(Very partial list of) Works Cited
The Bourgeois Revaluation (draft Jan 2010)

Posted July 23rd, 2010 at at 11:52 am by Journal staff under The Bourgeois Revaluation.

Child, Francis James. 1860. English and Scottish Ballads, Vol. VIII. Boston: Little, Brown. At http://books.google.com/books ?id=XgRbgUII054C&printsec=titlepage&source=gbs_summary_r&cad=0 Cumberland, Richard. 1771. The West Indian. Pp.713-749 in Nettleton, Case, and Stone. Nettleton, George H., Arthur E. Case, George Winchester Stone, Jr., eds. 1939 (1969). British Dramatists from Dryden to Sheridan. 2nd e. 1969. Carbondale, IL: University of Southern [...]

The Bourgeois Revaluation:
Items to be considered for insertion:

Posted July 5th, 2010 at at 3:39 pm by Journal staff under The Bourgeois Revaluation.

It needs some drama. Vol. 2 had it. It also needs pictures, to bring to life the frequent discussions of paintings, for example. Start collecting them. Chapters need to be about 1/3 shorter each (now 4400 average: cut in half after adding new material would do it) Lysias, “Against the Corn dealers,” q.v. Not all [...]

Chapter 21 of The Bourgeois Revaluation:
It Was a Rhetorical Change, Not a Deep Cultural One

Posted June 27th, 2010 at at 2:29 pm by Journal staff under The Bourgeois Revaluation.

The Industrial Revolution and the modern world did not arise in the first instance from a quickening of the capitalist spirit or the Scientific Revolution or an original accumulation of capital or an exploitation of the periphery or imperialistic exploitation or a rise in the savings rate or a better enforcement of property rights or [...]

Chapter 20 of The Bourgeois Revaluation:
Ethical Ideas and Their Rhetoric Mattered

Posted June 21st, 2010 at at 12:44 pm by Journal staff under The Bourgeois Revaluation.

To say it in a little more detail: In Dante’s time a market was viewed as an occasion for sin. Holiness in 1300 was earned by prayers and charitable works, whereas buying low and selling high was deemed a great danger to the soul. As the holier-than-thou Albigensians in southern France put it a century [...]

Chapter 19 of The Bourgeois Revaluation:
The Rhetoric Was Necessary, and Maybe Sufficient

Posted June 14th, 2010 at at 11:51 am by Journal staff under The Bourgeois Revaluation.

We live, that is, by words as much as by bread. Such a claim is “weak” in the sense of not requiring much demonstration. It asserts merely what few would deny when reminded, though many forget — in the present case that an anti-bourgeois rhetoric, especially if combined with the logic of vested interests, has [...]

Chapter 18 of The Bourgeois Revaluation:
It Led to a Hockey Stick of Growth

Posted June 9th, 2010 at at 12:08 pm by Journal staff under The Bourgeois Revaluation.

It had never happened before. In 1798 Robert Malthus (1766-1834), an Anglican clergyman irritated by the extravagant and anti-clerical claims of the French revolutionaries and their British friends that a new day had dawned, explained for the first time why the enrichment of the poor had not yet happened. He said in his great book [...]

Chapter 17 of The Bourgeois Revaluation:
Its Roots Were Not All Material

Posted June 2nd, 2010 at at 4:05 pm by Journal staff under The Bourgeois Revaluation.

It is merely a materialist-economistic prejudice to insist that such a rhetorical change from aristocratic-religious values to bourgeois values must have had economic or biological roots. It can of course have had instead, or also, legal, political, personal, social, class, gender, religious, philosophical, historical, linguistic, journalistic, literary, artistic, accidental roots. Charles Taylor attributes the rhetorical [...]

Chapter 16 of The Bourgeois Revaluation:
A Change in Talk Made the Modern World

Posted May 17th, 2010 at at 9:53 am by Journal staff under The Bourgeois Revaluation.

Let’s see where we’ve gotten. Once upon a time a great change occurred, unique for a while to Europe, especially after 1600 in the lands around the North Sea, and most especially in Holland and then in Britain. The change had been foreshadowed in the Hansa towns such as Lübeck and Bergen and Dantzig, and [...]

Chapter 15 of The Bourgeois Revaluation:
The New Values Triumphed

Posted May 11th, 2010 at at 4:21 pm by Journal staff under The Bourgeois Revaluation.

***the chapter is too long now; split when finished Rhetoric might ride as a little wave of talk upon deeper currents of biology or interest or the means of production. Much of social science and history for most of the twentieth century assumed so. I don’t think the assumption was correct. I don’t think it [...]

Chapter 14 of The Bourgeois Revaluation:
“Bourgeois England Loved Measurement”

Posted May 2nd, 2010 at at 4:08 pm by Journal staff under The Bourgeois Revaluation.

Public calculation is highly characteristic of the Thorowgoodian bourgeois world, such as the political arithmeticians of the seventeenth century, first in Holland and then in England and then in France. The theory of probability might be thought to develop from an aristocratic concern for games of chance, but the concern becomes plebian, too, and anyway [...]

