Political Economy from Pufendorf to Marx

István Hont (1947–2013) was born in Hungary, before defecting from the communist regime and moving to the United Kingdom in 1975. He became a Fellow at King's College, Cambridge in 1978 and a University Reader in the History of Political Thought. Hont was renowned globally as a leading intellectual historian of political economy, although much of his writing remained unpublished during his lifetime. His co-edited volume with Michael Ignatieff Wealth and Virtue: The Shaping of Political Economy in the Scottish Enlightenment (1983) and his collected essays Jealousy of Trade: International Competition and the Nation-state in Historical Perspective (2005) combine political theory with intellectual history and seek to illuminate contemporary debates. Lasse S. Andersen is Associate Director of the Institute of Intellectual History at the University of St Andrews. He has published articles on the history of political thought and political economy in the Journal of the Philosophy of History and Intellectual History Review. Béla Kapossy is a professor of Early Modern History at the University of Lausanne. He is the author of many works concerned with enlightenment politics and political economy including Iselin contra Rousseau: Sociable Patriotism and the History of Mankind (2006), and a number of edited works and editions including Commerce and Peace in the Enlightenment (2016) and Edward Gibbon et Lausanne (2022). Richard Whatmore is Professor of Modern History at the University of St Andrews and co-director of the Institute of Intellectual History. His most recent books are The End of Enlightenment (2023) and The History of Political Thought: A Very Short Introduction (2021).

• Introduction; 1. Theoretical history and natural law in the Scottish enlightenment; 2. Samuel Pufendorf's jurisprudential theory of history; 3. Natural jurisprudence, political economy, and the concept of civilisation: Samuel Pufendorf's theory of cultura; 4. Negative community and communism: the natural law heritage from Pufendorf to Marx; 5. The antinomies of the concept of 'use-value' in Marx's capital: economy and polity after the market; 6. Socialist natural law, commercial society, political economy: a contribution to the understanding of the idea of social science; 7. Unsocial sociability: eighteenth-century perspectives; Bibliography.