McCloskey’s ambition reaches beyond the constitution of present capitalism to illuminate its historic backstory, and is extended through two sequels to The Bourgeois Virtues, of which one, Bourgeois Dignity (2010), has the subtitle, “Why Economics Can’t Explain the Modern World.”
By “the modern world,” she means the “Great Enrichment,” the dramatic and sustained rise in living standards beginning in the early nineteenth century. And the subtitle really means “why Max U economics can’t explain the modern world, but virtue economics can.” She illustrates how a sweeping rhetorical revaluation of commerce in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, especially in England and Holland, changed people’s motives and priorities and set the stage for modern economic growth. But this story should be braided together with others to enrich the picture.
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