If the liberty-prosperity question was virtually absent in Antiquity, as Paul Rahe’s essay in this volume suggests, it certainly became prominent in the Long Eighteenth Century, and has remained so ever since.^{Footnote 1} The unprecedented mass abundance of our own time has spawned a plethora of historical theories as to how Homo sapiens could ever have escaped the Malthusian trap and made prosperity a durable and widespread possibility. Everything from geography and ecology, to culture and religion and values, to science and technology, has been adduced as the indispensable key.^{Footnote 2} New Institutionalists such as Douglass North have indeed emphasized liberty—constitutional, political, and legal—but their approach has had lively competition in the marketplace of interpretations.^{Footnote 3}

One thing all these theories have in common is the assumption that mass abundance, and the perennial growth that produces it, is both possible and at least broadly desirable. The Long Eighteenth Century was the period when that assumption came into being, but it did not do so in simple linear fashion. It was only the rising mercantile prowess of England and Holland in the seventeenth century that had brought wealth and political freedom together in some people’s minds, and it did so at first in a markedly limited way. For most European commentators, the chief benefit of the maritime powers’ growing wealth was solely strategic; its moral and social and even political implications were another matter entirely.

Even in England and Holland, the embrace of the new commercial society could be jolting in its novelty. “Trade,” wrote David Hume, looking back from the 1750s, “was never esteemed an affair of state until the last century.”^{Footnote 4} And since the broad well-being of what contemporaries often called the “middling sorts” was a new phenomenon, there was no easy way of knowing what it portended or what had caused it. In trying to explain the rise of the Dutch, for example, the merchant-author Josiah Child cited no fewer than fifteen factors that set those redoubtable traders apart from the rest of Europe—none of which included political liberty per se (although religious toleration managed to claim the eleventh spot).^{Footnote 5}

Equally novel, in its own way, was the concern over regime types. While Western thinkers since Aristotle had included a diversity of constitutional forms in their reflections on politics, the Long Eighteenth Century saw a new and protracted debate over which form of government was most conducive to justice and good order. The debate took place along a broad continuum from absolute monarchy to democratic republics. It is easy to forget that for many Europeans, and even many Englishmen, the upheavals of the English Civil War (1642–49) were proof positive of the dangers of any kind of popular government. And yet, the idea never really went away; indeed, it gathered momentum over time, until it burst to the forefront with the American and French Revolutions.

Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679) was by far the most sophisticated spokesman for the view that absolute sovereignty, of a sort usually associated with monarchy rather than with “political liberty,” was essential to all civil life, including the economic. Hobbes’s view was that private property could not exist in the state of nature, because it implies security, which is absent there. Only when the people—brought to desperation by the elementary passions of competition, diffidence, and reputation (or greed, fear, and honor in modern parlance)—decide to leave this state by contracting to create Leviathan does property become possible. Even then, Hobbes is at pains to underscore that such property is conditional, and that the sovereign alone decides who has how much of it and under what circumstances. Indeed, the sage of Malmesbury pursued a running polemic against those English revolutionaries who had been insisting on absolute property rights, blaming them for much of the unpleasantness of England’s Civil War. Only the sovereign can decide what resources are needed to fulfill his functions of securing peace and executing justice, so only the sovereign can determine the form and scale of taxes to levy upon the people he is protecting.^{Footnote 6}

Hobbes thought those same revolutionaries had erred grievously in attaching the word liberty, already “sacred” in English parlance, to political regimes. The only “liberty” worth the name, he argued, is the liberty of states, a condition tantamount to just the same anarchy that individuals had experienced in the state of nature. All else is civil liberty, and on that score, as he famously put it, “Whether a commonwealth be monarchical or popular, the freedom is still the same.”^{Footnote 7} Hobbes valued this freedom, and with it the economic prosperity pursued by passionate and self-interested individuals, but political liberty was emphatically not necessary for these things in his scheme, for that is a sacrifice that people have already made for the sake of their peace and security.^{Footnote 8}

