Yes, but was it just a show? Surely the Dutch of the Golden Age didn’t actually carry out their painted and poemed project of the virtues? Surely the bourgeoisie then as now were mere hypocrites, the comically middle class figures in a Molière play; or, worse, of a late-Dickens novel; or, still worse, of an (more…)

Yet in less progressive places the old calumnies against the bourgeoisie continued. In England especially. To the intense irritation of French and German and Japanese people, England, with Scotland in attendance, has been since about 1700 the very fount of bourgeois values. British merchants, British investors, British inventors, British imperialists, British bankers, British economists have (more…)

Abstract from Gustavo Morles’s (28 Feb. 2010 draft version of) “The Rhetoric of Economics: Why Words are Important”: By looking at historical evidence McCloskey concludes that the great transformation of the Industrial Revolution was made possible by the change in attitudes, reflected ultimately in the change in rhetoric, towards bourgeois values. This paper explores the (more…)

Esi/Ifree Lecture Friday, Mar 12 3:00p Wilkinson Hall, Orange, CA View detailed agenda

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The Journal staff found this excerpt from Charles K. Wilber’s Ethics In Economic Theory (Post Autistic Economics Review #20, 3 June 2003): “The defense of value-neutrality still stands, but the pillars have been shaken. Blaug conceded that both ‘factual’ and ‘moral’ arguments rest ‘at bottom’ on certain definite techniques of persuasion, which in turn depend (more…)

One countable piece of evidence that bourgeois values were becoming dominant in England in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries is the new, dominate role of counting in giving evidence. It is assuredly modern, and was not in fashion during Dekker’s or Shakespeare’s time. The pre-modern attitude — which survives nowadays in many a non-quantitative modern (more…)