john locke institute global essay

All essayists must register here by 11:59PM BST on 31 May 2024.

Enter your email address below to:

Register (if this is your first time here)

or Login (if you have already registered).

• [email protected]
• (650) 338-8226

Cupertino, CA

• Our Philosophy
• Our Results
• News, Media, and Press
• Common Application
• College Application Essay Editing
• Extracurricular Planning
• Academic Guidance
• Summer Programs
• Interview Preparation

Middle School

• Pre-High School Consultation
• Boarding School Admissions

College Admissions

• Academic and Extracurricular Profile Evaluation
• Senior Editor College Application Program
• Summer Program Applications
• Private Consulting Program
• Transfer Admissions
• UC Transfer Admissions
• Ivy League Transfer Admissions

Graduate Admissions

• Graduate School Admissions
• MBA Admissions

Private Tutoring

• SAT/ACT Tutoring
• AP Exam Tutoring
• Olympiad Training

Research Programs

• Science Research Program
• Humanities Competitions
• Passion Project Program
• Ad Hoc Consulting
• Athletic Recruitment
• National Universities Rankings
• Liberal Arts Colleges Rankings
• Public Schools Rankings

Acceptance Rates

• University Acceptance Rates
• Transfer Acceptance Rates
• Supplemental Essays
• College Admissions Data
• Chances Calculator
• GPA Calculator

National Universities

• College Acceptance Rates
• College Overall Acceptance Rates
• College Regular Acceptance Rates
• College Early Acceptance Rates
• Ivy League Acceptance Rates
• Ivy League Overall Acceptance Rates
• Ivy League Regular Acceptance Rates
• Ivy League Early Acceptance Rates

Public Schools

• Public Schools Acceptance Rates
• Public Schools Overall Acceptance Rates
• Public Schools Regular Acceptance Rates
• Public Schools Early Acceptance Rates

Liberal Arts

• Liberal Arts Colleges Acceptance Rates
• Liberal Arts Colleges Overall Acceptance Rates
• Liberal Arts Colleges Regular Acceptance Rates
• Liberal Arts Colleges Early Acceptance Rates

John Locke Institute Essay Competition: All You Need to Know

By Eric Eng

The philosopher John Locke left a big mark with his ideas. His work has inspired people to think about how we’re governed, our freedoms, and what role the state should play. The John Locke Institute Essay Competition keeps his ideas alive by inviting young minds to think about how his ideas relate to today’s world.

Let’s talk about the John Locke Institute Essay Competition. We’ll give you an overview of the rules and share some helpful tips to craft a winning essay. This comprehensive guide will help you make your essay submission shine.

What Is the John Locke Institute Essay Competition?

The John Locke Institute Essay Competition—also called the John Locke Institute’s Global Essay Prize—is a yearly event hosted by the John Locke Institute , an organization passionate about encouraging young people to excel academically and enjoy learning. Named after the famous English philosopher John Locke, it aims to honor his legacy by inspiring young students to think deeply and critically.

Students from anywhere in the world can enter by writing an essay on topics like politics , economics , philosophy , and history . You can pick from a wide range of topics for your essay, so you can write about what you’re really interested in and show off how curious you are. A group of experts will read all the essays and pick winners based on how original, well thought out, and clear they are.

If you win, you’ll get a scholarship and your work will get published on the John Locke Institute’s website, which is a big deal for your academic record.

What Are the John Locke Institute Essay Competition’s Prizes?

If you win in any subject category or the Junior category of the John Locke Institute Essay Competition, you’ll get a US$2000 scholarship. This scholarship can be used for any program offered by the John Locke Institute, and your winning essay will be published on the Institute’s website.

Plus, if you’re chosen as the overall best essay writer, you’ll become an honorary John Locke Institute Junior Fellow. This includes a US$10,000 scholarship for participating in the Institute’s summer schools or visiting scholars programs.

The prize-giving ceremonies take place in London, where you’ll have the chance to meet judges and faculty members. And whether you win a prize or not, if you’re short-listed, you’ll receive an eCertificate to recognize your achievement.

What Are the John Locke Institute Essay Competition’s Guidelines?

If you’re thinking about joining the John Locke Institute Essay Competition, it’s important to know the rules. Here’s a handy guide to get you started:

Eligibility

Students from any country and school can take part. There are two levels: one for high schoolers aged 15 to 18, and the Junior Prize for middle schoolers aged 14 and under.

There are seven categories to choose from: Philosophy, Politics, Economics, History, Psychology, Theology, and Law. Each category has its own set of questions (listed in the next section).

Essay format

Your essay should only answer one question from your chosen category. It should be no more than 2000 words, not counting diagrams, tables, bibliography, or authorship declaration. Don’t include footnotes, but you can have endnotes and a bibliography.

Your essay needs to be in PDF format and follow the filename format: FirstName-LastName-Category-QuestionNumber.pdf. Example: John-Locke-Economics-1.pdf.

Registration starts on April 1, 2024, and ends on May 31, 2024. Essays must be submitted by June 30, 2024.

You’ll find out if you’re short-listed by July 31, 2024. The academic conference is scheduled for September 20-22, 2024, and the awards night is on September 21, 2024.

Other requirements

There’s no submission fee. It’s free for everyone.

You’ll also need to provide the email address of an academic referee who knows your academic work well. They can be a teacher or another adult who’s not related to you. The institute will email them to verify that your essay is your own work.

If you have any questions, you can email [email protected] . Don’t forget to read through these guidelines carefully before submitting your essay.

John Locke Institute Essay Competition: Topics

Now that you’re familiar with the contest guidelines, it’s time to choose a topic for your essay . Here are the topics you can choose from, organized by category and question number. Remember to use the category and question number in titling the file you will submit:

• Q1. Do we have any good reasons to trust our moral intuition?
• Q2. Do girls have a (moral) right to compete in sporting contests that exclude boys?
• Q3. Should I be held responsible for what I believe?
• Q1. Is there such a thing as too much democracy?
• Q2. Is peace in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip possible?
• Q3. When is compliance complicity?
• Q1. What is the optimal global population?
• Q2. Accurate news reporting is a public good. Does it follow that news agencies should be funded from taxation?
• Q3. Do successful business people benefit others when making their money, when spending it, both, or neither?
• Q1. Why was sustained economic growth so rare before the later 18th century and why did this change?
• Q2. Has music ever significantly changed the course of history?
• Q3. Why do civilisations collapse? Is our civilisation in danger?
• Q1. When, if ever, should a company be permitted to refuse to do business with a person because of that person’s public statements?
• Q2. In the last five years British police have arrested several thousand people for things they posted on social media. Is the UK becoming a police state?
• Q3. Your parents say that 11pm is your bedtime. But they don’t punish you if you don’t go to bed by 11pm. Is 11pm really your bedtime?
• Q1. According to a study by researchers at four British universities, for each 15-point increase in IQ, the likelihood of getting married increases by around 35% for a man but decreases by around 58% for a woman. Why?
• ​Q2. There is an unprecedented epidemic of depression and anxiety among young people. Can we fix this? How?
• Q3. What is the difference between a psychiatric illness and a character flaw?
• Q1. “I am not religious, but I am spiritual.” What could the speaker mean by “spiritual”?
• Q2. Is it reasonable to thank God for protection from some natural harm if He is responsible for causing the harm?
• Q3. Does God reward those who believe in him? If so, why?

Junior Prize

• Q1. Does winning a free and fair election automatically confer a mandate for governing?
• Q2. Has the anti-racism movement reduced racism?
• Q3. Is there life after death?
• Q4. How did it happen that governments came to own and run most high schools, while leaving food production to private enterprise ?
• Q5. When will advancing technology make most of us unemployable? What should we do about this?
• Q6. Should we trust fourteen-year-olds to make decisions about their own bodies?

John Locke Institute Essay Competition: Writing Tips

The contest website states: “The John Locke Institute encourages young people to cultivate the characteristics that turn good students into great writers: independent thought, depth of knowledge, clear reasoning, critical analysis, and persuasive style .”

Let’s zoom in on the five main things they’re after:

1. Independent thought

Independent thought means coming up with your own ideas that challenge the status quo or offer unique insights. Don’t just analyze existing literature. Try to bring new perspectives or suggest innovative solutions to complex problems.

For example, in the Philosophy category, instead of just discussing whether girls should be allowed to compete in sports that exclude boys, you could explore deeper ethical principles. This might involve thinking about fairness and equal opportunity, or looking at how gender segregation in sports affects society.

2. Depth of knowledge

Having a deep understanding is super important for nailing the John Locke Institute Essay Competition. Know the key concepts, theories, and historical contexts of your topic. This could also mean checking out different views on historical events, analyzing primary sources, or considering other theories. You should be able to analyze information effectively, making connections and spotting patterns that deepen your understanding.

In the History category, for example, if you’re writing about the fall of civilizations, it’s not enough to just list events. You need to dig into why it happened, like economic pressures or cultural changes.

3. Clear reasoning

It’s essential to think logically when writing your essays. This means laying out your arguments in a way that makes sense, so each point flows smoothly into the next.

To do this well, you’ll want to avoid common mistakes like using emotional appeals instead of solid reasoning. If you’re debating whether news agencies should be funded by taxes, you’d need to make your case using economic principles and real-world evidence.

Another important aspect of clear reasoning is addressing counterarguments. Acknowledging and responding to opposing views shows that you understand the complexity of the issue. This not only makes your argument stronger but also demonstrates respect for different perspectives. By presenting a well-rounded argument, you can make a compelling case for your position in the competition

4. Critical analysis

Thinking critically means going beyond just summarizing facts. You need to analyze and interpret data, arguments, and evidence to come up with a thoughtful conclusion.

To do this effectively, you can’t just focus on your own viewpoint. You also need to think about other perspectives and respond to them. This shows that you’re open to different ideas and can think critically. For instance, when talking about the ideal global population, you should consider what environmentalists, economists, and policymakers might think, and then integrate those views into your analysis.

Another important part of critical analysis is choosing your sources carefully. Make sure you’re using reliable, up-to-date sources to back up your arguments. Avoid using biased or outdated information. By carefully evaluating your sources and selecting the most relevant and reliable ones, you can make your argument stronger and show that you’ve done thorough research.

5. Persuasive style

In any writing competition , having a persuasive writing style is key. You need to be able to convince the judges of your ideas and arguments. If you’re debating whether a company should be allowed to turn away business based on public statements, you’d need to make a strong, well-supported argument. This could involve citing legal cases, analyzing examples, and providing clear explanations to back up your point.

To make your essay even more persuasive, try using rhetorical devices like ethos, pathos, and logos. Ethos means showing why you’re a credible source, pathos means appealing to the judges’ emotions, and logos means using logic and reason. Using these devices can make your argument stronger and more compelling.

It’s also important to think about your tone and voice. You want to sound confident but also open-minded. Acknowledge any potential counterarguments or limitations to your argument, and respond to them respectfully. Strike the right balance in your tone, and you can make sure your essay is persuasive and engaging to the judges.

John Locke Institute Essay Competition: Sample Winning Works

Another sure way of standing out in the John Locke Institute Essay Competition is to read and study past winning works. Here are a few 1st placers and let’s see what we can learn from them:

1. Hosai Kishida – 1st place, Philosophy Category, 2023

Question: Is tax theft?

Summary: The essay says that taxation is like stealing, even though some people think it’s okay because we agree to it in the social contract. But the author argues that no one would really agree to give up their money to the government if they had a choice, because governments don’t always do a good job of protecting our rights and are often influenced by people who just want to make money. In the end, the author says that because taxation isn’t something we agree to, it’s basically stealing from us.

Analysis and tips

In the winning essay, Kishida used several smart writing tricks to argue against taxation. First off, they made sure to define important terms, like theft and rational consent, right at the start. This helped lay the groundwork for their argument and made sure readers were on the same page. For example, they defined theft as taking someone’s stuff without their okay, setting things up to argue that taxation is a type of theft.

The essay was also well-organized, with each point building on the last. This made for a clear and convincing argument. They started by talking about rational consent and how it relates to state power, then moved on to critique Kant’s ideas about the state, and finished up by discussing why some people think taxation is okay. This logical progression made it easy for readers to follow along.

Kishida also used rhetorical techniques, like logos and ethos, to make their argument stronger. They used logos by giving logical explanations and examples to back up their points. They also used ethos by mentioning famous philosophers like Locke, Kant, and Friedman, which made their argument seem more credible.

To make their argument even stronger, Kishida used real examples and evidence. They talked about bad things that governments have done in the past and argued that not everyone values the goods and services that governments provide equally, which weakens the case for taxation.

Lastly, Kishida kept things respectful and reasonable. Even though they were making a controversial argument, they stayed calm and used logic and evidence to back up their points, instead of using angry or rude language. This helped them keep their credibility with the audience.

2. Joonyoung Heo – 1st place, Junior Category, 2021

Question: Should the law ever prevent people from freely making self-harming decisions? If so, what should and shouldn’t be forbidden — and according to which principles?

Summary: In the essay, the author talks about why it’s not cool for the government to make laws that try to protect people from themselves, which is called legal paternalism. The main idea is that while it might make sense for the government to step in and make laws that protect people (like seatbelt laws), it’s not okay when those laws stop people from making choices that only affect themselves. The author thinks this principle is strong because it respects individual choice, even when the government doesn’t think it’s the best choice.

The winning essay shows how to write a great essay for the John Locke Institute Essay Competition. First, Heo starts by clearly explaining important terms and ideas. This makes sure everyone knows what they’re talking about. For example, they explain legal paternalism and the harm principle right at the start.

Next, the essay is put together in a logical way. Each point builds on the last. This makes the argument strong and easy to follow. The author also uses real examples and evidence to back up their points. They talk about things like Michael Bloomberg’s soda ban and the recent change in Germany’s laws about assisted suicide to support what they’re saying.

Another smart move is how the author thinks about and answers arguments against their own. They show they really know their stuff by considering other viewpoints and responding to them in a smart way. Finally, the author keeps a cool and respectful tone throughout the essay. This helps them stay believable and makes their argument even more convincing.

Joining the John Locke Institute Essay Competition is a great chance to tackle some big philosophical and ethical questions, while also sharpening your critical thinking and writing skills . You’ll get to dive into topics that are not just interesting, but also really relevant to what’s going on in the world today.

So, it’s not just about winning a prize—it’s about growing intellectually, opening up new perspectives, and becoming part of a community of people who love exploring the big ideas that shape our lives.

Who can join the John Locke Institute Essay Competition?

Any student from any country and school can join in. High schoolers aged 15 to 18 can compete in the regular categories, while the Junior Prize is for middle schoolers aged 14 and under.

Can you submit more than one entry to the John Locke Institute Essay Competition?

Yes. Feel free to submit as many essays as you’d like in any or all categories.

Does the John Locke Institute Essay Competition have an entry fee?

The good news is that there’s no entry fee. However, if you miss the regular deadline, there’s a 20.00 USD fee for late submissions.

What is the John Locke Institute?

The John Locke Institute is an educational organization that’s all about encouraging independent thinking, critical thought , and clear reasoning among young people. They run the annual Essay Competition to get students thinking about important philosophical and ethical questions.

Who was John Locke?

John Locke was a 17th-century philosopher and physician, known as one of the most influential Enlightenment thinkers. His thoughts on liberty, property, and the social contract had a big impact on modern political thought.

Want to assess your chances of admission? Take our FREE chances calculator today!

Why College Admissions Isn’t Perfect

US News Rankings

The Personal Statement: The Holy Grail of College Admissions

The Modern Day 4.0 and 1600 SAT Score Student Is No Longer Impressive

The Competitive Nature of College Admissions for Asian Americans

The College Application

Our Comprehensive Approach

Ivy League Schools

How Early Should You Prepare for College?

Featured in US News & World Report Best Colleges Publication

Congratulations to AdmissionSight Students and their Acceptances!

College Rejection

College Rankings

College Consultants Could Make A Difference

College Admissions Scandal and Higher Education

Top 10 Georgetown University Degrees

Is It Possible to Get a 5.0 GPA? Insights and Tips

The 7 Best Product and Industrial Design Schools in the US

Everything You Need to Know About the IB Grading Scale

The 7 Best Colleges for Figure Skating

Understanding Restrictive Early Action at Harvard

How to Get into Harvard: Admission Requirements and Tips

Carnegie Mellon University: Weighing the Pros and Cons

The Best Colleges for Pre-Med

Top 5 Princeton Majors: A Quick Guide

How Many People Apply to Stanford: Impact of Legacy Preferences on Admission

Top 10 Unique Classes at Brown University

Yale’s Hidden World: How Many Secret Societies Exist?

Discover the Best Law Schools in the US This 2024

Is Georgetown University a Good School? Insights and Tips

Fun facts about princeton university: discover why it’s one of america’s top universities.

What Is the Best Ivy League School For You? A Quick Guide

Leave a comment cancel reply.

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Save my name, email, and website in this browser for the next time I comment.

Recent Articles

Is It Possible to Get...

The 7 Best Product and...

Everything You Need to Know...

The 7 Best Colleges for...

Understanding Restrictive Early Action at...

How to Get into Harvard:...

Carnegie Mellon University: Weighing the...

Top 5 Princeton Majors: A...

How Many People Apply to...

Top 10 Unique Classes at...

Sign up now to receive insights on how to navigate the college admissions process..

Admissions Counseling

• Academic & Extracurricular Profile Evaluation

Copyright © AdmissionSight 2024

Privacy Policy - Terms and Conditions

• myPortledge

NS > Academics

Portledgeclassesoct22_414 1.

Athletics-min

Community Life

Community life-min.

Alumni-mind

About Panel

Portledge in the Now.

Celebrating Joshua L. '27 for Outstanding Achievement in the John Locke Institute 2023 Global Essay Prize

Latest news

List of 3 news stories..

Portledge Varsity Girls Soccer Claims Fourth PSAA Championship

IB Student's Quest at Jones Beach Energy and Nature Center

Become an Integral Part of Our Community.

Get In Touch

• Private Hire
• Public Events
• Music Events
• Sports Centre
• Study Courses

• Why Sherborne?
• Headmaster's Welcome
• Location and Maps
• Virtual Tour
• Sherborne Schools Group
• Sherborne Preparatory School
• Sherborne Girls Partnership
• Policies and Inspection Reports
• Job Vacancies
• The Old Shirburnian Society (OSS)
• Gifts & Souvenirs
• How to Apply- Registration
• Make an Enquiry
• Visit Sherborne School
• Sixth Form Applicants
• Sherborne Schools Overseas Visits
• Scholarships and Bursaries
• School Shop and Uniform
• Frequently Asked Questions
• Matrons Conference 2024
• Transport and Travel

Academic Aims

• Specialist Higher Education
• Overseas Higher Education
• Old Shirburnian Society & Sherborne Connect
• Weekly Higher Education & Careers Bulletin
• Apprenticeships & degree-apprenticeships
• Old Shirburnians in the Spotlight
• Academic Results
• Departments
• Enrichment and Societies
• Macnaghten Library
• Support and Resources

Boarding at Sherborne

• Abbey House
• Harper House
• School House
• Wallace House
• Weekends and Social Programme
• Pastoral Care
• Food at Sherborne
• Equality, Diversity and Inclusion
• Mental Health
• Teen Tips Hub
• Medical Care
• Co-Curricular Aims
• Clubs & Activities
• Combined Cadet Force
• Outdoor Education & Duke of Edinburgh's Award
• Socials & Trips
• Music at Sherborne
• Music Diary
• Sport at Sherborne
• Sports Centre Development
• Match Day Information
• Cross Country
• Fraser Henderson
• Jack Howden
• Richard Keen
• Ryan Buckley
• Chris Weale
• Outdoor Education
• Societies & Clubs
• Community Outreach and Charities
• Publications
• Record of Achievement
• School Calendar
• Starred Weekends
• Lunchtime Recitals
• Fixtures & Results
• Holiday Camps for Children
• Courses for Adults
• Collaborate Webinars
• Mack Rutherford - Sets New Guinness World Record
• Ruth Strauss Foundation Cricket Week 2024
• Foundation Trustees
• Donor Updates and Reports
• Sherborne Foundation Projects
• Completed Projects
• Legacy Society
• Legacy Stories
• Make a Gift
• Contact the Foundation
• Commemoration

follow the @sherborne story

2023 john locke institute global essay competition.

We are delighted to share the news that Hussain A and Bruno A-N were both selected as finalists in the 2023 John Locke Institute Global Essay Competition. Only the highest quality essays were shortlisted for a prize. The two boys were invited to Oxford to celebrate their achievement, and to participate in an academic programme with contestants from around the world.

Hussain comments "John Locke is definitely one of the most prestigious essay competitions around, and I am very honoured to be in the finals".

You may also be interested in...

• Faculty and Staff Directory
• Archmere Academy History
• Board of Trustees
• The History of The Patio
• Mission and Heritage
• From the Head of School's Desk
• Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion
• Parent Clubs
• Facility Rentals
• Meet the Interview Team
• Inquire Online
• Shadow Days
• Affording Archmere
• Transportation
• Postgraduate Year
• Global Studies Program
• College Counseling
• College Counseling Blog
• Planning Your College Search
• College Profile
• For College Representatives
• Campus Ministry
• Clubs & Organizations
• Community Service
• School Counseling
• Helena Raskob Arts Institute
• Performing Arts Center
• Ways To Give
• Preserving Our History
• Planned Giving
• Alumni Council Elections
• Sports Hall of Fame
• AuksConnect
• Physicians Society
• Golf Outing
• Multi-Cultural Alumni Collective
• Media Gallery
• Varsity Shop

Alex Chen '23 Wins Third Prize in Global Essay Competition

• Alex Chen '23

Admissions Process

Events & Tours

Tuition and Fees

International Students

Finalist in the 2023 John Locke Institute Global Essay Competition in Law

Sugyeong Hwang, our Grade 11 student, has been named a finalist in the Law category of the 2023 John Locke Institute Global Essay Competition.

The John Locke Essay Competition, named after the 17th century empiricist philosopher and father of liberalism, is organized by the John Locke Institute. This prestigious English-language essay competition is co-sponsored by the University of Oxford and Princeton University in the United States. This year's John Locke Institute Essay Competition received a record number of essays, and Sugyeong's essay was selected as one of the top five finalists after the first and second round of judging.

Her essay delved into the ongoing AI ethics debate by asking the question, "If submitting an AI-generated essay is against the rules of an essay contest, how is it different from a typical attempted theft?.” It discusses AI-generated essays using the main issues: the difference between contemplating and attempting, and whether the act is theft. The essay distinguishes between contemplating a crime and attempting it, arguing that contemplation without actual action does not constitute a crime, and that "it is not a legal offense to consider submitting an AI-generated essay without taking actual action."

The essay looks at the legal elements of theft and concludes that submitting an AI-generated essay is not theft. The essay delves into the complex issue of ownership, arguing that the author of the AI-generated essay is the legal owner and therefore the theft standard cannot be applied. This essay focuses on interpreting the John Locke Institute's regulations to define plagiarism, contractual misconduct, and the use of AI as a form of fraud. The essay's analysis links the use of AI to fraud, drawing parallels to the UK's 2006 Fraud Act.

Sugyeong's essay subtly explores the difference between submitting an AI-generated essay and attempted theft. As a finalist, Sugyeong's thought-provoking analysis contributes depth to the ongoing debate on AI ethics at academic conferences.

