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 (more…)

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]

[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 As socialists they wanted the market and the bourgeois life to be a mere recent stage, now thankfully to be superseded by the re-establishment of the communism that most intellectuals in the 1940s believed the remote past had seen and that the not-too-remote future would again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]

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 (more…)

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 (more…)

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]

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 (more…)

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…)