Deirdre McCloskey

Dr. Deirdre N. McCloskey is a Senior Fellow and the Isaiah Berline Chair in Liberal Thought at the Cato Institute and a Distinguished Affiliated Fellow with the F.A. Hayek Program for Advanced Study in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University. 

McCloskey is Distinguished Professor Emerita of Economics and History, Professor Emerita of English and Communication, and Emerita Adjunct Professor of Classics and Philosophy at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Previously, she was the Visiting Tinbergen Professor of Philosophy, Economics, and Art and Cultural Studies at Erasmus University of Rotterdam and a tenured Professor of Economics at the University of Chicago where she taught for twelve years

Trained at Harvard as an economist, by her own account she "drifted," writing on economic theory, economic history, philosophy, rhetoric, feminism, ethics, transgender advocacy, statistical theory, politics, and law. She now describes herself as a "postmodern, free-market, quantitative, literary, Episcopalian, feminist Aristotelian." 

Her main scientific work began in the 1960s with British economic history, but widened to world history, especially in her Bourgeois trilogy, consisting of The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for a Commercial Society (University of Chicago Press, 2006), Bourgeois Dignity: Why Economics Can't Explain the Modern World (University of Chicago Press, 2010), and Bourgeois Equality: How Ideas, Not Capital or Institutions, Enriched the World (University of Chicago Press, 2016).

For further publications by McCloskey, visit her website and Substack.