CHAPTER 7
David Singh Grewal
VIVIANA ZELIZER HAS HELPED to prompt a turn in economic sociology away from models that take a simple, naturalized conception of the market economy for granted. Through in-depth explorations of the monetary dimensions of contemporary social life, she has argued across several books—most prominently The Social Meaning of Money—that money has necessarily different meanings in different contexts. Far from being a single, undifferentiated medium of exchange or storehouse of value, money is a vividly contested site of value-determination and meaning-making; what would be expected of money based on textbook narratives of economic rationality prove only partly determinative of its role in social interactions. It is for this reason that Zelizer examines the social meanings of various “monies,” refusing the alleged unity of what proves a heterogeneous and complex institution.
In this chapter, I want to turn to a question that Zelizer’s work raises for the history of economic thought. For present purposes, I take it as uncontested that money is diverse in the ways that Zelizer and her students and allies have argued: a social institution whose richness and complexity is belied by simple economic accounts. What I wish to investigate is the origin of those accounts themselves. How should we understand their meaning in the broader project of meaning-making through money? It is with these questions in mind that I offer a condensed genealogy of what Zelizer calls the “mirage” that economic theory projects onto society.
I take as my point of departure Zelizer’s statement at the end of the Social Meaning of Money that “the vision of society fully transformed into a commodity market is no more than a mirage” (1994: 215). One way to read Zelizer’s entire project, in fact, is to see her particular concern about money as a criticism of the mirage—what we might call the “market mirage.” Indeed, her deeper point, as she put it a page earlier, is that “the constant, vigorous, and pervasive differentiation of modern monies provides the most powerful evidence against a homogenized, instrumental model of social life” (1994: 214, italics in original). By focusing on money, Zelizer was thus using it partly as a proxy for a broader complex of institutions in market society. Her point was that if money—a social institution designed, at least in large part, for fungibility, mobility, universality, homogeneity and instrumentality—is, in fact, complex, laden with contested meanings, and always embedded in complex social contexts that cannot escape entirely from their histories, then we should presume the same about everything else in our commercial societies as well.
To put the point directly, if money is not money (as it appears in the mirage), then neither should we expect “capital,” “labor,” “land,” or any other economic variable to exhibit the uniformity and internal consistency that is presupposed by economic theory. These, too, will be internally diverse aggregates whose meanings will be context-sensitive and historically variable. The critical thrust of Zelizer’s economic sociology takes us beyond the plural meanings of money/monies to question the functioning of the market mirage itself, which has been and remains an enormously attractive and powerful model of social life, even if ultimately illusory.
Before the Market Mirage
In such a critical task, an intellectual genealogy is often a helpful (if insufficient) first step in excavating the forgotten or hidden contexts in which dominant analytical tropes first appeared. How was the market mirage, this “homogenized, instrumental model of social life” that Zelizer identifies, first constructed—and to what end?
Significantly, if we look back to antiquity, we find no evidence of such a vision of society, at least none concerning what we now call “economic” questions.1 In fact, the idea that social life was regulated in a uniform and instrumental manner was not a “mirage” in antiquity, which is to say, apparent but illusory. It was simply nonexistent. To consider Zelizer’s particular example of money, it would be impossible to deny the diverse social meanings of ancient monies, particularly since the institution of money was itself emergent at that time: the construction of a relatively unified standard of value was a contested project with obvious social and symbolic import.2
Probably the closest approximations to a homogeneous conception of social life in the ancient world are found in discourses on citizenship and in the Stoic conception of a diffuse ethical fellowship of humankind. But even these are not very close. It is true that in ancient democracies such as Athens, a unifying ideal of citizenship was a hard-won political achievement. Yet the contours of this citizenship were nevertheless defined in contrast to many non-citizen identities: slaves, foreigners, immigrant-residents (metics), and women (who, even as citizens, did not have the same political powers as their male counterparts).3 Moreover, just as it was not a genuinely universal model of social life, the ancient ideal of citizenship was not an instrumental model of social relations either, but was predicated on different normative foundations.
