Bourgeois Dignity and Liberty: Why Economics Can’t Explain the Modern World

In The Bourgeois Virtues (2006) I thanked some of the many people and institutions to be blamed for pushing my thoughts along. (I myself am blameless — for it is the Voice of History which speaks through me.) By way of additional thanks: The Economic History Workshop at Northwestern University heard a version of the first few chapters of the present book in March of 2008, and gave me much good advice. The brown-bag workshop in my beloved Department of History at the University of Illinois at Chicago has heard an outline of the argument twice. My beloved old creation at the University of Iowa, the Project on Rhetoric of Inquiry, has heard it once. The Center for Population Economics at the Booth School of Business of my beloved University of Chicago heard a later version in February 2009. Parts of Chapters 5 and 7 on productivity change in Britain derive ultimately from my contributions to Roderick Floud and myself, editors, The Economic History of Britain, in the editions of 1981 and 1994. I thank Roderick for his encouragement at the time, and lament the shocking breakdown of our friendship. Parts of Chapters 10, 11, and 12 on thrift appeared in Josh Yates, ed., Thrift and American Culture, Columbia University Press (2009), and in Revue de Philosophie Économique (2007). Parts of 19 and 20 on imperialism appeared in the South African Journal of Economic History in 2006, much of Chapters 22, 23, and 24 on eugenic materialism in the European Economic History Review (2008) and theNewsletter of the Cliometric Society (2008). Early versions of the entire argument appeared in The American Scholar (1994a) and the Journal of Economic History (1998a). A seminar at the Institute for Historical Research in London, hosted by my old friend Negley Harte, was especially inspiriting.

I thank Beth Marston for her exceptional research assistance in the summer of 2008, with books and especially with computers. Perhaps, too, having mentioned computers, this is the place to thank the sober and unselfish Project Gutenberg, the bourgeois but (we pray) non-monopolizing Google, Inc., and the disreputably democratic, quirkily anarchic, and therefore sometimes mistaken, but nonetheless very helpful Wikipedia. “The electronic word” (as Richard Lanham puts it) is transforming scholarship as it is transforming much of life.¹ It is a case of creative construction and destruction. I cannot thank the Internet itself, because it is a spontaneous order arising from innovative and bourgeois people, and has no nameable entrepreneur or bureaucrat to thank. But come to think of it the electronic words fashioned inside the virtual halls of Gutenberg, Google, and Wiki also depend largely on spontaneous orders and bourgeois creativity — which is the point of this book.

Anthony Waterman of St. John’s College of the University of Manitoba, a long-distance friend, read the manuscript with care and saved me from numerous intellectual catastrophes. I thank the Stellenbosch Institute for Advanced Study, and especially Bernard Lategan and Stanislav du Plessis, for arranging for me a calm period in South Africa in May of 2008 to work on the manuscript. The College of Liberal Arts of the University of Illinois at Chicago under deans Stanley Fish and Dwight McBride has been very helpful. My thanks therefore go to them, and to the taxpayers of Illinois and the tuition-paying students of UIC who made their work possible. When Antoine Lavoisier, the theorist of oxygen and nitrogen, a nobleman (you can check it on Wikipedia), was to be executed in the Terror, he is said to have protested that he was a scientist. According to the story the arresting officer was unmoved: “The Republic has no need of scientists.” Our republic, fortunately, has seen the need. And I thank my students, whether or not tuition-paying, in various courses on the subject during the 1990s and 2000s, at UIC and at the University of Iowa and Erasmus University of Rotterdam and the University of the Free State in South Africa. Teaching and writing suit each other. The Continental research institute with no teaching — though it sounds at first like a scholar’s paradise — seems a poor plan.

I thank especially the participants in a small conference about an embarrassingly confused amalgam of this second volume and the third and fourth soon forthcoming (The Bourgeois Revaluation and Bourgeois Rhetoric), which took place in January 2008 at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University. The participants were Paul Dragos Aligica, Gregory Clark, Henry Clark, Jan de Vries, Pamela Edwards, Jack Goldstone, Thomas Haskell, Leonard Liggio, Allan Megill, John Nye, Alan Ryan, Virgil Storr, Scott Taylor, and Werner Troesken, with redoubled thanks to the organizers Claire Morgan and Rob Herritt. It was inspiriting to have so many fine scholars, a number of them dear friends, encouraging me and correcting me and instructing me. Think where a woman’s glory most begins and ends/ And say her glory was: she had such friends.

1. [back] Lanham 1993.

11 responses

1. McCloskey tar sin utgångspunkt i världens extraordinära ekonomiska tillväxt och brytning med Malthus lag under de senaste århundraden. Den disponibla inkomsten låg på 3 dollar per person och dag under i stort sett hela mänsklighetens historia, då alla produktivitetsökningar åts upp av befolkningsökningen. Men så hände något runt år 1800 och i dag är genomsnittsinkomsten i världen 30 dollar per dag (i Norge 137), en ökning med en faktor om 10 – detta trots en gigantisk befolkningsökning under samma period. 5,5 av världens 6,5 miljarder människor lever i rika länder eller i länder som är på väg att bli rika. Förvisso finns det fortfarande en ”Bottom Billion” med Paul Colliers ord, men man behöver inte vara kurzweiliansk i sina förutsägelser för att förutspå att så inte kommer att vara fallet om så lite som 50 år.

