Virtudes burguesas

On The Bourgeois Virtues

 For a century and a half the artists and intellectuals of Europe have scorned the bourgeoisie. And for two and a half millenia the philosophers and theologians of Europe have scorned the marketplace. Capitalism, the bourgeois life, Mencken's "booboisie," David Brooks's "bobos" — all have been, and still are, held responsible for financial and moral poverty, world wars, spiritual desuetude. Standing against centuries of such unexamined thinking is Deirdre McCloskey's The Bourgeois Virtues, a magnum opus offering 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, sustaining the arguments with erudition and wit. 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 without ethical foundation.
     High Noon, van Gogh, Bill Murray, Immanuel Kant, the modern novel, and Samuelsonian economics all come into play in a book that can only be described as monumental, a life's work. The Bourgeois Virtues is a dazzling reinterpretation of Western intellectual history, a dead-serious yet open-minded reply to the critics of capitalism — and a surprising page-turner.
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