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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 14 March 2017
1. I use the phrase “Long Eighteenth Century” in this article to refer to the period in intellectual history roughly from Hobbes to Tocqueville, i.e., from the 1650s to the 1830s.
2. For geography and ecology, see Diamond, Jared, Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies (New York, 1997),Google Scholar and Pomerantz, Kenneth, The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World Economy (Princeton, 2000).Google Scholar For culture, see Landes, David, The Wealth and Poverty of Nations: Why Some Are So Rich and Some So Poor (New York, 1999CrossRefGoogle Scholar) and Mokyr, Joel, A Culture of Growth: The Origins of the Modern Economy (Princeton, 2017).Google Scholar For religion, a large literature begins with Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, trans. Richard Swedberg (New York, 2008 [1904]). For technology, see Mokyr, Joel, The Lever of Riches: Technological Creativity and Economic Progress (Oxford, 1991)Google Scholar; The Gifts of Athena: Historical Origins of the Knowledge Economy (Princeton, 2002); The Enlightened Economy: An Economic History of Britain, 1700–1850 (New Haven, 2009). For science, see Jack Goldstone, Why Europe? The Rise of the West in World History (New York, 2008) and David Wootton, The Invention of Science: A New History of the Scientific Revolution (London, 2015). For values, see Deirdre N. McCloskey, The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics in an Age of Commerce (Chicago, 2006), Bourgeois Dignity: Why Economics Can’t Explain the Modern World (Chicago, 2011) and Bourgeois Equality: How Ideas, Not Capital or Institutions, Enriched the World (Chicago, 2016).
3. Douglass C. North and Robert Paul Thomas, The Rise of the Western World: A New Economic History (Cambridge, 1973); North, Douglass C., Wallis, John Joseph, and Weingast, Barry R., Violence and Social Orders: A Conceptual Framework for Interpreting Recorded Human History (Cambridge, 2009);Google Scholar Acemoglu, Daron and Robinson, James A., Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty (London, 2012).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
4. Hume, David, “Of Civil Liberty,” in Essays moral, political, and literary, ed. Miller, Eugene F., 2nd ed. (Indianapolis, 1987), 88.Google Scholar
5. See Josiah Child, “A New Discourse of Trade” [1690], available in Henry C. Clark, ed., Commerce, Culture, and Liberty: Readings on Capitalism Before Adam Smith (Indianapolis, 2003), 41.
6. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. Edwin Curley (Indianapolis, 1994 [1651]), 24.5–7, pp. 160–62.
7. Ibid., 21.8, p. 140.
8. Ibid., 13.6ff.
9. Locke, John, “Second Treatise of Civil Government,” in Two Treatises of Government, ed. Laslett, Peter, 2nd ed. (Cambridge, 1970),Google Scholar chap. 2, §13, pp. 275–76.
10. Ibid., chap. 7, §90.
11. Ibid., chap. 2, §14.
12. Ibid., chap. 4, §22.
13. Ibid., chap. 5, §37.
14. Ibid., §42.
15. In a banal sense, of course, every ruler who has ever been compared to a shepherd tending his flock may be seen as advancing the “prosperity” of his people. Most of the authors treated in this essay, however, not necessarily excluding Hobbes, seem to have believed that theirs was a time of systemically expanding prosperity. The emerging concept of “commercial society” does much to capture and articulate this new view.
16. See Weststeijn, Arthur, “From the Passion of Self-Love to the Virtue of Self-Interest: The Republican Morals of the Brothers De la Court,” European Review of History—Revue européenne d’histoire 17, no. 1 (February 2010): 75–92; quote at 80.Google Scholar
17. [Pieter de la Court], The True Interest and Political Maxims of the Republic of Holland (London: John Campbell, Esq, 1746), chap. 9, http://oll.libertyfund.org/titles/85#DeLaCourt_0428_162 (accessed 30 November 2014). See also Weststeijn, Commercial Republicanism in the Dutch Golden Age: The Political Thought of Johan & Pieter de la Court (Leiden, 2012),, 243–44. This translation was based on the 1669 edition.
18. la Court, De, True Interest, http://oll.libertyfund.org/titles/85#DeLaCourt_0428_110 (accessed 30 November 2014).Google Scholar
19. In this interpretation, I follow Weststeijn, Commercial Republicanism, 242.
20. Hundert, E. J., Enlightenment’s Fable: Bernard Mandeville and the Discovery of Society (Cambridge, 1994).Google Scholar
21. See ibid., 23, 31–38, for how “immersed” Mandeville was in this French moraliste literature.
22. Pascal, Pensées, trans. A. J. Krailsheimer (New York, 1966), 118. Pascal is more explicit but also more moralistic in 211: “We have established and developed out of concupiscence admirable rules of polity, ethics, and justice, but at root, the evil root of man, this evil stuff of which we are made is only concealed; it is not pulled up.”
