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Article: Morality Plays.(moralists and economists interested in moral economy)
- Article from:
- American Scholar
- Article date:
- January 1, 2000
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 2000 Phi Beta Kappa Society. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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"Leave those vain moralists, my friend," Rousseau advised, "and return to the depth of your soul." His great contemporary Edmund Burke lamented that "the age of chivalry is gone; that of ... economists ... has succeeded." One can only imagine, then, what the two thinkers might have said about our age--the age when moralists and economists got together to produce moral economy. From the Republican House Majority Leader Dick Armey, who argues that "poverty is not a material but a moral phenomenon," to the liberal journalist E. J. Dionne, Jr., who claims that "many aspects of the economy that conservatives celebrate ... undermine the very virtues that conservatives ... ...