The Passions and the Interests [antikvár]

TINTRODUCTION^His essay has its origin in the incapacity of contemporary social science to shed light on the political consequences of economic growth and, perhaps even more, in the so frequently calamitous political correlates of economic growth no matter whether such growth takes place under capitalist, socialist, or mixed auspices. Reasoning about such connections, I suspected, must have been rife at an earlier age of economic expansion, specifically the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. With the "disciplines" of economics and political science not yet in existence at the time, there were no interdisciplinary boundaries to cross. As a result, philosophers and political economists could range freely and speculate without inhibitions about the likely consequences of, say, commercial expansion for peace, or of industrial growth for liberty. It seemed worthwhile to look back at their thoughts and speculations, if only because of our own, specialization-induced intellectual poverty in this field.Such was the original motivation of the present essay, the idea that prompted me to venture into the edifice of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century social thought. Given the rich and complex nature of this edifice, it is not surprising that I emerged with something rather broader and even more ambitious than what I had come to look for. In fact, the very answers to the questions I began with yielded, as an intriguing by-product, a new approach to the interpretation of the "spirit" of capitalism and of its emergence. It may be useful here to outline this approach, reserving a fuller presentation for the last part of this study.