The Political Economy of Sentiment: Paper Credit and the Scottish Enlightenment in Early Republic Boston, 1780–1820 (review)

Abstract

The Political Economy of Sentiment: Paper Credit and the Scottish Enlightenment in Early Republic Boston., 1780-1820. By Jose R. Torre. (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2006. Pp. 251. Cloth, £66/ $99.00.)Reviewed by Cathy MaisonThe Political Economy of traces the transformation in thinking about that began in late seventeenth-century England and reached maturity before America's market revolution. Jose Torre argues that profound changes in the meanings of value spurred innovations in the paper credit and banking systems of the early national political economy, but he also invites the reader to consider parallel intellectual transformations among New England's Unitarian ministers, sentimental novelists, and decorative artists who articulated new views about value through the concept of sentiment.In Torre's background stand the traditional defenders of the intrinsic value of money (silver and gold), a beggar thy neighbor mercantilist model of commerce, and the regulation of personal behavior in the marketplace. Among them, John Locke is cast not as the herald of liberal individualism, but as an advocate of unchangeable intrinsic value in money. Slowly, under the influence of Scottish Moral Sense writersmost notably David Hume, Francis Hutcheson, and Adam Smith-value became changeable, contestable, and conceptually fictitious. Revolutionary Americans more readily accepted currency as a promise to facilitate exchange, an instrument of public trust, and confidence without real value. The true measure of wealth was not the store of money on hand, but the ability of mere paper to satisfy collective individual desires to develop America and consume more.This new view of value proved to be liberating in an infant republic whose citizens were deeply in debt, but also convinced of their tremendous potential for economic and cultural development. Powerful spokesmen pushed the new view of value further and celebrated speculative investments, expansive individual consumption, and an infinite system of paper credit, all of which, they insisted, would knit together large networks of investors and consumers in mountains of confidence and trust.Yet because paper credit was fictitious, and Americans had lost the security of attachment to the British commercial empire and fixed traditional political authority, some kind of glue was necessary to hold together otherwise discretely associated individuals in this new world of value. Sentiment would be the glue to ease disquietude about the unbridled self-interest, and it would provide New Englanders with an epistemology based on feelings (56). In the form of sympathy or benevolence, Adam Smith's impartial spectator knew what was morally right by imagining himself in the place of the other whom he was judging; an internal moral sentiment would bind individuals in a system of natural liberty that had little place for the constraints of mercantilism and much potential for the satisfaction of wants and needs.Torre is less effective in addressing a central conundrum in early national political economy: the failure of lofty ideals-in this case, sentiment-to play out in the reality of contentious interests. Surely, regulation, restraint, and paternalism persisted in disputes over cultural authority, but Torre provides only a few glimpses of discussions about commercial protection and internal improvements. He demonstrates that many key economic thinkers, among them Jonathan Witherspoon, Ben Franklin, William Barton, James Sullivan, and Mathew Carey (whose name is consistently misspelled), were excited about facilitating the new nation's liquid credit and enlarging public confidence in banks, and hence the nation's sympathetic social bonds. …