Commercial Society as a Philosophical Problem: An Analysis from Mandeville to the Scottish Enlightenment

Abstract

It is commonly held, on the authority of Hirschman, that interest was elaborated in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries as a countervailing principle against the destructive passions, and that commercial society rests upon the substitution of calculation for affection. This paper accepts the account as a history of vocabulary and qualifies the moral psychology that its readers have drawn from it. Interest did not displace passion. Interest is a passion that becomes calm. Calmness is not a property that interest possesses by nature but a state that a passion may attain when its object is constituted through the anticipated regard of others and measured against a settled standard abstracted from them. The mechanism is therefore specular, and the paper gives specularity a definition, conditions of existence, degrees and distinctions from reflection, reciprocity, empathy and recognition. Mandeville states the problem of an order arising without reason or virtue. The Scottish moralists answer it: Hume supplies the mechanism in sympathy and the calm passions; Smith, the normative correction in the impartial spectator; Ferguson, the insistence that the correction is never complete. The order of commerce is a sentimental order. The paper states the conditions under which this claim would be false.