Similarly, an ideal of a “fellowship” of humankind that was focused on social rather than political bonds flourished in some branches of Hellenistic philosophy, particularly after the ancient Greek city-states were absorbed into overarching empires, whether Macedonian or Roman (Annas 1995). The Stoic concept of oikeiosis posited this broad fellowship and was drawn on by early modern authors in their articulation of a “natural” society of humankind—which provided essential intellectual foundations for classical political economy.4 Nevertheless, the ancient ideal of ethical fellowship remains far from an “instrumental” model of social life tied to a particular conception of human socioeconomic development and would not be recognized as an obvious precursor by the modern economists who are Zelizer’s target.
It is true that our word “economy” derives from the ancient Greek oikonomia or “household-management.” However, the ancient writings on oikonomia are essentially distinct from today’s economic discourses.5 They do contain discussions of productive activity—farming, trading and the like—that sometimes approach a kind of instrumentality. But these, too, remain far from positing a unified, encompassing economic rationality, particularly since most of these ancient tracts are ultimately concerned with how the particular philosophical ideals of Stoicism or Epicureanism can be sustained in a life dedicated to practical affairs. Perhaps the closest that the ancient discourses on oikonomia come to modern economics is when they employ household-management as a metaphor for God’s management of the cosmos, which produces an orderly and harmonious universe.6 This ancient metaphor was drawn on by early modern political economists—such as Smith and others who wrote about the “invisible hand” in the market—but it remained in antiquity a theological or philosophical concept.7
We may thus assume, with admittedly limited evidence, that Zelizer’s emphasis on the complexity and context-relativity of meaning in the social relations of money (and related domains) would have been widely accepted in the ancient world—at least, much more widely accepted than the market mirage. It is true that in a few vivid passages of Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, we discover a brilliant description of money as a homogenizing instrument of social exchange (Eich 2016: 36–82). Marx and others later read those passages and made much of them.8 But we have to read these passages in isolation—as later readers have tended to do—to pretend that Aristotle denied the plural meanings of the institution he was describing. And if we put those slim passages together with books 8 and 9 at the end of the Nicomachean Ethics, in which Aristotle describes the varieties of philia—often translated as “friendship,” but encompassing a variety of forms of interpersonal exchange, including explicitly self-interested commercial exchange—we see that his discussion of money must be understood in the broader context of an ethical theory in which a plurality of goods or virtues sets the normative frame. More generally, the commitment to a plurality of goods and an “economy,” if we want to call it that, embedded in deep and conditioning norms reflects fundamental features of Aristotle’s social world, which he assumed his readers would recognize.
The market mirage—the “homogenized, instrumental model of social life”—may thus borrow some insights from ancient writers, with Aristotle being perhaps the most obvious because he was the most interested in questions of everyday activity. But it clearly does not come from antiquity. Ancient life was differentiated along diverse axes, and there is no homogenous model of social life presented in ancient philosophy, particularly concerning what we now call “the economy.” The origins of the mirage lie later.
