The Political Economy of Sentiment:

Paper Credit and the Scottish Enlightenment in Early Republic Boston, 1780–1820

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Jose R Torre

Financial History

This monograph repositions the financial revolution at the heart of the Enlightenment project. Torre argues that the Scottish philosophers’ transference of value from commodities to signs established an economy based on human imagination. This radical recalculation of value opened the door to a new social order based on emotions and desires. It undermined the empiricist world view and precipitated a fundamental shift in human psychology.

Torre focuses on Boston during the early years of the American Republic; a time of violent social flux. The widespread acceptance of paper money is a unique opportunity to document the role of nominal economic value in the construction of national personality.

Sample pages

• The Political Economy of Sentiment: Introduction
• The Political Economy of Sentiment: Index

Readership

Financial History, US History, Atlantic History, Enlightenment and Eighteenth Century Studies.

Contents

Introduction: Prometheus Unbound

Chapter 1: Things without him’: Locke and the Logic of Metallism

• The Recoinage Crisis
• The Logic of Metallism
• Nicholas Barbon and the Wants of the Mind
• An Essay Concerning Human Understanding

Chapter 2: Shaftesbury and Scottish Moral Sense Commercial Humanism: Inclinations Implanted in the Subject

• Shaftesbury
• Scottish Moral Sense Humanism
• Francis Hutcheson
• David Hume
• Adam Smith
• Scottish Banking

Chapter 3: American Money and Political Economy, 1780–1828

• Revolutionary Experience
• Money as a Thing
• Money as a Sign
• Adam Smith and Boston’s Political Economy

Chaper 4: Banking and Money in Boston

• Banking Practices
• Boston’s Banking History
• Property-Holding in Boston 1795–1821

Chapter 5: Likeness to God

• Boston’s Religious Institutional Structure
• Boston’s Liberal Religion
• Social and Religious Conflict
• Unitarian Christianity
• Likeness to God
• The Scottish Moral Sense Roots of Unitarian Religion

Chapter 6: The Luxury of Pity

• Scottish Notions of Pain, Pleasure and Fiction
• The Pleasures of Melancholy
• The Impression of Examples
• An Imaginary Friend

Chapter 7: The Political Economy of Beauty and the Imagination

• Mimesis
• Harmony
• Imagination
• Expression
• Washington Allston
• The Sublime and the Picturesque
• Goods are Good

Conclusion: Sense Subordinated to the Mind

Reviews

'It is good for the economist to contemplate occasionally the connections between the economic and social spheres.Torre helps us do that within an historical context.'
– Howard Bodenhorn, Economic History Review

'A bold, stimulating and valuable book'
– John Dixon, Eighteenth-Century Scotland

Related titles

• The Evolution of Sympathy in the Long Eighteenth Century
• Theory and Practice in the Eighteenth Century: Writing between Philosophy and Literature

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