At the Origins of the Valorisation of the Economy (15th–19th Centuries) – Article 4
In eighteenth-century Great Britain, the word “interest” condenses heterogeneous realities that we now distinguish in order to avoid confusion. First, there is financial interest, an instrumental category and the primary one etymologically, which designates the temporal cost of a debt. It articulates, very concretely, the three following normative domains: (a) the public interest, which concerns collective power and stability – the state finances war and infrastructure when confidence holds, but a credit crisis can conversely threaten political order; (b) located interests, those of groups and institutions such as merchants, companies, parishes, localities or corporations; (c) personal interest, that of the rentier, the lender, the consumer buying on credit. The order of these three normative domains corresponds to the social order of the early eighteenth century – the state, groups, individuals – which the economy puts under pressure.
In this respect, our inquiry does not attempt to reconstruct the “causes” of sustained growth: it follows the way in which the economy is instituted as a social and political value, as a continuation of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.1 We shall first observe how the encounter and confrontation of various political, economic and academic interests shape a certain economic and social openness.
Next, we shall describe the quarrels associated with state indebtedness, measures to stimulate the economy and the extension of credit at all social levels (state, firms, individuals). Despite the opposition, credit – inseparable from interest – is moralised, notably through the medium of the trust on which it rests. It spreads through financial institutions as well as everyday language. In this context, in which investment opportunities multiply, the outlines of a middle class begin to appear.
This normative and social shift accompanies a dynamic of production and consumption: alongside the domestic system, already well developed in the seventeenth century, we see the early signs of the Industrial Revolution and the emergence of a modern consumer society. The latter ushers in and reflects social emulation, which calls the traditional order into question.
After the political, economic and social history, we shall examine how the economy and self-interest entered philosophical theories (from Pufendorf to Smith), culminating in the notion of an “harmony of interests”, subject to conditions of justice and competition. It is at the crossroads of practices and theoretical justifications that the economy asserts itself, beyond politics, as a principle of social order.
An interested economic and social openness
Parliament as economic facilitator
In the wake of the rebalancing of the power relationship between Parliament and the monarchy – discussed in the previous article2 –, a partial loosening of the social hierarchy takes shape around a political-financial compromise. After 1688, Parliamentary credibility in servicing the debt and the consolidation of new institutions (Bank of England, “funded” debt, joint-stock companies) reduce frictions in financing and create opportunities to carry out projects without illustrious pedigree.3
At the local level, Parliament sustains hundreds of initiatives: turnpike trusts, created by Acts of Parliament that appoint trustees. The latter, often landed notables, collect tolls and borrow in order to modernise the roads. Academic work shows that these trusts increase road investment and ultimately lower transport costs and journey times, thereby enlarging domestic markets in which incremental know-how proves profitable.4
The same logic is applied to canals: the aristocracy acts as sponsor and legislative relay. The Bridgewater Canal – conceived and promoted by the Duke of Bridgewater, with James Brindley as engineer – is propelled by Acts of 1759–1760 and opens in 1761. It is a typical example of a transformative industrial infrastructure sponsored by a member of the nobility.5
In the energy sector, aristocratic and gentry coalitions organise supply. The “Grand Allies” (from 1726) pool capital and wayleaves in the north-east. They control production and build waggonways or primitive railways (mining tramways) operated by horses. George Bowes, a powerful coal owner and long-serving Whig MP, embodies this nexus between Parliament and energy supply – a strong signal of establishment endorsement of economic development6.
Finally, a more accommodating regime of credit and bankruptcy encourages new ventures. The Statute of Anne 1705/17067 allows a bankrupt to be discharged before full repayment; combined with a culture of personal credit, it stimulates initiatives and a kind of right to failure, treated as a normal stage in the process of business creation.8
Parliament’s actions thus articulate the interests of its majority – often Whig in the eighteenth century – those of the many stakeholders who petition it9 (localities, landowners, merchants, manufacturers, etc.) and the objectives of the state.
The economic involvement of the aristocracy
Alongside Parliament’s institutional role, the aristocracy intervenes directly in the economy: through patronage of producers and inventors, through the running of reward-granting institutions, and sometimes as entrepreneurs in their own right. The strategy of Wedgwood, potter and manufacturer of fine earthenware, is explicit: cultivate titled patrons and turn this symbolic capital into competitive advantage (Queensware,10 prestigious table services), a practice well described by classic studies of his marketing.11 In the same spirit, Michael W. McCahill has shown that peers were not merely cultural patrons but industrial allies: technical skill and tenacity on the part of manufacturers were among the factors that prompted peers to embrace their cause.12
The Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce (hereafter Society of Arts) provides an institutional framework for coalition between notables and practical men. Founded by William Shipley (1754), it recruited noble officers very early – notably Viscount Folkestone and Lord Romney – and distributed premiums oriented toward applied improvement, bringing together MPs, merchants, aristocrats and manufacturers.13 The endorsement of these elites confers legitimacy and visibility on innovations originating in technical milieus with little social prestige.
Further downstream, some aristocrats move from patronage to experimental industrialism. Archibald Cochrane, 9th Earl of Dundonald, is an example of this profile. He filed patents and created a tar business in the 1780s–1790s, working with industrial partners and seeking practical applications for coal by-products.14 This case, commented on by historians of chemistry and technology, reminds us that “gentlemanly” status could be compatible with an entrepreneurial process of trial and error.
There are, however, limits: this support remains instrumental. The same aristocratic and gentry networks know how to cartelise and restrict – the Grand Allies in the north-east combine capital, wayleaves and control of supply, building waggonways and regulating output to support prices.15 Geography and sector also matter: endorsement is neither uniform nor immediate. Taken together, the dynamics of canals, coal, turnpikes and the Society of Arts relate, by the mid-century, to a broadly Whig establishment that protects and backs “middle sort” entrepreneurs when it finds this to be in its interest.16
The circulation of people and useful knowledge
If this “interested social openness” takes root in the institutional soil sketched above, it is nourished by European migratory flows – which bring in artisans and their techniques – and by the transmission of useful knowledge,17 carried by popularisers, dictionaries, journals and academies.
