Istvan Hont's Politics in commercial society: Jean- Jacques Rousseau and Adam Smith, eds. Béla Kapossy and Michael Sonenscher. Cambridge (MA): Harvard University Press, 2015, 138 pp.

Abstract

Review of Istvan Hont's Politics in commercial society: Jean- Jacques Rousseau and Adam Smith, eds. Bela Kapossy and Michael Sonenscher. Cambridge (MA): Harvard University Press, 2015, 138 pp.In the past decades scholars have come to revise the view that Rousseau and Smith were on opposite sides in their appreciation of commercial society. In Politics in commercial society: Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Adam Smith (posthumously published and edited by Bela Kapossy and Michael Sonenscher), Istvan Hont (1947-2013) takes the issue to a new level. He presents Rousseau and Smith both as theorists of commercial society, arguing that we still underestimate the extent to which they held similar aims and views. They were engaged in conversation with fellow contributors to the ongoing debate on how to balance self-love, growth and stability through politics in commercial society. Emphasizing their extensive common ground, Hont highlights the riddle of why they held such different views on politics. Aiming to solve this riddle, he reconstructs the political theories of Rousseau and Smith, arguing that the themes and concerns of their contrasting visions of politics in commercial society still define tensions in modern politics.In the first two chapters Hont maps out the agreements and disagreements between Rousseau and Smith. He places them in the Hobbesian, selfish tradition, engaged in refining the moral foundation of selfish theory. While agreeing with Hobbes that humans have no inborn sociability, Rousseau and Smith rejected the Hobbesian claim that sociability only arises after sovereign power is established by contract to control the disruptive human desire for recognition and superiority. Instead they offered a conjectural history of law and government, explaining the rise of sociability and pre-political consensus out of need and utility. Sociability as well as morality are the natural outgrowth of development through which humans learn the benefits of cooperation and cohesion. Along the way, however, people also start to compare themselves, evoking envy and the desire for recognition and superiority with the inevitable result of dissension and conflicts. Thus Rousseau and Smith sought to explain how passions and judgments linked to selflove became the building materials of a working moral enterprise.Given their alternative view on the origin of sociability, Rousseau and Smith had no need for Hobbes's absolutism, which neglects prepolitical consensus and commercial sociability. Commercial society, interpreted by Hont as a halfway house between Tonnies's 'Gemeinschaft' and 'Gesellschaft', reflects this tension between pridebased and utility-based sociability. Hont argues that the tension between these two types of sociability has been pinned on Rousseau and Smith as if they were in two minds. The well-known Adam Smith problem has a precedent in Rousseau. Both 'problems' concern the (in)compatibility of amour-propre and compassion in commercial society, and lead up to the question of how inherent tensions need to be complemented by government to arrive at a stable social order. If commercial sociability is a product of historical evolution, how does politics develop from preexisting sociability and how can the rise of justice and government be plotted?Despite all similarities, Rousseau's and Smith's sketches of the historical development of law and government bring to light that views diverge on law, liberty, property, and inequality. As a consequence, Hont shows in chapter three and four, Rousseau and Smith developed very different visions of politics. One bone of contention is the question of what comes first: judges or the law? Rousseau, arguing from a contractual perspective, claimed the primacy of the law, taking his cue from Locke. Locke had argued that natural authority based on trust was bound to be corrupted with economic development. The institution of private property and the invention of money allowed accumulation of wealth, which increased inequality and created conflicts, only to be solved by establishing a legalized regime by social contract. …