Modern Commercial Society Research Articles

Innovative advertising design strategies on consumer psychology and BPD patients

BackgroundAdvertising plays a crucial role in modern commercial society as a means of information transmission. It not only affects consumers’ purchasing decisions but may also have a particular impact on their mental health. This study explores in depth how innovative advertising design strategies affect consumer psychology, focusing on their potential impact on patients with borderline personality disorders.Subjects and MethodsThe experiment used three methods: questionnaire survey, psychological experiment, and in-depth interview to select 800 consumers, including 100 diagnosed borderline personality disorder patients, for a 6-month observation experiment. The Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD) self-test was used to evaluate the patient’s status. The experimental data was statistically analyzed using SPSS 26.0.ResultsResearch shows that innovative advertising design strategies can significantly enhance consumers’ interest and willingness to purchase products, with 80% of respondents indicating an impulse to purchase after being influenced by such advertisements. However, for 60% of patients with borderline personality disorder, such advertisements may trigger impulsive purchases and emotional instability, and patients report feeling more anxious and unstable.Conclusions Innovative advertising design strategies significantly impact consumer psychology, promoting their willingness to purchase. Still, they may also have adverse psychological effects on specific groups, especially patients with borderline personality disorders.

A Near-Optimal Truthful Online Auction for Efficient Crowdsourced Data Trading with Dynamic Data Owners and Dynamic Data Requests

Data is an extremely important asset in a modern scientific and commercial society. The life force behind powerful artificial intelligence (AI) or machine learning (ML) algorithms is data, especially lots of data, which makes data trading significantly essential to unlocking the power of AI or ML. Data owners who offer crowdsourced data and data consumers who request data blocks negotiate with each other to make an agreement on data assignment and trading prices via a data trading platform; consequently, both sides gain profit from the process of data trading. A great many existing studies have investigated various kinds of data sharing or trading as well as protecting data privacy or constructing a decentralized data trading platform due to mistrust issues. However, existing studies neglect an important characteristic, i.e., dynamics of both data owners and data requests in trading crowdsourced data collected by IoT devices. To this end, we first construct an auction-based model to formulate the data trading process and then propose a near-optimal online data trading algorithm that not only resolves the problem of matching dynamic data owners and randomly generated data requests but also determines the data trading price of each data block. The proposed algorithm achieves several good properties, such as a constant competitive ratio for near-optimal social efficiency, incentive compatibility, and individual rationality of participants, via rigorous theoretical analysis and extensive simulations. We further design a decentralized data trading platform in order to construct a practical data trading process incorporating the proposed data trading algorithm.

One hundred and eighty-two overlooked British comments on Bernard Mandeville’s Fable of the Bees, 1724–1800

Abstract The Fable of the Bees (1714) by Bernard Mandeville, a Dutch émigré physician and acerbic satirist, provoked some of the fiercest debates of the eighteenth century by arguing that luxury and vice were the driving forces of modern commercial societies. However, studies of these polemical storms remain largely reliant on Frederick Benjamin Kaye’s incomplete appendix of contemporary references to Mandeville in the Clarendon Edition of the Fable (1924). To address this historiographical lacuna, this research note presents substantial new evidence on the Fable’s reception by listing and describing 182 overlooked eighteenth-century British responses to Mandeville.

Formacion economica y social de un territorio costero chileno durante el siglo XIX: la propiedad en San Antonio y su hinterland

Through the theme and concept of economic and social formation, this article studies the evolution during the 19th century of an important coastal territory of central Chile, relatively abandoned by historiography: the port of San Antonio and its immediate territory. The current relevance of this port with respect to the economy of the entire country has quite recent origins, and it is only from the first years of the 20th century, in a slow process, that this territory begins to develop strongly, acquiring its preponderance current. However, this development is determined by a previous period, an export boom based on cereal production, which characterized the transformation of this territory and its ports during the second half of the nineteenth century, especially in the last third of that century. century.The formation and slow transformation of this territory will be reconstructed from the analysis in two senses. At first, from a general observation point, through the reconstruction of the evolution of the property structure, in the territory that surrounded the modest port complex, through the analysis of census and agricultural data. Secondly, we will go into the information that gives an account of the export boom, which energized all this territory around 1870, especially considering the development of the "New Port" in connection with the establishment of a modern commercial society, which brought together important merchants and landowners.

