The Political Economy of Sentiment:
Paper Credit and the Scottish Enlightenment in Early Republic Boston, 1780–1820
Jose R Torre
Financial History
978 1 85196 885 5: 216x138mm: £60.00/$99.00
978 1 85196 533 5
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
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
Chapter 2: Shaftesbury and Scottish Moral Sense Commercial Humanism: Inclinations Implanted in the Subject
Chapter 3: American Money and Political Economy, 1780–1828
Chaper 4: Banking and Money in Boston
Chapter 5: Likeness to God Likeness to God
Chapter 6: The Luxury of Pity
Chapter 7: The Political Economy of Beauty and the Imagination
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
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