The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Commerce

Deirdre N. McCloskey. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006.

Alan Ryan, “Is Capitalism Good for You?”

The New York Review of Books,

pp. 70—73.

December 21, 2006.

Wisdom, courage, temperance, justice, faith, hope and charity (love)

Seven virtues derived from: Cicero, Paul, Aristotle, (Plato & Socrates?)

(Justice, liberality and mercy) or [Tillich’s Faith, Hope and Love]

During the sixteenth century in northern Europe, predominantly the Rhine Valley, but especially the Netherlands, concomitant changes took place in society.

These included:

• A “byproduct of displacement” of military, clergy & political elites
• “growing economic and political power of the bourgeoisie"
• “devoted to the pursuit of prosperity rather than glory,”
• “to the rule of law.”
• “to probity in economic transactions.”
  • &
• “to the science on which technological development depended.”

Virtues

Aristocratic Vs. Egalitarian

Upper class middle class commercial

Disdain for the public’s opinion widest circulation

Passion for liberty materialist (laissez faire)

Defense of honor defense of contracts

Personal heroism will of the masses

“Bad money drives out good” easy credit widely accessible

“McCloskey wants to defend something close to the libertarian free market utopia, a society where capitalists and workers are unfettered by the state in the pursuit of profit and prosperity but constrained by their own moral allegiances.”

p. 72.

“merely the best of all imperfect solutions to the problems of human existence.”

“The Bourgeois Virtues is such an impressive collection of intellectual riches that it disarms criticism in the usual sense.”

p. 73.

Notes on presenting this middle way.

Between the devil and the deep blue sea  (dilemma of the middle ground)

Myddle Earthe

One must avoid both:

Scylla of natural rights

Charybdis of Platonic justice

neither one nor the other:

Republican virtues (Cicero) nor maximum Utility of the Pareto optimum

Neither the military nor the clergy (2d Estate)

Where demonstrated power and force Where faith in charity and mercy

Dominate social virtue and civic life.

Hobbes Leviathan nor Rousseau’s general will

Compare with;

Arthur Schlesinger Jr. (died Feb 27, 2007, NYC) see: The Essential Middle