Capitalism and Modern Europe between Adam Smith and Karl Marx

In the course of the later eighteenth century, western Europe began to undergo a series of social and political changes that amounted to a revolution.  The expansion of economic activity, extension of European imperial power, changing experiences of social life, and political upheaval at the end of the century were strongly reflected in the intellectual culture of the period.  These circumstances help to explain the simultaneous discovery of both “society” and the “individual” as phenomena of the real world and objects of intellectual analysis.  Intellectuals confronted a new set of questions.  While some thinkers began to view the individual and society in some sort of antagonistic relationship, that was a perspective more typical of nineteenth-century liberalism.  More typically, eighteenth-century thinkers believed that society and the individual are entwined in a mutually reciprocal process.  Attempts to understand this process came to underpin many of the theories of progress that emerged during the period.  Animating these theories were fundamental, and fundamentally new questions: how does this process work and does it produce progress?  What drives progress and how should progress be measured?  Is progress even desirable?  In the nineteenth century, these questions produced increasingly divisive responses.  Defenders of the free market insisted that profit-seeking individuals should be liberated from the allegedly oppressive bonds of state and society, while the emerging socialist tradition developed radical visions of social transformation by building on Enlightenment theories of historical development and revolutionary ideas of emancipation.

This workshop will examine these developments across the span of roughly a century.  We will begin by looking at Scottish and French Enlightenment discussions of civilizational progress, with particular emphasis on the role of economic activity as an engine of progress.   Among the authors we will consider are David Hume, Adam Smith, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and the Marquis de Condorcet.  We will turn to the first half of the nineteenth century to look at currents of liberalism, represented by Benjamin Constant, Frédéric Bastiat, and John Stuart Mill.  Finally, we will examine the emergence of socialist critique in Charles Fourier, Henri de Saint-Simon, and Karl Marx.  A small selection of both classic and new historical scholarship will supplement our reading of primary work.