8 John Locke’s Defense of Commercial Society

2017 ◽  
pp. 157-178
Keyword(s):  
Commercial Society

Adam Ferguson and the Idea of Civil Society

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Craig Smith
Keyword(s):  
Civil Society ◽  
Moral Philosophy ◽  
David Hume ◽  
Adam Smith ◽  
Scottish Enlightenment ◽  
Commercial Society ◽  
University Of Edinburgh ◽  
English Speaking ◽  
English Speaking World ◽  
The University

Adam Ferguson was a Professor of Moral Philosophy at the University of Edinburgh and a leading member of the Scottish Enlightenment. A friend of David Hume and Adam Smith, Ferguson was among the leading exponents of the Scottish Enlightenment’s attempts to develop a science of man and was among the first in the English speaking world to make use of the terms civilization, civil society, and political science. This book challenges many of the prevailing assumptions about Ferguson’s thinking. It explores how Ferguson sought to create a methodology for moral science that combined empirically based social theory with normative moralising with a view to supporting the virtuous education of the British elite. The Ferguson that emerges is far from the stereotyped image of a nostalgic republican sceptical about modernity, and instead is one much closer to the mainstream Scottish Enlightenment’s defence of eighteenth century British commercial society.

Shipped but Not Sold

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nancy Um
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Indian Ocean ◽  
Arabian Peninsula ◽  
Social Meaning ◽  
The West ◽  
Commercial Society ◽  
The Indian Ocean

In the early decades of the eighteenth century, Yemen hosted a lively community of merchants that came to the southern Arabian Peninsula from the east and the west, seeking, among other products, coffee, at a time when this new social habit was on the rise. Shipped but not Sold argues that many of the diverse goods that these merchants carried, bought, and sold at the port, also played ceremonial, social, and utilitarian roles in this intensely commercial society that was oriented toward the Indian Ocean. Including sumptuous foreign textiles and robes, Arabian horses, porcelain vessels, spices, aromatics, and Yemeni coffee, these items were offered, displayed, exchanged, consumed, or utilized by major merchants in a number of socially exclusive practices that affirmed their identity and status, but also sustained the livelihood of their business ventures. These traders invested these objects with layers of social meaning through a number of repetitive ceremonial exercises and observances, in addition to their everyday protocols of the trade. This study looks at what happened to these local and imported commodities that were diverted from the marketplace to be used for a set of directives that were seemingly quite non-transactional.

A Cheerful Philosophical Life

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eric Schliesser
Keyword(s):  
David Hume ◽  
Commercial Society ◽  
Philosophical Life ◽  
The Dead ◽  
Argument Proceeds

This chapter uses Adam Smith’s obituary of David Hume, “Letter to Strahan,” published jointly with Hume’s brief autobiography, to explore the rewards and purpose of doing philosophy in a commercial society. Smith thinks that philosophers can enjoy the rewards of friendship in this life and immortality after death if they are benefactors to humanity. For Smith, friendship among equals is the most valuable goal. The argument proceeds by way of an analysis of how Hume and Smith understand magnanimity and vanity in light of the evidence surrounding Smith’s description of Hume’s deathbed scene reading of Lucian’s Dialogues of the Dead.

Double-edged development, 1767–

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Toye
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Global Climate Change ◽  
Global Climate ◽  
Negative Externalities ◽  
Commercial Society ◽  
Albert Hirschman ◽  
Economic Production ◽  
Production Growth ◽  
Friedrich Engels ◽  
Authentic Community

Many writers on development are extremists, either venerating it as the source of economic cornucopia and human fulfilment or denouncing it as bringing loss of authentic community and culture, greater exploitation, and the curtailment of liberty. A minority, however, have taken a more nuanced and ambivalent position—that, like the curate’s egg, development is good in parts. For example, Adam Ferguson acknowledged the benefits of commercial society but warned against the infinite expansion of human wants, increasing inequality, and the loss of community cohesion. Similar emphasis on the mixed results of development arises in the work of J. S. Mill, Friedrich Engels, and Joseph Schumpeter (‘creative destruction’). In more recent times Albert Hirschman pointed out the negative externalities such as environmental pollution caused by economic production growth—but man-made global climate change is a newer version. All change creates both winners and losers and this fuels the extreme evaluation of it.

無為 – On the Eurasian Roots of the Laissez-Faire Doctrine

2019 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Christian Gerlach
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Diffusion Process ◽  
Crystallization Process ◽  
Low Countries ◽  
Commercial Society ◽  
The Core ◽  
Wu Wei ◽  
Master Model ◽  
Laissez Faire

Abstract This paper focuses on the diffusion of 無為/ wu-wei (an ancient Chinese concept of political economy) throughout Europe, between 1648 and 1848. It argues that at the core of this diffusion process were three significant developments; first, the importation and active transmission of wu-wei by the Low Countries during the seventeenth century. It is revealed that the details of Chinese expertise entered Europe via the textual diffusion of Jesuit texts and the visual diffusion of millions of so-called minben-images during the ceramic boom of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Thus, the hypothesis is advanced that the diffusion of wu-wei, co-evolved with the inner-European laissez-faire principle, the Libaniusian model. In the second part, it is shown that the intellectual foundation of Europe’s first economic school, Physiocracy, is a direct replica of the imported Chinese economic, agrarian craftsmanship of wu-wei; subsequently, it is denied that the indigenous European Libaniusian ideology can be considered the intellectual master-model of Physiocracy and his founder Quesnay. Finally, we argue that Switzerland can be identified as the first European paradigm state of wu-wei. The crystallization process of wu-wei inside Europe ultimately ended with the economic-political reorganization of the newly formed Eidgenossenschaft in 1848. The Swiss succeeded in institutionally transforming traditional Chinese agrarian wu-wei into the modern version of European “commercial wu-wei”. In due course, this alpine paradigm enabled the endogenous Libaniusian model to verify and reflect upon its theory of commercial society. Additionally, this third focus also demonstrates that the later development of Europe’s laissez-faire doctrine has to be seen as a Eurasian co-production – without importing China’s wu-wei, Europe’s pro-commercial ideology might never have matured.

scholarly journals PHILOSOPHY AND POLITICAL AGENCY IN THE WRITINGS OF FREDERICK II OF PRUSSIA

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-24
Author(s):  
AVI LIFSCHITZ
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Great Power ◽  
Political Agency ◽  
State Service ◽  
Commercial Society ◽  
Window Dressing ◽  
Close Analysis ◽  
The Status ◽  
Enlightenment Philosophy

Abstract Frederick II's writings have conventionally been viewed either as political tools or as means of public self-fashioning – part of his campaign to raise the status of Prussia from middling principality to great power. This article, by contrast, argues that Frederick's works must also be taken seriously on their own terms, and interpreted against the background of Enlightenment philosophy. Frederick's notions of kingship and state service were not governed mostly by a principle of pure morality or ‘humanitarianism’, as argued influentially by Friedrich Meinecke. On the contrary, the king's views were part and parcel of an eighteenth-century vision of modern kingship in commercial society, based on the benign pursuit of self-love and luxury. A close analysis of Frederick's writings demonstrates that authorial labour was integral to his political agency, publicly placing constraints on what could be perceived as legitimate conduct, rather than mere intellectual window-dressing or an Enlightened pastime in irresolvable tension with his politics.

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