Pity, sympathy and self-interest: review of Pierre Force's Self-interest before Adam Smith

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size

Notes

1 Self-interest before Adam Smith. A Genealogy of Economic Science. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. pp. ix + 279. £45. ISBN: 0-521-83060-5.

2 However, as regards Mandeville and Smith scholarship there are references that seem to be missing. Force acknowledges his debt to Hirschman's classic, The Passions and the Interests, but leaves aside other texts that deal not only with Mandeville or Smith separately, but also with their historical and intellectual context as well as with their predecessors and influences. No doubt it is increasingly difficult to keep pace with this secondary literature, in particular, as regards Smith scholarship. Nevertheless, some well-known books, not to mention articles only in the area of the history of economic thought, do not appear in Force's references. This is the case, just to mention a few, with Milton Myers (1983), Maurice Goldsmith (1985), Terence Hutchison (1988), Vivienne Brown (1994), Jeffrey Young (1997), Samuel Fleischacker (1999) or James R. Otteson (2002). This also happens with literature on Rousseau, an author who has certainly received far less attention in the history of economic thought but who is gaining interest as some recent works in French prove. This is the case, just to mention two texts, with number 11 of the journal, Etudes Jean-Jacques Rousseau, on Rousseau and political economy (Bach 1999) and the recent edition (Bernardi 2002) of the Discourse on Political Economy under the direction of Bruno Bernardi, which gathers a series of articles reappraising Rousseau's text. There are other classical works on Rousseau that Force does not mention, such as R. Derathé's (1979) Jean-Jacques Rousseau et la Science Politique de son Temps or J. Starobinski's (1971) Jean-Jacques Rousseau. La Transparence et l'Obstacle, which have some insights on Rousseau's views on economic matters.