Economic Sentiments: Adam Smith, Condorcet, and the Enlightenment [Paperback]

Emma Rothschild (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0674008375 | ISBN-13: 978-0674008373 | Publication Date: April 30, 2002

In a brilliant recreation of the epoch between the 1770s and the 1820s, Emma Rothschild reinterprets the ideas of the great revolutionary political economists to show us the true landscape of economic and political thought in their day, with important consequences for our own. Her work alters the readings of Adam Smith and Condorcet--and of ideas of Enlightenment--that underlie much contemporary political thought.

Economic Sentiments takes up late-eighteenth-century disputes over the political economy of an enlightened, commercial society to show us how the "political" and the "economic" were intricately related to each other and to philosophical reflection. Rothschild examines theories of economic and political sentiments, and the reflection of these theories in the politics of enlightenment. A landmark in the history of economics and of political ideas, her book shows us the origins of laissez-faire economic thought and its relation to political conservatism in an unquiet world. In doing so, it casts a new light on our own times.

(20011202)

Editorial Reviews

From The New Yorker

This landmark work revisits the intellectual ferment of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries—a time when the brightest minds all talked like econ majors. Rothschild has delved through the pamphlets and tracts of the era—on everything from voting procedures to the suet trade—but the book is organized around the two greatest economic thinkers of the Enlightenment: Adam Smith and the Marquis de Condorcet. She dismantles, with quiet authority, the stereotype of the Enlightenment as a period dominated by chilly rationalists. In emphasizing the role of emotion in human life, the founders of modern economics were actually in advance of their successors.
Copyright © 2005 The New Yorker --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Review

A powerful and original reconsideration of the thinking of Smith and Condorcet. Delightfully fresh, sensitive, sensible and wide-ranging. A wonderfully evocative, even lyrical book. This is a scholarly achievement of a very high order. It will be of substantial interest to specialists in a range of fields within the humanities and social sciences, who will be obliged in reading it to think again about many conventional views within their disciplines. But it should also reach a broader audience among all those concerned with how we should think about economics and politics in a new century full of uncertainties and insecurities.
--Keith Baker, Stanford University (20010708)

We have all read Adam Smith and we all think we know him well. But this text, in its emphasis on the period after 1776 and its coverage of related works from other nations, is full of revelations and delicious quotes from unstudied sources.
--David S. Landes, author of The Wealth and Poverty of Nations (20010604)

Rothschild's richly complex and deeply informed account of the writings of Adam Smith and of the Marquis du Condorcet locates them more closely in their own time and, by so doing, changes their significance for us today. The monolithic view of the cold, inhuman Enlightenment, propagated by the early nineteenth-century Romantics, is undercut by close analysis and understanding of the political and social contexts. The book is a triumph of scholarship and reinterpretation, as well as a model of expository prose.
--Kenneth J. Arrow, Stanford University (20010705)

An elegant, sympathetic and original re-envisioning of the Enlightenment's two greatest economic theorists with significant implications for our own economic politics today.
--Linda Colley, London School of Economics (20010622)

In her readable as well as scholarly book, Economic Sentiments, [Rothschild] links [Adam] Smith with the French philosopher the Marquis de Condorcet, another thinker seen today as an emblem of "cold hard and rational enlightenment" but in reality interested, like Smith, "in economic life as a process of discussion, and as a process of emancipation," in which "one's freedom to buy or sell or lend or travel or work is difficult to distinguish from the rest of one's freedom." This larger picture, Rothschild thinks, is what was lost as economics developed along with the society it analyzed, and what she hopes to restore.
--Paul Mattick (New York Times Book Review 20011220)

This landmark work revisits the intellectual ferment of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries...[Rothschild] dismantles, with quiet authority, the stereotype of the Enlightenment as a period dominated by chilly rationalists. (New Yorker 20101018)

One of the many virtues of Economic Sentiments is that it provides exactly what its subtitle says: an investigation of 'Adam Smith, Condorcet, and the Enlightenment.' Another, even more attractive than an unusual degree of truth in advertising, is that it casts an extraordinarily revealing light on many other writers and many other moments in history. It is a book that does with great success two things that are usually thought to be wholly antithetical; certainly they are rarely attempted by the same writer. On the one hand, it takes us back into the last third of the eighteenth century, and shows us what economic thinking was like before it became modern economic theory, on the other, it complicates the image of the Enlightenment in ways that are intended to make the political discussions of the twenty-first century more sophisticated, nuanced, and self-conscious than they often are.
--Alan Ryan (New York Review of Books )

