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Modern Era
Deirdre McCloskey
b. 1942 · Economic humanism
Growth came from dignity, not from capital.
Bourgeois Equality argues that the great enrichment came not from exploitation or machinery alone but from a shift in rhetoric that made ordinary people's work honorable. McCloskey defends what she calls a humanistic economics, in which liberty is valued because it allows people to exercise their own judgment, and she has carried classical liberal argument into the humanities where it is least welcome.
Why it matters for freedom
She argued that liberty and dignity together, not capital alone, are what made the modern world possible.
Who they stood against
the economists who sneered at ordinary people and the idea that virtue is a luxury