The economic historian Deirdre McCloskey is part way through a monumental book project, The Bourgeois Era. There's an interesting new review (by James Seaton in The Weekly Standard) of the first of a planned six book series, the 2006 The Bourgeois Virtues. I reviewed the second, Bourgeois Dignity, in the New Statesman earlier this year.

Prof Seaton's review is interesting because he is preoccupied with how to categorise Prof McCloskey politically – whereas one of the most appealing things about her writing for me is that she is impossible to pigeon hole. The review notes and agrees with the argument of The Bourgeois Virtues, that left-wing intellectual thought in the west has on balance done people more harm than good in resisting market capitalism, and he reviews the book very positively. However, he concludes, uncomfortably, that “now the differences between her view of the movements of the sixties and
that of most neoconservatives has narrowed to the vanishing point.”

This is the final sentence of the review, and we are left dangling. What does Prof Seaton think about this? Are conservatives in all western economies right in their view that left-wing social liberalism and economic interventions from the 60s to at lease the Thatcher/Reagan era inadvertently caused damage to the fabric of society and the functioning of the economy? Can left-of-centre intellectuals even now bring themselves to agree with Deirdre McCloskey and admit it? This is unfinished business since 1989, and a pressing question at a time of financially essential cuts in public spending and the scope of the state. If the left wants to rebuild a credible and persuasive political narrative, it will have to address this so far taboo question of morality.