In the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, England welcomed refugee skills, notably those of Huguenots, which reinforced and broadened local capacities in London silk-weaving, shoemaking and boot-making, goldsmithing, watchmaking, the food trade and the manufacture of firearms.18 Integration is, however, conditional and institutionally mediated: the 1708 Act, which facilitates the naturalisation of foreign Protestants, is largely repealed as early as 1711;19 access to trades is regulated by the Statute of Artificers (1563), which imposes seven years of apprenticeship; the Calico Acts (1700, 1721) protect wool and silk against printed cottons;20 wages are regulated in order to ease tensions between immigrants and natives.21
Let us add, on apprenticeship, that in practice in the eighteenth century corporate control weakened, notably due to economic momentum. Regulation was no longer applied to the letter, up to its repeal in 1814. Lowering entry barriers opened opportunities to young people without high pedigree, including Huguenot refugees.22 In France by contrast, guilds kept legal monopolies until the Revolution: Turgot’s edict23 of February 1776 temporarily abolished corporations, only to be quickly thwarted, then definitively abolished in 1791 with the Le Chapelier law; this lag compressed legal access to trades for newcomers for longer.
In parallel with the circulation of people, useful knowledge spreads through public lectures in “experimental philosophy”, dictionaries, technical periodicals and dissenting academies,24 where practical education and intellectual sociability are combined. In this perspective, the Baconian programme25 is translated less into “grand theories” immediately applicable than into the accumulation, measurement, classification and dissemination of knowledge that facilitates experimentation in workshops. Musson and Robinson26 had already stressed this for science-technology linkages; Mokyr27 offers a synthetic account of the rise and circulation of “useful knowledge”.
The greater freedom and wider geographic and social reach of the circulation of ideas led Mokyr to speak of industrial Enlightenment. The picture nevertheless needs nuancing, for intellectual openness is superimposed on industrial and commercial practices aimed at protecting secrets coveted abroad. In 1784, Watt warns Wedgwood about French engineers and ironmasters who have visited his works:
We treated them with all manner of civility but took care to show them nothing but what they knew before. Several of the Birmingham people shut their doors against them and I am perswaded Mr. [John] Wilkinson to whom they are gone will not be very communicative—We gave warning of their approach to all with whom we had any connection—I believe they do not intend to visit the pottery but if they do you are warned that they are clever scientific people and one of them Mr. Perier an excellent mechanic.28
From 1754, the Society of Arts structures the circulation of knowledge through premiums, competitions and correspondence, which build a bridge between the polite arts (drawing, painting, sculpture) and the workshop. It legitimises practical improvements without requiring high-level theoretical knowledge and spreads sketches, treatises and techniques that have received prizes.29 It also introduces a revolutionary practice for the time: subscription (two guineas) gives a right to vote at meetings, where decisions are taken by show of hands; the formal equality of votes temporarily erases rank distances for those who attend.30
Shipley, the founder of the Society of Arts, did not conceive of membership of the organisation as devoid of interest. First, he sold it to potential subscribers as a public service and mobilised their patriotism, consistent with the fact that many projects benefited the state and its protectionist policies. Second, he stoked in patrons the desire to obtain a certain status or social recognition. Finally, through the premiums, he appealed to the personal interest of inventors and artists.
Credit as social pivot
Court vs Country
In the decades 1690–1740, two poles structure English political life. “Court” defends the stability of the reformed constitution, imperial expansion and the administration of war – which presupposes robust public credit to finance the fleet and the army so as to safeguard liberty and property. “Country”, for its part, raises civic virtue and the independence of landowners to the rank of principles and suspects that debts, the monied interests, offices and the standing army nourish systemic corruption – at the risk of enslaving Parliament to the Court. This divide does not prevent Great Britain from embracing the financial revolution;31 rather, it sets the conditions for its legitimisation and social acceptability.32
Criticism sharpens through pamphlets. On the Country side: Trenchard and Gordon, in the Cato’s Letters (1720–1723),33 denounce corruption and projectors (entrepreneurs) and defend liberties against the Court’s encroachments; Bolingbroke promotes “patriot” ideology against Walpole and makes corruption the cement of cross-party opposition.34 On the Court side: without denying the dangers of excessive or perpetual debt (Davenant), advocates of public credit argue – as Hoppit reminds us35 – that the funds do not penalise agriculture or commerce; they mobilise idle savings, increase monetary circulation, lower interest rates and, because the debt is owed to British subjects, make bankruptcy “inconceivable”.
The turning-point of 1720–1721 crystallises these lines. The South Sea Bubble and its political trauma fuel Country rhetoric against speculation and monopolies, while Walpole – hated by his opponents, praised as pragmatic by his supporters – stabilises the system of public finance and re-frames the use of privileged charters. From then on, the Court/Country disagreement focuses on the conditions for sustainable state credit, the policing of companies, and the degree to which the executive should be exposed to markets.
These controversies have institutional and public effects. At the level of rules, the Septennial Act (1716) increases parliamentary terms from three to seven years; place bills limit the Crown’s influence by forbidding MPs to combine a seat in the Commons with certain offices (“places”) that it grants; a set of reforms is adopted after the bursting of the South Sea Bubble to clean up the market, discipline companies and restore public credit. In practice, commissions of audit and of “appropriation” of funds are instituted,36 public accounts are quantified and published, which disciplines the executive. These measures contribute to the rise of a fiscal-military state that embraces credit as an instrument of power (Brewer37), while establishing a “moral economy” of politics: public opinion – made possible by a significantly broadened freedom of the press after the non-renewal of the Licensing Act (1695) – expresses itself in pamphlets, newspapers and the first parliamentary reports (which only become fully lawful after 1771), demanding publicity and probity without, however, halting power politics or the growth of credit.
