Conferment of Honorary Doctorates and Award Ceremony 2012

Academic Seminar

Deirdre McCloskey:

"Bourgeois Dignity: Why Economics Can't Explain the Modern World"

Learn more about the event here

Deirdre Nansen McCloskey is Distinguished Professor of Economics, History, English and Communication at the University of Illinois at Chicago, and Professor of Economic History, University of Gothenburg, Sweden.

McCloskey has written and edited more than 20 books and has published more than 350 articles on economic theory, economic history, philosophy, rhetoric, feminism and law. As this broad field of academic interests suggests, it is impossible to place her in a traditional disciplinary setting, and she describes herself as a “post-modern, quantitative, free-market, feminist, Episcopalian, Midwestern, gender-crossing, literary woman”.

Throughout her academic life, McCloskey has worked on bridging history and economics. She started her academic career in quantitative economic history and was one of the earliest and most respected pioneers in clinometric. In the beginning of the 1980s, her research took a cultural turn. McCloskey started to view economics and economic history from humanistic approaches such as rhetoric, narrative theory, philosophy, and literature.

Since 2006, she has worked on a reinterpretation of the rise of capitalism and the industrial breakthrough in the six volume tome: The Bourgeois Era. As a part of this, she published the book Bourgeois Dignity: Why Economics Can’t Explain the Modern World in 2011, in which she insists that the capitalist era can only be explained as an ideological and mental transformation that allows entrepreneurial spirit.