The History of Shareholder Primacy, from Adam Smith through the Rise of Financialism

2019 ◽  
pp. 73-85
Author(s):  
Judd F. Sneirson
Keyword(s):  
Adam Smith ◽  
Shareholder Primacy ◽  
History Of

The Early History of Financial Economics, 1478–1776. By Geoffrey Poitras. Cheltenham and Northampton: Edward Elgar, 2000. Pp. x, 522.

2002 ◽  
Vol 62 (1) ◽  
pp. 268-269
Author(s):  
Larry Neal
Keyword(s):  
Economic History ◽  
Financial Analysis ◽  
Adam Smith ◽  
Economic Thought ◽  
Financial History ◽  
X 522 ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Difference ◽  
Wealth Of Nations ◽  
Simon Fraser University

Economic historians usually have to explain to their economist colleagues the difference between economic history, which focuses on facts, and history of economic thought, which focuses on ideas. Our colleagues in finance departments, typically fascinated by episodes in financial history treated by economic historians, are bound to be disappointed in the lack of attention given to the development of ideas in finance by historians of economic thought. Geoffrey Poitras, a professor of finance at Simon Fraser University, makes a valiant effort to remedy these oversights in his collection of vignettes that highlight the sophistication of financial instruments and analysts of financial markets well before the time of Adam Smith. Starting in 1478 with the publication of the Treviso Arithmetic, a typical textbook of commercial arithmetic for Italian merchants, and ending with brief snippets from the Wealth of Nations, Poitras treats the reader to a fascinating potpourri of excerpts from various manuals, brief biographies of pioneers in financial analysis, and historical discursions on foreign-exchange and stock markets.

Moral canals: trust and social capital in the work of Hume, Smith and Genovesi

2000 ◽  
Vol 16 (1) ◽  
pp. 21-45 ◽  
Author(s):  
Luigino Bruni ◽  
Robert Sugden
Keyword(s):  
Social Capital ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Market Economy ◽  
David Hume ◽  
Adam Smith ◽  
Social Institution ◽  
Economic Life ◽  
Economic Agents ◽  
Trading Partners ◽  
History Of

It is a truism that a market economy cannot function without trust. We must be able to rely on other people to respect our property rights, and on our trading partners to keep their promises. The theory of economics is incomplete unless it can explain why economic agents often trust one another, and why that trust is often repaid. There is a long history of work in economics and philosophy which tries to explain the kinds of reasoning that people use when they engage in practices of trust: this work develops theories of trust. A related tradition in economics, sociology and political science investigates the kinds of social institution that reproduce whatever habits, dispositions or modes of reasoning are involved in acts of trust: this work develops theories of social capital. A recurring question in these literatures is whether a society which organizes its economic life through markets is capable of reproducing the trust on which those markets depend. In this paper, we look at these themes in relation to the writings of three eighteenth-century philosopher-economists: David Hume, Adam Smith, and Antonio Genovesi.

Passion's Fictions from Shakespeare to Richardson

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Benedict S. Robinson
Keyword(s):  
Adam Smith ◽  
Francis Bacon ◽  
Theoretical Knowledge ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Literary Works ◽  
Critical Moment ◽  
Intimate Relation ◽  
History Of ◽  
Social Scenes

Passion’s Fictions traces the intimate links between literature and the sciences of soul and mind from the age of Shakespeare to the rise of the novel. It chronicles the emergence of new sciences of the passions between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries out of and in some ways against a received “science of the soul,” and it argues that this history was shaped by rhetoric, which contained the most extensively particularized discourse on the passions, offering principles for moving and affecting the passions of others in concrete social scenes. This rhetoric of the passions centered on narrative as the instrument of a non-theoretical knowledge of the passions in their particularity, predicated on an account of passion as an intimate relation between an empassioned mind and an empassioning world: rhetoric offers a kind of externalist psychology, formalized in the relation of passion to action and underwriting an account of narrative as a means of both moving passion and knowing it. This book describes the psychology of the passions before the discipline of psychology, tracing the influence of rhetoric on theories of the passions from Francis Bacon to Adam Smith and using that history to read literary works by Shakespeare, Milton, Haywood, Richardson, and others. Narrative offers a means of knowing and moving the passions by tracing them to the events and objects that generate them; the history of narrative practices is thus a key part of the history of the psychology of the passions at a critical moment in its development.

