ABSTRACT
Seventeenth-and eighteenth-century political economy has been the subject
of a large and influential body of scholarship by historians, sociologists, political theorists, and economists. It is now widely recognized that figures
as diverse as Locke, Montesquieu, Hume, Smith, Ferguson, and Burke all
expected the extended market order to soften or polish away the barbarism,
rudeness, superstition, and enthusiasm of premodern societies. Eighteenth-
century thinkers in particular focused on ‘‘civil society’’ as the moral
antonym of ‘‘barbarism’’; ‘‘civilization’’ as the broader description of the
gradual progress of Enlightenment; commerce as the most likely engine of
this transformation; and ‘‘civility’’ as the distinctive virtue associated with the social conditions of an extended economic order (Pocock 1985b;
Langford 1989; Gellner 1994; Sally 1997; Shils 1997). This vision of political
economy has variously come to be known as the doux commerce thesis or
‘‘commercial republicanism’’ (A. Hirschman 1977; Lerner 1987, 195-221).
