Work · Analytic Philosophy
Bourgeois Morality
Reconstructs the bourgeois ethos – thrift, reliability, work – from Benjamin Franklin and other sources as a historical type of morality.
Introduction
“Bourgeois Morality” appeared in 1956, the year of the Polish October, after Ossowska had been barred from teaching for several years. She reconstructs the ethos of the bourgeoisie as a historical type: industry, thrift, reliability, punctuality, moderation, respect for property and the treatment of time as money. Her main source is Benjamin Franklin, read alongside other authors of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and she discusses the theses of Max Weber and Werner Sombart on the spirit of capitalism. The book departs from the official Marxist scheme of class morality and treats bourgeois values as a complex of norms to be described and analysed, not denounced. It became one of her best-known works in Poland; an English translation appeared in 1986.
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