The Court/Country opposition transcends the Whig/Tory divide, for “patriot” Whigs join the Country side. It manifests a shift in wealth, which from time immemorial had resided in land and which, progressively, becomes financial. Jonathan Swift, in 1710 in The Examiner, thus denounces the devouring ambition of financiers: “Power, according to the old maxim, was used to follow Land; is now gone over to Money.”38
The extension of credit
By the mid-eighteenth century, public debt becomes permanent and the debate shifts from its principle to its size and modalities. The War of the Austrian Succession and then the Seven Years’ War feed fears of a national bankruptcy. Hume judges it imprudent to contract heavy debts in the expectation of a future ability to repay and contemplates bankruptcy as a possible outcome;39 Smith, while noting that Great Britain bears a load once deemed unsustainable, considers that the practice of “funding” weakens states and that even a moderate increase would greatly heighten distress.40 In fact, controversy gives way to more pragmatic management of the stock and forms of debt.41
Debates over credit are not confined to the state; they extend to firms and individuals. Commercial credit (customer accounts, bills of exchange, accommodation bills) is associated by its detractors with rashness and extravagance: easier access to it encourages especially young merchants and entrepreneurs to launch into risky ventures where the hope of large gains goes hand in hand with a multiplied risk of failure. A “gaming spirit” is encouraged. The denunciation takes an explicitly moral turn: vanity, social emulation and ostentatious lifestyles undermine the traditional social order; Goldsmith castigates the pride and luxury of a burgeoning middle sort.42 In this framework, the same vices – folly, greed, extortion – as those singled out among speculators in the 1690s–1730s are condemned. The remedy consists in probity, justice and character, often relayed by clerical admonitions.43
Defenders of commercial credit, by contrast, insist on its necessity in an economy where money is scarce, payments are slow and initiative requires risk capital. John Cary compares credit to the “spirits” of the blood; Daniel Defoe presents it as the “younger sister” of money – a functional substitute to be handled with competence, experience and fair legal regulation. Hence his pleas for more generous bankruptcy law in 1706 and his attacks on abuses (companies, stockjobbers, bubbles).44 James Steuart anchors credit in sociability, making it synonymous with trust between men, underpinned by the respect of their commitments. While laws can guarantee the execution of contracts, “manners” alone can instil the confidence that shapes the spirit of a commercial nation. Credit is acquired through hard work and good deeds. Moreover, although creditors can be temporarily misled by appearances, their self-interest ultimately clarifies their judgment.45
At the lower level, credit extended at the shop counter or to consumers is widely tolerated, and the recovery of small debts is cautiously improved in the second half of the century. By contrast, pawnbrokers and Jewish moneylenders are heavily stigmatised for usury and handling stolen goods. Despite a legal ceiling on rates in 1757, observers such as Colquhoun estimate their effective returns very high, while other voices stress their social usefulness: to provide small sums when income dips and to maintain monetary circulation rather than letting savings sleep in public funds.46
The first signs of the emancipation of the middle sort
The extension of credit to different social strata brings to light a middle sort – small farmers, shopkeepers, merchants, artisans – in a society too quickly reduced to an opposition between patricians and plebeians – the former monopolising Parliament, the latter excluded. In The Birth of a Consumer Society, Brewer assembles a bundle of evidence for the rise of a sizeable group – up to one million people out of nearly seven million – which, over the course of the century, distinguishes itself socially and politically from both the patrician elite and the working world.47 He emphasises its diversity: neither a mere clientele at the service of aristocratic luxury, nor a one-dimensional industrial vanguard. This estimate nonetheless calls for caution: Langford underlines the difficulty of quantifying and precisely delimiting these middle layers.48
Eighteenth-century English social structure is marked by a “narrowing” of levels – a compression of socio-economic distances – which opens up opportunities for mobility and stokes status competition. From Smith to Malthus, observers and analysts describe a continuum of ranks in which “a gradual and easy transition from one rank to another” fuels emulation, accelerates the diffusion of wants and fashions, and broadens the demand for goods. In a country like France, where the gap between orders remains unbridgeable, luxury consumption is still an aristocratic prerogative; in Great Britain, by contrast, possessions and appearances – especially clothing – signal each rung climbed and stimulate a domestic market of immense potential.49
In this context, the patronage economy arouses growing rejection. The dependence of the shopkeeper on aristocratic patrons exposes him – imposed credit, delayed payments, political pressure – while the Whig oligarchic system reserves public contracts and favours for a handful of moneyed interests. Criticism of “public credit” targets less the instrument than its perverted uses – speculation, connivance and hidden wealth transfers – even as the middle sort bears an increasing share of consumption taxes (on tea, sugar, tobacco, beer, salt, glass, etc.). The fear of a new bubble, on the model of 1720, persists and sustains hostility toward metropolitan finance.50
Economic emancipation presupposes a change in the distribution of wealth and, above all, the growth of an extended domestic market. Two factors drive these developments: (1) the diffusion of more precise information via the press, which refines the assessment of risk; (2) the rise of voluntary associations – Masonic lodges and related societies – which cushion debt shocks, organise subscriptions, finance commercial and urban projects, and promote more regular credit norms. By federating, these groups gain autonomy (capacity to act without patrons) and transpose their practices into the political sphere: the opening of civic competition and the assertion of urban and bourgeois interests go hand in hand.51
A dynamic of production and consumption
The domestic system
The emergence of a middle sort is partly due to what is called the “domestic system”: merchants distribute raw materials and orders to families who spin, weave, sew, turn or mould at home – textiles and clothing, but also pots, pans, earthenware, copperware, and even specialised crops such as saffron or hops. Goods are collected at home on regular rounds. In seventeenth-century England, people speak of “projects” carried by projectors (entrepreneurs); as Joan Thirsk has shown, this vocabulary tends to supplant the ideal of the commonweal,52 deemed too inaccessible, while feeding an expanding domestic market – and, by ricochet, national wealth.53
Several forces, international and domestic, make this system grow. Internationally, mercantilist policy encourages exports and “national” production. The Statute of Artificers (1563) provides a durable legal framework for apprenticeship, on which subcontracting circuits rest.54 These policies fit with the existence of a wide market for cloth: from the sixteenth century, English cloth exports are anchored along the London–Antwerp axis (Merchant Adventurers of London), which gives clothiers the confidence to “put out” work in the countryside.55 Skilled immigration feeds the textile sector by importing the “new draperies”: Flemish and Walloon weavers spread techniques for lighter worsted cloth, notably in Norwich.56 In addition, imports of fine Spanish merino wool stimulate these new draperies.57
Domestically, the abundance of English wool sustains the “old” cloths, while demographic growth and sustained inflation (c. 1540–1640) financially strain households and boost demand for cheaper textiles. In this context, households reallocate their available time to domestic production.58 Agrarian rhythms leave time for spinning and certain stages of weaving; but beyond this seasonality, the domestic system rests above all on a family portfolio economy: women and children multiply contract work, often all year round, to stabilise household income, including in mining and metalworking regions.59 Culturally, women’s and children’s work is widely accepted – indeed valued as a contribution to household income – in the economic and moral literature of the time.60
The emergence of industry
In The Wealth of Nations (1776), Adam Smith describes this world mixing domestic work and workshops. In his view, the transition to “industry” in the eighteenth century takes place through the division of labour, placed at the heart of Book I and illustrated by the famous pin factory. While he highlights the contribution of machines, whose role is growing, he regards them as a consequence of the division of labour: “the invention of all those machines which facilitate and abridge labour seems to have been originally owing to the division of labour.”61 Smith transcribes and valorises what many foreign observers had already noted: nowhere is work as “divided” as in England.62
In 1776, many machines remain crude. Yet several already transform sectors: in coal mining, Newcomen and then Watt steam engines ease mine drainage; in spinning, the flying shuttle (1733), spinning jenny (1760s), water frame (1769), spinning mule (1779) and soon the power loom63 increase output. The appeal of machines is visible in the press: The London Magazine in the 1760s–1770s publishes plates and descriptions of wagons, waggonways and pits, while Lombe’s gigantic silk mill at Derby becomes a commonplace of public wonder.64 Amid technological emulation, Parliament fears industrial espionage and protects these skills by banning the export of certain tools.65
In public opinion, industry enjoys strong credit: it employs the poor and makes the nation less dependent. Nonetheless, worry and discontent arise when mechanisation displaces human labour (Lancashire). Faced with the refusal to use jennies, the local magistrate Dorning Rasbotham invokes the sheer inevitability of technical innovation, which does not fully convince: riots against the jennies break out in 1779. Beyond fears about unemployment, the English enthuse over new industries and their machines; they are fascinated by the “new spectacles”, especially blast furnaces and metalworking shops.66
A modern consumer society
The consumer society observable in eighteenth-century England differs markedly from that of Italian Renaissance city-states.67 In Italy, demand is largely rooted in religious uses (commissions of objects, garments, images, donations) and in a “republican” political horizon in which civic ostentation frames private spending. In England, consumption asserts itself in a context of increased social mobility: burghers and the middle sort aspire to improve their material conditions, adopt aristocratic manners and change status through purchases – a dynamic that the historiography of Italian material culture helps us measure by contrast, and that the English “consumer revolution” brings to an unprecedented scale.68
Neil McKendrick identifies imitation and social competition as drivers of this new demand: in imitating the rich, the middle sort “spends more frantically than ever, and the rest of society follows as far as it can”. Thus goods once reserved for the elite “descend” the social ladder69. Nathaniel Forster notes as early as 1767 that ranks interpenetrate and that “fashion” exerts an uncontrollable “empire” – a “contagion” of expenditure70. The quest for novelty, the fascination with fashion and the effectiveness of persuasive commercial rhetoric drive an aggregate demand without precedent.
