The Bourgeois Virtues

by McCloskey, Deirdre N.

• ISBN13: 9780226556642
• ISBN10: 0226556646
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2007-10-15
• Publisher: Univ of Chicago Pr

Summary

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 responsible for everything from financial and moral poverty to world wars and spiritual desuetude. Countering these centuries of assumptions and unexamined thinking is Deirdre McCloskey'sThe 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 realitiesfrom Plato to Barbara Ehrenreichoverturns 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 Virtuesis nothing less than a dazzling reinterpretation of Western intellectual history, a dead-serious reply to the critics of capitalismand a surprising page-turner.

Author Biography

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.

Table of Contents

Preface

Acknowledgments

Apology: A Brief for the Bourgeois Virtues

Exordium: The Good Bourgeois

Narratio: How Ethics Fell

Probatio A: Modern Capitalism Makes Us Richer

Probatio B: And Lets Us Live Longer

Probatio C: And Improves Our Ethics

Refutatio: Anticapitalism Is Bad for Us

Peroratio

The Very Word "Virtue"

The Very Word "Bourgeois"

On Not Being Spooked by the Word "Bourgeois"

The Christian and Feminine Virtues: Love

The First Virtue: Love Profane and Sacred

Love and the Transcendent

Sweet Love vs. Interest

Bourgeois Economists against Love

Love and the Bourgeoisie

The Christian and Feminine Virtues: Faith and Hope

Faith as Identity

Hope and Its Banishment

Against the Sacred

Van Gogh and the Transcendent Profane

Humility and Truth

Economic Theology

The Pagan and Masculine Virtues: Courage, with Temperance

The Good of Courage

Anachronistic Courage in the Bourgeoisie

Taciturn Courage against the "Feminine"

Bourgeois vs. Queer

Balancing Courage

Prudence Is a Virtue

The Monomania of Immanuel Kant

The Storied Character of Virtue

Evil as Imbalance, Inner and Outer: Temperance and Justice

The Pagan-Ethical Bourgeois

Systematizing the Seven Virtues

The System of the Virtues

A Philosophical Psychology?

Ethical Striving

Ethical Realism

Against Reduction

Character(s)

Antimonism Again

Dropping the Virtues, 1532-1958

Other Lists

Eastern and Other Ways

Needing Virtues

The Bourgeois Uses of the Virtues

P and the Capitalist Life

Sacred Reasons

Not by P Alone

The Myth of Modern Rati

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