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Bourgeois Equality
How Ideas, Not Capital or Institutions, Enriched the World
Language:
English
Published/Copyright:
2016
About this book
There’s little doubt that most humans today are better off than their forebears. Stunningly so, the economist and historian Deirdre McCloskey argues in the concluding volume of her trilogy celebrating the oft-derided virtues of the bourgeoisie. The poorest of humanity, McCloskey shows, will soon be joining the comparative riches of Japan and Sweden and Botswana.
Why? Most economists—from Adam Smith and Karl Marx to Thomas Piketty—say the Great Enrichment since 1800 came from accumulated capital. McCloskey disagrees, fiercely. “Our riches,” she argues, “were made not by piling brick on brick, bank balance on bank balance, but by piling idea on idea.” Capital was necessary, but so was the presence of oxygen. It was ideas, not matter, that drove “trade-tested betterment.” Nor were institutions the drivers. The World Bank orthodoxy of “add institutions and stir” doesn’t work, and didn’t. McCloskey builds a powerful case for the initiating role of ideas—ideas for electric motors and free elections, of course, but more deeply the bizarre and liberal ideas of equal liberty and dignity for ordinary folk. Liberalism arose from theological and political revolutions in northwest Europe, yielding a unique respect for betterment and its practitioners, and upending ancient hierarchies. Commoners were encouraged to have a go, and the bourgeoisie took up the Bourgeois Deal, and we were all enriched.
Few economists or historians write like McCloskey—her ability to invest the facts of economic history with the urgency of a novel, or of a leading case at law, is unmatched. She summarizes modern economics and modern economic history with verve and lucidity, yet sees through to the really big scientific conclusion. Not matter, but ideas. Big books don’t come any more ambitious, or captivating, than Bourgeois Equality.
Why? Most economists—from Adam Smith and Karl Marx to Thomas Piketty—say the Great Enrichment since 1800 came from accumulated capital. McCloskey disagrees, fiercely. “Our riches,” she argues, “were made not by piling brick on brick, bank balance on bank balance, but by piling idea on idea.” Capital was necessary, but so was the presence of oxygen. It was ideas, not matter, that drove “trade-tested betterment.” Nor were institutions the drivers. The World Bank orthodoxy of “add institutions and stir” doesn’t work, and didn’t. McCloskey builds a powerful case for the initiating role of ideas—ideas for electric motors and free elections, of course, but more deeply the bizarre and liberal ideas of equal liberty and dignity for ordinary folk. Liberalism arose from theological and political revolutions in northwest Europe, yielding a unique respect for betterment and its practitioners, and upending ancient hierarchies. Commoners were encouraged to have a go, and the bourgeoisie took up the Bourgeois Deal, and we were all enriched.
Few economists or historians write like McCloskey—her ability to invest the facts of economic history with the urgency of a novel, or of a leading case at law, is unmatched. She summarizes modern economics and modern economic history with verve and lucidity, yet sees through to the really big scientific conclusion. Not matter, but ideas. Big books don’t come any more ambitious, or captivating, than Bourgeois Equality.
Author / Editor information
Deirdre Nansen McCloskey is an emerita distinguished professor of economics and of history, and professor of English and of communications at the University of Illinois at Chicago. She is the author of sixteen other books, including If You’re So Smart, The Secret Sins of Economics, The Bourgeois Virtues, Bourgeois Dignity, and Crossing: A Memoir, all published by the University of Chicago Press.
Reviews
"It has always seemed to me that history is overdetermined, so any attempt to pick out a single cause will be doomed, and yet McCloskey's insistence on the essential role of what she variously calls ideas, ideology, ethics or rhetoric—the social acceptability of bourgeois folk engaging honourably in business—is persuasive. . . . Bourgeois Equality is richly detailed and erudite, and it will join its companion volumes as essential reading on the industrial revolution, as well as a model of the intellectual depth and breadth achievable through the study of economics."
— Diane Coyle, Financial Times"It took me two months to read this 650-page, small-type book, the third volume in a trilogy. In that time I read several other books, absorbing Bourgeois Equality in small doses on trains, ships, Tubes, sofas and beds. If that sounds like faint praise, it's not. I wanted to savour every sentence of this remarkable feast of prose. It is a giant of a book about a giant of a topic: the ‘great enrichment’ of humanity over the past 300 years. It is so rich in vocabulary, allusion and fact as to be a contender for the great book of the great book of our age. Dump your copy of Thomas Piketty and put Deirdre McCloskey on the bookshelf instead."
— Matt Ridley, The Times, Book of the Week"A sparkling book. . . . McCloskey makes a convincing case."
— Martin Wolf, Financial Times, Best Books of Early 2016“McCloskey has spent a long and distinguished career asserting the efficacy of free markets in goods and labour. . . . Unusually versed in philosophy and literature, she has acted as something of a domestic chaplain for the Chicago school of economists, ministering to the spiritual state of Homo economicus. . . . McCloskey is at her best in arguing that economics and ethics are mutually important but largely autonomous spheres of human endeavour.”
— Jeffrey Collins, Times Literary SupplementTopics
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Frontmatter
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Contents
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Exordium: The Three Volumes Show That We Are Rich Because of an Ethical and Rhetorical Change
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Acknowledgments
xxxvii - First Question. What Is to Be Explained?
- Part I A Great Enrichment Happened, and Will Happen
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1 The World Is Pretty Rich, but Once Was Poor
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2 For Malthusian and Other Reasons, Very Poor
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3 Then Many of Us Shot Up the Blade of a Hockey Stick
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4 As Your Own Life Shows
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5 The Poor Were Made Much Better Off
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6 Inequality Is Not the Problem
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7 Despite Doubts from the Left
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8 Or from the Right and Middle
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9 The Great International Divergence Can Be Overcome
73 - Second Question Why Not the Conventional Explanations?
