Steven B. Smith, Modernity and Its Discontents: Making and Unmaking the Bourgeois from Machiavelli to Bellow (New Haven & London: Yale U. Press, 2016) ("My own point of departure begins with modernity as the site of a unique type of human being, one entirely unknown to the ancient and medieval worlds that I want to call the bourgeois. I realize that the term 'bourgeois' is contested and currently out of favor, but it is something I would like to resurrect. I use the term not in the Marxist sense to mean owners of 'the means of production' but to indicate members of an urban middle class that began to think of itself a constituting a distinctive culture with a distinctive way of life and set of moral characteristics. Among the traits that character this bourgeois way o life ar the desire for antinomy and sell-direction, the aspiration to live independently of the dictates of habit, custom, and tradition, t accept moral institutions and practices only if they pass the bar of one's critical intellect, and to accept ultimate responsibility for one's life and actions. . . . These are traits of character that arose initially in the early modern period and are uniquely attached to the constitutional democracies of the West. "The character traits described about have come to be most fully identified with the American way of life. . . . "The thesis that I develop in this book is that modernity has created within itself a rhetoric of antimodernity that has taken philosophical, literary, and political form. How did the idea of the bourgeois, once considered virtually synonymous with the free and responsible individual, became associated with a kind of low-minded materialism, moral cowardice, and philistinism? It is this dialectic that I hope to explore." Id. at ix-xi. ).
Deirdre Nansen McCloskey, Bourgeois Equality: How Ideas, Not Capital or Institutions, Enriched the World (Chicago & London: U. of Chicago Press, 2016) (From the book jacket: "There's little doubt that most humans today are better off than their forebears. Stunningly so, the economist and historian Deirdre McCloskey argues in the concluding volume of her trilogy celebrating the oft-derided virtues of the bourgeoisie. The poorest of humanity, McCloskey shows, will soon be joining the comparative rich of Japan and Sweden and Botswana. "Why? Most economists . . . attribute the Great Enrichment since 1800 to accumulated capital. McCloskey disagrees, fiercely. 'Our riches,' she argues, 'were made not by piling brick on brick, bank balance on bank balance, but by piling idea on idea.' Capital was necessary, but so was the presence of oxygen. It was ideas, not matter, that drove 'trade-tested betterment.' Nor were institutions the drivers. The World Bank orthodoxy of 'add institutions and stir' doesn't work, and never has. McCloskey builds a powerful case for the initiating role of ideas--ideas for electric motors and free elections, of course, but more deeply the bizarre liberal idea of equal liberty and dignity for ordinary folk. Liberalism arose from theological and political revolutions in northwest Europe, yielding a unique respect for betterment and its practitioners, and unending ancient hierarchies. Commoners were encouraged to have a go, the bourgeoisie look took up that Bourgeois Deal and we were all enriched.").
