Bourgeois Equality: How Ideas, Not Capital or Institutions, Enriched the World by Deirdre N. McCloskey

Author:Deirdre N. McCloskey [McCloskey, Deirdre N.]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9780226334042
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Published: 2016-04-20T22:00:00+00:00

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Political Ideas Mattered for Equal Liberty and Dignity

“One history of Western politics,” writes the political philosopher Mika LaVaque-Manty, citing Charles Taylor and Peter Berger (he could have cited most European writers on the matter from Locke and Voltaire and Wollstonecraft through Tocqueville and Arendt and Rawls), “has it that under modernity, equal dignity has replaced positional honor as the ground on which individuals’ political status rests”:

Now, the story goes, the dignity which I have by virtue of nothing more than my humanity gives me both standing as a citizen vis-à-vis the state and a claim to respect from others. Earlier, my political status would have depended, first, on who I was (more respect for the well-born, less for the lower orders) and also on how well I acquitted myself as that sort of person. In rough outline, the story is correct.1

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