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The big economic story of our times is not the Great Recession. It is how China and India began to embrace neoliberal ideas of economics and attributed a sense of dignity and liberty to the bourgeoisie they had denied for so long. The result was an explosion in economic growth and proof that economic change depends less on foreign trade, investment, or material causes, and a whole lot more on ideas and what people believe.
Or so says Deirdre N. McCloskey in Bourgeois Dignity, a fiercely contrarian history that wages a similar argument about economics in the West. Here she turns her attention to seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Europe to reconsider the birth of the industrial revolution and the rise of capitalism. According to McCloskey, our modern world was not the product of new markets and innovations, but rather the result of shifting opinions about them. During this time, talk of private property, commerce, and even the bourgeoisie itself radically altered, becoming far more approving and flying in the face of prejudices several millennia old. The wealth of nations, then, didn’t grow so dramatically because of economic factors: it grew because rhetoric about markets and free enterprise finally became enthusiastic and encouraging of their inherent dignity.
An utterly fascinating sequel to her critically acclaimed book The Bourgeois Virtues, Bourgeois Dignity is a feast of intellectual riches from one of our most spirited and ambitious historians—a work that will forever change our understanding of how the power of persuasion shapes our economic lives.
- Sales Rank: #578299 in Books
- Published on: 2010-11-30
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 9.00" h x 1.70" w x 6.00" l, 2.04 pounds
- Binding: Hardcover
- 592 pages
Review
“The startling perspective McCloskey brings to the history of economics qualifies her as the Max Weber of our times. This is a wonderfully entertaining and stimulating antidote for the reigning view of Homo Economicus.”
(Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi)
“Over a wide range of nations and times, McCloskey advances the arresting thesis that humble ideas, especially those pertaining to the role of a bourgeois dignity, supply the spark that jumpstarts the rest of the process. Readers will be impressed with the breadth of her knowledge, the clarity of her thought, and the sophistication of this finely wrought book.” (Richard Epstein)
“Deirdre McCloskey has embarked on a heroic enterprise, the wholesale reconsideration of the modern capitalist economy. The author’s lightness of touch is deeply admirable: competing hypotheses from the Protestant Ethic to technological determinism are rounded up and dispatched in a wonderfully invigorating fashion, and not the least of the many virtues of Bourgeois Dignity is the demonstration that serious argument can also be fun.” (Alan Ryan)
About the Author
Deirdre N. McCloskey is Distinguished Professor of Economics, History, English, and Communication at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Among her many books are The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Commerce; Crossing: A Memoir; The Secret Sins of Economics; and If You’re So Smart: The Narrative of Economic Expertise, all published by the University of Chicago Press.
Most helpful customer reviews
25 of 26 people found the following review helpful.
Why are we now rich? Explaining the GREAT FACT!
By B Leyden
We in the Western World tend to take our present day wealth for granted, very much like an entitlement. And McCloskey makes clear just how very rich in real terms we are relative to most human kinds history. We don't stop to ask the logical follow-up question: Why are other societies - such as in Africa and South America - still so poor?
McCloskey's answer is that it is simple: (1)Give the "bourgeoisie" respect; and (2)give these same bourgeosie freedom. It is, according to this very mainline economic historian, THAT simple. It is the path that countries such as South Korea and China have successfully followed to achieve the same wealth and prosperity in little more than a generation.
McCloskey considers - and discards - alternative explanations for what economic historians describe as "The Great Fact." Explantions such as "colonial exploitation," Max Weber's Protestant work ethic, and the "Guns, Germs and Steel" advantage that European nations had over the rest of the world.
On the surface - and before you read her book - you might have concluded that the author was some kind of right-wing apologist. Nothing could be farther from the truth! As McCloskey makes clear, she started off her university and economic career from a Marxist orientation. She makes clear that her political inclinations are still mainly to the "left." In other words, the facts as she discovered them forced the conclusion.
McCloskey is a very literate - and cultured - thinker. This in my opinion is a very, very important book that deserves every intellectually inclined persons attention.
32 of 36 people found the following review helpful.
Great Ideas, Unpleasant to Read
By Amazon Customer
McCloskey's primary idea in this book is that the explosion in wealth creation that started somewhere around 1800 is due to a changing attitude towards making money; it became cool ("dignified") to make money instead of vulgar, unclean, unholy, etc. She argues this forcefully and completely enough that it seems plausible that she's right and I found it convincing that the change in attitude was at least a factor in the extraordinary explosion of innovation and wealth.
While the ideas and content are excellent, I found the writing painful to read. It could've been written in one-third as many pages without skipping any content whatsoever. After a few hundred pages, it was hard to not start skimming.
I'd love for these ideas to be read by as many people as possible, but I wouldn't want to put anybody through the pain of reading this book. If you have a lot of time and want to read an interesting perspective on economic history, then I recommend buying and at least skimming this book. Otherwise, I'd skip it.