Hume and Smith on Natural Religion

Philosophy ◽  
2015 ◽  
Vol 91 (3) ◽  
pp. 345-360 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gordon Graham
Keyword(s):  
Social Psychology ◽  
Adam Smith ◽  
Psychology Of Religion ◽  
Philosophical Theology ◽  
Scottish Enlightenment ◽  
Contemporary Philosophy ◽  
Social Significance ◽  
Natural Religion ◽  
The Social ◽  
History Of

AbstractThe prominence of David Hume's Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion in contemporary philosophy of religion has led it to overshadow his other short work, The Natural History of Religion, and thus obscure the fact that the social psychology of religion was in many ways of greater interest and more widely debated among the philosophers of the Scottish Enlightenment than philosophical theology. This paper examines and compares the social psychology of religion advanced by Hume and Adam Smith. It argues that Hume's account of the psychological sources and social significance of religion is less satisfactory than Smith's.

scholarly journals A Few Remarks on Adam Smith’s Dissertation (1761)

1977 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 59-67 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jan Noordegraaf
Keyword(s):  
Adam Smith ◽  
French Translation ◽  
Moral Sentiments ◽  
The Third ◽  
History Of Linguistics ◽  
History Of ◽  
Theory Of Moral Sentiments

Summary In 1761 Adam Smith (1723–90) published his Dissertation on the Origin of Languages. Erroneously scholars have thought that this essay appeared as a supplement to the second edition of Smith’s book The Theory of Moral Sentiments of the same year; in fact it was only added to the third edition of that work (1767). Against Coseriu’s opinion that Adam Smith must be considered as a pioneer of the typology of language, one can put forward that Smith’s ideas on the typology of language are very similar to those of the French Abbé Gabriel Girard (1677–1748), whose influence is admitted by Smith himself. On another point, it turns out that before 1809, the year in which J. Manget published a French translation of Smith’s Dissertation, already three other translations into French of the same work had appeared. First-hand inspection of texts appears desirable in the writing of the history of linguistics.

Epilogue

2019 ◽  
pp. 232-248
Author(s):  
James M. Vaughn
Keyword(s):  
West Indies ◽  
Atlantic World ◽  
Adam Smith ◽  
Political History ◽  
Critical Examination ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
Ancient Regime ◽  
History Of ◽  
East And West ◽  
Wealth Of Nations

This chapter describes The Abbé Raynal's A Philosophical and Political History of the Settlements and Trade of the Europeans in the East and West Indies, one of the Enlightenment treatises that blazed like a comet across the night sky of the ancient régime. Widely translated and published, twenty official and fifty illegal editions produced between 1770 and 1796. While the Philosophical History was a bestseller throughout the Atlantic world, it was particularly widely discussed and debated in Britain and its empire. The work was the most detailed and critical examination to date of European overseas expansion, and it was avidly read in Britain—where it most famously influenced Adam Smith while he was in the final stages of composing An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations.

scholarly journals Garrett Barden and Tim Murphy. Law and Justice in Community (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010)

2011 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Guðmundur Heiðar Frímannsson
Keyword(s):  
Political Philosophy ◽  
Adam Smith ◽  
Thomas Aquinas ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Deep Roots ◽  
Oxford University ◽  
History Of ◽  
Law And Justice ◽  
Field Of Inquiry ◽  
Oxford University Press

