Prudentia  a magazine from www.deirdremccloskey.org

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Deirdre McCloskey is pleased to consider major speaking engagements on any of the topics described here. On visits to campuses she prefers, as she puts it, to be kept very busy, with as many talks in as many varied departments as can be arranged. In view of her other commitments, routine seminars, attracting one academic department only cannot be a high priority, especially those beyond a day's round trip of Chicago.

1.) "Bourgeois Deeds: How Values Made Modernity, 1700-1848"

Deirdre McCloskey, a well-known economic historian and philosopher of economics, discusses her book in progress, the second of a planned five called "The Bourgeois Era" (the first, The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Commerce was published in 2006 by the University of Chicago Press, and widely reviewed). She concludes in Bourgeois Deeds that the industrial revolution was not caused by material changes, but by a change in the rhetoric about markets, capitalism, and the bourgeois life.

2.) "Bourgeois Rhetorics: How Capitalism Became Virtuous, 1600-1776"

Deirdre McCloskey, a well-known economic historian and philosopher of economics, discusses her book in progress, the third of a planned five called "The Bourgeois Era" (the first, The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Commerce was published in 2006 by the University of Chicago Press, and widely reviewed). Northwestern Europe, and England in particular, moved from admiration for the aristocratic virtues to admiration for the bourgeois virtues, and caused the industrial revolution. A new way of talking about profit and invention and markets came to correspond with how these work: through words.

3.) "The Bourgeois Virtues"

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 recent book The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Capitalism (University of Chicago Press, 2006) she put 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 developed world which is all bourgeois.

4.) "The Bankruptcy of Statistical Fit as a Measure of Importance"

McCloskey, internationally known as a critic of economics and of statistical practice, has long followed other critics from "Student" (William Gosset) in 1905 and Neyman and Pearson in 1933 to the present in arguing that fit without an explicit loss function is meaningless as a criterion of "importance." Acknowledgment of the criticism would radically change practice in medicine, economics, population biology, psychology, and many other fields (in physics, chemistry, geology, and others the mistake is seldom made). Her disquieting book on the subject with Stephen T. Ziliak, The Cult of Statistical Significance: How the Standard Error is Costing Jobs, Justice, and Lives was recently published (2008) by the University of Michigan Press.

5.) "Adam Smith, the Last of the Former Virtue Ethicists"

Smith was mainly an ethical philosopher, though he practiced what was considered for a long time after Smith an obsolete sort of ethical philosophy, known nowadays as "virtue ethics." After 1790 most ethical theory as practiced in departments of philosophy has derived instead from Kant or Bentham, but virtue ethics has recently come back. From the Seven Primary Virtues, Smith chose five to admire especially. He chose all four of the pagan and stoic virtues of courage, temperance, justice, and prudence. To these he added, as virtue number five, a part of the Christian virtue of love, the part admired by his teacher Francis Hutcheson. Smith was not, as has often been claimed, a Stoic, because he was always a pluralist, and would not reduce the good life to, say, Stoic temperance alone. Smith's choice of the virtues makes sense of his writings and career. And it reveals a flaw, shared with Hume: the banishment of the monkish virtues of hope and faith, necessary for human flourishing.

6.) "Nussbaum, Buchanan, Hobbes, Rawls, and All Seven of the Virtues"

Virtue ethics proposes a set of seven---four pagan virtues and three Christian---as a roughly adequate philosophical psychology. Hobbes tried to get along with one virtue, prudence, to which Rawls added a veiled virtue of justice. Nussbaum's Frontiers of Justice adds the virtue of love. But in criticizing Rawls she enunciates a "Nussbaum Lemma," that a good society is unlikely to arise from over-simple models of ethical life. Since virtuous, flourishing societies are what we wish, we had better insert the virtues, as she puts it, "from the start." James Buchanan's constitutionalism, for example, solves moral hazards in a Nussbaumian world, but leaves hanging the ethical start. To start a project ending in constitutional citizenship---or human capabilities, or justice as fairness, or a Leviathan state, or the categorical imperative, or the greatest happiness of the greatest number---we need already an ethical actor, embodying the seven principal virtues.

Other Talks:

"Crossing: Notes of a Novice Woman"

Deirdre McCloskey, internationally known economist, historian, and rhetorician, was until 1995 "Donald." She describes her adventures---sad, funny, terrifying, illuminating of gender roles---in crossing genders, from her 1999 memoir, Crossing (1999), a New York Times Notable Book.

