The Bourgeois Virtues
Ethics for an Age of Commerce
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Narrated by:
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Marguerite Gavin
About this listen
For a century and a half, the artists and intellectuals of Europe have scorned the bourgeoisie. And for a millennium and a half, the philosophers and theologians of Europe have scorned the marketplace. The bourgeois life, capitalism, Mencken's "booboisie", and David Brooks's "bobos" all have been, and still are, framed as being responsible for everything from financial to moral poverty, world wars, and spiritual desuetude. Countering these centuries of assumptions and unexamined thinking is Deirdre McCloskey's The Bourgeois Virtues, a magnum opus that offers a radical view: capitalism is good for us.
McCloskey's sweeping, charming, and even humorous survey of ethical thought and economic realities - from Plato to Barbara Ehrenreich - overturns every assumption we have about being bourgeois. Can you be virtuous and bourgeois? Do markets improve ethics? Has capitalism made us better as well as richer? Yes, yes, and yes, argues McCloskey, who takes on centuries of capitalism's critics with her erudition and sheer scope of knowledge. Applying a new tradition of "virtue ethics" to our lives in modern economies, she affirms American capitalism without ignoring its faults and celebrates the bourgeois lives we actually live, without supposing that they must be lives without ethical foundations.
High Noon, Kant, Bill Murray, the modern novel, van Gogh, and of course economics and the economy all come into play in an audiobook that can only be described as a monumental project and a life's work. The Bourgeois Virtues is nothing less than a dazzling reinterpretation of Western intellectual history, and a dead-serious reply to the critics of capitalism.
©2007 Deirdre N. McCloskey (P)2016 Gildan Media LLCListeners also enjoyed...
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Discovering that reason is the defining feature of our species, we named ourselves the “rational animal”. But is this flattering story itself rational? In this sweeping account of irrationality from antiquity to today - from the fifth-century BC murder of Hippasus for revealing the existence of irrational numbers to the rise of Twitter mobs and the election of Donald Trump - Justin Smith says the evidence suggests the opposite.
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A good brain workout
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Fantastic and insightful book
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James V. Schall is a treasure of the Catholic intellectual tradition. A prolific author and essayist, Schall readily connects with his readers on sundry topics from war to friendship, philosophy, politics, and to ordinary everyday living. In his newest work, The Mind That Is Catholic, he presents a retrospective collection of his academic and literary essays written in the past 50 years.
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In the years between her first public lecture in 1961 and her last in 1981, Ayn Rand spoke and wrote about topics as different as education, medicine, Vietnam, and the death of Marilyn Monroe. In The Voice of Reason, these pieces are gathered together in book form for the first time. Written in the last decades of Rand's life, they reflect a life lived on principle, a probing mind, and a passionate intensity. With them are five essays by Leonard Peikoff, Rand's longtime associate and literary executor.
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A Must Read
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Good primer.
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A thorough political tract rather than history
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Spectacular! A must read!
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Whether you're an avid student of the Bible or a skeptic of its relevance, The Book That Made Your World will transform your perception of its influence on virtually every facet of Western civilization. Vishal Mangalwadi reveals the personal motivation that fueled his own study of the Bible. Learn how the Bible transformed the social, political, and religious institutions that have sustained Western culture for the past millennium, and discover how secular corruption endangers the stability and longevity of Western civilization.
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loved this look on the Western World
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What listeners say about The Bourgeois Virtues
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- booklover
- 03-14-18
I Can't Wait to Read the Other Volumes
Beautifully written, wonderful breadth and depth, narrator a pleasure to listen to. I can't wait for the rest of the series.
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- B. Wilson
- 02-08-18
Great performance!
I mean the book is terrific, but the narration was incredible for a book like this.
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2 people found this helpful
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- Hyrum
- 03-15-19
A Masterpiece on Virtue and Ethics
I began this book in 2018, and it is the most important book I read that year.
The author has a delightful style. Go to any location at random. Listen for five minutes, and you will find a sentence or insight that can only be described as delicious.
The book is simply and clearly organized, but it is dense. It is not a meal, but a cuisine that must be savored over time in many servings.The book reads as though the author has spent years lovingly and carefully collected index cards filled with insights and then carefully assembled them into a work of art. The works she cites are a reading list of the great, the good, and the wise.
Do not be confused by her advocacy of capitalism and free markets, powerful as that is. This is an introduction to ethics that is more complete, and more accessible than any other I have encountered. I could not listen without applying the virtues to my own life.
The audible version is the ideal introduction to this work as it's marvelous narrator turns a ponderous tome into a conversation with a friend.
I have many books on reading lists to be reread every year. This book is unique as I will be reading a chapter chosen at random every month. (Yes, I bought the print version as well).
The best analogy I can think of us to imagine a Michelangelo painted by a member of the Dutch school, where every brush stroke or sentence can be studied with a microscope. Your life will be richer. for having experienced this work of scholarship, art, and love.
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2 people found this helpful
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- Benzion N. Chinn
- 04-24-18
An Important Follow Up for Anyone Reading Ayn Rand
What other book might you compare The Bourgeois Virtues to and why?
What McCloskey offers is a virtue ethics defense of capitalism. This is very similar to Ayn Rand's Objectivist philosophy in books such as Atlas Shrugged. The advantage of McCloskey is that she is able to capture the heroic nature of free enterprise without some of Rand's baggage. For example, when reading Atlas Shrugged it is very easy to fall into the trap of thinking that the story is an apology for greed and being a sociopath. In truth, if you are paying attention, none of Rand's heroes are actually motivated by money or personal material benefit. Part of the problem is Rand's self-inflicted wound of praising "selfishness" even though, for her, that word means something very different from how it is usually used. Rand was an explicit virtue ethicist and saw capitalism as having an inherent moral value, regardless of its ability to improve anyone's life. Engaging in the process of market exchanges teach a person to not want something they have not earned. Furthermore, a person learns to value creativity in oneself as well as in other people.
For those intrigued by this model of capitalist virtue ethics, McCloskey offers a wider historical context for such a position. In contrast to Rand's atheist materialism, McCloskey connects capitalism to the "Christian" virtues of faith, hope, and charity as opposed to mere prudence. Just in case anyone is turned off by the Christian material in the book, there are also numerous references to Jewish sources.
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8 people found this helpful
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- Gustavo
- 08-31-18
Unbearable
I really wanted to know about bourgeois virtues, but this book feels like an aimless rant, it’s unbearable.
The narrator does a very annoying thing of prolonging the last word of sentences, which was very distracting.
I hoped this was a more objective account on bourgeois history. It seems odd that the three volumes are over 60 hours long.
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1 person found this helpful