Review of Bourgeois Equality: How Ideas, Not Capital or Institutions, Enriched the World

Quarterly Journal of Austrian Economics, Vol. 19, No. 2

9 Pages Posted: 26 Sep 2016

Date Written: 2016

Abstract

If it’s true that Wayne Booth inspired Deirdre McCloskey’s interest in the study of rhetoric, then it’s also true — happily, in my view — that McCloskey has refused to mimic Booth’s programmatic, formulaic methods and boorish insistence on prosaic succinctness. Bourgeois Equality is McCloskey’s third volume in a monumental trilogy that began with The Bourgeois Virtues (2006) and Bourgeois Dignity (2010), each published by the University of Chicago Press. This latest volume is a Big Book, alike in kind but not in theme to Jacques Barzun’s From Dawn to Decadence (2000), Camille Paglia’s Sexual Personae (1990), or Herald Berman’s Law and Revolution (1983) and Law and Revolution II (2006). It’s meandering and personal, blending scholarship with an essayistic style that recalls Montaigne or Emerson.

McCloskey’s elastic arguments are shaped by informal narrative and enlivened by her plain and playful voice. At times humorous, rambling, and deliberately erratic, she gives the distinct impression that she’s simply telling a story, one that happens to validate a thesis. She’s having fun. Imagine Phillip Lopate articulating economic history. McCloskey is, in this regard, a latter-day Edward Gibbon, adopting a mode and persona that’s currently unfashionable among mainstream historians, except that she’s more lighthearted than Gibbon, and unashamedly optimistic.

Keywords: Austrian Economics, capitalism, ideas, institutions, literature and economics, rhetoric

Suggested Citation

Mendenhall, Allen, Review of Bourgeois Equality: How Ideas, Not Capital or Institutions, Enriched the World (2016). Quarterly Journal of Austrian Economics, Vol. 19, No. 2 , Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=2842986

Allen Mendenhall (Contact Author)

Troy University ( email )

Troy, AL
United States

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