Accounting for Government: Holland and the Rise of Political Economy in Seventeenth-Century Europe

2009 ◽  
Vol 40 (2) ◽  
pp. 215-238 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jacob Soll
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
The Political ◽  
Industrial Complexes ◽  
General Movement ◽  
Paradigmatic Change ◽  
Double Entry ◽  
Political Economic

In the 1650s, political administrators across Europe began adopting accounting strategies to manage government. Although the method of double-entry book-keeping emerged during the Middle Ages and spread from Italy during the Renaissance, governments were slow to adopt it. Inspired by the Dutch precedent, however, English, French, German, and Russian rulers and ministers looked to accounting to build new military industrial complexes. This general movement represents a paradigmatic change in the language of politics, away from traditional humanist theory toward a technocratic culture that would later evolve into the political-economic movement of the eighteenth century.

Humane Markets

2019 ◽  
pp. 293-315
Author(s):  
James R. Otteson
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Human Dignity ◽  
The Political ◽  
Economic Institutions ◽  
Moral Concern ◽  
Commercial Society ◽  
The Core ◽  
The Poor ◽  
Political Economic

Markets are often criticized for being amoral, if not immoral. The core of the “political economy” that arose in the eighteenth century, however, envisioned the exchanges that take place in commercial society as neither amoral nor immoral but indeed deeply humane. The claim of the early political economists was that transactions in markets fulfilled two separate but related moral mandates: they lead to increasing prosperity, which addressed their primary “economic” concern of raising the estates of the poor; and they model proper relations among people, which addressed their primary “moral” concern of granting a respect to all, including the least among us. They attempted to capture a vision of human dignity within political-economic institutions that enabled people to improve their stations. Their arguments thus did not bracket out judgments of value: they integrated judgments of value into their foundations and built their political economy on that basis.

POLITICAL ECONOMY, THE STATE, AND REVOLUTION IN EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FRANCE

2009 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 425-444
Author(s):  
ANDREW JAINCHILL
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
Social Order ◽  
The Political ◽  
Intellectual Life ◽  
Intellectual Origins ◽  
Political Economic ◽  
The Impact ◽  
The French Revolution

Among the stunning changes in material and intellectual life that transformed eighteenth-century Europe, perhaps none excited as much contemporary consternation as the twin-headed growth of a modern commercial economy and the fiscal–military state. As economies became increasingly based on trade, money, and credit, and states both exploded in size and forged seemingly insoluble ties to the world of finance, intellectuals displayed growing anxiety about just what kind of political, economic, and social order was taking shape before their eyes. Two important new books by Michael Sonenscher and John Shovlin, Before the Deluge: Public Debt, Inequality, and the Intellectual Origins of the French Revolution and The Political Economy of Virtue: Luxury, Patriotism, and the Origins of the French Revolution, tackle these apprehensions and the roles they played in forging French political and economic writings in the second half of the eighteenth century. Both authors also take the further step of demonstrating the impact of the ideas they study on the origins of the French Revolution.

Introduction

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Emily C. Nacol
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
The Political ◽  
Political Subject ◽  
For Profit

This chapter briefly discusses three insights into early modern British engagement with risk: the presence of a distinct conceptual refinement in late seventeenth-century sources; the tight relationship between risk and trust in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century political thought and political economy; and the character of the political subject, which is worked out in the early modern engagement with risk. Beyond these three observations, the chapter also argues that early modern British engagement with risk offers two narratives—views of risk that persist in our own time and shape our orientation toward an unknown future. These include accounts of risk as a threat to security, as well as depictions of risk as an opportunity to be exploited for profit or gain.

Narrating Lives: A Mughal Empress, A French Nabob, A Nationalist Muslim Intellectual

1995 ◽  
Vol 54 (2) ◽  
pp. 474-480 ◽  
Author(s):  
Barbara D. Metcalf
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Indian Subcontinent ◽  
The Political ◽  
Benjamin Franklin ◽  
Malcolm X ◽  
Intellectual Life ◽  
Political Economic ◽  
Political Figure

With some exaggeration, one could claim that these three biographies, despite their disparate subjects—a seventeenth-century aristocratic lady of the Mughal court, an eighteenth-century French adventurer, and a twentieth-century Muslim intellectual and political figure—all tell the same story. In each case, a figure is born (as it happens, outside the Indian subcontinent) in relatively humble circumstances and emerges as a singular figure in some combination of the political, economic, intellectual life of the day. Each account proceeds chronologically, with the life presented as an unfolding, linear story, the fruit of “developments” and “influences,” in which the protagonist independently takes action. These accounts fit, in short, the genre of biography or autobiography known to us Americans from Benjamin Franklin to Malcolm X, of rags to riches—and, typically, lessons to impart (Ohmann 1970). Each is an example of the canonical form of male biography and autobiography that emerged in Europe from the eighteenth century.

scholarly journals Francesca Bregoli, Mediterranean Enlightenment. Livornese Jews, Tuscan Culture, and Eighteenth-Century Reform (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2014)

2015 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Maurizio Tani
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Cultural History ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
The Political ◽  
Stanford University ◽  
History Of ◽  
Political Economic ◽  
The Middle Ages

Tuscany has a long history of Semitic presence within its territory. Phoenicians during the Etruscan times, Jews and Arabs as of the Middle Ages: they all have played a key-role in the political, economic and cultural history of Tuscany.

