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Political Thought and the Historical Epistemology of Political Economy

Andrew Sartori

Abstract

Istvan Hont argued that the emergence of political economy defined the threshold of modern political thought. The intellectual challenge that economic thought posed for political thought, however, has not been adequately conceptualized. That challenge can only be properly recognized when we grasp the historicity of political economy as a form of knowledge specifically calibrated to make sense of the sociality characteristic of capitalist society.

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1One of the defining thresholds of modern political thought, Istvan Hont argued, was the inability to frame political argument without engaging questions of economy (Hont 2005). But Hont tended to assume that economic processes were just ‘there’ to be discovered, and the complex dynamic set in motion in modern political thought has been fundamentally continual and iterative. In contrast, many of his collaborators in the history of political thought, loosely associated with Cambridge scholarship, were engaged in a revision of the reading of Adam Smith, insisting that his economic thought emerged not as the foundation of a new value-neutral proto-science of economics, but rather out of intellectual developments in, and fundamentally as a modality of, normative political thought itself (Forbes 1978; Haakonssen 1981; Hont and Ignatieff 1981; Griswold 1988; Hundert 1994; Winch 1996; Rothschild 2002; Phillipson 2012; Hont 2015). In the process, however, they tended to contain the intellectual challenge that economic thought posed for political thinking.

2I propose in this article to suggest that we return to Hont’s core provocation, but with a sharper eye to the historicity of the intellectual challenges that political economy has posed to modern political thought. In the process, I will suggest that the history of modern political thought cannot be understood without locating its key impulses within a history of capitalism, and that this requires a serious engagement with problems of historical epistemology.

3The initial epistemic impulses associated with what would come to be known as ‘political economy’ emerged from the early-modern conjuncture, when the exigencies of state power became increasingly entangled in the constraints and possibilities implied by new, extended, and intensified networks of commercial interdependence. As a result, the history of political economy by definition unfolded at the interface of heterogeneous but mutually entangled historical processes implied by the term itself: processes of state formation, and processes of commercialization.

4To the degree that historical actors used economic arguments as a means to pursue specific political and ethical projects (which was almost always the way in which political economic arguments were in fact framed in the early modern period), political economy was by definition embedded in the constellation of institutions, norms, aspirations, and interests that fissure any form of collective life. It was, in this sense, pervasively political, whether seen as a mode of engaging in political discourse, as a mode of articulating class projects, or as a mode of espousing and debating ongoing processes of state formation. Historians studying the history of political-economic discourse have tended to look to this political dimension of its history to lay the foundations for a critique of claims about the self-equilibrating autonomy of economic processes, and of teleological assumptions about economic development and economic thought. This political emphasis has been especially prominent in studies of colonial and postcolonial contexts, where the history of political economy has been closely identified with strategies of exploitation, technologies of governance, and aspirations to self-determination.

5Yet there is no plausible history of political economy to be written that does not take seriously the history of economic practices beyond the limits of political institutions. This is so, first, because what we would consider to be economic practices are the explicit referent of political-economic discourses, even when historical actors used the term ‘economy’ in significantly different ways. Second, the ability to locate a political economic argument as a political intervention in a field of contesting interests depends on an account of the economic processes that constitute such interests. And third, only an account of economic processes can explain why political claims should have been framed in economic terms in the first place. Thus, for example, reading John Locke’s political writings as if they did not entail a set of claims about money as a set of practices in the historical world he inhabited, as if his intervention in monetary thought was not embedded in a range of possibilities structured by the working of money in that historical world, and how his engagement with monetary practices shaped the form of his wider political arguments, is to ignore something fundamentally about his political thought (Sartori 2021a). It is arguably in the history of economic practices that we find the most compelling practical context within which to embed an analysis of political economy as a problem of historical epistemology: it is here, after all, that we might find a point of departure for making sense of the specifically economic dimensions of political-economic discourse.

6The implied task of using the history of economic practices to contextualize the history of political economy as a form of knowledge and in its relation to the history of political thought, however, is not as uncomplicated as it might appear at first glance.