As a finalist, Sugyeong was invited to an award ceremony. Beginning with a dinner at the University of Oxford dining hall on the evening of the 15th, followed by an exclusive, invitation-only conference at Oxford Town Hall on September 16th, the event featured a series of lectures and seminars. These sessions were facilitated by professors from Oxford and Cambridge universities, each possessing specialized expertise in this year's essay question. Attendees also had the opportunity to meet Jamie Wight, Chair of the judging panel, and Robin Connor, Dean of the Faculty, along with Martin Cox, Director of the John Locke Institute. Unfortunately, Sugyeong regretfully was not able to attend due to prior school commitments.

We want to congratulate Sugyeong on this significant achievement and applaud her for all the hard work and dedication to academic excellence!

• Coronavirus
• Covid-19 In-depth
• Navigate Bermuda
• RG Fantasy League
• Classifieds
• Drive For Change
• Terms of Service

BHS students win honours in global essay competition

Sienna Spurling learnt about embryonic stem cell research in biology class at the Bermuda High School.

The 14-year-old was intrigued by the controversy. Embryonic stem cells are the building blocks of the body and can become any kind of cell. Scientists want to use them to research a range of diseases but harvesting them kills the embryo.

“There is a global debate with so many different views political, religious, and scientific,” she said. “It is very similar to the abortion debate in that there are opposing pro-life and pro-choice camps.”

Two thousand words on the topic won her a distinction in the prestigious John Locke Institute 2023 Global Essay Competition , based in Oxford, England.

Her classmate, Joy Yammine, also received a distinction in the Under-15 category; 13-year-old Aditi Varwandkar was shortlisted.

Each year 19,000 students from around the world enter the competition; 100 are shortlisted. Three winners are chosen; the top 15 per cent receive distinctions.

Essays were judged on the writer’s understanding of the relevant material, the use of evidence, quality of argumentation, originality, structure, writing style and persuasive force.

The contest was named for the English philosopher John Locke and asks students 18 and under to ponder questions such as why John Locke is considered the father of liberalism; why safety is more important than fun; and if you had $10 billion, how would you use it to make the world better.

Sienna and Joy wrote in response to the question, what is something important that people are often wrong about?

Joy took a philosophical angle, making her essay about happiness.

“It is something I have been interested in for a while,” she said. “My essay was about how people pursue happiness. Often happiness is looked at as a destination, when it is really a journey. It is not a tangible feeling. You do not know if you have reached happiness.”

The 14-year-old looked at the correlation between money and happiness.

“Beyond the point where all your basic needs are met and you are comfortable with food and shelter, there is no correlation with happiness,” she said. “Money does not make you any more happy.

“In my conclusion, I said that if you want to pursue happiness over a long period of time, you first need to find fulfilment, and contentment.”

Aditi tackled the question what, if anything, do parents owe their children?

“My take on it was that a parent owes their child the best life possible and the tools to succeed in life,” she said.

The teenager discussed central things that children need, such as food, water, clothing, and love. She felt they also needed practice for the real world and tools such as education.

“All children deserve a parent but not all parents deserve a child,” Aditi said. “It’s just about making sure that you’re in the position where you can give your child that better life.”

Their prize was a weekend seminar at Oxford University and admission to a prizegiving reception and gala dinner there.

The girls were scheduled to be in England for the weekend of September 16, but Hurricane Lee intervened, brushing past Bermuda with high waves and power cuts.

“Our flights were pushed back,” said Sienna. “Joy and I arrived a day late.”

That meant they missed the gala dinner and workshops arranged for the Saturday morning.

“At least we got to go to most of the seminars and the main award ceremony on Saturday evening at the Sheldonian Theatre,” Joy said. “That was really great.”

The awards ceremony was very formal.

“They don’t make you walk across the stage to receive your certificate [but] they call your name,” Sienna said. “It is very exciting to see so many people from around the world.”

It was her second time attending after she was shortlisted last year for an essay on taxes.

“We were told we were in the room where students take exams,” Sienna said. “There was a giant clock on the wall. The instructor told us that if we went to Oxford this would be one of the most stressful places for us.”

Seminar topics covered everything from essay writing, to tips on the United Kingdom university application process, to application to Oxford and Cambridge. The winning students also shared their essays.

“Getting into Oxford or Cambridge is not my main goal but that was very interesting,” Sienna said. “There were lots of people at the awards ceremony. It was good that BHS could be represented.”

Students took part in the competition with the help of BHS global politics and history teacher Amy Dingley-Jones.

“I’ve directed students to the John Locke essay prize for the last eight or nine years while working in different countries,” she said.

She added that the competition was a great opportunity for students to explore subjects they were interested in.

“They have to cut it down and structure it in a way that is readable but also different to the other thousands of entries,” Ms Dingley-Jones said. “They also have to give references. It is really impressive that they have been not only shortlisted but received distinctions, as well.”

Reading and writing about embryonic stem cell research cemented Sienna’s fascination with science. “I might go into biology or medicine,” she said.

Joy would like to take courses in psychology. “As a career, I might go into medicine or dentistry,” she said.

Meanwhile, Aditi was also considering psychology, or law.

• For more information on the John Locke Institute Global Essay Competition see www.johnlockeinstitute.com/essay-competition

You must be Registered or Signed in to post comment or to vote.

• Electronic Edition
• Registration
• Privacy Policy

• Undergraduate
• Short Courses
• Online Courses
• Masters/Postgraduate
• Postdoctoral
• Study in Africa
• Study in Asia
• Study in Australia
• Study in Europe
• Study in USA
• Fellowships
• Internships
• Volunteering
• OD Live Series
• Young Person of the Month
• Success Stories
• General Tips
• ODIC 2023 Application
• ODIC Judges
• ODIC 2023 Winners
• ODIC 2022 Winners
• ODIC 2021 Winners
• ODIC 2019 Winners
• ODIC 2018 Winners
• ODIC 2017 Winners
• ODIC 2016 Winners
• Australia and Oceania

John Locke Institute Global Essay Prize 2024

Deadline: May 31, 2024

Applications are open for John Locke Institute Global Essay Prize 2024 . The John Locke Institute encourages young people to cultivate the characteristics that turn good students into great writers: independent thought, depth of knowledge, clear reasoning, critical analysis and persuasive style. The Essay Competition invites students to explore a wide range of challenging and interesting questions beyond the confines of the school curriculum.

Entering an essay in the competition can build knowledge and refine skills of argumentation. It also gives students the chance to have their work assessed by experts. All of the essay prizes are judged by a panel of senior academics drawn from leading universities including Oxford and Princeton, under the leadership of the Chairman of Examiners, former Cambridge philosopher, Dr Jamie Whyte. The judges will choose their favourite essay from each of seven subject categories – Philosophy, Politics, Economics, History, Psychology, Theology and Law – and then select the winner of the Grand Prize for the best entry in any subject. There is also a separate prize awarded for the best essay in the junior category, for under 15s.

• There is a prize for the best essay in each category. The prize for each winner of a subject category, and the winner of the Junior category, is a scholarship worth US$2,000 towards the cost of attending any John Locke Institute programme, and the essays will be published on the Institute’s website. Prize-giving ceremonies will take place in London, at which winners and runners-up will be able to meet some of the judges and other faculty members of the John Locke Institute. Family, friends, and teachers are also welcome.
• The candidate who submits the best essay overall will be awarded an honorary John Locke Institute Junior Fellowship, which comes with a US$10,000 scholarship to attend one or more of JLI’s summer schools and/or visiting scholars programmes.
• All short-listed candidates, including prize-winners, will be able to download eCertificates that acknowledge their achievement. If you win First, Second or Third Prize, and you travel to London for the ceremony, you will receive a signed certificate.

Eligibility

• Open to students from any country.
• Candidates must be eighteen years old, or younger, on that date. (Candidates for the Junior Prize must be fourteen years old, or younger, on that date.)
• Each essay must address only one of the questions in your chosen subject category, and must not exceed 2000 words (not counting diagrams, tables of data, endnotes, bibliography or authorship declaration).

Application

Click here to apply

For more information, visit Global Essay Prize .

Jahmel Brown is a youth leader, advocate, and opportunity connector from Jamaica, which is located in the Caribbean. He believes in the power of young people through shaping them with life-changing opportunities.

Related Posts

Call for applications: centres for innovation and entrepreneurship south africa (up to r700,000), dart documentary film fellowship 2025 (funded), call for applications: youth advisory board member of au-eu youth voices lab – power of the collective.

Type above and press Enter to search. Press Esc to cancel.

• Search Menu
• Sign in through your institution
• Conflict, Security, and Defence
• East Asia and Pacific
• Energy and Environment
• Global Health and Development
• International History
• International Governance, Law, and Ethics
• International Relations Theory
• Middle East and North Africa
• Political Economy and Economics
• Russia and Eurasia
• Sub-Saharan Africa
• Advance Articles
• Editor's Choice
• Special Issues
• Virtual Issues
• Reading Lists
• Archive Collections
• Book Reviews
• Author Guidelines
• Submission Site
• Open Access
• Self-Archiving Policy
• About International Affairs
• About Chatham House
• Editorial Board
• Advertising & Corporate Services
• Journals Career Network
• Journals on Oxford Academic
• Books on Oxford Academic

Article Contents

Liberal internationalism and world order, the era of american liberal hegemony, crises and transformations, conclusions.

• < Previous

The end of liberal international order?

• Article contents
• Figures & tables
• Supplementary Data

G. John Ikenberry, The end of liberal international order?, International Affairs , Volume 94, Issue 1, January 2018, Pages 7–23, https://doi.org/10.1093/ia/iix241

• Permissions Icon Permissions

These are not happy times for liberal internationalists. No one can be sure how deep the crisis of liberal internationalism runs. However, in what follows, I argue that despite its troubles, liberal internationalism still has a future. The nature of the crisis is surprising. The threats to liberal internationalism were expected to come from rising non-western states seeking to undermine or overturn the postwar order. In the face of hostile, revisionist states, the United States and Europe were expected to stand shoulder to shoulder to protect the gains from 70 years of cooperation. But, in fact, liberal internationalism is more deeply threatened by developments within the West itself. The centrist and progressive coalitions that lay behind the postwar liberal order have weakened. Liberal democracy itself appears fragile and polarized, vulnerable to far right populism and backlash politics. In recent decades, the working and middle classes in advanced industrial democracies—the original constituencies and beneficiaries of an open and cooperative international order—have faced rising economic inequality and stagnation. Within the West, liberal internationalism is increasingly seen, not as a source of stability and solidarity among like-minded states, but as a global playing field for the wealthy and influential. Liberal internationalism has lost its connection to the pursuit of social and economic advancement within western countries.

For seven decades the world has been dominated by a western liberal order. After the Second World War, the United States and its partners built a multifaceted and sprawling international order, organized around economic openness, multilateral institutions, security cooperation and democratic solidarity. Along the way, the United States became the ‘first citizen’ of this order, providing hegemonic leadership—anchoring the alliances, stabilizing the world economy, fostering cooperation and championing ‘free world’ values. Western Europe and Japan emerged as key partners, tying their security and economic fortunes to this extended liberal order. After the end of the Cold War, this order spread outwards. Countries in east Asia, eastern Europe and Latin America made democratic transitions and became integrated into the world economy. As the postwar order expanded, so too did its governance institutions. NATO expanded, the WTO was launched and the G20 took centre stage. Looking at the world at the end of the twentieth century, one could be excused for thinking that history was moving in a progressive and liberal internationalist direction.

Today, this liberal international order is in crisis. For the first time since the 1930s, the United States has elected a president who is actively hostile to liberal internationalism. Trade, alliances, international law, multilateralism, environment, torture and human rights—on all these issues, President Trump has made statements that, if acted upon, would effectively bring to an end America's role as leader of the liberal world order. Simultaneously, Britain's decision to leave the EU, and a myriad other troubles besetting Europe, appear to mark an end to the long postwar project of building a greater union. The uncertainties of Europe, as the quiet bulwark of the wider liberal international order, have global significance. Meanwhile, liberal democracy itself appears to be in retreat, as varieties of ‘new authoritarianism’ rise to new salience in countries such as Hungary, Poland, the Philippines and Turkey. Across the liberal democratic world, populist, nationalist and xenophobic strands of backlash politics have proliferated. 1

How deep is this crisis? It might simply be a temporary setback. With new political leadership and renewed economic growth, the liberal order could bounce back. But most observers think there is something more fundamental going on. Some observers see a crisis of American hegemonic leadership. For 70 years, the liberal international order has been tied to American power—its economy, currency, alliance system, leadership. Perhaps what we are witnessing is a ‘crisis of transition’, whereby the old US-led political foundation of the liberal order will give way to a new configuration of global power, new coalitions of states, new governance institutions. This transition might be leading to some sort of post-American and post-western order that remains relatively open and rules-based. 2 Others see a deeper crisis, one of liberal internationalism itself. In this view, there is a long-term shift in the global system away from open trade, multilateralism and cooperative security. Global order is giving way to various mixtures of nationalism, protectionism, spheres of influence and regional Great Power projects. In effect, there is no liberal internationalism without American and western hegemony—and that age is ending. Liberal internationalism is essentially an artefact of the rapidly receding Anglo-American era. 3 Finally, some go even further than this, arguing that what is happening is that the long era of ‘liberal modernity’ is ending. Beginning with the Enlightenment and running through the industrial revolution and the rise of the West, world-historical change seemed to be unfolding according to a deep developmental logic. It was a progressive movement driven by reason, science, discovery, innovation, technology, learning, constitutionalism and institutional adaptation. The world as a whole was in the embrace of this global modernizing movement. Perhaps today's crisis marks the ending of the global trajectory of liberal modernity. It was an artefact of a specific time and place—and the world is now moving on. 4

No one can be sure how deep the crisis of liberal internationalism runs. In what follows, I argue that, despite its troubles, liberal internationalism still has a future. The American hegemonic organization of liberal order is weakening, but the more general organizing ideas and impulses of liberal internationalism run deep in world politics. What liberal internationalism offers is a vision of open and loosely rules-based order. It is a tradition of order-building that emerged with the rise and spread of liberal democracy, and its ideas and agendas have been shaped as these countries have confronted and struggled with the grand forces of modernity. Creating an international ‘space’ for liberal democracy, reconciling the dilemmas of sovereignty and interdependence, seeking protections and preserving rights within and between states—these are the underlying aims that have propelled liberal internationalism through the ‘golden eras’ and ‘global catastrophes’ of the last two centuries. Despite the upheavals and destruction of world war, economic depression, and the rise and fall of fascism and totalitarianism, the liberal international project survived. It is likely to survive today's crises as well. But to do so this time, as it has done in the past, liberal internationalism will need to be rethought and reinvented.

I make this argument in three steps. First, I offer a way of thinking about liberal internationalism. It is not simply a creature of American hegemony. It is a more general and longstanding set of ideas, principles and political agendas for organizing and reforming international order. In the most general sense, liberal internationalism is a way of thinking about and responding to modernity—its opportunities and its dangers. What has united the ideas and agendas of liberal internationalism is a vision of an open, loosely rules-based and progressively oriented international order. Built on Enlightenment foundations, it emerged in the nineteenth century with the rise in the West of liberalism, nationalism, the industrial revolution, and the eras of British and American hegemony. A conviction has run through nineteenth- and twentieth-century liberal internationalists that the western and—by extension—the global international order is capable of reform. This separates liberal internationalism from various alternative ideologies of global order—political realism, authoritarian nationalism, Social Darwinism, revolutionary socialism and post-colonialism.

Second, I trace liberal internationalism's crooked pathway into the twenty-first century, as it evolved and reinvented itself along the way. In the nineteenth century, liberal internationalism was seen in the movements towards free trade, international law, collective security and the functional organization of the western capitalist system. Along the way, liberal internationalism mixed and intermingled with all the other major forces that have shaped the modern global system—imperialism, nationalism, capitalism, and the shifting movements of culture and civilization. In the twentieth century and into the twenty-first, it moved through a sequence of golden eras, crises and turning points: Wilson and the League of Nations; the post-Second World War Anglo-American settlement and the building of the US-led postwar order; crises of capitalism and leadership in the world economy; the post-Cold War American ‘unipolar’ moment and the ‘globalization’ of liberalism and neo-liberal ideas; debates about the Responsibility to Protect (R2P) and liberal interventionism; and today's crisis of the western liberal order. Liberal internationalism came into its own as a political order during the Cold War, under American auspices. American liberal hegemony was essentially a western order built around ‘free world’ social purposes.

Third, I identify the sources of the contemporary crisis of liberal internationalism. These can be traced to the end of the Cold War. It is important to recall that the postwar liberal order was originally not a global order. It was built ‘inside’ one half of the bipolar Cold War system. It was part of a larger geopolitical project of waging a global Cold War. It was built around bargains, institutions and social purposes that were tied to the West, American leadership and the global struggle against Soviet communism. When the Cold War ended, this ‘inside’ order became the ‘outside’ order. As the Soviet Union collapsed, the great rival of liberal internationalism fell away, and the American-led liberal order expanded outwards. With the end of the Cold War, liberal internationalism was globalized. Initially, this was seen as a moment of triumph for western liberal democracies. But the globalization of the liberal order put in motion two shifts that later became the sources of crisis. First, it upended the political foundations of the liberal order. With new states entering the system, the old bargains and institutions that provided the sources of stability and governance were overrun. A wider array of states—with a more diverse set of ideologies and agendas—were now part of the order. This triggered what might be called a ‘crisis of authority’, where new bargains, roles and responsibilities were now required. These struggles over authority and governance continue today. Second, the globalization of the liberal order also led to a loss of capacity to function as a security community. This can be called a ‘crisis of social purpose’. In its Cold War configuration, the liberal order was a sort of full-service security community, reinforcing the capacity of western liberal democracies to pursue policies of economic and social advancement and stability. As liberal internationalism became the platform for the wider global order, this sense of shared social purpose and security community eroded.

Taking all these elements together, this account of the crisis can be understood as a crisis of success, in the sense that the troubles besetting the liberal order emerged from its post-Cold War triumph and expansion. Put differently, the troubles today might be seen as a ‘Polanyi crisis’—growing turmoil and instability resulting from the rapid mobilization and spread of global capitalism, market society and complex interdependence, all of which has overrun the political foundations that supported its birth and early development. 5 They do not, on the contrary, constitute what might be called an ‘E. H. Carr crisis’, wherein liberal internationalism fails because of the return of Great Power politics and the problems of anarchy. 6 The troubles facing liberal internationalism are not driven by a return of geopolitical conflict, although conflicts with China and Russia are real and dangerous. In fact, the liberal international order has succeeded all too well. It has helped usher in a world that has outgrown its political moorings.

Liberal internationalism has survived its 200-year journey into the current century because, with liberal democracy at the core, it offered a coherent and functional vision of how to organize international space. The industrial revolution and the relentless rise of economic and security interdependence generated both opportunities and threats for liberal democracies. Liberal internationalism, in all its varied configurations, has provided templates for cooperation in the face of the grand forces of modernity. To do so again, the liberal international project will need to rethink its vision. It will either need to offer a ‘small and thick’ vision of liberal order, centred as it was during the Cold War on the western liberal democracies; or it will need to offer a ‘large and thin’ version of liberal internationalism, with global principles and institutions for coping with the dangers and vulnerabilities of twenty-first-century modernity—cascading problems of environmental destruction, weapons of mass destruction, global health pandemics and all the other threats to human civilization.

When the nineteenth century began, liberal democracy was a new and fragile political experiment, a political glimmering within a wider world of monarchy, autocracy, empire and traditionalism. Two hundred years later, at the end of the twentieth century, liberal democracies, led by the western Great Powers, dominated the world—commanding 80 per cent of global GNP. Across these two centuries, the industrial revolution unfolded, capitalism expanded its frontiers, Europeans built far-flung empires, the modern nation-state took root, and along the way the world witnessed what might be called the ‘liberal ascendancy’—the rise in the size, number, power and wealth of liberal democracies. 7 Liberal internationalism is the body of ideas and agendas with which these liberal democracies have attempted to organize the world.

Liberal internationalism has risen and fallen and evolved. But its general logic is captured in a cluster of five convictions. One concerns openness. Trade and exchange are understood to be constituents of modern society, and the connections and gains that flow from deep engagement and integration foster peace and political advancement. An open international order facilitates economic growth, encourages the flow of knowledge and technology, and draws states together. Second, there is a commitment to some sort of loosely rules-based set of relations. Rule and institutions facilitate cooperation and create capacities for states to make good on their domestic obligations. This is what John Ruggie describes as ‘multilateralism’—an institutional form that coordinates relations among a group of states ‘on the basis of generalized principles of conduct’. 8 Third, there is a view that liberal international order will entail some form of security cooperation. This does not necessarily mean alliances or a formal system of collective security, but states within the order affiliate in ways designed to increase their security. Fourth, liberal internationalism is built on the idea that international society is, as Woodrow Wilson argued, ‘corrigible’. Reform is possible. Power politics can be tamed—at least to some extent—and states can build stable relations around the pursuit of mutual gains. Fifth and finally, there is an expectation that a liberal international order will move states in a progressive direction, defined in terms of liberal democracy. The order provides institutions, relationships, and rights and protections that allow states to grow and advance at home. It is a sort of mutual aid and protection society. 9

Seen in this way, a liberal international order can take various forms. It can be more or less global or regional in scope. The early postwar western liberal order was primarily an Atlantic regional community, while the post-Cold War liberal system has had a wider global reach. A liberal international order can be more or less organized around a hegemonic state—that is, it can be more or less hierarchical in character. It can be more or less embodied in formal agreements and governance institutions. Perhaps most importantly, the ‘social purposes’ of a liberal international order can vary. It can have a ‘thin’ social purpose, providing, for example, only rudimentary rules and institutions for limited cooperation and exchange among liberal democracies. Or it could have a ‘thick’ social purpose, with a dense set of agreements and shared commitments aimed at realizing more ambitious goals of cooperation, integration and shared security. Overall, liberal internationalism can be more or less open, rules-based and progressively oriented. 10 Liberal internationalism can be seen as breaking down or disappearing when international order is increasingly organized around mercantile blocs, spheres of influence, imperial zones and closed regions.