   McCloskey tror att det är den så kallade ”bourgeoisiens” (ett medvetet provokativt valt ord) värderingar och attityder, som i störst utsträckning förklarar denna välståndsökning utan motstycke i historien. Denna volym, som är del två av sex i hennes Magnum Opus The Bourgeois Era, är tänkt att vederlägga i stort sett alla andra presumtiva förklaringar bakom världens ekonomiska tillväxt (sparsamhet, protestantismen och handel, för att nämna några).

   Det uttalade syftet med de sex banden är att skriva ett försvarstal för den genom tiderna så bespottade bourgeoisien, dess värderingar och ”värdighet”. Den första delen, The Bourgeois Virtues gavs ut 2007 och hamnade på femte plats på Atlas Foundations lista över de tio mest betydelsefulla frihetsböckerna under det gångna decenniet. McCloskey deltog även i Mont Pelerin Societys konferens föregående sommar i Stockholm som arrangerades av Ratio. Där presenterade hon de första tre kapitlen i den nya boken.

   Written by Bourgeoisiens värderingar « Niklas Elert on January 11th, 2010.

2. Dear Mr. Elert:

   I got the “extraordinära ekonomiska,” which served my vanity. But can you tell me the gist of what you wrote in English?

   Sincerely,

   Deirdre

   Written by Deirdre McCloskey on January 13th, 2010.

3. Dear Deirdre,

   As a Dane I can understand what Elert is writing. He is relating the subject [of The Bourgeois Virtues] and mentioning your visit to the Mont Pelerin society and other accolades. “Extraordinara ekonomiska” refers to the economic development since 1800.

   Regards,
   Kim

   Written by Kim Hvid Johnsen on January 14th, 2010.

4. Dear Deirdre,
   “extraordinära ekonomiska” could have referred to your skills as well. :) What appeared as a comment on this site was actually a post on my blog linking here, whereas your comment appeared on my blog as well (very odd indeed).

   I posted a translation of the post in the comment field at my blogg prior to realizing this, you’ll find it here: http://niklaselert.wordpress.com/2010/01/11/bourgeoisiens-varderingar/#comments

   Regards
   Niklas

   Written by Niklas Elert on January 14th, 2010.

5. Prudentia editors are at fault here. In response to a pingback of Mr. Elert’s post that arrived at deirdremccloskey.org, they meant to refer to Mr. Elert’s mention of the Bourgeois Era volumes in a new post but instead copied it as a comment. Prudentia apologizes to all for the confusion.

   Written by Journal staff on January 15th, 2010.

6. Basta Niklas,

   Thanks for the translation and your praise. I dearly would like to reach my cousins in sweet Scandinavia! Regards, Deirdre

   Written by Deirdre McCloskey on January 15th, 2010.

7. [...] in Spite of Themselves ) привели к тому явлению, который отмечает McCloskey – к вере в прогресс и возможности реализации своих [...]

   Written by Все таки, как решить проблему пенсионеров? | Sergey Kurdakov blog on November 13th, 2010.

8. [...] – можно взять Gregory Clark Farewell to Alms ( есть в сети ), Deirdre McCloskey и тогда и этот момент тоже станет более [...]

   Written by Моя библиотека 4 | Sergey Kurdakov blog on November 22nd, 2010.

9. My Dear Russian Commentators,

   Google Translate does not give very good texts, but so far as I can understand what you are saying (1.) Yes, innovation CAN be bad for the poor (and the rich), but in actual, historical fact it has been enormously good for the poor; (2.) there has been an explosion of Big History recently, and my book Bourgeois Dignity: Why Economics Can’t Explain the Modern World is merely the last of at least a dozen in the past few years (mine, of course, is the best!)

   Regards,

   Deirdre McCloskey

   Written by Deirdre McCloskey on November 28th, 2010.

10. [...] dos livros já lançados da Deirdre McCloskey (Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Commerce e Bourgeois Dignity: Why Economics Can’t Explain the Modern World), uma visita ao seu site e os seguintes [...]

    Written by As virtudes burguesas, segundo Deirdre McCloskey | OrdemLivre.org/blog on April 20th, 2011.

11. [...] ( более ранний черновик можно поглядеть тут ( вернее тут ) ), заметила одну вещь, очень часто упускают. О том, что [...]

    [Site Admin: We apologize for excluding this comment on Bourgeois Dignity, which originally appeared in November of 2010, as spam.]

    Written by В блоге у Тайлер Коуэна рядом с Deirdre McСloskey | Sergey Kurdakov blog on January 7th, 2012.