"Who Raised the Boats?" or Why Deirdre McCloskey Has to Be Right

I assess Deirdre McCloskey's three volumes on the bourgeois revaluation and the making of the modern world, situating her contribution within a broader historical concern for ideas and context. In this regard, she is still seen to be making an essentially Weberian argument that revives aspects of an earlier German historicist tradition, but in a fashion that remains consistent with an Austrian understanding of economic processes and purposefulness. I find that she has not so much refuted the importance of institutions, technology, and science as placed each in its proper causal relationship.