The Theological Origins of the Market Mirage
As I examine in more detail in a forthcoming book, the most obvious precursors to this way of thinking appear in an initially surprising context: a theological debate in later seventeenth-century France concerned with the elaboration of St. Augustine’s religious doctrines.9 A sect of Catholics called the Jansenists (after its founder, Cornelius Jansenius) advanced an austere view of salvation through God’s grace and of the radical inscrutability of the elect, which conflicted with established Catholic teaching, thus pitting Jansenists against Jesuits in the religious debates of that time.10
For my purposes, what is interesting about the Jansenist view is that it deployed the skeptical anthropology of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries through the device of Augustine’s two cities to articulate a homogenous, instrumental model of social life on earth. This was an early modern innovation that built on ancient inspiration. Augustine’s masterwork, The City of God, was oriented around the opposition between two “cities”—the “earthly city” (or civitas terrena), standing in for Rome, or more generally, mundane and mortal life; and the “city of God” (or civitas Dei), which is the heavenly kingdom promised to God’s chosen. The elect are citizens of the civitas Dei during their sojourn on earth; they remain noncitizen “pilgrims” in the earthly city (much as ancient Christians were initially in the Roman Empire), living in the world but not of it. Augustine’s theory reflected a theologically motivated denial that the civitas terrena had any genuine virtue, since true virtue belongs to God alone. And yet, as a Roman citizen himself, Augustine (and all his contemporaries) were raised on vivid stories of Rome’s grandeur and the virtue of its citizens, particularly during Rome’s republican era. How was the earthly success of these citizens and the city-turned-empire they built to be understood in theological terms, particularly now that the Roman Empire was no longer the opponent of Christianity but its institutional vehicle?
Augustine argued, following Sallust, that the pride of the Romans mimicked genuine virtue in its effects. The proud—and thus sinful—competition among the old Romans for military glory had the collective, unintended consequence of advancing the glory of their city (Sal. Cat. VII). Sallust had even written that political ambition is a vice, yet one “not so far removed from virtue” (Sal. Cat. XI. 1–3), at least in comparison with the avarice that later brought down the republic. Augustine relied on Sallust in his analysis of pagan virtue, in which he explained the greatness of Rome with reference to the efficacious but ultimately sinful “love of praise,” which was the basis of the virtues the pagans displayed (Aug. De Civ. Dei V.12–13). Augustine thus offered an analysis of virtue and vice that showed how a sinful people (before or without Christ) could nevertheless have the simulacrum of virtue, and how that simulacrum could be part of God’s providential plan for sustaining the world in which the elect make their pilgrimage.
It was this aspect of Augustine’s theology that was drawn on in the first explicit theorization of how the market mechanism operates to create order in commercial societies (Grewal 2016). As austere neo-Augustinians, the French Jansenists provided a reading of Augustine that explained how a durable social order could be achieved, through commerce, among the unredeemed citizens of the civitas terrena, who nevertheless remain entirely dependent on God’s will. Jansenist moral and social theory began with the assumption of sinful “self-love” as the motivation for human action and then derived all forms of seemingly public or other-regarding behavior as nothing but this self-love in disguise (Nicole [1670–78] 1845). Its explicit assumption was that all humans are sinners—unless redeemed by God’s unbidden grace—and that although self-love was understood to be opposed to love of God, it was nevertheless the only basis for social order after the Fall. Sinful self-love was, in this sense, a theologically derived anthropological universal.
It is possible, then, to read Jansenism as offering an early and theologically inspired version of the “mirage” that Zelizer criticizes. Its vision of postlapsarian terrestrial order presented a homogenous, instrumental model of social life in which we can know ex ante that what sinners pursue is only self-love, however disguised—and, furthermore, that we are all sinners (or at least, unable to distinguish ourselves, by ourselves, from sinners). One necessary feature of this vision is that any good that appears in the world must be capable of being produced by sin mimicking virtue. For salvation to be a matter entirely of God’s grace—and not, as in one or another heretical claim, something we can influence through our own actions—the City of God must be entirely non-apparent to us and in God’s hands alone. Since God’s grace must be inscrutable to us, the same worldly effect has to be capable of being produced by either charity (love of God) or self-love, and we must be unable to distinguish between the two.
The relationship between charity and self-love was examined in a series of essays by the major Jansenist theologian Pierre Nicole.11 Nicole argued that charitable actions are merely the artifice of self-love working in a subtle manner, since it is often advantageous to seem to be helping others by putting one’s own needs last, if only as a device to prevail over them ultimately. Such a clever or strategic deployment of self-love is required to sustain orderly terrestrial life, including the lives of those true Christians who are merely pilgrims in this world below.12
Nicole looked to commercial exchange—what we now call “the market” in the abstract—for his best examples of this successful channeling of self-love into seemingly other-oriented outcomes. Thus, in addition to providing a theory of law as a punitive device to maintain civic order, he adapted the ancient literature on philia or the “exchange of benefits” in order to theorize commercial exchange as a form of providential design capable of producing order among sinners (Grewal 2016: 424–26). With philia decoded as self-love, all social interaction came to be understood on a model of self-interested exchange.