Taken as a whole, liberal internationalism offers a vision of order in which sovereign states—led by liberal democracies—cooperate for mutual gain and protection within a loosely rules-based global space. Glimmerings of this vision emerged in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, triggered by Enlightenment thinking and the emergence of industrialism and modern society. Over the next century, a variety of economic, political and intellectual developments set the stage for the reorganization of relations among western states. The Great Powers of Europe met as the patrons of western order in the Congress of Vienna. Led by Britain, these states entered into a period of industrial growth and expanding trade. Political reform—and the revolutions of 1848—reflected the rise of and struggles for liberal democracy and constitutionalism, the growth of the middle and working classes, and the creation of new political parties arrayed across the ideological spectrum from conservative to liberal and socialist. Nationalism emerged and became tied to the building of modern bureaucratic states. Britain signalled a new orientation towards the world economy with the repeal of the Corn Laws. Nationalism was matched with new forms of internationalism—in law, commerce and social justice. Peace movements spread across the western world. A new era of European industrial-age imperialism began, as Britain, France and other European states competed for colonial prizes. Along the way, new ideas of ‘the global’ emerged, intellectual and political visions of a rapidly developing global system. 11

In this setting, liberal internationalism emerged as a way of thinking about western and world order. It began as a variety of scattered nineteenth-century internationalist ideas and movements. Liberal ideas in Britain began with Adam Smith's writings in the late eighteenth century and continued with thinkers such as Richard Cobden and John Bright in the nineteenth. A general view emerged—captured, for example, in the writings of Walter Bagehot and many others—that there was a developmental logic to history, a movement from despotic states to more rules-based and constitutional ones. Kant's ideas on republicanism and perpetual peace offered hints of an evolutionary logic in which liberal democracies would emerge and organize themselves within a wider political space. Ideas of contracts, rights and the law were developed by thinkers from John Locke to John Stuart Mill. 12

The connections between domestic liberalism and liberal internationalism are multifaceted, and they have evolved over the last two centuries. It is hard to see a distinctive or coherent liberal international agenda in the nineteenth century. At this time, such notions were primarily manifest in ideas about world politics that emerged from thinkers and activists committed to liberalism within countries—in ideas about liberalization of trade, collective security, arbitration of disputes and so forth. What emerges during this era is a sense of an international sphere of action that was opening up within the liberal democratic world, and a conviction that collective efforts could and should be made to manage this expanding international space. As Mark Mazower has argued, what was new was the notion that a realm of ‘the international’ was growing and that ‘it was in some sense governable’. 13

In the twentieth century there emerged a much more full-blown sense of liberal internationalism, understood as a set of prescriptions for organizing and reforming the world in such a way as to facilitate the pursuit of liberal democracy at home. Beginning with Woodrow Wilson in 1919, liberal internationalism emerged as an agenda for building a type of order—a sort of ‘container’ within which liberal democracies could live and survive. In the hands of F. D. Roosevelt and his generation after 1945, liberal internationalism became to an even greater extent an agenda for building an international community within which liberal democracies could be stabilized and protected. Growing out of the New Deal experience, the postwar ‘embedded liberal’ order was designed in part to safeguard liberal democracies from growing risks of economic and political upheavals generated by modernity itself. In this way, liberal internationalism offered a vision of a reformed and managed western—and, eventually, global—order that would provide the organizational principles, institutions and capacities to negotiate the international contingencies and dislocations that threaten the domestic pursuit of liberal democracy.

Liberal internationalism emerged after the Second World War as an organizing vision for the western-led order. As in 1919, so after 1945 the United States used its postwar position to lead in the building of a postwar order. But along the way, liberal internationalism took on a new shape and character—and with the rise of the Cold War, a US-led liberal hegemonic order emerged. In the age of Wilson, liberal internationalism was a relatively simply vision. International order was to be organized around a collective security system in which sovereign states would act together to uphold a system of territorial peace. The Wilsonian vision was undergirded by open trade, national self-determination, and the expectation of the continuing spread of liberal democracy. As Wilson himself put it: ‘What we seek is the reign of law, based on the consent of the governed and sustained by the organized opinion of mankind.’ 14 It was an ambitious scheme of order, but one without a lot of institutional machinery for global economic and social problem-solving or the management of Great Power relations. It was to be an institutionally ‘thin’ system of order in which states—primarily the western powers—would act cooperatively through a shared embrace of liberal ideas and principles. 15 The great centrepiece and organizational embodiment of Wilsonian liberal internationalism was the League of Nations.

The dramatic upheavals of the Great Depression, the Second World War and the Cold War set the stage for another American-led attempt to build a liberal order. A new moment to remake the world had arrived. Basic questions about power, order and modernity had to be rethought. From the 1930s onwards, the viability of western liberal democracy was itself uncertain. The violence and instabilities of the 1930s and 1940s forced liberal internationalists—and indeed everyone else—to reassess their ideas and agendas. The First World War was a jolt to the optimistic narratives of western civilization and progress. But FDR and his generation—facing the even more frightening rise of fascism and totalitarianism, followed by the horrors of total war, the Holocaust and the advent of atomic weapons, not to mention the collapse of the world economy—seemed to face a far more formidable, even existential array of threats. Modernity itself showed its dark side.

In this setting, FDR and his contemporaries found themselves advancing a new—more world-weary—vision of liberal international order. Paradoxically, it became both more universalistic in its vision and more deeply tied to American hegemonic power. The universalism can be seen in the Charter of the United Nations and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. In the 1940s, liberal internationalism was reframed. The liberal internationalism of the Woodrow Wilson era was built around civilizational, racial and cultural hierarchies. It was a creature of the western white man's world. It was a narrow type of principled internationalism. Wilson-era liberal internationalism did not challenge European imperialism or racial hierarchies. British liberals explicitly defended empire and continued to see the world in racial and civilizational terms. The 1940s saw a shift or reformulation of these ideas. Universal rights and protections became more central to the ideological vision. FDR's Four Freedoms (of speech and worship, from want and fear) were the defining vision for this new conception of liberal international order. The postwar order was to be a security community—a global space where liberal democracies joined together to build a cooperative order that enshrined basic human rights and social protections.

At the same time, these universal rights and protections were advanced and legitimated in terms of the American-led Cold War struggle. The United States would be the hegemonic sponsor and protector of the liberal order. With American leadership, the ‘free world’ would be a sort of ‘security community’. It would have rules, institutions, bargains and full-service political functions. To join the western liberal order was to join a ‘mutual protection’ society. To be inside this order was to enjoy trade, expanding growth, and tools for managing economic stability. Inside, it was warm; outside, it was cold. Countries would be protected in alliance partnerships and an array of functional organizations. In other words, in the postwar era, liberal internationalism became both more universal in its ideas and principles and more tied to an American-led political order. 16

Over the Cold War decades, American-led liberal internationalism emerged as a distinctive type of order. The United States came to take on a variety of functions and responsibilities. It came to have a direct role in running the order—and it also found itself increasingly tied to the other states within the order. The United States became a provider of public goods—or at least ‘club goods’. It upheld the rules and institutions, fostered security cooperation, led the management of the world economy, and championed shared norms and cooperation among the western-oriented liberal democracies. In security affairs, the United States established an array of security partnerships, beginning with NATO and alliances in east Asia. In the management of the world economy, the Bretton Woods international financial institutions became tied to the American market and dollar. Together, in the shadow of the Cold War, the American domestic system—its market and polity—became ‘fused’ to the evolving and deepening postwar liberal order.

American liberal hegemony, as a type of international order, had several key characteristics. First, it was built around open multilateral trade. In many ways, this was the key vision of the postwar American architects of liberal order. During the war, the question was debated: how large a geopolitical market space would the United States need so as to remain a viable global power? This was the era when most of the world's regions were divided into imperial zones, blocs and spheres of influence. The American strategic judgement was that, on the contrary, the postwar world would need to be open and accessible to the United States. The worst outcome would be closed regions in Europe, Asia and the Middle East, dominated by hostile Great Powers. Out of these worries, the United States launched its efforts to open the world economy and build institutions and partnerships that would establish a durably open global order. At the core of this system would be the liberal democracies, facilitating trade through GATT and later the WTO.

Second, American liberal hegemony was also defined by its commitment to a ‘managed’ open world economy. This is what John Ruggie has called ‘embedded liberalism’. International agreements, embodied in the Bretton Woods system, were designed to give governments greater ability to regulate and manage economic openness to ensure that it was reconciled with domestic economic stability and policies in pursuit of full employment. 17 The New Deal itself provided an inspiration for this new thinking about the organization of an open world economy. The visionary goal was a middle ground between openness and stability. Free trade was essential for the sort of economic recovery and growth that would support centrist and progressive postwar political leadership in the United States and Europe. But trade and exchange would need to be reconciled with government efforts to ensure economic stability and the security of workers and the middle class. Social and economic security went hand in hand with national security.

Third, the postwar liberal order was built around new and permanent international institutions. To a greater extent than in Wilson's day, post-1945 liberal internationalists sought to build order around a system of multilateral governance. This was a vision of intergovernmentalism more than supranationalism. Governments would remain the primary source of authority. But governments would organize their relations around permanent regional and global institutions. They would conduct relations on multilateral platforms—bargaining, consulting, coordinating. These institutions would serve multiple purposes. They would facilitate cooperation by providing venues for ongoing bargaining and exchange. They would reinforce norms of equality and non-discrimination, thereby giving the order more legitimacy. And they would tie the United States more closely to its postwar partners, reducing worries about domination and abandonment. The result was an unprecedented effort across economic, political and security policy spheres to build working multilateral institutions.

Fourth, there was a special emphasis on relations among the western liberal democracies. The core underlying principles and norms of the liberal order could be construed as ‘universal’. FDR's Four Freedoms were of this sort, and so too were the principles of multilateralism embedded in the postwar economic institutions. But the order itself was organized around the United States and its liberal democratic allies and clients. The fact that it was built inside the larger Cold War-era bipolar system reinforced this orientation. Architects of the order understood that there was a special relationship among the western liberal democracies. At first this encompassed essentially just western Europe and Japan; but in the aftermath of the Cold War a larger and more diverse community of democracies took hold. The essential premise of American global leadership was that there is something special and enduring about the alignment of democracies. They have shared interests and values. American presidents from Woodrow Wilson to Barack Obama have acted on the assumption that democracies have a unique capacity to cooperate. In building liberal order during the Cold War, there was an authentic belief—held in Washington but also in European and Asian capitals—that the ‘free world’ was not just a temporary defensive alliance ranged against the Soviet Union: it was a nascent political community—a community of shared fate. 18 In this sense, the American-led order was, at its core, a ‘democratic alliance’ to defend and support a shared liberal democratic political space.

This liberal hegemonic order flourished over the decades of the Cold War. It provided a framework for the liberalization of trade and decades of growth across the advanced industrial world. Incomes and life opportunities steadily increased for the postwar generations of Europeans, Japanese and Americans. This open system ushered in, as Paul Johnson argues, ‘the most rapid and prolonged economic expansion in world history’. 19 But the postwar liberal order was more than a growth machine. It provided a ‘container’ within which liberal democracies could gain greater measures of security and protection as well. To be inside this liberal hegemonic order was to be positioned inside a set of full-service economic, political and security institutions. It was both a Gesellschaft —a ‘society’ defined by formal rules, institutions and governmental ties—and a Gemeinschaft —a ‘community’ defined by shared values, beliefs and expectations. 20 Liberal order was a sort of nascent security community—with ‘security’ defined broadly.

The foundations of this postwar liberal hegemonic order are weakening. In a simple sense, this is a story of grand shifts in the distribution of power and the consequences that follow. The United States and its allies are less powerful than they were when they built the postwar order. The unipolar moment—when the United States dominated world economic and military rankings—is ending. Europe and Japan have also weakened. Together, this old triad of patrons of the postwar liberal order is slowly dwindling in its share of the wider global distribution of power. This shift is probably not best seen as a transition from an American to a Chinese hegemonic order, the ‘return to multipolarity’ or a ‘rise of the non-West’. Rather, it is simply a gradual diffusion of power away from the West. China will probably not replace the United States as an illiberal hegemon, and the global South will probably not emerge as a geopolitical bloc that directly challenges the US-led order. But the United States—and its old allies—will continue to be a smaller part of the global whole, and this will constrain their ability to support and defend the liberal international order.

The political troubles of western liberal democracies magnify the implications of these global power shifts. As noted above, democracies everywhere are facing internal difficulties and discontents. The older western democracies are experiencing rising inequality, economic stagnation, fiscal crisis, and political polarization and gridlock. Many newer and poorer democracies, meanwhile, are beset by corruption, backsliding and rising inequality. The great ‘third wave’ of democratization seems to have crested, and now to be receding. As democracies fail to address problems, their domestic legitimacy is diminished and increasingly challenged by resurgent nationalist, populist and xenophobic movements. Together, these developments cast a dark shadow over the democratic future.

During the Cold War, the American-led liberal order was lodged within the western side of the bipolar world system. It was during these decades that the foundations of liberal hegemonic order were laid. With the collapse of the Soviet Union, this ‘inside’ order became the nucleus of an expanding global system. This had several consequences. One was that the United States became the sole superpower—the world entered the unipolar moment. This made American power itself an issue in world politics. During the Cold War, American power had a functional role in the system: it served as a balance against Soviet power. With the sudden emergence of unipolarity, American power was less constrained—and it did not play the same system-functional role. New debates emerged about the character of American hegemonic power. What would restrain American power? Was the United States now an informal empire? The American war in Iraq and the global ‘war on terror’ exacerbated these worries. 21

Ironically, the crisis of the US-led liberal order can be traced to the collapse of Cold War bipolarity and the resulting spread of liberal internationalism. The seeds of crisis were planted at this moment of triumph. The liberal international order was, in effect, globalized. It was freed from its Cold War foundations and rapidly became the platform for an expanding global system of liberal democracy, markets and complex interdependence. During the Cold War, the liberal order was a global subsystem—and the bipolar global system served to reinforce the roles, commitments, identity and community that were together manifest as liberal hegemony. The crisis of liberal internationalism can be seen as a slow-motion reaction to this deep transformation in the geopolitical setting of the postwar liberal international project. Specifically, the globalization of liberal internationalism put in motion two long-term effects: a crisis of governance and authority, and a crisis of social purpose.

First, with the collapse of the Soviet sphere, the American-led liberal international order became the only surviving framework for order, and a growing number and diversity of states began to be integrated into it. This created new problems for the governance of the order. During the Cold War, the western-oriented liberal order was led by the United States, Europe and Japan, and it was organized around a complex array of bargains, working relationships and institutions. (Indeed, in the early postwar years, most of the core agreements about trade, finance and monetary relations were hammered out between the United States and Britain.) These countries did not agree on everything, but relative to the rest of the world, this was a small and homogeneous group of western states. Their economies converged, their interests were aligned and they generally trusted each other. These countries were also on the same side of the Cold War, and the American-led alliance system reinforced cooperation. This system of alliance made it easier for the United States and its partners to make commitments and bear burdens. It made it easier for European and east Asian states to agree to operate within an American-led liberal order. In this sense, the Cold War roots of the postwar liberal order reinforced the sense that the liberal democracies were involved in a common political project.

With the end of the Cold War, these foundational supports for liberal order were loosened. More, and more diverse, states entered the order—with new visions and agendas. The post-Cold War era also brought into play new and complex global issues, such as climate change, terrorism and weapons proliferation, and the growing challenges of interdependence. These are particularly hard issues on which to reach agreement among states coming from very different regions, with similarly different political orientations and levels of development. As a result, the challenges to multilateral cooperation have grown. At the core of these challenges has been the problem of authority and governance. Who pays, who adjusts, who leads? Rising non-western states began to seek a greater voice in the governance of the expanding liberal order. How would authority across this order be redistributed? The old coalition of states—led by the United States, Europe and Japan—built a postwar order on layers of bargains, institutions and working relationships. But this old trilateral core is not the centre of the global system in the way it once was. The crisis of liberal order today is in part a problem of how to reorganize the governance of this order. The old foundations have been weakened, but new bargains and governance arrangements are yet to be fully negotiated. 22

Second, the crisis of the liberal order is a crisis of legitimacy and social purpose. During the Cold War, the American-led postwar order had a shared sense that it was a community of liberal democracies that were made physically safer and economically more secure by affiliating with each other. The first several generations of the postwar period understood that to be inside this order was to be in a political and economic space where their societies could prosper and be protected. This sense was captured in John Ruggie's notion of ‘embedded liberalism’. Trade and economic openness were rendered more or less compatible with economic security, stable employment and advancing living standards. The western-oriented liberal order had features of a security community—a sort of mutual protection society. Membership of this order was attractive because it provided tangible rights and benefits. It was a system of multilateral cooperation that provided national governments with tools and capacities to pursue economic stability and advancement.

This idea of liberal order as a security community is often lost in the narratives of the postwar era. The United States and its partners built an order—but they also ‘formed a community’: one based on common interests, shared values and mutual vulnerability. The common interests were manifest, for example, in the gains that flowed from trade and the benefits of alliance cooperation. The shared values were manifest in a degree of public trust and ready capacity for cooperation rooted in the values and institutions of liberal democracy. Mutual vulnerability was a sense that these countries were experiencing a similar set of large-scale perils—flowing from the great dangers and uncertainties of geopolitics and modernity. This idea of a western security community is hinted at in the concept of ‘risk society’ put forward by sociologists Anthony Giddens and Ulrich Beck. Their argument is that the rise of modernity—of an advanced and rapidly developing global system—has generated growing awareness of and responses to ‘risk’. Modernization is an inherently unsettling march into the future. A risk society is, as Beck defines it, ‘a systematic way of dealing with hazards and insecurities induced and introduced by modernisation itself’. 23 The Cold War intensified this sense of risk, and out of a growing sense of shared economic and security vulnerabilities, the western liberal democracies forged a security community.

With the end of the Cold War and the globalization of the liberal order, this sense of security community was undermined. This happened in the first instance, as noted above, through the rapid expansion in the number and variety of states in the order. The liberal order lost its identity as a western security community. It was now a far-flung platform for trade, exchange and multilateral cooperation. The democratic world was now less Anglo-American, less western. It embodied most of the world—developed, developing, North and South, colonial and post-colonial, Asian and European. This too was a case of ‘success’ planting the seeds of crisis. The result was an increasing divergence of views across the order about its members, their place in the world, and their historical legacies and grievances. There was less of a sense that liberal internationalism was a community with a shared narrative of its past and future.

The social purposes of the liberal order were further undermined by rising economic insecurity and grievance across the western industrial world. Since the 2008 financial crisis at least, the fortunes of workers and middle-class citizens in Europe and the United States have stagnated. 24 The expanding opportunities and rising wages enjoyed by earlier postwar generations seem to have stalled. For example, in the United States almost all the growth in wealth since the 1980s has gone to the top 20 per cent of earners in society. The post-Cold War growth in trade and interdependence does not seem to have directly advanced the incomes and life opportunities of many segments of the western liberal democracies. Branko Milanovic has famously described the differential gains across the global system over the last two decades as an ‘elephant curve’. Looking across global income levels, Milanovic finds that the vast bulk of gains in real per capita income have been made in two very different groups. One comprises workers in countries such as China and India who have taken jobs in low-end manufacturing and service jobs, and, starting at very low wage levels, have experienced dramatic gains—even if they remain at the lower end of the global income spectrum. This is the hump of the elephant's back. The other group is the top 1 per cent—and, indeed, the top 0.01 per cent—who have experienced massive increases in wealth. This is the elephant's trunk, extended upward. 25 This stagnation in the economic fortunes of the western working and middle classes is reinforced by long-term shifts in technology, trade patterns, union organization and the sites for manufacturing jobs.

Under these adverse economic conditions, it is harder today than in the past to see the liberal order as a source of economic security and protection. Across the western liberal democratic world, liberal internationalism looks more like neo-liberalism—a framework for international capitalist transactions. The ‘embedded’ character of liberal internationalism has slowly eroded. 26 The social purposes of the liberal order are not what they once were. It is less obvious today that the liberal democratic world is a security community. What do citizens in western democracies get from liberal internationalism? How does an open and loosely rules-based international order deliver security—economic or physical—to the lives of the great middle class? Liberal internationalism across the twentieth century was tied to progressive agendas within western liberal democracies. Liberal internationalism was seen not as the enemy of nationalism, but as a tool to give governments capacities to pursue economic security and advancements at home. What has happened in the last several decades is that this connection between progressivism at home and liberal internationalism abroad has been broken.

For the past 70 years, liberal internationalism has been embedded in the postwar American hegemonic order. It is an order that has been marked by economic openness and security cooperation as well as collective efforts to keep the peace, promote the rule of law, and sustain an array of international institutions organized to manage the modern problems of interdependence. This expansive version of liberal order emerged in fits and starts during the twentieth century as the United States and Europe struggled with the great dangers and catastrophes that shocked and shook the world—world war, economic depression, trade wars, fascism, totalitarianism and vast social injustices. Today this American-led era of liberal internationalism looks increasingly beleaguered. To bet on the future of the global liberal order is a little bit like a second marriage—a triumph of hope over experience. But it is important to take the long view. The liberal international project has travelled from the eighteenth century to our own time through repeated crises, upheavals, disasters and breakdowns—almost all of them worse than those appearing today. Indeed, it might be useful to think about liberal international order the way John Dewey thought about democracy—as a framework for coping with the inevitable problems of modern society. It is not a blueprint for an ideal world order; it is a methodology or machinery for responding to the opportunities and dangers of modernity.

The future of this liberal order hinges on the ability of the United States and Europe—and increasingly a wider array of liberal democracies—to lead and support it. This, in turn, depends on the ability of these leading liberal democracies to remain stable, well functioning and internationalist. Can these states recover their stability and bearings as liberal democracies? Can they regain their legitimacy and standing as ‘models’ of advanced societies by finding solutions to the current generation's great problems—economic inequality, stagnant wages, fiscal imbalances, environmental degradation, racial and ethnic conflicts, and so forth? Global leadership hinges on state power, but also on the appeal and legitimacy of the ideals and principles that Great Powers embody and project. The appeal and legitimacy of liberal internationalism will depend on the ability of the United States and other states like it to re-establish their ability to function and to find solutions to twenty-first-century problems.

It is worth remembering that American liberal internationalism was shaped and enabled by the domestic programmes of the Progressives, the New Deal and the Great Society. These initiatives aimed to address American economic and social inequalities and reorganize the American state in view of the unfolding problems of industrialism and globalization. FDR and the New Deal were the critical pivot for America's liberal internationalist vision of order.

It was an era of pragmatic and experimental domestic and foreign policy. It was a moment when the regime principles of the American foundation and Civil War were once again renewed and updated. It was a time of existential crisis—but also of bold and visionary undertakings. The domestic progressive experience provides an important lesson for those seeking to grapple with the present generation's crisis of liberal democracy. The liberal internationalism of the twentieth century was closely tied to domestic progressive policy and movements. The internationalism of Wilson's and FDR's generations emerged from their efforts to build a more progressive domestic order. Internationalism was put at the service of strengthening the nation—that is, the ability of governments and national leaders to make good on their promises to promote economic well-being and social advancement.

So the future of liberal internationalism hinges on two questions. First, can the United States and other liberal democracies recapture their progressive political orientation? America's ‘brand’—as seen in parts of the non-western world—is perceived to be neo-liberal, that is, single-minded in its commitment to capital and markets. It is absolutely essential that the United States shatter this idea. Outside the West—and indeed in most parts of Europe—this is not the core of the liberal democratic vision of modern society. If there is an ideological ‘centre of gravity’ in the wider world of democracies, it is more social democratic and solidarist than neo-liberal. Or, to put it simply: it looks more like the vision of liberal democracy that was articulated by the United States during the New Deal and early postwar decades. This was a period when economic growth was more inclusive and was built around efforts to promote economic stability and social protections. If liberal internationalism is to thrive, it will need to be built again on these sorts of progressive foundations.

Second, can the United States and its old allies expand and rebuild a wider coalition of states willing to cooperate within a reformed liberal global order? It is a simple fact that the United States cannot base its leadership on the old coalition of the West and Japan. It needs to actively court and co-opt the wider world of developing democracies. It is already doing this, but it needs to make the enterprise integral to its grand strategic vision. The goal should be to reconfigure rights and responsibilities in existing institutions to reflect the diffusion of power in an increasingly multipolar world. This should be done in such a way as to cultivate deeper relations with democratic states within the rising non-western developing world. The global multilateral institutions—from the UN and IMF downwards—need to be reformed to reflect this new global reality.