23. Mandeville, Bernard, The Fable of the Bees: or, Private Vices, Publick Benefits, 2 vols., ed. Kaye, F. B. (Oxford, 1924; repr. Liberty Classics, 1988), 2:128.Google Scholar Some scholars see passages such as this as proof of a Hayekian-style theory of spontaneous order at the heart of Mandeville’s economics; others disagree. See, respectively, M. M. Goldsmith, Private Vices, Public Benefits: Bernard Mandeville’s Social and Political Thought (Cambridge, 1985), 61–64, and Hundert, Enlightenment’s Fable, 77–78.
24. See Mandeville, Fable, 1:318, for a typical example.
25. Mandeville, Fable, 1:185.
26. “An Essay on Charity, and Charity-Schools” and “A Search into the Nature of Society,” in ibid., 1:309 and 335, respectively; see also “A Vindication of the Book,” in ibid., 1:390.
27. “The Fable of the Bees, Part Two,” in ibid., 2:156.
28. In a passage clarifying his political views, he writes, “I don’t recommend Wooden Shoes, nor do the Maxims I would introduce require Arbitrary Power in one Person. Liberty and Property I hope may remain secured, and yet the Poor be better employ’d than they are.” See ibid., 1:318.
29. Thomas Gordon, coeditor of Cato’s Letters, also brought out a translation and commentary of Publius Cornelius Tacitus, The Works of Tacitus, in Four Volumes, To which are prefixed, Political Discourses upon that Author (London: T. Woodward and J. Peele, 1737), 2nd ed.; for the quote, see Edward J. Montagu, Reflections on the Rise and Fall of Ancient Republicks. Adapted to the Present State of Great Britain. (London: Rivington, 1759), 145; this work is now available in a version edited and with an introduction by David Womersley (Indianapolis, 2015).
30. William Hazeland, “A View of the Manner in Which Trade and Civil Liberty Support Each Other” [1756], in Clark, ed., Commerce, Culture, and Liberty, 404–16.
31. See Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws, trans. Anne Cohler, Basia Miller, and Harold Stone (Cambridge, 1989), 7.1, 97 and 19.8, 312. Céline Spector argues for the centrality of Mandeville to Montesquieu’s own intellectual enterprise in Montesquieu et l’émergence de l’économie politique (Paris, 2006).
32. For a discussion of the conquest vs. commerce distinction, see Henry C. Clark, “Montesquieu and the Spirit of Modern Commercial Civilization,” in Wealth, Commerce, and Philosophy: Foundational Thinkers and Business Ethics, ed. Eugene Heath and Byron Kaldis (Chicago, forthcoming 2017).
33. Mandeville, Fable, 1:251.
34. Montesquieu, “Réflexions sur la monarchie universelle en Europe,” in Œuvres complètes de Montesquieu, 3 vols., ed. André Masson (Paris, 1950–55), 3:XVIII, 378.
35. Montesquieu, Persian Letters, trans. George R. Healy (Indianapolis, 1964 [1999]), L. 122, p. 205.
36. Montesquieu, My Thoughts, trans. Henry C. Clark (Indianapolis, 2012), #32. In his constitutional thought, some scholars see Montesquieu as an Anglophile liberal, others as a classical republican, and still others as a relativist who is more or less content with his native French monarchy. Respectively, see Pangle, Thomas, Montesquieu’s Philosophy of Liberalism (Chicago, 1973)CrossRefGoogle Scholar and The Theological Basis of Liberal Modernity in Montesquieu’s “Spirit of the Laws” (Chicago, 2010); Mark Hulliung, Montesquieu and the Old Regime (Berkeley, 1976); Krause, Sharon, Liberalism with Honor (Cambridge, Mass., 2002).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
37. Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws, 11.4.
38. Ibid., 11.1–6.
39. Ibid., 5.2–5.3. An aristocratic republic would of course be different.
40. Ibid., 5.6.
41. See Domville’s 4 June 1749 letter in Montesquieu, Œuvres complètes, 3:1235–37.
42. See Montesquieu, My Thoughts, #1960, 595. For a fuller discussion of the place of zero-sum and positive-sum reasoning in the political-economy debates of the period, see Steven Pincus’s essay in this issue.
