Every month, the University of Chicago Press offers a free e‑book from its catalog of thought-provoking titles. This month it’s Deirdre McCloskey’s The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Commerce (2006).

We discussed her follow-up volume, Bourgeois Dignity: Why Economics Can’t Explain the Modern World (2010), in last month’s Cato Unbound. Back in 2006, Cato Policy Report gave a short summary of McCloskey’s argument in The Bourgeois Virtues.

Her argument as I understand it is that commerce and virtue can be mutually reinforcing. Obviously they aren’t always so, but this positive feedback loop has governed much of world history in the modern era, helping to create the world we see around us today. I’d encourage anyone who takes interest in the intersection of markets, virtue, and modernity to take a look. And best of all, it’s free.