Economic Sentiments : Adam Smith, Condorcet, and the Enlightenment
Editorial Reviews
Review
Keith Baker, Stanford University : A powerful and original reconsideration of the thinking of Smith and Condorcet. Delightfully fresh, sensitive, sensible and wide-ranging. A wonderfully evocative, even lyrical book. This is a scholarly achievement of a very high order. It will be of substantial interest to specialists in a range of fields within the humanities and social sciences, who will be obliged in reading it to think again about many conventional views within their disciplines. But it should also reach a broader audience among all those concerned with how we should think about economics and politics in a new century full of uncertainties and insecurities.
David S. Landes, author of The Wealth and Poverty of Nations : We have all read Adam Smith and we all think we know him well. But this text, in its emphasis on the period after 1776 and its coverage of related works from other nations, is full of revelations and delicious quotes from unstudied sources.
Kenneth J. Arrow, Stanford University : Rothschild's richly complex and deeply informed account of the writings of Adam Smith and of the Marquis du Condorcet locates them more closely in their own time and, by so doing, changes their significance for us today. The monolithic view of the cold, inhuman Enlightenment, propagated by the early nineteenth-century Romantics, is undercut by close analysis and understanding of the political and social contexts. The book is a triumph of scholarship and reinterpretation, as well as a model of expository prose.
Linda Colley, London School of Economics : An elegant, sympathetic and original re-envisioning of the Enlightenment's two greatest economic theorists with significant implications for our own economic politics today.
Book Description
In a brilliant recreation of the epoch between the 1770s and the 1820s, Emma Rothschild reinterprets the ideas of the great revolutionary political economists to show us the true landscape of economic and political thought in their day, with important consequences for our own. Her work alters the readings of Adam Smith and Condorcet--and of ideas of Enlightenment--that underlie much contemporary political thought.
Economic Sentiments takes up late-eighteenth-century disputes over the political economy of an enlightened, commercial society to show us how the "political" and the "economic" were intricately related to each other and to philosophical reflection. Rothschild examines theories of economic and political sentiments, and the reflection of these theories in the politics of enlightenment. A landmark in the history of economics and of political ideas, her book shows us the origins of laissez-faire economic thought and its relation to political conservatism in an unquiet world. In doing so, it casts a new light on our own times.
Economic Sentiments : Adam Smith, Condorcet, and the Enlightenment
Economic Sentiments : Adam Smith, Condorcet, and the Enlightenment,Emma Rothschild,Harvard University Press,0674008375,Business & Economics,Business / Economics / Finance,Business/Economics,Economic History,Economics - Theory,Business & Economics / Economic History
Economic Sentiments : Adam Smith, Condorcet, and the Enlightenment
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