Inequality in the Enlightenment: New Work on the “Jealousy of Trade”

Session Submission Type: Full Paper Panel

Session Description

This panel begins from the premise that the major questions of Enlightenment political economy were not so different from our own: are self-interest and inequality compatible with the public interest? And how should we navigate a world of unequal commercial states? Can markets provide a channel for liberty and prosperity? Or do they more often promote corruption and war-making? To what extent can democracy solve the dilemmas of economic competition and global conflict?

In asking these questions, the panel revisits Istvan Hont’s thesis that the eighteenth century was an age when the economy became political. Enlightenment political thought is significant not just for historical reasons but because its authors were preoccupied with the promise and confusion they associated with a globalizing society. As Hont liked to argue, we are still living in the world that eighteenth-century commerce created. A decade after his death in 2013, his work continues to inspire new paths of research.

The papers by Danielle Charette and Daniel Luban each take prominent Hontian themes as their point of departure. Charette suggests that Hume’s solution to the “jealousy of trade” entailed a surprising engagement with James Harrington. Using John Rawls as a case study, Luban asks why the concept of amour propre seemed to disappear from contemporary social science. For William Selinger and Richard Bourke, the eighteenth century was a period of conceptual innovation. Selinger shows how Montesquieu’s science of politics was an attempt to fill in the lacunas of seventeenth-century natural jurisprudence—and how this project was judged as insufficient by Rousseau. Bourke argues that by the 1790s, major theorists had become less concerned with the corrupting effects of wealth and more willing to argue that inequality and even property rights were in themselves unjust.

A theme across all the papers is the rise of modern democratic theory. In the writings of Rawls, Paine, Rousseau, and (surprisingly) Hume, proposals for a more “equal commonwealth” arose in opposition to standard eighteenth-century ideas about property, human nature, the state, and political science itself. These authors believed a more equal commonwealth could solve the dilemmas of inequality and jealousy of trade. Among other things, this panel asks whether they were right, and what the prospects for such a project are in the twenty first century.

Sub Unit

• Division 1: Political Thought and Philosophy

Individual Presentations

• Rights, Property, and Politics - Richard Bourke, University of Cambridge

• David Hume and the Balance of Property - Danielle Charette James, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

• The Erasure of Amour-Propre: The Case of Rawls - Daniel Luban, Columbia University

• Why Did Montesquieu Write “The Spirit of the Laws?” - William Selinger, University of Oklahoma

Chair

• Tejas Parasher University of California, Los Angeles

Discussants

• Alex Haskins Wheaton College

• Glory M. Liu Johns Hopkins University