118 of 153 people found the following review helpful.
Thought-Provoking But Not Successful
By P. Graham
Foremost, Bourgeois Dignity is to be recommended because it offers an abundance of economic insights. Professor McCloskey deserves the highest praise for emphasizing the hugely important, predominant role of ideology and innovation in the unprecedented improvement in the standard of living since the close of eighteenth century.
Ultimately, however, Bourgeois Dignity fails to prove that what McCloskey terms "bourgeois dignity and liberty" are, to the virtual exclusion of every other factor, responsible for this economic revolution.
One problem is semantics. It seems that, in "bourgeois dignity and liberty", McCloskey means an ideology that promotes and rewards (materially and psychically) commerce and innovation. Fair enough, but McCloskey's choice of the word "dignity" is highly problematic.
In one historical meaning, in the sense of "being dignified", having dignity meant being worthy of honor, being illustrious, being highly esteemed. One was endowed with dignity by doing or accomplishing something honorable or illustrious or esteemed. In this sense, not everyone was inherently endowed with dignity: it had to be earned, and it could be forfeited. In this historical sense, McCloskey's use of the term "dignity" is not objectionable, and is faithful to the substance of the argument. For example, McCloskey writes of the "bourgeois revaluation" in Holland that started it all: "It became honorable - `Honorable', the aristocrat snorts! - to invent a machine for making screws or to venture in trade to Cathay." (p. 11)
However, in its modern usage, in the sense of the U.N.'s declaration that "all human beings are born...equal in dignity," in the sense of Geneva's declaration that "outrages upon personal dignity" are war crimes, the term "dignity" has arrived at a comprehensively different meaning. No matter what his or her political persuasion, no sane person could argue that is a war crime to deprive a Khalid Sheikh Mohammed of "high esteem and honors." Unfortunately, McCloskey seems to be using the word to mean something closer to its bastardized modern sense, when, for example, writing,
"Dignity encourages faith. You are dignified in standing, in being who you most truly are, and have been. A Chicagoan. A scholar. A woman." (p. 10)
If this is how we are to understand McCloskey's "bourgeois dignity", then the book's entire argument is utter rubbish. The Industrial Revolution did not begin because a bunch of eighteenth century Dutchmen started "being who they most truly were, and had been." And, as noted, this does not even appear to be what McCloskey is arguing, no matter how the term is being defined. Either way, McCloskey deserves criticism for selecting a word that is fraught with so much potential for intellectual mischief.
Moving on, the failure of the book's thesis seems almost inevitable in McCloskey's approach, which is to argue that every other proposed factor had no material role in the economic revolution, and merely by that process of elimination, anoint "bourgeois dignity and liberty" as its sole cause.
In the process of doing this, McCloskey deserves credit for clearing away a lot of silliness about the roles of imperialism, expropriation, exploitation, genetics, religion, mineral endowments, and the like (silliness that, unfortunately, seems eternally trapped within the thick skulls of academics, journalists, politicians, most Europeans, and many Latin Americans).
However, the book's arguments become much more difficult to accept when McCloskey addresses trade, incentives, institutions, and, especially, science and technology. In all of these cases, McCloskey relies heavily, if not exclusively, on this one form of an argument: "X factor" existed somewhere in the world prior to 1700 or 1800, and since it didn't cause a revolution in the standard of living there and then, it could not have caused the revolution in the standard of living since 1700 or 1800. As we will see, the only (serious) factor to which McCloskey does not apply this standard is "bourgeois dignity and liberty."
In the case of science and technology, the weaknesses in McCloskey's argument are manifold. For some reason, McCloskey spends a lot of time reviewing examples of late European scientific or technological discoveries that were allegedly "anticipated" by centuries or millennia in other cultures - mostly, the Chinese. So, we read that the Chinese invented "soil science or ecology" and the curved-moldboard in 500 b.c., the compass in 400 b.c., cardboard in 200 b.c., that they drilled for natural gas (for whatever purpose), invented the crank handle, and knew about the circulation of blood a millennia or more before the Europeans, and so forth. We read that the Koreans invented movable type two centuries before the Europeans. It is not clear what any of this proves beyond the Professor's solid anti-Eurocentric credentials.
If the point is that a listing of miscellaneous scientific or technological discoveries of the Chinese and Koreans (and Africans and Arabs) spanning several earlier millennia in time is comparable in impact to the revolutionary discoveries surrounding scientific methodology, energy and metallurgy - just to name the most prominent -- during the first two centuries of the Scientific Revolution in Europe, then it is a frivolous argument.