Chapter 13 of The Bourgeois Revaluation:
New Chapter, unnamed as yet

Posted April 26th, 2010 at at 11:35 am by Journal staff under The Bourgeois Revaluation.

The virtue of prudence rose in prestige in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. By the middle of the eighteenth century British men — especially the men — delighted in claiming prudence for their own behavior and a cynical supposition that others were motivated similarly. Thus Adam Smith initiated the economist’s delight in the [...]

Chapter 12 of The Bourgeois Revaluation:
The Words Show the Change

Posted April 19th, 2010 at at 5:09 pm by Journal staff under The Bourgeois Revaluation.

The trouble with word-evidence, of course, is that people — and chimpanzees and camouflaging plants — can be dishonest. That is, they can fashion a gap between what they say and what they mean, if no material payment or other physical act is involved. “I just love that outfit!” can mean in the right circumstances, [...]

Chapter 11 of The Bourgeois Revaluation:
But in the Late Seventeenth Century the English Changed

Posted April 9th, 2010 at at 10:26 am by Journal staff under The Bourgeois Revaluation.

What changed 1600-1848, and dramatically, was the high- and low-cultural attitude towards thrift, capitalism, innovation, and the bourgeoisie. Weber is here correct, though not in thinking that the Puritans had much to do with it. Thriftiness and other specifically economic virtues, such as prudent calculation of costs and benefits or an admiring attitude towards industrial [...]

Chapter 10 of The Bourgeois Revaluation:
And So the English Bourgeoisie Could Not “Rise”

Posted April 5th, 2010 at at 4:39 pm by Journal staff under The Bourgeois Revaluation.

**Project: fix, 3 days: The chapter is very raw and confused at present. The elite continued to sneer at the bourgeoisie. It is by now widely realized that the sixteenth-century in Europe, with its increasingly literate and even rhetorically cultivated elite, came to view the keeping and finding out of secrets as a suitable occupation [...]

Chapter 9 of Bourgeois Revaluation:
Aristocratic England Scorned Measurement

Posted March 30th, 2010 at at 10:49 am by Deirdre McCloskey under The Bourgeois Revaluation.

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 [...]

Bourgeois Dignity’s “Creative Language, Creative Destruction, Creative Politics” sparks a new conversation

Posted March 11th, 2010 at at 3:33 pm by Deirdre McCloskey under McCloskey's Books, The Bourgeois Era.

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 [...]

Chapter 8 of the Bourgeois Revaluation:
“Yet Still Old England Disdained the Market and the Bourgeoisie”

Posted March 11th, 2010 at at 1:37 pm by Deirdre McCloskey under The Bourgeois Revaluation.

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 [...]

Chapter 7 of the Bourgeois Revaluation:
And the Dutch Bourgeoisie Was Virtuous

Posted March 4th, 2010 at at 5:17 pm by Deirdre McCloskey under The Bourgeois Revaluation.

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 [...]

Chapter 6 of The Bourgeois Revaluation:
The Dutch Preached Bourgeois Virtue

Posted February 21st, 2010 at at 3:23 pm by Deirdre McCloskey under The Bourgeois Revaluation.

Dear Reader: This is a rough draft as of January 2010. The three asterisks *** or the bold or NNN (for a name) or DDDD (for a date) and the many pages at the end with “items [perhaps] to be inserted” indicate only some of the numerous things to be done. I welcome comments, at [...]

Chapter 5 of The Bourgeois Revaluation:
Yet on the Whole the Bourgeoisies Have Been Precarious

Posted February 11th, 2010 at at 4:02 pm by Deirdre McCloskey under The Bourgeois Revaluation.

So the bourgeoisie is always with us. Yet bourgeoisies have usually been precarious. Braudel again chronicled the reluctant triumph of business civilization: “as the years passed, the demands and pressures of everyday life [in Europe in early modern times] became more urgent. . . . So with a bad grace, it allowed change to force the gates. And the experience was not peculiar to the West.” Even during the momentous turn 1300-1776 in Europe there were de-bourgeoisfications. [continues; click title bar above]

Chapter 4 of The Bourgeois Revaluation:
There Were Precursors of a Self-Respecting Bourgeoisie

Posted January 29th, 2010 at at 1:45 pm by Deirdre McCloskey under The Bourgeois Revaluation.

Dear Reader: This is a rough draft (Jan. 2010) of The Bourgeois Revaluation: How Innovation Became Virtuous, 1600-1848. Three asterisks *** or the bold or NNN (for a name) or DDDD (for a date) and the many pages with “items [perhaps] to be inserted” indicate only some of the numerous things to be done. I [...]

Chapter 3 of The Bourgeois Revaluation:
But the Bourgeoisie Has Been Disdained

Posted January 22nd, 2010 at at 10:41 am by Deirdre McCloskey under The Bourgeois Revaluation.

