Theology and the Rise of Political Economy in Britain in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries

2014 ◽  
pp. 93-112
Author(s):  
A. M. C. Waterman
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Economic Thought ◽  
Christian Theology ◽  
Intellectual Context ◽  
Eighteenth And Nineteenth Centuries ◽  
Christian Society

In the eighteenth century, and for much of the nineteenth, Britain was a Christian society. In such a society, ideas are inevitably conceived within a theological matrix; and to be generally acceptable they must be consonant with prevailing theological orthodoxy. In eighteenth-century England and Scotland, there is hardly a trace of any dissonance between economic thought and Christian theology. But at the very end of that century there appeared T. R. Malthus’s anonymous Essay on the Principle of Population, which almost immediately created a conflict between theology and what was becoming known as “political economy,” a conflict which in some respects has continued to the present. This chapter surveys the characteristics of Christian society that provided the intellectual context of economic thought in those centuries and provides an account of the relation between economic thought and theology in the eighteenth century, and the story of what happened after Malthus.

Freedom and Perfection: German Debates on the State in the Eighteenth Century

2009 ◽  
Vol 42 (4) ◽  
pp. 1003-1023 ◽  
Author(s):  
Douglas Moggach
Keyword(s):  
Political Philosophy ◽  
Political Economy ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
The State ◽  
Political Activity ◽  
Christian Wolff ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
Intellectual Context ◽  
Political Intervention

Abstract.This paper explores eighteenth-century German debates on the relation of freedom and perfection in the course of which Kant works out his juridical theory. It contrasts the perfectionist ideas of political activity in Christian Wolff and Karl von Dalberg (a historically important but neglected figure), with Fichte's program inThe Closed Commercial State(1800), distinguishing logics of political intervention. Examining insufficiently recognized aspects of the intellectual context for Kant's distinction between happiness, right and virtue, the paper demonstrates Fichte's (problematic) application of Kantian ideas of freedom to political economy and contests current interpretations of the politically disengaged character or attenuated modernism of German political philosophy in the Enlightenment.Résumé.Ce texte étudie le rapport entre liberté et perfection dans la pensée allemande du dix-huitième siècle. C'est dans le contexte de ces débats que Kant élabore sa propre théorie juridique. En examinant les fondements théoriques de l'intervention politique, le texte fait une distinction entre le perfectionnisme éthique de Christian Wolff et de Karl von Dalberg (personnage historiquement important mais peu étudié), et le programme d'inspiration kantienne proposé par Fichte dans sonÉtat commercial fermé(1800).L'objectif du texte est de reconstruire le contexte intellectuel de la distinction kantienne entre bonheur, droit et vertu, et de démontrer l'usage problématique qu'en fait Fichte dans le domaine de l'économie politique. Le texte remet en question des interprétations récentes qui dévalorisent l'engagement politique et le modernisme des Lumières allemandes.

Gender and the Guild Order: The Garment Trades in Eighteenth-Century Paris

1994 ◽  
Vol 54 (4) ◽  
pp. 768-793 ◽  
Author(s):  
Judith G. Coffin
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Economic Thought ◽  
Female Labor ◽  
The Social ◽  
Economic Forces

This article concerns female labor, guild organization, and eighteenth-century political economy. The first half of the article analyzes the changing relations between the major men's and women's guilds in the Parisian clothing trades, the norms that governed those relations, and the social and economic forces that reshaped them. The second half focuses on pre-revolutionary petitions from the guilds, which illustrate dramatically the different ways in which guildsmen and women interpreted the rules of gender in the corporate order. The guildswomen's distinctive perspective reflected their history, experience, and changing currents of economic thought.

The Ideological Alliance of Political Economy and Christian Theology, 1798–1833

1983 ◽  
Vol 34 (2) ◽  
pp. 231-244 ◽  
Author(s):  
A. M. C. Waterman
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Political Culture ◽  
Social Attitudes ◽  
Christian Theology ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Church

It has been maintained by E. R. Norman that:…the social attitudes of the Church have derived from the surrounding intellectual and political culture, and not, as Christians themselves always seem to assume, from theological learning. The theologians have always managed to reinterpret their sources in ways which have somehow made their version of Christianity correspond almost exactly to the values of their class and generation. Thus theological scholarship justified the structural social obligations of the eighteenth century world; thus it provided a Christian basis for Political Economy… [my italics]

Nikolay Sieber in the history of prerevolutionary Russian economic thought

2018 ◽  
pp. 95-110
Author(s):  
L. D. Shirokorad
Keyword(s):  
Economic Theory ◽  
Political Economy ◽  
Organic Synthesis ◽  
Marginal Utility ◽  
Economic Thought ◽  
History Of ◽  
Three Stages

This article shows how representatives of various theoretical currents in economics at different times in history interpreted the efforts of Nikolay Sieber in defending and developing Marxian economic theory and assessed his legacy and role in forming the Marxist school in Russian political economy. The article defines three stages in this process: publication of Sieber’s work dedicated to the analysis of the first volume of Marx’s Das Kapital and criticism of it by Russian opponents of Marxian economic theory; assessment of Sieber’s work by the narodniks, “Legal Marxists”, Georgiy Plekhanov, and Vladimir Lenin; the decline in interest in Sieber in light of the growing tendency towards an “organic synthesis” of the theory of marginal utility and the Marxist social viewpoint.

