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Enterprise and Society Advance Access originally published online on May 1, 2009
Enterprise and Society 2009 10(2):419-422; doi:10.1093/es/khp007
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© The Author 2009. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Business History Conference. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oupjournals.org.

Deirdre N. McCloskey. The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Commerce

Deirdre N. McCloskey. The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Commerce. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2006. xviii + 616 pp. ISBN 0-226-55663-8, $32.50

The first 10% of the full text of this article appears below.

When two friends eat at a restaurant and the time comes to pay the bill, if one party offers, the other might respond with anything from simple gratitude to hesitation, uncertainty, anxiety, discomfort, and even protestation (false or real, mild or angry), depending on the friendship's history, the particular situation, and personalities involved. McCloskey's book, at its highpoint, might help us consider why seemingly mundane moments like these might be so unexpectedly fraught, or at least less simple than common sense would have them. Despite the regnant philosophy of our day, so pervasive in economics and beyond, all of human behavior cannot be explained by rational choice—the reasoned pursuit of self-interest—and a resulting calculus based on self-interested acquiescence to . . . [Full Text of this Article]

Elisabeth Lasch-Quinn

Syracuse University


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