In The Passions and the Interests (1977), the historian Albert O. Hirschman shows how, in the 17th and 18th centuries, the concept of interest established itself as the pivot of justificatory frameworks in political economy.1 His enquiry draws in particular on 17th-century moral philosophy, as well as on Montesquieu, Hume, and Smith.
Building on those analyses, and on the series of articles devoted to the valorisation of the economy,2 this article seeks to offer a synoptic view of the rise of interests and values, considered this time from a political point of view.3 Its purpose, then, is not merely to revisit their place within the economic order, but to grasp how they gradually asserted themselves as driving forces of government, social organisation, and political stability.
To shed light on this shift, we take Machiavelli as our point of departure, and then turn to 17th- and 18th-century political philosophy. We follow the way in which interests, together with the values of liberty and equality, acquired an increasingly central place in modern political thought, to the point of competing with virtue and relegating it to a secondary function.
The Rise of Interests and Values
Machiavelli: Greatness and Corruption in History
The humanists of the Italian Renaissance drew inspiration from ancient rhetoric, especially that of Cicero.4 Petrarch distrusted the laws because, in his view, jurists lapsed into ignorance and dishonesty. Moreover, those who broke the laws were more numerous than those who obeyed them. To establish justice, the humanists relied first and foremost on virtue, education, and exemplary conduct.
Like Florentine humanists such as Salutati, Bruni, Alberti, and Palmieri, Machiavelli cherished the liberty of his city and republican equality, relative though it was by the standards of the time. The political liberty to which he aspired rested on the model of the Roman republic, that is, the republic before the Empire. This liberty depended on the virtue of citizens, itself fostered by education, worship, and military discipline.5 In turn, virtue presupposed liberty.6
Florence came into being under the Roman Empire: “accustomed to living under the government of a master, it remained for a long time in subjection, without attending to its own existence.”7 Later, a constitution combining old and new customs was established, but this did not remedy its corrupted origins. Even had its customs been virtuous from the outset, they would have become corrupted over time: “virtue gives rise to tranquillity, tranquillity gives rise to idleness, idleness gives rise to disorder, disorder gives rise to ruin; and likewise, from ruin is born order, from order is born virtue, and from virtue are born glory and good fortune.”8 Machiavelli conceived history in cyclical terms.
Once customs have been corrupted, there are only two means of setting them right again: partial or gradual reform, or the total and simultaneous reform of the constitution.9 The first requires an enlightened man who, despite his insight, would fail to convince corrupted citizens unwilling to face the evil before them. The second requires a reformer who must make himself “absolute master of the state, so as to be able to dispose of it as he pleases.”10 Yet it rarely happens either that “a virtuous citizen should wish to seize power by illegitimate means”, or that “a wicked man, having become prince, should wish to do good”.11 Neither solution appears likely; this is why “it would still be better to incline towards monarchy than towards a popular state, so that those men whose insolence the laws alone cannot restrain might at least be subdued by an authority that is, so to speak, royal”.12
Machiavelli’s psychological pessimism – he judges human beings to be “ungrateful, fickle, deceitful and dissembling, fearful in the face of danger, eager for gain”13 and driven by interest – can be explained by his cyclical conception of history and by the fact that he believed himself to be living in an age of corruption. The Prince thus appears as an expedient for times of decay.
Beyond corruption, cyclical and inescapable though it is, Machiavelli aimed at the “greatness” of the city, a greatness comparable to that of Rome. For the Florentine secretary, this was an implicit postulate that he never questioned: his model, the Roman Republic, thanks to the virtue of its founder and its martial discipline, had succeeded in building an empire.14 Yet greatness requires strength and the perpetual enlargement of territory by military means.15 Political liberty, as Machiavelli conceived it, corresponded to that of the Roman republic. It grounded greatness,16 for “it is not private interest, but that of all, which makes the greatness of states. It is clear that the common interest is respected only in republics”.17
Common interest and power thus converge: both rest on political liberty, virtue, and religion. At the beginning of the 16th century, religion still constituted, for Machiavelli, a principle of cohesion capable of binding individuals together despite their oppositions. In his view, “the surest sign of a country’s ruin is contempt for the worship of the gods”.18 A century later, the wars of religion, along with the scepticism they fostered, had swept away this kind of conviction.
