Abstract
Murray Milgate of Queen's College, University of Cambridge reviews “Bourgeois Equality: How Ideas, Not Capital or Institutions, Enriched the World,” by Deirdre Nansen McCloskey. The Econlit abstract of this book begins: “Presents a social and intellectual history of how the ideology of European liberalism accorded a new liberty and dignity to commoners—including the bourgeois—and shaped the revaluation by society of trading and the betterment of technologies. Focuses on how a great enrichment happened, and will happen; how explanations from the left and right have proven false; how bourgeois life had been rhetorically revalued in Britain at the onset of the industrial revolution; how a probourgeois rhetoric formed in England around 1700; how England had recently lagged in bourgeois ideology, compared with the Netherlands; how reformation, revolt, revolution, and reading increased the liberty and dignity of ordinary Europeans; how nowhere before on a large scale had bourgeois or other commoners been honored; how words and ideas caused the modern world; how history and economics have been misunderstood; and how rhetoric made and can readily unmake the contemporary world.”
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