  • 1 I use ‘mercantilism’ here loosely, not to refer to theories of bullionism or balance of trade, but (...)

7Discourses of commercial statecraft could be expected to emerge in some form wherever the intensification of commercial relations intersected with the ambitions of state actors and state builders. Evidence of this is to be found across the expanse of the early-modern world of commercial entanglements (Subrahmanyam 1995; Subrahmanyam 2005; Sen 2016; Dunstan 1996; Helleiner 2021). Nonetheless, Europe was the site of an unusually elaborated and prolonged engagement with this broad impulse, in the form of competing models of neo-Machiavellian mercantilism.1 It was not new for monetary and commercial policies to be deemed to fall within the broader parameters of politico-legal authority. But in a context defined by intensified interstate competition, as well as the first phases of European expansion, the early modern period saw deepening attention to the ways in which political life, whether considered from a normative or a pragmatic standpoint, entailed an urgent confrontation with the commercial constraints and opportunities shaping institutional forms and military capacities (Hont 2005; Cheney 2010; Parthasarathi 2014; Beckert 2014; Shovlin 2021). The analysis of commercial interdependencies pervaded the vast textual expanses of pamphlets, books, articles, reports, unpublished manuscripts, and correspondence that together constitute the archive of early-modern European debates about the character and significance of specific commodities, natural resources, production, population, poverty, food security, merchant expertise, corporate forms, navigation and transportation, money, credit, taxation and state revenues, price controls, tariffs and trade policies, interstate relations, and the complex interrelationships that mutually entwined trade, governmental institutions, imperial projects, and political theories. (On the distribution of themes, topics, and terminologies characteristic of the emergent discourse of political economy, see Perrot 1992.)

8The body of empirical knowledge and of analytical concepts developed around these discourses of commercial statecraft became, however, the foundations of a substantially new epistemic project: namely, the analysis of ‘society’ as a self-organizing mode of collective life constituted out of a constellation of economic forms, practices and institutions (Berry 2013; Hont 2015; Clark 2007; Sheehan and Wahrman 2015). Political economy pushed the elements of commercial statecraft (themselves substantively indifferent to ‘the social’ as an object of knowledge) into what Giambattista Vico had already begun to grasp as a «new science», and that William Thompson would later title «social science» (Thompson 1824: vii-x; Bergin and Fisch 1968; Robertson 2005). It is this specific epistemic project that I primarily have in mind when I invoke political economy in this article; that is, as a form of knowledge of commercial society, beyond the specific nexus of possibilities and constraints conjoining trade and polity. Obviously, a discourse on human sociability was far from new to this period; but a discourse on the peculiarly unsocial form of sociality that the concept of commercial society was invented to name was a more strikingly novel departure, and it instituted, Jean-Baptiste Say would insist, a decisive split between political economy and political theory (Say 1803; Collini, Winch, and Burrow 1983). In the later nineteenth century, political economy’s epistemic decomposition would in turn form the point of departure for the later disciplinary bifurcation of the fields of sociological and economic inquiry; yet it would enjoy much more enduring and consequential vitality beyond this window outside the narrower limits of disciplines, academies, and technocrats (Clark 1982; Jorland 2000; Karak 2021; Sartori 2014).

9The concept of commercial society emerged in the context of the directly normative preoccupations of political and ethical thought, as Cambridge scholars and others have shown (Hont 2005: 37-51, 159-84, and 389-443; Larrère 1992; Force 2009; Perrot 1992: 333-54). A famous passage in Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments already presaged the concept of commercial society he would later announce more famously, and analyze more systematically, in the Wealth of Nations:

Society may subsist among different men, as among different merchants, from a sense of its utility, without any mutual love or affection; and though no man in it should owe any obligation, or be bound in gratitude to any other, it may still be upheld by a mercenary exchange of good offices according to an agreed valuation (Smith 2004: 100).

