Many essays start by quoting dictionaries and definitions, but few can be much more revealing than the dictionaries and encyclopedia themselves, as is the one done by McCloskey in Chapter 2 to start talking about the Bourgeoisie, plural of a Bourgeois whose female partner would be a Bourgeoise, not to be distinguished in spoken language from its plural form Bourgeoises, who all share ancestry with the German Bürger and Bürgerinnen, the hard-working "towns-man-ly" people, what McCloskey tries to portray as a virtuous class.
One thing peculiar about her portrait is the inauthenticity and the lack of creativity of the Bourgeois class, whose greatest drives for hard work are freedom and the ability to imitate, rather than any pure profit maximization with resolution nor logic. I wonder what economics would be like if such a homo socius becomes the protagonist.
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