Virtue Capitalists: The Rise and Fall of the Professional Class in the Anglophone World, 1870-2008

Forsyth, Hannah Hannah Forsyth,

ISBN 10: 1009206451 / ISBN 13: 9781009206457

Published by Cambridge University Press, 2005

About this Item

Seller Inventory # 6666-GRD-9781009206457

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Virtue Capitalists: The Rise and Fall of the Professional Class in the Anglophone World, 1870-2008
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Publication Date: 2005
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1009206451
• ISBN 13: 9781009206457
• Binding: paperback
• Condition: New

About this title

Synopsis

Virtue Capitalists explores the rise of the professional middle class across the Anglophone world from c. 1870 to 2008. With a focus on British settler colonies – Canada, Australia, New Zealand and the United States – Hannah Forsyth argues that the British middle class structured old forms of virtue into rapidly expanding white-collar professional work, needed to drive both economic and civilizational expansion across their settler colonies. They invested that virtue to produce social and economic profit. This virtue became embedded in the networked Anglophone economy so that, by the mid twentieth century, the professional class ruled the world in alliance with managers whose resources enabled the implementation of virtuous strategies. Since morality and capital had become materially entangled, the 1970s economic crisis also presented a moral crisis for all professions, beginning a process whereby the interests of expert and managerial workers separated and began to actively compete.

About the Author

Hannah Forsyth is a historian at the Australian Catholic University, Sydney. She was President of Australian and New Zealand History of Education Society 2020-1. Her first book was A History of the Modern Australian University (2014).