ABSTRACT
During the last twenty years, Istvan Hont has published extensively on the role of political economy in the thought of European and British thinkers in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Written between 1983 and 1994, the seven essays collected in this volume constitute a major contribution to our understanding of why and how so many early modern European thinkers made the interplay between political and economic thinking the main focus of their work. Taken together, the essays show how these thinkers responded to the increasing global competition for markets among the world’s emerging commercial states and trading empires. Just as instructively, the essays show how these market states developed a commercial ideology that explained why peace and plenty rather than destructive commercial wars would be the result of free trading among the commercial nations of the world.
