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

Two volumes containing essays by leading scholars in modern British intellectual history.

Stefan Collini (Edited by), Richard Whatmore (Edited by), Brian Young (Edited by)

9780521630184, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 8 May 2000

292 pages
22.9 x 15.2 x 2.1 cm, 0.58 kg

'… the authors contributing to this volume have an extremely deep, detailed and subtly nuanced understanding of their subject matter; the volume is a monument to scholarship in the best sense of that term … All British intellectual historians must buy and engage with this book. Indeed, anyone involved in the study of nineteenth-century Britain would do well to read it as a corrective to the misconceptions and generalizations that occur in so many standard texts. For the eager undergraduate the book provides many examples of historical investigation of the highest quality, real benchmarks to measure aspirations against.' Cromhos

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.

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.

Subject Areas: History of ideas [JFCX]