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

by Deirdre McCloskey

0 ratings • 0 reviews • 1 shelved
Book cover for Bourgeois Dignity

Bookhype may earn a small commission from qualifying purchases. Full disclosure.

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, but rather the result of shifting opinions about them. 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.
  • ISBN10 0226556654
  • ISBN13 9780226556659
  • Publish Date 30 November 2010 (first published 1 January 2010)
  • Publish Status Active
  • Publish Country US
  • Imprint University of Chicago Press