For his part, John Locke (1632–1704) did not deny what he called the “ill Nature, Passion and Revenge” found in the state of nature, and he echoed Hobbes in believing that “Nothing but Confusion and Disorder will follow” from such a condition, so that government is the “proper remedy” for these indefeasible facts.^{Footnote 9}

But instead of dwelling on its implications for civil society, Locke immediately turns this dark side of human nature against the Hobbesian paradigm itself. He notes that rulers are made of the same raw material as their subjects, and thus cannot be trusted with the calm impartiality imputed to them. For that reason, absolute monarchy, far from being optimal, is not even a legitimate form of government for Locke.^{Footnote 10} Indeed, it turns out to be better to trust one’s fellows in the state of nature, however grossly imperfect an option this may seem, than to bear the burdens of a ruler equipped with unlimited power to unleash his own partiality.

Since property rights and binding agreements exist in the state of nature for Locke,^{Footnote 11} the role of government is much more limited for him than for Hobbes. He states that legitimate government in civil society must be “established, by consent, in the Common-wealth.” Defending the “liberty” party against the suspicion of anarchy attached to it by Robert Filmer in his 1653 Patriarcha (first published in 1680), Locke specifies that individual liberty will not warrant license, but will ensure the predictability of having “a standing Rule to live by, common to every one of that society.”^{Footnote 12} This rule-of-law conception can only be achieved if there is a tight connection between the will of the people and the limited powers of the government they set up.

Although Hobbes was well aware that civil society was more prosperous than simple natural societies, Locke did more to underscore the point; he highlighted the productivity of labor wherever private property is recognized. At one point he estimates that privately worked land is at least ten times more productive than common lands lying in waste.^{Footnote 13} The implication becomes clear: private property, perhaps paradoxically, actually adds to “the common stock of mankind,” so the individual cultivator becomes nothing less than a benefactor of the human race.^{Footnote 14} Government, then, must be free and limited, so that it may achieve its overriding purpose, which is to ensure the property—the prosperity—of those who have created it.

The idea that government exists for the prosperity of the people, broadly conceived, was not new when Locke articulated it.^{Footnote 15} Before him, there was a flurry of Dutch republican thought that flowered especially in the interlude between the death of the stadtholder in 1651 and the return of the stadtholderate in 1672. An intriguing feature of these republicans was that they were fundamentally Hobbesian in their moral psychology. Although they obviously did not arrive at the same absolutist political conclusions, they agreed with the Englishman that the pursuit of individual self-interest was both a universal feature of human nature and a necessary starting point for the grounding of any sound political theory. The brothers Pieter and Johan De la Court, drawing on their reading not only of Hobbes but of Descartes, Jean-François Sénault, and the Augustinians of the previous generation, attempted to devise just such a theory. They posed the essential problem of politics not as one of reducing fractious humans to order, but of reconciling the perennially conflicting interests of ruler and ruled. To illustrate their views, they made a distinction between eerzucht and heerszucht—i.e., the pursuit of ambition-as-honor and the pursuit of ambition-as-domination. By this Dutch pun, they meant something like a contrast between moderate and immoderate self-love. For them, though, it is only ambition-as-honor that “makes people understand that they have to perform deeds by which they themselves and the rest of society have something to gain.”^{Footnote 16} For this reason, the sought-after reconciliation of interests simply could not be achieved under monarchy; the inescapably sycophantic character of royal education prevents it. Only in a republic was it possible to seek out that balanced arrangement whereby the solid interests of ruler and ruled could be mutually accommodated.

