Moral Discourses of the Economy in Eighteenth-Century Britain

This book presents a comprehensive picture of eighteenth-century British authors' engagement with a society increasingly driven by commercial interests. The books and pamphlets constituting the discourses on economic topics overstep the boundaries separating the domains of economics, religion (William Warburton, John Wesley), law (William Blackstone, Lord Mansfield), history (William Robertson, Edward Gibbon), physiology (Richard Morton, Goerge Cheyne) and politics (Edmund Burke, the Abolitionists). An impartial and inclusive history of the discourses is what the book purports to construct. The luminaries of the British (and Scottish) Enlightenment (Adam Smith, David Hume), are given due respects, but a great number of less well-known and even anonymous authors also feature in the book. Giving as much scope as possible to the sources themselves, the book pays attention to both the rhetorical and the thematic layers of the quotations, while keeping generalization and theorizations to the minimum. The eighteenth-century in the title begins in the 1680s, when some of the important authors such as Nicholas Barbon published their thoughts, and ends in the 1790s, with the contrastive pair of Edmund Burke and Jeremy Bentham.

explores moral debates in british economics offers compelling vignettes of the rise of capitalist structures analyzes the philosophy underpinning the present

Autorentext

Hye-Joon Yoon is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Yonsei University, Seoul, Korea. His research interests embrace intellectual history and publishing history, as well as literary studies, and has published on Adam Smith, Edmund Burke, and the eighteenth-century review magazines.

Inhalt

1. Introduction.- 2. Private Vices, Pubic Benefits.- 3. Industry and Idleness.- 4. Consumption and Luxury.- 5. Projects, Monopoly, and Nabobing.- 6. Slavery, Property, and Justice.- 7. Epilogue.