INSTITUTE FOR NEOHELLENIC RESEARCH
NATIONAL HELLENIC RESEARCH FOUNDATION
John Robertson,
The Enlightenment, the Public Sphere and Political Economy / Διαφωτισμός,
δημόσια σφαίρα και πολιτική οικονομία. Translation: Σοφία Ματθαίου
Annual C. Th. Dimaras Lecture -2010, INR/NHRF, Athens 2011, 176 pp.
From the eighteenth century on when the terms lumières and Aufklärung were first
coined, up to the 1970s and 1980s deconstructionist critique of the Postmodernists,
the Enlightenment, was defined in many different ways. The concept of the public
sphere coined by Jürgen Habermas made it possible for scholars to study the
historical phenomenon of the Enlightenment as a form of social practice. Τhis
approach inspired fresh lines of enquiry, the most valuable of which has been into
the place of women in the Enlightenment as well as into the combination of the
concept of public sphere with the much older idea of the ‘Republic of Letters’.
Among the three linked enquiries at the heart of Enlightenment thought,
anthropology, history, and political economy, the last is perhaps the less studied.
The rise of political economy to intellectual prominence in the mideighteenth century should be understood as the emergence of a new way of thinking
about sociability, or the development of society, in which economic activities
assumed a much more important place. At least three long-established ways of
thinking about politics and the social order underwent radical adjustment in the later
seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries: reason of state, the classification of
forms of government, and natural law. Montesquieu, who introduced the ideal of
doux commerce, was the thinker who combined the categories of reason of state
and the classification of forms of government in his work.
The understanding of political economy as an independent field of study was
facilitated by the appearance of texts presenting political economy as a body of
systematic principles (Jean-François Melon, Antonio Genovesi, Étienne Bonnot de
Condillac, Adam Smith). None of these works limited itself to abstract principles
alone: comparative and historical examples were integral to their presentation of
economic argument. Even more important than original works of political economy,
however, were translations. Translations served several purposes besides –and
sometimes instead of– making available faithful renderings of the original into
another vernacular in order to put forth a specific argument. The multiplication of
translations testified to a profound sense of common discourse over economic
issues. The same inference can be drawn from the proliferation of debate over
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48, Vassileos Constantinou Av., 116 35 Athens, Greece, Tel. (+30210) 72.73.554, Fax: 72.46.212,
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specific economic issues over the course of the century. Among the issues explored
in recent scholarship two have stood out, the ‘Luxury Debate’, and the debate over
the relative prospects of ‘rich’ and ‘poor’ countries.
Economic arguments were formally set out, variously translated, deliberately
adapted to meet different ‘national’ circumstances – and then subjected to the test
of explicit disagreement. By these means, political economy acquired credibility as
an intellectual discipline; by these means too, it presented itself in forms suitable to
be placed in the ‘public sphere’, there to be discussed, in all the major vernaculars,
by educated readers. In so doing, it may also be argued, political economy made
itself important, indeed fundamental, to ‘Enlightenment’. For it offered not only a
new instrument for the understanding of human behaviour, but one which explicitly
addressed the conditions of human betterment in this world, in terms which
engaged the ‘public’.
INR/NHRF – Institute for Neohellenic Research / National Hellenic Research Foundation
48, Vassileos Constantinou Av., 116 35 Athens, Greece, Tel. (+30210) 72.73.554, Fax: 72.46.212,
E-mail:[email protected]