Bourgeois Dignity: Why Economics Can't Explain the Modern World - Couverture souple

McCloskey, Deirdre Nansen

Couverture souple

ISBN 10 : 0226556743 ISBN 13 : 9780226556741

Editeur : University of Chicago Press, 2011

Synopsis

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.

A propos du livre

À propos de l?auteur

Deirdre Nansen McCloskey is distinguished professor emerita of economics and of history, and professor emerita of English and of communication, at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

Détails de l'édition

• Éditeur: University of Chicago Press
• Date d'édition: 2011
• Langue: anglais
• ISBN 10: 0226556743
• ISBN 13: 9780226556741
• Reliure: Broché
• Nombre de pages: 587
• Coordonnées du fabricant: non disponible
• Personne responsable: non disponible