Economic historians often discuss the half century after 1770 with barely a nod (or none at all) to the political revolutions. Emma Rothschild, however, turns that convention on its head. Her book examines the period from the vantage point of two of the most influential economic writers of the time--Adam Smith and the Marquis de Condorcet--and their followers...The book's distinctive approach brings real and unexpected insights.
--William Kennedy (Times Higher Education Supplement )

In her brilliantly illuminating and compelling reinterpretation of Adam Smith and Condorcet, Emma Rothschild presents a view of late 18th century ideas through which we can ourselves re-envision the human realities of life in the market. In so doing, she has produced a masterpiece of the historical imagination. First and foremost, Economic Sentiments is a rich, profound and at times revelatory essay in the history of ideas which will undoubtedly become part of the academic canon. But it is also an inspiring commentary on our own times, which can be read with profit by many outside the academy.
--John Gray (Los Angeles Times )

One must look hard to find a work so adept at doing the vigorous hermeneutics required to truly understand what drove the 18th-century Enlightenment and how that era impacts our thinking today. Rothschild roams across the landscape of thinkers and historical events focusing on Condorcet as an example of the 'cold, universalistic enlightenment of the French Revolution' and on Smith, who appears as the more conservative proponent of the 'reductionist enlightenment of laissez-faire economics.' Along the way the reader is challenged to rethink the positive-normative dichotomy commonly taught in economics, the meaning and role of Smith's 'invisible hand' and the self-serving manner in which 19th-century interpreters framed Smith's ideas...There is exceptional depth to this book...[It] has interdisciplinary appeal, systematically relying on literary, philosophical, political, economic, natural science, and sometimes theological disciplines to build arguments. Highly recommended.
--J. Halteman (Choice )

A lucid and historical account of one of the finest achievements of the European Enlightenment, the application of the new science of political economy to the solving of real problems. Emma Rothschild shows that modern free-marketeers who neglect the political and moral aspects of Adam Smith's writings are unfair to the man whose name they have hijacked. (The Economist )

One of the most original and mind-altering academic works of the past decade.
--Adam Gopnik (New Yorker )

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 368 pages
• Publisher: Harvard University Press (April 30, 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0674008375
• ISBN-13: 978-0674008373
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6.1 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.3 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #423,782 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

14 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A new look at some old whipping boys, January 24, 2002

By 

Toby Joyce - See all my reviews

This review is from: Economic Sentiments: Adam Smith, Condorcet, and the Enlightenment (Hardcover)

First, a romantic note - Rothschild dedicates this book to her husband Amartya Sen, and Sen dedicated his last book ('Development as Freedom') to her. So these books will lie side by side on my shelf. Both are well worth reading.

There is more than just a familial connection. Sen clearly used his wife's research on Smith and Condorcet in the writing of 'Development as Freedom' since the Adam Smith that appears in his book is not the cold and callous economist of myth. One suspects that Rothschild's perception of Smith and Condorcet had been coloured by Sen as she presents them as more than just economists as we understand the term, but concerned with a far wider range of phenomena in politics and sociology. In fact they were exactly as much an 'economist' as Sen himself is. As any reader of Sen knows, he covers an extremely broad range of factors in his work, not just GDP and income.

Rothschild argues that Smith's example of the 'invisible hand' that regulates free markets would have as easily been meant as a malign as a benign regulator. Traders who influence markets by bribery or trickery are as much an 'invisible hand' as an imagined self-regulating mechanism. In fact, the beneficient invisible hand was very much a product of later economists. Smith was not as negative on government regulation as he was made out to be by later writers, though strongly against price-fixing by government fiat, guilds which prevented fair competition, and over-zealous regulation of trade and commerce by insiders, profiteers and parasites.

Condorcet comes across as a very attractive human being, passionate and commited to his beliefs. Accused of Utopianism, he struggled with his conviction that he had no right to dictate opinion to others. Yet he believed that his liberal philosophy was best.He was concerned with the 'ordinary man in the street', and rejected any idea that he/ she should be indoctrinated with the 'right' ideas by a state-supported educational system. He wrote for the rights of women, believing that all humanity were entitled to equal rights.

I have to say the book is dense and quite difficult at times. However, it is the ideas that are difficult, not the presentation. It will probably repay a second reading.But I feel after reading this that I have had an excellent introduction to two first-class and important (in a world-historical sense) intellects.