Measuring the Stomach of a Gentleman with the Heart-Mind of a Pipsqueak

This article seeks to historicize the affinity between narrative fiction and the cognitive function known as theory of mind. The author believes this affinity holds true mostly in modern commercial societies structured by stranger sociality, cosmopolitanism, and social mobility. Elsewhere, both temporally and culturally, theory of mind is certainly present and useful but not always prized in social life and does not animate expressive culture to the same extent. Such societies are structured by kinship sociality that presumes relatively stable identity and valorizes guileless “characters” who effortlessly embody socially shared values. The hierarchical structures of these societies also place a greater premium on theory of mind for subordinates than for the powerful, hence attaching a tinge of opprobrium to its exercise. In literature this translates into the moral ambivalence concerning “crafty” figures. The author presents her arguments with reference primarily to premodern Chinese literary classics. For comparative purposes she also brings into discussion the Sanskrit play Shakuntala and a King Solomon legend. In the coda, she asks if the importance of theory of mind is overstated when in social life we resort to a much wider range of folk psychological heuristics.

Condorcet and the Viability of Democracy in Modern Republics, 1789–1794

Democracy was in the margins both as an idea and as a political force in the eighteenth century. Even in the 1790s, ‘democracy’ was hardly the defining notion of the revolutionaries’ political visions. The small states as much as the large states perceived democracy as an outmoded legacy of antiquity leading to anarchy and despotism, inapplicable not least because it was undesirable in the modern world in which commerce was a rising force. This article tells the story of how this changed, how the understanding of ‘democracy’ was transformed during the French Revolution to represent a viable transition mechanism to a state of widespread and durable liberty. To avoid a teleological approach in the process of this analysis, this article examines the works of Condorcet on modern democracy in the context of the predicaments of the eighteenth century and the French revolutionary decade: how to avert at the same time despotism, military government and popular anarchy; and how to establish a free and stable state on the basis of modern commercial society? The history of the French Revolution is hereby placed in dialogue with that of eighteenth-century political and intellectual history. The effect is that a fresh picture of the entirety of Condorcet’s political vision emerges as his idea of democracy is studied from the viewpoint of his historical sensitivity, political economy, constitutional theory and international thoughts. In the end, Condorcet was the thinker who most significantly and prominently contributed to the post-1789 emergence of the concept of ‘democracy’ – which had thitherto been considered as the political form inevitably leading to destructive anarchy and despotic Caesarism – as a viable pathway to stability and prosperity.

Adam Smith and the conspiracy of the merchants

ABSTRACT Adam Smith famously declared that ‘People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the publick, or in some contrivance to raise prices’. Although Smith’s hostility to the merchants and the mercantile system is well known, what has not hitherto been appreciated is the full extent to which Smith believed such a ‘conspiracy’ to obtain, how he believed that it came about, and why it would likely prove highly resistant to effective political control. To appreciate this, it is necessary to situate The Wealth of Nations in relation to Smith’s wider assessment of the origins of modern European commercial societies, connecting his critique of mercantilism to his history of law and government, as well as to his late interventions regarding the problematic centrality of political judgement to managing affairs of state. Once this is done, we see that the famous attack on mercantilism in The Wealth of Nations must ultimately be read as Janus-faced, given Smith’s wider assessment of modern European conditions as revealed in the student lecture notes of the 1760s, and the final edition of the Theory of Moral Sentiments.

