Sophus A. Reinert

Historians have traditionally turned to free trade and laissez faire to explain the development of political economy during the Enlightenment. Reinert argues that economic emulation was the prism through which philosophers, ministers, reformers, and merchants thought about imperialism, economics, industry, and reform in the early modern period.

TRANSLATING EMPIRE

Richard Whatmore

Isaac Nakhimovsky

Bla Kapossy

When Istvn 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 HontÕs 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 contextÑHobbes, Rousseau, Spinoza, and many others. The contributors also add depth to HontÕs lifelong, if sometimes veiled, engagement with Marx. The result is a work of interpretation that does justice to HontÕs 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.

Jealousy of Trade and the History of Political Thought

Markets, Morals, Politics

Translating Empire

The Italian Enlightenment, no less than the Scottish, was central to the emergence of political economy and creation of market societies. Sophus Reinert turns to Milan in the late 1700s to recover early socialists' preoccupations with the often lethal tension among states, markets, and human welfare, and the policies these ideas informed.

Sophus A. Reinert

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