In the end, the sources of continuity in the postwar liberal international order become visible when we look at the alternatives. The alternatives to liberal order are various sorts of closed systems—a world of blocs, spheres and protectionist zones. The best news for liberal internationalism is probably the simple fact that more people will be harmed by the end of some sort of global liberal international order than will gain. This does not mean it will survive, but it does suggest that there are constituencies—even in the old industrial societies of the West—that have reason to support it. Beyond this, there is simply no grand ideological alternative to a liberal international order. China does not have a model that the rest of the world finds appealing. Neither does Russia. These are authoritarian capitalist states. But this type of state does not translate into a broad set of alternative ideas for the organization of world order. The values, interests and mutual vulnerabilities that drove the rise and spread of liberal internationalism are still with us. Crises and transformations in liberal internationalism have marked its 200-year passage to the present. If liberal democracy survives this era, so too will liberal internationalism.

On the troubles of western liberal democracy, see Edward Luce, The retreat of western liberalism (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 2017); Bill Emmott, The fate of the West: the battle to save the world's most successful political idea (New York: Public Affairs, 2017).

See G. John Ikenberry, Liberal Leviathan: the origins, crisis, and transformation of the American world order (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011); Amitav Acharya, The end of American world order (Cambridge: Polity, 2014).

See Robert Kagan, The world America made (New York: Vintage, 2013). For recent views, see Ian Buruma, ‘The end of the Anglo-American order’, New York Times Magazine , 29 Nov. 2016; Ulrich Speck, ‘The crisis of liberal order’, The American Interest , 12 Sept. 2016; Michael J. Boyle, ‘The coming illiberal era’, Survival 58: 2, 2016, pp. 35–66.

On the crisis of liberal modernity, see Pankaj Mishra, Age of anger: a history of the present (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2017).

Karl Polanyi, The great transformation: the political and economic origins of our times (Boston: Beacon, 1957).

E. H. Carr, The twenty years crisis, 1919–1939: an introduction to the study of international relations (London: Macmillan, 1951).

See Michael Doyle, ‘Kant, liberal legacies, and foreign affairs’, parts 1 and 2, Philosophy and Public Affairs 12: 1–2, 1983, pp. 205–35, 323–53.

John Gerard Ruggie, ‘Multilateralism: the anatomy of an institution’, in John Gerard Ruggie, ed., Multilateralism matters: the theory and praxis of an institutional form (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), p. 11.

See Tim Dunne and Matt McDonald, ‘The politics of liberal internationalism’, International Politics 50: 1, Jan. 2013, pp. 1–17; Beate Jahn, Liberal internationalism: theory, history, practice (New York: Palgrave, 2013).

For a discussion of these various dimensions of liberal internationalism, see G. John Ikenberry, ‘Liberal internationalism 3.0: America and the dilemmas of liberal world order’, Perspectives on Politics 7: 1, March 2009, pp. 71–87.

For depictions of the theory and history of liberal internationalism, see Tony Smith, America's mission: the United States and the worldwide struggle for democracy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994); Michael Mandelbaum, The ideas that conquered the world: peace, democracy, and free markets in the twenty-first century (New York: Public Affairs, 2004); Elizabeth Borgwardt, A new deal for the world: America's vision for human rights (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005); Frank Ninkovich, Modernity and power: a history of the domino in the twentieth century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994). For a portrait of liberalism within the wider array of classical theories of international relations, see Michael Doyle, Ways of war and peace: realism, liberalism, and socialism (New York: Norton, 1997).

See Edmund Fawcett, Liberalism: the life of an idea (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014).

Mark Mazower, Governing the world: the history of an idea (London: Allen Lane, 2012), p. 15.

Woodrow Wilson, speech at Mount Vernon, Virginia, 4 July 1918, https://archive.org/details/addressofpreside00wilsonw .

See Ikenberry, ‘Liberal internationalism 3.0’.

For a depiction of the American liberal hegemonic order, see Ikenberry, Liberal Leviathan .

John Ruggie, ‘International regimes, transactions, and change: embedded liberalism in the postwar economic order’, International Organization 36: 2, Spring 1982, pp. 379–415.

Timothy Garton Ash, Free world: America, Europe, and the surprising future of the West (New York: Random House, 2004).

Quoted in Paul Ninkovich, The global republic: America's inadvertent rise to world power (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014), p. 178.

These terms were introduced in the early twentieth century by the German sociologists Ferdinand Tonnies and Max Weber.

See Ikenberry, Liberal Leviathan , ch. 6. For debates about American unipolarity, see Steve Walt, Taming American power: the global response to US primacy (New York: Norton, 2005); Stephen G. Brooks and William C. Wohlforth, World out of balance: international relations and the challenge of American primacy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008).

For an overview of these governance challenges, see Amitav Acharya, Why govern? Rethinking demand and progress in global governance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016).

Ulrich Beck, Risk society: towards a new modernity (London: Sage, 1992), p. 7. See also Anthony Giddens and Christopher Pierson, Making sense of modernity: conversations with Anthony Giddens (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998).

For evidence of stagnant and declining incomes among the working and middle classes in the US and Europe, and connections to the election of Donald Trump and Brexit, see Ronald Ingelhart and Pippa Norris, Trump, Brexit, and the rise of populism: economic have-nots and cultural backlash , working paper (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Kennedy School, 19 July 2016).

Branko Milanovic, Global inequality: a new approach for the age of globalization (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016), ch. 1.

See Jeff D. Colgan and Robert O. Keohane, ‘The liberal order is rigged: fix it now or watch it wither’, Foreign Affairs 96: 3, May–June 2017, pp. 36–44. For an account of the rise of neo-liberalism in the late twentieth century, see Mark Blyth, Great transformation: economic ideas and institutional change in the twentieth century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002).

Email alerts

Citing articles via.

• Recommend to Your Librarian
• Advertising and Corporate Services

Affiliations

• Online ISSN 1468-2346
• Print ISSN 0020-5850
• Copyright © 2024 The Royal Institute of International Affairs
• About Oxford Academic
• Publish journals with us
• University press partners
• What we publish
• New features  
• Open access
• Institutional account management
• Rights and permissions
• Get help with access
• Accessibility
• Advertising
• Media enquiries
• Oxford University Press
• Oxford Languages
• University of Oxford

Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University's objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide

• Copyright © 2024 Oxford University Press
• Cookie settings
• Cookie policy
• Privacy policy
• Legal notice

This Feature Is Available To Subscribers Only

Sign In or Create an Account

This PDF is available to Subscribers Only

For full access to this pdf, sign in to an existing account, or purchase an annual subscription.

Academia.edu no longer supports Internet Explorer.

To browse Academia.edu and the wider internet faster and more securely, please take a few seconds to  upgrade your browser .

Enter the email address you signed up with and we'll email you a reset link.

• We're Hiring!
• Help Center

RELATED TOPICS

•   We're Hiring!
•   Help Center
• Find new research papers in:
• Health Sciences
• Earth Sciences
• Cognitive Science
• Mathematics
• Computer Science
• Academia ©2024

How is the modern world different from previous periods of history and why did it come into existence when and where it did? (Dr. Stephen Davies, Institute of Economic Affairs)

Runan Lin, Georgetown Preparatory School, United States

Winner of the 2020 History Prize ​| 7 min read 

Picture a country that is the global leader in terms of military strength and political influence. It has a complex law code that governs all parts of the population regardless of their social or economic status; it plays a major role in global trade and maintains a vibrant industrial system divided into public and private sectors; this is a country whose population comes from different cultures and has various religious affiliations, including but not limited to Christianity, Buddhism, and Islam; this country practices the idea of meritocracy - selecting government officials on the base of merit - and has a complex system of government built upon the balance of power. This country is also unrivaled globally in civil and military technology, its inventions being spread across continents.

This country, of course, is china during the tang and song dynasties. the “complex law code” refers to the law code of the tang dynasty, which went through three major modifications and included four distinct forms of law enforcement; [1] meritocracy is exercised through the keju examination system; the “complex system of government” refers to the “three departments and six ministries” model, which divides the government into three major branches and six subordinating ministries; advanced “civil and military technology” is exemplified in the development of gunpowder and the introduction of paper currency. indeed, for many living during the tang-song period, this was the pinnacle of civilization, their “modern” society. [2], the oxford dictionary defines the concept of modern as “[pertaining to] the present time or recent times.” [3] the encyclopaedia britannica explains modernity as “the self-definition of a  generation about its own technological innovation , governance, and socioeconomics,” and the key phrase in this explanation is “self-definition of a generation. [4] this essay aims to reconsider the questions of how, why, when, and where the modern world came into existence, and what sets it apart from the pre-modern world. instead of tying the emergence of the modern world to a specific time and place, this work will analyze several historical periods to suggest that the definition of modernity is extremely subjective and that this concept manifests itself differently in various times and places., since modernity is, according to the encyclopedia britannica, “a self-definition of a generation,” the concepts of modernity and of a modern society have been subject to different interpretations at different time periods. for example, the united states considered itself to be the “city upon a hill,” the beacon of liberty and the avant-garde in democracy and human rights. american exceptionalism was a common theme since the founding of the young republic, and thomas jefferson famously described the united states in the following words:, [the united states was] trusted with the destinies of this solitary republic of the world, the only monument of human rights, and the sole depository of the sacred fire of freedom and self-government from hence it is to be lighted up in other regions of the earth, if other regions of the earth shall ever become susceptible of its benign influence. all mankind ought then, with us, to rejoice in its prosperous, and sympathize in its adverse fortunes, as involving every thing dear to man. [5], the founding fathers had indeed provided their citizens with more personal and political freedom under a democratic elective government, and, at the time, the united states did indeed seem modern. however, only several decades later, frederick douglass and w.e.b. dubois would go on to challenge jefferson’s perception of america as the epitome of modernity and freedom and the best realization of enlightenment ideals by pointing to the institution of slavery and to racial injustice. in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, when the us was at the forefront of modernity in terms of industrial developments, activists such as elizabeth c. stanton criticised the society’s unequal and backward treatment of women in social, economic, and political spheres. what was thought to be modern in the 19th and early 20th centuries became obsolete within a matter of a few decades, once again demonstrating that the understanding of modernity changes over time., even within the same historical period, however, modernity remains an extremely subjective concept that could be interpreted differently in different places and cultures. in the middle ages, europe saw little progress under the shadows of feudalism and manorialism, while the islamic world and china were entering their respective “golden ages.” in the middle ages, the islamic world was reaching unprecedented heights in cultural and scientific advancements. mathematician al-khwarizmi created the concept of algebra, arab scholars in cordoba translated and preserved the works of great greco-roman writers, and muslim scholars made remarkable progress in medicine and navigation technology. [6] at the same time, song dynasty china was going through a golden age similar to that in the islamic world. therefore, while a resident of song dynasty china would have considered paper currency, thousand-miles-long canals, and civil service examinations to be modern, a contemporary western european would have never heard of gunpowder, compasses, spices of asia, and social mobility and would have seen the heavy plough as the pinnacle of modernity. [7], when europeans first discovered the american continent and came into contact with the natives, the aztecs must have thought that tenochtitilan was the most developed city of the world, and firearms, written languages, and the renaissance were definitely not included in their definition “modernity.” similarly, during the industrial age, emperor qianlong of qing dynasty wrote a letter to king george iii of the united kingdom in which he claimed that “...our celestial empire possesses all things in prolific abundance and lacks no product within its own borders. there was therefore no need to import the manufactures [sic] of outside barbarians in exchange for our own produce.” [8] at the time of this letter (1793), great britain was embroiled in the new ideas of the enlightenment and the inception of the industrial revolution and was considered to be the most advanced nation in terms of its military and civilian technology. while an 18th-century european would have defined modernity in terms of factorial production, voting, and republicanism, a citizen of the qing empire would have had a vastly different interpretation of the term. this is reflected in qianlong’s belief that the celestial empire possessed “all things in prolific abundance and lacked no product within its own borders” and therefore did not need to be modernized any further. [9], in each of the examples above, it is clear that interpretations of the concept of “modern” differ drastically across time and space. many scholars, including those not coming from a western background, believe that the enlightenment marks the beginning of the modern world. [10] however, if these criteria are applied to the contemporary world, then countries that do not have a democratic or republican form of government or do not otherwise conform to the western standards of modernity would have no place in our shared modernity. such a western-centric approach dismisses the cultural and scientific innovations that non-western civilizations have made throughout history, thus contributing to the establishment of the modern world from which they are now excluded. while the western understanding of modernity is becoming more prevalent around the world due to globalization, the contemporary world still does not have a unified definition of “modern,” nor do people in different parts of today’s world experience modernity in the same way. even in the 21st century, absolute monarchs retain their power in kingdoms such as saudi arabia and brunei, [11] despite the fact that this system of government goes against the ideals of natural rights, republicanism, and democracy. even throughout the western world, undisputedly “modern” to most, is still plagued by issues such as slavery and human trafficking, as well as the remnants of racial discrimination rooted in slavery. 12.3 million people remain under some form of forced labor, and at least 10,000 of them are in the united states - the number would increase further if the incarcerated population were included in this statistic. [12] stories of forced laborers being moved across huge tracts of land and being abused along the way frequently make us question our socioeconomic definition of “modern.”, in all of the three main factors defining modernity according to the encyclopaedia britannica - technological innovation , governance, and socio-economics - the world had never before, has not yet, and probably never will, reach a consensus. in terms of technological innovation, the internet could not be accessed by 89.3% of the households in africa and 52.4% in asia and the middle east. [13] in terms of governance, the debate ensues in terms of the balance between individual freedom and security ever since john locke’s proposal of a social contract theory. the discrepancy among attitudes towards socio-economics upheld by various nations is even more extensive and complex. taking these three factors into consideration, it is impossible to identify a specific point in history during which everyone in the world lived according to the same definition of modernity, which suggests that the concept of modernity is subject to individual interpretation and that there has never been and never will be a universal “modern world.”.

1 Li Linfu, Tang Liudian, ed. Jiuling Zhang (Shangwu Yinshuguan, 1978).

2 Patricia Buckley Ebrey, The Cambridge Illustrated History of China, trans. Shiyu Zhao, Shiling Zhao, and Hongyan Zhang (Jinan, Shandong: Shandong Huabao Press, 2001), pp.76-92; 98-105.

3 “Modern,” Oxford Learner's Dictionaries, accessed June 12, 2020, https :// www.oxfordlearnersdictionaries.com/definition/english/modern?q=modern.

4 Sharon L. Snyder, “Modernity,” Encyclopædia Britannica (Encyclopædia Britannica, inc., May 20, 2016), https :// www.britannica.com/topic/modernity.

5 Thomas Jefferson, “Thomas Jefferson to the Citizens of Washington, D.C., 4 March.,” National Archives and Records Administration (National Archives and Records Administration), accessed June 13, 2020, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Jefferson/03-01-02-0006 .

6 Amira K. Bennison, The Great Caliphs: the Golden Age of the Abbasid Empire (New Haven, CT: Yale University, 2014), pp.181-186.

7 “China in 1000 CE,” The Song Dynasty in China (Asia for Educators, Columbia University, 2020), http://afe.easia.columbia.edu/songdynasty-module/index.html ; Thomas Barnebeck Andersen, Peter S. Jensen, and Christian Skovsgaard, “The Heavy Plough and the Agricultural Revolution in Medieval Europe,” SSRN Electronic Journal, 2013, https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.2362894.

8 Qianlong, “Letter to George III, 1793,” Internet History Sourcebooks (Fordham University, 2020), https://sourcebooks.fordham.edu/mod/1793qianlong.asp.

9 Qianlong, “Letter to George III, 1793,” Internet History Sourcebooks (Fordham University, 2020), https://sourcebooks.fordham.edu/mod/1793qianlong.asp.

10 Yi Junqing, and Lingmei Fan, "Dimensions of Modernity and Their Contemporary Fate," Frontiers of Philosophy in China 1, no. 1 (2006): 6-21, Accessed June 15, 2020. www.jstor.org/stable/30209946 . This article serves as a good example ofto the argument above, with the authors - both Chinese- beginning by defining modernity as “the cultural schemata and mechanisms of social action stemming from the Enlightenment.”

11 Harry St. John Bridger Philby, William L. Ochsenwald, and Joshua Teitelbaum, “Saudi Arabia,” Encyclopædia Britannica (Encyclopædia Britannica, iInc., June 13, 2020), https://www.britannica.com/place/Saudi-Arabia ; Ooi Jin Bee, Mohamad Yusop Damit, and Pushpa Thambipillai, “Brunei,” Encyclopædia Britannica (Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc., June 15, 2020), https:// www.britannica.com/place/Brunei.

12 Rodger Doyle, "Modern Slavery," Scientific American 294, no. 1 (2006): 30, Accessed June 16, 2020. www.jstor.org/stable/26061289.

13 Marcus Leaning, “Internet Accessibility Continental Comparison,” UNESCO, accessed June 23, 2020, https://en.unesco.org/sites/default/files/milweek17_marcus_leaning.pdf.

Bibliography

Andersen, Thomas Barnebeck, Peter S. Jensen, and Christian Skovsgaard. “The Heavy Plough and the Agricultural Revolution in Medieval Europe.” SSRN Electronic Journal, 2013. https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.2362894.

Bennison, Amira K. The Great Caliphs: the Golden Age of the Abbasid Empire. New Haven, CT: Yale University, 2014.

Bee, Ooi Jin, Mohamad Yusop Damit, and Pushpa Thambipillai. “Brunei.” Encyclopædia Britannica. Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc., June 15, 2020. https://www.britannica.com/place/Brunei .

“China in 1000 CE.” The Song Dynasty in China. Asia for Educators, Columbia University, 2020. http://afe.easia.columbia.edu/songdynasty-module/index.html.

Doyle, Rodger. "Modern Slavery." Scientific American 294, no. 1 (2006): 30. Accessed June 16,

2020. www.jstor.org/stable/26061289 .

Ebrey, Patricia Buckley. The Cambridge Illustrated History of China. Translated by Shiyu Zhao, Shiling Zhao, and Hongyan Zhang. Jinan, Shandong: Shandong Huabao Press, 2001.

Hunter, Shireen T. "Can Islam and Modernity Be Reconciled?" Insight Turkey 11, no. 3 (2009): 1-12. Accessed June 15, 2020. www.jstor.org/stable/26331091 .

Leaning, Marcus. “Internet Accessibility Continental Comparison.” Internet Accessibility.

UNESCO. Accessed June 23, 2020. https://en.unesco.org/sites/default/files/milweek17_marcus_leaning.pdf.

Linfu, Li. Tang Liudian. Edited by Jiuling Zhang. Shangwu Yinshuguan, 1978.

“Modern.” Oxford Learner's Dictionaries. Accessed June 12, 2020. https://www.oxfordlearnersdictionaries.com/definition/english/modern?q=modern .

Qianlong. “Letter to George III, 1793.” Internet History Sourcebooks. Fordham University, 2020. https://sourcebooks.fordham.edu/mod/1793qianlong.asp . From E. Backhouse and J.

O. P. Bland, Annals and Memoirs of the Court of Peking (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1914), pp. 322-331

Snyder, Sharon L. “Modernity.” Encyclopædia Britannica. Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc., May 20, 2016. https://www.britannica.com/topic/modernity .

“Thomas Jefferson to the Citizens of Washington, D.C., 4 March 1809,” Founders Online, National Archives, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Jefferson/03-01-02-0006. [Original source: The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, Retirement Series, vol. 1, 4 March

1809 to 15 November 1809, ed. J. Jefferson Looney. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004, pp. 13–14.]

Yi, Junqing, and Lingmei Fan. "Dimensions of Modernity and Their Contemporary Fate." Frontiers of Philosophy in China 1, no. 1 (2006): 6-21. Accessed June 15, 2020. www.jstor.org/stable/30209946.

• DOI: 10.1201/9781003073369-2
• Corpus ID: 56880447

The Critique of Pure Reason

• Immanuel Kant
• Published in A Commentary on Kant’s… 14 July 2020
• A Commentary on Kant’s Critique of Judgment

Figures and Tables from this paper

1,059 Citations

Toward a definition of the matter in philosophy, principle of sufficient reason, reason, ideas and their functions in classical german philosophy, what is kant's refutation of idealism designed to refute, an essay concerning language, giving meaning and interpretation, the totality of predicates and the possibility of the most real being, kant on complete determination and infinite judgement, intuition and the end of all –isms, representing subjects, mind-dependent objects, c. i. lewis, kant, and the reflective method of philosophy, related papers.

Showing 1 through 3 of 0 Related Papers

• Table of Contents
• Random Entry
• Chronological
• Editorial Information
• About the SEP
• Editorial Board
• How to Cite the SEP
• Special Characters
• Advanced Tools
• Support the SEP
• PDFs for SEP Friends
• Make a Donation
• SEPIA for Libraries
• Entry Contents

Bibliography

Academic tools.

• Friends PDF Preview
• Author and Citation Info
• Back to Top

Economics in Early Modern Philosophy

Economic discourse of the early modern period offers an analysis of specific core phenomena: property, money, commerce, trade, public finance, population growth, and economic development, as well as investigations into economic inequality and distributive justice. Many of the leading early modern philosophers, from Nicholas Copernicus to Adam Smith, made significant contributions to economics. This list includes Jean Bodin, Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, George Berkeley, Montesquieu, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, David Hume, Étienne Bonnot de Condillac, and Jeremy Bentham. Other philosophers of renown addressed the principles of property and commercial obligations, notably Hugo Grotius, Samuel Pufendorf, Thomas Paine, Immanuel Kant, Condorcet, and Sophie de Grouchy. If economics is construed more broadly as reflections on the moral dimensions of material betterment, then the list much expands, to include, for example, Bernard Mandeville, Frances Hutcheson, Voltaire, Thomas Reid, and Antonio Genovesi. If one expands the ambit of economics to include the complex interplay between reason and the passions as directed at the pursuit of happiness, then countless men and women of letters in the early modern period contributed to this discourse.

There were at least a dozen schools of economic thought in the early modern period. Impressively, by the close of the eighteenth century, many of the core principles and laws on money, markets, and trade had been articulated, and many of the methods of economics—model building, time series analysis, statistical estimation, game theory and decision theory—were already extant. In sum, the “science of commerce” as economics was mostly known at the time, was a mature inquiry and, as held true of the natural sciences in the early modern period, drew substantially on its philosophical roots.

1. Schools of Economic Thought

2. temporal boundaries, 3. pre-modern economic thought, 4. ethics of commerce and trade, 5. principles of property and contracts, 6. philosophy of money, 7. scientific status of economics and its methodology, 8. distributive justice, primary literature, secondary literature, other internet resources, related entries.

Adam Smith’s An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776) is without question the single most influential tome, both for the early modern period and for the entire history of economics. Smith’s analysis not only unpacked the core features of money and markets, but also provided a dynamic analysis of the “progress of opulence”, sweeping across the globe and reaching back to ancient times (see Rothschild & Sen 2006). He covered the entire range of economics, from price theory to public finance. Significantly—and this may prove his greatest contribution—his first and only other book, The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759), developed a moral psychology that served as the foundation for his economics and, arguably, for economics to the present insofar as it still commits to the self-interest axiom (see Davis 2003; Schliesser 2017; Fleischacker 2013 [2020]). Smith’s first book motivated the universal sympathetic regard that binds us to one another, even to strangers, and it established a restless desire for approbation and hence for wealth as the driving force of human betterment. Finally, his essays on the history of science served to elevate the epistemic standing of economics, and by the first half of the nineteenth century the science of political economy, as it came to be known, was widely esteemed (see Redman 1997).