A Revolutionary Narrative of European History: Bonneville's History of Modern Europe (1789–1792)

A Revolutionary Narrative of European History: Bonneville's <i>History of Modern Europe</i> (1789–1792)

LIBERTY, POVERTY AND CHARITY IN THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF JOSIAH TUCKER AND JOSEPH BUTLER

Josiah Tucker, who was the Anglican dean of Gloucester from 1758 until his death in 1799, is best known today as a controversialist, a political economist and a lesser contemporary of Adam Smith. Little attention has been paid, however, to the important relationship between his religious writings and his wider economic thought. This article addresses this lack of attention in two ways: first by demonstrating the link between Tucker's conception of civil and religious liberty and his “science” of political economy, and second by drawing sustained attention to his economic adaptation and reformulation of the moral philosophy of Bishop Joseph Butler, Tucker's ecclesiastical mentor from 1739 to 1752. Emphasizing Butler and Tucker's views on the traditional Christian virtue of charity, and the moral duty of the rich towards the poor, the article suggests that both clergymen were proponents of a sociability-based, neo-Stoic conception of human nature, which was not only compatible with, but also dependent upon, the established Anglican Church and state and the predominantly Whig commercial order. In consequence, Tucker's political economy was premised on the unavoidability of social subordination and economic inequality as necessary hallmarks of modern commercial society. Accordingly, the article closes with a brief discussion of Tucker's “Butlerian” assessment and rejection of the “anti-social” doctrine of individual natural rights, associated with the popular radicalism of the American and French Revolutions in the latter half of the eighteenth century.

Consumer Redress Legislation: Simplifying or Subverting the Law of Contract

The growth of statutory consumer protection regimes in modern commercial societies has the potential profoundly to disrupt the private law landscape. Such schemes aim to increase access to justice for consumers by offering simplified and clear suites of rights and corresponding remedies. In so doing, however, they affect core areas of private law rights and remedies, and may come to undermine or replace existing contractual principles and policies. The result could be an incoherent system of private law with different principles and rules applying to commercial and consumer transactions. Coherence in the law requires that lawyers abandon their traditional ‘oil and water’ attitudes to legislative schemes and confront directly the interactions between these two bodies of law. This paper engages in that enquiry by considering the relationship between the relatively new consumer redress provisions in the Consumer Protection from Unfair Trading Regulations 2008 and general law principles.

The Trends and Influence of Literary Criticism for Western Feminism on Chinese Female Writing under Linguistics of English

The future prospects of women as a gender group and direction, not always within their grasp, the ideal and the reality is always inconsistent. After a long theoretical confirmation of a century and bold practice, the female body and spirit, including female writing are given a maximum free space. Freedom comes, but it is inexplicable anxiety and nothingness. For women, sex is a modern double-edged sword; it enables women to self-consciousness and its inherent lust germinating, the recovery process, but also to make this powerful explosive with a woman inside the body with an extreme emotional kinks, resulting in women is easy to lose self-control and causing hysteria on Speech aspects, but also makes them vulnerable to being manipulated modern commercial society patriarchal control and consumption. Meanwhile, the English linguistic theoretical basis, the Western feminist literary criticism of Chinese female writing had a certain impact.

Irony in Adam Smith’s Critical Global History

This essay argues that attention to Adam Smith’s ironic framing of his historical narratives in the Wealth of Nations shows his critique of modern commercial society to have been more radical than is generally recognized. These narratives traced the pathologies of European development and the complex chains of causation that linked Smith’s readers—with often destructive and even catastrophic results—to other human beings distant from themselves. While Smith gave reasons to doubt that sympathy for distant others could bring about reform, I argue that he used irony and what he called ridicule to make the book’s British audience aware of the violence of the global commercial system and their place in it as both abettors and lesser victims of its abuses.

Science, politics, and the economy: the unintended consequences of a diabolic paradox (editorial)