10Pace the arguments of Helvétius and d’Holbach, a commercial society could not depend for the alchemical adequation of private interests and common weal only on the pedagogical inculcation of an explicit and pervasive consciousness that everyone’s best interest required a commitment to sociability as a vehicle of the common interest. The extended interdependencies of commercial society tended to attenuate the power of solidaristic sentiments, and even the consciousness of objective interdependence as a set of relationships sustaining the possibility of discrete commercial exchanges (Smith 2004: 28). Instead, commercial society subsisted through blind mechanisms that translated self-interest into a foundation for a viable (albeit vulnerable and imperfect) form of collective life, so that the sense of society’s utility was experienced primarily as the satisfaction of private interests through “mercenary exchange”. It was precisely those mechanisms that political economy was equipped to analyze, thanks to its inheritance of the elaborated analyses of trade and finance bequeathed by the discourses of commercial statecraft and the ars mercatoria.

11Any reader of the Wealth of Nations should be able to recognize in Smith’s movement through the layered analyses of real, nominal, natural, and market prices an acknowledgement of the ineradicable opacity implicit in the very notion of a commercial society. This opacity was fundamental to the entire epistemic project that the social scientific trajectory of political economy inaugurated, and it would later also be a central theme of Marx’s analysis of capital through the critique of political economy. It is of relatively marginal significance to this problem whether Smith ‘intended’ his work as an exercise in what we could retrospectively recognize as social science (with all due caveats about the anachronistic implications of that term); for the logico-structural implications of his argument far outstripped the limits of those authorial intentions. No authorial intention could contain the heterogeneous entailments of the forms of argument that he was elaborating in his political thought. Unlike the normative discourses out of which the consciousness of commercial sociability first emerged, the empirical foundations of political economy were not the dispositions, affections, or virtues of sociability, but rather prices, stocks, interest rates, profits, rents, wages, and productivity. Yet none of these latter were adequate, by themselves, to sustain an extension of political economy from the narrower technical problems centered on the specialized concerns of merchants or on the state/merchant interface into the first (and for several decades arguably the only) science of the social (Sartori 2016).

12This science of society presumed the existence of an object that was constitutively commercial in character; that is to say, it presumed the existence of a commercial society. That is something more than a society host to a great deal of commerce. «The issue was not whether the members of such a society traded a great deal with one another», stressed Istvan Hont, «but whether they related within such societies as traders» (Hont 2015: 3). There was thus a connection between the development of political economy’s social scientific orientation and the emergence of a qualitatively distinct form of life.

  • 2 The original passage from Buck-Morss invokes “the economy” as the originary object of political eco (...)

13This connection was a central element of Karl Marx’s analysis of the modern form of “civil society” (bürgerliche Gesellschaft), a term that since Hegel had been understood to subsume Smith’s conception of commercial society. The peculiar mode of interdependence that Smith called commercial society arose, Marx argued, when the commodity became the general form of the product; which presumed that work had become primarily a means to acquire the products of others; which presumed that labor had been subsumed to the processes of the reproduction and accumulation of capital; which presumed that the commodity had become the general form of the product. To the extent that ‘commercial society’ came to be identified with a form of life radically determined by the reproduction and accumulation of capital – the kind of commercial society Marx understood Smith to be talking about – it could further be specified as ‘capitalist.’ An «extraordinary revision of the social body», Susan Buck-Morss has wryly observed, the social object of political economy «was already capitalist, so the description of one entailed the description of the other» (Buck-Morss 1995: 439, 456-57).2

14When political economy set out to analyze the mechanisms and processes characterizing such a society, it of course made claims about empirical realities. Nonetheless, as an opaque systemic object, commercial society could not be a simple empiricity. Such a society could only emerge as an object of political economic analysis through the kind of rigorous conceptual mediation that we might, for want of a better term, call theory. Any history of political economy that seeks to broach as a historical problem «the Kantian question about the preconditions that make thinking this or that idea possible» must begin with this recognition (Daston 1991: 282).