This emulation does not spare the traditional upper classes: in the early nineteenth century, William Cobbett fulminates against “competition in show and luxury”, a paradoxical proof of the power of “commercial arts” that turn latent envy into an overpowering need to buy.71 At home, oak yields to mahogany; stools to “fashionable” chairs; earthenware services, glassware, carafes, prints and novels now populate interiors. This is one explanation for the success of Gillows (Lancaster) and Seddon & Son (Aldersgate Street), which sell massive stocks of furniture. The latter firm holds a stock of over £100,000 (1790) and employs more than 400 people (1796) – gilders, mirror-makers, locksmiths, sculptors, seamstresses, as well as sawyers and joiners. At the same time, products spread to the bottom of the social scale: tea, decried by Jonas Hanway as a symbol of “frivolity” imported through social imitation, sees its per capita consumption multiplied by fifteen over the eighteenth century. These behaviours and figures attest to the democratisation of consumption.72
For many contemporary observers, the key explanatory concept is “fashion”. In The Fable of the Bees (1714), Bernard Mandeville observes that everyday usefulness does not guide consumption: expenditure makes wealth visible, clothing signals leisure – what Veblen will later theorise under the expression “conspicuous consumption.”73 The textile industry is among the first to produce on a large scale, but England’s economic take-off rests just as much on London beer, Birmingham buckles and buttons, Sheffield knives and forks, Staffordshire tableware and cheap Lancashire cottons. As fashions succeed one another ever more quickly, a kind of truce in male dress takes hold: for the first time in history, male elites adopt the discreet style of workers – a social superiority expressed less by excess than by cut.74
With the rush for consumption, advertising and marketing professionalise in the 1760s–1770s by relying on patronage. Before turning to steam engines, the famous industrialist Matthew Boulton manufactures silver plate and other decorative items. He orchestrates spectacular product launches in London: sumptuous sales at Christie’s in Pall Mall, carefully timed and repeated adverts in the newspapers, close monitoring of effects. Each advertisement must foreground royal patronage in order to heighten social emulation. Wedgwood rivals him, capitalising on the prestige of names (duchesses, countesses) and calibrating his ranges: price and distribution make ornament desirable… then accessible. Exclusivity thus serves as a springboard for mass markets: make fashion an aspiration, then open it to the many through series production and small margins.75
A moral inversion
The historical elements evoked so far highlight how interests (financial, public, located, personal) shaped behaviour and debate in eighteenth-century Great Britain. The notions of interest and credit sculpt the two faces of an economic Janus – on one side the vices of particular interests, on the other the virtue of the public interest and credit – whose modernity is not reducible to commerce: finance, the domestic system and nascent industry are equally crucial aspects. Self-interest, though castigated in pamphlets targeting excessive and irresponsible behaviour, acquires legitimacy when associated with the reasonable pursuit of better living conditions, understandable in a historical context in which precariousness often prevails. Let us now examine how this legitimacy was constructed at the theoretical level.
Pufendorf : a natural and commercial sociability
Although Pufendorf is German, his philosophy is essential for linking, on the one hand, Grotius and Hobbes and, on the other, Smith. This is what Istvan Hont shows in Jealousy of Trade.76 According to Pufendorf,77 Grotius is the first to understand that natural law, in order to be valid, must apply to the whole of humanity. From this standpoint, positive laws, which are relative, must be cautiously distinguished from natural, universal laws. All previous legal systems, starting with Aristotle’s, mixed the two. Even Grotius, by admitting as natural the (relative) customs of the most civilised nations, compromises his philosophical project.78
To remedy the lack of universality in the Dutch jurist’s theory, one must rely on an adequate conception of human nature, which cannot be found in Hobbes’s profoundly pessimistic view (man as a wolf to man). Though Pufendorf rejects some of the English philosopher’s premises, he adopts his method. He starts from a fictive state of nature in which man’s condition is hardly more enviable than that of his Hobbesian predecessor:
“Let us imagine a man dropped, if I may so say, from the clouds and entirely abandoned to himself; who, having the faculties of his body and mind as limited as we actually see them when they have not been cultivated, is neither assisted by his fellows nor favoured by any extraordinary care on the part of the Deity. One can only conceive the condition of such a man as very sad and very miserable”79
It is thanks to experience, “industry” and the “arts” that human beings gradually extricate themselves from this misery. “To be convinced of this, he goes on, one need only consider the great number of things now in use in life, and how difficult it would have been for each man to invent them all for himself alone, without the instruction and help of others”.80 Men depend on one another “in order to preserve themselves”, this Stoic-inspired self-preservation81 forming the foundation of the state of nature, alongside independence from any human authority.
