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McCloskey's leviathan tome borrows capital from both overvalued firms. (Call it Bobo Theodicy.) Coming in at just over 500 pages of padded and lazily written text, The Bourgeois Virtues is a tower of babble, a bloated and inglorious mess of a book, the first of a threatened four-volume series that will cover the history and ethics of capitalism. (If you want an outline of this unfolding disaster, read the postscript.) Don't be fooled by the gorgeous trappings of erudition, the hundreds of quotations from economists, philosophers, poets, novelists, theologians, and historians. For all its attempts at philosophical, historical, and theological depth, it's a Sargasso Sea of intellectual froth. The only possible reward in reading this awful book is the instruction it provides in the overpriced art of ideology. From its inadvertently portentous cover—a 16th-century merchant vends a large and smelly fish—to the shameful blurbs on the back, The Bourgeois Virtues is a sign of how shallow and overrated The Other Side can be.
McCloskey is a distinguished professor of economics, history, English, and communication at the University of Illinois at Chicago. (Talk about multi-tasking.) Educated at Harvard and tenured at Chicago as Donald, McCloskey is the author of two previous books on economics—The Rhetoric of Economics (1985) and If You're So Smart (1992)—in which he tried to demonstrate that economists don't have to be dismal scientists. "Economists are poets," he wrote in If You're So Smart. (I can't wait for that Norton anthology.) In the mid-'90s, Donald became Deirdre, an existential metamorphosis she chronicled in Crossing (1996). Later, McCloskey became a Christian, or as she describes herself in the present book, "a progressive Episcopalian, the quasi-Quaker branch of the Frozen Chosen."
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