[PDF] Problems And Promise Of Commercial Society eBook

Author : Dennis C. Rasmussen
Publisher : Penn State Press
Page : 188 pages
File Size : 31,14 MB
Release : 2015-11-04
Category : Philosophy
ISBN : 0271076046

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Adam Smith is popularly regarded as the ideological forefather of laissez-faire capitalism, while Rousseau is seen as the passionate advocate of the life of virtue in small, harmonious communities and as a sharp critic of the ills of commercial society. But, in fact, Smith had many of the same worries about commercial society that Rousseau did and was strongly influenced by his critique. In this first book-length comparative study of these leading eighteenth-century thinkers, Dennis Rasmussen highlights Smith’s sympathy with Rousseau’s concerns and analyzes in depth the ways in which Smith crafted his arguments to defend commercial society against these charges. These arguments, Rasmussen emphasizes, were pragmatic in nature, not ideological: it was Smith’s view that, all things considered, commercial society offered more benefits than the alternatives. Just because of this pragmatic orientation, Smith’s approach can be useful to us in assessing the pros and cons of commercial society today and thus contributes to a debate that is too much dominated by both dogmatic critics and doctrinaire champions of our modern commercial society.

Author : Istvan Hont
Publisher : Harvard University Press
Page : 161 pages
File Size : 47,75 MB
Release : 2015-06-09
Category : Political Science
ISBN : 0674286197

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Scholars normally emphasize the contrast between the two great eighteenth-century thinkers Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Adam Smith. Rousseau is seen as a critic of modernity, Smith as an apologist. Istvan Hont, however, finds significant commonalities in their work, arguing that both were theorists of commercial society and from surprisingly similar perspectives. In making his case, Hont begins with the concept of commercial society and explains why that concept has much in common with what the German philosopher Immanuel Kant called unsocial sociability. This is why many earlier scholars used to refer to an Adam Smith Problem and, in a somewhat different way, to a Jean-Jacques Rousseau Problem. The two problems—and the questions about the relationship between individualism and altruism that they raised—were, in fact, more similar than has usually been thought because both arose from the more fundamental problems generated by thinking about morality and politics in a commercial society. Commerce entails reciprocity, but a commercial society also entails involuntary social interdependence, relentless economic competition, and intermittent interstate rivalry. This was the world to which Rousseau and Smith belonged, and Politics in Commercial Society is an account of how they thought about it. Building his argument on the similarity between Smith’s and Rousseau’s theoretical concerns, Hont shows the relevance of commercial society to modern politics—the politics of the nation-state, global commerce, international competition, social inequality, and democratic accountability.

Author : Samuel Gregg
Publisher : Lexington Books
Page : 200 pages
File Size : 44,62 MB
Release : 2007
Category : Business & Economics
ISBN : 9780739119945

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Preface -- Toward commercial order -- Foundations -- Neither angel nor beast -- The system of natural liberty -- The liberty of law -- Challenges -- The temptation of politics -- The dilemma of democracy -- Culture and the possibility of "non-spontaneous" commercial society.

Author : Francesca Trivellato
Publisher : Princeton University Press
Page : 424 pages
File Size : 20,23 MB
Release : 2021-06-08
Category : Business & Economics
ISBN : 0691217386

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How an antisemitic legend gave voice to widespread fears surrounding the expansion of private credit in Western capitalism The Promise and Peril of Credit takes an incisive look at pivotal episodes in the West’s centuries-long struggle to define the place of private finance in the social and political order. It does so through the lens of a persistent legend about Jews and money that reflected the anxieties surrounding the rise of impersonal credit markets. By the close of the Middle Ages, new and sophisticated credit instruments made it easier for European merchants to move funds across the globe. Bills of exchange were by far the most arcane of these financial innovations. Intangible and written in a cryptic language, they fueled world trade but also lured naive investors into risky businesses. Francesca Trivellato recounts how the invention of these abstruse credit contracts was falsely attributed to Jews, and how this story gave voice to deep-seated fears about the unseen perils of the new paper economy. She locates the legend’s earliest version in a seventeenth-century handbook on maritime law and traces its legacy all the way to the work of the founders of modern social theory—from Marx to Weber and Sombart. Deftly weaving together economic, legal, social, cultural, and intellectual history, Trivellato vividly describes how Christian writers drew on the story to define and redefine what constituted the proper boundaries of credit in a modern world increasingly dominated by finance.