Pufendorf’s model, starting simply from the natural hypothesis of self-preservation, constructs sociability out of human interactions, particularly economic ones. As Hont writes, he defines a “sociability based on utility”.82 Technical progress is, however, not uniformly beneficial, for human desire, as in Hobbes, proves unlimited. Thus the material abundance generated by great cities is accompanied by vices such as ambition and vanity. But the dynamic of progress is irreversible: the poorest find themselves forced to invent and improve the arts. Money, by facilitating exchange, links the various classes.83 Wealth that satisfies luxurious desires, in return, allows society as a whole to survive.
Hutcheson: a moral sense with a utilitarian criterion
At the end of the seventeenth century, Pufendorf’s legal theory marks a philosophical turning point: the incorporation of the economy as a principle of sociability and, consequently, of society. Starting from individualistic premises, notably in order to avoid any presupposition that would undermine his Cartesian, geometrical approach,84 he justifies human cooperation through self-preservation and utility, two facets of self-interest. This philosophical position does not please Hutcheson who, across the Channel, labels Pufendorf an “Epicurean” and holds that his theory rests exclusively on “self-love.”85 The Scottish philosopher laments that sociability is not primary, but is derived from human weakness.86
According to Hutcheson (1726), man is endowed with a moral sense that tells him the goodness or badness of the actions he perceives or of the people around him. This moral sense naturally inclines him towards the public good and cooperation87 when no personal interest (self-love) intervenes. It is knowable without revelation, although Hutcheson sees it as implanted by the Author of nature.88 Grounded in the four cardinal virtues (temperance, courage, prudence, justice), it appears subordinated to a common good that draws on Greek political philosophy. These virtues correspond to “dispositions universally and necessarily conducive to the public good, and which denote affections toward rational agents.”89
At first sight, the moral sense seems hardly compatible with utilitarianism. Yet Hutcheson does not regard self-interest as systematically bad: it can be “indifferent” when it does not entail painful consequences for others.90 Moreover:
“Our Reason can indeed discover certain Bounds, within which we may not only act from Self-Love, consistently with the Good of the Whole, but every Mortal’s acting thus within these Bounds for his own Good, is absolutely necessary for the Good of the Whole . . . Hence, he who pursues his own private Good, with an Intention also to concur with that Constitution which tends to the Good of the Whole . . . acts not only innocently, but also honourably, and virtuously”.91
Hutcheson thereby proposes a philosophy consistent with the economic development of his time: the reasonable pursuit of self-interest coincides with the common good. He even anticipates Bentham in affirming that an action is best when it produces “the greatest happiness for the greatest number”.92
Mandeville: private vices, public benefit
Bernard Mandeville, a Dutch physician who emigrated to Great Britain, has already been mentioned. His Fable of the Bees (1714),93 the target of particularly hostile criticism, made him notorious. And with good reason: the subtitle of his book, “private vices, publick benefits”, is enough to provoke the highest indignation among his contemporaries.94 Although he wrote before Hutcheson, I mention him afterwards because he represents a break with the philosophical orientation launched by Pufendorf and continued by Hutcheson, which moralised economic self-interest by making it an elementary component of a social principle (the common good).
For Mandeville, all forms of vice (avarice, pride, envy, etc.), not just moderate self-interest, can contribute to a public good conceived in terms of wealth – he valorises vices for their public effects (strictly instrumental) without elevating them to the rank of virtues. He compares human society to a hive where every part was “full of vice”95 and which, taken as a whole,
Was Slave to Prodigality, That noble Sin; whilst Luxury
Employ’d a Million of the Poor, […] Envy it self, and Vanity, Were Ministers of Industry; Their darling Folly, Fickleness, In Diet, Furniture and Dress, That strange ridic’lous Vice, was made The very Wheel that turn’d the Trade.96
The wealth produced by this social dynamic brings such pleasures and comfort that the poorest live better than the rich of old.97
Faced with the general outcry, Mandeville tries to justify himself: “Mercers, Upholsterers, Taylors and many others . .. would be starv’d in half a Year’s time, if Pride and Luxury were at once to be banish’d the nation”.98 He even goes so far as to suggest that highwaymen encourage trade by spending their loot.99 Obviously, such statements do not calm the controversy: Tory landowners and their allies even call for new sumptuary laws for “the immediate suppression of bare-fac’d luxury. . .”, and Swift concurs.100 Others, however, progressively come to accept a “necessary evil”101 which may have contributed to the advent of a consumer society in eighteenth-century England.
Smith: the harmony of interests
In continuity with Pufendorf, Hutcheson and Mandeville, Smith resumes the intuition that ordinary motives can produce useful public effects, but strips it of any paradoxical apology of vice. In Mandeville, the economy prospers “despite” morality; in Smith, it progresses “with” morality: sympathy, justice and a few simple rules frame the pursuit of particular interests and allow for their coordination.102 In The Theory of Moral Sentiments, he refuses to elevate vanity or prodigality to the status of virtues; in The Wealth of Nations, he shows how, within the framework of the division of labour and competition, well-ordered self-interest aggregates into common benefits – the famous “invisible hand”.
The Smithian synthesis claims clear filiations.103 From Pufendorf, Smith retains the idea that modern sociability passes through utility and exchange: reciprocal dependence, made visible by money and markets, inclines individuals to cooperate without presupposing civic friendship. From Hutcheson, he inherits a normative backdrop: a moral sense that makes us attentive to the public good and authorises a measured pursuit of self-interest when it fits within shared limits. Finally, Hume provides the “scientific” framework: through his methodological scepticism, he naturalises the study of man, distinguishes “natural” from “artificial” virtues (justice falling under stabilised conventions) and shows that moral order and commercial order support one another.104 This is not to relativise morality: Hume, like Smith, seeks a science of morals – a close description of the passions, rules and institutions that make social life possible.
On this basis, Smith reformulates the relationship between passions and interests. Hirschman offers a convincing solution to the “Adam Smith problem”, that is, the apparent contradiction between, on the one hand, a moral theory and, on the other, an economic theory where morality seems practically absent.105 In The Wealth of Nations, the author gives much space to the “desire of bettering our condition” and to “the augmentation of fortune” as the most common way of achieving it, so that one might think he reduces man to greed.106 But, Hirschman stresses, it is precisely in The Theory of Moral Sentiments that Smith prepares the “telescoping”: under the cover of highlighting non-economic motives (glory, esteem, propriety), he explains how, in practice, they feed the sustained effort to improve one’s material condition. In other words, Smithian political economy does not evacuate passions; it channels them into regular behaviours (work, saving, exchange) whose aggregate effects are socially useful.
