The Political Theology of Laissez-Faire: From Philia to Self-Love in Commercial Society

Abstract

This essay examines the neglected theological origins of early economic discourse. Against accounts emphasizing the secular and scientific foundations of classical political economy, I examine the origins of economic thought in religious debates concerning the nature of human love and divine grace. Specifically, the theorization of what was called “commercial society” in the eighteenth-century depended upon two general theoretical innovations, each of which began in the post-Hobbesian social contract tradition. The first was a conception of the oeconomy understood as a domain of non-political “society,” based on pre-political property relations and sub-political voluntary associations of a primarily commercial variety, reflecting divinely ordained social progress. The second was the transformation of the ancient concept of philia to stress the self-love underlying all human relationships and the necessary role of divine grace in generating social integration. The idea that an “invisible” mechanism – the market functioning according to God's providential design – makes private vices conduce to public benefit promised an account of social order generated through essentially non-political processes based on a specific political theology. Tracing these ideas from their origins in theological debates through to their appropriation as core features in the analysis of commercial society takes us from a late seventeenth-century theological argument to the late eighteenth-century formalization of a secular model of sociability in classical political economy. In conclusion, I consider how aspects of this early political theology may remain implicit in the modern conception of economic rationality.