Synopses & Reviews
In a brilliant recreation of the epoch between the 1770s and the 1820s, Emma Rothschild reinterprets the ideas of the great revolutionary political economists to show us the true landscape of economic and political thought in their day, with important consequences for our own. Her work alters the readings of Adam Smith and Condorcet and of ideas of Enlightenment that underlie much contemporary political thought.
Economic Sentiments takes up late-eighteenth-century disputes over the political economy of an enlightened, commercial society to show us how the "political" and the "economic" were intricately related to each other and to philosophical reflection. Rothschild examines theories of economic and political sentiments, and the reflection of these theories in the politics of enlightenment. A landmark in the history of economics and of political ideas, her book shows us the origins of laissez-faire economic thought and its relation to political conservatism in an unquiet world. In doing so, it casts a new light on our own times.
Review
"In her readable as well as scholarly book, Economic Sentiments, [Rothschild] links [Adam] Smith with the French philosopher the Marquis de Condorcet, another thinker seen today as an emblem of "cold hard and rational enlightenment" but in reality interested, like Smith, "in economic life as a process of discussion, and as a process of emancipation," in which "one's freedom to buy or sell or lend or travel or work is difficult to distinguish from the rest of one's freedom." This larger picture, Rothschild thinks, is what was lost as economics developed along with the society it analyzed, and what she hopes to restore." Paul Mattick, New York Times Book Review
Review
This landmark work revisits the intellectual ferment of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries...[Rothschild] dismantles, with quiet authority, the stereotype of the Enlightenment as a period dominated by chilly rationalists. The New Yorker
Review
"A powerful and original reconsideration of the thinking of Smith and Condorcet. Delightfully fresh, sensitive, sensible and wide-ranging. A wonderfully evocative, even lyrical book. This is a scholarly achievement of a very high order. It will be of substantial interest to specialists in a range of fields within the humanities and social sciences, who will be obliged in reading it to think again about many conventional views within their disciplines. But it should also reach a broader audience among all those concerned with how we should think about economics and politics in a new century full of uncertainties and insecurities." Keith Baker, Stanford University
Review
"We have all read Adam Smith and we all think we know him well. But this text, in its emphasis on the period after 1776 and its coverage of related works from other nations, is full of revelations and delicious quotes from unstudied sources." David S. Landes, author of The Wealth and Poverty of Nations
Review
Rothschild's richly complex and deeply informed account of the writings of Adam Smith and of the Marquis du Condorcet locates them more closely in their own time and, by so doing, changes their significance for us today. The monolithic view of the cold, inhuman Enlightenment, propagated by the early nineteenth-century Romantics, is undercut by close analysis and understanding of the political and social contexts. The book is a triumph of scholarship and reinterpretation, as well as a model of expository prose. Kenneth J. Arrow, Stanford University
About the Author
Emma Rothschild is a Fellow of King's College, Cambridge, and Director of the Center for History and Economics, King's College.
Table of Contents
Introduction
1. Economic Dispositions
The History of Sentiments
Civilized and Commercial Society
The Unfrightened Mind
Two Kinds of Enlightenment
The Devil Himself
Heroic Dispositions
A Sort of Inner Shuddering
The Cold Light of Reason and the Warmth of Economic Life
Seeing the State as in a Picture
Indulgence and Indifference
The Light of History
The Enlightenment and the Present
2. Adam Smith and Conservative Economics
This Famous Philosopher
Scotland in the 1790s
Economic and Political Freedom
The Liberal Reward of Labor
One-Sided Rationalistic Liberalism
Smith's Real Sentiments
3. Commerce and the State
A Reciprocal Dependence
Scarcities, Dearths, and Famines
Poverty and General Equilibrium
Turgot's Policies against Famine
Interpretations of Smith and Turgot
The Lapse of Time
4. Apprenticeship and Insecurity
A Strange Adventure
It Is But Equity, Besides
Corporations and Competition
Education and Apprenticeship
A State of Nonage
The Apprenticeship: A Digression on the Slave Trade
Uncertain Jurisprudence
History and Institutions
5. The Bloody and Invisible Hand
The Invisible Hand of Jupiter
Tremble, Unfortunate King!
Intentions and Interests
Political Influence
Clerical Systems
Smith's "Stoicism"
Order and Design
A Persuasive Device
Explanation and Understanding
Greatest Possible Values
Evolved Orders
Two Shortcomings of Liberal Thought
6. Economic and Political Choice
Raton Was Quite Astonished...
General Economic Interdependence
Giving the Impression of Doing Nothing
The Soul Discouraged
Poverty, Taxes, and Unsalubrious Factories
Formal Methods
Social Choice and Economic Procedures
Discussions and Constitutions
Pelion and Ossa
7. Condorcet and the Conflict of Values
Cold, Descriptive Cartesian Reason
Diversity and Uniformity
The Indissoluble Chain
Civilized Conflict
Inconsistent Universalism
Domestic Virtues
The Imaginary Enlightenment
The Liberty of Thought and Discussion
8. A Fatherless World
A Different Enlightenment
Smith and Condorcet
Uncertainty and Irresolution
A System of Sentiments
Civilized Political Discussion
Economic Sentiments
A World Unrestored
Suitable Equality
Notes
Acknowledgments
Index