The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Commerce

by Deirdre Nansen McCloskey

Book Overview

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...

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0226556638
• ISBN13: 9780226556635
• Release Date: July 2006
• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Length: 634 Pages
• Weight: 2.20 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.6" x 6.8" x 9.1"

Customer Reviews

3.5-McCloskey wants to mix University of Chicago,Benthamite Utilitarian economics with Aristotle,Aqu

McCloskey(M)is unable to operationalize her apparently recent realization that morality and economics can't be separated.There is no such thing as a value free economics based on the Benthamite utilitarianism that formerly served McCloskey intellectually at the University of Chicago's economics department.She designates this type of thinking as Max U thinking.It is operational .The standard Max U thinking is that people are honest,in business relations and personal relations, because they think that honesty will maximize their long run rate of return or intertemporal stream of discounted utility over time.This means,of course,that if one is able to use the Bayesian subjective probability approach to calculate probabilities showing that honesty will not,in a particular case,lead to such a Max U result, then one should not be honest.This approach is directly opposed by the standard Christian view ,based on Aritotle and Aquinas,and updated by Adam Smith,that honesty is a virtue.The virtuous person is ALWAYS honest,even if it leads to a result that does not Max U. McCLoskey appears to be caught in the middle of a Saul into Paul transformation.She wants to have her cake and eat it too.The book is not the settled reflections of a master moral philosopher like Smith in his Theory of Moral Sentiments or in his application of that book to the case of the capitalist business enterprise( virtuous entrepreneur)producing goods and services that generate employment and income for himself(self interest) and his work force(enlightened self interest).The seven virtues are all evident here.This can be contrasted with the imprudent,greedy,fearful, prodigality of the projector and libertarian speculator.McCloskey fails to sufficiently differentiate between market activities that promote social interaction and understanding ,sympathy,and empathy(enterprise and entrepreneurship) and those that do not (speculator activity).This conflict is ,of course,the result of her having studied at an economics department at the University of Chicago that glories in the atheistic short run,short sighted decision making calculus of Jeremy Bentham,a well known supporter of,even if not actively involved in ,speculative activity . This is the first volume of four.It is possible that McCloskey will complete her metamorphosis .At this stage one realizes she will have a very bumpy road ahead of her.

Very interesting but flawed

McCloskey has written a fascinating and potentially great book, but she doesn't quite pull it off. It is a book that covers a remarkable lot of ground, and which has an important argument at its heart: namely, that the so-called bourgeois virtues are generally both treated unfairly and their value underestimated, in terms of contributing to our material well-being. She ranges far and wide, discussing Greek tragedy, character theory and films, moral agency and novels, as well as philosophers, writers, and economists (she is herself an economist, but a very learned and obviously interesting one). The problem, however, is that this book reads like the cobbled-together journal musing and responses of a remarkably talented and well-read diarist, but one that hasn't edited her work carefully enough. To say it is unsystematic is an understatement. Still, it is very much worth reading, not least because it's spontaneity is infectious. It's an exciting book. Many works on virtue theory are dry and detailed, as if the authors want to match the dryness of (most) deontological or utilitarian accounts of ethics. McCloskey's work is the opposite of dry. Think of it as (loosely) applied virtue theory. But as another reviewer says, you will want to read or re-read Adam Smith after this, just to see how an excellent and successful defence of the bourgeois virtues and the market economy is conducted. (Is it unfair to demand of McCloskey that she provide us with another, perhaps updated version of The Theory of the Moral Sentiments? Probably. But her book is good enough that it provokes this demand.)

Heartfelt clearheadedness

If you think you have read already a lot about economical, societal, philosophical, psychological, ethical themes and topics, this book will make you feel humble - the depth and breadth of Deirdre McCloskeys reading, thinking, and I found unprecented. The classic virtues are revived and revitalised in a most compelling way, she writes from the heart, and both her reasoning ánd feeling are at the same time so clearheaded and humanly touching, that it is difficult to put this book away. Do reserve some reflection time.

Bourgeois Virtues?

I find reviews very irksome when the reviewer states that the author of the book under review has failed miserably because he or she has not said what the reviewer would say had the reviewer written the book. Such reviews are as self-serving as they are silly and if I lapse into such here please dismiss my comments. The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Commerce is at 508 pages a hefty work but it is in fact just the first of four books Professor McCloskey has planned to write on our attitudes toward how we earn a living. I am not among those McCloskey sees as her primary audience--the romantic, anti-capitalist clerisy--for I admire the bourgeoisie and capitalism. Indeed, my heroes are foremost among McCloskey's heroes--Montesquieu, David Hume, and especially Adam Smith. Yet I believe that McCloskey fails to achieve her aims of defending capitalism and bourgeois character. She does so in a way that may actually escape attention as one reads this sometimes engaging but often tedious and very long book. The book seeks to defend "virtue ethics" against Kantian, utilitarian and contractarian ethical theories and it provides a catalogue of seven "bourgeois" virtues--love, faith, hope, courage, temperance, prudence and justice. The first three virtues McCloskey associates more with women than men and she acknowledges the obvious fact that they are essentially the Christian, "sacred" virtues. The other four virtues she associates more with men than women but they are even older than the sacred virtues because they were identified and described by the ancient, pagan Greeks and Romans. So, descriptions of the "bourgeois" virtues predate the bourgeois era by some 1800 years or more. There would be no problem with such an assertion if these rather timeless virtues are grounded in the most vigorous passions of human nature but are more likely to be achieved in the capitalist bourgeois order than in other orders or eras. Nonetheless, with a few passages in the quite excellent prologue/apology and in the final chapter aside, no such case is made. It is possible that despite the impression created by the title of this book, the case for the flourishing of the sacred and pagan virtues in capitalism will finally be made in the other three books but it is not contained within the book titled The Bourgeois Virtues. Now, I believe I can safely avoid the irksome sort of review described above because the book I believe Professor McCloskey should have written is a book she is better prepared to write than anyone else alive. What Professor McCloskey should have written is an updated and empirical case for the argument contained in one of the greatest books ever written and certainly the best book ever written on commerce and ethics--Adam Smith's The Theory of Moral Sentiments. As things stand, The Theory of Moral Sentiments is a vastly superior work to McCloskey's The Bourgeois Virtues. I say this because, like McCloskey, Smith identifies a catalogue of timele