The Bourgeois Virtues, Deirdre N. McCloskey
The Bourgeois Virtues, Deirdre N. McCloskey
List: $34.98 | Sale: $24.48
Club: $17.48

The Bourgeois Virtues
Ethics for an Age of Commerce

Author: Deirdre N. McCloskey

Narrator: Marguerite Gavin

Unabridged: 23 hr 12 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Ascent Audio

Published: 01/01/2017


Synopsis

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 an audiobook 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, and a dead-serious reply to the critics of capitalism.

About Deirdre N. McCloskey

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.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Daniel on March 09, 2018

It has taken me a very long time to finish reading this book, because this book is very long, and parts of it is rather long winded. McCloskey is a polymath: professor of Economics, History, English, Communications and Philosophy in University of Illinois. It shows in her writing: she was able to ta......more

Goodreads review by Gavin on July 14, 2018

I've been most things in my life: a positivist social engineer, a Joan Baez socialist, a man. Now I'm a free-market feminist, a quantitative postmodernist, a woman. I'm not ashamed of these changes of mind. In one sentence: The obscured origins of the modern world and its heart, as built by the......more

Goodreads review by Sean Rosenthal on August 01, 2014

Interesting Quotes: "I am puzzled when my friends on the right preach freedom for the owner of an assault weapon loaded with dum-dum shells hung on a rack in his Hummer, but then preach, too, intrusions by the government into that same man's sexual practices or his taste in recreational drugs or the......more