The Bourgeois Virtues is the first book of a four-volume set intending to resurrect the themes of A Theory of Moral Sentiments and The Wealth of Nations. "Forgetting Smith in a commercial society," McCloskey [p. 507] argues, "has orphaned the virtues. It is the ethical tragedy of the modern West." And "the way forward is to go back to the blessed Adam Smith, or at any rate to his project" [p. 514]. As planned, "Volume 1 has most of the philosophy and theology, volume 2 most of the economic and social history, volume 3 most of the intellectual history, and volume 4 most of the economics" [p. 36].
The audience for this grand work is the "clerisy." From the left, "the members of the clerisy believe that capitalism and profit are evil," and from the right "they believe that capitalism and profit are good for business but have nothing to do with ethics." Those in the middle are "bobos in paradise" agreeing "with the harder folk to the left or right about the laughably nonethical character of capitalism" [pp. 5–6]. Since Marx, McCloskey [p. 148] suggests, the clerisy has failed to articulate a transcendent moral tradition that illuminates our lives. She intends to remedy this error.
The book begins with a 50-page overview of the larger work. Capitalism has enriched humanity, making democracy and higher culture possible. Capitalism has also made us more virtuous. Trade nurtures love, for example, by spreading trust, even trust in strangers. Love "in an expanded sense," love as "disinterested solidarity" benefits from repeated interactions through trade. "It's not exactly because I love the newsagent," McCloskey [p. 128] writes, "though a weak form of love develops if I buy from him everyday." The result? "Love, in short, is arguably thicker ... in the modern, Western, capitalist world. Or at any rate it is not obviously thinner ... than in the actual world of olden ... times" [p. 141].
Many readers will agree with McCloskey's view that people want to be virtuous. Narrow utilitarianism is an incomplete explanation of behavior. Choices are not made by prudence alone. Love, faith, hope, courage, temperance, prudence, and justice reinforce each other in a system of "virtue ethics."
Fewer readers are going to appreciate McCloskey's choice to "genderize" the virtues. Love, faith, and hope are feminine, Christian virtues. Courage and temperance are male, pagan virtues. Prudence and justice are androgynous, pagan virtues. It is unclear how using these stereotypes clarifies ethical choices.
The discussion is presented from a Christian perspective, although the word "Christian" is only meant to be "evocative, not exclusive." McCloskey [p. 95] insists, "I do not mean to praise Christianity or attack non-Christians." Intended or not, the focus and language constantly draw the reader into her Christian faith. Consider Chapter 42, "God's Deal." After a four-page review of how various non-Christian religious traditions value and embrace prosperity, McCloskey spends five pages preaching, concluding that Jesus was not opposed to market economies. She writes [p. 450]: "God is nothing less than Perfect Love... That Christianity need not itself be inconsistent with capitalism shines in the lives of the saints who lived by trade ... or indeed in the commercial carpentry of our Lord and Savior." "Evoking Christianity" is a form of preaching, understated but always present in the text.
Secular people will have little interest in McCloskey's theology, for they have no place there. While she writes that "faith ... need not be faith in God," [p. 153] and she suggests that a person can have faith in art, in science, in learning, and so on, McCloskey [p. 171] also derides "the atheist's stony inability to grasp that these other objects, in which he does believe, are psychologically the same as the God in which he proudly does not." Or: "The agnostic and especially the atheist, unaware of the god he believes in, is as uncritical of his faith as a Sicilian widow lighting a candle before the statue of the Virgin" [p. 193]. Or: "You wish to retain an identity, a Faith and Hope, as you might put it, named You. You might as well give in and call it a soul" [p. 125]. Her call for a broad interpretation of faith morphs into a thinly veiled defense of theism based, in part, on a caricature of an unthinking atheist.
A reader new to McCloskey's writing may be surprised by such excess. With over 700 different works cited, quoting is excessive. In addition to the appeal to expert authority, McCloskey also uses redundancy, the ad hominem, the straw man, and even the insult. Kant is a monomaniac [p. 262]. Dr Compte-Sponville hasn't read enough [p. 385]. McCloskey confuses a valid argument that science without a story is poor science with an invalid argument that any story will do as long as it supports your reasoned beliefs.
Central to her beliefs is a rejection of the "fact-value split," a philosophical method she would drop from her "postmodern economic theology" [p. 198]. According to McCloskey [p. 396], "the central dogma of modernism" is that values can be separated from cognition; that "knowing what is" is somehow different or separate from "affirming what should be". She rejects this idea and dismisses Kant's "concepts of pure reason," for if we follow Kant, we will have to "study how people are supposed to behave without reference to their psychologies or their customs or their histories" [p. 264].
According to McCloskey, this error is rampant in modern economics. Economists who run regressions control only for "the profane" and ignore "the sacred," risking omitted variable bias [pp. 407–411]. This is a silly argument. When McCloskey's criticism is relevant, intelligent people usually notice and make adjustments. For example, researchers studying the effects of school resources on student test scores have understood for years that parental support (love?) was not being measured in their data sets and that omitted variable bias was a potential problem. Numerous studies have controlled for this problem, and few economists are going to take her criticism seriously.
McCloskey's system of ethics probably will not win many adherents either. She rejects Kantian or Rawlsian meta-rules as a basis for ethics. "As a mere economist and historian," she [p. 499] writes, "I am incapable of the fantasies that people of principle are so gifted at. I keep being brought up short by the world as it is, at least as I can discern it through a glass darkly." McCloskey [p. 327] would ground our ethics in stories about "exemplars," "human models of prudence or justice or love."
The result is that she says absolutely nothing about Rawls' two principles of justice, a choice that will be viewed as a weakness to her system of virtue ethics. People are going to want to know: Where do her ethics lead, if not to general principles to inform our lives? The answer is something of a surprise. After spending the entire book ridiculing utilitarians and emphasizing that prudence alone is insufficient as the basis for any ethical system, at the end it is prudence that "is the leading bourgeois virtue" [p. 507]. This is the world as it is, after all, not the world as we might want it to be.
Most of the economic arguments will be developed later, and McCloskey certainly has her work cut out for her. It was not unregulated capitalism that delivered the world as it is. To the degree that capitalism has bettered our lives (a debate for another day), it has done so with the assistance of government. OSHA, the EPA, the FAA, the FDA, the VA, HHS, and other government agencies did not emerge from a Kantian vacuum. These agencies were a response to the failures of markets, to the world as it is.
McCloskey [p. 18] believes that "enrichment rather than regulation is the main cause of our better human condition," but she also believes that education should be financed from the center, that maternity care and early child care should be expanded and be state financed, that inheritance taxes should be steep, that corporate welfare should be eliminated, that military expenditures should be cut to a tiny fraction of their present levels, that a modest minimum income should be given to every American, [and] that tax laws should "encourage both men and women to combine paid work with family and community work" [p. 43].
Apparently, there is no universal rule about capitalism and government. The world is filled with mixed economies, where the greatest threat to democracy comes from powerful, moneyed interests.
People who liked Deirdre McCloskey's earlier work may enjoy The Bourgeois Virtues. It is unlikely to attract new converts.