The origins of the “mirage” are in this neo-Augustinian theology, whose main aim was to theorize the condition of fallen man, and in which markets were understood in a providentialist framework. In order to maintain the claim that virtue comes from God alone, the Jansenists argued that beneficial collective consequences could spring from individual sin, such that what might appear the product of human charity could be decoded as nothing but vice in disguise. The simulacrum of heroism that Augustine argued was produced through the Roman lust for glory was thus echoed in early modern Europe in the simulacrum of charity produced by commercial selfishness.
Homo economicus began as the terrestrial citizen addicted to self-love but maintained unwittingly through God’s hidden providence. At its core, this was the idea that Bernard de Mandeville later called the “private vices, public benefit” argument (Mandeville [1714] 1924), which later became famous in Adam Smith’s account of the “invisible hand” (Force 2003: 69–72). While it appears to us now as a secular model of human commercial sociability, it was the Jansenists in their theorizing about the forms of earthly order who first proposed the “hand” of God operating behind the market to turn sinful self-love into collective benefit.13 It was the Jansenists who argued that the effects of true charity and the effects of what they called enlightened self-love—which Smith would later call “enlightened self-interest”—would prove indistinguishable in practice. As Smith famously claimed, it was not from the “benevolence” of the butcher and the baker that we expect our dinner but “from their regard for their own interest” (Smith [1776] 1976: 27), which nevertheless produces a benevolent outcome all the same.
Institutionalizing the Mirage
But what is the relation between these theological arguments and the contemporary market mirage? An intertwined intellectual and juridical legacy of these early theological debates has continuing relevance. Notably, soon after Pierre Nicole put forward his argument concerning the beneficial consequences of the exchange of sinful self-love, we find the first recognizably economic analysis of the market in the work of Pierre de Boisguilbert, a Norman noble and administrator, who had studied with Nicole in the main Jansenist school of Port-Royal des Champs. Boisguilbert produced the first analytic account of the unintended benefits of market exchange and used this theory to criticize the overreaching governmental bureaucracy of Louis XIV (Boisguilbert [1695–1710] 1966; Faccarello 1999). Marx ([1859] 1904: 56) later identified Boisguilbert as the founder of the French branch of political economy, and a relatively direct line of influence runs between Boisguilbert and the later work of the économistes (or Physiocrats) Quesnay and Turgot, from whom the Scottish economists Hume and Smith borrowed a great deal (Groenewegen 2002). Full recognition of this influence has been complicated by the fact that what began, with Boisguilbert and the Jansenists, as a program of laissez-faire opposed to the centralizing French monarchy became, over the course of the eighteenth century, a program of top-down economic liberalization pursued by royal advisers and administrators keen to deploy central power to promote and protect market relations.14
In parallel to this intellectual development, and the related activity of the French économistes in attempting to reform the ancien régime, was a Jansenistinfluenced program of legal codification that delivered the foundational law codes of France—and, after Napoleon, much of the European continent (Pena 1992). This program reflected the centralization of power in the French monarchy, which sought to promulgate unifying national codes. While these codes were heavily indebted to Roman law, their drafting was executed by jurists with links to the Jansenists: first, under Louis XIV, by the Jansenist jurist Jean Domat;15 and second, in the mid-eighteenth century, by Jean-Etienne-Marie Portalis, sometimes called the “father of the civil code” (Chartier 2004), and others who drew on natural law and Jansenist principles—the latter source often obscured, because Jansenism was banned in the early eighteenth century (Arnaud 1969).