15The reflexive self-historicization characteristic of the most sophisticated forms of eighteenth-century social and political thought, and certainly of Marx’s critique of political economy, suggests that the historical development of political economy into a science of the social could entail its own internal account of social context (Hont 2005; Hont 2015; Bee and Paganelli 2019). That is, political economy could narrate its own development into a social science as a response to the emergence of a form of society in which, in Smith’s famous words, everyone «lives by exchanging» (Smith 1976: 26). But while (as Hont noted) «the quantitative increase of commercial or commercial-type transactions was for Smith an important index of social change», it was not in itself sufficient to establish the kind of qualitative shift in «the constitutive moral quality» that marked «commercial society» in his more rigorous sense (Hont 2015: 3). It was the development of political economy into a science of the social that ultimately made capitalist society into an epistemic object.

16If political economy is what makes capitalism thinkable as an epistemic object, then when we historicize political economy by relating it to the history of specific economic or political institutions, we will make better sense of specific arguments about specific economic or political phenomena, but we will fail to account for the social itself as the underlying premise of this social scientific project. In other words, to appeal to capitalism as context is to flirt with the logical perils of a petitio principii: we cannot determine capitalism as the context through which the history of political economy is to be read without appealing to political economy in order to determine the nature and potential significance of that context. The explanandum therefore represents an irreducible element in the constitution of the explanans.

17A peculiar intimacy thus connects political economy’s epistemic project to a social world that is simultaneously the context of its emergence and the object of its inquiry – albeit an intimacy that presents a historical puzzle insofar as both terms in the relation represent unfolding and uncertain phenomena, especially in the earliest phases of their development. We need not rush to read this condition through the lens of a nominalist constructivism though. The theoretical dimension of political economy’s social scientific development might instead be read as a conceptually mediated process of construal that recognized something profound about systemic transformations in the practical and normative character of social relations based on commodity-mediated forms of social interdependence that neither more directly empirical nor more abstractly philosophical discourses could have grasped.

18Marx broached this very problem in the 1850s in his well-known discussion of «the Method of Political Economy» in the Grundrisse. «It seems to be correct to begin with the real and the concrete», Marx there observed. In fact, though, taking a mere aggregation of facts as a point of departure – «the population» – could only present «a chaotic conception of the whole.» Only conceptual mediation, he insisted, could lead us to a conception of that whole as a «rich totality» in which the heterogenous positivities that form the grist of political economic analysis might become moments of a determinate epistemic object, the social (Marx 1973: 100). This recognition, he insisted, did not imply that the «process of thinking» was determinative of the object, but rather that it led to «the reproduction of the concrete by way of thought» (Marx 1973: 101). In other words, the process of construing society as an object of political economy is a process that makes it possible to understand the nature of society as something immediately visible neither in the empirical forms of economic practices, nor in the immediacy of interpersonal sociability. Political economy only grasps its object as something that its conceptual apparatus can appropriately construe when it proceeds through a process of conceptual determination – the work of theory. «Population», a chaotic conception whose epistemic status as an object is intuitively presumed without being understood, becomes instead bürgerliche Gesellschaft, an intelligible object the simplicity of whose conceptual determinations turns out, on careful reflection, to be the clearest trace of their historicity (Marx 1973: 103-05).

19An account of how political economy construed the social as an object thus became at the same time an account of the kind of object that the social actually was: namely, one that did not appear immediately in the empirical data that rendered it knowable, but rather appeared only through abstractions that captured something profound about the peculiar mechanisms of impersonal interdependence that sustained it. It was insofar as political economy provided a foundation for this reflexive account of its epistemic object that it could provide the point of departure for the kind of immanent reading given to it in Capital, where the history of political economy was treated as the necessary point of departure for any adequate understanding of capitalist society (Postone 1993). If, as Adorno insisted, «it is a societal law that decisive structures of the social process cannot become apparent without the intervention of theory», then this epistemic condition is itself what Marx’s critique of political economy sought to grasp as a historically determinate feature of capitalist society (Adorno 1976: 11-12; cf. Sartori 2020). For Marx then, recognizing the conceptually mediated nature of the epistemic object, capitalist society, was itself a point of departure into political economy’s realist engagements. The processual and systemic nature of that object entailed conceptual mediation as a condition of its knowability. But it was only by recognizing the conceptually mediated nature of the object, he effectively suggested, that it became possible to properly recognize the processual and systemic object, capitalist society, to which political economy’s social scientific impulse was oriented.