Grotius: Stoicism Infused into Law
Following Machiavelli and Botero, the concept of raison d’état established itself in political analysis: it described the strategies of nations as they emerged, consolidated themselves, developed, and projected themselves internationally.19 Rivalries between powers and the wars of religion fractured Western Christendom and consumed minds. How, amid such chaos, could relations between states and between confessions be pacified? During the first quarter of the 17th century, the Dutch jurist Hugo Grotius reflected at length on international law. He shaped his theory as legal adviser to the Dutch East India Company (VOC), whose interests were closely intertwined with those of the Republic of the United Provinces.20 He gave it its most accomplished form in On the Law of War and Peace (1625), which draws on natural law and on Stoicism.
The use of natural law in legal theories goes back to Aristotle. There was nothing new about it in the 17th century, especially since natural law had been extensively discussed and put to use since the 11th century.21 Grotius’s originality lay notably in his massive use of Stoicism, drawing, beyond Cicero – who was not a Stoic – on Seneca, but also on Marcus Aurelius, Epictetus, Hierocles, and Zeno.22
Whereas Aristotle grounds the political sociability of human beings in the family and in procreation,23 the Stoics anchor it in self-preservation, or self-conservation, the object of the “primary impulse”.24 Another fundamental ethical concept in Stoicism is that of “appropriation”, which refers to possession, to an affective disposition in relation to the thing possessed, and to the fact that the latter is suited, or “appropriate”.25 Appropriation is linked to instinct: it “guarantees that animals are born with the dispositions of an affectionate owner towards themselves, and this is a consequence of nature’s disposition towards them”.26 This first level of appropriation is thus associated with self-love and with a will to preserve oneself. From this origin follows love for one’s children and, by extension, concern and affection for one’s fellow human beings.27
Stoic morality is individualistic in its premises. It emerged in an ancient Mediterranean world in which independent cities were being integrated into vast empires, in which local political traditions were fading, and in which men and women sought moral orientation in the existing philosophies that had been diversifying since the 4th century.28 As Cicero argued, this morality, because it recognises no good other than rational virtue, is not necessarily suited to a politics that requires the definition of good and evil and an adherence involving the passions.29
By drawing on Stoicism, Grotius adopted a philosophical approach, centred on law, nature, and virtue, which Machiavelli rejected and regarded as idealistic – even though his own political philosophy also rested on a certain ideal, a historical one, namely that of the Roman republic. Despite the clear differences between the two thinkers, one common point may be noted: both postulated that interest constitutes a primary psychological motive in the human being, prior to the social bond. According to Grotius, it is “not contrary to the nature of society to look after and provide for one’s own interests, provided that no injury is thereby done to the rights of others”.30
Hobbes: A Political Science Built on Moral Relativity
A number of commentators, including Hirschman, consider that Machiavelli initiated a “scientific method” by “taking men as they are”.31 Certainly, he described human behaviour without recourse either to religious faith or to the ethical frameworks traditionally invoked in political philosophy;32 and he relied in a privileged way on historical examples and experience. Nevertheless, the “truth” he brought out relied on presuppositions, or convictions, bound up with a philosophical conception of the history of civilisations. That conception included a number of idealisations drawn from the Roman republic, from which he took a great many examples.
Thus, like Aristotle’s political philosophy, his argument rested on moral assumptions, which gave rise to divergent philosophical orientations: Machiavellian virtue, conflictual and directed towards greatness, differs from Aristotelian virtue, which is moderate. Moreover, both forms of virtue claim to be rational: they rest on the description of a human nature motivated by passions, which an appropriate education must channel or exploit according to the end pursued – for Aristotle, the happiness of a contemplative life fostered by prudent politics; for Machiavelli, the satisfaction of living in an independent republic sustained by a policy of conquest.