These early efforts provided much of the foundation for the major codification project of the later French Revolution, which produced the famous Napoleonic Code (Levasseur 1969; Halpérin 1992). Through the Code and the power of Napoleon, the Directory achieved the long-sought goal of the économistes: the legal foundation for economic liberalism and the “legal despotism” capable of enforcing it.16 The market mirage thus became part of a consolidated juridical order; it did not remain in the realm of ideas and ideals but was enacted, at least partly, through law.
In suggesting that an early modern political theology of fallen humanity provided the origins of the mirage, I may have answered one historical question at the expense of introducing many others. Why, after all, did it take the Jansenists to arrive at this interpretation of Augustine—and why was it then taken up by economists and jurists so readily in the eighteenth century? What remained constant, and what changed in the movement from a pessimistic theology through what Hume claimed as the “new science of man” to the legal order that Napoleon would take with him as he swept across postrevolutionary Europe? How much of the mirage that Zelizer has criticized can be located in this early view of the invisible hand of God governing a world of fallen sinners—and how fully was it possible to make the mirage real through legal reforms? And in terms of our present-day understandings, how indebted do we remain to this universalizing philosophical anthropology, albeit rendered in apparently non-theological terms as part of a social science of the market?
These and related questions, I think, must be situated in light of a broader argument: that it was the rise of the early modern state that provoked the first glimmerings of the market mirage, and that it was state action that ultimately worked to build the “economy” that has so frequently been thought opposed to it.17 The Jansenists were working in an expressly post-Hobbesian vein, and both Hobbes’s political theory and Jansenist moral theory were, in key respects, responses to the rise of the modern state. That modern state, for all its assumed monarchical form, introduced a new concept of universal subjecthood and enacted a homogenizing juridical relation to its citizens. In this sense, the emergence of the modern state was the beginning of what we would later call “the rule of law,” and in its own way it presented a deliberately homogenized social world as an aspirational ideal, albeit not one that was instrumental about law’s purposes in the way that Zelizer has criticized in the market mirage. Indeed, within appropriate domains, the law is supposed to mean the same thing to everyone: in a modern legal ordering, shades of meaning may constitute the failure of an ideal of equal citizenship rather than a mirage that obscures the richness of our social life.
But what is the relation between this emerging rule of law and the emerging domain of the market? While the market mirage may have had a surprising beginning in an obscure political theology, it was soon transformed into something approaching a governing philosophy for the commercializing states of early modern Europe. This new conception played a role in guiding the state in its construction of “the economy” (Grewal forthcoming). In this respect, the market mirage in its earliest guise must be considered the result of a policy intervention.
Moreover, it was precisely one of its virtues, as Adam Smith and others claimed, that the market treats disparate and diverse social elements in a uniform and homogenizing manner.18 Early political economy was fighting explicitly against the diversity of social relations: in a Europe dominated by residual feudal categories, different social meanings provided obvious leverage points for social oppression. In this respect, money’s multiplicity of meanings could only prove an obstacle to the construction of a smoothly functioning market economy that its proponents thought would help to ensure juridical equality and the rule of law to all exchangers.
Owing to this orientation, and like the early French économistes, Smith and many who followed him were denounced as radicals bent on upending the social order (Rothschild 1992). It may be difficult for us now to see market advocacy as a radical endeavor, particularly in an age of neoliberal consolidation.19 Indeed, the endeavor may have been compromised, even in Smith’s own day. But we should nevertheless recognize that the market mirage reflected an ideal of bourgeois radicalism, an unrealized political aspiration corresponding to a particular vision of egalitarianism and the modern rule of law. That the mirage remains illusory may reflect enduring features of human social life that resist the logic of the market, as Zelizer has noted—the vagaries of history, the partialities of love and place, a preference for the familiar and the existent, the complexities of identity—but more’s the pity for us, Smith might say, and for the eighteenth-century project of enlightenment through commerce.