Essays of a “comparatively progressive” economist (On the 150th birth anniversary of Vladimir Geleznoff)

2019 ◽  
pp. 135-145
Author(s):  
Viktor A. Popov
Keyword(s):  
Economic Theory ◽  
Political Economy ◽  
Economic Thought ◽  
History Of Economic Thought ◽  
The Political ◽  
Russian History ◽  
Working Ability ◽  
Intellectual Inquiry ◽  
History Of

Deep comprehension of the advanced economic theory, the talent of lecturer enforced by the outstanding working ability forwarded Vladimir Geleznoff scarcely at the end of his thirties to prepare the publication of “The essays of the political economy” (1898). The subsequent publishing success (8 editions in Russia, the 1918­-year edition in Germany) sufficiently demonstrates that Geleznoff well succeded in meeting the intellectual inquiry of the cross­road epoch of the Russian history and by that taking the worthful place in the history of economic thought in Russia. Being an acknowledged historian of science V. Geleznoff was the first and up to now one of the few to demonstrate the worldwide community of economists the theoretically saturated view of Russian economic thought in its most fruitful period (end of XIX — first quarter of XX century).

Nicolas Gueudeville's Enlightenment Utopia

Moreana ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 55 (Number 209) (1) ◽  
pp. 24-60
Author(s):  
Russ Leo
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
New World ◽  
Economic Life ◽  
Political Anthropology ◽  
French Translation ◽  
Natural Religion ◽  
Original Length ◽  
English Law

Nicolas Gueudeville's 1715 French translation of Utopia is often dismissed as a “belle infidèle,” an elegant but unfaithful work of translation. Gueudeville does indeed expand the text to nearly twice its original length. But he presents Utopia as a contribution to emergent debates on tolerance, natural religion, and political anthropology, directly addressing the concerns of many early advocates of the ideas we associate with Enlightenment. In this sense, it is not as much an “unfaithful” presentation of More's project as it is an attempt to introduce Utopia to eighteenth-century francophone audiences—readers for whom theses on political economy and natural religion were much more salient than More's own preoccupations with rhetoric and English law. This paper introduces Gueudeville and his oeuvre, paying particular attention to his revisions to Louis-Armand de Lom d'Arce, Baron de Lahontan's 1703 Nouveaux Voyages dans l'Amérique Septentrionale. Published in 1705, Gueudeville's “revised, corrected, & augmented” version of Lahontan's Voyages foregrounds the rational and natural religion of the Huron as well as their constitutive aversion to property, to concepts of “mine” and “yours.” Gueudeville's revised version of Lahontan's Voyages purports to be an anthropological investigation as well as a study of New World political economy; it looks forward, moreover, to his edition of Utopia, framing More's work as a comparable study of political economy and anthropology. Gueudeville, in other words, renders More's Utopia legible to Enlightenment audiences, depicting Utopia not in terms of impossibility and irony but rather as a study of natural religion and attendant forms of political, devotional, and economic life. Gueudeville's edition of Utopia even proved controversial due, in part, to his insistence on the rationality as well as the possibility of Utopia.

Lord Dacre and the Politics of the Scottish Enlightenment

2005 ◽  
Vol 84 (2) ◽  
pp. 202-220 ◽  
Author(s):  
Colin Kidd
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Cultural History ◽  
Economic Transformation ◽  
Scottish Enlightenment ◽  
North East ◽  
The Social ◽  
Romantic Movement ◽  
Scottish History

Hugh Trevor-Roper (Lord Dacre) made several iconoclastic interventions in the field of Scottish history. These earned him a notoriety in Scottish circles which, while not undeserved, has led to the reductive dismissal of Trevor-Roper's ideas, particularly his controversial interpretation of the Scottish Enlightenment, as the product of Scotophobia. In their indignation Scottish historians have missed the wider issues which prompted Trevor-Roper's investigation of the Scottish Enlightenment as a fascinating case study in European cultural history. Notably, Trevor-Roper used the example of Scotland to challenge Weberian-inspired notions of Puritan progressivism, arguing instead that the Arminian culture of north-east Scotland had played a disproportionate role in the rise of the Scottish Enlightenment. Indeed, working on the assumption that the essence of Enlightenment was its assault on clerical bigotry, Trevor-Roper sought the roots of the Scottish Enlightenment in Jacobitism, the counter-cultural alternative to post-1690 Scotland's Calvinist Kirk establishment. Though easily misconstrued as a dogmatic conservative, Trevor-Roper flirted with Marxisant sociology, not least in his account of the social underpinnings of the Scottish Enlightenment. Trevor-Roper argued that it was the rapidity of eighteenth-century Scotland's social and economic transformation which had produced in one generation a remarkable body of political economy conceptualising social change, and in the next a romantic movement whose powers of nostalgic enchantment were felt across the breadth of Europe.

Poverty and Prosperity: Political Economics in Eighteenth-Century Ireland

2020 ◽  
Vol 88 ◽  
pp. 73-96
Author(s):  
Marc A. Hight
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Political Institutions ◽  
Full Employment ◽  
Well Being ◽  
Common Interest ◽  
Early Step ◽  
Political Situation ◽  
Irish People ◽  
Economic Thinking

AbstractI draw attention to a group of thinkers in Ireland in the first half of the eighteenth century that made significant contributions to the philosophy of political economy. Loosely organized around the Dublin Philosophical Society founded in 1731, these individuals employed a similar set of assumptions and shared a common interest in the well-being of the Irish people. I focus on Samuel Madden (1686-1765), Arthur Dobbs (1689-1765), and Thomas Prior (1680–1751) and argue for two main theses. First, these Irish thinkers shared a number of commonalities with the English mercantilist thinkers of the eighteenth century, and to the degree that they did, their proposals to aid Ireland and reduce poverty were largely doomed to failure. Second, these Irish thinkers also importantly diverged from typical eighteenth-century mercantilist thinking in several ways. These modifications to mercantilism resulted in large part from the unusual political situation of Ireland (as a nation politically dependent on England) and helped orient their economic thinking along more institutional lines. In particular, the emphasis of the Irish on full employment and on the modification of social as well as political institutions is an early step forward in making political economy more sophisticated.

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