Bourgeois Dignity: Why Economics Can't Explain the Modern World

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.

• The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World Economy.
• The Lever of Riches: Technological Creativity and Economic Progress
• Rulers, Religion, and Riches: Why the West Got Rich and the Middle East Did Not (Cambridge Studies in Economics, Choice, and Society)
• The British Industrial Revolution in Global Perspective (New Approaches to Economic and Social History)
• A Farewell to Alms: A Brief Economic History of the World (The Princeton Economic History of the Western World)
• The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Commerce
• Economical Writing, Third Edition: Thirty-Five Rules for Clear and Persuasive Prose (Chicago Guides to Writing, Editing, and Publishing)
• Bourgeois Equality: How Ideas, Not Capital or Institutions, Enriched the World
• Why Liberalism Works: How True Liberal Values Produce a Freer, More Equal, Prosperous World for All
• Bourgeois Equality: How Ideas, Not Capital or Institutions, Enriched the World