Smith remains nonpareil, not only because of the breadth and depth of his work, but also because he provided one of the most penetrating analyses of human behavior to explain our economic condition. If Hobbes offered a political solution to conflict and penury, Smith grasped a century later that economic forces, the accumulation of wealth and the ever-expanding global trade, overrode the power of the most ambitious of sovereigns. Recognition of the immense power of markets, both local and international, commenced in the seventeenth century, as a number of prominent twentieth-century economists came to recognize. John Maynard Keynes paid tribute to the English Mercantilists, John Locke, and William Petty; Friedrich Hayek honored the insights of Bernard Mandeville and Richard Cantillon; Paul Samuelson admired François Quesnay; and Milton Friedman praised John Law. All four—Keynes, Hayek, Samuelson, and Friedman—admired and wrote about David Hume’s economics (see Schabas & Wennerlind 2020: Ch. 7).

Smith owed a sizable debt to his immediate predecessors, above all to his close friend Hume with whom he exchanged ideas for over twenty-five years (see Harris 2015). There is a grain of truth to Joseph Schumpeter’s harsh judgment that

the Wealth of Nations does not contain a single analytic idea, principle, or method that was entirely new in 1776. (Schumpeter 1954: 184)

This, however, is testament to the theoretical maturity of economics by the second half of the eighteenth century. The most robust verities of economics, even to this day, are to be found in the pre-Smithian literature (see Hutchison 1988). The core elements of the theory of prices had been broached, its grounding in use-value and exchange-value, the appeal to the costs of labor and the imperative of cost-recovery, as well as the laws of supply and demand in various guises, including the concept of the price-elasticity of demand. Pre-Smithian economists are renowned for contributions to monetary theory, stipulating the form and function of money, the principles of bimetallism, debasement and devaluation, the quantity theory of money, the specie-flow mechanism and the multiplier (see Murphy 2009; Arnon 2010). Gresham’s law, devised circa 1560, was extended from domestic currencies to foreign exchange markets. Financial markets became increasingly sophisticated, with a wide array of equities, bonds, and discounted banknotes in circulation. The state issued public debt in the form of bonds and Exchequer notes, and amassed significant funds through lotteries and annuities (see Neal 1990). In the stock markets of Hamburg (1558), Amsterdam (1602), and London (1698), one could find short selling ( windhandel ), bond-equity swaps, and futures (see De Marchi & Harrison 1994). In 1747, Émilie du Châtelet is reputed to have devised and profited from contracting a percentage of future tax revenues, a novel instrument akin to a modern derivative (Bodanis 2006: 217–218).

Economists before Smith, such as Cantillon, Hume, James Steuart, and Anne-Robert-Jacques Turgot, discerned some of the key arguments for the gains from trade and the dynamics of economic growth that stemmed from the division of labor, population growth, economies of scale and, above all, capital accumulation (see Murphy 2009). Because of the growth of markets and factor mobility, eighteenth-century economists recognized the regional manifestation of a uniform wage and profit rate, and thus made insights not only about the inverse relationship between profits and wages but also about the tendency of the profit rate to decline over time. Above all, they did what is essential to most if not all philosophical thought—drive a wedge between appearance and reality—distinguishing prices from underlying values, and the nominal or money wage from the real wage, its purchasing power. Petty, Hume, and Smith firmly entrenched the central distinction of the nominal and the real in economic discourse while also grappling with efforts to measure inflation.

As a field of inquiry, economics was prodigious during the early modern period. From the mid-sixteenth to the late eighteenth century, the catalogue of French and English publications on economics exceeded five thousand entries (see Massie 1760; Théré 1998; Hoppit 2006). These took the form of books, short tracts, essays, pamphlets, and dictionaries, as well as entries in periodicals such as the Gentleman’s Magazine or Éphémérides du citoyen .

There were at least a dozen distinct schools of economic thought in early modern Europe (see Hutchison 1988). By far the largest and most long-lived were the Cameralists, and their voluminous output is not included in the figure of five thousand given above. Cameralists were to be found across the Germanic, Scandinavian, and Italian principalities or republics for much of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Kameralwissenschaft , or the economics of the chamber, was primarily a set of courses for young men as preparation for government positions. They also studied philosophy, the metaphysics of Christian Wolff for example, as well as botany, chemistry and metallurgy (see Tribe 1978; Wakefield 2009). Some of the leading Cameralists, notably Johann Joachim Becher, Joseph von Sonnenfels, and Johann Heinrich Gottlob von Justi, advanced distinct doctrines pertaining to autarky or public finance, vestiges of which endured in twentieth-century Fascism. Justi’s last book, System des Finanzwesens (1766), synthesized much of the extant knowledge of Cameralism, specifically on fiscal policy. As a group, they concentrated on resource extraction—mining and logging—as the means to enrichment and self-sufficiency, but there were also schemes, particularly by the Swedish botanist and Cameralist, Carl Linnaeus, to domesticate non-native plants as a means to reduce trade dependencies (see Koerner 1999).

Innumerable writings on money, trade and commerce were posthumously grouped by Adam Smith under the rubric of the “Mercantile System”, or what eventually came to be known as Mercantilism. Many of the texts were polemical and self-serving, and endorsed Crown rights and monopolistic trade. Mercantilist writings sprang up across western Europe, particularly in seventeenth-century Sweden, Holland, and England (see Magnusson 1994; Stern & Wennerlind 2014). Among these were important works by Gerard de Malynes (1622) and Edward Misselden (1623), each of whom made efforts to discover the underlying factors for the economic depression of the 1620s (see Appleby 1978). The two most influential English mercantilists, Thomas Mun (1664) and John Cary (1695) theorized about the gains from trade and its benefits for national wealth and well-being, and were by no means crude bullionists (see Reinert 2011).

Other schools were more localized and less enduring than the Cameralists or Mercantilists. One of the first is the Salamanca school of mid-sixteenth-century Spain that included Luis de Molina, Martín de Azpilcueta, and Francisco Suárez (see Grice-Hutchinson 1978). Another school drew inspiration from the natural law theories of Hugo Grotius and Samuel Pufendorf, who had addressed the principles governing contractual obligations in general, and the complexities of property rights in particular (see Skinner 1999). Johan De Wit and Christiaan Huygens of the Dutch Golden age recorded important insights into commercial mathematics (see Daston 1988; Sylla 2003). The Political Arithmeticians of seventeenth-century England and Ireland, notably William Petty, Edmund Halley, and John Graunt, devised ingenious methods for measuring population, the money supply, and the movement of core prices (see Rusnock 1999). The Stadialists of eighteenth-century Scotland, namely Lord Kames, Adam Ferguson, and John Millar, offered a theory of economic development based on four stages, hunting and gathering, shepherding, cultivation, and commerce and trade that was partly adopted by Hume and Smith (see Wolloch 2011).

Early modern France spawned a number of distinct groups, each one adhering to the dictates of a single leader, namely the Colbertistes (Jean-Baptiste Colbert), the Gournay Circle (Jacques-Claude-Marie-Vincent de Gournay), and most famously, the Physiocrats, who were also known as “les économistes” devoted to their founder François Quesnay, court physician at Versailles (see Meek 1962; Larrère 1992; Faccarello 1989 [1999]). In the Italian cities, Milan and Naples, Enlightenment circles were renowned for espousing the ideals of pubblica felicità (public happiness) and economia civile (civil economy). Some of the leading thinkers were Antonio Genovesi, Cesare Beccaria, Pietro Verri, and Ferdinando Galiani (see Robertson 2005; Reinert 2018). Portugal housed an active group of economic thinkers, notably António de Vasconcelos Nogueira and Isaac da Pinto (Cardoso 1990). In colonial America and its early days as the republic of the United States of America, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Paine, Alexander Hamilton, and James Madison, among others, devised a distinct set of principles on money, banking, capital markets, and property rights that were directly indebted to the teachings of Locke, Montesquieu, Hume, and Smith (see Pocock 1985).

From the standpoint of present mainstream economics, the legacy of the British utilitarians was by far the deepest and longest, starting with Francis Bacon, Shaftesbury (Anthony Ashley Cooper), and Francis Hutcheson, who coined the phrase “the greatest happiness for the greatest number” (1725 [1726: §3.8]), a governing principle for both Hume and Smith in their economic inquiries (see Gill 2006; Driver 2009 [2014]). Hume’s quartet of “happiness essays” (1742 but collected in 1758), and Smith’s two books (1759, 1776) are replete with insights on the ethical dimensions of the pursuit of wealth. Each one recognized that there were many impediments to happiness, that humans are prone to self-deception, to overestimate their luck and to underestimate the adversities that life holds. They each positioned non-pecuniary goods, equanimity and friendship, as more valuable than material wealth, and issued numerous insights on the various paths one might take with one’s life. While the debate about the degree to which either Hume or Smith adhered more to virtue ethics than to utilitarianism may never be resolved, when it comes to their respective economic analyses, their consequentialist observations about untoward ambition or the value of foresight fits a utilitarian sensibility (see Sakamoto 2016: Schabas 2015).

The early utilitarians, grounded in British empiricism, laid the foundation for both the classical school of political economy and for neoclassical economics that commenced with the Marginal Revolution of the 1870s. Jeremy Bentham, John Stuart Mill and Henry Sidgwick made major contributions to the moral doctrine of utilitarianism and to political economy. It is important to distinguish the moral doctrine of utilitarianism from the utility theory of value that unpacks the formation of prices. Utilitarianism provided a framing for economic thought from the seventeenth century, whereas the utility theory of value, while broached multiple times in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, only replaced the labor theory of value in the 1870s.

Interestingly, the majority of the leading contributors to nineteenth economics lived in Britain. This list features David Ricardo, John Stuart Mill, Alfred Marshall—even Karl Marx, notwithstanding Jean-Baptiste Say, Léon Walras, or the Austrians. The prevalence of economic discourse in Britain might partly reflect its hegemonic standing in global trade, but a more significant factor might be its enlightened culture that fostered freedoms of the press, liberal mores, and religious toleration (see Winch 1996).

Eighteenth-century economic discourse was more evenly spread across the Continent, but the empiricist school in Britain left the most enduring imprint. Locke, Hume and Smith made important contributions to economics, whereas scholars have yet to locate significant economic insights in the work of the leading rationalists, Descartes, Spinoza, or Leibniz, although Leibniz also wrote extensively on politics. One discernible pattern is that the leading anglophone contributors to eighteenth-century economics were, for the most part, not English-born, but Dutch, Scottish or Irish; nor were they particularly devout. Locke is the notable exception on both counts. It is important to point out that Mandeville (Dutch), Cantillon (Irish-French), and the Scots Law, Hume, and Smith, were inclined to study and promote commerce and trade as the progressive face of a more secular world. If much of modern economic thinking builds upon moral philosophy, it is and was, with a few exceptions, grounded in non-sacred sources.

This pattern of thinkers on the periphery of the religious status quo is also manifest in the nineteenth century, with Say, Ricardo, and the Mills, père et fils. To engage in the study of economics demands a willingness to overcome the Biblical restrictions on commercial activities. As Voltaire observed, praising the degree of religious diversity in the London stock market,

where there is not liberty of conscience, there is seldom liberty of trade, the same tyranny encroaching upon commerce as upon Religion. (Voltaire [1952: 43])

The fact that individual liberties and religious toleration were more prevalent in Britain might provide a more plausible explanation as to why mainstream economic thought was most cultivated in the English language over the course of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (see Mokyr 2009). This is in marked contrast to the natural sciences, which were most concentrated in France in the eighteenth century and in Germany in the nineteenth century.

Many contributors to economics were actively engaged in scientific and philosophical societies. The members of the Hartlib Circle of mid-seventeenth century England conjoined natural science with economic objectives, not least alchemical pursuits as a solution to the dire shortage of coins (see Wennerlind 2014). Its best known member, the Irish philosopher William Petty, was a leading contributor to monetary theory and demography, as well as a founding member of the Royal Society. His economic writings fill two large volumes and he broached the concepts of the transactions level and the velocity of money, two key variables that cemented the core principle of the quantity theory of money. Two of the most renowned philosophers of the period, Locke and Isaac Newton, were actively engaged in debates over the value of the currency, specifically when Newton served as Warden and then Master of the Mint (see Westfall 1981). Hume and Smith were members of the Edinburgh Philosophical Society (Hume was co-secretary) and were close friends of the leading contributors to mainstream science, William Cullen, Joseph Black, and James Hutton in Scotland, as well as, in Hume’s case, the French proto-evolutionist Comte de Buffon and, in Smith’s case, the French botanist Charles Bonnet. Smith’s essays on the history of astronomy and of physics, first sketched in the 1750s but updated and revised for the rest of his life, display a sophisticated command of science and the history and philosophy of science. His stance was one of fallibilism and instrumentalism, and he broached the possibility that the Newtonian system, while ascendant, would one day be superseded (see Schliesser 2017).

In France, the Académie des Sciences offered prizes for contributions to economics, and the multi-volume Encyclopédie (1751–1780) produced by Denis Diderot and Jean le Rond d’Alembert distinctly positioned economics on the tree of knowledge, as one of the three branches of the moral sciences (politics and natural jurisprudence were the other two). It contained numerous entries on mining, metallurgy and textiles, including one that illustrated the production of metal pins that most likely inspired Smith for his analysis of the division of labor (Ross 1995, 273-274). There were important entries by Rousseau, entitled “économie ou œconomie” (1755), by Quesnay, entitled “fermiers” (1756) and “grains” (1757), and by Turgot, entitled “foire” (1756). In sum, eighteenth-century economics was conjoined with natural philosophy, both theoretical and applied. It is not by accident that Turgot, best known as an economist and as Contrôleur général des finances (1774-1776), devised one of the most critical breakthroughs for the Chemical Revolution. His concepts of expansibilité and vaporization recognized that each substance, when heated, underwent state changes from solid, to liquid, to gas. A number of the leading contributors to eighteenth-century science, notably Carl Linnaeus, Leonhard Euler and Antoine Lavoisier, also wrote about economics.

When writing the history of a segment of the past there is always a degree of arbitrariness in demarcating its temporal boundary. Early modern philosophy spans the early sixteenth century to the late eighteenth century, but where to draw the precise boundaries will forever garner debate. In the history of economics, there is little question that Adam Smith constitutes the founding authority on the subject. A few general treatises appeared before Adam Smith’s, starting with Antoine de Montchrétien’s Traicté de l’économie politique (1615), Pierre de Boisguilbert, Dissertation de la nature des richesses (1707) and culminating with Turgot’s Réflexions sur la formation et la distribution des richessess (1766), James Steuart’s Principles of Political Œconomy (1767), and Condillac’s Le Commerce et le gouvernement considérés relativement l’un à l’autre (1776). Nevertheless, Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations (1776) was the definitive work of the period, although it took about two decades to reach that stature, and serve as the founding text for the classical school of political economy of the nineteenth century.

As Michel Foucault discerned in Les mots et les choses ( The Order of Things , 1966 [1970]), there was a significant transformation in economic discourse circa 1800, but not for the reasons he gave. It was not that the concept of wealth was merely represented before 1800, and then gained materiality. What distinguishes early modern economics from the classical period that took hold in the early nineteenth century was that the latter organized their analysis around “the economy”. Prior to that, the various core phenomena were either treated separately or, if bundled together, were for the most part treated as part of the natural order (see Schabas 2005).

It is important to recognize that “the economy” is a theoretical construct, an emergent order that sits upon patterns of human activity directed at production, distribution, and consumption. As a social kind, recognition of “the economy” took hold with Ricardo (1817) and John Stuart Mill (1848), among others (see Tribe 1981). This shift in part reflected the great economic transformation of the time, what has come to be known as the Industrial Revolution. Smith and his predecessors were still under the grip of a pre-industrial world, one of mercantile and agrarian capitalism, with only fleeting acknowledgments of the industrial take-off that had commenced by the 1760s.

Finally, the adjective “political” became paramount in the nineteenth century, but was seldom used in the early modern period. The primary name for economics in the eighteenth century was the “science of commerce”, as is evident in the titles of a number of leading texts at the time, for example by Forbonnais, Cantillon, Tucker, and Condillac. Moreover, the primary focus was on public debt, and appeals to significant political reforms were peripheral rather than central. As Hume observed in 1741, “trade was never esteemed an affair of state till the last century” (“Of Civil Liberty”, [1987: 88])—Niccolò Machiavelli made no mention of trade; moreover, it might prove too challenging to arrive at “general truths in politics” (ibid. [1987: 87–88]). When Smith took up the “science of political economy” in Book Four of the Wealth of Nations , he limited it to the policies of the legislator and public finance. Notwithstanding attention to the political restrictions on trade and commerce, the leading economists of the latter half of the eighteenth century, namely Hume, Quesnay, Turgot, and Smith, were inclined to downplay the influence of politics, and were conservative when it came to property rights. It was an age dominated by Montesquieu in France, and Edmund Burke in Britain, and the revolutions of 1776 and 1789 were bourgeois rather than socialist (see Pocock 1985; Sonenscher 2007).

In this respect as well, political economy of the nineteenth century was significantly different in tenor; it put center-stage the plight of the poor, the expansion of suffrage to working men, and their entitlement to form trade unions. Socialist economic thought only emerged in the beginning of the nineteenth century, particularly in France. There were antecedents, such as the English Levellers Gerrard Winstanley and John Lilburne, and the Dutch reformers Johan De Witt and Pieter de la Court, but they were not important contributors to economic discourse. To a significant degree, Smith served as the inflection point, with his famous statement that “no society can surely be flourishing and happy, of which the far greater part of the members are poor and miserable”, or that merchants “have an interest to deceive and even to oppress the public” (Smith 1776 [1976: 96, 267]). British and French economic thought, with some exceptions, leaned primarily toward socialism throughout the nineteenth century. Ricardo exposed the parasitical standing of the landowning class, and spawned a radical following that included both James and John Stuart Mill, as well as a group known as the Ricardian socialists. In fact, many of the early neoclassical economists, for example William Stanley Jevons, Alfred Marshall, and Léon Walras, were democratic socialists of one stripe or another. It is not a challenge to plaster a very different and far more conservative tenor to mainstream economics of the twentieth century, whether one looks to Vilfredo Pareto, Irving Fisher, Schumpeter, Hayek or Friedman. Attending to the political hue of economic discourse serves all the more to distinguish the early modern period from the classical school of political economy of the nineteenth century or the neoclassical school that persists to the present.

While there is no single definition of economics, most of the discourse of the early modern period centered upon a set of phenomena such as prices, trade, taxes, money and banking. In the nineteenth century, most texts foregrounded the laws that govern production and distribution and, starting in the 1870s, exchange and consumption. In the twentieth century, the best known definition is the one offered by Lionel Robbins in 1932:

Economics is the science which studies human behaviour as a relationship between ends and scarce means which have alternative uses. (Robbins 1932: 15)

Consumers maximize utility (preferences) and firms maximize profits (expected returns), and this seeps into virtually every facet of life. Given some limiting assumptions, modern welfare theory can prove that an economy in general equilibrium attains Pareto optimality, that it is the most efficient and the most just.

As with many sciences, Aristotle laid much of the groundwork for economic thought, and his legacy, with the medieval scholastics, with the early modern philosophers and last but not least with Karl Marx, was profound and far-reaching (see Meikle 1995). Aristotle’s unit of analysis was the oikos , or household, from which the word economy is derived, but he also issued important insights on money and prices, as well as property and slavery. Above all, he argued that commercial pursuits were, for the most part, unethical, because they distorted means and ends. He thus drove a wedge between material betterment and the pursuit of virtue. Economic pursuits must always be subsumed to the good life, or sustained happiness ( eudaimonia ). Usury was particularly problematic because it violated the natural order, obtaining a yield from an object, money, that was inanimate (Aristotle Politics 1258b).

Aristotle asked one of the most fundamental questions of economics: What is a price? The simple answer is a ratio of two goods, one of which might be the established currency, but he maintained that it made no difference; a price in barter is the same as a money price. However, he qualified this claim with the recognition of the evolution of money over time and the fact that many mistake it as an end in itself rather than simply a means to facilitate barter. More remarkably, Aristotle grasped that a price masks the fact that no two commodities are fully commensurable. Exchange of goods or services, he noted, is grounded in fulfilling specific human needs, and no two of those are ever the same.

Although [two] things so different cannot become commensurate in reality, they can become commensurate enough in relation to our needs … Currency, then by making things commensurate as a measure does, equalizes them. (Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics , 1131b16-20)

He went further on this path and asserted what is one of the most enduring propositions in economics, namely that “everything must have a price”. (ibid.)

Aristotle identified the three functional properties of money that remain canonical: money serves as a unit of account (a measure), a medium of exchange (replacing barter), and a store of value (stockpile of wealth). Furthermore, he noted that the denomination is purely conventional and that legal authorities might alter this at whim. Money was but a yardstick to measure the exchange-value of goods but unlike those goods, lacked a use-value as the fable of Midas proved all too well. He also asserted that it made no difference what substance is used for money, but then went on to assert that the fetish for gold and silver had made metallic coins unique in human society. Moreover, precious metals offered certain advantages: they are durable, divisible, transportable, and easily stamped with the value of the coin. Finally, his analysis of monopolistic pricing displays a firm grasp of the principles of supply and demand.

Aquinas, Jean Buridan, and Nicole Oresme, among others of the late medieval period, assimilated Aristotelian economic thought to Biblical teachings and, by and large, cast commercial activities in a negative light (Jones 1989; Langholm 1998). To buy low and sell high was to engage in deception and hence to violate the Golden Rule. To practice usury contravened the Biblical dictum, to “lend, expecting nothing in return” (Luke 6:35). The late medieval philosophers dug more deeply into the evolving legal practices of their time, insofar as wholesale grain merchants, partnerships, and debasements had become increasingly commonplace. Aquinas and Buridan each accepted, albeit with qualifications, that money is but a unit of measure set by men, and thus decreed that the crown might alter the denomination to serve the common good (Kaye 1998; Hirschfeld 2018). Oresme’s Treatise on Money (1358) went further, acknowledging the problematic shortage of specie and thereby promoting the use of copper or “black money”, since the coins had turned this color from overuse. He positioned the currency within the commercial sphere and thus broke all the more from the Christian view that the established coins emanated from God via divine rule, and were thus the sole property of the prince (Lapidus 1997).

In the case of commercial transactions, particularly of necessities, the late scholastics recognized legitimate charges for mercantile services of transportation, storage, and risk-taking, but condemned the practices of price gouging and other types of market manipulations, particularly the forestalling, regrating and engrossing of grain supplies. As for singular purchases of land or a luxury item, Aquinas unpacked in considerable detail the question of whether or not it was ethical to sell a good for more than it is worth. Notwithstanding customary prices, he recognized numerous circumstances where this might prove not only legal but also ethical. While berating the Roman maxim of caveat emptor , he endorsed the prevailing principle of laesio enormis which stipulated that the contracted price could fall within a fifty percent range (plus or minus) of the customary price. The doctrine of the “just price”, one that covered costs but was also sensitive to local conditions of demand, was further developed in this period and is still at the core of commercial law. Aquinas also reviewed four different contexts that would permit the charging of interest. One articulated the concept of an opportunity cost, and another appealed to the arrangement of capital transfer known as a partnership still honored today by Islamic authorities. Increasingly, commercial loans saw the principal as a form of capital that had legitimate and alternative yields. In sum, the late scholastics offer many insights on commerce and trade, the status of the Crown in managing legal tender, and the inherent tensions between commerce and virtue.