A century after Machiavelli, Grotius adopted a far more formal approach, seeking to constitute a genuine legal theory. In De Jure Praedae, he thus sets out, in the manner of mathematicians, axioms and postulates. Yet his first two precepts – the right to defend oneself and the right to acquire the things useful to life – still incorporate an element of experience, since their legitimacy derives from the fact that all philosophers have recognised them.33 As Julie Saada points out, Hobbes deduces the opposite from similar premises: “it is precisely because each person seeks to secure his own defence, and in so doing follows his individual interest, that no rule of justice can be deduced from experience”.34
Hobbes was a contemporary of Galileo and Descartes. Like the latter, he formulates a sceptical thought experiment leading to the suppression of the surrounding world, with the exception of the brain.35 Unlike his French counterpart, however, he retains certainty as to the existence of external bodies, which are susceptible of measurement and calculation. According to him, reason “is nothing but Reckoning (that is, Adding and Substracting) of the Consequences of generall names agreed upon, for the Marking and Signifying of our thoughts”.36 Reason is not innate: it results from a method of reflection consisting in starting from the basic elements, that is names, and relating them to one another, notably by means of syllogisms, so as to know all the consequences of the names belonging to a given subject. This method is science.37
Galileo’s influence38 is especially apparent in Hobbes’s treatment of the passions: he defines them as voluntary bodily motions.39 Since the body is in “continuall mutation”, it is impossible for the same things always to cause the same passions in it. “much lesse can all men consent, in the Desire of almost any one and the same Object.”40 Since the object of desire is what is called “good”, the “words of Good, evill, and Contemptible, are ever used with relation to the person that useth them”.41
Hobbes transposes Galilean relativity concerning the motion of bodies into physiology, psychology, and ethics. His political science rests, on the one hand, on a calculating reason and, on the other, on a moral relativity analogous to the relativity of bodies in motion. This moral relativity rests on the postulate that the good is nothing other than pleasure.42 Moreover, power is sought continuously: “I put for a generall inclination of all mankind, a perpetuall and restlesse desire of Power after power, that ceaseth onely in Death. And the cause of this, is not alwayes that a man hopes for a more intensive delight, than he has already attained to; or that he cannot be content with a moderate power: but because he cannot assure the power and means to live well, which he hath present, without the acquisition of more.”43
If Hobbes does not generalise from social experience in the way Grotius does, he does generalise from psychological observations. In the state of nature he postulates, equality of human faculties combines with the desire to possess things that exist in limited quantity.44 The rivalry and diffidence that result from this, together with the insatiable desire for power, bring about a war of all against all. Men seek to escape this state of war out of fear of death and from the desire to enjoy a “commodious living”. These passions dispose them to obey a common authority.
Although a feeling of terror is necessary if men are to respect the laws, “Reason suggesteth convenient Articles of Peace”,45 through the laws of nature. From this point of view, Hobbes distinguishes between a logic of power, passionate and short-term, and a logic of self-preservation, rational and long-term:46
And because where a man hath right to the end, and the end cannot be attained without the means, that is, without such things as are necessary to the end, it is consequent that it is not against reason, and therefore right for a man, to use all means and do whatsoever action is necessary for the preservation of his body.47
The notion of interest is therefore split in two: on the one hand, material interest, associated with competition to acquire wealth, glory, and so forth; on the other, vital interest, on which reason relies in order to discover the laws of nature.
Rohan and Nedham: Interest Will Not Lie
So far, we have considered three distinct and historically successive theoretical approaches to the question of interests: Machiavelli’s, republican and historical; Grotius’s, theoretical and Stoic; and Hobbes’s, scientific and relative. Each of these orientations contributes to the construction of what is called “modernity”, an edifice whose stones take the form of individual interests, and whose cement consists in a mixture of history, values (liberty and equality), and science. The question whether this modernity still remains current is one of the great challenges of the present day.
