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

by Stefan Collini, Richard Whatmore, Brian Young

Overview

Economy, Polity and Society and its companion volume History, Religion and Culture aim to bring together new essays by many of the leading intellectual historians of the period. The essays in Economy, Polity and Society begin by addressing 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. They then explore the adaptations of and responses to the Enlightenment legacy in the work of such early nineteenth-century figures as Jeremy Bentham, Tom Paine, Maria Edgeworth and Richard Whately. Finally, in discussions that range up to the middle of the twentieth century, they explore particularly telling examples of the conflict between economic thinking and moral values.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780521639781
Publisher:	Cambridge University Press
Publication date:	05/22/2000
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	292
Product dimensions:	5.98(w) x 9.02(h) x 0.67(d)

Table of Contents

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.

Editorial Reviews

"a valueable and useful book...it is evident that the very richnesss of the scholarship which makes up Economy, Polity and Society illustrates that the maturation of the field of modern British intellectual history has taken place...Finally, the book will also be useful fro advanced undergraduates and lower level graduates students because it offers many ways to conceptualize history...Therefore, a generation from now Economy, Polity and Society: Essays in British Intellectual History, 1750-1950 may be remembered as more than a work of commemoration or an index of academic trends, but also as a book which helped to shape future research agendas." H-Net Reviews

From the Publisher

At some point in the future historians will look back and mock the fin-de-millenium for its remorseless preoccupation with questions of culture, language and identity, just as we today look down upon the vulgar materialism and economism which we see informing so much of the historical scholarship of the years 1920-70. But though they may mock, the more discerning of our successors will want to read this unusual, but entirely appropriate, double Festschrift in honour of John Burrow and Donald Winch, because their works have formed one of the most important strands in the remarkable renascence of the history of ideas in late twentieth-century Britain, alongside those of their near contemporary Quentin Skinner. And the historian of the future will certainly want to enquire into the connection between this renascence, which began in the 1960s, and the wholescale historiographical migration into the realms of culture and language in the 1980s.
—History Magazine

Peter Ghosh