The finished version of Bourgeois Dignity and Liberty: Why Economics Can’t Explain the Modern World is under review at University of Chicago Press and expected to debut sometime in the 2010-11 academic year. Its draft version and tentative introduction and table of contents were made available in Prudentia last February in PDF format but we plan to post some final copy in HTML. Stay tuned.

Navigation to all parts of Bourgeois Dignity and Liberty: Why Economics Can’t Explain the Modern World

Two centuries ago the world’s economy stood at the present level of Chad or Bangladesh. In those good old days of 1800, further, on past form the average person in Norway or Japan would have had less rational hope than a Chadian or Bangladeshi does nowadays of seeing in a couple of generations the end of such poverty. In 1800 the average human consumed in modern-day prices, fully corrected for exchange rates, roughly $3 a day, give or take a dollar or two. That’s $3 a day in present money to live now in, say, Los Angeles. … [continues; click title above]

It is a materialist prejudice common in scholarship from 1890 to 1980 that economic results must have economic causes. But ideas caused the modern world. The point can be made by looking through each of the materialist explanations, from the “original accumulation” favored by early Marxist historians to the “new institutionalism” favored by late Samuelsonian economists. The book present does so, and finds them surprisingly weak. The residual is ideas, in particular the Bourgeois Revaluation of the 17th and 18th centuries in northwest Europe. The argument takes six books, constituting a full-scale defense of capitalism. One is that … [continues; click title bar above]

Teaching at EBAMBA in Soreze, France