The Political Economy of Attention

2021 ◽  
Vol 50 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Morten Axel Pedersen ◽  
Kristoffer Albris ◽  
Nick Seaver
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
Online Publication ◽  
The Political ◽  
Annual Review ◽  
Publication Date ◽  
Moral Concern ◽  
Digital Platforms ◽  
Political Economic

Attention has become an issue of intense political, economic, and moral concern over recent years: from the commodification of attention by digital platforms to the alleged loss of the attentional capacities of screen-addicted children (and their parents). While attention has rarely been an explicit focus of anthropological inquiry, it has still played an important if mostly tacit part in many anthropological debates and subfields. Focusing on anthropological scholarship on digital worlds and ritual forms, we review resources for colleagues interested in this burgeoning topic of research and identify potential avenues for an incipient anthropology of attention, which studies how attentional technologies and techniques mold human minds and bodies in more or less intentional ways. Expected final online publication date for the Annual Review of Anthropology, Volume 50 is October 2021. Please see http://www.annualreviews.org/page/journal/pubdates for revised estimates.

“How drie a Cinder this world is”: Dissociation of Sensibility Redux

2017 ◽  
Vol 24 (2) ◽  
pp. 163-186
Author(s):  
R. V. Young
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Figurative Language ◽  
Charles Taylor ◽  
Religious Change ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
General Movement ◽  
Century Poetry ◽  
Classic Essay ◽  
The Impact

Although T.S. Eliot's phrase “dissociation of sensibility,” applied to the changes in poetry during the seventeenth century, made a stir when he introduced it in the review essay “The Metaphysical Poets” in 1921, it draws less attention now, and seems never to have been adequately explained. Since Eliot's claims are, in part, historical, it makes sense to consider the most historically significant changes occurring during the seventeenth century. It is during this period that the Reformation culminates and its effects become permanently established. Several recent studies of the Reformation by Charles Taylor, Brad Gregory, and Carlos M.N. Eire provide clues about how the religious and social cataclysm of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries may have affected the poetic imagination. James Smith's classic essay, “The Metaphysical Poets,” offers a way of analyzing the figurative language of seventeenth-century poetry in order to grasp the impact of the religious change. The investigations by Taylor, Gregory, and Eire into the dynamic of the reforming tendency, beginning in the late Middle Ages, as well as the Scotist and nominalist intellectual underpinnings of the Reformation, prove to be pertinent to Eliot's insight regarding seventeenth-century poetry. The growth of individualism, personal anxiety about religious choice, and materialism portend a general movement towards secularization and influence the way poets see the world. Dissociation of sensibility can thus be understood as a result of the effect of the religious and social dislocations of the Reformation in the realm of poetry.

Social-media-weaponised populism and community development

2020 ◽  
pp. 89-108
Author(s):  
Jacques Boulet
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Political Economy ◽  
Community Development ◽  
Theory And Practice ◽  
Development Theory ◽  
The Political ◽  
Community Life ◽  
Daily Lives ◽  
Economic Background ◽  
Political Economic

This chapter assesses the resurfacing of populism and its much-discussed and documented adoption and enactment by leaders and citizens. More specifically, it discusses reasons for this (re-)emergence and its effects on people's daily lives and their participation in community life against the wider political-economic background, two areas central to much community development theory and practice. The first question posed is: what is going on with and around people — especially their modalities of 'being' and 'relating' — rendering them more 'prone' to being influenced by populisms and become populisms' 'accomplices'? Second, what role does social media play in this imposition/complicity dialectic? Indeed, social media powerfully invades and interpenetrates all levels and processes of the political economy, of people's everyday experiences and their subjective-affective lives, and they infest the mediating institutions operating 'between' the virtual global and the imperceptible here and now. Finally, a third question is posed: what is the effect of such socially mediated populism on communities and on efforts to (re)develop and maintain them? The chapter concludes with some ideas about ways to resist the (combined) assault of populism and social media and restart the project of democracy.

From Geopolitics to Social and Political Struggle

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dan Schiller
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
Structural Changes ◽  
The Political ◽  
Political Struggle ◽  
Economic Relations ◽  
Digital Capitalism ◽  
Accumulation By Dispossession ◽  
Interstate System ◽  
Historical Movement ◽  
Political Economic

This chapter examines some of the larger forces that propelled digital capitalism into what was evidently a fraught future. It first considers how the historical movement of the political economy is shaped both within and beyond a top-down, state-oriented geopolitics before discussing how the onset of the digital depression brought changes to the interstate system, indicative of altering political–economic relations. It then describes attempts by numerous states to multilateralize control of U.S.-centric internet in relation to structural changes in the interstate system and to competing efforts to regenerate the political economy in ways that might capture an outsized share of overall profits for specific units of capital and particular fractions of the capitalist class. It also explains the concept of accumulation by dispossession and concludes with suggestions for resolving the digital depression on terms favorable to capital.

The Political Economy of Charles E. Lindblom

1978 ◽  
Vol 72 (3) ◽  
pp. 1012-1016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Charles W. Anderson
Keyword(s):  
Economic Theory ◽  
Political Economy ◽  
Institutional Design ◽  
The Political ◽  
Economic Systems ◽  
Market Mechanisms ◽  
Social Coordination ◽  
Political Economic ◽  
And Control ◽  
Coordination And Control

The consistent theme in Charles E. Lindblom's work is a vision of political economy as constitutional engineering. Lindblom sees the question of institutional design in terms of a mechanical metaphor in which political economic systems are contrived out of relatively simple components. Politics and Markets compares a broad range of capitalist and socialist systems as a means of evaluating market mechanisms and authority structures as instruments of social coordination and control. Lindblom's argument that the privileged power of the corporation poses a problem for liberal market-oriented societies is logically distinct from his case that the corporation fits “oddly” with democratic theory, and the latter may be the more significant theme for further inquiry in political economic theory.

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