20By centering a historical epistemology of political economy on the concept of the social, I do not mean to suggest that political economy was any less engaged with political concerns. It was central to Marx’s analysis, for example, that capitalist society was so fundamentally incoherent in its normative and practical entailments that it posited political contestation as one of its fundamental features: thus, for example, when presented with the «antinomy, of right against right, both equally bearing the seal of the law of exchange», Marx observed in his discussion of the working day, only «force» can decide (Marx 1977: 344). But it was ultimately in its engagement with the social, rather than with the political, where the novelty of political economy’s epistemic departure is to be found. This remains true even when political economy may often have been operating more immediately as a modality of political theory.

21Orienting a historical epistemology of political economy around the intimacy of its relationship with its object – a particular historical form of opaque and impersonal sociality – does not correlatively imply that we should ignore the extraordinary scholarship that has been dedicated to the intellectual history of political economy in early-modern Europe. But the power of political economy to serve as a plausible mode of claims-making far beyond the parochialities of that regional history frames a different kind of historical problem, one that exceeds a narrow emphasis on the coercive efficacy of colonial mechanisms of discursive transmission and imposition. To dismiss political economy as a technology of colonial governance (even though that is indeed how political economy found its first clear articulations in most colonial contexts), or to write a history of colonial societies without taking seriously the political economic processes affecting those societies and the embrace of political economy as a mode of claims-making by historical actors within those societies, is to write histories impoverished in their capacity to make sense of the constraints, aspirations, and dynamics driving social change and social conflict. But to understand those constraints, aspirations, and dynamics adequately also demands understanding the epistemic status of political economy in non-dogmatic ways, as something other than a simple reflex of natural endowments, natural scarcity, and natural dispositions. The relativizing gesture of historical epistemology becomes, in this approach, a basis for grasping the enduring interpretive power of political economy without submitting to the inevitability of its authority. But this is more a point of departure for inquiry than a resolution. For most historians of colonial contexts, for example, the question is precisely to make sense of how the role of political economy in constituting its epistemic object might relate to the domain of social reference that political economy identifies as its object in a particular place and time (Sartori 2024; Sartori 2021b). Where capitalism is neither fully constituted, nor plausibly irrelevant, the epistemological status of political economy exists in a condition of uncertainty that historical actors on both sides of the colonial divide could not simply wish away – a condition that demands more serious analysis than a conventionally constructivist account can provide.

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Note

1 I use ‘mercantilism’ here loosely, not to refer to theories of bullionism or balance of trade, but to refer to economic thought oriented primarily to the advantages to be gained from the mutually reinforcing nature of the enhancement of wealth through trade and the enhancement of the power of political institutions and states. See Hont 2005: ch. 2; Larrère 1992: ch. 3; Reinert 2011; Reinert and Roge 2013; Stern and Wennerlind 2013; Magnusson 2015; Pincus 2012.

2 The original passage from Buck-Morss invokes “the economy” as the originary object of political economy as a form of knowledge. As Mitchell (2002: 4) has noted, “the economy” was the product of a later period. I instead read Buck-Morss’s terminological anachronism here to be referring more loosely to the object of political economy in its social-scientific mode (which I would prefer to identify as the social). For a more detailed history of the word “economy,” see Tribe 2015.

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Andrew Sartori, «Political Thought and the Historical Epistemology of Political Economy»Politics [Online], 22 | 2024, online dal 21 décembre 2024, consultato il 23 juin 2025. URL: http://journals.openedition.org/politics/510; DOI: https://doi.org/10.4000/142wo

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Autore

Andrew Sartori

Professor of History at New York University. He is the author of Bengal in Global Concept History: Culturalism in the Age of Capital (University of Chicago Press, 2008), and Liberalism in Empire: An Alternative History (University of California Press, 2014), as well as the co-editor of a number of volumes, including (with Samuel Moyn) Global Intellectual History (Columbia University Press, 2013). He is also the co-editor of the journal Critical Historical Studies.

Email: asartori[at]nyu.edu

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