Thread by @mccormick_ted

Thread on the history of self-interest, drawing on my chapter for a volume on the subject coming out shortly
routledge.com/Historicizing-…

One of the most influential arguments about the history of self-interest as an idea is in Albert Hirschman's book, The Passions and the Interests (1977), helpfully subtitled "Political Arguments for Capitalism before its Triumph".
press.princeton.edu/books/paperbac…

Simply put, Hirschman located the weakness of contemporary economic analysis in a failure to recognize the ideological roots of economic thought. Rather than timeless fact of human nature, however, economic self-interest had been theorized in particular historical circumstances.

Hirschman's account focused on the development of ideas within moral and political philosophy. He argued that during the 16th-18th centuries passions, once denigrated as sources of moral and social disorder, came to be seen as important, even ineradicable drivers of human action.

They came too to be differentiated. Some passions were more predictable and less socially harmful than others. If the passions themselves could not be eliminated or suppressed, different passions might counterbalance one another, the less harmful ones outweighing the more.

Greed in particular came to be seen as predictable and, in the 18th century, even socially beneficial -- if not virtuous (Mandeville's Fable of the Bees equated "private vices" with "public benefits"). Now described as interest, it became a natural and rational spring of action.

Hirschman's argument was neat and powerful. It connected intellectual changes to the economic and political contexts of commercialization and secularization. And it explained the origins of the rational, calculating, self-interested individual described by Adam Smith.

In setting the philosophical stage for liberal economic thought, however, Hirschman said little to nothing about the *economic* writing of the 17th century. There are good reasons for this: little of this writing was systematic; much of it consists of ad hoc, ephemeral pamphlets.

Often these were tied to arguments about particular crises or policies or to their authors' own political, commercial or colonial projects. They were not often engaged in deep philosophizing. They proposed new crops, new engines, new trades, new colonies, and agued for them.

Yet these projects were marked by debates about "interest" in a variety of senses: the interest of the state in backing them, of the commonwealth in their success, and, not least, of the projector himself. Indeed the projector as a figure was arguably defined by self-interest.

So by examining the meanings of "interest" in a series of commercial, technological, and colonial projects from the mid-seventeenth century (all associated with a group of inventors, projectors and reformers known as the Hartlib Circle), I wanted to do two things:

First, see how closely Hirschman's account of changing moral and political thought matches how technological and commercial projectors justified themselves; and second, argue for the value of "mid-level", practical writing and projects as sources for the history of key concepts.

What I found was that for projectors in the 1640s and 1650s, "interest" had a wide range of meanings: it could be individual, collective, or general; it could be held in money, land, goods, ideas (IP), or persons (access to them, command over their time or attention).

Notably, there was a sense among several of these figures that self-interest was needed to motivate certain kinds of activity -- the adoption of new tech or "improvements" to boost profit or productivity -- and in that sense integral to *their* conception of the common good.

At the same time, however, there was a recognition that self-interest of this kind was not necessarily a given or even natural. It might well have to be cultivated or constructed from whole cloth. In some cases this meant trying to argue people into seeing their "real" interests.

Often, in England and elsewhere, it meant fighting against "custom" -- which self-conscious "improvers" constructed as the enemy of change or of what we would call innovation, but to which their putative beneficiaries (farmers, fishermen, craftsmen) remained stubbornly attached.

With respect to agriculture, it often meant creating a "single" interest that would benefit from new techniques -- typically, through enclosure. In other words, extensive changes in the legal, physical, and social landscape had to be made before "self-interest" could make sense.

Rather than a matter of merely liberating some natural individual self-interest from the clutches of regulation, many of these projects required state support in the form of patents, monopolies, or new offices -- to say nothing of ongoing imperial expansion -- to work.

In short, while elements of each stage of Hirschman's argument find echoes (and sometimes strikingly precocious anticipations) in the arguments and justifications of technological and economic projectors, the picture is a good deal messier on the ground.

Indeed it seems possible if not likely that when most people thought of self-interest in the early eighteenth century -- the "projecting age", according to Defoe -- it was the mixed legacy of projectors as much as the moral critique of the passions that they had in mind.