As Albert O. Hirschman (1977) argued, philosophers in early modern Europe went to great lengths to position commerce, banking, and the accumulation of wealth in a positive light, and thus overturn the harsh judgments of Aristotle and Aquinas. The widespread doctrine of doux commerce cast the pursuit of pecuniary interests in an innocent light and tamed the other more untoward passions for political power or lust. The core idea was that the love of gain—relishing the ever-increasing pile of coins—eclipsed inclinations for other pleasures or more indolent pursuits. This in turn prompted industriousness, a virtue that had already been firmly established by Hobbes and Locke, among others. Furthermore, as Locke had argued, money served to reduce the affront to God in the event that plums or meat were left to rot rather than brought to market. That said, the modern era was a far cry from Locke’s vision of the American frontier. Many merchants made vast sums from importing luxuries—coffee, tea or tobacco—and some European nations imposed sumptuary laws or hefty taxes to reduce this trade. Several philosophers argued that the consumption of luxuries was unethical, Joseph Butler and Claude-Adrien Helvétius for example (see Berry 1994). Mandeville and Hume were two of the first to argue that the economic benefits of luxuries outweighed the potential deleterious effects (see Susato 2006). Hume also noted that goods that had once been luxuries, such as paper, had become not just conveniences but even necessities. Adam Smith condemned sumptuary laws as hypocritical, since the extravagant consumption by the aristocrats who set the laws tended to be far more ruinous to the well-being of the state (Smith 1776 [1976: 346]).

Money-making and material advancement also rendered human actions more predictable and transparent. The seventeenth-century maxim that “interest will not lie”, first coined by Henri de Rohan, was in wide circulation (Hirschman 1977: 36). The self-interest axiom also began to germinate in economic discourse, enhanced by appeals to other virtuous traits, prudence and foresight (see Force 2003). Self-interest did not eclipse other-regarding traits, however, nor entail selfishness. While serving their pecuniary interests, merchants maintained that they also served God and Country, by increasing crown revenues and by taming the open seas. Merchants also prompted the rise of artisanal techniques and hence the growth of towns. This in turn prompted more mild and moderate dispositions. As Montesquieu remarked in the Spirit of the Laws :

it is an almost general rule that everywhere there are gentle mores, there is commerce and that everywhere there is commerce, there are gentle mores. (1748: [1989: 338])

Commerce induced civility and more feminine sentiments. As Hume observed of those who

flock into cities, … both sexes meet in an easy and sociable manner; and the tempers of men, as well as their behaviour, refine apace… it is impossible but they must feel an increase of humanity, from the very habit of conversing together. (“Of Refinement in the Arts” [1987: 271])

Smith observed in his Theory of Moral Sentiments that “humanity is the virtue of a woman”, and that

among civilized nations, the virtues which are founded upon humanity, are more cultivated than those which are founded upon self-denial and the command of the passions. (1759 [1976: 190, 204–5])

Smith, however, also expressed the worry that the European upper crust suffered from excessive “flattery and falsehood”, and that the “man of fashion” lacked the more esteemed “masculine virtues” (1759 [1976: 63]). Modern commercial life, for Smith, was not unequivocally for the good.

In his overview of early modern economics, Hirschman foregrounded what he called the Montesquieu-Steuart doctrine, namely that international trade induced global peace. Montesquieu singled out the significance of the bill of exchange as a critical starting point. This was an international bank order that much expanded European trade in the early modern period, and constituted an extensive network of trust between the major banking families in different countries. To trade over great distances requires considerable coordination and cooperation, if only because of the need to recognize different currencies or to contract deliveries at a later point in time. The bill of exchange averted the risky practice of shipping silver and gold from one port to another, and allowed paper representations to circulate and hence the expansion of credit.

Hobbes had already grasped that the interdependency of nations for basic goods, such as Swedish timber for English wool, might lessen international conflict, particularly if nations depended on one another for necessities or conveniences. Conflict stemmed from the desire for imported luxury goods; these goods tended to instill a new type of cupidity that would endanger peaceful trade, or so Hobbes believed (see Sorell 2006). He thus endorsed the imposition of sumptuary laws. Montesquieu was of a different mind. War is always more destructive and more costly than trade under peaceful terms. His argument pivoted on an appeal to the mutual gains from trade, and the ensuing division of labor. Hume issued other worries. He observed that each war of his lifetime had lasted longer, and cost more in real terms, than was rational given the initial objectives (“Of the Balance of Power” [1987: 339]). Insofar as much of the funding came from the excessive issuance of government bonds, the mounting public debt was bound to cripple the British government. The best means to avoid state bankruptcy was to overcome protectionist policies and promote unrestricted global trade, thereby enriching the world and diminishing military conquests.

However myopic these theories might sound—given the horrific treatment of African slaves and Indigenous peoples throughout the early modern period, and given the bloodbath of the twentieth century between purportedly civil trading nations—it is important to underscore that a widespread optimism for a more peaceful and prosperous world characterized early modern economic thought. Immanuel Kant’s celebrated appeal to a world of perpetual peace may be viewed as the capstone to this long line of thought (see Nakhimovsky 2011). As Hirschman noted, Adam Smith was the exception, for exposing the monopolistic and rapacious tendencies of European merchants and colonizers. Smith deplored the European treatment of African slaves and Indigenous peoples, not only for the inherent injustices of their actions, but because this tended to inculcate deplorable traits in the colonizers, such as tyranny, cowardice and inhumanity (Smith 1759 [1976: 200–211]; Rothschild 2001).

Above all, Smith reduced the pursuit of wealth to mere vanity and the desire for the approbation of others. There may be a trickle-down effect to the lower orders, or a gradual enrichment of the globe, but the inherent parasitical nature of men, particularly of landlords—“who love to reap where they never sowed”—and the oppressive actions of the merchants ensured that our world would be permanently saddled with grave injustices and inequalities (Smith 1776 [1976: 67]). Smith was still a far cry from the stronger despairing claims of later critics of capitalism, notably Marx’s appeal to widespread alienation, Durkheim’s caveats about anomie , or Keynes’s ridiculing of stock market frenzies (see Hirschman 1977: Part 3). Nevertheless, there is a clear sense in Smith that, however entrenched our practices of commerce and trade, their potential to elevate humans to a kinder and better world beyond mere material gratifications is severely limited (see Griswold 1998; Hanley 2009). Smith looms large as the voice of pessimism.

Contracts lie at the very core of economic thought. A simple purchase is a type of contract, the use of money another. Property rights are also grounded in the idea of a contract, at least since the early modern period. Aristotle had argued in favor of private property, primarily with appeals to security and superior stewardship. Aquinas reinforced these claims but also argued that in the case of a famine or siege, one might appropriate available foods to fulfil the Christian dictate of self-preservation. In the early modern period, Bodin, Grotius, and Pufendorf reflected at length on the question of property rights, prompted by the breakdown of feudal land tenure and ever-expanding overseas trade. Grotius’s De Mare Liberum (1609) addressed the possibility of unregulated naval and fishing rights. Hobbes (1651) and Locke (1689), with their respective appeals to the state of nature, motivated the formation of property rights and hence the government. Sovereign rule would alleviate penury, facilitate the spread of trade and commerce and, above all, foster population growth, or so it was widely believed.

Population growth, providing more hands as well as the demand for more corn and cloth, was viewed as the primary source of economic prosperity for about two centuries, until the alarm bell sounded by Thomas Robert Malthus’s Essay on the Principle of Population (1798). Whereas for Hobbes, might made right, Locke grounded property rights in consent and the virtue of industriousness; those who enclosed and cultivated the land created a right to its yield that did no harm to one’s neighbors (see Sreenivasan 1995). Because children are one’s property, this also legitimated the transfer of accumulated wealth via inheritance. Over time, inequality became salient, as some owned land while others, less fortunate, were compelled to enter into a wage contract to earn their bread and ale. Locke, however, underscored the volitional nature of these arrangements, forged on equal terms and by “tacit consent”.

While a strong advocate of traditional property laws to insure economic flourishing, Hume underscored their contingent nature, pointing to the voluminous quantity of law books that meant interpretation would never come to an end. In opposition to Locke, Hume believed that the appeal to an ancient contract forming the commonwealth was merely a myth. Ancient land rights were primarily gained by conquest and usurpation, and sustained by privilege, rather than a reward to the sweat of one’s brow. By contrast, the modern commercial era that enabled the spread of capital and hence moveable wealth, moved in step with the rise of representative government, either in the form of a republic or a constitutional monarchy such as his own (McArthur 2007; Harris 2015).

In his Treatise of Human Nature (Book Three) Hume unpacked the essential components of a contract. He identified the implicit conventions in contracts and the importance of trust.

Your corn is ripe to-day; mine will be so to-morrow. ’Tis profitable for us both, that I shou’d labour with you to-day, and that you shou’d aid me to-morrow. (Hume 1739–40 [2000: 334])

Such contractual arrangements might exist and spread among strangers as individuals came to discern their benefits. As Hume observed,

the freedom and extent of human commerce depend entirely on a fidelity with regard to promises. (1739–40 [2000: 349])

This included the use of money, which Hume recognized symbolized a chain of pledges, extending backward and forward in time. Property, money, and markets were thus bundled together, as conventions that ran no deeper than the utility of promise-keeping and one’s honor.

Hume took up the matter of forging an honorable character in his Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals (1751). Although the sphere for exercising one’s free will to reform one’s character was very limited, Hume adhered to the gradual evolution of behavioral norms, forged by material conditions, particularly commerce and trade. Monkish virtues of the medieval period had given way to commercial virtues of the modern period, honesty, probity and industry. For Adam Smith, self-command, prudence, and courage were virtues ranked more highly than others. For these reasons, those in the middling ranks, merchants and bankers, were more likely to happen onto the road to virtue than those in the lower or upper classes. And because the nouveau riches were the ones to safeguard contractual settlements, this meant that the core institutions of property and commerce would, ceteris paribus , be sustained in the centuries ahead. The merchant or banker, not the knight, had become the paragon of honor, serving the national interests as much as themselves.

A cornerstone of monetary theory, and arguably the most robust and enduring law in economics, is the quantity theory of money that commits to a causal and positive function between the price level and the money supply, treating the latter as the independent variable, that is, \(P = f(M^s)\) (see Schabas & Wennerlind 2020: 151–172). With the influx of silver from Latin America after Columbus, the money supply in Europe had more than doubled by 1510. While entering exclusively on Spanish ships, it spread rapidly, first to the Netherlands and then across Europe. Prices rose as well, although the underlying factors were not readily understood. Most purchases were of food, whose prices fluctuated with the harvests, good and bad. Consumer durables tended to be purchased infrequently, often at seasonal fairs, which had complex systems for price negotiations, pitching and haggling. The rise of middlemen, wholesale markets and retailing, became more prevalent in the seventeenth century, although the public was suspicious that these traders who lived well off their earnings were the cause of increasing prices. Although newspapers and broadsides posted prices, starting in the late seventeenth century, urban shopping still required negotiation. It was only with the department stores of the late nineteenth century that prices were routinely posted.

Pause and reflect on how difficult it would be to discern inflation in the early modern period, or perhaps even at present, and thus how brilliant was the insight that the overall price level is a function of the money supply. In the 1520s, the Prussian Diet commissioned none other than Nicholas Copernicus to investigate the recent increase in price instability. Drawing on his skills with handling large quantities of data, Copernicus’s Monetae cudendae ratio (1526) established the proposition that the value of the currency (its purchasing power) had diminished due to its abundance. We thus have the first inkling of a principle that is, in some respects, as central to economics as the principle of inertia is in physics.

Others in the second half of the sixteenth century, notably Navarrus, Luis de Molina, and Jean Bodin, arrived independently at a variant of the quantity theory of money. A century later, John Locke and William Petty added two additional variables, the velocity and the transactions level, to the core relation in the quantity theory of money. The velocity of money is something of a misnomer. It is the average rate at which a given unit of currency turns over in a given period of time. The transactions level is the rate at which payments are made, for example wages (daily or weekly) or rents (quarterly). For the capital bill, Petty estimated that five per cent of its value was manifest in liquid terms at any point of the year, a sum equivalent to the interest payment. As a remedy for the shortage of money, a problem that beset not only Petty’s Ireland but virtually every nation, the best policy was to shorten the temporal interval for the transactions level and hence increase the velocity. These four variables were cemented by Irving Fisher in 1911, with his equation that MV = PT (money supply (M) times the velocity of money (V) is equal to the price level (P) times the transactions level (T)). Fisher was also the first to measure the velocity of money. The average rate for the turnover of one dollar in New Haven was twenty times per annum.

The quantity theory of money also entails the neutrality of money. Hume broached a series of thought experiments, whereby the quantity of money in a nation doubled or halved overnight, or was reduced by an even greater amount, four-fifths (“Of Interest” [1987: 299]; “Of the Balance of Trade” [1987: 311]). He argued that this would have no lasting effect. In the case of an increase, prices would rise commensurate to the increase in money as dictated by the quantity theory. As a result, imports would surge because foreign goods were favorably priced, and the specie would flow out almost immediately and prices return to their original level, hence what came to be known as the specie-flow mechanism. Earlier contributors, such as Mun, had already argued that money would follow trade, and hence that the quantity of specie in England would reflect the balance of trade. If the balance was favorable, such that exports exceeded imports, the nation’s coffers would be augmented. Hume extrapolated from Mun’s one nation to the entire globe. Imposing the metaphor of the world’s oceans, Hume argued that it was no more possible to stockpile specie in a nation than to dam the oceans and raise them above sea-level. Each nation would see its domestic prices rise or fall in accordance with the quantity of money, and hence the strong propensity for the global supply of money to equilibrate in each nation in line with the balance of trade. It rested on a clear understanding of the distinction between the nominal and the real.

Notwithstanding his brilliant argument for the neutrality of money, Hume recognized that the specie-flow mechanism was never fully achieved; trade barriers, transaction costs, and other interferences with the money supply limited its full operation. As a result, Hume endorsed the non-neutrality of money as more veridical. He argued that, from roughly 1500 to 1750, the money supply had increased by a factor of eight but the price level had only increased by a factor of four. The simple reason was significant economic growth, a doubling of output that required the extant money to service the significant increase in transactions. The growth was stimulated by many factors, the gains from trade, the division of labor, and the accumulation of capital. Hume also acknowledged the importance of new technologies and their rapid spread once in place. Above all, he discerned that money could engender growth, even though this remained mysterious and was not “easily accounted for” (Hume “Of Money” [1987: 288).

Hume articulated the various steps by which an influx of good Spanish coins might magically stimulate economic growth. The circulation of the additional coins could induce a multiplier effect that essentially incentivized weavers and farmers to work more intensively. They did this for an interval of time, until prices and wages caught up to the additional money stock and reached a level once more. In short, the specie-flow mechanism was couched as an ideal (friction-free) process, understood as a thought experiment, whereas the injection of new money and its circulation resulted in genuine economic growth. Milton Friedman received the Nobel Prize for making these arguments, but he paid specific homage to Hume for the central analysis (Schabas & Wennerlind 2020: 208, 232). Friedman also credits Hume with asking what the optimal quantity of money for a given nation would be, but in fact several before Hume had grappled with this question, Petty and Berkeley most notably. Hume’s work is best known but there were dozens at the time who articulated one or more of the three core principles of monetary theory, the quantity theory, the specie-flow mechanism, and the multiplier.

Only the first of these three could be easily verified by empirical findings. Because legal tender was issued by the royal mint, it was possible to estimate the money supply. Hume, for example, claimed that about 90 million pounds circulated in Britain circa 1750. It was much more difficult to measure changes to the price level. Consumer price indexing, a systematic method for measuring inflation that would serve to confirm the quantity theory of money, was first devised in the late nineteenth century and only undertaken by state agencies in the decades after World War One. Nevertheless, early modern economists devised clever means to measure the purchasing power of the currency, whether by examining the price of corn (grains) or looking to other benchmarks. William Fleetwood’s Chronicon Preciosum; or an Account of English Money, the Price of Corn and other Commodities for the last 600 years (1707), proved an invaluable resource. He also made estimates of purchasing power, noting that his stipend as a Fellow of King’s College Cambridge, which had been fixed at five pounds in 1450 ought to be increased to thirty pounds to command the same value. Adam Smith proposed the longterm silver price of corn as the best metric for estimating inflation. His belief was that one must take a weighted average over a longer period of time, 50 to 100 years in order to eliminate the seasonal variations in harvests or isolated discoveries of silver reserves.

The focus on corn prices also unleashed another central principle of economics, the law of demand (quantity demanded is an inverse function of price). The so-called King-Davenant law, attributed to Gregory King (see Evans 1967) and Charles Davenant (1698) of the late seventeenth century, provided a time series analysis of corn prices (see Hutchison 1988: 46–53). They argued that in the case of a severe shortage of corn, a fall by fifty per cent of the normal supply, the price could increase by forty-five per cent. They also provided data in the case of a bountiful harvest. Their chart established that the function was an inverse one and, significantly, nonlinear.

The early modern period was plagued by a shortage of coins, and of those in circulation, most were clipped or hammered. Gresham’s law, that bad coins drive out the good ones, explained this phenomenon very well. It was estimated that the average coin had only half of the metallic content that had been stipulated by the mint. This meant that countless people were filing the coins and melting the shavings into bullion for additional remuneration from the mint. It was illegal to tamper with coins, and for most countries of Western Europe, the death penalty applied, even if one was caught simply with the tools of the trade. Other commonplace illegal activities were counterfeiting paper banknotes, bribery, smuggling, and adulterating products for sale. It would be difficult to estimate the overall level of such activities, but a background assumption in the writings of most early modern economists was the understanding that criminal methods were widespread (see Wennerlind 2011). The demise of Spain had become a trope, insofar as it had been illegally drained of its American silver. As Hume noted, smugglers in the previous two centuries had taken the Spanish silver over the Pyrenees where French prices were one-tenth those in Spain (“Of the Balance of Trade” [1987: 312]). The money had saturated most where there was international trade. By the early seventeenth century, it was the Dutch East India Company that commanded the envy of European traders, and its legacy was such that Mexican silver coins continued to dominate Asian trade until the nineteenth century.

Early modern philosophers weighed in on legal monetary interventions, notably debasement, devaluation, or recoinage. For most, the preferred policy was to leave the money stock untouched, or restore its nominal metallic value given the widespread hammering and clipping of coins. In the fourteenth century, the French crown had altered the currency, mostly with debasements, more than eighty times. As Bodin recognized, this increased the money supply and hence raised prices, but it also undermined confidence in the stability of the currency. There is no greater incident of leading philosophers tampering with the money supply than when Locke and Newton famously oversaw the Great Recoinage of 1696. Locke persuaded Newton to do the opposite of a debasement, namely to restore the silver content of the shilling to the amount stipulated by Elizabeth I circa 1600 (see Appleby 1978; Vaughn 1980). Newton thus affirmed Locke’s belief in essentialism (see Caffentzis 1989). This meant that those willing to break the law benefitted from a de facto money pump, and the crown lost some two million pounds (roughly thirty million pounds in total was in circulation). This contraction of the money supply engendered an economic downturn, but for other reasons the English economy began to expand and flourish under the reign of Queen Anne.

In their analysis of the essential properties of money, a number of early modern philosophers climbed several rungs of the ladder of monetary abstraction. George Berkeley, in his short tract The Querist (1725), recognized that the substance used for money was irrelevant, and thus promoted the concept of fiat money, a counter or token that was recognized as legal tender but not redeemable for a precious metal. (Caffentzis 2000). Benjamin Franklin (1729) proposed a novel schema whereby notes were issued with the land as the underlying asset, but the practice was short-lived in colonial Pennsylvania. Hume, while secretary to the British ambassador in France in 1765, oversaw the dismantling of a fiat-currency in Québec that had commenced in 1685 and the reinstatement of British Sterling in lower Canada.

In his Treatise , Hume broached the idea that money is analogous to language, both in its commencement in a prehistoric age, and in the sense that its primary role is to represent value, much as words represent objects (see Schabas & Wennerlind 2020: 99–101). Neither money nor language adequately refer to objects in this sense, but we tend to be duped into thinking that they do. Because of this imperfect mapping, and the fact that money embodies a pledge, a type of speech act, Hume was also inclined to appreciate paper banknotes, whether from private banks or the Exchequer. He did not share Locke’s view that nature had stamped an indelible value on gold and silver. Hume grasped that credit forms a continuum with money, and noted that there was a range of degrees of liquidity: mortgages, bonds, equities, promissory notes, bills of exchange, and so forth. Hume praised the recent innovations of Scottish bankers, to devise daily lines of credit so that merchants might monetize idle capital, and to issue ten-shilling notes denominated such that ordinary tradesmen might use them. He estimated that in 1750, over half the transactions in Britain were conducted with paper-notes, thus lubricating the wheels of trade that much the better.

Smith was more inclined to see banking and credit as precarious, and captured this sentiment with his metaphor of paper money as a “sort of wagon-way through the air”, bolstered by its “Daedalian wings” (Smith 1776 [1976: 321]). If banks were reckless with their issuance, their bills would soar in value and become over-heated, as witnessed in the serious bank failures of 1772. Smith in general was more circumspect about the benefits of merchants and overseas trade, and he argued for firm regulations to be imposed on banks and credit markets.

In the early 1670s, Shaftesbury, who had become chancellor of the Exchequer, encouraged Locke to oppose a measure that would set a legal ceiling of four percent on the interest rate. Locke revisited the debate in 1692, and in both cases, persuaded the government to keep a higher ceiling. Locke argued that in a world of perfectly competitive banking a “natural” rate of interest would override the legal one (see Vaughn 1980). Ironically, he made his arguments before the monopolistic Bank of England was formed in 1694. Jeremy Bentham’s Defence of Usury (1787), in opposition to Smith, restored Locke’s position that the interest rate ought to be unregulated and hence subject solely to market forces (see Sigot 2001). Smith’s position has remained a puzzle, since for the most part, interest rates were low and hence non-usurious, and because Smith in general embraced laissez-faire thinking (see Hollander 1999). Both Hume and Smith recognized the longterm tendency of the interest rate to fall, from ten percent under Elizabeth I to three or four percent in their day, and they arrived at the more profound understanding that this was due to capital accumulation and sophisticated commerce and trade. They did not articulate the principle of zero profits, but they understood that in a perfectly competitive world, the profit rate would equal the interest rate, the cost of borrowing capital.

The most central leitmotif of early modern economics was its appreciation for the transformative effects of money. Hobbes, drawing on William Harvey, had depicted money as the blood that courses through the body politic (see Christensen 1989; Apeldoorn 2017). Money vitalized a region, and was most effective if it was in circulation and “quickened”, that is, increased its velocity. Quesnay underscored the importance of the circulation of money, particularly bullion, and its multiplier effects, again drawing an analogy to Harvey’s great discovery. The French had initially, under the inspiration of the Scottish émigré John Law (1705), embraced private banknotes and equity swaps. But after the collapse of the Mississippi Company in 1720, for which Law was blamed, they chose to hoard silver as household plate, and banking did not recover until the end of the century. The Dutch and the British, looking to France, imposed a tax on silverware and promoted the use of chinaware as measures to reduce hoarding.

