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:kne@eie.gr

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 mid-eighteenth 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

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:kne@eie.gr

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’.