In the 16th and 17th centuries, the rise of interests went hand in hand with that of the values of liberty and equality, as we have seen in Machiavelli, Grotius, and Hobbes, despite their differing analytical perspectives. Historically, this shared development was tied to the growth of the modern nation-state, which unfolded against a background of wars of religion and the gradual valorisation of the economy, notably through commercial empires.48
In Hobbes, as we have just seen, interest has two sides: that of the passions, more particularly the desire to accumulate; and that of reason, grounded in self-preservation. In mid-17th-century England, its rational aspect spread under the influence of the writings of the Duke of Rohan.49 In De l’Interest des Princes et Estats de la Chrestienté (1638), he maintained that interest can never “fail”, a term that probably became the object of a misunderstanding across the Channel, giving rise to the expression “interest will not lie”.50
As a member of the nobility, Rohan primarily defended the interests of princes. For that reason, he was first and foremost valued by royalists, while arousing the distrust of parliamentarians. Yet, as a Huguenot, he attracted the attention of all Englishmen because, in his view, their country occupied a particular geographical position, one that gave it a leading role and made it an arbiter with regard to Protestant interests. More than other nations, England had to show unity if it was to continue defending itself and maintaining its existence.51
According to J. A. W. Gunn, it is this theme of unity that reappears in William Prynne and in Harrington’s Oceana.52 Yet the man most closely associated with Rohan’s maxim is Marchamont Nedham, who helped bring about its adoption by the parliamentarians. In the decade following the execution of Charles I, several signs point to the growing importance of interests in political language. Charles Herle, who served as prolocutor of the Westminster Assembly, observed that “the word interest is a word of late much come into use among us, and in the ordinary use of it … it implies in one two things, concernment and importance.”53
In his treatise Interest Will Not Lie, Nedham clarifies this maxim while broadening its meaning. Not only can the interest that a man “states aright” not deceive him, but such a man will also not depart from the end he pursues: it thus becomes possible to anticipate his conduct with certainty. Rational calculation of human behaviour here finds an application in economics, but also in politics, even if the pursuit of interests still regularly gives rise to moral tensions, notably because it remains associated with “corruption”.54
Interests as the Basic Elements of Politics
Harrington: Divide and Choose
In the middle of the 17th century, the emergence of the modern sciences, the development of commercial empires, and civil war made England an unparalleled intellectual crucible. Hobbes and Harrington, each in his own way, reflect this singularity. Both introduce elements of rupture while seeking to preserve or revive a tradition: royal authority in the case of the former, republican liberty in that of the latter, who drew heavily on Machiavelli.
In Oceana (1656), Harrington classically links vice to the passions and virtue to reason. The latter, translated into action by the will, is synonymous with virtue and with “freedom of soul”.55 Now government “is no other than the soul of a nation or city”.56 Hence the reason associated with republican deliberation corresponds to virtue. And since “the soul of a city or nation is the sovereign power, her virtue must be law.”57
Since Plato and Aristotle, law has played a part in the education and formation of individual virtues. Harrington extends individual virtue to the nation and encapsulates virtue in law. He believes himself to be continuing Aristotle and Livy, who maintained that a “commonwealth is an empire of laws and not of men”.58 The republic stands opposed to the arbitrariness of tyranny.
Since laws are made by men in a republic, how can it be an empire of laws? According to Harrington, there is first reason, or private “interest”. Then comes “reason of state, which is the interest … of the ruler or rulers”.59 Finally, there is a reason of “mankind”, expressed in the laws of nature and in common right. Following Hobbes, Harrington reduces reason to interest60 and divides it into three categories: private, public, and universal. This segmentation makes it possible to conceive an articulation of private interests such as to facilitate common life. But how, exactly, can private interests be articulated so as to coordinate into a general interest?
To answer this question, Harrington puts forward the exemplary, and now famous, case of two girls dividing a cake: “Divide, says one, and I will choose; or let me divide, and you shall choose.” This distribution of roles means that the one who cuts has an interest in dividing the cake into equal parts. Harrington then concludes: “That which great philosophers are disputing upon in vain is brought unto light by two silly girls, even the whole mystery of a commonwealth, which lies only in dividing and choosing.”61
Translated into concrete political life, this means that it falls to the senate, composed of a form of virtuous aristocracy, to divide up the questions subject to debate and to weigh the arguments for and against by means of reason. Choice, for its part, belongs to a representative council of the whole commonwealth, that is, of the nation. Representation must be such that representatives, equal among themselves, pursue no interest other than those of their electors.62 The representative system thus coordinates, through election and consent, a diversity of interest groups. The quality of political discussion, meanwhile, depends on the wisdom of the senators.
