Today’s Wall Street Journal features a review by Matt Ridley of Deirdre McCloskey’s The Bourgeois Virtues The book is, says Ridley, “an exhaustive philosophical treatise on virtue ethics, and a very fine one, too. Ms. McCloskey is spectacularly well read. She can pull an apposite quotation not only from her heroes, such as Adam Smith and Thomas Aquinas, but also from Thucydides and Machiavelli, or from the anthropologist Ruth Bendict and the contemporary philosopher Alistair MacIntyre, or (for that matter) from the movies ‘Groundhog Day’ and ‘Shane.’ What is more, she writes with wonderful ease. . . . The book radiates intelligence and insight and will illuminate my thinking for years to come.”
Read an excerpt from the book.