Modern Age - Winter 2017 - 140

MODERN AGE

WINTER 2017

class citizens. McCloskey's analysis of this crucial idea, while it
owes much to earlier scholars, is nothing short of breathtaking in
its scope, perception, and intellectual courage.
McCloskey's central concern is with the rising freedom and prosperity of "ordinary people" over the past five hundred years, those
who benefited most from what she terms "trade-tested betterment" or what others would simply term "capitalism." The tenor
of the work is restrained and scholarly, but the premise is radical.
The great advancement of the past half millennium, beginning in
northwestern Europe and now extending to much of the world,
has resulted from equality of opportunity that itself stemmed
from an extraordinary shift in ideas. Global society is radically more
equal, more just, and more secure as a result of the acceptance of
a few compelling notions: the idea that all human beings should
be free to innovate, to conduct business, and to engage in trade,
and that their efforts should be accorded dignity and rewarded
as the market dictates. More so than capital investment or institutions, which can be encumbrances to progress to the extent that
they fuel monopolistic and rent-seeking practices, ideas change
the world.
As McCloskey rightly emphasizes, the rise of bourgeois culture
made possible, for the first time in history, the true well-being of
most members of society and at levels of affluence that have been
doubling every generation or so, and that continue to expand
within both developed and developing nations. The left has continually questioned the importance of this shift in prosperity to
broad masses of humanity, arguing that it is destructive of social
order, unsustainable, or inhuman in its materialism. A long line
of thinkers, including Malthus, Marx, Spencer, Dewey, Gramsci,
Lukács, and Chomsky, each in his own way, attacked the notion
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Modern Age - Winter 2017

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Modern Age - Winter 2017

Contents
Modern Age - Winter 2017 - Cover1
Modern Age - Winter 2017 - Cover2
Modern Age - Winter 2017 - Contents
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