"A Novice Woman in Academic Life"

Deirdre McCloskey starts from her unusual perspective a discussion about being a woman and being a professor. McCloskey, twelve years a professor at the University of Chicago and nineteen at Iowa, now teaches economics, history, English, communication at three universities. She was until 1995 "Donald." What changed? How can academic life become more open to women?

"Free Market Feminism: A Contradiction?"

Deirdre McCloskey, a well-known "Good Old Chicago School" economist, thinks it is not a contradiction. The market, she argues, has been the chief liberator of women; and the government has been most often a men's club.

"A Conversation with Deirdre McCloskey"

Deirdre McCloskey describes herself as a "postmodern, free-market, quantitative, rhetorical, Anglican, transsexual, Midwestern, European, female economist -- that's why I haven't got any friends!" Is such a mixture possible? McCloskey is ocular proof that it is. She says, "It's like believing in infant baptism. Not only do I believe in it, I've seen it."

"Learning to Love Globalization"

Deirdre McCloskey, a well-known economist and economic historian, argues in favor of capitalism, globalization, and modern economic growth. She views them as the hope for the world's poor and the promise of the century before us.

"The Rhetoric of Some Mathematical Sciences"

Deirdre McCloskey is well known as one of the originators of the "rhetoric of inquiry," a broad-based use since the early 1980s of an ancient tradition to understand scholarship and public affairs. She here discusses her latest thoughts on how literary and communications theory can illuminate-and improve-science and scholarship.

"Theology and Capitalism"

Deirdre McCloskey describes herself as an "Anglican, statistical, literary, post-modern free-market economist who was once a Trotskyist, Keynesian, positivist agnostic." Can God and Mammon (Aramaic: "money") lie down together? Says McCloskey, Yes, as even Jesus of Nazareth affirmed.

Formal Biography

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 (1996, 2002-2006) of Philosophy, Economics, and Art and Cultural Studies at Erasmus University of Rotterdam. She teaches also as Professor of Social Thought at Academia Vitae, Deventer, The Netherlands and as Extraordinary Professor of Economics and of English, University of the Free State, Bloemfontein, South Africa. 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 is Costing Jobs, Justice, and Lives [with Stephen Ziliak; University of Michigan Press, 2008], and The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Capitalism (U. of Chicago Press, 2006). Before The Bourgeois Virtues and The Cult of Statistical Significance 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 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. She has written widely on the philosophy and rhetoric of science. 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 capitalism. She is currently finishing a book, second in a series of five initiated with The Bourgeois Virtues on Dutch and British economic and social history, 1600-1800, Bourgeois Deeds: How Values Made the Modern World, 1700-1848.

Informal Autobiographical Remarks

I'm an economist and economic historian who around 1980 got interested in the rhetoric of persuasion in my field, and then wider literary matters, such as literary and social theory. My main project for the next few years will be writing a five-volume series on The Bourgeois Era. Volume 1 was published by the University of Chicago Press in 2006, and widely and on the whole favorably reviewed. The next volume, Bourgeois Deeds: How Values Made Modernity, 1600-1848, is almost finished. I'm a free-market economist, and so the project is theologically speaking an "apology" for capitalism. But I try to be fair to my friends on the left and on the right. Among its other methods -- economic, historical, philosophical -- the project 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 I 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 new book with Stephen Ziliak, The Cult of Statistical Significance: How the Standard Error is Costing Jobs, Justice, and Lives (2008). In the longer run I intend to write a book called Language Matters: The Linguistic Economy, which will try to bring speech back into economics. Surprisingly, it's not there now. An economy is not, admittedly, "merely" a matter of language. But a great deal of it takes place on lips and pages, which is the subtext of much of my career. The third volume of The Bourgeois Era, Bourgeois Rhetorics: How Capitalism Became Virtuous, 1600-1776, deals with language.

The oddest personal fact about me is that I was until 1995 "Donald." I have written on the matter, especially the account of my 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 my own peculiar---or at any rate particular---way in our intellectual culture. I describe myself as a postmodern free-market literary quantitative rhetorical Episcopalian pro-globalization feminist Aristotelian woman who was once a Marxist, a social engineer, a positivist, and a man. As Mae West said, "I was Snow White. . . but I drifted." Such allegedly contradictory positions are not adopted merely to shock the bourgeoisie. On the contrary, I believe they are the only reasonable positions!

PR Bullet Points

Deirdre N. McCloskey is Distinguished Professor of Economics, History, English, and Communication at the University of Illinois at Chicago and Professor of Social Thought at Academia Vitae, Deventer. Print date: Friday, 10 October 2008

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