A Discussion of Bourgeois Equality Chapter 47 “Yet Some Christians Anticipated a Respected Bourgeoisie” Dr. McCloskey notes that in the later medieval era you can already see Christianity making room for trading and profits that will allow successful merchants to still be devout Christians. She notes Thomas Aquinas promoting such thinking in…
Tag: Trade Tested Betterment
Bourgeois Equality
We Need to Bring Back Virtue Not Give Up on Economics
A Discussion of Bourgeois Equality Chapter 67 “A Change in Rhetoric Made Modernity, and Can Spread It” This is an historic blog — 67 chapters over nearly 18 months, and now we are at the final chapter of Dr. McCloskey’s Bourgeois Equality! I was drawn to do a chapter by chapter review of…
Bourgeois Equality
Our Language Shows Historic, and Current, Disdain for the Bourgeois
A Discussion of Bourgeois Equality Chapter 46 “The Hostility was Ancient” Dr. McCloskey continues her exploration of the negative attitude that has existed over time towards trading and profits started last chapter. Trading and profit making and entrepreneurship and betterment have been more or less despised by the aristocracy in pastoral…
Bourgeois Equality
Radical Reformation of Church Governance Contributed to the Bourgeois Revaluation
A Discussion of Bourgeois Equality Chapter 39 “‘Democratic’ Church Governance Emboldened People” Dr. McCloskey continues her exploration of what led to a cultural shift away from esteeming hierarchy and towards esteeming the individual because it is that shift that enables the Great Enrichment she is trying to explain. She focuses…
Bourgeois Equality
Elizabethan England Esteemed Elites
A Discussion of Bourgeois Equality Chapter 33 “As Did Elizabethan England Generally” Dr. McCloskey is continuing on with the thesis of last chapter, offering examples of Elizabethan writers other than Shakespeare, who valued hierarchy over the disruptive bourgeois virtues that will allow the trade tested betterment system to take off…
Bourgeois Equality
Seeing The Bourgeois Revaluation in Literature
A Discussion of Bourgeois Equality Chapter 27 “Defoe, Addison, and Steele Show It, Too” Dr. McCloskey demonstrates the literature of the 1700s shifted to reflect the values and the interests of the rising bourgeois class. This Bourgeois Revaluation is simultaneously esteeming the behaviors that will now lead to success and…
Bourgeois Equality
Aspiring to Bourgeois Virtues
A Discussion of Bourgeois Equality Chapter 23 “Ben Franklin was Bourgeois and He Embodied Betterment” and Chapter 24 “By 1848 A Bourgeois Ideology Had Triumphed” Two more chapters to conclude this section of the book establishing the ideas that took root in the 1800s that allowed the Bourgeois Deal to…
Bourgeois Equality
Adam Smith Wanted You Free to Make Your Own Decisions
A Discussion of Bourgeois Equality Chapter 22 “And He Formulated the Bourgeois Deal” In this fourth and final chapter exploring Adam Smith’s impact, Dr. McCloskey explores his intellectual contribution toward a cultural shift to a favorable view of the rising bourgeois class. In the past three chapters, she has been…
Bourgeois Equality
The Right’s Story of Economic Growth is Wrong, Too
A Discussion of Bourgeois Equality Chapter 13 “But Neither Can Poverty Be Overcome from the Right by Implanting Institutions” OK, now McCloskey is coming for me! The textbook I use for my intro macroeconomics class has a chapter on the source of economic growth, and the quality of the institutions is one…
Bourgeois Equality
Knowledge Is the True Key
A Discussion of Bourgeois Equality Chapter 12 “‘Accumulate, Accumulate’ Is Not What Happened in History” Last chapter McCloskey explored reasons the word “capitalism” should be replaced with a term that captures the source of the Great Enrichment, such as “trade-tested betterment.” Now she continues along the same path in this chapter…