deirdremccloskey Deirdre Nansen McCloskey
Distinguished Professor of Economics, History, English, and Communication
University of Illinois at Chicago

Professor of Social Thought
Academia Vitae, Deventer, NL

Professor Extraordinary, Department of Economics, University of the Free State, Bloemfontein, South Africa 		     Deirdre McCloskey is an economist and economic historian who around 1980 got interested in the rhetoric of persuasion in her field, and then wider literary matters, such as literary and social theory. Her main project for the next few years will be writing a four-volume tome on The Bourgeois Virtues. Volume 1 was published as a trade book by the University of Chicago Press in 2006, and widely and on the whole favorably reviewed. She is a free-market economist, and so the book is theologically speaking an "apology" for capitalism. But she tries to be fair to her friends on the left and right. ...
     The oddest personal fact about Deirdre is that until 1995 she was "Donald." She has written on the matter... Read entire text »
What is crucial, Amélie Oksenberg Rorty wrote in 1983, is

Our ability to engage in continuous conversation, testing one another, discovering our hidden presuppositions, changing our minds because we have listened to the voices of our fellows. Lunatics also change their minds, but their minds change with the tides of the moon and not because they have listened, really listened, to their friends' questions and objections.

A.O. Rorty, "Experiments in Philosophical Genre: Descartes' Meditations," pp. 545-565 in Critical Inquiry 9: 562

The editors of Prudentia are pleased to report that Professor McCloskey will be awarded a third honorary degree in September 2009, this time from University of Economics, Prague. »

Printable version of McCloskey's CV updated July 2009.
Updated HTML version to follow.

McCloskey's "little purple book" is a companion to Strunk and White


"[O]ne of the finest writing books I've ever read, a fitting companion to Strunk & White's Elements of Style and a handful of other beautifully written, easily read, and thoroughly entertaining books about writing.
14 February 2009, Published and Profitable
See Journal entry for complete review.
"One of the best books for writers in the social sciences is Deirdre McCloskey's Economical Writing, a very short, very small book that offers a number of important principles for writing. McCloskey is an economist by training, but she has written across a wide variety of fields. Economical Writing is a must-have and a must-read for any serious writer."
Art Carden, Assistant Professor of Economics and Business, Rhodes College (Complete review, 10 October 2008)

Welcome to the restructured Prudentia and interactive Journal. Anyone can reply to existing entries without registering; replies will be posted if they are on-topic and non-abusive. The index page serves as a sitemap to the journal contents. Data from McCloskey's previous guestbook and blogs have been or are being transferred. Commenters can find old entries by searching (name, keyword, date, and so on).