The “harmony of interests” is, however, neither automatic nor universal. Three minimal conditions recur in Smith. First, justice as “pillar”: without security of persons and possessions, no prudent calculation holds.107 Second, competition, which disciplines the search for gain:108 “people of the same trade” and mercantilist connivances threaten this discipline, hence his distrust of privileges, exclusive charters and barriers to entry.109 Third, price publicity and open markets: emulation, far from being a vice, spreads improvements and squeezes local rents.110 Only then can the “invisible hand” describe how ordinary interest – earning a living, making an undertaking prosper, selling more cheaply – turns, without central design, into an increase in social product.111
On the Continent, physiocracy (Quesnay, Turgot) at the same time systematises the idea of a “natural” economic order as a direct object of government (net agricultural product, single tax, “legal despotism”): Smith praises its coherence while rejecting agricultural exclusivism; both elevate the economy to the rank of principle of political order.112 Note also that this account, focused on metropolitan England, coexists with colonial expansion and slavery, which feed revenues, credit circuits and consumption. This tension does not invalidate the hypothesis of a harmony of interests within the country, but does limit its universal normative reach.113
The economic dynamic of eighteenth-century Great Britain has social and political consequences that Smith brings out forcefully.114 The attraction of commodities – fashions, furniture, tableware, fabrics – seduces the lords themselves; in seeking more regular monetary incomes, they lengthen leases, rationalise estate management and substitute for personal dependence more frankly economic relations.115 Smith notes bluntly that “in order to gratify the most childish and meanest vanity”, they gradually abandoned what remained of their credit and power, until they were reduced to the level of “a substantial tradesman or a wealthy shopkeeper”. The political outcome is not negligible: deprived of maintained clienteles, “the great proprietors were no longer able to interrupt the ordinary course of justice, or to disturb the peace of the country”. Thus the internal coherence of the Smithian system is revealed: human passions tamed by rules, ordinary self-interest disciplined by competition and justice, and, in the end, a social recomposition in which feudal authority yields to a more peaceful commercial order – not through heroic moralisation, but through the prosaic sequence of motives and institutions.
This “moral inversion” – the idea that the public good can result from rational self-interests framed by rules – does not unify minds: it divides opinion throughout the eighteenth century between supporters of a commercial order disciplined by justice and competition, and critics who see in it moral disorder, corruption and the undermining of hierarchies. It constitutes the high point of the valorisation of the economy, for it allows economic activity to be thought outside a moral framework based on virtues applied to individuals; the residual norm – the public good – now pertains to society as a whole. Yet it was precisely in such frameworks that the economy had long been “embedded”116 – as brought out by the questions of Italian humanists and the Salamanca theologian-jurists. And the hypothesis of a harmony of interests is still debated today, both with regard to its institutional conditions (justice, competition, publicity) and to its social and political effects (inequalities, externalities, cohesion).
Notes
1 Cf. previous articles: https://damiengimenez.fr/wpdgi_article_en/wealth-as-a-political-principle-england-17th-18th-centuries/ ; https://damiengimenez.fr/wpdgi_article_en/the-age-of-extractive-and-commercial-empires-spain-and-the-dutch-republic-16th-17th-century/.
2 https://damiengimenez.fr/wpdgi_article_en/wealth-as-a-political-principle-england-17th-18th-centuries/
3 P. G. M. Dickson, The Financial Revolution in England: A Study in the Development of Public Credit, 1688–1756, London: Routledge, 1993 (1967) ; David Stasavage, Public Debt and the Birth of the Democratic State: France and Great Britain, 1688–1789, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003 ; Bank of England, “Our History,” https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/about/history, accessed 4 November 2025.
4 Dan Bogart, Turnpike Trusts and the Transportation Revolution in 18th Century England, UC Irvine Working Paper, 2004 ; Dan Bogart, “Did Turnpike Trusts Increase Transportation Investment in Eighteenth-Century England?,” The Journal of Economic History 65, no. 2, 2005, 439-468.
5 Parliamentary Archives, “A Brief History of Canals,” 16 août 2021 ; Chetham’s Library, “The Duke of Bridgewater’s Canal,” 27 mai 2015.
6 John William Brown, “Lead Production on the Northeast Periphery: A Study of the Bowes Family Estate, c. 1550–1771”, PhD diss., Durham University, 2010 ; McCollum-Oldroyd, David Andrew, 1998, Accounting and estate management in North-East England c.1700-1770 with particular reference to the Bowes estates. Masters thesis, Durham University.
7 Bankruptcy Act 1705, Royal Assent 19 March 1706. Unless otherwise stated, dates are given in New Style.
8 Ann M. Carlos, Edward Kosack, et Luis Castro Penarrieta, “Bankruptcy, Discharge, and the Emergence of Debtor Rights in Eighteenth-Century England,” Enterprise & Society 20, no. 2, 2019, 475-506 ; Craig Muldrew, The Economy of Obligation: The Culture of Credit and Social Relations in Early Modern England (London: Macmillan, 1998).
9 On the diversity of economic petitions to Parliament, see in particular Julian Hoppit, Britain’s Political Economies: Parliament and Economic Life, 1660-1800, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2017.
10 A type of cream-coloured earthenware (creamware) manufactured by Wedgwood.
11 Neil McKendrick, « Josiah Wedgwood: An Eighteenth-Century Entrepreneur in Salesmanship and Marketing Techniques », The Economic History Review 12, no 3 (1960): 408-433 ; Harold Osborne (ed), The Oxford Companion to the Decorative Arts, Oxford University Press, 1975.
12 Michael W. McCahill, « Peers, Patronage, and the Industrial Revolution, 1760–1800 », Journal of British Studies 16, no 1, 1976, 84-107.
13 Anton Howes, Arts & Minds: How the Royal Society of Arts Changed a Nation, Princeton University Press, 2020.
14 Archibald Clow et Nan L. Clow, « Lord Dundonald », The Economic History Review 12, 1942, 47-58 (références et contexte des brevets) ; The Chemical Engineer, « Old King Coal, Part 3: Coal Chemicals », 2025, URL : https://www.thechemicalengineer.com/features/old-king-coal-part-3-coal-chemicals/
15 John W. Brown, Lead Production on the Northeast Periphery: A Study of the Bowes Family Estate, c.1550–1771, PhD diss., Durham University, 2010 ; D. A. McCollum-Oldroyd, Accounting and Estate Management in North-East England c.1700–c.1860, PhD diss., University of Durham, 1998, chap. sur les Grand Allies.
16 Michael W. McCahill, op. cit. ; Anton Howes, op. cit.
17 The economic historian Joel Mokyr speaks of useful knowledge. Joel Mokyr, « The Intellectual Origins of Modern Economic Growth », The Journal of Economic History, 65/2, 2005, 285–351.