In the second of his Two Treatise of Government (1689), Locke provided an important fable as to how money came into being as a store of wealth given the existence of perishable goods. Hume, conversely, emphasized money as a medium of exchange, as the “oil” which lubricated the “wheels of trade” (“Of Money” [1987: 281]). Hume’s story looked more to the allure of luxury goods and the rise of towns and cities as prompting the thorough monetization of the countryside, such that “no hand is entirely empty of it [money]” (ibid. [1987: 294]). Once this was achieved, however, money took on a power of its own, one that no government could adequately control. As a general maxim, Hume declared that

a government has great reason to preserve with care its people and its manufactures. Its money, it may safely trust to the course of human affairs, without fear or jealousy. (“Of the Balance of Trade” [1987: 326])

Money may well be a human artifact, but as Hume and Smith, among others, argued, it operated according to laws that transcended individual human agency. “Money answers all things”, to quote the title of Jacob Vanderlint’s influential book of 1734. Money had become so complex and so deeply entrenched in the social fabric of modern commercial society that measures to retain or channel it were believed to be futile.

Newton lay down the gauntlet in his well-known Query 31 to the Opticks (1704), namely that his methods for deciphering the natural world might prove efficacious in understanding the moral sphere. Many took up his plea to advance the moral sciences. In France, one could name Voltaire, Condillac and Condorcet, and in Britain, Hutcheson, Hume, and Smith. The common conviction was to identify sufficient uniformities to human nature that resulted in manifest patterns, whether in the economic or political sphere. Hume’s associationist psychology and the copy principle implied remarkable uniformity in the machinery of the human mind, while Smith treated the sympathetic regard as akin to gravitational attraction. Both believed that introspection meant that the moral sciences, including economics could become epistemically superior to the natural sciences. As both Hume and Smith pointed out, pre-modern philosophers had endorsed a geocentric universe for thousands of years and in modern times, mistakenly adhered to the system of Cartesian vortices for almost a century. Nothing compared to the occasionalism of Malebranche, that Hume deemed “a fairy land” (Hume 1748 [2000: 57]). In the moral realm, however, we could know right away if something is as fanciful as a system of vortices. Both Hume and Smith were fallibilists about all knowledge, but they each argued that we are more likely to know when we are wrong in the moral sphere than in the physical sphere. Introspection and experience of the world were important assets in this respect. But, as Hume averred, “nature will forever elude our grasp”, and even if we dig more deeply into the microphysical realm, this would simply expose the need for further investigations.

The scientific spirit that Hume and Smith brought to their economics was already present a century earlier; both Hobbes and Petty voiced the aspiration of rendering morals into a quantitative discourse. “Commercial mathematics” took hold during the first half of the seventeenth century and many of the formal methods that have become commonplace in postwar economics were first adopted in the early modern period (see Redman 1997; Sylla 2003). Blaise Pascal’s wager to believe in God (1670 [1910]) and Daniel Bernoulli’s Saint Petersburg paradox (1738 [1954]) are preliminary examples of decision theory (see Hutchison 1988). Both imposed probability measures on expected utilities and thus provided the scaffolding of what has become an important line of inquiry in mainstream economics. Pierre de Fermat (1654) [1962] and Christiaan Huygens (1657) also studied games of chance (see Klein 1997). Game theoretical modes of thinking permeated the works of Hobbes and Hume (see Hampton 1986; Kavka 1986; Hardin 2007). Hume also articulated core elements of decision theory, including the idea of time discounting (see Diaye & Lapidus 2019; Sugden 2021).

Undergirding these preliminary efforts at both decision theory and game theory was a clear appreciation for strategic behavior, more or less a given among early modern philosophers following in the wake of Machiavelli. No one was more vocal on the widespread tendency to strategize for individual gain than Mandeville. As he observed, everyone in commercial society was duplicitous, dressing to a higher station, and rationalizing their frequent breach of ethical norms. It was well known that the hand holding the scales of justice “had often dropt ‘em, brib’d with Gold” (Mandeville 1714 [1988: 8]). Smith would echo these sentiments of duplicity:

civil government, so far as it is instituted for the security of property, is in reality instituted for the defence of the rich against the poor, or of those who have some property against those who have none at all. (Smith 1776 [1976: 715])

It is important to see that the rise of game theory in mainstream economics since the mid-twentieth century is to some extent an unwitting revival of ascriptions of strategizing and power imbalances that were commonplace in the early modern period.

Probability theory was developed in the early modern period, notably by Huygens and Abraham de Moivre (see Daston 1988). The early eighteenth-century English mathematician, John Arbuthnot, undertook calculations that resembled Neyman-Pearson testing (see Stigler 1986: 226). Hume may have copied this method, as a young admirer of Arbuthnot. Hume’s 100-page essay on population pivoted around the null hypothesis that ancient Rome was more populated than Europe in 1750, and he ably demonstrated that the likelihood that this was the case was vanishingly small. Hume may also have appreciated the insights of Thomas Bayes, who devised his theorem—now known as Bayesianism—in the 1750s, with a posthumous publication in 1764 (see Raynor 1980).

Hume appealed explicitly to the law of large numbers and invoked a number of mean-reverting tendencies, as in his commitment to uniform wages, prices and interest rates. Quantitative efforts to measure population or the money supply were undertaken with much regularity starting in the 1660s, despite a paucity of data (Endres 1985; Derringer 2018). Many, such as Graunt, understood the value of trimming outliers and seeking what Thomas Simpson (1755) coined as the arithmetic mean (see Stigler 1986; Klein 1997). Smith’s analysis of the wage spectrum was grounded in the belief that market forces had established stable and salient wages for each type of trade, and that deviations could be reduced down to his list of six key factors (Smith 1776 [1976: 82–104]).

There were some efforts at model building in the eighteenth century. Jean-François Melon (1734), whose work was widely known, constructed a model based on three similar islands with two goods in circulation (see Hont 2005: 30–32). Quesnay’s tableau économique (1758) was the most celebrated model. His disciple, Pierre Samuel Du Pont de Nemours, published a treatise in 1768 that promoted physiocracy as a “new science” on equal standing with the natural sciences. Adam Smith intended to dedicate the Wealth of Nations to Quesnay, but he died too soon.

Quesnay’s model made stylized assumptions about the French nation, ascribing three distinct classes: a quarter were landowners (aristocrats), a quarter artisans, and half farmers. He showed visually that after the initial payment of rent (the annual net product) by the farmers to the landowners, the entire unfolding of the economy would reach mathematical closure by the time of the next harvest and, like a perpetual motion machine, prompt the next period of production and distribution. No sector would increase or decrease in size and each would have its just reward in accordance with its station (a stylized assumption was that landowners consumed twice as much as the others, per capita). Quesnay also, brilliantly, introduced disturbances, for example, an unduly high interest rate, a tax, or an increased demand for artisanal goods, to demonstrate the rapid disequilibration of his system (see Quesnay 1758-1759). Contemporary modelling thrives on introducing slight variations or manipulations to disclose the underlying structure and is much indebted to Quesnay (see Hausman 2003 [2021]; Morgan 2012).

As was recognized at the time, the transition from feudalism to capitalism commenced by the early sixteenth century. In his History of England , Hume argued that commerce arose in Britain under Henry VII circa 1500, drawing on the Flemish trade. Smith shared this view, and both looked to the Italian city-states of Florence and Genoa a century before as critical developments. The shift to capitalism intensified, as both Hume and Smith recognized, with the rise of the joint-stock companies, particularly the East India companies of the Dutch, French and English.

There may be no single event or even decade to mark the transition to capitalism. Aristotle’s analysis of the agora in central Athens reminds us that markets and money were commonplace in antiquity. What sets capitalism apart is the emergence and central role of markets for the three factors of production—land, labour, and capital—and it was these that took hold during the sixteenth century. By the end of that century, possibly galvanized by other major transformations, notably the Reformation and the Scientific Revolution, it had become evident that prominent bankers and merchants were wealthier than many aristocrats. By the mid-1600s, half the people in the Netherlands lived in towns or cities and most were wage-earners.

Land was still the primary source of wealth, and merchants were renowned for retiring to a country estate. And there was widespread suspicion of upstarts, not to mention appeals to the longstanding adage that the newly-acquired wealth would disappear by the third generation. Moreover, there was a deeply-rooted belief in the necessity of ranks, most explicitly voiced by Millar and Smith. Despite the considerable expansion of domestic manufacturing in Western Europe, there was a pronounced predilection, at least among the Physiocrats and Adam Smith, to foreground the agrarian sector and view the aristocratic landowning class as an essential part of the economic picture. Historical studies justify this emphasis. Until the twentieth century, the majority of capital was invested in the agrarian sector, far more than in manufacturing or trade. If anything best characterizes the early modern period, it was the sustained increase in population due to improved fishing and agrarian yields.

Egalitarian ideals reach back to ancient times, but in early modern philosophy the arguments appeared to have more efficacy. Locke, Rousseau, Paine, William Godwin, and Mary Wollstonecraft are just some of the more significant philosophers who left their mark on the modern transition to a more equal society. Diderot was an important voice for the abolition of the slave trade and slavery. Both Hume and Smith argued that wage labor was more efficient than slavery and thus gave economic motivations for the significant end to slavery that came to pass in the nineteenth century.

The primary emphasis in the early modern period was on the rights of the “middling sorts”, merchants, bankers, and manufacturers, in contrast to the landed aristocracy. Fiscal policy, as a means to address economic inequality and serve middle-class interests, spawned a large body of thought, running from Hobbes to Hume and finally to Smith, whose principles of taxation became canonical until John Stuart Mill. Hume’s essay “Of the Middle Station of Life”, in conjunction with his writings on economics, makes plain that this group would provide the impetus for future economic growth. The commercial class was far more likely to be industrious and enterprising, and serve as the backbone of modern civil society and the custodians of liberal values. In his Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals (1751), Hume portrays a hypothetical son-in-law, Cleanthes, as a paragon of virtue. He was also a lawyer and businessman and, as the father of Hume’s hypothetical grandchildren, the one most likely to insure that the family name would be sustained for at least one more generation.

The early modern philosophers reflected on the principles of international distributive justice and its implications for global peace. As Istvan Hont highlighted, the rich-country/poor-country question was vigorously debated in the eighteenth century (Hont 2005). Gershom Carmichael and Hutcheson, for example, gave voice to these concerns, but it was Hume and Smith who laid the analytic foundations. A country was wealthier than another not because of specie but because of its people and its accumulated capital in agriculture and manufacturing. Josiah Tucker (1755) gave voice to the potential for unlimited growth, noting that higher wages were correlated with more skilled labor and capital infrastructure. Both Hume and Smith advocated high wages, but feared that with time capital would be shifted to countries with lower wages until those regions were also enriched. Because of increasing demand worldwide, however, there was no reason to suppose that a nation with a healthy export sector would decline. As was widely understood, Holland was testament to the potential of long-lived wealth, having sustained its significant foothold in global trade since it reached its apogee as the most powerful economic nation in the 1620s.

Smith is recognized as the critical figure to shift attention to the working class and to advocate higher wages. He noted that merchants and manufacturers are strongly inclined to collude so as not to raise wages (Smith 1776 [1976: 267]). He noted the degradation of workers who were compelled to spend their entire lives “performing a few simple operations” (1776 [1976: 782]). With pointed words, he underscored the dehumanizing effects of unvaried work, such that a typical person

generally becomes as stupid and ignorant as it is possible for a human creature to become. (1776 [1976: 782])

Smith believed this would become widespread. In

every improved and civilised society this is the state into which the labouring poor, that is, the great body of the people, must necessarily fall, unless government takes some pains to prevent it. (1776 [1976: 782])

Smith advocated widespread schooling, with mechanics and gymnastics, and the fostering of theatre or dancing on the day of rest. He believed that inventions often came from the shopfloor, and that a more orderly standing army would be fostered by men who learned to develop both body and mind.

Above all, Smith exposed the emptiness of the pursuit of wealth, that it consisted primarily in “the parade of riches”, which feeds upon the envy of those without (Smith 1776 [1976: 190]). The rich garner far more pleasure from being observed riding in a carriage than from the comforts a carriage might offer. Our efforts to pursue wealth and power stem from the universal desire for admiration and approbation. There is also a deep asymmetry in Smith’s account of human sympathy, the act of fellow-feeling, in that we sympathize with the rich and shun the poor. The reason is that we imagine ourselves in their place and thus fill in the gaps of our otherwise inadequate lives. It is for this reason, Smith believes, that the state must insure that royalty indulge in opulent displays. Ranks are of great importance in the world, for motivating us to strive, driven by “the desire of bettering our condition” (Smith 1776 [1976: 341]). Smith believed that we are a restless lot, that

there is scarce perhaps a single instant in which any man is so perfectly and completely satisfied with his situation, as to be without any wish of alteration or improvement of any kind. An augmentation of fortune is the means by which the greater part of men propose and wish to better their condition. (1776 [1976: 341])

As a result, there is nothing worse than a fall from grace and ensuing loss of admiration. Smith observes that “bankruptcy is perhaps the greatest and most humiliating calamity which can befall an innocent man” and its fear has thus fostered widespread prudence in the modern commercial world (Smith 1776 [1976: 342]).

Smith’s portrayal of human nature is tinged with these dark thoughts, similar to the cynicism of Mandeville. We spend our entire life attempting to garner approval, grounded in the sympathetic regard, and are for the most part prone to vanity and greed. His parable about the poor man’s son, who is driven by ambition to become wealthy only to realize at the end of his life that the indignities he suffered “to serve those whom he hates” and to be “obsequious to those whom he despises” have robbed him of a “real tranquillity” that he might have achieved had he known his place and remained poor. (Smith 1759 [1976: 181]). Only at the end of his life does he grasp that “wealth and greatness are mere trinkets”, and that the loss of friendship and the “injustice of his enemies” that he has suffered as he climbed upwards has left him bereft of peace of mind (ibid.). Smith remarks that the beggar on the highway sleeps better than the king, and that the better aim in life is to achieve inner equanimity. Adam Smith, the philosopher most readily associated with the voice of capitalism, could not be more disparaging about its tendencies to reinforce the baser features of human nature. While he endorsed rising standards of living for the lower orders, his stoicism was the more dominant sentiment. Life was a lottery and one had best prepare for adversity. As Smith aptly put it, wealth might “keep off the summer shower, [but] not the winter storm” (Smith 1759 [1976: 183]). Early modern economics thus offered practical wisdom and served as a major resource for forging a wise and virtuous life.

