Stapelbroek, Koen (2017) From jealousy of trade to the neutrality of finance: Isaac de Pinto's "system" of luxury and perpetual peace. In: Kapossy, Béla, Nakhimovsky, Isaac, and Whatmore, Richard, (eds.) Commerce and Peace in the Enlightenment. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK, pp. 78-109.

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Abstract

[Extract] “A spectre was haunting the modern world, wrote the Neapolitan Ferdinando Galiani in 1751, the spectre of ‘luxury’”.1 When Istvan Hont reminded his readership of Galiani’s phrase from Della moneta, which would echo in the opening lines of a much more famous text, the Communist manifesto, he immediately stressed the existence of two different eighteenth-century luxury debates: one between ‘ancients’ and ‘moderns’ – on whether inequality was an unequivocal political problem and the idea of luxury represented moral vice – and the other among 'moderns’ – where the issue was how to channel human nature as it was onto a course of morally and politically sustainable economic growth. It was the latter debate among moderns that Hont argued ran from Fénelon and Mandeville to Adam Smith to which virtually all eighteenth-century political writers in some way contributed. This debate connected the somewhat differently oriented natural law, property and sociability debates of the seventeenth century to the discourses of classical political economy, the ‘social question’ and economic nationalism of the nineteenth century.

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