Theorising commercial society: Rousseau, Smith and Hont
| DOI | 10.1177/1474885118782390 |
| Author | Robin Douglass |
| Date | 01 October 2018 |
| Published date | 01 October 2018 |
| Subject Matter | Review Article |
E J P T
European Journal of Political Theory
2018, Vol. 17(4) 501–511
Theorising commercial
! The Author(s) 2018
Article reuse guidelines:
society: Rousseau, Smith and
sagepub.com/journals-permissions
DOI: 10.1177/1474885118782390
Hont
journals.sagepub.com/home/ept
Robin Douglass
King’s College London, UK
Istvan Hont, Politics in Commercial Society: Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Adam Smith.
Harvard University Press: Cambridge, 2015; 160 pp. $36.00 (hbk)
Abstract
In his posthumously published lectures, Politics in Commercial Society, Istva´n Hont argues
that Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Adam Smith should be understood as theorists of
commercial society. This article challenges Hont’s interpretation of both thinkers and
shows that some of his key claims depend on conflating the terms ‘commercial society’
and ‘commercial sociability’. I argue that, for Smith, commercial society should not be
defined in terms of the moral psychology of commercial sociability, before questioning
Hont’s Epicurean interpretation of Smith’s theory of sociability. I then turn to Rousseau
and outline some of the difficulties involved with classifying him as a theorist of com-
mercial society, the most important of which is that he often appeared to be more
deeply opposed to commercial progress than Hont suggests. I conclude by highlighting
some of the most salient differences between Rousseau’s and Smith’s views of the
politics of eighteenth-century Europe.
Keywords
Adam Smith, commercial society, history of political thought, Istva´n Hont, Rousseau
Istva´n Hont (2005: 156) thought that intellectual history, at its best, could lead us to
ask more penetrating questions about the present. Understanding the questions past
thinkers asked, and the answers they pursued, might ‘help us avoid repeating the
same questions again and again, running in circles unproductively’. If, for example,
we think there is a contemporary crisis of the nation-state, we would do well to
reflect on its intellectual origins and consider how this label came to be applied to the
states we inhabit today. Viewed this way, those who posit a contemporary crisis fail
to see that the tensions and problems they identify have been inherent in the idea of
Corresponding author:
Robin Douglass, King’s College London, Bush House (North East-Wing), 30 Aldwych, London, WC2B 4BG.
Email: robin.douglass@kcl.ac.uk
502
European Journal of Political Theory 17(4)
the nation-state from its inception. The nation-state, on Hont’s (2005: especially
447–456) analysis, has always been in crisis. More generally, turning to the early-
modern period may allow us to understand our own predicament better, for the
‘commercial future that many eighteenth-century observers imagined as plausible
has become our historical present’ (Hont, 2005: 156).
In Politics in Commercial Society: Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Adam Smith, the
posthumously published version of his 2009 Carlyle Lectures, Hont adopts a similar
approach. Too often commercial society is ‘used incorrectly and in a theoretically
imprecise sense . . . as a theoretical category, commercial society is hardly used cor-
rectly at all’ (p. 4).1 Scholars often use the term to distance their analysis from the
Marxist language of capitalism or bourgeois society, but this ‘remains an unfinished
journey’. One aim of the book is thus ‘to throw some light on its possible use in
political thought’ (p. 6). Hont’s guides in doing so are Rousseau and Smith and,
in a work that aims to surprise, one of its most ‘seemingly radical’ or ‘paradoxical’
arguments is that Rousseau, and not just Smith, should be read as a theorist of
commercial society (p. 2). Rousseau, of course, is often read as a critic of commer-
cial society, but Hont uses the term ‘theorist’ in a narrower sense to argue that
Rousseau’s own political and economic proposals were intended for commercial
societies.
If the approach Hont takes is familiar from his earlier work, the experience of
reading Politics in Commercial Society is somewhat different (a point nicely cap-
tured by Harris, 2016: 151–152). It is a bold and insightful work, but those insights
are not always fully developed and worked out in the text itself. We encounter
nothing like the extensive footnotes that support many of Hont’s arguments else-
where and are left wondering how these arguments would have looked had they
been subjected to the level of scholarly dissection characteristic of his other work.
Hont aims to illuminate some of the most interesting points of comparison between
Rousseau and Smith with a view to reorienting the way we understand both thin-
kers and the relation between them. The book comprises six chapters paired
around the themes of ‘Commercial Sociability’, ‘Histories of Government’ and
‘Political Economy’. While these chapters focus on Rousseau and Smith, Hont’s
coverage is wide-ranging and the book’s most original contribution is arguably its
re-contextualisation of the Discourse on Inequality, which presents John Locke and
Montesquieu as two of Rousseau’s principal interlocutors.
In light of these considerations, I think the most rewarding and charitable way
of reading Politics in Commercial Society is not as ‘a coherent and highly structured
study that needs no further elaboration’ (p. xxi), as its editors suggest, but rather,
and much as we might expect from a series of lectures, as a source of original and
challenging theses that will repay further investigation. My aim here is to investi-
gate some of those theses by assessing the status Hont accords both Rousseau and
Smith as theorists of commercial society. In the case of Smith, I seek to disentangle
Hont’s use of the terms ‘commercial society’ and ‘commercial sociability’, arguing
that the former should not be defined in terms of the latter, before pushing back
against his Epicurean reading of Smith on sociability. In the case of Rousseau, I
highlight some of the difficulties involved with classifying him as a theorist of
Douglass
503
commercial society and argue that, in important respects, he and Smith did not
share ‘a view of the type of society whose politics they wanted to change’, as Hont
argues (p. 2).
Commercial society and commercial sociability
The term commercial society is most readily associated with Adam Smith, even
though the precise phrase is found only twice in The Wealth of Nations (1981: I.iv.1,
V.i.f.52) and not at all in The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1982b).2 Hont identifies
two characteristics of commercial society in Smith, which stretch its meaning
beyond the idea of a society characterised by commercial activity. The first is
quantitative. Commercial societies contain ‘a great deal of commercial and
market activity’ (p. 3, emphasis mine; see also Hont, 2005: 160–161). It is the
extent of commercial activity that separates a commercial society from an agricul-
tural society, its immediate historical predecessor. Only once the division of labour
is ‘thoroughly established’,...
To continue reading
Request your trial