Bourgeois dignity: why economics can't explain the modern world
Bourgeois dignity: why economics can't explain the modern world
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资产阶级尊严：为什么经济学无法解释现代世界
DOI：
10.1080/17449359.2013.802645
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发表时间：
2013
期刊：
影响因子：
--
通讯作者：
Scott Taylor
中科院分区：
文献类型：
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作者：
Scott Taylor
经济学的兴起（或者更确切地说，是坚持认为所有社会生活都可以用工具性理性的自利行为来解释的经济思想的变体）可能是学术界现代主义最显著的特征，并延伸到构成我们日常生活的政治决策中。投资回报、效用、成本、经验主义、市场主体互动、效率、增长、周期、不确定性——这些概念提供了强大的动机词汇、评估行动或行为的手段、解释理性，是大多数在西方资本主义工作的人认识和体验的学科语言的基础。这本书及其精神饱满的作者问了为什么。为什么会这样呢？为什么我们通常接受它？为什么会发生这种情况？为什么我们给予经济学思想如此多的信任（从而赋予其权力）？为什么我们不以不同的方式思考我们所生活和经历的胜利资本主义的起源、兴起和当前的实践？资本主义的起源和兴起是经济历史学家可以解决的两个最大的问题，麦克洛斯基特别谈到了19世纪的一系列关键思想家。这本书是她试图为现代资本主义的第三个世纪所发生的事情（遵循麦克洛斯基自己的历史计划，以18世纪末/ 19世纪初为资本主义思想扎根的时刻）奠定一系列复杂的论点和解释的一部分。在这一点上，作者有足够的信心：
The rise of economics (or rather, the variant of economistic thinking that insists that all social life can be explained with reference to instrumentally rational self-interested behavior) is perhaps the most remarkable feature of modernism in the academy, and by extension in the political decisions that frame our everyday lives. Return on investment, utility, cost, empiricism, market–agent interaction, efficiency, growth, cycles, uncertainty – these ideas provide powerful vocabularies of motive, means of assessing actions or behaviors, explanatory rationalities, and are the foundations of a disciplinary language that most people working in/for Western capitalism recognize and experience. This book, and its spirited author, ask why. Why is this so? Why do we usually accept it? Why has it happened? Why do we grant economistic thinking so much credence (and therefore power)? And why do we not think in different ways about the origins, rise and current practice of the triumphant capitalism we live in and through? The origins and rise of capitalism are the two largest issues that an economic historian can address, and McCloskey speaks to a series of key thinkers from the nineteenth century in particular. This book forms part of her attempt to lay down a complex series of arguments and explanations for what is happening in this third century of modern capitalism (following McCloskey’s own historical scheme here, taking the late eighteenth/ early nineteenth century as the moment when the idea of capitalism took hold). In this, the author is confident enough to: