Presenting a survey of ethical thought and economic realities - from Plato to Barbara Ehrenreich, this title offers a view that capitalism is good for us. It shows that American capitalism without ignoring its faults and celebrates the bourgeois lives we actually live, without supposing that they must be lives without ethical foundations.

McCloskey's sweeping, charming, and even humorous survey of ethical thought and economic realities--from Plato to Barbara Ehrenreich--overturns assumptions about being bourgeois. Applying a new tradition of "virtue ethics," she affirms American capitalism without ignoring its faults.