18 Robin D. Gwynn, Huguenot Heritage: The History and Contribution of the Huguenots in Britain, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1985, p. 60-73.
19 https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/historical-background-information-on-nationality/historical-background-information-on-nationality-accessible
20 Jonathan P. Eacott, “Making an Imperial Compromise: The Calico Acts, the Atlantic Colonies, and the Structure of the British Empire”, William and Mary Quarterly, 3d ser., 69/4, 2012, 731-762, DOI: 10.5309/willmaryquar.69.4.0731.
21 Local regulation of labour: in Spitalfields, the Acts from 1773 place the fixing/ratification of wages in the hands of magistrates in order to stabilise the sector and calm conflict – diffusion of skills, yes, but under public control: J. H. Clapham, “The Spitalfields Acts, 1773–1824”, The Economic Journal, vol. 26, no. 104, 1916, 459–471.
22 Patrick Wallis, « Apprenticeship and Training in Premodern England », The Journal of Economic History, 68/3, 2008 ; Patrick Wallis, « Apprenticeship in England », in Maarten Prak et Patrick Wallis (dir.), Apprenticeship in Early Modern Europe, Cambridge University Press, 2019 ; Nadav Ben Zeev, Joel Mokyr et Karine Van der Beek, « Flexible Supply of Apprenticeship in the British Industrial Revolution », The Journal of Economic History, 77/2, 2017.
23 Royal edict abolishing guilds and communities of merchants, arts and crafts, registered 12 March 1776, Gallica-BnF.
24 The dissenting academies do not result from a chosen secession but from a refusal of admission: as long as the religious tests of the English universities excluded non-conformists, they offered a functional equivalent of higher education – more open to useful knowledge – which Oxford and Cambridge did not allow them to enter.
25 https://damiengimenez.fr/la-philosophie-technico-naturelle-et-critique-de-francis-bacon/ (not translated).
26 A. E. Musson et Eric H. Robinson, Science and Technology in the Industrial Revolution, University of Toronto Press, 1969.
27 Joel Mokyr, op. cit.
28 James Watt cité par Larry Stewart, “A Meaning for Machines”, The Journal of Modern History, vol. 70, n°2, June 1998, 259-294.
29 Anton Howes, op. cit.
30 Ibid., p. 19.
31 On the financial revolution: https://damiengimenez.fr/wpdgi_article_en/wealth-as-a-political-principle-england-17th-18th-centuries/#The_English_handover
32 H. T. Dickinson, Liberty and Property: Political Ideology in Eighteenth-Century Britain, Holmes and Meier Publishers, 1997.
33 John Trenchard & Thomas Gordon, Cato’s Letters, or Essays on Liberty, Civil and Religious, and Other Important Subjects (éd. Ronald Hamowy), Liberty Fund, 1995.
34 Henry St John, Viscount Bolingbroke, Letters, on the Spirit of Patriotism: On the Idea of a Patriot King: And on the State of Parties…, A. Millar, Londres, 1749.
35 Julian Hoppit, « Attitudes to Credit in Britain, 1680–1790 », The Historical Journal, Cambridge University Press, 1990.
36 Commission of Public Accounts (1690–1691) and insertion of “appropriations” into supply Bills from 1690 onwards.
37 John Brewer, The Sinews of Power: War, Money and the English State, 1688–1783, Harvard University Press, 1990.
38 J. Swift, The Examiner, ed. H. Davis (Oxford, 1957), p. 5, 2 Nov. 1710 in Julian Hoppit, op. cit.
39 David Hume, Essays, Moral, Political, and Literary (incl. « Of Public Credit »), Liberty Fund, 1985 [1752].
40 Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, Liberty Fund, 1981 [1776].
41 Julian Hoppit, op. cit.
42 Paul Langford, A polite and commercial people, Clarendon Press, 1990, p. 61.
43 Ibid.
44 Daniel Defoe, A Review of the State of the British Nation (éd. John McVeagh), Pickering & Chatto, 2003–2008.
45 Sir James Steuart, An Inquiry into the Principles of Political Oeconomy, A. Millar & T. Cadell, 1767.
46 Patrick Colquhoun, A Treatise on the Police of the Metropolis, H. Fry, 1797. ; Julian Hoppit, op. cit.
47 Neil McKendrick, John Brewer, J. H. Plumb, The Birth of a Consumer Society: The Commercialization of Eighteenth-Century England, Indiana University Press, 1982, p. 197
48 Paul Langford, A Polite and Commercial People: England 1727–1783, Clarendon Press, 1989 (chap. « The Middle Class » ; pagination variable selon l’édition).
49 Neil McKendrick, John Brewer, J. H. Plumb, op. cit., p. 21-22.
50 Ibid., p. 198-199.
51 Ibid. p. 200-201.
52 The word weal means “well-being, welfare” (Old English wēal/wela). Hence commonwealth, a concurrent and later form: depending on context, it may mean the common good or the state as a political community (for example: Commonwealth of England, 1649–1660). It will therefore be translated according to the orientation of the passage: “common good” when the emphasis is moral, “public interest”/“public prosperity” in economic debates, and “body/community politic” when it refers to the collective subject of the state.
53 Joan Thirsk, Economic Policy and Projects: The Development of a Consumer Society in Early Modern England, Clarendon Press, 1978.
54 Patrick Wallis, « Apprenticeship and Training in Premodern England », History of Education, Taylor & Francis, 2012.
55 D. M. Woodward, « Export Trade in Textiles from Hull and London, 1500–1700 », Transactions of the Historic Society of Lancashire and Cheshire, HSLC, 2007.
56 Christopher Joby, « Flemish and Walloon Migrations and the New Draperies in Norwich », Immigrants & Minorities, Taylor & Francis, 2024.
57 John H. Munro, « Spanish Merino Wools and the Nouvelles Draperies », The Economic History Review, Wiley-Blackwell, 2005.
58 Jan de Vries, The Industrious Revolution: Consumer Behavior and the Household Economy, 1650–1850, Cambridge University Press, 2008.
59 Maxine Berg, « What Difference did Women’s Work Make to the Industrial Revolution », Warwick Economic Research Papers, University of Warwick, 1991, p. 28.
60 Ibid.
61 Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, Liberty Fund, 1981 (1776).
62 Larry Stewart, « A Meaning for Machines: Modernity, Utility, and the Eighteenth-Century British Public », The Journal of Modern History, University of Chicago Press, 1998.