• Aquinas, “Fraud” (Qu. 77) and “The Sin of Usury” (Qu. 78) in Summa Theologiae (The Second Part of Part II, 1271-1272), in St. Thomas Aquinas on Politics and Ethics, Paul E. Sigmund (ed. and trans.), New York: W.W. Norton and Co., 1988, 73-75.
• Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics , Terence Irwin (trans.), Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1985.
• –––, Politics , C.D.C. Reeve (trans.), Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1998.
• Bayes, Thomas, 1764, “An Essay towards solving a Problem in the Doctrine of Chances”, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London , 53: 370–418. doi:10.1098/rstl.1763.0053
• Bentham, Jeremy, 1787, Defence of Usury , London: Payne.
• –––, 1789, An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation , London: Payne. Reprinted New York: Haffner, 1948.
• Berkeley, George, 1725, The Querist, Containing Several Queries, Proposed to the Consideration of the Public , Dublin.
• Bernoulli, Daniel, 1738 [1954]. “Exposition of a New Theory of the Measurement of Risk”, Louise Sommer (trans.), Econometrica, 22: 23-36.
• Boisguilbert, Pierre le Pesant de, 1707, “Dissertation de la nature des richesses, de l’argent et des tributs, où l’on découvre la fausse idée qui règne dans le monde à l’égard de ces trois articles”, appended to the 1707 edition of Le Détail de la France , Rouen?, volume 2, 213–302.
• Cantillon, Richard, 1755, Essai sur la Nature du Commerce en Général , Londres: Fletcher Gyles. Translated as Essay on the Nature of Commerce in General , Henry Higgs (trans.), with an Introduction by Anthony Brewer, New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2001.
• Cary, John, 1695, An Essay on the State of England in Relation to Its Trade, Its Poor, and Its Taxes , Bristol: W. Barry.
• Clark, Henry C., ed., 2003, Commerce, Culture, and Liberty: Readings on Capitalism before Adam Smith, Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund.
• Condillac, Étienne Bonnot, abbé de, 1776, Le Commerce et le gouvernement, considérés relativement l’un a l’autre , Amsterdam/Paris: Jombert & Cellot. Translated as Commerce and Government, Considered in their Mutual Relationship , Shelagh Eltis and Walter Eltis (trans), Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar, 1997.
• Copernicus, 1526, Monetae cudendae ratio , presented to the Prussian Diet.
• D’Alembert, Jean le Rond, 1751, Discours préliminaire des éditeurs , to Diderot and D’Alembert Encyclopédie des arts et des métiers , volume 1. Translated as Preliminary Discourse to the Encyclopedia of Diderot , R. N. Schwab. (trans.), Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1955.
• Davenant, Charles, 1698, Discourses on the Publick Revenues, and on the Trade of England , London.
• Defoe, Daniel, 1710, An Essay upon Publick Credit , London.
• Diderot, Denis, Political Writings , John Hope Mason and Robert Wokler (eds.), New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992. doi:10.1017/CBO9781139168052
• Diderot, Denis and Jean le Rond D’Alembert (eds.), 1751–1780, Encyclopédie des arts et des métiers , 35 vols., Paris: Briasson. Reprint, Stuttgart/Bad Cannstatt: Frommann, 1966.
• Du Pont de Nemours, Pierre Samuel, 1768, De l’origine et des progrès d’une science nouvelle , Paris: Desaint.
• Du Tot, Charles de Ferrère, 1738, Réflexions politiques sur les finances et le commerce , The Hague: Frèrers Vaillant and N. Prevôst.
• Ferguson, Adam, 1767, An Essay on the History of Civil Society , Edinburgh: Millar. Reprinted, Duncan Forbes (ed.), Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1966.
• Fermat, Pierre de, 1654 [1962], “Correspondence”, M. Merrington (trans.), in Games, Gods and Gambling: The Origins and History of Probability and Statistical Ideas from the Earliest Times to the Newtonian Era, Florence David (ed), London: Charles Griffin: 229-253.
• Fisher, Irving, 2011, The Purchasing Power of Money , New York: Macmillan.
• Fleetwood, William, 1707, Chronicon Preciosum; or an Account of English Money, the Price of Corn and other Commodities for the last 600 years , London: Charles Harper.
• Forbonnais, François Véron de, 1754, Élemens du commerce , second edition, 2 vols., Leiden.
• Franklin, Benjamin, 1729, A Modest Enquiry into the Nature and Necessity of a Paper-Currency , Philadelphia, PA: New Printing-Office near the Market. Reprinted in L.W. Larabee and W.J. Bell (eds.), The Writings of Benjamin Franklin , New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
• Galiani, Ferdinando, 1751, Della moneta , Naples.
• Grotius, Hugo, 1609, De Mare Liberum , Leiden, Elzevier.
• –––, 1625, De iure belli ac pacis libri tres , Paris: Buon. Translated as Of the Law of War and Peace in Three Books , Frank W. Kelsey (trans.), Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1925.
• Helvétius, Claude-Adrien, 1758, De l’esprit , Paris: Laurent Durand. Translated as De l’esprit or, Essays on the Mind, and its Several Faculties , W. Mudford (trans.), London: M. Jones, 1807.
• Hobbes, Thomas, 1651, Leviathan , London. Reprinted, Richard Tuck (ed.), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996.
• Hume, David, 1739–40 [2000], A Treatise of Human Nature , London. Reprinted, David Fate Norton and Mary J. Norton (eds.), Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000.
• –––, 1748, An Enquiry concerning Human Understanding . Reprinted, Tom L. Beauchamp (ed.), Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000.
• –––, 1751, An Enquiry concerning the Principles of Morals . Reprinted, Tom L. Beauchamp (ed.), Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998.
• –––, 1752, Political Discourses , Edinburgh: A. Kincaid and A. Donaldson.
• 1741, “Of Civil Liberty” originally titled “Of Liberty and Despotism” [1987: 87–96]
• 1742, “The Epicurean”, the first of the “Happiness Essays” [1987: 138–145]
• 1742, “The Stoic”, the second of the “Happiness Essays”, [1987: 146–154]
• 1742, “The Platonist”, the third of the “Happiness Essays” [1987: 155–158]
• 1742, “The Sceptic”, the fourth of the “Happiness Essays” [1987: 159–180]
• 1752, “Of Refinement in the Arts” originally titled “Of Luxury” [1987: 268–380]
• 1752, “Of Money” [1987: 281–294]
• 1752, “Of Interest” [1987: 295–307]
• 1752, “Of the Balance of Trade” [1987: 308–326]
• 1752, “Of the Balance of Power” [1987: 332–341]
• 1742, “Of the Middle Station of Life”, [1987: 545–551]
• –––, 1955 [2007], David Hume: Writings on Economics , Eugene Rotwein (ed.), Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press. New edition with an introduction by Margaret Schabas, New Brunswick NJ: Transaction, 2007.
• Hutcheson, Francis, 1725 [1726], An Inquiry into the Original of Our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue , London; second edition [B] 1726, London; third edition [C] 1729, London; fourth edition [D] 1738, London.
• –––, 1755, A System of Moral Philosophy , 3 vols., Glasgow.
• Huygens, Christiaan, 1657, “De Ratiociniis in Aleæ Ludo”, in Exercitionum Mathematicarum, libri quinque, Francis van Schooten (ed), Leiden: Johannis Elsevirii: 517-534.
• Justi, Johann Heinrich Gottlob von, 1766, System des Finanzwesens , Halle: Renger.
• Kant, Immanuel, 1795, Zum ewigen Frieden. Ein philosophischer Entwurf , Königsberg: F. Nicolovius. Translated as “To Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Sketch”, in Perpetual Peace and Other Essays , Ted Humphrey (trans.), Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1983.
• Kelly, Patrick Hyde (ed.), 1991, Locke on Money , volume 2 of The Clarendon Edition of the Works of John Locke , John W. Yolton (gen. ed.), Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Law, John, 1705, Money and Trade Considered, with a Proposal for Supplying the Nation with Money , Edinburgh.
• Locke, John, 1689, Two Treatises of Government , London: Awnsham Churchill. Reprinted, Peter Laslett (ed.), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988.
• –––, 1695, Further Considerations concerning Raising the Value of Money , London.
• Malynes, Gerard de, 1622, The Maintenance of Free Trade, According to the Three Essentiall Parts of Traffique; Namely Commodities, Moneys and Exchange of Moneys, by Bills of Exchanges for other Countries. Or answer to a Treatise of Free Trade, or the meanes to make Trade floushish , London: William Shefford.
• Mandeville, Bernard, 1714 [1988], The Fable of the Bees, or Private Vices, Publick Benefits , London: J. Roberts. Reprinted, F.B. Kaye (ed.), 2 volumes, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1924; reprinted Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1988.
• Massie, Joseph, 1760, A Representation concerning the Knowledge of Commerce as a National Concern: Pointing out the Proper Means of Promoting such Knowledge in this Kingdom , London: Payne.
• Malthus, Thomas Robert, 1798, Essay on the Principle of Population , London: J. Johnson.
• Meek, Ronald L., 1962, The Economics of Physiocracy: Essays and Translations , London: Allen and Unwin.
• Melon, Jean-François, 1734, Essai politique sur le commerce , Rouen? Translated as A Political Essay upon Commerce , David Bindon (trans.), Dublin: Philip Crampton, 1738.
• Mill, John Stuart, 1848, Principles of Political Economy , 2 volumes, London: John W. Parker.
• Millar, John, 1771, Observations Concerning the Distinction of Ranks in Society , London: W. and J. Richardson. The third edition in his lifetime changed the title to The Origin of the Distinction of Ranks , London: J. Murray, 1781. Reprinted, Aaron Garrett (ed.), Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund, 2006.
• Mirabeau, Victor Riqueti, marquis de, 1756, L’ami des hommes, où Traité de la population , 3 vols., Avignon.
• Misselden, Edward, 1623, The Circle of Commerce, or The Balance of Trade, in Defence of Free Trade , London: Nicholas Bourne.
• Monroe, Arthur Eli (ed.), 1924, Early Economic Thought, Selected Writings from Aristotle to Hume , Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press.
• Montchrétien, Antoine de, 1615, Traicté de l’économie politique , Rouen: J. Osmont.
• Montesquieu, Charles-Louis de Secondat, baron de, 1748 [1989], De l’esprit des lois , Geneve. Translated as The Spirit of the Laws , Anne M. Cohler, Basia Carolyn Miller, and Harold Samuel Stone (eds., and trans), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989.
• Mun, Thomas, 1664, England’s Treasure by Forraign Trade , London: T. Clark. Reprinted Fairfield, NJ: Augustus M. Kelly, 1986.
• Newton, Isaac, 1704 (1730), Opticks , I. Bernard Cohen (ed.), New York: Dover, 1979.
• Oresme, Nicholas, 1358, Treatise on Money ( Traité Monétaires ), Jacquelines Fau (ed.) Paris: Cugas, 1990.
• Pascal, Blaise, 1670 [1910], Pensées, W.F. Trotter (trans.), London: Dent.
• Pinto, Isaac de, 1771, Traité de la circulation et du crédit , Amsterdam.
• Pufendorf, Samuel, 1673, De Officio Hominis et Civis Juxta Legem Naturalem . Translated as On the Duty of Man and Citizen According to Natural Law , James Tully (ed.) and Michael Silverthorne (trans.), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991.
• Quesnay, François, 1756, “Fermiers”, in Diderot and D’Alembert Encyclopédie , 6: 528–540.
• –––, 1757, “Grains”, in Diderot and D’Alembert Encyclopédie , 7: 812-831.
• –––, 1758, “Tableau économique”, manuscript. Recast and printed in 1766 as “Analyse de la formule arithmétique du tableau économique de la distribution des dépenses annuelles d’une Nation agricole”, Journal de l’Agriculture, du Commerce et des Finances , 2(3): 11–41.
• –––, 1758-1759, “Tableau économique”, (first, second and third editions) in Meek, 1962, pp. 109-137.
• Reid, Thomas, 1764, An Inquiry in the Human Mind, on the Principles of Common Sense , Edinburgh.
• Ricardo, David, 1817, On the Principles of Political Economy and Taxation , London: John Murray.
• Robbins, Lionel, 1932, An Essay on the Nature and Significance of Economic Science , London: MacMillan.
• Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 1755 [2012], “Économie ou Oeconomie”, in Diderot and d’Alembert Encyclopédie , 5: 537–549. Translated as “Discourse on Political Economy”, in D. Cress (ed. and trans.), Jean-Jacques Rousseau: The Basic Political Writings , second edition, Indianapolis, IN: Hackett.
• Shaftesbury, Anthony Ashley Cooper, 1711, Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times , London. Second edition, London, 1714–15. Reprinted, Lawrence E. Klein (ed.), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999.
• Simpson, Thomas, 1755, “A Letter to the Right Honourable George Earl of Macclesfield, President of the Royal Society, on the Advantage of Taking the Mean of a Number of Observations, in Practical Astronomy”, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society , 49(1): 82-93.
• Smith, Adam, 1759 [1976], The Theory of Moral Sentiments , London: Andrew Millar and Edinburgh: Alexander Kincaid and J. Bell. Reprinted, D.D. Raphael and A.L. Macfie (eds.), Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976.
• –––, 1776 [1976], An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations , 2 volumes, London: W. Strahan and T. Cadell. Reprinted, R.H. Campbell, A.S. Skinner, and W.B. Todd (eds.), Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976.
• –––, 1795 [1980], “The Principles which Lead and Direct Philosophical Enquiries: Illustrated by the History of Astronomy”, in his Essays on Philosophical Subjects , Dugald Stewart (ed.), London. Reprinted, W.P.D. Whightman and J.C. Bryce (eds.),Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980, pp. 31–105.
• Steuart, James, 1767, An Inquiry into the Principles of Political Œconomy , 2 vols., London. Reprinted, Andrew S. Skinner (ed.), Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966.
• Tucker, Josiah, 1755, The Elements of Commerce and the Theory of Taxes, n.p. private edition of the author.
• Turgot, Anne-Robert-Jacques, 1756, “Foire”, in Diderot and D’Alembert Encyclopédie , 7: 39-41.
• –––, 1766 [in manuscript; printed in 1770], Réflexions sur la formation et la distribution des richesses , Paris. Translated as Reflections on the Formation and Distribution of Riches, William J. Ashley (trans., 1898), New York: Augustus M. Kelley, 1971.
• Vanderlint, Jacob, 1734, Money Answers All Things , London: T. Cox.
• Voltaire, François Marie Arouet de, 1733/34, Lettres philosophiques , in English, 1733 and as Lettres Ecrites de Londres sur les Anglois , in French, Basle, 1734. Translated as Philosophical Letters , Ernest Dilworth (trans.), Indianapolis, IN: Bobbs-Merrill, 1961.
• –––, 1952, Voltaire’s Notebooks , two volumes continuous pagination, Theodore Besterman (ed.), Genève, Institut et musée Voltaire.
• Xenophon, Œconomicus , E.C. Merchant and O.J. Todd (trans.), in Memorabilia, Œconomicus, Symposium, Apology , Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press.
• Apeldoorn, Laurens van, 2017, “‘The Nutrition of a Commonwealth:’ On Hobbes’s Economic Thought”, in History of Economic Rationalities: Economic Reasoning as Knowledge and Practice Authority , Jakob Bek-Thomsen, Christian Olaf Christiansen, Stefan Gaarsmand Jacobsen, and Mikkel Thorup (eds.), (Ethical Economy 54), Dordrecht: Springer International Publishing, 21–30. doi:10.1007/978-3-319-52815-1_3
• Appleby, Joyce Oldham, 1978, Economic Thought and Ideology in Seventeenth-Century England , Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
• Arnon, Arie, 2010, Monetary Theory and Policy from Hume and Smith to Wicksell: Money, Credit, and the Economy , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/CBO9780511921384
• Bodanis, David, 2006, Passionate Minds: The Great Enlightenment Love Affair , New York: Random House.
• Baier, Annette C., 1991, A Progress of Sentiments: Reflections on Hume’s Treatise , Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
• Berry, Christopher J., 1994, The Idea of Luxury: A Conceptual and Historical Investigation , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/CBO9780511558368
• Brewer, Anthony, 1995, “The Concept of Growth in Eighteenth-Century Economics”, History of Political Economy , 27(4): 609–638. doi:10.1215/00182702-27-4-609
• Bruni, Luigino and Pier Luigi Porta, 2003, “Economia civile and pubblica felicità in the Italian Enlightenment”, in Schabas and de Marchi 2003: 361–385.
• Caffentzis, Constantine George, 1989, Clipped Coins, Abused Words, and Civil Government: John Locke’s Philosophy of Money , Brooklyn, NY: Autonomedia.
• –––, 2000, Exciting the Industry of Mankind: George Berkeley’s Philosophy of Money , Dordrecht: Springer. doi:10.1007/978-94-015-9522-3
• Cardoso, José Luís, 1990, “Economic Thought in Late Eighteenth-Century Portugal: Physiocratic and Smithian Influences”, History of Political Economy, 22(3): 429-441.
• Christensen, Paul P., 1989, “Hobbes and the Physiological Origins of Economic Science”, History of Political Economy , 21(4): 689–709. doi:10.1215/00182702-21-4-689
• Coleman, William Oliver, 1995, Rationalism and Anti-Rationalism in the Origins of Economics: The Philosophical Roots of 18th Century Economic Thought , Aldershot: Edward Elgar.
• Daston, Lorraine, 1988, Classical Probability in the Enlightenment , Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
• Davis, Gordon F., 2003, “Philosophical Psychology and Economic Psychology in David Hume and Adam Smith”, History of Political Economy , 35(2): 269–304. doi:10.1215/00182702-35-2-269
• De Marchi, Neil and Paul Harrison, 1994, “Trading ‘in the Wind’ and with Guile: The Troublesome Matter of the Short Selling of Shares in Seventeenth-Century Holland”, in Higgling: Transactors and Their Markets in the History of Economics , Neil de Marchi and Mary S. Morgan (eds.), supplement to History of Political Economy , 26(suppl_1): 47–65. doi:10.1215/00182702-1994-suppl_1008
• Derringer, William, 2018, Calculated Values: Finance, Politics, and the Quantitative Age , Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
• Diaye, Marc-Arthur and André Lapidus, 2019, “Decision and Time from a Humean Point of View”, The European Journal of the History of Economic Thought , 26(3): 622–652. doi:10.1080/09672567.2019.1623280
• Driver, Julia, 2009 [2014], “The History of Utilitarianism”, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2014 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = < https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2014/entries/utilitarianism-history/ >
• Endres, A.M., 1985, “The Functions of Numerical Data in the Writings of Graunt, Petty, and Davenant”, History of Political Economy , 17(2): 245–264. doi:10.1215/00182702-17-2-245
• Evans, G. Heberton Jr., 1967, “The Law of Demand – The Roles of Gregory King and Charles Davenant”, The Quarterly Journal of Economics , 81(3): 483–492.
• Faccarello, Gilbert, 1989 [1999], Aux origines de l’économie politique libérale , Paris: Éditions Anthropos. Translated as The Foundations of “Laissez-Faire”: The Economics of Pierre de Boisguilbert , Carolyn Shread (trans.), London: Routledge, 1999. doi:10.4324/9780203005637
• ––– (ed.), 1998, Studies in the History of French Political Economy: From Bodin to Walras , London: Routledge. doi:10.4324/9780203024850
• Fleischacker, Samuel, 2004, On Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations: A Philosophical Companion , Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
• –––, 2013 [2020], “Adam Smith’s Moral and Political Philosophy”, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2020 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = < https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2020/entries/smith-moral-political/ >.
• Force, Pierre, 2003, Self-Interest before Adam Smith: A Genealogy of Economic Science , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/CBO9780511490538
• Foucault, Michel, 1966 [1970], Les mots et les choses: une archéologie des sciences humaines , Paris: Gallimard. Translated as The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences , Catherine Porter (trans.), New York: Random House, 1970.
• Gaukroger, Stephen, 2010, The Collapse of Mechanism and the Rise of Sensibility: Science and the Shaping of Modernity, 1680–1760 , New York: Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199594931.001.0001
• Gill, Michael B., 2006, The British Moralists on Human Nature and the Birth of Secular Ethics , New York: Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/CBO9780511499272
• Grice-Hutchinson, Marjorie, 1978, Early Economic Thought in Spain, 1177–1740 , London: George Allen and Unwin.
• Griswold, Charles L., Jr, 1998, Adam Smith and the Virtues of Enlightenment , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/CBO9780511608964
• Haakonssen, Knud, 1981, The Science of a Legislator: The Natural Jurisprudence of David Hume and Adam Smith , New York: Cambridge University Press.
• Hampton, Jean, 1986, Hobbes and the Social Contract Tradition , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/CBO9780511625060
• Hanley, Ryan Patrick, 2009, Adam Smith and the Character of Virtue , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/CBO9780511581212
• Hardin, Russell, 2007, David Hume: Moral and Political Theorist , New York: Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199232567.001.0001
• Harris, James A., 2015, Hume: An Intellectual Biography , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/CBO9781139033220
• Hausman, Daniel M., 2003 [2021], “Philosophy of Economics”, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2021 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = < https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2021/entries/economics/ >
• Hirschfeld, Mary, 2018, Aquinas and the Market: Toward a Humane Economy , Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
• Hirschman, Albert O., 1977, The Passions and the Interests: Political Arguments for Capitalism before Its Triumph , Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
• Hollander, Samuel, 1999, “Jeremy Bentham and Adam Smith on the Usury Laws: A ‘Smithian’ Reply to Bentham and a New Problem,” European Journal of the History of Economic Thought , 6(4): 523-551. doi:10.1080/10427719900000042
• Hont, Istvan, 2005, Jealousy of Trade: International Competition and the Nation State in Historical Perspective , Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
• –––, 2015, Politics in Commercial Society: Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Adam Smith , Béla Kapossy and Michael Sonenscher (eds.), Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
• Hoppit, Julian, 2006, “The Contexts and Contours of British Economic Literature, 1660–1760”, The Historical Journal , 49(1): 79–110. doi:10.1017/S0018246X05005066
• Hundert, E. J., 1994, The Enlightenment’s Fable: Bernard Mandeville and the Discovery of Society , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/CBO9780511584749
• Hutchison, Terence, 1988, Before Adam Smith: The Emergence of Political Economy, 1666–1776 , Oxford: Basil Blackwell.
• James, Susan, 2006, “The Passions and the Good Life”, in The Cambridge Companion to Early Modern Philosophy , Donald Rutherford (ed.), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 198–220. doi:10.1017/CCOL0521822424.008
• Jones, Norman L., 1989, God and the Moneylenders: Usury and Law in Early Modern England , Oxford: Basil Blackwell.
• Hirschfeld, Mary, 2018, Aquinas and the Market: Toward a Humane Economy, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
• Kavka, Gregory S., 1986, Hobbesian Moral and Political Theory , Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
• Kaye, Joel, 1998, Economy and Nature in the Fourteenth Century: Money, Market Exchange, and the Emergence of Scientific Thought , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/CBO9780511496523
• Klein, Judy L., 1997, Statistical Visions in Time: A History of Time Series Analysis, 1662–1938 , New York: Cambridge University Press.
• Koerner, Lisbet, 1999, Linnaeus: Nature and Nation , Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
• Langholm, Odd, 1998, The Legacy of Scholasticism in Economic Thought: Antecedents of Choice and Power , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/CBO9780511528491
• Lapidus, André, 1997, “Metal, Money, and the Prince: John Buridan and Nicholas Oresme after Thomas Aquinas”, History of Political Economy , 29(1): 21–53. doi:10.1215/00182702-29-1-21
• Larrère, Catherine, 1992, L’invention de l’économie au XVIIIe siècle: Du Droit naturel à la physiocratie , Paris: Presses Universitaires de France.
• Maas, Harro, 2003, “Where Mechanism Ends: Thomas Reid on the Moral and the Animal Oeconomy”, in Schabas and de Marchi 2003: 338–360.
• Magnusson, Lars, 1994, Mercantilism: The Shaping of an Economic Language , London: Routledge. doi:10.4324/9780203416488
• McArthur, Neil, 2007, David Hume’s Political Theory: Law, Commerce, and the Constitution of Government , Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
• –––, 2012, “‘Thrown amongst Many’: Hobbes on Taxation and Fiscal Policy”, in Hobbes Today: Insights for the 21st Century , S. A. Lloyd (ed.), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 178–189. doi:10.1017/CBO9781139047388.011
• Meikle, Scott, 1995, Aristotle’s Economic Thought , Oxford: Clarendon Press.
• Mokyr, Joel, 2009, The Enlightened Economy: An Economic History of Britain, 1700–1850 , New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
• Morgan, Mary S., 2012, The World in the Model: How Economists Work and Think, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Murphy, Antoin E., 2009, The Genesis of Macroeconomics: New Ideas from Sir William Petty to Henry Thornton , Oxford: Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199543229.001.0001
• Nakhimovsky, Isaac, 2011, The Closed Commercial State: Perpetual Peace and Commercial Society from Rousseau to Fichte , Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
• Neal, Larry, 1990, The Rise of Financial Capitalism: International Capital Markets in the Age of Reason , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/CBO9780511665127
• Pocock, J. G. A., 1985, Virtue, Commerce, and History: Essays on Political Thought and History, Chiefly in the Eighteenth Century , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/CBO9780511720505
• Raynor, David, 1980, “Hume’s Knowledge of Bayes’s Theorem”, Philosophical Studies , 38(1): 105–106. doi:10.1007/BF00354534
• Redman, Deborah A., 1997, The Rise of Political Economy as a Science: Methodology and the Classical Economists , Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
• Reinert, Sophus, 2011, Translating Empire: Emulation and the Origins of Political Economy , Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
• –––, 2018, The Academy of Fisticuffs: Political Economy and Commercial Society in Enlightenment Italy , Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
• Robertson, John, 2005, The Case for The Enlightenment: Scotland and Naples 1680–1760 , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/CBO9780511490705
• Ross, Ian Simpson, 1995, The Life of Adam Smith, Oxford: Clarendon Press.
• Rothschild, Emma, 2001, Economic Sentiments: Adam Smith, Condorcet, and the Enlightenment , Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
• Rothschild, Emma and Amartya Sen, 2006, “Adam Smith’s Economics”, in The Cambridge Companion to Adam Smith , Knud Haakonssen (ed.), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 319–365. doi:10.1017/CCOL0521770599.013
• Rusnock, Andrea A., 1999, “Biopolitics: Political Arithmetic in the Enlightenment”, in The Sciences in Enlightened Europe , William Clark, Jan Golinski, and Simon Schaffer (eds.), Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 49–68.
• Sakamoto, Tatsuya, 2016, “Hume’s Philosophical Economics”, in Oxford Handbook of Hume , Paul Russell (ed.), Oxford: Oxford University Press, 569–587.
• Schabas, Margaret, 2005, The Natural Origins of Economics , Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
• –––, 2015, “Hume on Economic Well-Being”, in The Bloomsbury Companion to Hume , Alan Bailey and Dan O’Brien (eds.), London: Bloomsbury, (ch. 18) pp. 332–348.
• Schabas, Margaret and Neil de Marchi (eds.), 2003, Œconomies in the Age of Newton , Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
• Schabas, Margaret and Carl Wennerlind, 2020, A Philosopher’s Economist: Hume and the Rise of Capitalism , Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
• Schliesser, Eric, 2017, Adam Smith: Systematic Philosopher and Public Thinker , Oxford: Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/oso/9780190690120.001.0001
• Schumpeter, Joseph A., 1954, History of Economic Analysis , New York: Oxford University Press.
• Sigot, Nathalie, 2001, Bentham et l’économie: Une histoire d’utilité , Paris: Economica.
• Skinner, Andrew, 1999, “Pufendorf, Hutcheson and Adam Smith: Some Principles of Political Economy”, in Grotius, Pufendorf and Modern Natural Law , Knud Haakonssen (ed.), Aldershot: Ashgate.
• Sonenscher, Michael, 2007, Before the Deluge: Public Debt, Inequality and the Intellectual Origins of the French Revolution , Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
• Sorell, Tom, 2006, “Hobbes on Trade, Consumption and International Order”, The Monist , 89(2): 245–258. doi:10.5840/monist200689223
• Sreenivasan, Gopal, 1995, The Limits of Lockean Rights in Property , New York: Oxford University Press.
• Stern, Philip J. and Carl Wennerlind (eds.), 2014, Mercantilism Reimagined: Political Economy in Early Modern Britain and Its Empire , Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Stigler, Stephen M., 1986, The History of Statistics , Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
• Sugden, Robert, 2021, “Hume’s Experimental Psychology and the Idea of Erroneous Preferences”, Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization , 183(3): 836–848. doi:10.1016/j.jebo.2020.11.017
• Susato, Ryu, 2006, “Hume’s Nuanced Defense of Luxury”, Hume Studies , 32(1): 167–186. doi:10.1353/hms.2011.0185
• Sylla, Edith Dudley, 2003, “Business Ethics, Commercial Mathematics, and the Origins of Mathematical Probability”, in Schabas and de Marchi 2003: 309–337.
• Théré, Christine, 1998, “Economic Publishing and Authors, 1566–1789”, in Faccarello 1998: 1–56.
• Tribe, Keith, 1978, Land, Labour and Economic Discourse , London: Routledge.
• –––, 1981, Genealogies of Capitalism , London: MacMillan. doi:10.1007/978-1-349-04731-4
• Vaughn, Karen, 1980, John Locke: Economist and Social Scientist , Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
• Wakefield, Andre, 2009, The Disordered Police State: German Cameralism as Science and Practice , Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
• Wennerlind, Carl, 2011, Casualties of Credit: The English Financial Revolution, 1620–1720 , Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
• –––, 2013, “Money: Hartlibian Political Economy and the New Culture of Credit”, in Stern and Wennerlind 2014: 74–93. doi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199988532.003.0003
• Westfall, Richard S., 1981, Never at Rest: A Biography of Isaac Newton , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/CBO9781107340664
• Winch, Donald, 1996, Riches and Poverty: An Intellectual History of Political Economy in Britain, 1750–1834 , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Wolloch, Nathaniel, 2011, “The Civilizing Process, Nature, and Stadial Theory”, Eighteenth-Century Studies , 44(2): 245–259.

How to cite this entry . Preview the PDF version of this entry at the Friends of the SEP Society . Look up topics and thinkers related to this entry at the Internet Philosophy Ontology Project (InPhO). Enhanced bibliography for this entry at PhilPapers , with links to its database.

• Works on Economics , at the Online Library of Liberty.
• Early Modern Texts
• The History Of Economic Thought
• 80 Economic Bestsellers before 1850 , at the academic blog Developing Economics: A Critical Perspective On Development Economics,
• History of Economics Society
• European Society for the History of Economic Thought
• International Adam Smith Society
• The Hume Society
• Eighteenth-Century Scottish Studies Society
• Centre International d’étude du XVIII e siècle

Condillac, Étienne Bonnot de | consequentialism | economics: philosophy of | economics [normative] and economic justice | Enlightenment | Hobbes, Thomas | Hume, David | Locke, John | markets | money and finance, philosophy of | Montesquieu, Charles-Louis de Secondat, Baron de | moral psychology: empirical approaches | property and ownership | School of Salamanca | Scottish Philosophy: in the 18th Century | Smith, Adam: moral and political philosophy | utilitarianism: history of

Acknowledgments

I wish to thank Carlos Eduardo Suprinyak for his feedback, and Zoe Zhiyu Luo and Joan Pauls for their sure-footed editing.

Copyright © 2022 by Margaret Schabas < margaret . schabas @ ubc . ca >

• Accessibility

Support SEP

Mirror sites.

View this site from another server:

• Info about mirror sites

The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy is copyright © 2023 by The Metaphysics Research Lab , Department of Philosophy, Stanford University

Library of Congress Catalog Data: ISSN 1095-5054