The Bourgeois Era

"The Bourgeois Era", also referred to as the Bourgeois trilogy, is a series of books by Deirdre McCloskey. They argue that the ethical revaluation of commercial life was the primary cause of what she terms the Great Enrichment, the 3,000-percent increase in real income per capita that began in northwestern Europe in 1800 and has since spread across much of the world. The series includes The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Commerce (2006), Bourgeois Dignity: Why Economics Can't Explain the Modern World (2010), and Bourgeois Equality: How Ideas, Not Capital or Institutions, Enriched the World (2016). With Art Carden, she wrote a summary book of her arguments in the trilogy, Leave Me Alone and I'll Make You Rich: How the Bourgeois Deal Enriched the World (2020). All volumes were published by the University of Chicago Press.

Together the volumes of the trilogy run more than 1,800 pages and constitute what reviewers have described as one of the most ambitious works of synthesis of economic history and moral philosophy.^[1]

The unifying historical concern of the series is the unprecedented improvement in material living standards since 1800. McCloskey emphasizes the scale of the change, observing that it dwarfs all previous periods of economic growth in its speed, breadth, and ultimate scope.^[2] The Great Enrichment is, on this account, the most important civilizational event in human history since the domestication of plants and animals.

The series attributes the Great Enrichment to a transformation in ideas that McCloskey terms the "Bourgeois Revaluation," originating in the Netherlands and England during the seventeenth century. The revaluation accorded liberty to ordinary people, expecially the urban commercial middle class, that licensed and encouraged innovation. She claims that associated material factors like capital accumulation, natural resources, colonial exploitation, and so on, played a role in the Great Enrichment but were not causal. The series argues that virtue ethics in commercial life is not just compatible with moral virtue, but actively nourishes it.

McCloskey's explanation of the Great Enrichment is anti-materialist. She argues in the second and third volumes that the standard explanations offered by economists and historians, including capital accumulation, trade, imperialism, natural resources, property rights, rule of law, and the division of labor, are either insufficient to explain the observed growth, or themselves require a prior explanation in terms of changed attitudes and ideas. She attributes the growth instead to what she calls the "Bourgeois Deal," an implicit social compact in which ordinary people were permitted to attempt innovation and creative destruction in exchange for the promise of enrichment. This deal became possible only when the cultural stigma attached to trade and commercial life was lifted, beginning in seventeenth-century Netherlands and England.^[3]

The first volume of the trilogy establishes the normative framework for the series. McCloskey argues that mainstream economics has impoverished our understanding of commercial life by reducing human motivation to a single virtue, prudence, understood as self-interest or utility maximization, thus ignoring the other six virtues of the Western tradition. Drawing on Aristotle, Thomas Aquinas, and Adam Smith, she organizes her ethical account around the seven classical virtues: the four cardinal virtues of prudence, justice, courage, and temperance, and the three theological virtues of faith, hope, and love.^[4]

Against critics who argue that capitalism is morally corrosive, McCloskey contends that commercial life calls on all seven virtues and that the bourgeois character, properly understood, is not reducible to greed or narrow self-interest. "To put the matter positively," she wrote in Bourgeois Virtues, "we have been and can be virtuous and commercial, liberal and capitalist, democratic and rich, all these." ^[5]

Across all volumes, McCloskey identifies a persistent cultural opponent to her thesis: what she calls the "clerisy," a term she borrows from Samuel Taylor Coleridge to denote the educated opinion-forming class: intellectuals, artists, journalists, and academics who have been hostile to the bourgeoisie and to commercial life since 1848. She argues that the clerisy's anticapitalism is partly a sociological phenomenon in which intellectuals are themselves bourgeois but feel compelled to distinguish themselves from merchants, partly a misreading of economic history, and partly an aesthetic reflex against the Industrial Revolution and mass production.^[6]

The first volume sets out the ethical case for capitalism as a moral system. McCloskey frames the book as a reasoned defense addressed to those who believe that "bourgeois virtues" is a contradiction in terms. She structures the book around extended treatments of each of the seven virtues and their expression in commercial life, drawing on philosophy (Aristotle, Aquinas, Smith, and Kant), literature (Chaucer and Henry James), film (High Noon, Groundhog Day), and contemporary social science.^[7] McCloskey also defends Adam Smith against the standard reading of him as a theorist of self-interest, arguing that Smith was a virtue ethicist in the Aristotelian tradition, and that later economics went wrong by following the utilitarian reduction of Smith's moral psychology.^[8]

Peter Boettke said of the book, "Deirdre McCloskey has written what must be acclaimed as the most ambitious book in political economy published in over half a century (perhaps a full century). It is not only ambitious, but it is absolutely brilliant."^[9]

The second volume systematically rebuts alternative explanations for the post-1800 explosion in living standards, including capital accumulation, trade expansion, geography, natural resources, property rights, the rule of law, class conflict, and the Protestant ethic. McCloskey argues that these factors played a role, but that they are insufficient to explain the observed scale and timing of the Great Enrichment, and that all of them were in place in various forms in earlier periods and other places without producing anything comparable.^[10] Instead, what changed was ideology. In the seventeenth-century Netherlands and the early eighteenth-century British Isles, a new dignity and liberty were accorded to commercial people, and trade-tested betterment came to be regarded not as shameful or marginal but as admirable and central. This "Bourgeois Revaluation," McCloskey argues, was historically unique and provides the best available explanation for why the Great Enrichment happened where and when it did.^[11]

Donald Boudreaux, writing for The Independent Review, praised Bourgeois Dignity, noting that "world-class historian and economist Deirdre N. McCloskey proposes an essential ingredient missing from previous theories: ideology—specifically, the spread of attitudes and rhetoric that praised profit-seeking commerce and industrial innovation."^[12]

McCloskey argues in Bourgeois Equality that the Great Enrichment was broadly egalitarian in its effects: the poor gained proportionally more than the rich from the explosion of innovation and productivity that began around 1800, and the spread of commercial liberalism has raised living standards for the poorest of humanity in ways that no redistributive program has approached.^[13] The volume takes direct aim at Thomas Piketty's Capital in the Twenty-First Century (2013) and its argument that capital accumulation is the primary driver of modern inequality. McCloskey argues that Piketty misunderstands both the history of the Great Enrichment and the nature of modern inequality, and that the emphasis on redistribution of existing wealth diverts attention from the far more important dynamic of innovation-driven growth. She also extends the intellectual history of the Bourgeois Revaluation, tracing the linguistic and rhetorical shifts in the valuation of commercial life from Shakespeare's England (which remained deeply suspicious of trade) through the early eighteenth century, in which writers such as Daniel Defoe, Joseph Addison, and Richard Steele began to celebrate the mercantile life, to the triumph of bourgeois ideology by 1848 and its subsequent reaction among the clerisy.^[14]

Matt Ridley, writing in The Times, recommended the book as a counterpoint to Piketty.^[15]

Leave Me Alone and I'll Make You Rich, co-authored with the economist Art Carden of Samford University, distills the central argument of the trilogy into a shorter book, substituting brief examples and contemporary references for McCloskey's extensive scholarly analysis.^[16] The book applies the series' arguments to contemporary policy debates, using examples such as the Affordable Care Act and the Simpsons household's changing stock of consumer goods.

George Leef noted of the book, "Much of Leave Me Alone is devoted to refuting the common objections that statists have drummed into people’s minds about the imagined dangers of a truly liberal society."^[17]

• Deirdre McCloskey
• Virtue ethics
• Bourgeoisie
• Protestant ethic