Utility and Money in Modern Economics
We are now in the midst of a different argument, which is how to understand the theorization of the commercial societies in which we now live in relation to the foundational ideal and only partly realized practice of the “rule of law”—and the relationship of that ideal to the achievement of genuine and universal citizenship within modern states. I can do no more here than acknowledge that these problems are unresolved, both in historical scholarship and in diverse and ongoing political contestations. But it would be misleading to close without recognizing one important way in which earlier generations of economists elaborated the idea that money’s meaning could vary.
Classical political economy was focused on the study of “commercial society,” understood to be based not only on the division of labor and the satisfaction of needs through commercial exchange but on a class structure in which the members of some classes owned land, others capital, others only their labor. It was readily accepted that money, on the margin, would be worth more to a member of the laboring classes—and, more generally, to poor people than to rich people. In nineteenth-century political economy and its philosophical counterpart, classical utilitarianism, this idea would be formalized in the concept of a “diminishing marginal utility of wealth”—namely, that an additional bit of money would be worth more (and thus contribute to greater social utility overall, aggregating across persons) if it went to a poor person rather than a rich one. In the hands of classical utilitarian reformers, including the politicians who helped inaugurate the British welfare state, an assumption of this kind was thought to support broadly redistributive social policies (Goodin 1988). Progressive taxation and public expenditure on health, education, and culture was supported by this view of money’s meaning different things to different people with different levels of wealth.
Nevertheless, from the perspective of Zelizer’s work, the assumption of the diminishing marginal utility of wealth might be thought to represent a fairly limited concession to the multiple meanings of money/monies. After all, it assumes that money has different value for different people, but in a uniform way, making the meaning of money relative only to the amount one possesses. Money is presumed to mean the same thing to each person at each level of wealth, while it is admitted only that all fortunes are not equal.
Nevertheless, even this money-relative variation in the meaning of money was ultimately rejected by mid-twentieth-century economic orthodoxy—and this time, ironically, on the very grounds of difference that the market mirage would otherwise deny. The assumption of “diminishing marginal utility” rested on the idea that utilities were “comparable” across persons: that is, that it was possible to say (either as between individuals or considering social averages across classes) that the poor really did get more utility from an additional dollar than the wealthy did. It was this assumption that several important twentieth-century economists attacked and overturned on grounds of epistemological modesty and a heightened, perhaps exaggerated, respect for difference: since no one could really know that an extra dollar was worth more to a poor person than a rich one, such an argument should not enter into a value-neutral economic analysis. As the influential British economist Lionel Robbins argued, the law of diminishing marginal utility “begs the great metaphysical question of the scientific comparability of different individual experiences” (1935: 147). By contrast, a scientific analysis, Robbins explained, should be able to lay forth positively the facts of a case, and the diminishing marginal utility of wealth was not a fact but a “judgment of value.” Value judgments, according to Robbins’s positivist approach, can be rigorously separated from facts and should only enter into economic analysis after the relevant facts have been ascertained.20
If we are not to rely on “judgments of value,” what are the data that a positive economic science can utilize? According to a set of arguments following Robbins—worked out by Paul Samuelson and others—the data of economic science should be restricted to “revealed preferences,” the decisions that individuals make when subject to a budget constraint in a market or quasi-market setting (Samuelson 1948). Such revelation of preference is supposed to allow the analyst to account for real differences among individual consumers, thus respecting pluralism of choice in a deep way. The reliance on the market as the definitive site of social exchange—the institution that provides the paradigm for the “mirage” of social life with which this chapter began—was thus justified in twentieth-century economics precisely on grounds of difference rather than of homogeneity.
