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Politics in commercial society : Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Adam Smith /
"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. However, Istvan Hont finds significant commonalities in their work, arguing that both were theorist...
| Clasificación: | Libro Electrónico |
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| Autor principal: | |
| Otros Autores: | , |
| Formato: | Electrónico eBook |
| Idioma: | Inglés |
| Publicado: |
Cambridge, Massachusetts ; London, England :
Harvard University Press,
[2015]
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| Temas: | |
| Acceso en línea: | Texto completo |
| Sumario: | "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. However, Istvan Hont finds significant commonalities in their work, arguing that both were theorists of commercial society but from different 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."-- |
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| Notas: | Text of the six Carlyle Lectures on the thought of Adam Smith and Jean-Jacques Rousseau that Hont gave at Oxford University in the Hilary Term of 2009. |
| Descripción Física: | 1 online resource (xxi, 138 pages) |
| Bibliografía: | Includes bibliographical references and index. |
| ISBN: | 9780674286177 0674286170 |