The year 2014 marked the 300th anniversary of the publication of Bernard Mandeville's Fable of the bees, or private vices, publick benefits. To celebrate this occasion, as well as its own centennial, the Erasmus University Rotterdam organized an international conference on the work of Mandeville, its historical and intellectual context, and its present relevance, on June 6, 2014. The conference was organized around three keynote lectures,1 which discussed a different field Mandeville worked on or influenced: science and medicine, moral and political philosophy, and political economy. Papers presented at the conference ranged thematically from the co-evolution of commerce, medicine and moral philosophy in the Dutch Republic, via Mandeville's attitudes to religion to the social and intellectual context of his analysis of the passions.This special issue on Mandeville presents a selection of the twenty-two papers presented at the conference. The papers have been selected both for their quality and for their thematic diversity. They thus indicate the range of conference themes as well as the multifaceted nature of current Mandeville scholarship. All papers went through the normal process of blind review before being accepted for publication by this journal.Mandeville was born to a family of city physicians in Rotterdam in 1670, in an age when science, politics and commerce were rapidly changing in their methods and substance. These revolutions forced men of science and letters to reflect anew on the nature of economy, state and society. Mandeville was undoubtedly one of the most radical of these thinkers, proposing controversial new ideas about human motivation, the relationship between individual behavior and the common good, and the role of the state in society. Politically, the Mandeville family were affiliated with the States Party, which favoured economic, political, and religious liberty, as opposed to the Orangists and the allied conservative Calvinists. In the aftermath of the so-called Costerman riots in October 1690, the family was banned from Rotterdam. Bernard Mandeville, who had been educated in medicine at Leiden, ended up in England where he started publishing pasquils and pamphlets, while practicing as a physician.The famous Fable of the bees elaborated one of these pasquils, the poem The grumbling hive, or knaves turn'd honest (1705). Published in 1714 (shortly after Lord Shaftesbury's Characteristics of man, manners, and morals [1711]), the Fable could not have been more at odds with Shaftesbury's claim that mankind's virtues automatically align with the common good. Mandeville promised to unveil man's true nature by observing the trifling films and little pipes of the human frame (Mandeville 1988, vol. I, 3). He claimed, provocatively, that it was human wickedness from which social benefits were to be expected. Luxury, though a private vice, contributes to a nation's prosperity; frugality leads to public ruin. Mandeville published several other increasingly philosophical works, the most important being the second volume of the Fable (1729), which substantially altered its earlier message, and An enquiry into the origin of honour, and the usefulness of Christianity in war (1732).After the Fable was condemned in 1724 by the Grand Jury of Middlesex for its diabolic attempts against religion, Mandeville's notoriety increased sharply. His shocking paradox that mankind's vices contributed to the common good haunted moral philosophers, social scientists and economists ever since. In a famous lecture on the Dutch philosopher, Friedrich Hayek wrote that Mandeville, in his efforts to understand modern commercial society, was asking the right questions (1967, 127). But as Hayek's political antagonist the Cambridge economist Joan Robinson noted, the main question has never been properly answered (1962, 19). The papers in this collection reveal that Mandeville's lasting importance cannot be reduced to what Hayek considered his most important insight: that the unintended consequences of self-interested human actions can be mutually beneficial. …

Tending to the (National) Household: Walter Scott’s The Antiquary and “that happy commerce” of the Enlightenment

This essay explores the question of commercialism in Walter Scott’s The Antiquary (1816), particularly as it reflects Enlightenment debates about the place of ethics in a modern commercial society. I examine the challenge—and, for Enlightenment thinkers, the urgency—of living morally in a commercialized, modern Britain, where communal ties were replaced by self-interest and monetary gain. In The Antiquary, Scott follows the thinking of Adam Smith and David Hume, who strove to define an aggregate of self-interested men as a principled community with well-developed social and ethical norms that would allow for what Smith called a “happy commerce” of socialization. Set during the French Revolution, the community anxiously anticipating a supposed French invasion cannot afford to give in to self-interested impulses that threaten to pull its members away from a unified polity. Rather than valorizing the feudal community and its social relationships, Scott historicizes the moment when sentiment as an affective communal glue is remediated from its feudal model into a force of sociability that would fit a society governed by a system of moral economy that is contingent upon the rules of contemporary, post-feudal commercial order.

