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Commerce and Peace in the Enlightenment
About this book
For many Enlightenment thinkers, discerning the relationship between commerce and peace was the central issue of modern politics. The logic of commerce seemed to require European states and empires to learn how to behave in more peaceful, self-limiting ways. However, as the fate of nations came to depend on the flux of markets, it became difficult to see how their race for prosperity could ever be fully disentangled from their struggle for power. On the contrary, it became easy to see how this entanglement could produce catastrophic results. This volume showcases the variety and the depth of approaches to economic rivalry and the rise of public finance that characterized Enlightenment discussions of international politics. It presents a fundamental reassessment of these debates about 'perpetual peace' and their legacy in the history of political thought.
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Information
Table of contents
- Cover
- Half title
- Title
- Copyright
- Dedication
- Contents
- List of Contributors
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction: power, prosperity, and peace in Enlightenment thought
- 1 Harrington's project: The balance of money, a republican constitution for Europe, and England's patronage of the world
- 2 The enlightened prince and the future of Europe: Voltaire and Frederick the Great's Anti-Machiavel of 1740
- 3 From jealousy of trade to the neutrality of finance: Isaac de Pinto's ``system'' of luxury and perpetual peace
- 4 Eighteenth-century Carthage
- 5 Enlightenment socialism: Cesare Beccaria and his critics
- 6 State-machines, commerce and the progress of Humanitat in Europe: Herder's response to Kant in Ideas for the Philosophy of History of Mankind
- 7 Peace, commerce and cosmopolitan republicanism: The legacy of Andrew Fletcher in late-eighteenth-century Scotland
- 8 Liberty, war and empire: Overcoming the rich state-poor state problem, 1789–1815
- 9 Karl Ludwig von Haller's critique of liberal peace
- 10 Pierre-Joseph Proudhon's War and Peace: The right of force revisited
- 11 From King's prerogative to constitutional dictatorship as reason of state
- 12 Afterword: Peace, politics and the division of labour
- Index