Research Catalog

Title

Bourgeois dignity : why economics can't explain the modern world / Deirdre N. McCloskey.

Author

McCloskey, Deirdre N.

Publication

Chicago : University of Chicago Press, 2010.

Items in the Library & Off-site

Details

Description

xvi, 571 p.; 24 cm.

Summary

• Bourgeois Dignity turns 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 or imperial theft, but rather of shifting opinions about the economy. Talk of private property, commerce, innovation, and the bourgeoisie radically altered, becoming far more approving and contradicting prejudices several millennia old. The wealth of nations, then, didn't grow so dramatically after 1800 because of economic factors; it grew because rhetoric about markets, enterprise, and innovation finally became enthusiastic and encouraging of their inherent dignity.
• Bourgeois Dignity retells the story of modern economic growth, recasting what we thought we knew from 1776 to the present. McCloskey tests the traditional stories against what actually happenedùand the usual stories don't work very well. Not Marx and his classes. Not Max Weber and his Protestants. Not Fernand Braudel and his Mafia-style capitalists. Not Douglass North and his institutions. Not the mathematical theories of endogenous growth. Not the left wing's theory of working-class struggle, nor the right wing's theory of spiritual decline. What works is "rhetoric." What people said about markets and innovation changed in Holland and then England and then the world. --Book Jacket.

Subject

• Economic history
• Economics > Philosophy
• Middle class
• Europe > Economic conditions

Bibliography (note)

• Includes bibliographical references (p. [493]-533) and index.

Contents

The modern world was an economic tide, but did not have economic causes -- Liberal ideas caused the innovation -- And a new rhetoric protected the ideas -- Many other plausible stories don't work very well -- The correct story praises capitalism -- Modern growth was a factor of at least sixteen -- Increasing scope, not pot-of-pleasure happiness, is what mattered -- And the poor won -- Creative destruction can be justified therefore on utilitarian grounds -- British economists did not recognize the tide -- But the figures tell -- Britain's (and Europe's) lead was an episode -- And followers could leap over stages -- The tide didn't happen because of thrift -- Capital fundamentalism is wrong -- A rise of greed or of a Protestant ethic didn't happen -- Endless accumulation does not typify the modern world -- Nor was the cause original accumulation or a sin of expropriation -- Nor was it accumulation of human capital until lately -- Transport or other domestic reshufflings didn't cause it -- Nor geography, nor natural resources -- Not even coal -- Foreign trade was not the cause, though world prices were a context -- And the logic of trade-as-an-engine is dubious -- And even the dynamic effects of trade were small -- The effects on Europe of the slave trade and British imperialism were smaller still -- And other exploitations, external or internal, were equally profitless to ordinary Europeans -- It was not the sheer quickening of commerce -- Nor the struggle over the spoils -- Eugenic materialism doesn't work -- Neo-Darwinism doesn't compute -- And inheritance fades -- Institutions cannot be viewed merely as incentive-providing constraints -- And so the better institutions, such as those alleged for 1689, don't explain -- And anyway the entire absence of property is not relevant to the place or period -- And the chronology of property and incentives has been mismeasured -- And so the routine of Max U doesn't work -- The cause was not science -- But bourgeois dignity and liberty entwined with the Englightenment -- It was not allocation -- It was words -- Dignity and liberty for ordinary people, in short, were the greatest externalities -- And the model can be formalized -- Opposing the bourgeois hurts the poor -- And the bourgeois era warrants therefore not political or environmental pessimism -- But an amiable, if guarded optimism.

Call Number

JBE 12-615

ISBN

• 9780226556659 (cloth : alk. paper)
• 0226556654 (cloth : alk. paper)

LCCN

2010018367

OCLC

555650388

Author

McCloskey, Deirdre N.

Title

Bourgeois dignity : why economics can't explain the modern world / Deirdre N. McCloskey.

Imprint

Chicago : University of Chicago Press, 2010.

Bibliography

Includes bibliographical references (p. [493]-533) and index.

Research Call Number

JBE 12-615