The Social Change Project at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University presents a public lecture by Deirdre McCloskey, Distinguished Professor of Economics, History, English, and Communication at the University of Illinois at Chicago.  Prof. McCloskey, basing her talk on her upcoming book “The Treason of the Clerisy: How Capitalism was Demoralized in the Age of Romance,” will discuss the changing attitudes towards capitalism of mid-19th century intellectuals.

Deirdre N. McCloskey has been since 2000 UIC Distinguished Professor of Economics, History, English, and Communication at the University of Illinois at Chicago and was Visiting Tinbergen Professor (2002-2006) of Philosophy, Economics, and Art and Cultural Studies at Erasmus University of Rotterdam.

Prof. McCloskey has written fourteen books and edited seven more, and has published some three hundred and sixty articles on economic theory, economic history, philosophy, rhetoric, feminism, ethics, and law. She taught for twelve years in Economics at the University of Chicago, and describes herself now as a "postmodern free-market quantitative Episcopalian feminist Aristotelian."

Her scientific work has been on economic history, especially British. She has written on British economic "failure" in the 19th century, trade and growth in the 19th century, open field agriculture in the middle ages, the Gold Standard, and the Industrial Revolution. Her philosophical works concern the maladies of social scientific positivism, the epistemological limits of a future social science, and the promise of a rhetorically sophisticated philosophy of science. Recently she has turned to ethics and to a philosophical-historical apology for modern economies.