Credit, Honor, and the Early Modern French Legend of the Jewish Invention of Bills of Exchange

Next article No AccessArticlesCredit, Honor, and the Early Modern French Legend of the Jewish Invention of Bills of ExchangeFrancesca TrivellatoFrancesca TrivellatoYale University Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by The Journal of Modern History Volume 84, Number 2June 2012The Jew in the Modern European Imaginary Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/664732 Views: 270Total views on this site Citations: 9Citations are reported from Crossref © 2012 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved.PDF download Crossref reports the following articles citing this article:Alexandr Osipian Debt, Trust and Reputation in Early Modern Armenian Merchant Networks, (Dec 2020): 153–180.https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-59769-6_7Robert Geraci Pragmatism and Prejudice: Revisiting the Origin of the Pale of Jewish Settlement and Its Historiography, The Journal of Modern History 91, no.44 (Nov 2019): 776–814.https://doi.org/10.1086/706046Lauren Jacobi The Architecture of Banking in Renaissance Italy, XV (Apr 2019).https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108673471Clément Lenoble, Valentina Toneatto Les « lexiques médiévaux de la pensée économique »: Une histoire des mots du marché comme processus de domination et d’exclusion, Annales. Histoire, Sciences Sociales 74, no.11 (Apr 2020): 25–41.https://doi.org/10.1017/ahss.2019.138Giacomo Todeschini Il valore fiduciario del denaro e la razionalizzazione della violenza europea (secoli XV-XVIII), CHEIRON , no.11 (Jan 2019): 72–86.https://doi.org/10.3280/CHE2019-001004Francesca Trivellato Between Usury and the “Spirit of Commerce”, French Historical Studies 39, no.44 (Oct 2016): 645–683.https://doi.org/10.1215/00161071-3602220Andrew Scott Bibby The Maligned Merchant and the New History of Commerce, (Jan 2016): 73–87.https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137477224_5Maurice Kriegel L’esprit tue aussi, Annales. Histoire, Sciences Sociales 69, no.0404 (Jan 2017): 875–899.https://doi.org/10.1353/ahs.2014.0205Claire Lemercier, Claire Zalc Pour une nouvelle approche de la relation de crédit en histoire contemporaine, Annales. Histoire, Sciences Sociales 67, no.44 (Jan 2017): 977–1009.https://doi.org/10.1017/S0395264900009483

Adam Smith’s Bourgeois Virtues in Competition

ABSTRACT:Whether or not capitalism is compatible with ethics is a long standing dispute. We take up an approach to virtue ethics inspired by Adam Smith and consider how market competition influences the virtues most associated with modern commercial society. Up to a point, competition nurtures and supports such virtues as prudence, temperance, civility, industriousness and honesty. But there are also various mechanisms by which competition can have deleterious effects on the institutions and incentives necessary for sustaining even these most commercially friendly of virtues. It is often supposed that if competitive markets are good, more competition must always be better. However, in the long run competition enhancing policies that neglect the nurturing and support of the bourgeois virtues may undermine the continued flourishing of modern commercial society.

Du Châtelet, Voltaire, and the Transformation of Mandeville's Fable

Summary In about 1735, Emilie Du Châtelet began to translate Mandeville's Fable of the Bees. Her work, which is largely ignored by scholars, did, as this article demonstrates, turn out to be one of transformation rather than of translation and came at a crucial moment in the emerging French luxury debate. So far commercial society and luxury had been defended in purely economic terms, for instance in Melon's Essai politique, or as an aspect of divine providence for fallen man, by Pierre Nicole amongst others. There was as yet no coherent defence on the level of secular ethics. As this article shows, Du Châtelet set out to remedy this. In co-operation with Voltaire, with whose recent praise of English society in the Lettres philosophiques she strongly identified, she rewrote the Fable to offer a defence of modern commercial society as both natural and moral. The article argues that she was able to do so by taking recourse to classic Epicureanism in the guise of Lucretius' De rerum natura, as an alternative to the Neo-Epicureanism, with its Augustinian overtones, as espoused by Mandeville. Voltaire in turn used her translation to lay the foundations for his defence of commercial society and progress in his Traité de métaphysique in which he uses the precise passages she had inserted into Mandeville's original. This article analyses the further aspects Voltaire adds to her arguments. Taken together, Du Châtelet's ‘translation’ and Voltaire's Traité offer a coherent defence of bourgeois society that would underlie Voltaire's later historiographical and philosophical works and which were crucial to his concept of ‘Enlightenment’ and ‘progress’.

