Enlightenment: A Very Short Introduction by John Robertson

Author:John Robertson [Robertson, John]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, General, Philosophy, History & Surveys
ISBN: 9780199591787
Google: 0xAxCgAAQBAJ
Amazon: 0199591784
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2015-09-14T19:00:00+00:00

Political economy

What confirms Rousseau’s centrality is that his challenge was answered. None was clearer in doing so, moreover, than Adam Smith. As we have seen, Smith was without illusion in acknowledging that what drove men and women to better their condition was the ambition to acquire status in the eyes of others. At the very end of his life, he positively reinforced this admission, by adding to the sixth edition of the Theory of Moral Sentiments a chapter entitled ‘Of the corruption of our moral sentiments, which is occasioned by this disposition to admire the rich and the great, and to despise or neglect persons of poor and mean condition’. The impartial spectator of commercial society could not but be ambivalent about its values. But Smith did not withdraw his countervailing contention that it was the drive to better our condition which resulted in material prosperity—for all ranks of society. It may do so as if by ‘an invisible hand’, as an unintended consequence; but when the rich employ thousands in ‘the gratification of their own vain and insatiable desires, they divide with the poor the produce of all their improvements’. To explain why this was so, Smith proceeded to write the Wealth of Nations. A landmark in the history of economic thought, the Wealth of Nations was also the culmination of the emergence of political economy as a discourse of Enlightenment.

The roots of political economy lie in the 17th century. It was then that the term was coined (in the first instance in French), and that economic activity became the subject of extended commentary as the basis of a nation’s standing and power. Early in the century the arbitristas debated whether the problems facing the Spanish monarchy may have had something to do with its reliance on American silver. By the mid century the rulers of German states devastated by the Thirty Years War were turning to the new discourse of ‘cameralism’ to learn how to rebuild their populations and basic economic resources. But the most vigorous debates, in which participants offered markedly different diagnoses of problems and solutions to them, took place in England and in France. Prominent in the English debate were Thomas Mun, Nicholas Barbon, William Petty, Henry Martin, and John Cary. Cary’s Essay on the State of England (1695) was representative in its concern with the perceived threat from Ireland, whose low labour costs threatened English industries; if England lost competitiveness in manufactures, it was likely to fall under the commercial hegemony of either the Dutch or France. The French were no less anxiously debating their own prospects. Louis XIV’s minister Colbert made a strong case for the protection and encouragement of manufactures and merchant shipping to complement France’s agricultural resources. Others, opposed to the military aggression of Louis, insisted that agriculture should be put first, and manufacturing, especially of luxuries, curtailed. Boisguilbert argued for the primacy of agriculture in the face of the disproportionate growth of Paris, while Archbishop Fénelon’s allegory, Télémaque (1699), suggested that urban populations be stripped of their luxuries and forcibly returned to the countryside.

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