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

An ambitious study of the making of the professional middle class in the Anglophone world from c.1870 to 2008.

Hannah Forsyth (Author)

9781009206488, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 30 September 2023

317 pages
28 x 19 x 2.4 cm, 0.686 kg

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.

1. Introduction: capitalism, class, and virtue
Part I. Professionalizing the Anglo Economy, c.1870-1945: 2. Civilizing capitalism
3. Achieving class
4. From bourgeois to professional
Part II. Managing the Global Economy, c.1945–1975
5. Angels of the state
6. Classy work
Part III. The New Class Conflict c.1975–2008: 7. Moral crisis
8. Success is the only virtue
Epilogue: contours of the new class conflict.

Subject Areas: Economic history [KCZ]