ON THE CUTTING EDGE: The Capitalist Manifesto
Writing in The Wall Street Journal, Matt Ridley, chairman of the board of the British mortgage bank Northern Rock, reviews “The Bourgeois Virtues,” a new book that makes the case that “Modern capitalism does not need to be offset to be good … I say that the market supports the virtues”:
The intelligentsia - in thrall for centuries to religion and now to socialism – has for a long time snobbishly despised the bourgeoisie that practices capitalism. … Their values and virtues, like those of the proletariat and the aristocracy, are widely admired. But almost nobody admires the bourgeoisie. Yet it was for anti-bourgeois ideologies, she notes, that “the twentieth century paid the butcher's bill.”
As Ms. McCloskey explains: “Anyone who after the twentieth century still thinks … socialism, nationalism, imperialism, mobilization, central planning, regulation, zoning, price controls, tax policy, labor unions, business cartels, government spending, intrusive policing, adventurism in foreign policy, faith in entangling religion and politics, or most of the other thoroughgoing nineteenth-century proposals for government action are still neat, harmless ideas for improving our lives is not paying attention.” By contrast, she argues, “capitalism has not corrupted our souls. It has improved them.” …
Economists have made the mistake of defending capitalism by arguing that only prudence matters, that what counts is whether it works rather than whether it is good. Ms. McCloskey wants to make the case that … hope, faith, love, justice, courage and temperance, as well as prudence … also matter, and that capitalism encourages them all. A businessman is motivated as much by emotion, sentiment and the transcendent as anybody else.
This is an ambitious claim, but then it is part of an ambitious project. “The Bourgeois Virtues,” we are told, is the first of four volumes. The second will be a history of how the Dutch and English invented the bourgeois world, with its deals, its reciprocity and its respectability. The third will be a tragedy of how the clerisy after 1848 turned against the bourgeoisie. The fourth volume will “defend the indefensible” and make the case for ethical capitalism.
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