Historicizing Self-Interest in the Modern Atlantic World A Plea for Ego?

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.

Introduction: The Search for Self-Interest and the Problems with its Historicization Christine Zabel Part 1: Creating, Inspiring and Calculating Self-Interest 1. Improvement, Projecting, and Self-Interest in the Hartlib Circle, c. 1640–1660 Ted McCormick 2. Reckoning Self-Interest at the French Revolutionary Comité des Finances Christine Zabel Part 2: Understanding, Teaching, and Learning about Self-Interest 3. Commercial Sociability and the Management of Self-Interest in Isaac de Pinto’s Letter on Card-Playing Koen Stapelbroek 4. The Concept of Self-interest in Eighteenth Century Anthropology and Economic Theory. From Richard Cumberland to Adam Smith Simone de Angelis 5. The Problem of Embeddedness Revisited. Self-Interest as a Challenge in Ethnographic and Historical Research Christof Dejung Part 3: Embodying, Feeling and Practicing Self-Interest 6. Commercial Desires in a Web of Interest. Dutch Discourses on (Self-)interest, 1600-1830 Inger Leemans 7. Practical Knowledge of Self-Interest: The Disembedding of Agency in Rural Areas, Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries Ulrich Pfister and Friederike Scholten-Buschhoff 8. Pursuing Self-Interest: Stock Market Speculation in the Early Twentieth-Century United States Daniel Menning Part 4: Taming Self-Interest, Self-Interest as Limitation 9. Interest as an Enduring Political Problem in Early Modern France Rafe Blaufarb 10. Self-Interest, Speculation, and Gambling in Nineteenth-Century America Cornelius Torp 11. Against Self-interest: The Codification of “Disinterestedness” as an Axiological Operator, in Religion, Aesthetics, and the Ethics of Intellectual Professions Gisèle Sapiro

Christine Zabel is Director of the Early Modern Department at the German Historical Institute in Paris, France. She is currently completing a book on the economic and financial history of speculation, especially in early modern France. She is particularly interested in the history of political economy, financial mathematics, the history of knowledge and early modern republicanism(s). She is the author of the book Polis und Politesse. Der Diskurs über das antike Athen in England und Frankreich, 1630–1760 (2016).