Dear Professor Gunning: I agree with your distinction between the first inventors of capitalism and its adopters. The adopters have an easier time of it. Yet if a lack of individualism is such a strong obstacle in 1300 or 1700, why not in 2007 in China and India? And I am worried by the concept of "prerequisites," for which see the old essays by Alexander Gerschenkron on the subject long ago. He pointed out that humans have a way of finding substitutes (a most economic concept) for alleged prerequisites. Thus the Russians used large scale to economize on very scarce entrepreneurship there. But again the point about individualism may be correct: see the historical anthropologists Alan Macfaralane's long series of books making the argument in detail, especially about England, in more detail than Depak could make in a short volume as an outsider to historical scholarship, of course (no blame in that, I emphasize as an outsider to most of the literatures I use!) As to habits of the heart and the virtues, I'm afraid you'll have to read The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Commerce (cheap on amazon.com even for the hardback!) to get the full picture. Here's a riff from it that might help: The newspapers restrict "ethics" to business practice, usually corrupt, and "morality" to sexual behavior, often scandalous. I opt for the ordinary, non-newspaper usage that takes "morality" to be a synonym for "ethics," which is to say the patterns of character in a good person. True, the words have become entangled in the Red vs. Blue states and their culture wars. The left once embraced situational ethics and the right favored a moral majority. Now the Christian and progressive left wonders at the ethics of capital punishment and the Christian and neocon right wonders at moral decline. But at the outset let us have peace. "Ethics" is the system of the virtues. A "virtue" is a habit of the heart, a stable disposition, a settled state of character, a durable, educated characteristic of someone to exercise her will to be good. The definition would be circular if "good" just meant the same thing as "virtuous." But it's more complicated than that. Alasdair MacIntyre's famous definition is: "a virtue is an acquired human quality the possession of which tends to enable us to achieve those goods which are internal to practices and the lack of which effectively prevents us from achieving such goods." A virtue is at the linguistic level something about which you can coherently say "you should practice X"--courage, love, prudence, temperance, justice, faith, hope, for example. Beauty is therefore not a virtue in this sense of "exercising ones will." One cannot say, "You should be beautiful" and make much sense, short of the extreme makeover. Neat, clean, well turned out--yes. But not "beautiful." At the simplest level people have two conventional and opposed remarks they make nowadays when the word "ethics" comes up. One is the fatherly assertion that ethics can be reduced to a list of rules, such as the Ten Commandments. Let us post the Sacred List, they say, in our courthouses and high schools, and watch its good effects. In a more sophisticated form the fatherly approach is a natural-law theory that, say, homosexuality is bad, because unnatural. In contrast, the other remark that people make reflects the motherly assertion that ethics is after all particular to this family or that person. Let's get along with each other and not be too strict. Bring out the jello and the lemonade. In its sophisticated form the motherly approach is a cultural relativist theory that, say, female circumcision and the forced marriage of 11-year old girls is all right--because it is their custom. The "virtue-ethic" parallel to such college-freshman commandments or college-sophomore relativism is the vocabulary of the hero and of the saint. Regards, Deirdre McCloskey