12 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars In defence of the Enlightenment, December 23, 2001

By 

[e-mail] (Edmonton, Alberta Canada) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Economic Sentiments: Adam Smith, Condorcet, and the Enlightenment (Hardcover)

To their enemies the Marquis de Condorcet was the epitome of the worst elements of the French Enlightenment, fatuously optimistic, subtly intolerant and dangerous utopian with his emphasis on the "perfectability" of man, while the notoriously absent-minded Adam Smith was the architect of a notoriously callous and philistine economic theory. Aside from that, the enthusiastic and idealistic Condorcet does not appear to have much in common with the quiet and discreet Smith. Emma Rothschild is the husband of the nobel prize winning economist A. Sen, whose most famous work shows the devastating effect dogmatically applied free market rules can have on worsening famines. Yet this book is a defense of the two from the critics of the Enlightenment.

To a surprising extent she succeeds. Conservatives will be unpleasantly surprised to read that in the decade after his death, mentioning your support of Smith did not prevent Scottish democrats from being transported to Australia by reactionary Scottish judges. For many years Tories did not view Smith as the great economist or philosopher. Instead Smith was the man whose account of his friend, the atheist philosopher David Hume on his deathbed, enraged the pious for showing Hume's complete calm, class and lack of fear of eternal damnation. Rothschild notes how the great economist Carl Menger noted how prominent socialists quoted Smith against their enemies. (Oddly enough she does not quote the passage in CAPITAL where Marx cites an enraged prelate angry at Smith for classifying priests as "unproductive labor.) Smith was an opponent of militarism, a supporter of high wages, and a supporter of French philosophy (and not unsympathetic to the French Revolution,either). Reading of his relations with Turgot and Condorcet, it will be much harder to defend the view of a sharp distinction between a good sensible Protestant Enlightenment, and a bad, Nasty, atheist one on the continent.

In discussing Turgot and Condorcet's support for the free trade in grain, which Smith also supported, Rothschild helps remind us that laissez faire did not simply mean watching while people starved. Confronted with the threat of famine in Limousin in 1770, Turgot preserved the freedom of the corn trade. But he also provided workshops for the poor, increased grain imports from other regions, reduced taxes for the poor, and protected poor tenants from eviction. Condorcet and Smith were both sympathetic to these policies. Rothschild also devotes a whole chapter to Smith's metaphor of the "invisible hand." She points out how rarely it was used in Smith's work, and how on the centennial of the publication of the Wealth of Nation almost no-one mentioned it, even at a special celebration organized by William Gladstone. She then goes into how the concept is used in Smith's works. The concept is complex, and in my view not entirely convincing. But she is successful in pointing out how Smith did not follow Hayek in viewing pre-existing structures as the product of an infallible "organic" wisdom. In contrast to the cant of a Calhoun or a Kendall, Smith realized that the most tyrannical acts of government are those that are local and unofficial.

One should point out the defense of Condorcet as well. In an age where Francois Furet, Keith Michael Baker, Mona Ozouf and others have castigated the French Revolutionary tradition as inherently totalitarian, it is good to be reminded that Condorcet is firmly in the liberal tradition. Like Smith, Condorcet was a great supporter of public education, in contrast to the conservative critics of both. Rothschild discusses his views as an economist, and as a theorist of proportional representation. Surprisingly she does not discuss what were Condorcet's most admirable views, his support for female emancipation and suffrage. But she is excellent in pointing out how Condorcet opposed the crassness of the utilitarians. She notes how Condorcet had a view of the limits of truth and scientific inquiry that would have been approved by Karl Popper himself. She notes that he did not believe that voting could or should create a General Will, in the Rousseauean Sense. He did not believe in using education as a form of propoaganda in civic studies, while his opinions were closer to the reservations of a Herder, a Holderin or a Kant than previously believed.

The book is not perfect. Although studiously documented, most of the quotes are from Smith and Condorcet themselves. More historical context could have been provided. There should have been more about actual historical studies of famines, and more on the political and social context of modern Scotland would have been very informative. And her defense of Condorcet would have been stronger if Rothschild had confronted the well-deserved reputation of Condorcet's colleagues in the Gironde for hypocrisy and demagoguery. But this is an important work, and it helps link one of the most familiar of "english" minds into a full international context. That in itself is praise enough.

22 of 28 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Where globalization began, June 12, 2001

By A Customer

This review is from: Economic Sentiments: Adam Smith, Condorcet, and the Enlightenment (Hardcover)

This is an admirably lucid exposition of the beginnings (at the end of the 18th century) of thinking about economics and globalization. It offers a revision of received ideas about Adam Smith and, for me (not an economist, nor a student of same) it's an introduction to a fascinating figure, the Marquis de Condorcet. Some of it is a real revelation.

The biggest revelation is that the non-specialist can really follow it!

It's an important book.