Montesquieu and Modern Republicanism

In this article I explore Montesquieu's discussion of republics and the constitution of England in order to question the extent to which he should be accorded a central place in a tradition of modern republicanism. This involves challenging Paul Rahe's recent thesis that Montesquieu thought both that monarchy was not at all suited to modernity and that England was a republic all along. By stressing the importance of honour and ambition I argue that the liberty that Montesquieu thought exemplified in the English constitution was, in large part, secured by its monarchical principle. Moreover, by eschewing the relevance of political virtue for modern commercial societies, Montesquieu set his own proposals out in opposition to the prevalent French republican discourse of his time; thus it is highly problematic to view him as having proposed a republic for the moderns. The article also serves to disentangle Montesquieu's understanding of political liberty from his analysis of republics in order to refute the idea that he provides support for a distinctively republican conception of liberty as non-domination. This undermines the republican critique of liberalism set forth by Philip Pettit, which is further challenged by considering the affinities between Montesquieu's and Constant's conceptions of liberty. Many commentators have argued that Montesquieu repudiated classical republicanism, yet on the reading advanced in this article it is equally problematic to view him as a modern republican.

The Expansion of Peasant Rationality: An Analysis of the Creators of the “China Miracle”*—Challenging Existing Theories and Proposing New Analytical Approaches

在中国，农民占多数，长期以来农民被视为传统保守的力量。长期日常农业生产 方式下形成的农民理性，在农业社会内部的功效是有限的，主要是生存理性。而这种 理性以其惯性进入工商业社会后会形成扩张势态，产生一种农民理性与工业社会优势 结合的“叠加优势”，释放出传统农业社会和现代工商业社会都未有的巨大能量。要 理解“中国奇迹”，必须理解中国农民；要理解农民，必须理解农民理性。以农民理 性中的关键性词语来说明农民理性扩张是如何造就“中国奇迹”的，需要跳出传统与 现代二元对立的思维定式，高度重视社会变革中的民性民情民意。 关键词: 农民理性 中国奇迹 创造主体 The peasants, the majority of China's population, have always been seen as a traditional and conservative force. Formed over centuries of daily rural production activities, peasant rationality had limited efficacy within rural society and mainly functioned as a survival rationality. As rural society was transformed into industrial and commercial society, peasant rationality moved into the new society through inertia and expanded there. By combining with the advantages of the new society, it produced a kind of “superimposed advantage” that released enormous power unprecedented in both traditional rural society and modern industrial and commercial society. To comprehend the “China Miracle,” we must first understand the Chinese peasant. Similarly, to understand the peasants, we must first apprehend peasant rationality. To illustrate how the expansion of peasant rationality helped to create the “China Miracle,” it is imperative to discard the formula of tradition vs. modernity and to stress the character, attitudes and views of ordinary people in the process of social transformation.

Foolish knowledge: the commercial modernity of the periodical press

This article adds to critics’ growing interest in Romantic periodicals by focusing on weekly periodicals’ role as “the Historian of character and manners.” If the monthly reviews and magazines boasted of their panoptic survey of the whole of recent literary production, the single‐essay periodicals defined their importance by embracing what was in many ways the opposite perspective. Preoccupied with the resonant power of local truths, they gravitated towards a style which functioned as a microcosm of a larger order that could only ever be delineated through fragments rather than through any more encompassing structural analysis. If their fragmentary style left weekly periodical writers vulnerable to the charge of contributing to the age’s cultural decline by satisfying readers with a stream of brief and highly conversational essays, they countered this objection by insisting that their disconnected form fostered an active process of critical engagement by training readers to participate in what Samuel Johnson called the “miscellaneous and unconnected” nature of a modern commercial society. In doing so they helped to translate the discourse of polite sociability into a basis of cultural authority which reflected the domain of middle‐class life at the expense of the aristocratic connotations that critics such as the Earl of Shaftesbury had associated with it.