43. See Montesquieu, Spirit of the Laws, 11.6.
44. Persian Letters, L. 24 and 106, respectively.
45. Montesquieu, Spirit of the Laws, 20.22.
46. Hume, “Of Commerce,” in Essays moral, political and literary, 255.
47. Blewhitt, George, An Enquiry Whether a General Practice of Virtue Tends to the Wealth or Poverty, Benefit or Disadvantage of a People (London: Wilkin, 1725).Google Scholar
48. Interestingly enough, the only time the self-described “citizen of Geneva” cited Mandeville by name, it was to use him as rhetorical ballast for his own theory. Even Mandeville had acknowledged the existence of pity, after all, which Rousseau sees as the basis for a whole raft of social virtues expressly denied in The Fable of the Bees. Still, much of his intellectual enterprise aimed to reject the whole modern consensus that the Dutchman represented. See Jean-Jacques Rousseau, “Discourse on the Origins and the Foundations of Inequality Among Men,” in The Major Political Writings of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, trans. John T. Scott (Chicago, 2012), 83–84.
49. The argument appears for the first time (according to Rousseau) in Jean-François Melon’s 1734 Political Essay on Commerce; see “Dernière réponse de J.-J. Rousseau, de Genève [à M. Bordes],” in J.-J. Rousseau, Œuvres complètes, 3 vols., ed. Bernard Gagnebin and Marcel Raymond (Paris, 1964), 3:95; this edition is hereafter cited as OC.
50. For example, the playwright Palissot had a Rousseauian character crawl on all-fours in his 1760 production Les philosophes. See Palissot de Montenoy, Les Philosophes, comédie en 3 actes (Paris: Duchesne, 1760). And Voltaire’s thank-you note for the Discourse on Inequality began, “I have received your new book against the human race; I thank you for it.” Voltaire to Rousseau, 30 August 1755; a translation is included in Rousseau’s Political Writings, trans. Julia Conaway Bondanella, ed. Alan Ritter and Julia Conaway Bondanella (New York, 1988), 191ff.
51. Rousseau, “Discourse on Political Economy,” in Rousseau’s Political Writings, 63–64.
52. Ibid., 75.
53. Rousseau, Major Political Writings, III.9, 227. Note: this is the only use of the word “prospérité” I have found in The Social Contract.
54. See Rousseau, OC, 3:ccvii–ccviii.
55. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, “Plan for a Constitution for Corsica,” in The Collected Writings of Rousseau, vol. 2, ed. Christopher Kelly (Hanover, N.H., 2005), 142 and 140.
56. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, “Considerations on the Government of Poland and on Its Planned Reformation,” in The Collected Writings of Rousseau, vol. 2, chap. 11, pp. 210–11.
57. Rousseau, “Considerations on Poland,” chap. 3, p. 175.
58. Like Montesquieu, Rousseau believed that population in the modern world, and in modern Europe, had declined steeply since Antiquity, and like many contemporaries, he worried about ways to reverse the trend. For some context, see Carol Blum, Strength in Numbers: Population, Reproduction, and Power in Eighteenth-Century France (Baltimore, 2002).
59. Rousseau, “The Social Contract,” Major Political Writings, III.9, 227.
60. Rousseau, “Considerations on Poland,” chap. 11, p. 214.
61. Ibid., p. 211.
62. Ibid., p. 214; emphasis added.
63. See ibid., pp. 211 and 214 for his support of corvée labor.
64. The ARTFL database contains no hits for Rousseau’s use of the phrase “liberté politique,” which is a little surprising given what a meticulous reader of Montesquieu the Genevan was; on this point, see Rahe, Paul A., Soft Despotism, Democracy’s Drift: Montesquieu, Rousseau, Tocqueville, and the Modern Prospect (New Haven, 2009), 74.Google Scholar
65. Rousseau, “Considerations on Poland,” chap. 3, p. 174.
66. Ibid., p. 176.
67. The first passage appears in ibid., chap. 11, p. 213, the second in “Plan for a Constitution for Corsica,” p. 143.
68. Recent scholarship has done much to uncover this inconspicuous Smith-Rousseau dialogue. See, for example, Force, Pierre, Self-Interest before Adam Smith: A Genealogy of Economic Science (Cambridge, 2003)Google Scholar; Dennis Rasmussen, “Does ‘Bettering Our Condition’ Really Make Us Better Off?” “Adam Smith on Progress and Happiness,” American Political Science Review 100, no. 3 (August 2006): 309–18, and The Problems and Promise of Commercial Society: Adam Smith’s Response to Rousseau (University Park, Pa., 2009).
