Politics in Commercial Society: Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Adam Smith

161 Pages·2015·0.95 MB·English

by  Istvan Hont

Politics in Commercial Society

Politics in Commercial Society
Jean- Jacques Rousseau and Adam Smith
(cid:2)
ISTVAN HONT
edited by Béla Kapossy and Michael Sonenscher
Cambridge, Massachusetts
London, En gland
2015
Copyright © 2015 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
First printing
Library of Congress Cataloging- in-P ublication Data is available
from the Library of Congress.
ISBN 978-0-674-96770-0 (hardcover)
Contents
Acknowledgments vii
Editors’ Introduction ix
A Note on the Text xxi
1. Commercial Sociability: The Jean-J acques Rousseau Problem 1
2. Commercial Sociability: The Adam Smith Problem 25
3. Histories of Government: Which Comes First, Judges or the Law? 48
4. Histories of Government: Republics, In e qual ity, and Revolution? 68
5. Po liti cal Economy: Markets, House holds, and Invisible Hands 89
6. Po liti cal Economy: Nationalism, Emulation, and War 111
Index 133

Ac know ledg ments
P
aul Sagar provided important help during the early
phase of preparing this book for publication by comparing various
electronic versions of the text, identifying and supplying references to
quotations, and correcting numerous typos and grammatical errors.
The editors would like to express their gratitude to him for his judi-
cious contributions. Many thanks also to John Robertson, Richard Tuck,
John Dunn, Keith Tribe, Isaac Nakhimovsky, Richard Whatmore, and
Anna Hont for many helpful comments. Istvan Hont’s friend and ed-
itor at Harvard University Press, Michael Aronson, encouraged the
project from the outset and steered it through its various stages. Had
Istvan Hont been allowed to see the publication of his Carlyle Lectures,
he would have dedicated them to his wife, Anna. This book thus rightly
belongs to her.
vii

Editors’ Introduction
I
stvan Hont died in the spring of 2013, leaving a
large number of unpublished works. The most wide ranging of these
was also his last. This was the text of the six Carlyle Lectures on the
thought of Adam Smith and Jean- Jacques Rousseau that he gave at Ox-
ford University in the Hilary Term of 2009.1 Hearing these lectures was
intellectually exhilarating. Istvan Hont was a fi ne lecturer who did not
need to prepare a detailed script to be able to talk fl uently and precisely
about the assortment of complicated subjects that he often addressed.
But the care that he took to prepare these lectures for publication is
both a sign of the signifi cance that he attached to their content and an
indication of the richness of the content itself. These are lectures that
are best read, not heard, because they contain too much to absorb, even
in six concentrated periods. They are the outcome—or distillation—of
over thirty years of work, and it shows. They are, certainly, lectures
about the thought of Adam Smith and Jean- Jacques Rousseau and,
more specifi cally, about the real, though still largely unrecognized, ana-
lytical proximity of their respective theoretical concerns. But they are
also, above all, lectures about modern politics—t he politics of nation-
states, global commerce, social ine qual ity, international competitiveness,
1. The lectures were originally entitled “Visions of Politics in Commercial Society:
Comparing Jean- Jacques Rousseau and Adam Smith.” Hont drew on this text for the Schiller
and the Benedict Lectures, which he gave in Jena and Boston, respectively, in 2010.
ix