Dear Reader: This is a rough draft (Jan. 2010) of The Bourgeois Revaluation: How Innovation Became Virtuous, 1600-1848. Three asterisks *** or the bold or NNN (for a name) or DDDD (for a date) and the many pages with “items [perhaps] to be inserted” indicate only some of the numerous things to be done. I [...]

Interview question: “Best business book you ever read?” Answer: “The Bourgeois Virtues by Deirdre McCloskey.”

Posted January 19th, 2010 at at 9:36 am by Journal staff under The Bourgeois Era, The Bourgeois Virtues.

So says Michael Weiner, land development and zoning attorney credited with the redevelopment of Delray Beach. (The Palm Beach Post, “Virtues at Weiner and Associates law firm: Patience, confidence” by Alexandra Clough, 15 January 2010. View entire interview. Who is Michael Weiner?

Bourgeois Virtues is among Peter Boettke’s favorites of the (first decade of) 2000′s.

Posted January 18th, 2010 at at 9:22 am by Journal staff under The Bourgeois Era, The Bourgeois Virtues.

Written December 30, 2009: [Favorite] Books — tie between Chris Coyne’s After War, and Peter Leeson’s The Invisible Hook, with honorable mention going to Bill Easterly (both The Elusive Quest, and The White Man’s Burden) and Deirdre McCloskey, The Bourgeois Virtues. Peter Boettke View entire entry

“I’m eagerly awaiting the arrival of Deirdre McCloskey’s books on the subject.”

Posted January 17th, 2010 at at 1:25 pm by Journal staff under McCloskey's Books, McCloskey's Economics, The Bourgeois Era.

Josh McCabe, responding to Nick Krafft’s Transition to Capitalism and Overdetermination, January 4, 2010. See full entry.

“Kling’s triangle … is back in focus due to my reading of Hayek and McCloskey.”

Posted January 16th, 2010 at at 12:27 pm by Journal staff under Blog alerts, McCloskey's Books, McCloskey's Economics, The Bourgeois Era.

Excerpts from Aretae, January 15, 2010 (author unknown): Kling’s triangle … is back in focus due to my reading of Hayek and McCloskey. One of the most fascinating arguments in the first tenth of Deirdre McCloskey’s new book is her line that Europe conquered the world for 1 reason…. it’s the Romer/Friedman/Moldbug argument, but it’s [...]

“Whole Foods” C.E.O. John Mackey: a devotee of Bourgeois Virtues?

Posted January 12th, 2010 at at 1:22 pm by Journal staff under Blog alerts, McCloskey's Books, The Bourgeois Era, The Bourgeois Virtues.

John Mackey [photo: Dan Winters] From an article in the New Yorker by Nick Paumgarten, “Does Whole Foods Know What’s Good for You?” Prudentia discovers John Mackey’s book interests: He sits in a recliner, surrounded by stacks of books. He gives them a good working over, marking them with underlinings, highlighter, and Post-its. He is, [...]

Chapter 2 of The Bourgeois Revaluation
And So Did the Ancient World

Posted January 10th, 2010 at at 5:04 pm by Deirdre McCloskey under The Bourgeois Revaluation.

[D]own to his death in 1964 Polanyi and his associates tried to demonstrate that at any rate the ancient world followed his anti-market model, and in particular that ancient Mesopotamia did. As socialists they wanted the market and the bourgeois life to be a mere recent stage, now thankfully to be superseded by the re-establishment of the communism that most intellectuals in the 1940s believed the remote past had seen and that the not-too-remote future would again achieve. The idea that a market society would turn out to be the end of history was from 1944 to 1964 obnoxious to the leading members of the European clerisy. [continues; click title bar above]

Chapter 1 of The Bourgeois Revaluation:
Medieval and Early Modern Economies had Bourgeois Capitalists

Posted January 10th, 2010 at at 11:59 am by Deirdre McCloskey under The Bourgeois Revaluation.

The usual explanations for the modern world, Marxist or anti-Marxist, do not work very. What does work is a story of innovation by the bourgeoisie, a bourgeoisie revalued 1600 to the present, first in Holland and then in Britain and then the world. That’s what was argued in Bourgeois Dignity: Why Economics Can’t Explain the Modern World (2010).

Where then to look for the springs of innovation? The place to look, I say, is in the innovative activities of the urban middle class, …. [continues; click title bar above]

The Bourgeois Revaluation:
Table of Contents

Posted January 9th, 2010 at at 10:28 am by Journal staff under The Bourgeois Revaluation.

The Bourgeois Revaluation: How Innovation Became Virtuous, 1600-1848 [Vol. 3 of The Bourgeois Era] © Deirdre McCloskey 2010 Medieval and Early Modern Economies had Bourgeois Capitalists And So Did the Ancient World But the Bourgeoisie has been Disdained There were Precursors of a Self-Respecting Bourgeoisie Yet on the Whole the Bourgeoisies have been Precarious The [...]