Research Catalog

Title

Bourgeois equality : how ideas, not capital or institutions, enriched the world / Deirdre Nansen McCloskey.

Author

McCloskey, Deirdre N.

Publication

• Chicago ; London : The University of Chicago Press, 2016.
• ©2016

Items in the Library & Off-site

Details

Description

xlii, 787 pages : illustrations; 24 cm

Subject

• Economic history > Moral and ethical aspects
• Middle class > Economic aspects
• Liberty > Economic aspects
• Idea (Philosophy) > Economic aspects
• Technological innovations > Economic aspects
• Income distribution > History
• Cost and standard of living > History
• Cost and standard of living
• Income distribution
• Industrielle Revolution
• Ideengeschichte
• Liberalismus
• Gleichheit

Genre/Form

History.

Bibliography (note)

• Includes bibliographical references (pages 651-750) and index.

Contents

Part I. A great enrichment happened, and will happen -- 1. The world is pretty rich, but once was poor -- 2. For Malthusian and other reasons, very poor -- 3. Then many of us shot up the blade of a hockey stick -- 4. As your own life shows -- 5. The poor were made much better off -- 6. Inequality is not the problem -- 7. Despite doubts from the Left -- 8. Or from the Right and Middle -- 9. The great international divergence can be overcome -- Part II. Explanations from Left and Right have proven false -- 10. The divergence was not caused by imperialism -- 11. Poverty cannot be overcome from the Left by overthrowing "Capitalism" -- 12. "Accumulate, accumulate" is not what happened in history -- 13. But neither can poverty be overcome from the Right by implanting "Institutions" -- 14. Because ethics matters, and changes, more -- 15. And the oomph of institutional change is far too small -- 16. Most governmental institutions make us poorer -- Part III. Bourgeois life had been rhetorically revalued in Britain at the onset of the Industrial Revolution -- 17. It is a truth universally acknowledged that even Dr. Johnson and Jane Austen exhibit the revaluation -- 18. No woman but a blockhead wrote for anything but money -- 19. Adam Smith exhibits bourgeois theory at its ethical best -- 20. Smith was not a Mr. Max U, but rather the last of the former virtue ethicists -- 21. That is, he was no reductionist, economistic or otherwise -- 22. And he formulated the bourgeois deal -- 23. Ben Franklin was bourgeois, and he embodied betterment -- 24. By 1848 a bourgeois ideology had wholly triumphed -- Part IV. A pro-bourgeois rhetoric was forming in England around 1700 -- 25. The word "honest" shows the changing attitude toward the aristocracy and the bourgeoisie -- 26. And so does the word "eerlijk" -- 27. Defoe, Addison, and Steele show it, too -- 28. The bourgeois revaluation becomes a commonplace, as in The London Merchant -- 29. Bourgeois Europe, for example, loved measurement -- 30. The change was in social habits of the lip, not in psychology -- 31. And the change was specifically British -- Part V. Yet England had recently lagged in bourgeois ideology, compared with the Netherlands -- 32. Bourgeois Shakespeare disdained trade and the bourgeoisie -- 33. As did Elizabethan England generally -- 34. Aristocratic England, for example, scorned measurement -- 35. The Dutch preached bourgeois virtue -- 36. And the Dutch bourgeoisie was virtuous -- 37. For instance, bourgeois Holland was tolerant, and not for prudence only -- Part VI. Reformation, revolt, revolution, and reading increased the liberty and dignity of ordinary Europeans -- 38. The causes were local, temporary, and unpredictable -- 39. "Democratic" church governance emboldened people -- 40. The theology of happiness changed circa 1700 -- 41. Printing and reading and fragmentation sustained the dignity of commoners -- 42. Political ideas mattered for equal liberty and dignity -- 43. Ideas made for a bourgeois revaluation -- 44. The rhetorical change was necessary, and maybe sufficient -- Part VII. Nowhere before on a large scale had bourgeois or other commoners been honored -- 45. Talk had been hostile to betterment -- 46. The hostility was ancient -- 47. Yet some Christians anticipated a respected bourgeoisie -- 48. And betterment, though long disdained, developed its own vested interests -- 49. And then turned -- 50. On the whole, however, the bourgeoisies and their bettering projects have been precarious -- Part VIII. Words and ideas caused the modern world -- 51. Sweet talk rules the economy -- 52. And its rhetoric can change quickly -- 53. It was not a deep cultural change -- 54. Yes, it was ideas, not interests or institutions, that changed, suddenly, in Northwestern Europe -- 55. Elsewhere ideas about the bourgeoisie did not change -- Part IX. The history and economics have been misunderstood -- 56. The change in ideas contradicts many ideas from the political middle, 1890-1980 -- 57. And many Polanyish ideas from the Left -- 58. Yet Polanyi was right about embeddedness -- 59. Trade-tested betterment is democratic in consumption -- 60. And liberating in production -- 61. And therefore bourgeois rhetoric was better for the poor -- Part X. That is, rhetoric made us, but can readily unmake us -- 62. After 1848 the clerisy converted to antibetterment -- 63. The clerisy betrayed the bourgeois deal, and approved the Bolshevik and Bismarckian deals -- 64. Anticonsumerism and pro-bohemianism were fruits of the antibetterment reaction -- 65. Despite the clerisy's doubts -- 66. What matters ethically is not equality of outcome, but the condition of the working class -- 67. A change in rhetoric made modernity, and can spread it.

Call Number

JFE 16-11366

ISBN

• 9780226333991
• 022633399X

LCCN

• 2015035276
• 40025968841

OCLC

920017440

Author

McCloskey, Deirdre N., author.

Title

Bourgeois equality : how ideas, not capital or institutions, enriched the world / Deirdre Nansen McCloskey.

Publisher

Chicago ; London : The University of Chicago Press, 2016.

Copyright Date

©2016

Type of Content

text

Type of Medium

unmediated

Type of Carrier

volume

Bibliography

Includes bibliographical references (pages 651-750) and index.

Other Standard Identifier

40025968841

Research Call Number

JFE 16-11366