Biographies: Formal —Informal

Deirdre N. McCloskey has been since 2000 UIC Distinguished Professor of Economics, History, English, and Communication at the University of Illinois at Chicago and was Visiting Tinbergen Professor (2002-2006) of Philosophy, Economics, and Art and Cultural Studies at Erasmus University of Rotterdam. Trained at Harvard as an economist, she has written fourteen books and edited seven more, and has published some three hundred and sixty articles on economic theory, economic history, philosophy, rhetoric, feminism, ethics, and law. She taught for twelve years in Economics at the University of Chicago, and describes herself now as a "postmodern free-market quantitative Episcopalian feminist Aristotelian." Her latest books are How to be Human* *Though an Economist (University of Michigan Press 2001), Measurement and Meaning in Economics (S. Ziliak, ed.; Edward Elgar 2001), The Secret Sins of Economics (Prickly Paradigm Pamphlets, U. of Chicago Press, 2002), The Cult of Statistical Significance: How the Standard Error Costs Us Jobs, Justice, and Lives [with Stephen Ziliak; University of Michigan Press, forthcoming 2008], and The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Capitalism (U. of Chicago Press, 2006). Before The Bourgeois Virtues her best-known books were The Rhetoric of Economics (University of Wisconsin Press 1st ed. 1985; 2nd ed. 1998) and Crossing: A Memoir (Chicago 1999), which was a New York Times Notable Book.

Her scientific work has been on economic history, especially British. She is currently writing a book, second in a series of four initiated with The Bourgeois Virtues, on Dutch and British economic and social history, 1600-1800, Bourgeois Towns: How Capitalism Became Ethical, 1600-1800. She has written on British economic "failure" in the 19th century, trade and growth in the 19th century, open field agriculture in the middle ages, the Gold Standard, and the Industrial Revolution.

Her philosophical books include The Rhetoric of Economics (University of Wisconsin Press 1st ed. 1985; 2nd ed. 1998), If You're So Smart: The Narrative of Economic Expertise (University of Chicago Press 1990), and Knowledge and Persuasion in Economics (Cambridge 1994). They concern the maladies of social scientific positivism, the epistemological limits of a future social science, and the promise of a rhetorically sophisticated philosophy of science. Recently she has turned to ethics and to a philosophical-historical apology for modern economies.


Informal Biographical Remarks

Deirdre McCloskey is an economist and economic historian who around 1980 got interested in the rhetoric of persuasion in her field, and then wider literary matters, such as literary and social theory. Her main project for the next few years will be writing a four-volume tome on The Bourgeois Virtues. Volume 1 was published as a trade book by the University of Chicago Press in 2006, and widely and on the whole favorably reviewed, we at Prudentia were gratified to see. A draft of the next volume, Bourgeois Towns: How Capitalism Became Ethical, 1600-1848, is available for comment and criticism, if you are kind enough to view it as the draft that it is. Deirdre is a free-market economist, and so the project is theologically speaking an "apology" for capitalism. But she tries to be fair to her friends on the left and right. Among other methods — economic, historical, philosophical — the books examine numerous literary examples of the ideology of the middle class, 1600 to the present in Europe and its offshoots, and the attacks on the bourgeoisie since 1848 in novels, films, songs.

Sometime she will do a book called Economie, making a case for an economic criticism, as a form of literary criticism. A recent technical contribution to economics and statistics is a book with Stephen Ziliak, The Cult of Statistical Significance: How the Standard Error is Costing Jobs, Justice, and Lives published by the University of Michigan Press in 2008. In the longer run she intends to write a book called Language Matters: The Linguistic Economy, which will try to bring speech into economics. Surprisingly, it's not there now. An economy is not "merely" a matter of language. But a great deal of it takes place on lips and pages, which is the subtext of much of her career.

The oddest personal fact about Deirdre is that she was until 1995 "Donald." She has written on the matter, especially the account of her transition, 1994-98, Crossing: A Memoir (U. of Chicago Press, 1999; NY Times Notable Book). But that's merely the oddest instance of a longstanding insistence on finding her own peculiar — or at any rate particular — way in our intellectual culture. She describes herself as a postmodern free-market quantitative rhetorical Episcopalian feminist Aristotelian woman who was once a man. Such positions are not adopted merely to shock the bourgeoisie. On the contrary, she believes they are the only reasonable positions.