Deirdre McCloskey:
The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Commerce
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007)
The Bourgeois Virtues is certainly the most ambitious liberal academic project of the decade. McCloskey does not just want to argue that the market economy has made us more efficient people. She wants to defend the market economy has made us better people, more virtuous - and make this defense in a tome of 600 pages (supposedly the first in a series of four volumes) before an audience conditioned to throw rocks to the sound word of the bourgeoisie. McCloskey balances his Herculean effort with an essay style, conversational, without ever losing the scholarship. The scope of his work can hardly find a parallel between liberal economists, living or dead. To promote hope, faith, love, justice, courage, temperance and prudence, no other book this decade can more successfully defend the thesis that the market not only allows a man to gain the world, but can also help you not lose your soul.
Source: Survey of Free Order on the most important books for understanding and promoting freedom published in the last decade (00-09).
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