by Béla Kapossy (Editor), Isaac Nakhimovsky (Editor), Sophus A. Reinert (Editor), Richard Whatmore (Editor)
About the Author
Béla Kapossy is Professor in the Department of History at the University of Lausanne.
About this book
When István Hont died in 2013, the world lost a giant of intellectual history. A leader of the Cambridge School of Political Thought, Hont argued passionately for a global-historical approach to political ideas. To better understand the development of liberalism, he looked not only to the works of great thinkers but also to their reception and use amid revolution and interstate competition. His innovative program of study culminated in the landmark 2005 book Jealousy of Trade, which explores the birth of economic nationalism and other social effects of expanding eighteenth-century markets. Markets, Morals, Politics brings together a celebrated cast of Hont’s contemporaries to assess his influence, ideas, and methods.
Richard Tuck, John Pocock, John Dunn, Raymond Geuss, Gareth Stedman Jones, Michael Sonenscher, John Robertson, Keith Tribe, Pasquale Pasquino, and Peter N. Miller contribute original essays on themes Hont treated with penetrating insight: the politics of commerce, debt, and luxury; the morality of markets; and economic limits on state power. The authors delve into questions about the relationship between states and markets, politics and economics, through examinations of key Enlightenment and pre-Enlightenment figures in context―Hobbes, Rousseau, Spinoza, and many others. The contributors also add depth to Hont’s lifelong, if sometimes veiled, engagement with Marx.
The result is a work of interpretation that does justice to Hont’s influence while developing its own provocative and illuminating arguments. Markets, Morals, Politics will be a valuable companion to readers of Hont and anyone concerned with political economy and the history of ideas.
Brief contents
Introduction 1
1. Marx and Material Culture: Istvan Hont and the History of Scholarship 23
2. Sociability in Sacred Historical Perspective, 1650–1800 53
3. From Rousseau to Kant 82
4. Modern Representative Democracy: Intellectual Genealogy and Drawbacks 111
5. Revision, Reorganization, and Reform: Prussia, 1790–1820 136
6. Liberty, Autonomy, and Republican Historiography: Civic Humanism in Context 161
7. Millennium and Enlightenment: Robert Owen and the Second Coming of the Truth 211
8. Identification and the Politics of Envy 244
9. Commerce, Credit, and Sovereignty: The Nation-State as Historical Critique 265
10. Why We Need a Global History of Political Thought 285
acknowledgments 311
index 313
Length: 336 pages
Publisher: Harvard University Press (March 19, 2018)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0674976339
ISBN-13: 978-0674976337