Montesquieu: When the Play of Interests Devalues Virtue
Almost a century after the publication of Oceana, The Spirit of the Laws (1748) appeared, a synthesis drawing notably on classical political philosophy, on Stoic morality,63 on Machiavelli’s work,64 on the modern sciences, and on the English constitution. Montesquieu does not defend any particular type of government there, even though he shows a clear admiration for English representative government and plainly condemns tyranny. He defines liberty as the “right to do everything that the laws permit”,65 those laws being “the necessary relations deriving from the nature of things”.66 If the material world, animals, and human beings all have their laws, one must distinguish the laws governing the physical world from human laws, because the latter can be transgressed. Law is also, in a general sense, “human reason insofar as it governs all the peoples of the earth”,67 a reason that varies from one people to another: “the government most in conformity with nature is that whose particular arrangement best corresponds to the disposition of the people for whom it is established”.68
Montesquieu associates monarchy with aristocratic honour, and the republic with virtue, which he defines as “the love of the laws and of the patria”, an attachment that requires one to prefer “the public interest to one’s own”.69 Whereas in Oceana reason underpins virtue, Montesquieu anchors it in a sentiment, in other words in a passion, for the patria. As Paul A. Rahe points out, like Machiavelli, Montesquieu “has practically nothing to say concerning public deliberation”.70 He does not conceive virtue in the humanist manner, which grounded it in ancient rhetoric, in oratorical capacities that shaped exemplary citizens able to rise above their private interests and aim at the common good.
Political virtue being reduced to an initial political impulse or, in Thomas Pangle’s interpretation,71 to a means of preserving the political community, it loses value and, in many respects, becomes superfluous. Under these conditions, political ethics rests mainly on laws and on interests. Indeed, the transformation of virtue into passion goes together with a logic of conflicting interests, Machiavellian in spirit and English in inspiration, expressed in the famous formula: “To prevent the abuse of power, power must be checked by power, through the arrangement of things.”72 Liberty, which follows from respect for the laws and from the absence of tyranny, is guaranteed by the existence of counterpowers, that is, by the continual opposition of interests, without any particular interest succeeding in gaining the upper hand over the others.
As an observer of different political regimes and of the growth of commerce, Montesquieu offers valuable insights into the concept of interest in the 18th century. According to him, “the spirit of commerce carries with it the spirit of frugality, economy, moderation, labour, wisdom, tranquillity, order, and rule”.73 It awakens a sense of justice, opposed to brigandage, as well as moral virtues, distinct from political virtue, that favour negotiation and the possibility of neglecting one’s own interests for the sake of those of others.74 Luxury, based on “the conveniences one gives oneself through the labour of others”,75 stands opposed to the frugality and moderation of the spirit of commerce: it stimulates private interests, whereas frugality feeds the desire for the glory of the patria and of oneself.76
The English republican model, permeated by the spirit of commerce, provides both an example and a proof that commerce does not necessarily corrupt mores as a whole.77 Indeed, the people there “have more virtue than those who represent them”.78 The English Parliament, though corrupt, “is not lacking in enlightenment”,79 notably because corruption is exposed openly rather than concealed. Moreover, the riches at the origin of corruption come from commerce and industry, sources “of such a nature that he who draws from them cannot enrich himself without enriching many others as well”.80
Montesquieu does not deny that commerce can lead to corruption; on the contrary, he maintains that it corrupts pure mores.81 Yet that corruption does not necessarily infect the whole body politic. Switzerland, the Netherlands, and the German republics provide other historical examples supporting this argument. For Montesquieu, it is less commerce that corrupts republics than inequalities.82 Overall, commerce softens mores: “wherever there are gentle mores, there is commerce”, and conversely, “wherever there is commerce, there are gentle mores”.83 Moreover, it pacifies international relations by introducing interdependence between nations: “if one has an interest in buying, the other has an interest in selling; and all unions are founded on mutual needs”.84
Montesquieu’s work represents a major intellectual turning point in political philosophy. The synthesis he produced not only places the play of interests at the foundation of behaviour in politics and economics, but also relegates virtue to the background when it comes to obtaining and preserving a good constitution: what matters is not that rulers be virtuous, but that their interests be open to negotiation, and that they be confronted by other interests, thus guaranteeing a balance of powers together with respect for the laws, and therefore liberty. This dynamic underlies contemporary Western constitutions. With Montesquieu, interests and values dethrone virtue.
Does the Counterbalancing of Interests Compensate for the Weakening of Virtue?
