Deirdre, Although I am not surprised to see economists endorsing John Edwards, I am surprised that such a person would also call herself free-market. How do you connect the two? Thanks, Bill

LONDON: “Bourgeois Virtues” at St. Paul’s Cathedral, London; and “How Capitalism Became Ethical, 1600-1776” at the Institute of Economic Affairs, London

“How Capitalism Became Ethical, 1600-1776,” Economic History Workshop, Department of Economics, Northwestern University

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]

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 As socialists they wanted the market and the bourgeois life to be a mere recent stage, now thankfully to be superseded by the re-establishment of the communism that most intellectuals in the 1940s believed the remote past had seen and that the not-too-remote future would again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

See notes on the release of The Morality of Capitalism: What Your Professors Won’t Tell You, edited by Tom Palmer. Includes contributions by Deirdre McCloskey.

The Morality of Capitalism Notes on the release of The Morality of Capitalism: What Your Professors Won’t Tell You, edited by Tom Palmer. Includes contributions by Deirdre McCloskey.