69. “Consumption,” Smith writes, “is the sole end and purpose of all production; and the interest of the producer ought to be attended to, only so far as it may be necessary for promoting that of the consumer.” Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, ed. R. H. Campbell, A. S. Skinner, and W. B. Todd (Oxford, 1976; repr. Liberty Classics, 1981), IV.viii.49, 660.
70. “The greatness of a state,” he wrote, “and the happiness of its subjects, how independent soever they may be supposed in some respects, are commonly allowed to be inseparable with regard to commerce.” Hume, “Of Commerce,” in Essays moral, political, and literary, 255.
71. Ibid., 260.
72. By Quesnay’s definition, that wealth was ultimately agrarian in nature, unlike the views of either Hume or Smith, which did not favor one sector over another in their accounts of wealth-creation.
73. See Dugald Stewart, “An Account of the Life and Writings of Adam Smith, LL.D.,” ed. I. S. Ross, in Adam Smith, Essays on Philosophical Subjects, ed. W. P. D. Wightman and J. C. Bryce (Oxford, 1980), III.12, 304.
74. For the governmental emphasis of Physiocratic political economy, see Arnault Skornicki, L’Economiste, la cour et la patrie (Paris, 2011), chap. 5.
75. Smith, Wealth of Nations, II.iii.36, 345.
76. Ibid., IV.vii.c.88, 630. For a fuller discussion of the political implications of market reasoning in this period, see Pierre Rosanvallon, Le libéralisme économique (Paris, 1979), esp. chap. 2.
77. Montesquieu, Spirit of the Laws, 11.6.
78. Stewart, “An Account of the Life and Writings of Adam Smith,” IV.25, 322.
79. Smith, Wealth of Nations, III.iii.12, 405, and III.iv.4, 412, for examples. The role of violence in this story is treated in Barry Weingast, “From ‘The Lowest State of Poverty and Barbarism’ to the Opulent Commercial Society: Adam Smith’s Theory of the Political Economics of Development,” manuscript, Stanford University, October 2014.
80. Smith, Wealth of Nations, II.iii.28, 341.
81. See Smith’s letter to the Duke of La Rochefoucauld, 1 November 1785, in Correspondence of Adam Smith, ed. Ernest Campbell Mossner and Ian Simpson Ross (Oxford, 1977; repr. Liberty Classics, 1987), 287. See also Ernest C. Mossner, Adam Smith: The Biographical Approach, David Murray Lecture, University of Glasgow, 1969, 5. For the use of terms like “skepticism” and even “quietism” to characterize his political views, see Donald Winch, Adam Smith’s Politics: An Essay in Historiographical Revision (Cambridge, 1978), 3–4; for his missing politics, see Winch, 6.
82. See D. E. Buchan, “The Bee or Literary Weekly Intelligencer,” 8 June 1791, 165; cited in Winch, Adam Smith’s Politics, 7; but see 42, note, for Buchan’s possible unreliability as a witness.
83. Smith, Wealth of Nations, III.iii.7, 401.
84. “I have never known much good to be done by those who affected to trade for the publick good,” is his famously mordant commentary. See Wealth of Nations, IV.ii.9, 456.
85. See especially Hutcheson, Francis, An Inquiry into the Original of Our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue (London: Darby, 1726),Google Scholar sect. VII; see also Phillipson, Nicholas, Adam Smith: An Enlightened Life (New Haven, 2010), 69.Google Scholar
86. For an especially revealing insight into Hume’s jaundiced view of the relationship between republicanism and liberty, at least late in his life, see his letter to John Millar of Glasgow in The Letters of David Hume, 2 vols., ed. J. Y. T. Grieg (Oxford, 1932), 2:306; cited in Winch, Adam Smith’s Politics, 43.
87. Hume, “Of the Rise and Progress of the Arts and Sciences,” in Essays moral, political, and literary, 115, 124–25.
88. See Winch, Adam Smith’s Politics, 42, for this observation. It is of course true that the atmosphere was more politically turbulent during Millar’s academic career than during Smith’s.
89. Smith, Wealth of Nations, III.i.7, 379.
90. Emma Rothschild, Economic Sentiments: Adam Smith, Condorcet, and the Enlightenment (Cambridge, Mass., 2001), 61.
91. For a short introduction, see R. R. Palmer, Twelve Who Ruled: The Year of the Terror in the French Revolution (Princeton, 1941; 1969), chap. 10, “Dictated Economy.”