From Machiavelli to Montesquieu, we can see a transition taking shape in political philosophy: interests and values are raised to the rank of elementary and primary components, to the detriment of virtue, which is transformed into a cog in the machine, a factor of transmission from one generation to the next, ensuring the durability of the political constitution and of the social body. This weakening of virtue took place in the 17th and 18th centuries, at a time when the economy was moving to the forefront and absolute monarchies ruled in Europe. This historical context encouraged enthusiasm for two aspects of liberty, which stand out explicitly in Harrington and Montesquieu: the absence of tyranny; and access to private property. The latter, through an equitable distribution of land, guarantees the possibility for each person to participate in political life.
The distribution of land, mentioned by Montesquieu in connection with democracy,85 stands alongside three major developments of his century: the rise of commerce, that of finance, and the emergence of industry. Under these conditions, new wealth came increasingly from labour rather than from land, as reflected in the opposition between Court and Country. The monied interests, associated with an imperial and mercantilist policy financed by public debt, were identified by the supporters of Country as a source of corruption, they who remained attached to the land.86
Whereas the distribution of land was supposed to secure attachment to the country through a rootedness in landed property, and therefore a certain political virtue, an economy based on commerce, finance, and industry lent itself far more readily to controversy. We have seen that Montesquieu associated moral virtues with commerce — frugality, moderation, labour, wisdom — some of which may strike us today as surprising. In the 18th century, even though the wealth produced by commercial exchange could be considerable, it was understandable to oppose it to aristocratic luxury. Moreover, commerce, in a liberal spirit, rightly appeared as a factor of pacification through the economic interdependence it brought about. Today, however, several of these moral assumptions about the economy have long since lost their force: while labour did indeed become a cardinal value in the 19th century, the spirit of frugality, moderation, and wisdom associated with commerce cannot impose itself sociologically. Already contested in the 18th century, it does not reflect the Hobbesian desire for power characteristic of large firms. Even if this pursuit of wealth partly results from the competition induced by the law of supply and demand, it undermines the conjecture of a frugal commerce.
Why dwell on a few moral assumptions? Because they appear to me inseparable from Montesquieu’s philosophy as a whole, in which commerce plays a central role. The separation of powers and the counterbalancing of interests work only if the interested parties are willing to negotiate. In the absence of negotiation, when a tyranny succeeds in imposing itself, the separation of powers and the counterbalancing of interests can be dismantled. History has shown this on several occasions, most notably in Nazi Germany. Trumpism is a distinct form of tyranny, but it too participates in the demolition of checks and balances when it tramples on American law and on the principles of international law upheld by the United Nations.
Should virtue therefore be revalorised, should it be restored to the lustre it had before Machiavelli?87 I doubt it: to try to revalorise virtue without first taking a step back from the economy, which underlies a large part of the play of interests, would that not be to put the cart before the horse? For how can moderation be recovered without questioning the indefinite pursuit of prosperity,88 a pursuit arising in particular from geopolitical competition and one that technological upheavals are now calling into question?89
Notes
1 Albert O. Hirschman, Les passions et les intérêts, PUF, 2020 (1977).
2 https://damiengimenez.fr/wpdgi_instant/aux-origines-de-la-valorisation-de-leconomie-xve-xixe-siecle/
3 As regards the economic point of view, see the article “Interests as Drivers of Social Recomposition in 18th-Century Great Britain”, which discusses in particular Pufendorf, Hutcheson, Mandeville, Hume, and Smith.
4 https://damiengimenez.fr/wpdgi_article_en/when-the-economy-becomes-a-value-the-turning-point-of-the-italian-renaissance/#Prosperity_Decline_and_Humanism
5 Michel Senellart « Machiavel (1469-1527) : l’ethos politique de grandeur et de liberté » in Alain Caillé, Christian Lazzeri, Michel Senellart, Histoire raisonnée de la philosophie morale et politique, La Découverte, 2011.
6 Discours, I, XVIII : “if good morals cannot be preserved without the support of good laws, then, likewise, the observance of the laws requires good morals.”
8 Machiavel, Histoires Florentines in James Hankins, Virtue Politics, Harvard University Press, 2019.
10 Ibid.
11 Ibid.
12 Ibid.
13 Machiavel, Le Prince, Librairie Générale Française, 2000, p. 125.
14 Discours, II, I: “If no republic ever made the same advances as Rome, it is because no republic ever received institutions as well suited as hers to enable it to make conquests. It owed its empire to the courage of its armies; but it owed the preservation of its conquests to its wisdom, its conduct, and the distinctive character that its first legislator knew how to impress upon it.”
