Historicizing Self-Interest in the Modern Atlantic World

A Plea for Ego?

Christine Zabel

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000364071
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Economics
• Subtopic: Economic Conditions
• Index: Economics

This volume historicizes the use of the notion of self-interest that at least since Bernard de Mandeville and Adam Smith's theories is considered a central component of economic theory.

Having in the twentieth century become one of the key-features of rational choice models, and thus is seen as an idealized trait of human behavior, self-interest has, despite Albert O. Hirschman's pivotal analysis of self-interest, only marginally been historicized. A historicization(s) of self-interest, however, offers new insights into the concept by asking why, when, for what reason and in which contexts the notion was discussed or referred to, how it was employed by contemporaries, and how the different usages developed and changed over time. This helps us to appreciate the various transformations in the perception of the notion, and also to explore how and in what ways different people at different times and in different regions reflected on or realized the act of considering what was in their best interest. The volume focuses on those different usages, knowledges, and practices concerned with self-interest in the modern Atlantic World from the seventeenth to twentieth centuries, by using different approaches, including political and economic theory, actuarial science, anthropology, or the history of emotions.

Offering a new perspective on a key component of Western capitalism, this is the ideal resource for researches and scholars of intellectual, political and economic history in the modern Atlantic World.

Part I

Creating, inspiring, and calculating self-interest

1Improvement, projecting, and self-interest in the Hartlib Circle, c. 1640–1660

Ted McCormick

The unnatural origins of self-interest

Perhaps no concept in economics is as apparently natural as self-interest.¹ It is the engine that drives the individual economic actor; at the same time, it supplies an analytical criterion by which the rationality of past actions is assessed and the likelihood of future ones predicted. It has always been with us, and is universal. Certainly, individuals may have a better or worse understanding of their interests, and they determine these with reference to different timeframes and kinds of good. Historically, too, self-interested behavior has faced complex and varied constraints. Indeed, if the key economic fact of the modern era—for some historians, at least—is the rise of free enterprise, then the central insight of modern economic thought is the corresponding realization that the untrammeled pursuit of individual self-interest leads, as if guided by an invisible hand, to the good of society as a whole. Beginning in the eighteenth century, this interest had only to be liberated by the progress of Enlightenment ideas to transform the world for the better.²

One of the enduring virtues of Albert O. Hirschman's The Passions and the Interests is that it complicated the intellectual side of this story. Writing his manuscript in the early 1970s, Hirschman was frustrated by what he called “the incapacity of contemporary social science to shed light on the political consequences of economic growth,” a problem he blamed on a failure to grasp the ideological roots of economics.³ His book sought the origins of “interest” in changing philosophical ideas about passions. Long denigrated as a source of disorder and sin, the passions came by the seventeenth century to be seen as drivers of human action, and ultimately as susceptible if not to being subdued then at least to being differentiated and balanced against each other, the merely selfish restraining the politically destructive. During the eighteenth century, greed in particular—so Hirschman argued—came to be described less as a passion and more as an interest, indeed the interest. Because it was natural, its operations were predictable; analytically speaking, it made popular behavior legible. In practical terms, it kept the peace.

The Passions and the Interests underlined the ideological origins and purposes of arguments for self-interest—that is, in Hirschman's terms, capitalism. Selfish behavior may have been part of human nature, by this account, but conceptualizing self-interest as the fundamental and legitimate spring of action became acceptable, and then imperative, because it solved a political problem. Generations of political-economic writing that took this solution for granted naturalized the concept and put it beyond critical scrutiny. Yet, Hirschman's account also imposed a chronology that makes apparent anticipations of self-interest in earlier, non-canonical sources harder to interpret. Focusing as it did on canonical works of moral and political philosophy, his book had little to say about the ephemeral pamphlets and proposals that made up the bulk of “economic writing” in the seventeenth century, at least in England—a kind of writing in which concrete economic interests were often directly and explicitly at stake.⁴ Still less did this intellectual history accommodate the kinds of profitable, material, technological “improvements,” innovations, and schemes that many figures retrospectively classified as “economic writers” pursued in the workshops, on the estates, and in the colonies of the seventeenth-century British world.⁵ Inasmuch as ideas of interest, and of self-interest, animated “projects” for improvement and clung to the figure of the “projector” as the architect and purveyor of these profitable designs, this was a significant oversight.