While classical political economy had tried to deploy the market as a homogenizing instrument in the service of a radical program of postfeudal social consolidation, twentieth-century economics, in recoil from the redistributive ambitions of classical utilitarianism, turned to the market as a site that allowed the differences in consumer preferences to be revealed, rather than presumed. And yet beneath this ostensible respect for diversity was again an assumed, if implicit, constant: the claim that the market should serve as the privileged institution managing the plurality of values among persons and the site of their ongoing renegotiation. The continued insistence on this institution of social choice as the paradigm for human interaction links twentieth-century consumer choice theory back to the market mirage that I have argued has its origins in the theological debates of early modernity—and which Viviana Zelizer’s research into the meanings of money has helped to unsettle.
Notes
1. This is the major contention of one side in an ongoing debate about the nature of the ancient world, prompted in large part by Moses Finley (1973); for a theoretical overview of the debate, see Nafissi (2005).
2. Kurke (1999) helped to prompt an ongoing debate about the origin and meaning of money in antiquity. On the ancient political theory of money, see the early chapters of Eich (2016); and on the “making” of money as a technique of governance in the early modern state, see Desan (2014).
3. On the spectrum of statuses in ancient societies, see Finley (1964).
4. On oikeiosis, see Striker (1996). For later uses of the concept, see Long (2003: 20–22); cf. the warning about the confused use of the term among later authors in Tuck (1999: 37n34).
5. On the meanings of ancient oikonomia, see Natali (1995).
6. Unlike ancient discourses on oikonomia, this eighteenth-century inquiry did not concern the management of an estate or household, but the study of a new social universe, modeled on God’s harmonious cosmic arrangement, oikonomia tou theou, familiar in both pre-Christian Hellenistic and patristic sources (Reumann (1957: 391ff.).
7. For two recent studies of Smith’s providentialism, see Harrison (2011) and Hill (2001); for a criticism deemphasizing the import of providentalism to Smith’s thought, see Fleischacker (2009: 44–45).
8. See, e.g., Marx ([1867] 1990: 151–52); for secondary discussions, see Finley (1970: 38); Meikle (1995: 189–90).
9. See Grewal (forthcoming) for an overview of this history and Grewal (2016) for a specific examination of the political theology of early economic thought.
10. On Jansenism generally, see Keohane (1980: 262–303); Van Kley (2006: 110–34) and the opening chapters of Faccarello (1999). On the Jansenist influence on eighteenth-century social and economic thought, see Heilbron (1998).
11. See his moral essays, particularly “De la charité et de l’amour-propre,” in Nicole ([1670–78] 1845).
12. For more on the taming and channeling of the passions in early modern moral theory, see Hirschman (1977: 7–66, esp. 12–13, on Jansenist theories). Hirschman’s broader point concerning the pacifying effect of commerce—doux commerce—is compatible with the argument I am making here, though the Jansenists did not emphasize this international dimension, which would emerge in other authors, notably, Montesquieu.
13. In his “Des différentes manières dont on tente Dieu,” Pierre Nicole explains that God’s “hand” is everywhere, conducting all things to their proper end: “it’s always him [God] who acts and who sustains us … we are obliged to recognize his hand and all-powerful operation as well” (Nicole [1670–78] 1845: 160).
14. This dialectic is perhaps unsurprising, since, as Foucault (2004) has elaborated, laissez-faire ideology was initially justified as an internal limitation on raison d’état, promulgated as a beneficial self-restraint on sovereign power by itself.
15. For the Jansenist theory of self-love that frames his major treatise on civil law, see Domat (1722: 19–21). For background on Domat’s project, see Gordley (2013: 141–55).
16. On “legal despotism” as a feature of Physiocratic thought, see Shovlin (2006: 107–8); on the economic orientation of the Directory, see Miller (2002: 71–72).
17. For an account of the rise of the economy as an “instituted,” not a natural process, see Polanyi (1957).
18. Desan (in chapter 6 of this volume) makes a similar point for the modern meaning of money.
19. For a criticism of contemporary neoliberalism and an examination of its legal foundations, see Grewal and Purdy (2014).
20. For a study of this problem and the argument that facts and values are in fact “entangled” in economics, see Putnam (2002).
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