments," and I just don't get it. Or, maybe I do get it and this is simply a bad book.

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Attention, ce livre est un livre d'éthique, non pas un livre d'histoire de l'économie

Reviewed in France 🇫🇷 on July 22, 2021

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J'ai acheté ce livre en pensant qu'il portait sur l'histoire du capitalisme. J'ai quelques sympathies pour la thèse que je croyais principale de ce livre, à savoir que le capitalisme a plus de bons côtés que de mauvais, qu'il est tout à fait compatible avec une vie vertueuse et que la bourgeoisie ne mérite pas les condamnations qu'elle reçoit de la part d’intellectuels... souvent eux-mêmes bourgeois.
Mais à part les toutes premières pages, et les toutes dernières, il n'est en réalité que très peu questions de bourgeois et de capitalisme. De la page 91 à la page 407, c'est à dire le cœur du livre, nous avons en fait à faire à un traité (assez désordonné) de philosophie éthique, défendant l'éthique de la vertu contre ses concurrentes académiques, à savoir, l'utilitarisme et le kantisme.
Je ne suis pas suffisamment expert en philosophie de l'éthique pour pouvoir juger de la pertinence de cette défense, bien que j'ai l'impression que McCloskey combat tout au long de son livre des hommes de paille. La principale critique que j'adresserais à ce livre est qu'il n'était annoncé nulle part que ce serait ça le sujet principal !
Par ailleurs, l'impression que McCloskey combat des hommes de paille me semble renforcer par le traitement qu'elle fait, à plusieurs reprises, des positions de Steven Pinker et de la psychologie évolutionniste. Sur ces points particuliers, qui ne sont pas essentiels, mais qui sont les seuls points sur lesquels je suis à peu près aptes à juger, j'ai l'impression qu'elle caricature et mésinterprète complètement le projet de la psychologie évolutionniste. J'ai l'impression par exemple qu'elle ignore d'une part la distinction entre explication ultime et explication proximale d'un comportement, et qu'elle flirte donc avec le degré zéro de la critique que l'on fait à la psychologie évolutionniste, à savoir de prétendre qu'elle affirme que l'on est altruiste dans la vie dans le seul souci de pouvoir transmettre nos gènes. D'autre part, elle semble également ignorer la nature descriptive et explicative du projet évolutionniste en lui attribuant une nature normative qu'elle n'a pas. Steven Pinker a toujours dit que, si une connaissance de la nature humaine pouvait être utile afin d'avoir un regard éclairé sur les décisions politiques et éthiques, en aucun cas l'évolution ne prescrivait une éthique. Il a fait remarqué par exemple que d'un point de vue purement évolutionnaire, lui-même, qui n'a pas d'enfant biologique, était un complet raté, mais que ceci n'avait jamais eu aucune incidence sur son choix de vie.
Une dernière critique que je ferais est que McCloskey utilise tout au long de ce livre un vocabulaire inutilement religieux. Tout au long du livre, elle argumente en long, en large et en travers sur un point qui me semble pourtant évident, à savoir que certaines choses sont désirées pour elles-mêmes, comme fin, et non pas parce qu'elles sont utiles, comme moyen. Cet enfonçage de portes ouvertes sert à McCloskey à établir une distinction entre ce qui relève du profane (en gros, ce qui est utile) et ce qui relève selon elle du sacré (ce qui est une fin en soi). Elle semble attribuer à l'utilitarisme l'idée selon laquelle il n'y aurait que des choses utiles, et aucune fin en soi, mais je n'avais personnellement jamais compris ça quand j'ai étudié l'utilitarisme. McCloskey se dit chrétienne, et elle le fait bien comprendre.
Peut-être que je suis injuste et que je combats moi-même un homme de paille dans ces critiques. Dans ce cas, je revendique le fait de ne pas être le seul responsable car McCloskey n'est souvent pas très claire dans ce qu'elle veut démontrer. Très souvent dans le livre je me suis dit : "quel est le propos, où veut-elle en venir ?". Et effectivement, on ne trouve dans ce livre que très peu de développements argumentatifs analytiques ou de données empiriques à l'appuie de propositions que l'on voudrait démontrer. On a, à la place, des anecdotes, des récits de livre et de films, qui sont censés soutenir des propositions qu'on ne discerne pas toujours très nettement.
Bien que je me suis énormément ennuyé, j'ai tout de même tenu à finir le livre. Certains passages au début et à la fin du livre, quand on parle un peu d'économie, sont intéressants, mais pas suffisamment argumentés de mon point de vue. Bien que le contenu des tomes suivants me semble un peu plus intéressant, je n'ai pas le courage, après avoir lu ce tome, de lire la suite.

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Pablo Etchegaray

Ser de luz

Reviewed in Spain 🇪🇸 on June 5, 2018

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Una Genia la autora. Una persona brillante moral y amorosa. Sincera en momentos de progresimo buenista que proyecta en otros sus miserias. El mundo necesita en mi opinion sesiones con psicologos jungueanos. Proyectamos y condenamos muestras miserias y se tortura a la persona en quien se proyecta. Hasta se los ha matado como en la URSS China Alemania Oriental toda Europa del Este, Venezuela Cuba. Hemos sufrido el socialismo fracasado y mesianico casi todo el mundo. Argentina, Uruguay, Chile, Brasil etc etc. Hasta cuando? Fracaso desde el primer dia en 1825 en New Harmony Indiana con Owen. No habra llegado el momento de decir basta. El mundo libre logro bajar la pobreza al 5 por ciento de 7000 Millones. Partiendo del 90 de 1000. Eso en 200 años.

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barbara yerolemou

Bourgeois and proud

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on June 19, 2014

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At last a good book explaining the benefits of capitalism. Anyone who has experienced communism, as I have, knows that it corrodes the spirit, makes people afraid to interact and as for customer care, forget it! My only gripe is that Mccloskey waffles on a bit.

11 people found this helpful

Aadisht

Four Stars

Reviewed in India 🇮🇳 on July 19, 2017

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Highly enjoyable to read, even though I disagree with a lot of it.

One person found this helpful

Nicola Rossi

-

Reviewed in Italy 🇮🇹 on August 1, 2021

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