The Passions and the Interests: Political Arguments for Capitalism before Its TriumphIn this volume, Albert Hirschman reconstructs the intellectual climate of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to illuminate the intricate ideological transformation that occurred, wherein the pursuit of material interests--so long condemned as the deadly sin of avarice--was assigned the role of containing the unruly and destructive passions of man. Hirschman here offers a new interpretation for the rise of capitalism, one that emphasizes the continuities between old and new, in contrast to the assumption of a sharp break that is a common feature of both Marxian and Weberian thinking. Among the insights presented here is the ironical finding that capitalism was originally supposed to accomplish exactly what was soon denounced as its worst feature: the repression of the passions in favor of the "harmless," if one-dimensional, interests of commercial life. To portray this lengthy ideological change as an endogenous process, Hirschman draws on the writings of a large number of thinkers, including Montesquieu, Sir James Steuart, and Adam Smith. |
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Political Arguments for Capitalism before Its Triumph Albert O. Hirschman. THE PASSIONS AND THE INTERESTS AND THE INTERESTS Political Arguments for Capitalism before Its Triumph.
Political Arguments for Capitalism before Its Triumph Albert O. Hirschman. AND THE INTERESTS Political Arguments for Capitalism before Its Triumph ALBERT O. HIRSCHMAN Foreword by Amartya Sen With a new afterword by Jeremy Adelman ...
... Interests were Called Upon to Counteract the Passions The Idea of Glory and Its Downfall 9 Man “as he really is" 12 Repressing and Harnessing the Passions 14 The Principle of the Countervailing Passion 20 “Interest” and “Interests” as ...
... Intellectual History Where the Montesquieu-Steuart Vision Went Wrong 117 The Promise of an Interest-Governed World versus the Protestant Ethic 128 Contemporary Notes 13s Afterword by Jeremy Adelman Notes Index »»5 137 145 155 viii CONTENTS.
... Interests does not have the policy urgency that a contribution to public decisions may enjoy (as Hirschman's The Strategy of Economic Development eminently does), nor the compulsive immediacy that the exigencies of practical reason ...
Contents
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7 | |
PART TWO How Economic Expansion was Expected to Improve the Political Order | 67 |
PART THREE Reflections on an Episode in Intellectual History | 115 |
Afterword | 137 |
Notes | 145 |
Index | 155 |