| Description |
xviii, 616 pages : illustrations ; 24 cm |
| Contents |
Preface -- Acknowledgments -- Apology : A brief for the bourgeois virtues -- 1. Exordium : the good bourgeois -- 2. Narratio : How ethics fell -- 3. Probatio A : Modern capitalism makes us richer -- 4. Probatio B : And lets us live longer -- 5. Probatio C : And improve our ethics -- 6. Refutatio : Anticapitalism is bad for us -- 7. Peroratio -- Appeal -- 1. The very word "virtue" -- 2. The very word "bourgeois: -- 3. On not being spooked by the word "bourgeois" -- pt. 1. The Christian and feminine virtues : love -- 4. The first virtue : love profane and sacred -- 5. Love and the transcendent -- 6. Sweet love vs. interest -- 7. Bourgeois economists against love -- 8. Love and the bourgeoisie -- 9. Solidarity regained -- pt. 2. The Christian and feminine virtues : faith and hope -- 10. Faith as identity -- 11. Hope and its banishment -- 12. Against the sacred -- 13. Van Gogh and the transcendent profane -- 14. Humility and truth -- 15. Economic theology -- pt. 3. The pagan and masculine virtues : courage, with temperance -- 16. The good of courage -- 17. Anachronistic courage in the bourgeoisie -- 18. Taciturn courage against the "feminine" -- 19. Bourgeois vs. queer -- 20. Balancing courage |
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pt. 4. The androgynous virtues : prudence and justice -- 21. Prudence is a virtue -- 22. The monomania of Immanuel Kant -- 23. The storied character of virtue -- 24. Evil as imbalance, inner and outer : temperance and justice -- 25. The pagan-ethical bourgeois -- pt. 5. Systematizing the seven virtues -- 26. The system of the virtues -- 27. A philosophical psychology? -- 28. Ethical striving -- 29. Ethical realism -- 30. Against reduction -- 31. Character(s) -- 32. Antimonism again -- 33. Why not one virtue? -- 34. Dropping the virtues, 1532-1958 -- 35. Other lists -- 36. Eastern and other ways -- 37. Needing virtues -- pt. 6. The bourgeois uses of the virtues -- 38. P & S and the capitalist life -- 39. Sacred reasons -- 40. Not by P alone -- 41. The myth of modern rationality -- 42. God's deal -- 43. Necessary excess? -- 44. good work -- 45. Wage slavery -- 46. The rich -- 47. Good barons -- 48. The anxieties of bourgeois virtues -- Postscript : The unfinished case for the bourgeois virtues -- Notes -- Works cited -- Index |
| Summary |
"For a century and a half, the artists and intellectuals of Europe have scorned the bourgeoisie. And for a millennium and a half, the philosophers and theologians of Europe have scorned the marketplace. The bourgeois life, capitalism, Mencken's "booboisie" and David Brooks's "bobos"--All have been, and still are, framed as being responsible for everything from financial to moral poverty, world wars, and spiritual desuetude. Countering these centuries of assumptions and unexamined thinking is Deirdre McCloskey's The Bourgeois Virtues, a magnum opus that offers a radical view: capitalism is good for us. McCloskey's sweeping, charming, and even humorous survey of ethical thought and economic realities--from Plato to Barbara Ehrenreich--overturns every assumption we have about being bourgeois. Can you be virtuous and bourgeois? Do markets improve ethics? Has capitalism made us better as well as richer? Yes, yes, and yes, argues McCloskey, who takes on centuries of capitalism's critics with her erudition and sheer scope of knowledge. Applying a new tradition of "virtue ethics" to our lives in modern economies, she affirms American capitalism without ignoring its faults and celebrates the bourgeois lives we actually live, without supposing that they must be lives without ethical foundations. High Noon, Kant, Bill Murray, the modern novel, van Gogh, and of course economics and the economy all come into play in a book that can only be described as a monumental project and a life's work. The Bourgeois Virtues is nothing less than a dazzling reinterpretation of Western intellectual history, a dead-serious reply to the critics of capitalism--and a surprising page-turner."--Publisher's website |
| Bibliography |
Includes bibliographical references (pages 557-588) and index |
| Notes |
Print version record |
| Subject |
Economic history -- Moral and ethical aspects.
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Capitalism -- Moral and ethical aspects.
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Commerce -- Moral and ethical aspects.
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Social ethics -- History.
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Business ethics -- History.
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Virtues -- History.
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Economic history.
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| Genre/Form |
History.
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| LC no. |
2005029657 |
| ISBN |
0226556638 |
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9780226556635 |
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