Jurisprudence is a lively field of inquiry and law and justice are among its most important subjects. They are not exclusive to jurisprudence but are also inquired into in ethics and political philosophy. The book under review is an extensive inquiry into law and justice from the point of view of jurisprudence but it is jurisprudence that has deep roots in the history of the discipline. The authors use ideas from Aristotle, Gaius, Justinian, Thomas Aquinas, Adam Smith, Hobbes and from various law books from the Code of Hammurabi onwards. One way of understanding the book is to see the authors as reworking an old tradition that has not been prominent in modern jurisprudence. This approach leads to surprising conclusions from a modern point of view that are both radical and conventional.

scholarly journals Emotions vocabulary and the reconceptualisation of emotions in Ann Radcliffe’s “The Italian, or the Confessional of the Black Penitents”

2019 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 40-58
Author(s):  
Elena D. Andonova-Kalapsazova
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
David Hume ◽  
Adam Smith ◽  
Emotional Experience ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Emotional Experiences ◽  
Critical Studies ◽  
Francis Hutcheson ◽  
History Of

The article undertakes the analysis of Ann Radcliffe’s novel The Italian, or the Confessional of the Black Penitents (1797) from a history of literary emotions perspective which, I argue, yields insights into the attitudes towards emotions embedded in Radcliffe’s works. A reading of the novel from such a perspective also complements the critical studies of the artist’s engaging with the eighteenth-century cult of sensibility. The novel is read as a text that registered but also participated in the dissemination of an epistemology of emotional experience articulated in the idiom of eighteenth-century moral philosophers – Francis Hutcheson, David Hume and Adam Smith - at the same time as it retained some of the older, theology-based conceptions of passions and affections. The dynamic in which the two frameworks for understanding the emotions exist in the novel is explored through a close reading of the vocabulary in which Radcliffe rendered the emotional experiences of her fictional characters. In this reading it is the passions which are found to have been invested with a variety of meanings and attributed a range of moral valences that most noticeably foreground the movement from a generally negative towards a more complex appreciation of powerful emotions.

‘Of the Expence of Defence’: What Has Changed Since Adam Smith?

2017 ◽  
Vol 23 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Jurgen Brauer
Keyword(s):  
Adam Smith ◽  
Economic Thought ◽  
History Of Economic Thought ◽  
War And Peace ◽  
Chronological Order ◽  
Military Security ◽  
History Of

AbstractThis essay selectively reviews the history of economic thought on war and peace, starting with Adam Smith. Today, Smith’s trickle of thoughts has become a broad marshland. In this marshland, however, discrete currents are apparent – some stronger, some weaker – which this essay identifies, in rough chronological order, as war, defense, conflict, military, security, and peace economics. As these terms often are used interchangeably, one purpose of the essay is to more clearly delineate these intellectual currents and differentiate them from each other. By building canals in the marshlands as it were, the aim is to help all flows of contributions become stronger.

Taming ‘the Tyranny of Priests’: Hume’s Advocacy of Religious Establishments

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ryu Susato
Keyword(s):  
Adam Smith ◽  
Religious Policy ◽  
Practical Solution ◽  
History Of ◽  
Religious Establishment

For Hume, how to cope with the possible eruption of religious and political frenzies is one of the most crucial issues. He criticises any types of false religion throughout his writings, while supporting religious establishments as a way to tame ‘the tyranny of priests’ or the priestcraft. This chapter traces the origins of Hume’s essay ‘Of Superstition and Enthusiasm’ and demonstrates that his criticism of the clergy and his arguments concerning religious establishments were much influenced by Mandeville and Shaftesbury’s discussions. Although Hume’s endorsement of religious establishment in his History of England has been cited as evidence for the view that he became more conservative with his advancing age, this chapter provides a more coherent and consistent understanding of his criticism of the clergy and practical solution for religious strife. This chapter also delineates how Hume’s ironical defence of Erastianism differs from the position of Voltaire and other thinkers, and how Adam Smith sophisticated Humean countermeasures against false religion, despite their alleged and seeming dissimilarities in religious policy.

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