Further, McCloskey writes that
of course one problem that has to be faced by advocates of science as a cause, and to some degree even by the advocates of the Enlightenment as a cause, is that Chinese, and at one point Islamic, science and technology, separately and together, and their humanistic scholarship, were until very lately superior to Western science and enlightenment in most ways, and yet resulted in no industrial revolution (p. 358)
No, Professor McCloskey, this is not a problem that has to be faced by advocates of science because it is beside the point. The issue is not about the relative level of science and technology among different societies at one time or another, but whether the absolute level of scientific and technological knowledge reached by any society was enough to facilitate the accomplishments of the Industrial Revolution and later (and which societies reached that level and when they reached it). "Advocates of science as a cause" would "of course" face the problem McCloskey poses only if the Chinese or Ottomans in, say, 1500 were more advanced scientifically and technologically than the Europeans in 1800, but nobody would argue that point.
Recognizing the sheer implausibility of arguing that our modern standard of living owes nothing to science and technology, McCloskey develops the argument that the "first Industrial Revolution and its nineteenth century denouement...depended hardly at all on science" (p. 360) and that the economic growth from this first Industrial Revolution caused the science and technology to which we obviously owe our modern standard of living. There is something to the fact that greater and greater wealth leads to greater and greater scientific and technological accomplishments. But McCloskey's argument implies that, in the opening stage of things, steam power and advancing techniques of iron and steel production "depended hardly at all on science." This, in turn, implies a surprisingly narrow or theoretical-only definition of "science" when "science", in the earlier "superior" examples of it in China and Korea, included the curved moldboard, cardboard, the crank handle, movable type and so on.
To sum up the point, McCloskey boldly asserts that "a world without modern electrical, electronic, chemical, agronomical, aeronautical, or for that matter economic science, would be poorer, of course, but still it would be very much richer than the world of 1800 - so long as the Bourgeois Revaluation had taken place." (One presumes that McCloskey's omission of modern medical science was oversight). Very much richer? I very much doubt that. To me, it is simply not serious to argue that we could have escaped the Malthusian trap without "modern electrical, electronic, chemical, agronomical, aeronatical" medical, and all of the other branches of modern science and technology. It would seem that we would have had recourse to very little beyond the shuffling and reshuffling and the "accumulate, accumulate, accumulate" of classical economics that McCloskey properly consigns to insignificance in the scope of our actual long-term economic development.
Finally, McCloskey does make an important (Austrian) insight that it is not scientific discoveries, per se, that generate economic growth but successful commercial applications of scientific discoveries. But this is not the same thing as arguing that scientific discoveries had little or nothing to with the resulting economic growth. Fundamental scientific discoveries without the entrepreneurial or innovative talent to figure out how and where to apply them will not do much for a society's general economic welfare; by the same token, opportunities for entrepreneurs and innovators are, it seems undeniable, circumscribed by the state of fundamental scientific (and technological and mechanical) knowledge.
No matter how entrepreneurial or innovative or commercial a society might be, it obviously would not and could not generate modern levels of economic growth and standards of living without access to the scientific and technological discoveries that closely preceded and have continuously accompanied the modern period of economic growth.
The proof of this, and the point that definitively undermines McCloskey's argument, is that Holland in the eighteenth century was not the first society of "bourgeois dignity and liberty." Not nearly so. Remember McCloskey's standard applicable to other factors: if "bourgeois dignity and liberty" existed somewhere in the world prior to 1700 or 1800, and it didn't cause a revolution in the standard of living there and then, it could not have alone caused the revolution in the standard of living since 1700 or 1800.
McCloskey strikingly concedes this point in writing that
An ethical and rhetorical change in favor of such formerly dishonorable activities of the bourgeoisie - innovating a fulling mill for woolens or innovating a bank for paying florins in England easily -- happened after 1300 in isolated parts of the European South (Florence, Venice, Barcelona), as in many other scattered locales in the world and in many other eras, and after 1400 or so in other towns of the south (such as Lisbon) and the Hansa towns of the north, and after 1600 in larger chunks of the north (Holland), and after 1700 in England, Scotland, and British North America, and after 1800 in southern Belgium, the Rhineland, northern France, and then the world. Such words or conversations or rhetoric mattered to the economy, and still do. The words enabled after 1800 a big fall in poverty and a big rise in spirit. (p. 40)
If all (or virtually all) that was necessary for the economic revolution was the adaptation of the right "words" or ideology - and the state of scientific and technological knowledge (including transportation and communication) was immaterial - why didn't the economic revolution start in Florence, or Venice, or Genoa, or Pisa after 1300, or Hamburg, or Lubeck after 1400 (or ancient Carthage, or even more ancient Tyre in the first millennium B.C.)? The ideology of these "trading" societies was incomparably closer to that of Holland in 1700 and England in 1800 (and perhaps the United States in 1900) than was the level of sixteenth century Chinese or Ottoman technology to that of Holland in 1700 or England in 1800 (or the United States in 1900).
Why was it that "the words" did not matter much at all in 1300 or 1400 or 1500, but were virtually all that mattered by 1800?
Unfortunately, McCloskey does not - and, I think, cannot - provide a convincing answer.
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