Reddit reviews The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Commerce

holy shit

P U R E

>The big economic story of our times is not the Great Recession. It is how China and India began to embrace neoliberal ideas of economics and attributed a sense of dignity and liberty to the bourgeoisie they had denied for so long



but wait there's more
>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.

i think im going to die from an overdose of ideology

The Great Enrichment of the past two centuries has one primary source: the liberation of ordinary people to pursue their dreams of economic betterment

That is Deirdre McCloskey and behind the Wall Street Journal paywall and I tried every obvious trick to get around it but cannot. If you have never taken a look at her bourgeois trilogy (starts with The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Commerce) you might want to. She is an equal opportunity gadfly and apparently she has read more books than anybody I have ever met in real life.

> McCloskey, Deirdre Nansen (2009): Slavery and Imperialism Did Not Enrich Europe. Unpublished.

> Makes sense, considering the content. I don't know where one would even begin to try publishing a "paper" that discards over a dozen different theories in just 34 pages.

It's a chapter from a book she's working on, part of a series. The first volume, The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Commerce, was published by University of Chicago press, so this book will probably be published by them, too.

Since your post is just empty sarcasm, I'm not sure which points of hers you object to.

http://www.amazon.com/dp/0226556646