Economy, Polity, and Society: British Intellectual History 1750–1950

Cambridge University Press, 5/8/2000
EAN 9780521630184, ISBN10: 0521630185

Hardcover, 292 pages, 22.9 x 15.2 x 2.1 cm
Language: English
Originally published in English

Economy, Polity, and Society and its companion volume History, Religion, and Culture bring together major new essays on British intellectual history by many of the leading scholars of the period, continuing a mode of enquiry for which Donald Winch and John Burrow have been widely celebrated. This volume addresses aspects of the eighteenth-century attempt, particularly in the work of Adam Smith, to come to grips with the nature of 'commercial society' and its distinctive notions of the self, of political liberty, and of economic progress. It then explores the adaptations of and responses to the Enlightenment legacy in the work of such early nineteenth-century figures as Jeremy Bentham, Tom Paine and Maria Edgeworth. Finally, in discussions which range up to the middle of the twentieth century, the volume examines particularly telling examples of the conflict between economic thinking and moral values.

Preface
General introduction Stefan Collini
Presentation of 'Economy, Polity, and Society'
Part I
1. Sociability and self-love in the theatre of moral sentiments
Mandeville to Adam Smith E. J. Hundert
2. That noble disquiet
meanings of liberty in the discourse of the North Dario Castiglione
3. Language, sociability, and history
the foundations of Adam Smith's Science of Man Nicholas Phillipson
4. Adam Smith and tradition
The Wealth of Nations before Malthus Richard Teichgraeber
Part II
5. Economy and polity in Bentham's science of legislation David Lieberman
6. 'A gigantic manliness'
Paine's republicanism in the 1790s Richard Whatmore
7. Irish culture and Scottish enlightenment
Maria Edgeworth's histories of the future Marilyn Butler
8. Improving Ireland
Richard Whately, theology and political economy Norman Vance
Part III
9. Political and domestic economy in Victorian social thought
Ruskin and Xenophon Jane Garnett
10. State and market in British university history Sheldon Rothblatt
11. Mr Gradrind and Jerusalem Donald Winch
Acknowledgements
Index.