15 Discours, I, VI: “If the Roman republic had been more peaceful, the disadvantage would have followed that its weakness would have been increased, and that it would itself have closed off the paths to the greatness it later attained.”
16 Discours, II, II: “cities increased their power and wealth only so long as they lived in freedom.”
17 Ibid.
19 https://damiengimenez.fr/wpdgi_article_en/the-age-of-extractive-and-commercial-empires-spain-and-the-dutch-republic-16th-17th-century/ ; https://damiengimenez.fr/wpdgi_article_en/wealth-as-a-political-principle-england-17th-18th-centuries/
20 https://damiengimenez.fr/wpdgi_article_en/the-age-of-extractive-and-commercial-empires-spain-and-the-dutch-republic-16th-17th-century/#The_Dutch_colonial_system
21 Concering this topic, see Brian Tierney, The Idea of Natural Rights: Studies on Natural Rights, Natural Law, and Church Law 1150-1625, William B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 2001.
22 Number of mentions of an author from the index of De iure belli ac pacis, Liberty Fund, 2005 : Cicéron: 245 ; Sénèque: 164 ; Marc Aurèle: 37 ; Épictète: 6 ; Hiéroclès: 6 ; Zénon: 5.
23 Aristote, Les Politiques, 1252a 25-30.
24 Long et Sedley, Les philosophes hellénistiques II, Flammarion, 2001, p. 411.
25 Ibid., p. 411-412.
26 Ibid.
27 Cicéron, Fin., III, 63 in Christelle Veillard, Les Stoïciens II, le stoïcisme intermédiaire, Les Belles Lettres, 2015, p. 122: “From this instinct there also arises a natural feeling common to all human beings, which makes them concern themselves with one another, and by virtue of which one man, simply because he is a man, can never be wholly foreign in the eyes of another.”
28 Célestin Bouglé, Émile Bréhier, Henri Delacroix et Dominique Parodi, Du Sage antique au Citoyen moderne. Études sur la Culture morale, Librairie Armand Colin, 1921, p. 23.
29 https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/cicero/#EthiTheo
30 Hugo Grotius, Le droit de la guerre et de la paix, PUF, 2012, p. 52.
31 Albert O. Hirschman, op. cit., p. 17. For a presentation of the debate, see Gábor Almási (2018): Machiavelli’s scientific method: a common understanding of his novelty in the sixteenth century, History of European Ideas, DOI:10.1080/01916599.2018.1503482.
32 On Lucretius’s influence on Machiavelli, see Paul A. Rahe “In the Shadow of Lucretius: the Epicurean Foundations of Machiavelli’s Political Thought.” History of Political Thought 28, no. 1 (2007): 30–55. http://www.jstor.org/stable/26222665.
33 Hugo Grotius, Commentary on the Law of Prize and Booty, Liberty Fund, 2006, p. 23 ; Hugo Grotius, Le droit de la guerre et de la paix, PUF, 2012, p. 20 sq.
34 Julie Saada, « Chapitre 2. La loi naturelle et les objections sceptiques » in Hobbes et le sujet de droit. Paris: CNRS Éditions, 2010. doi:10.4000/books.editionscnrs.48970.
35 Gérard Mairet, Introduction to Thomas Hobbes, Léviathan, Gallimard, 2014 (1651).
36 Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (1651). Project Gutenberg e-text, accessed 10 March 2026. https://www.gutenberg.org/files/3207/3207-h/3207-h.htm, chapter 5.
37 Ibid.
38 As regards the influence of Galileo on Hobbes : Douglas M. Jesseph, “Galileo, Hobbes, and the Book of Nature”, Perspectives on Science, 2004, vol. 12, no. 2, The Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
39 Ibid., chapter 6.
40 Ibid.
41 Ibid.
42 Ibid.: “Pleasure therefore, (or Delight,) is the apparence, or sense of Good.”
43 Ibid., chapter 11.
44 Ibid., chapter 13.
45 Ibid.
46 Julie Saada, op. cit., sheds very interesting light on this distinction. However, she “redefines” interest by reducing it to self-preservation, which unfortunately sidesteps the problem of the imprecision of the concept of interest.
