A. R. J. Turgot (1727-81), one of the greatest thinkers of the century of the Enlightenment, is known to political historians as a pioneer of the doctrine of universal progress, which he first put forward when a student at the Sorbonne in a lecture on The Successive Advances of the Human Mind. He is also well known to economists as the author of Reflections on the Formation and the Distribution of Wealth, in which he anticipated - and in some respects surpassed - the theoretical system of classical political economy. In this volume, translations of these two works are printed together with a lesser-known work entitled On Universal History, which should be of great interest to sociologists. Professor Meek has prefaced his own translations of the three texts with an introduction in which he analyses the interesting interrelationship between Turgot's political, economic and sociological theories.
“Classical Economics Today: Essays in Honor of Alessandro Roncaglia” comprises a collection of original essays by leading economists who adopt a Classical approach to political economy. The essays showcase the relevance and topicality of the Classical approach, as opposed to the sterility and real-world irrelevance of mainstream economics.
A synthesis of eighteenth-century intellectual and cultural developments that offers an original explanation of how Enlightenment thought grappled with the problem of divine agency. Why is the world orderly, and how does this order come to be? Human beings inhabit a multitude of apparently ordered systems—natural, social, political, economic, cognitive, and others—whose origins and purposes are often obscure. In the eighteenth century, older certainties about such orders, rooted in either divine providence or the mechanical operations of nature, began to fall away. In their place arose a new appreciation for the complexity of things, a new recognition of the world’s disorder and randomness, new doubts about simple relations of cause and effect—but with them also a new ability to imagine the world’s orders, whether natural or manmade, as self-organizing. If large systems are left to their own devices, eighteenth-century Europeans increasingly came to believe, order will emerge on its own without any need for external design or direction. In Invisible Hands, Jonathan Sheehan and Dror Wahrman trace the many appearances of the language of self-organization in the eighteenth-century West. Across an array of domains, including religion, society, philosophy, science, politics, economy, and law, they show how and why this way of thinking came into the public view, then grew in prominence and arrived at the threshold of the nineteenth century in versatile, multifarious, and often surprising forms. Offering a new synthesis of intellectual and cultural developments, Invisible Hands is a landmark contribution to the history of the Enlightenment and eighteenth-century culture.
This book can be described as a development of my Masters thesis, 'The Economics of A. R. J. Turgot' written at the University of Sydney in 1961-62. It has therefore been a long time in the making and, needless to say, I in curred many an intellectual debt during this period which I would like to acknowledge here. My thanks go first to Professor J. R. Wilson, who super vised my Masters thesis and who read part of this manuscript in draft, to the late Professor Jacob Viner whose tremendous knowledge of the history of economics was put at my disposal on several occasions, and to Professor R. L. Meek with whom I discussed this work in conversation and cor respondence and who has given assistance in several other ways. I also owe a great debt of gratitude to a large number of librarians for their assistance in unearthing infrequently used material housed in the collections over which they preside. In particular, I wish to acknowledge thanks to the librarians of the Fisher Library at the University of Sydney, the Public Library of New South Wales, the Australian National Library, the British Library of Economics and Political Science, the British Museum, the Goldsmiths' Library at the University of London, the Kress Collection at the Baker Library at Harvard, the Seligman Collection at the Butler Library at Columbia University, and the Bibliotheque nationale.
Evolutionary Social Theory and Political Economy traces the origins, extension, marginalization and revival of evolutionary approaches to social theory from the Enlightenment through the beginning of the 21st century. It demonstrates how changes in understandings of social evolution corresponded to changes in definitions of Political Economy and how both reflected changes in the Philosophy of Science. This book is written for students and researchers alike in all the social sciences. Economists will benefit from understanding how ideas about evolution in Economics corresponded to ideas about evolution in other social sciences, and Social Scientists outside of Economics will benefit from understanding how Economics has related to their discipline.
Volume Two covers the years 1861-1863, when Marx consolidated and refined the arguments of his critique of political economy in his relatively neglected manuscripts Theories of Surplus Value. * Special attention is paid to the nature, scope and limitations of Marx's critique and to the critique of Ricardo's Principles.
