Cloth: 978-0-226-55665-9 | Paper: 978-0-226-55674-1 | Electronic: 978-0-226-55666-6
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226556666.001.0001
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ABOUT THIS BOOK
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. The result was an explosion in economic growth and proof that economic change depends less on foreign trade, investment, or material causes, and a whole lot more on ideas and what people believe.
Or so says Deirdre N. McCloskey in Bourgeois Dignity, a fiercely contrarian history that wages a similar argument about economics in the West. Here she turns her attention to seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Europe to reconsider the birth of the industrial revolution and the rise of capitalism. According to McCloskey, our modern world was not the product of new markets and innovations, but rather the result of shifting opinions about them. During this time, talk of private property, commerce, and even the bourgeoisie itself radically altered, becoming far more approving and flying in the face of prejudices several millennia old. The wealth of nations, then, didn’t grow so dramatically because of economic factors: it grew because rhetoric about markets and free enterprise finally became enthusiastic and encouraging of their inherent dignity.
An utterly fascinating sequel to her critically acclaimed book The Bourgeois Virtues, Bourgeois Dignity is a feast of intellectual riches from one of our most spirited and ambitious historians—a work that will forever change our understanding of how the power of persuasion shapes our economic lives.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY
REVIEWS
“The startling perspective McCloskey brings to the history of economics qualifies her as the Max Weber of our times. This is a wonderfully entertaining and stimulating antidote for the reigning view of Homo Economicus.”
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Preface and Acknowledgments
1. The Modern World Was an Economic Tide, But Did Not Have Economic Causes
2. Liberal Ideas Caused the Innovation
3. And a New Rhetoric Protected the Ideas
4. Many Other Plausible Stories Don’t Work Very Well
5. The Correct Story Praises “Capitalism”
6. Modern Growth Was a Factor of at Least Si
7. Increasing Scope, Not Pot-of-Pleasure “Happiness,” Is What Mattered
8. And the Poor Won
9. Creative Destruction Can Be Justifi ed Therefore on Utilitarian Grounds
10. British Economists Did Not Recognize the Tide
11. But the Figures Tell
12. Britain’s (and Europe’s) Lead Was an Episode
13. And Followers Could Leap over Stages
14. The Tide Didn’t Happen because of Thrift
15. Capital Fundamentalism Is Wrong
16. A Rise of Greed or of a Protestant Ethic Didn’t Happen
17. “Endless” Accumulation Does Not Typify the Modern World
18. Nor Was the Cause Original Accumulation or a Sin of Expropriation
19. Nor Was It Accumulation of Human Capital, Until Lately
20. Transport or Other Domestic Reshuffl ings Didn’t Cause It
21. Nor Geography, nor Natural Resources
22. Not Even Coal
23. Foreign Trade Was Not the Cause, Though World Prices Were a Context
24. And the Logic of Trade-as-an-Engine Is Dubious
25. And Even the Dynamic Effects of Trade Were Small
26. The Effects on Europe of the Slave Trade and British Imperialism Were Smaller Still
27. And Other Exploitations, External or Internal, Were Equally Profitless to Ordinary Europeans
28. It Was Not the Sheer Quickening of Commerce
29. Nor the Struggle over the Spoils
30. Eugenic Materialism Doesn’t Work
31. Neo-Darwinism Doesn’t Compute
32. And Inheritance Fades
33. Institutions Cannot Be Viewed Merely as Incentive-Providing Constraints
34. And So the Better Institutions, Such as Those Alleged for 1689, Don’t Explain
35. And Anyway the Entire Absence of Property Is Not Relevant to the Place or Period
36. And the Chronology of Property and Incentives Has Been Mismeasured
37. And So the Routine of Max U Doesn’t Work
38. The Cause Was Not Science
39. But Bourgeois Dignity and Liberty Entwined with the Enlightenment
40. It Was Not Allocation
41. It Was Words
42. Dignity and Liberty for Ordinary People, in Short, Were the Greatest Externalities
43. And the Model Can Be Formalized
44. Opposing the Bourgeoisie Hurts the Poor
45. And the Bourgeois Era Warrants Therefore Not Political or Environmental Pessimism
46. But an Amiable, if Guarded, Optimism
Notes
Works Cited