"An Inward Spring of Motion and Action": The Teleology of Political Economy and Moral Philosophy in the Age of the Anglo-American Enlightenment

2010 ◽  
Vol 8 (3) ◽  
pp. 646-671
Author(s):  
Jose R. Torre
Author(s):  
Georg Menz

The explosive rise in not just public, but also private debt has recently attracted more scholarly attention. This is a novel development and might expose politico-economic models of governance to instability from an angle previously underappreciated. The liberalization of credit access in the Anglo-American countries, and, somewhat later, beyond those, might be seen as liberating for some, but they also create the potential for entrapment in debt. The term ‘privatized Keynesianism’ has been proposed to suggest a systematic agenda behind the facilitated access to lending. In this chapter, the broader access to investment vehicles is also being scrutinized, although upon closer inspection any claims of mass ownership of shares turn out not to be tenable.


1997 ◽  
Vol 30 (3) ◽  
pp. 307-320 ◽  
Author(s):  
JENNIFER TANNOCH-BLAND

Dugald Stewart (1753–1828) lectured in astronomy and political economy, held the chair of mathematics at Edinburgh University from 1775 to 1785, then the chair of moral philosophy from 1785 to 1810, and wrote extensively on metaphysics, political economy, ethics, philology, aesthetics, psychology and the history of philosophy and the experimental sciences. He is commonly regarded as the last voice of the Scottish Enlightenment, the articulate disciple of Thomas Reid, father of Scottish common sense philosophy. Recently some historians have begun to rediscover elements of the contribution Stewart made to early nineteenth-century British intellectual culture, and his Collected Works have been republished with a new introduction by Knud Haakonssen.


2017 ◽  
Vol 34 (1) ◽  
pp. 277-295 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ryan Patrick Hanley

Abstract:Adam Smith has long been celebrated as a polymath, and his wide interests in and contributions to each of the discrete component fields of PPE have long been appreciated. Yet Smith deserves the attention of practitioners of PPE today not simply for his substantive insights, but for the ways in which his inquiries into these different fields were connected. Smith’s inquiry was distinguished by a synthetic approach to knowledge generation, and specifically to generating knowledge with applications exportable to other fields. Further, Smith’s investigations of various areas of study led him to recognize patterns in and across these fields, and his sensitivity to such patterns helped guide his inquiry and render it a connected enterprise. This paper examines several of Smith’s discrete inquiries in the history of astronomy, language, moral philosophy, and political economy, to show how he employed the techniques of pattern detection that he practiced in each of these inquiries to the task of generating new insights into new fields of inquiry. In so doing, Smith not only distinguished himself as an early practitioner of what we today identify with PPE, but he also provides a useful point of reference for those doing PPE today.


Dialogue ◽  
1970 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-19
Author(s):  
C. D. MacNiven

“What has ethical theory to do with the moral life?”. This is a question which continually confronts moral philosophers, especially those who identify themselves with the analytic tradition of contemporary Anglo-American philosophy. Continental European moral philosophers and those Anglo-Americans who identify themselves with them are seldom confronted with this question. Existentialism, for example, has an obvious connection with the moral life which contemporary analytic philosophy seems to lack. For many people outside professional philosophic circles analytic moral philosophy appears completely irrelevant to the moral life. Since the analysts conceive ethics, to quote R. M. Hare, as “the logical study of the language of morals”, they never seem to get past linguistic analysis to the concrete moral problems which are its main incentive in the first place.


1975 ◽  
Vol 4 (4) ◽  
pp. 689-695
Author(s):  
Justin Leiber

The notion of moral philosophy that has been dominant in Anglo-American philosophizing since G.E. Moore is peculiar. Reviewing traditional works such as Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics, Hume's Treatise, Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, and Mill's Utilitarianism, one is tempted to call this new notion of moral philosophy a different subject; and if one does this, it is less peculiar. However, let us accept that this new sort of moral philosophy does belong to the previous tradition; granted this, I shall explain why I think it peculiar through considering the status of the judgement that Hitler was a bad man.Consider the sentential function ‘x is (was) a bad man’. ‘Hitler’ seems an obviously suitable substitution for ‘x, at least in the most important sense. That is, one wants to say that if it is not proper or true to say that ‘Hitler was a bad man’ or ‘Hitler was bad’, it fs never proper or true to issue a sentence of this form, restricting x to human beings. Hitler seems indeed, in this most important sense, to be a paradigm case. One wants to say: if Hitler was not a bad man, who could be?


2021 ◽  
pp. 164-193
Author(s):  
Julian Germann

This chapter explores how the German political economy was transformed by the global rise of neoliberalism and how this change feeds into Germany’s approach to the eurocrisis. Rather than being pushed down an Anglo-American road, German policymakers still seek to preserve what is left of the domestic compromise between capital and labor. The chapter argues that China’s massive demand for German exports informs the long-term vision of a neoliberal Europe structurally adjusted to support the global position of German manufacturers. At the same time, the perceived threat of US interest rates rising out of step with economic conditions in Europe and emerging markets hardened the German stance on austerity during the fever-pitched policy battles at the height of the eurocrisis. Together, these international pressures and opportunities have produced the predicament of German primacy as a transformative and yet destabilizing force within the EU.


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