63 Eric J. Hobsbawm, Industry and Empire: The Making of Modern English Society, 1750 to the Present, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, Londres, 1968 ; éd. revue Penguin, 1999, p. 58-59.
64 Paul Langford, op. cit., p. 655-658.
65 Ibid.
66 Ibid., p. 668-670.
67 https://damiengimenez.fr/wpdgi_article_en/when-the-economy-becomes-a-value-the-turning-point-of-the-italian-renaissance/
68 Richard A. Goldthwaite, Wealth and the Demand for Art in Italy, 1300–1600, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993 ; Evelyn S. Welch, Shopping in the Renaissance: Consumer Cultures in Italy, 1400–1600, Yale University Press, 2005 ; Neil McKendrick, John Brewer, J. H. Plumb (dir.), op. cit.
69 N. Forster, An Enquiry into the Present High Price of Provisions (1767), p. 41. in Ibid., p. 11.
70 Ibid.
71 W. Cobbett, Rural Rides, entry for 25 October 1825, p. 226 in Ibid., p. 28.
72 Ibid., p. 28-29.
73 Thorstein Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class, Macmillan, 1899.
74 Neil McKendrick, John Brewer, J. H. Plumb (dir.), op. cit., p. 52-56.
75 Ibid., p. 72-74. ; Shena Mason (dir.), Matthew Boulton: Selling What All the World Desires, Yale University Press, 2009.
76 Istvan Hont, Jealousy of Trade: International Competition and the Nation-State in Historical Perspective, Harvard University Press, Cambridge (MA), 2005.
77 De jure naturae et gentium (1672) / De officio (1673).
78 Ibid., p. 165.
79 Samuel von Pufendorf, Le droit de la nature et des gens, Amsterdam : Chez la veuve de Pierre de Coup, 1734, p. 169. Orthographe modernisée.
80 Ibid.
81 Istvan Hont, op. cit., p. 166.
82 Ibid., p. 183 sq.
83 Pufendorf, De jure naturae et gentium (1672), V.i.11 ; trad. angl. The Law of Nature and Nations: “In a well-ordered society, where the subjects are divided into orders and ranks, certain people could hardly subsist if barter alone were used”
84 Simone Goyard-Fabre, Pufendorf et le droit naturel, PUF, 1994.
85 Hutcheson, Social Nature of Man, §20, p. 134 in Istvan Hont, op. cit., p. 39.
86 Istvan Hont, Ibid.
87 Francis Hutcheson, An Inquiry into the Original of Our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue in Two Treatises, ed. Wolfgang Leidhold, Liberty Fund, 2004, II, IV, I.
88 Ibid., II, VII, I : “If any one ask, Can we have any Sense of Obligation, abstracting from the Laws of a Superior?”
89 Ibid., II, II, I.
90 Ibid., II, III, V.
91 Ibid.
92 Ibid., II, III, VIII.
93 Editorial landmarks – 1705: poem The Grumbling Hive; 1714: first Fable of the Bees; 1723: expanded edition (Charity Schools, etc.); 1732: new enlarged edition.
94 Neil McKendrick, John Brewer, J. H. Plumb, op. cit., p. 16. The pun “Man-devil”, coined by an anonymous author, illustrates the tone of the attacks.
95 Bernard Mandeville, The Fable of the Bees or Private Vices, Publick Benefits, Liberty Fund, 2004 (1732), p. 69.
96 Ibid.
97 Ibid., p. 70.
98 Bernard Mandeville, An Enquiry into the Origin of Moral Virtue in Neil McKendrick, John Brewer, J. H. Plumb, op. cit., p. 18.
99 Ibid.
100 Ibid. These calls do not, however, lead to any great national sumptuary act in the eighteenth century (in England, national legislation ceases after 1603; a few local ordinances in the early seventeenth century quickly peter out), control being exercised instead via taxation, mores and polemic.
101 Charles Davenant, An essay upon the Probable Methods of making People Gainers in the Balance of Trade, 2nd edn. (1700), p. 152 in Ibid., p. 19.
102 Adam Smith, TMS, I.i.4.7 et VII.ii.1.49: role of sympathy and the impartial spectator in stabilising moral norms.
103 Istvan Hont, op. cit., chapitre 1.
104 David Hume, Enquiry concerning the Principles of Morals (EPM), Liberty Fund, éd. 1983, Section III (« Of Justice »): justice as an “artificial virtue” founded on conventions and well-understood interest ; David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, III.ii.2 (« Of the Origin of Justice and Property ») : conventional genesis of rules of justice and property.
105 Albert O. Hirschman, The Passions and the Interests, Princeton University Press; French translation Albert O. Hirschman, Les passions et les intérêts, Paris, PUF, 1980/2011, p. 98.
106 Smith, WN, II.3.31 : “the uniform, constant, and uninterrupted effort of every man to better his condition”.
107 Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments (TMS), Liberty Fund, éd. 1982, II.ii.3.4 : “Justice… is the main pillar that upholds the whole edifice.”
108 Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (WN), Liberty Fund, éd. 1981, I.x.c.27 : “People of the same trade seldom meet together… but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public.”
109 Smith, WN, IV.7 (passim): critique of exclusive privileges, charters and barriers to entry, consistent with his distrust of “mercantilist connivances”.
110 Smith, WN, I.3.1-3: dependence of the division of labour on “the extent of the market”.
111 Smith, WN, IV.2.9: famous occurrence of the “invisible hand” (“…he is… led by an invisible hand…”), in the argument about the preference for domestic industry and the unintentional effect on national income.
112 On physiocracy: François Quesnay, Tableau économique (1758; versions 1759, 1766); “Maximes générales du gouvernement économique d’un royaume agricole”; “Despotisme légal”. See also Anne-Robert-Jacques Turgot, Réflexions sur la formation et la distribution des richesses (1766). For a short overview: net agricultural product, single tax, natural order, government by the “laws of the economy”. To be compared with Smith, The Wealth of Nations, IV (critique of agricultural exclusivism), for convergence on the centrality of the economic and divergence over its productive base.
113 On the “doux commerce”/slavery tension: Albert O. Hirschman, op. cit. (intellectual context of “doux commerce”); Eric Williams, Capitalism and Slavery, Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press, 1944 (thesis on the articulation between colonial profits and industrialisation).
114 Albert Hirschman, op. cit., p. 92-93.
115 Smith, WN, III.4.10-13: on the effect of “baubles and trinkets”; great lords, seduced by commodities, lengthen leases and lose power and credit, until they can no longer “interrupt the ordinary course of justice”.
116 Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation, 1944, in Polanyi’s sense of economies “embedded” in social institutions and norms.