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Traces the history of two rival American economic moralities from colonial times to the present.
Since colonial times, two discernable schools have debated major issues of economic morality in America. The central norm of one morality is the freedom, or autonomy, of the individual and defines virtues, vices, obligations, and rights by how they contribute to that freedom. The other morality is relational and defines economic ethics in terms of behaviors mandated by human connectedness. America’s Economic Moralists shows how each morality has been composed of an ethical outlook paired with a compatible economic theory, each supporting the other. Donald E. Frey adopts a multidisciplinary approach, not only drawing upon historical economic thought, American religious thought, and ethics, but also finding threads of economic morality in novels, government policies, and popular writings. He uses the history of these two supported yet very different views to explain the culture of excess that permeates the morality of today’s economic landscape.
“…America’s Economic Moralists is one of those still rare academic explorations of this subject … The strength of Frey’s book lies in the author’s ability to condense the study of a quite large number of schools of economic morality into workable, chronologically directed chapters … provide[s] a useful lens for thinking through competing visions of economic morality in America, and underscores the truth that there is no such thing as a value-free economic science.” —EH.net
“…Frey’s book is a timely and welcome contribution to the literature on ethics in business and economics. He provides scholars the much-needed historical background on the development of thoughts related to economic morality since Colonial times.” — CHOICE
Donald E. Frey is Professor of Economics at Wake Forest University and the author of Tuition Tax Credits for Private Education: An Economic Analysis.
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Table of Contents
Acknowledgments
1. Introduction
2. Colonial Faith: Work, Wealth, and the
Wider Welfare
3. Acting for Self’s Sake: The Later Colonial Era
4. Laissez-Faire for Americans
5. Ethics Better than the Morals of Hermits
6. Religious Socialism: The Communal Moravians
7. Abolition: Human Dignity as a Boundary
to Markets
8. Social Darwinists of Different Species
9. New Influences in Economics
10. The Social Gospel and Catholic Thought
Around
11. The 1920s and 1930s: Depressed Old Values
12. Too Agnostic, Too Certain: Welfare Economics,
Chicago Economics
13. Moralists of Twentieth-Century Capitalism
14. Unconventional Alternatives to the
Conventional Wisdom
15. An Ecumenical Consensus on Economic Ethics
16. Summary, Assessments, and a Projection
Notes
Works Cited
Index
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