47 Thomas Hobbes, The Elements of Law Natural and Politic, Simpkin, Marshall and Co., 1889, I, XIV, § 6, p. 72. On Gallica.
48 https://damiengimenez.fr/wpdgi_snapshot/at-the-origins-of-the-valorisation-of-the-economy-15th-19th-century/ : see in particular the second and the third articles.
49 J. A. W. Gunn, “‘Interest Will Not Lie’: A Seventeenth-Century Political Maxim.” Journal of the History of Ideas 29, no. 4 (1968): 551–64. https://doi.org/10.2307/2708293 .
50 Ibid.
51 Ibid.
52 Ibid.
53 Wisdomes Tripos . . . (London, 1655), 169 in Ibid.
54 On this topic see the Court vs Country debate : https://damiengimenez.fr/wpdgi_article_en/interests-as-the-driving-forces-of-social-recomposition-in-eighteenth-century-great-britain/#Court_vs_Country
55 James Harrington, The Commonwealth of Oceana, Project Gutenberg, 2016.
56 Ibid.
57 Ibid.
58 Ibid.
59 Ibid.
60 Ibid.: “if reason be nothing else but interest, and the interest of mankind be the right interest, then the reason of mankind must be right reason.”
61 Ibid.
62 Ibid.
63 Carole Dornier, “Vertu”, in A Montesquieu Dictionary [en ligne], sous la direction de Catherine Volpilhac-Auger, ENS de Lyon, septembre 2013. URL: https://dictionnaire-montesquieu.ens-lyon.fr/en/article/dem-1376475883-fr/fr
64 Lorenzo Bianchi, “Machiavel, Nicolas”, in A Montesquieu Dictionary [en ligne], sous la direction de Catherine Volpilhac-Auger, ENS de Lyon, septembre 2013. URL: https://dictionnaire-montesquieu.ens-lyon.fr/en/article/dem-1367167607-fr/fr
65 Montesquieu, L’esprit des lois, XI, III, Flammarion, 1979.
66 Ibid., I, I.
67 Ibid., I, III.
68 Ibid.
69 Ibid., IV, V.
70 Paul A. Rahe, Montesquieu and the Logic of Liberty, Yale University Press, 2009, p. 70-71.
71 Thomas Pangle, Montesquieu’s Philosophy of Liberalism. A Commentary on The Spirit of the Laws, The University of Chicago Press, 1973, p. 61 in Bernard Manin, Montesquieu, Hermmann, 2024, p. 117.
72 Montesquieu, op. cit., XI, IV.
73 Ibid., V, VI.
74 Ibid., XX, II.
75 Ibid., VI, I.
76 Ibid., VII, II.
77 Lettre à William Domville, copied in the Pensées, n°1960, in Oeuvres complètes, vol. II, p. 592-595, in Bernard Manin, op. cit., p. 238-239.
78 Ibid.
79 Ibid.
80 Ibid.
81 Montesquieu, op. cit., XX, I.
82 Carole Dornier , “Vertu”, in A Montesquieu Dictionary [en ligne], sous la direction de Catherine Volpilhac-Auger, ENS de Lyon, septembre 2013. URL: https://dictionnaire-montesquieu.ens-lyon.fr/en/article/dem-1376475883-fr/fr
83 Ibid., XX, I.
84 Ibid., XX, II.
85 Ibid., V, V.
86 For more details on this topic: https://damiengimenez.fr/wpdgi_article_en/interests-as-the-driving-forces-of-social-recomposition-in-eighteenth-century-great-britain/#Court_vs_Country
87 James Hankins, in Virtue Politics, Harvard University Press, 2019, is particularly representative of this attitude. The theme of the revalorisation of virtue has become common since the publication of Elizabeth Anscombe’s 1958 article “Modern Moral Philosophy”.
88 Since the beginning of the 19th century, this pursuit of prosperity has been shared by the main political currents. On this subject, see in particular https://damiengimenez.fr/wpdgi_article_en/utility-work-distribution-a-new-grammar-of-the-social-19th-century/
89 https://damiengimenez.fr/wpdgi_article_en/how-technologies-are-eroding-creative-destruction/