- Part II Explanations from Left and Right Have Proven Fa lse
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10 The Divergence Was Not Caused by Imperialism
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11 Poverty Cannot Be Overcome from the Left by Overthrowing “Capitalism”
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12 “Accumulate, Accumulate” Is Not What Happened in History
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13 But Neither Can Poverty Be Overcome from the Right by Implanting “Institution
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14 Because Ethics Matters, and Changes, More
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15 And the Oomph of Institutional Change Is Far Too Small
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16 Most Governmental Institutions Make Us Poorer
139 - Third Question What, Then, Explains the Enrichment?
- Part III Bourgeois Life Had Been Rhetorically Revalued in Britain at the Onset of the Industrial Revolution
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17 It Is a Truth Universally Acknowledged That Even Dr. Johnson and Jane Austen Exhibit the Revaluation
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18 No Woman but a Blockhead Wrote for Anything but Money
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19 Adam Smith Exhibits Bourgeois Theory at Its Ethical Best
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20 Smith Was Not a Mr. Max U, but Rather the Last of the Former Virtue Ethicists
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21 That Is, He Was No Reductionist, Economistic or Otherwise
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22 And He Formulated the Bourgeois Deal
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23 Ben Franklin Was Bourgeois, and He Embodied Betterment
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24 By 1848 a Bourgeois Ideology Had Wholly Triumphed
223 - Part IV A Pro-Bourgeois Rhetoric Was Forming in England around 1700
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25 The Word “Honest” Shows the Changing Attitude toward the Aristocracy and the Bourgeoisie
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26 And So Does the Word “Eerlijk”
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27 Defoe, Addison, and Steele Show It, Too
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28 The Bourgeois Revaluation Becomes a Commonplace, as in The London Merchant
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29 Bourgeois Europe, for Example, Loved Measurement
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30 The Change Was in Social Habits of the Lip, Not in Psychology
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31 And the Change Was Specifically British
285 - Part V Yet England Had Recently Lagged in Bourgeois Ideology, Compared with the Netherlands
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32 Bourgeois Shakespeare Disdained Trade and the Bourgeoisie
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33 As Did Elizabethan England Generally
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34 Aristocratic England, for Example, Scorned Measurement
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35 The Dutch Preached Bourgeois Virtue
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36 And the Dutch Bourgeoisie Was Virtuous
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37 For Instance, Bourgeois Holland Was Tolerant, and Not for Prudence Only
345 - Part VI Reformation, Revolt, Revolution, and Reading Increased the Liberty and Dignity of Ordinary Europeans
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38 The Causes Were Local, Temporary, and Unpredictable
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39 “Democratic” Church Governance Emboldened People
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40 The Theology of Happiness Changed circa 1700
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41 Printing and Reading and Fragmentation Sustained the Dignity of Commoners
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42 Political Ideas Mattered for Equal Liberty and Dignity
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43 Ideas Made for a Bourgeois Revaluation
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44 The Rhetorical Change Was Necessary, and Maybe Sufficient
417 - Part VII Nowhere Before on a Large Scale Had Bourgeois or Other Commoners Been Honored
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45 Talk Had Been Hostile to Betterment
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46 The Hostility Was Ancient
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47 Yet Some Christians Anticipated a Respected Bourgeoisie
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48 And Betterment, Though Long Disdained, Developed Its Own Vested Interests
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49 And Then Turned
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50 On the Whole, However, the Bourgeoisies and Their Bettering Projects Have Been Precarious
476 - Part VIII Words and Ideas Ca used the Modern World
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51 Sweet Talk Rules the Economy
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52 And Its Rhetoric Can Change Quickly
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53 It Was Not a Deep Cultural Change
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54 Yes, It Was Ideas, Not Interests or Institutions, That Changed, Suddenly, in Northwestern Europe
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55 Elsewhere Ideas about the Bourgeoisie Did Not Change
520 - Fourth Question: What Are the Dangers?
- Part IX The History and Economics Have Been Misunderstood
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56 The Change in Ideas Contradicts Many Ideas from the Political Middle, 1890–1980
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57 And Many Polanyish Ideas from the Left
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58 Yet Polanyi Was Right about Embeddedness
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59 Trade-Tested Betterment Is Democratic in Consumption
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60 And Liberating in Production
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61 And Therefore Bourgeois Rhetoric Was Better for the Poor
574 - Part X That Is, Rhetoric Made Us, but Can Readily Unmake Us
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62 After 1848 the Clerisy Converted to Antibetterment
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63 The Clerisy Betrayed the Bourgeois Deal, and Approved the Bolshevik and Bismarckian Deals
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64 Anticonsumerism and Pro-Bohemianism Were Fruits of the Antibetterment Reaction
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65 Despite the Clerisy’s Doubts
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66 What Matters Ethically Is Not Equality of Outcome, but the Condition of the Working Class
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67 A Change in Rhetoric Made Modernity, and Can Spread It
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Notes
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Works Cited
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Index
751
Publishing information
Pages and Images/Illustrations in book
eBook published on:
January 20, 2021
eBook ISBN:
9780226334042
Pages and Images/Illustrations in book
eBook ISBN:
9780226334042
Keywords for this book
ideas; capital; capitalism; property; money; finance; institutional; institutions; worldwide; international; academic; scholarly; research; history; historical; improvement; change; progress; economist; trilogy; values; morals; ethics; bourgeoisie; rich; wealth; riches; poor; poverty; trade; liberalism; bourgeois deal; income; inequality; equality; innovation; technology
Audience(s) for this book
For an expert adult audience, including professional development and academic research