92. See Renato Galliani, “La Fortune de Montesquieu en 1789: un sondage,” in R. Galliani and F. Loirette, eds., Études sur Montesquieu (Paris, 1981), 31–47; Norman Hampson, Will and Circumstance: Montesquieu, Rousseau, and the French Revolution (London, 1983); Keith Michael Baker, Inventing the French Revolution: Essays on French Political Culture in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge, 1990), chap. 11.
93. See his speech in the Archives parlementaires de 1787 à 1860, ed. M. J. Mavidal and M. E. Laurent, first series (1787–93), 82 vols. (Paris: Librairie administrative, 1867–1914), 54:45 (2 December 1792).
94. The methodology behind the remarks that follow is very simple, and does not pretend to be exhaustive. Drawing on the marvelous new resource, the French Revolution Digital Archive at Stanford University (http://frda.stanford.edu/en/images ), I have surveyed each use of Adam Smith’s name in a speech contained in the Archives parlementaires, the semiofficial record of activity at the assemblies. It goes without saying that this sounding provides nothing more than a crude introductory access to the use of Smith’s ideas in Revolutionary debates.
95. See, for examples, the Archives parlementaires, 8:648 (15 September 1789), 9:363 and 369 (6 October 1789), 10:139 (20 November 1789), 10:673 (18 December 1789), 10:749 (22 December 1789), 19:228 (25 September 1790), 306 (28 September 1790), 21:172 (1 December 1790), 22:642 (31 January 1791), 25:622 (6 May 1791), 31:205 (22 September 1791), 42:423 (26 April 1792), 53:435 (16 November 1792), 57:31 (13 January 1793), 59:251 (25 February 1793), 72:498 (20 August 1793), 72:505, 74:600 (21 September 1793), 76:29 (4 October 1793). Thus, despite the above-cited revisionist interpretation of Adam Smith’s reputation in England during the 1790s, the situation in France would appear to have been quite different. There, it was the reformist and the economist who was almost invariably cited. The only passage I have found in these records where Smith seems to be appropriated for a “conservative” cause is 32:487 (30 September 1791).
96. France was unable to establish a tolerably stable republic until the 1870s.
97. “The Liberty of the Ancients Compared with that of the Moderns,” Speech Given at the Athénée Royale in Paris [1819], in Benjamin Constant, Political Writings, trans. and ed. Biancamaria Fontana (Cambridge, 1988), 311.
98. Constant, “Ancient and Modern Liberty,” 318. I add emphasis here to remind the reader that it was Montesquieu, ironically, whose Spirit of the Laws did most to encourage the search for a psychological dimension to constitutional or political or social or economic or any other kind of public reality.
99. Ibid., 319.
100. Ibid., 323–36; quote at 323.
101. The passages can be found, respectively, in the following places: “Of Conquest,” in Political Writings, chap. 4, p. 58; “Usurpation,” in Political Writings, chap. 4, p. 98; “On Ancient and Modern Liberty Compared,” Political Writings, 327; “Principes de politique,” chap. 15 in Cours de politique constitutionnel (Paris: Guillaumin, 1872), 1:114.
102. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 2 vols., ed. Eduardo Nolla, trans. James T. Schleifer (Indianapolis, 2012), 2:948, note a; I cite here from the author’s notebooks, but the published text is similar.
103. Ibid., 2:902.
104. See his note in ibid., note c, 2:949.
105. See especially Rahe, Soft Despotism, Democracy’s Drift.
106. For general orientation, see Brewer, John and Porter, Roy, eds., Consumption and the World of Goods (London, 1993);Google Scholar Smith, Woodruff D., Consumption and the Making of Respectability, 1600–1800 (London, 2002);Google Scholar Berg, Maxine, Luxury and Pleasure in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Oxford, 2007);Google Scholar Vries, Jan de, The Industrious Revolution: Consumer Behavior and the Household Economy, 1650 to the Present (Cambridge, 2008).Google Scholar Estimates of per capita GDP also suggest that the Age of Prosperity began in this pre-industrial period of the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, rather than in the Industrial Age of the nineteenth. See Angus Maddison, The World Economy: Historical Statistics (Paris, 2003), table 1C, 58–59, and Stephen Broadberry, “Accounting for the great divergence,” Economic History Working Papers, 184/13, London School of Economics (2013) (http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/54573/).