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

by Edited by Stefan Collini , Richard Whatmore , Brian Young

• ISBN13: 9780521639781
• ISBN10: 0521639786
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2000-05-22
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Summary

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.

Table of Contents

Preface	vii
General introduction	1	(21)
Stefan Collini
Presentation of Economy, Polity, and Society	22	(9)
Part I
Sociability and self-love in the theatre of moral sentiments: Mandeville to Adam Smith	31	(17)
E. J. Hundert
`That noble disquiet': meanings of liberty in the discourse of the North	48	(22)
Dario Castiglione
Language, sociability, and history: some reflections on the foundations of Adam Smith's science of man	70	(15)
Nicholas Phillipson
Adam Smith and tradition: the Wealth of Nations before Malthus	85	(22)
Richard F. Teichgraeber III
Part II
Economy and polity in Bentham's science of legislation	107	(28)
David Lieberman
`A gigantic manliness': Paine's republicanism in the 1790s	135	(23)
Richard Whatmore
Irish culture and Scottish enlightenment: Maria Edgeworth's histories of the future	158	(23)
Marilyn Butler
Improving Ireland: Richard Whately, theology, and political economy	181	(24)
Norman Vance
Part III
Political and domestic economy in Victorian social thought: Ruskin and Xenophon	205	(19)
Jane Garnett
State and market in British university history	224	(19)
Sheldon Rothblatt
Mr Gradgrind and Jerusalem	243	(24)
Donald Winch
List of contributors	267	(2)
Acknowledgements	269	(1)
Index	270