Author : Paul Sagar
Publisher : Princeton University Press
Page : 248 pages
File Size : 32,86 MB
Release : 2022-04-19
Category : Biography & Autobiography
ISBN : 0691210837

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A radical reinterpretation of Adam Smith that challenges economists, moral philosophers, political theorists, and intellectual historians to rethink him—and why he matters Adam Smith has long been recognized as the father of modern economics. More recently, scholars have emphasized his standing as a moral philosopher—one who was prepared to critique markets as well as to praise them. But Smith’s contributions to political theory are still underappreciated and relatively neglected. In this bold, revisionary book, Paul Sagar argues that not only have the fundamentals of Smith’s political thought been widely misunderstood, but that once we understand them correctly, our estimations of Smith as economist and as moral philosopher must radically change. Rather than seeing Smith either as the prophet of the free market, or as a moralist who thought the dangers of commerce lay primarily in the corrupting effects of trade, Sagar shows why Smith is more thoroughly a political thinker who made major contributions to the history of political thought. Smith, Sagar argues, saw war, not commerce, as the engine of political change and he was centrally concerned with the political, not moral, dimensions of—and threats to—commercial societies. In this light, the true contours and power of Smith’s foundational contributions to western political thought emerge as never before. Offering major reinterpretations of Smith’s political, moral, and economic ideas, Adam Smith Reconsidered seeks to revolutionize how he is understood. In doing so, it recovers Smith’s original way of doing political theory, one rooted in the importance of history and the necessity of maintaining a realist sensibility, and from which we still have much to learn.

Author : Shoshana Zuboff
Publisher : PublicAffairs
Page : 658 pages
File Size : 15,59 MB
Release : 2019-01-15
Category : Business & Economics
ISBN : 1610395700

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The challenges to humanity posed by the digital future, the first detailed examination of the unprecedented form of power called "surveillance capitalism," and the quest by powerful corporations to predict and control our behavior. In this masterwork of original thinking and research, Shoshana Zuboff provides startling insights into the phenomenon that she has named surveillance capitalism. The stakes could not be higher: a global architecture of behavior modification threatens human nature in the twenty-first century just as industrial capitalism disfigured the natural world in the twentieth. Zuboff vividly brings to life the consequences as surveillance capitalism advances from Silicon Valley into every economic sector. Vast wealth and power are accumulated in ominous new "behavioral futures markets," where predictions about our behavior are bought and sold, and the production of goods and services is subordinated to a new "means of behavioral modification." The threat has shifted from a totalitarian Big Brother state to a ubiquitous digital architecture: a "Big Other" operating in the interests of surveillance capital. Here is the crucible of an unprecedented form of power marked by extreme concentrations of knowledge and free from democratic oversight. Zuboff's comprehensive and moving analysis lays bare the threats to twenty-first century society: a controlled "hive" of total connection that seduces with promises of total certainty for maximum profit -- at the expense of democracy, freedom, and our human future. With little resistance from law or society, surveillance capitalism is on the verge of dominating the social order and shaping the digital future -- if we let it.

Author : James Livesey
Publisher : Yale University Press
Page : 225 pages
File Size : 15,14 MB
Release : 2020-01-07
Category : Languedoc (France)
ISBN : 0300237162

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A microhistory of eighteenth-century systemic change that places ordinary French lives alongside global advances Provincializing Global History explores the subtle transformation of the coastal province of the Languedoc in the eighteenth century. Mining a wealth of archival sources, James Livesey unveils how provincial elites and peasant households unwittingly created new practices. Managing local political institutions, establishing new credit systems, building networks of natural historians, and introducing new plants and farm machinery to the region opened up the inhabitants of the province to new norms and standards. The practices were gradually embedded in daily life and allowed the province to negotiate the new worlds of industrial society and capitalism.