The English Enlightenment and “The Economy”: How Some Men with a Vision Created the Modern World and Its Problems
Production, Consumption, Business and the Economy: Structural Ideals and Moral Realities
ISBN: 978-1-78441-056-8, eISBN: 978-1-78441-055-1
Publication date: 16 September 2014
Abstract
Purpose
This conceptual paper examines the claim of ahistorical, transcultural universality in aspects of Enlightenment thinking as it has been embedded in the assumptions of classical economic theory. Specifically, with respect we query to presupposing rationality and maximization, that all nations are on an evolutionary course to betterment conceptualized as development and progress.
Design/methodology/approach
Using historical data, examined from a cross-cultural perspective, the arguments put forth in England in the late seventeenth century to justify the enclosures and private property, that led to revolution, are shown to have introduced new institutions, including private property, entrepreneurship and self-regulating markets.
Findings
Maximizing behavior is shown to be the result of successive generations being socialized under the new institutional arrangements that, conflated with modernity, were then taken to the Americas and South Asia as part of British colonial/imperial expansion.
Theoretical implications
When economic theory is examined in its cultural and historical context it is just one of a large number of possible cultural patterns.
Practical implications
If contemporary economic and social institutions, and the behaviors they produce, are but one of a number of alternative possibilities, many of the problems facing so many can be rethought and perhaps ameliorated with new institutional arrangements.
Keywords
Citation
Greenfield, S.M. (2014), "The English Enlightenment and “The Economy”: How Some Men with a Vision Created the Modern World and Its Problems", Production, Consumption, Business and the Economy: Structural Ideals and Moral Realities (Research in Economic Anthropology, Vol. 34), Emerald Group Publishing Limited, Leeds, pp. 1-28. https://doi.org/10.1108/S0190-128120140000034001
Publisher
:Emerald Group Publishing Limited
Copyright © 2014 Emerald Group Publishing Limited