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

Tags World HistoryPhilosophy and MethodologyPolitical Theory

09/13/2016Allen Mendenhall

Quarterly Journal of Austrian Economics 19, no. 2 (Summer 2016)

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.

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Contact Allen Mendenhall

Allen Mendenhall is a Mises Institute Associated Scholar, Associate Dean and Grady Rosier Professor in the Sorrell College of Business at Troy University, where he is also Executive Director of the Manuel H. Johnson Center for Political Economy. Visit his website at AllenMendenhall.com.

Cite This Article

Allen Mendenhall, "Review of Bourgeois Equality: How Ideas, Not Capital or Institutions, Enriched the World by Deirdre McCloskey," Quarterly Journal of Austrian Economics 19, no. 2 (Summer 2016): 214–22