Taking up Hirschman's fundamental insight into the ideological origins of the concept of self-interest while building on more recent work in the histories of improvement and projecting, this chapter aims to bring seventeenth-century projects and projecting into a discussion of interest and its ideological origins. It focuses in particular on projects emerging from the network of philosophers, inventors, Protestant ecumenists, and social reformers centered on the London-based, German-born intelligencer Samuel Hartlib (c. 1600–1662) and known as the “Hartlib Circle.”⁶ Reaching the peak of its activity in the 1640s and 1650s, in a time of civil conflict and political experimentation, the Hartlib Circle was the matrix for a multitude of projects whose authors invoked and negotiated a plethora of interests even as they proposed to improve, reform, or transform the nation and the world around them. Because of this, because several of Hartlib's associates enjoyed some prominence either as scientific figures or as economic writers after the Restoration, and because Hartlib's voluminous papers have been preserved, it is extraordinarily rich ground for tracing ideas about self-interest in shifting practical as well as intellectual contexts.⁷

The picture that emerges is far messier than the elegant portrait Hirschman sketched. It reveals the practical combination of ideas his account separated. As this chapter will argue, the Hartlibian record indicates a deeper ambiguity in attitudes toward self-interest or self-seeking (as embodied in the figure of the projector), a greater complexity in the language of “interest” (as borne out in Hartlib's archive), and an earlier appreciation of the benefits, if not the necessity, of self-interest for the common good (in projects predicated on enclosure, in particular), than Hirschman's argument allows. At the same time, however, this examination highlights some of the ideological functions of self-interest that Hirschman grasped and further illuminates some of the problems that self-interest seemed to solve. Indeed, reading seventeenth-century projects through the lens of The Passions and the Interests lets us see not only the role of self-interest in projecting, but also the extent to which the conceptualization and promotion of self-interest was itself a kind of project.

Projecting and self-interest

What did a projector look like? In March 1661, William Petty—soon to be knighted by the restored king, Charles II—sent “certain proposals for the improvement of Ireland” to the Duke of Ormond, Charles's new Lord-Lieutenant of Ireland. Petty introduced his proposals, which included a land registry, with a disavowal: “I do not appear a projector to shark for my necessities.” Well might he protest. His service to the recently overthrown Cromwellian regime had made him one of the greatest non-noble landowners in Ireland; a registry would protect his holdings against the claims of dispossessed royalists and Irish Catholics. That alone might raise questions about Petty's motives, but that was not all. As he bragged, he had “scaped pretty well in several new proposals already,” and was willing to be “laughed at once more,” if need be.⁸ In fact, Petty had acquired his estates thanks to his own “Down Survey” of Ireland, undertaken from 1653 to 1657.⁹ As master of the survey, he had been responsible for assessing the quality and extent of confiscated Irish Catholic lands—lands from which Cromwell's soldiers, London investors, and Petty himself were all to be paid. Neither his skill at framing his ideas (in part by casting rivals, including the Surveyor-General, Benjamin Worsley, as devious, incompetent, and self-interested projectors) nor the profit they brought him went unremarked.¹⁰ Ormond would live to complain of both. Facing the end of his career under James II, the duke wrote in 1686 that “Sir William Pet[t]y”—already pitching schemes to James's new favorites—“thinks it prudence to secure himself by applications to men in power & if hee can not save all will try to save one.”¹¹

To his critics, Petty's career was one long, twisted thread of self-seeking behavior. As they watched his lucrative service to the Protectorate morph into a frenetic scramble for royal patronage, they saw the prudence of the political survivor intertwined with the ambition of the parvenu, the pursuit of privilege and office fueled by hunger for wealth and fame. Yet, the moral cast of these motives depended on perspective. What was avarice to the Baptist soldier or usurping pride to the dispossessed royalist might seem to others no more than the reasonable enjoyment of just reward for ingenious labor in the public interest. This was all the more true because, in science, politics, and economy alike, projecting—the framing of schemes for improvement of all kinds—was the medium of Petty's machinations.¹² As his disavowal of the name suggests, projects, projecting, and above all the figure of the projector had a strongly negative rhetorical charge. Petty had been stung by it before, and would be again. A 1662 broadside attacking the new Hearth Tax singled out the “pur-blind” Petty's role in this “Painted Project”:

But was this done, my Gracious Liege, for You?

No, though at first it might make a shew,

As Painted Projects use, t’inhance Your Rents,

Their Subtle Sconces moulded worse intents

Than pur-blin’d Eyes discover’d; for they sought

Either by Farming what their Brokage wrought,

Or by their Agents to ingratiate

Your Smile for whom they did negotiate.¹³

A year later, another ballad mocked Petty's plan for a double-hulled ship in the same terms. Noting that Petty “had many Acres got,/By measuring of Land a Spot,” it suggested that, “gaping for [further] promotion,” he “Doth now project upon the Water.”¹⁴ As balladeers would have it, obsequious projectors hid private interest behind a veil of service, whether to king and country or to the advancement of knowledge. Yet even sympathetic observers, who dwelt on the public benefits of these same projects, did not deny their private profitability nor their authors’ desire of name or place. As Daniel Defoe would come to describe it in his Essay upon Projects, projecting in itself was neither good, bad, nor indeed neutral, but a morally complex endeavor that aligned—or bound together—a tangle of private motivations and public interests.¹⁵

It is, therefore, surprising that the historiographies of self-interest, projecting, and the public good have, until recently, rarely intersected.¹⁶ Through the seven...