Interest and Connection in the Eighteenth Century by Jacob Sider Jost

Author:Jacob Sider Jost [Jost, Jacob Sider]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780813945040
Google: f55_zQEACAAJ
Publisher: University of Virginia Press
Published: 2020-01-15T00:44:57+00:00

The Limits of Interest

This attempt to imagine an alternative to modernity can be explained partly by the fact that Smith saw his eighteenth-century present as unsustainable, headed for catastrophe. Smith in the Lectures on Jurisprudence and Wealth of Nations tells again and again the story of how chieftains and lords dwindle into customers. The same historical mechanism, “Luxury, and Refinement of manners,” is responsible in the Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres for the ascendency of the “interesting” over the “marvelous” as commerce replaces barbarism in both the ancient and modern worlds: “They who live thus in a great City where they have the free Liberty of disposing of their wealth . . . would naturally turn their attention to the motions of the human mind. . . . The French monarchy is in much the same condition as the Romans under Trajan” (LRBL 112). Thus, eighteenth-century French novelists write like the “interesting” Tacitus (LRBL 111). A city filled with merchants and manufacturers will provide the monarch with “luxuries” and “costly trinkets,” redirecting his feudal hospitality into consumption (WN 2:508). It will also, on Smith’s account, be naturally a city of sentimental novel readers. Finally, Smith argues in the final chapter of The Wealth of Nations, “Of Public Debts,” it will be a city of public creditors. The sovereign who spends the entire peacetime revenue on “pageantry,” “splendid buildings,” and “other public ornaments” will, unlike his or her feudal ancestors, have no accumulated treasure when a war breaks out (WN 2:508). Luckily, the very merchants and manufacturers who sold their luxurious products to the sovereign will for that very reason have money to lend: “The same commercial state of society which, by the operation of moral causes, brings government in this manner into the necessity of borrowing, produces in the subjects both an ability and an inclination to lend. If it commonly brings along with it the necessity of borrowing, it likewise brings along with it the facility of doing so” (WN 2:509).

There is thus in Smith’s system a metonymic as well as an analogical link between interest in others’ minds and interest on others’ debts: both are consequences of luxury and refinement, and both belong to the commercial stage of human development. Government debt in particular, and the rentier class that it creates, are for Smith natural developments of capitalist modernity. They follow from the decline of feudalism, the rise of luxurious consumption by sovereigns, and the eagerness of merchants and manufacturers to lend their capital to finance wartime expenditure. Yet in the utopian-apocalyptic final pages of The Wealth of Nations, this debt is also an existential threat to commercial society, as Smith worries about “the progress of the enormous debts which at present oppress, and will in the long-run probably ruin, all the great nations of Europe” (WN 2:511).69 Smith accurately saw that the British national debt had ballooned across the wars of the long eighteenth century (including a £100 million augmentation between first publication in 1776 and

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