The internal organisation of production before the development of the factory system is still shrouded in historical mystery. How goods were made before machines, how work was organised before the factory system, how artisans and labourers perceived and lived their work are questions to which we have only hesitant and tentative answers. Hitherto, historians have been too concerned with the emerging features of the modern industrial capitalist order to seek to understand how another and different economy and community worked in its own terms. The essays in this book are intended to begin to...
The internal organisation of production before the development of the factory system is still shrouded in historical mystery. How goods were made befo...
This 1989 analysis of the urban trades of eighteenth-century France lays the foundations for studies of the workshop economy in modern European history.
This 1989 analysis of the urban trades of eighteenth-century France lays the foundations for studies of the workshop economy in modern European histor...
Scholars normally emphasize the contrast between the two great eighteenth-century thinkers Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Adam Smith. Rousseau is seen as a critic of modernity, Smith as an apologist. Istvan Hont, however, finds significant commonalities in their work, arguing that both were theorists of commercial society and from surprisingly similar perspectives.
In making his case, Hont begins with the concept of commercial society and explains why that concept has much in common with what the German philosopher Immanuel Kant called unsocial sociability. This is why many earlier...
Scholars normally emphasize the contrast between the two great eighteenth-century thinkers Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Adam Smith. Rousseau is seen a...
