Professor McCloskey's Academic Interests

Are capitalism, globalization, and the middle class evil? A good many artists and intellectuals in the West since 1848 have thought so. Deirdre McCloskey, an internationally known economist, historian, and critic, shows why they have been mistaken. In her recently published book The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Capitalism (University of Chicago Press, 2006) she puts forward a new approach to commercial life, neither country-club arrogance or centralizing imprudence. Prudence came to be viewed around 1800 as an all purpose ethical guide. Yet the new commercial economy then flourishing required in fact a full set of "bourgeois virtues." McCloskey argues that these are simply the virtues exercised in a commercial society — love and courage, prudence and justice, hope and faith and temperance. A critic from the inside of modern economics and its reduction of virtues to one, McCloskey participates in the revival of an Aristotelian and rhetorical social science — -without giving up mathematics and number. Her talk ranges from Adam Smith to Babbitt, Plato to Death of a Salesman.

The story is of the rise of a prudential rhetoric in the Netherlands and England in the 17th century, its triumph in the Scottish Enlightenment and American colonial thought in the 18th century, and its decline after 1848 from, as Shaw once called it, the Great Conversion. An ethics of the virtues, as old as Aristotle and as new as feminist ethics, provides a way out of the growing self-hatred of the bourgeoisie. "Bourgeois virtue" is not a contradiction in terms. Economists are recognizing that virtue underlies a market economy; economic historians have long understood so in the lives of Quakers and the vital few. What the social sciences have not recognized since the 18th century and its notion of doux commerce is that a market economy can underlie the virtues. Not all virtues. Some virtues — in fact the ones we celebrate in philosophy and myth — are pagan or Christian, aristocratic and plebeian. We need new philosophies and myths, new readings of the ancient virtues, to suit a world in which we are all now bourgeois.

The sciences, or subfields within each science, divide into those which have kept a focus on How Big and those which have not. No geomorphologist, for example, would rest satisfied that "there exists" an effect of rainfall on the height of the land: she wants quantitative estimates of the rate of mechanical denudation in millimeters per century. No physicist is much interested in the "statistical significance" at conventional levels between exact IA calculations as against pole approximations of the electromagnetic form factor at high values of four-momentum transfer squared: he wants to see the quantitative difference in a simulation and argue that it matters for the science. No historian would be comfortable with a claim that German migration to the United States "was a factor" in the election of 1860: she would want to know how much. What matters to science is oomph, every time. Unhappily, in many fields of science the matter of How Much has been lost, commonly by a confusion between actual scientific measurement on the one hand and philosophical absolutes on the other. One counterexample to Goldbach's Conjecture (that every even number can be expressed as the sum of two primes: 20 = 13 + 7) would suffice to kill it for good in the Department of Mathematics. Yet it would still go on being useful to engineers devising computer locks, since no counterexample has been found for numbers up into the billions. Existence, arbitrary statistical significance, philosophical possibilities uncalibrated to the sizes of important effects in the world are useless for science. Yet in medical science, in population biology, in much of sociology, political science, psychology, and economics, in parts of literary study, there reigns the spirit of the Mathematics or Philosophy Departments (appropriate in their own fields of absolutes). The result has been a catastrophe for such sciences, or former sciences. The solution is simple: get back to seeking oomph. It would be wrong, of course, to abandon math or statistics. But they need every time to be put into a context of How Much, as they are in chemistry, in most biology, in history, and in engineering science.