The polity itself, for these new-style republicans, was held together and defined not by virtue (as for classical republicans such as Cicero or Machiavelli), or by sovereignty (as for modern authors like Bodin, Grotius, or Hobbes), or by the divine functional interdependence of a society of orders led by clergy and nobility, but rather by the reciprocal bonds created by material interests themselves. As one of their chapter titles proclaims, “the inhabitants of Holland, being in a state of freedom, are by a common interest wonderfully linked together.”^{Footnote 17}

The first chapter title of their bestselling Political Maxims of the State of Holland promises to explain “the general political principles which tend to the prosperity of all countries,” and those principles are left in little doubt.^{Footnote 18} A broad representative assembly would be essential for the harmonizing of private and public interests.^{Footnote 19} Thus, the Dutch republicans parted company emphatically with Hobbes’s view of a major disjuncture between political liberty and economic prosperity, despite their appropriation of a remarkably Hobbesian psychology.

In his Fable of the Bees, the Dutchman-turned-Englishman Bernard Mandeville (1670?–1733) did arguably more than any thinker before Adam Smith to work out the general logic of the interdependent commercial society described by the Dutch republicans. Historians see his scandalous classic as achieving nothing less than the “discovery of society.”^{Footnote 20} In a way, however, what he “discovered” was much the same thing that late seventeenth-century Jansenists such as Blaise Pascal and Pierre Nicole had already observed: namely, that it was literally cause for wonder how the fallen man depicted in resurgent Augustinian theology could have parleyed his inescapable self-love into a complex and ordered civilization—how private vices can somehow yield public benefits.^{Footnote 21} “Man’s greatness even in his concupiscence,” Pascal had marveled. “He has managed to produce such a remarkable system from it and make it the image of true charity.”^{Footnote 22}

The main “public benefit” Mandeville himself had in mind was the generalized opulence achieved by his adopted country. In the “Fable” that made him infamous, a hive of bees, anxious about the moral price paid to achieve their power and wealth, go all-in for virtue and find they have become weak and impoverished.

Was political liberty necessary for the newfound prosperity the fabulist was recommending? It depends upon what time scale we look at. For one novelty of Mandeville’s “discovery of society” was his development of a long-term evolutionary frame of reference.

When he writes in this register, he can sound as if prosperity preceded any specific political institutions. Thus, he expressly rejects the theory of an original lawgiver in a distant past, a “Moralist or Politician . . . that could teach Men to be proud of hiding their Pride.” Instead, he cites an innate species-desire for prosperity and self-improvement: “The restless Industry of Man to supply his Wants, and his constant Endeavours to meliorate his Condition upon Earth, have produced and brought to Perfection many useful Arts and Sciences, of which the Beginnings are of uncertain Æra’s, and to which we can assign no other Causes, than human Sagacity in general, and the joynt Labour of many Ages.”^{Footnote 23}

The arts of “bettering one’s condition” evolve, on Mandeville’s account, over three distinct phases through prehistory: first, when humans learned to overcome the threat of wild beasts by cooperating together against them; second, when they began to learn to overcome the threat posed by other humans; and third, when writing was invented and used to codify the laws by which men might live together in peace. Thus, contrary to Hobbes, the rule of law seems to have developed after the essential problem of violence has already been brought under control through lengthy collaborative trial-and-error. This impression is strengthened when Mandeville cites language as an example of the early “arts and sciences” that have grown gradually through cooperation and the division of labor, before states and legal systems had arisen. So unlike Hobbes, who envisioned no material progress before absolute government, Mandeville very nearly reversed the sequence.

When speaking in a more contemporary register, Mandeville’s view of the political preconditions of prosperity is best described as a combination of loose Lockean constitutionalism on the one hand and Hobbesian skepticism toward the rhetoric of liberty on the other. As an immigrant from Holland, he had lived in the two freest European polities of his time. Sometimes he links the palpable prosperity of his adopted England to her free political institutions, in a generic way. The phrase “liberty and property” appears in his writings as a sort of shorthand for the English way of life.^{Footnote 24}

But on the other hand, where some Whig patriots of the day saw “liberty” and “virtue” as coequal partners, Mandeville was withering in his scorn toward such a link. For him, it was trade and civil liberty that mattered, not political virtue. Thus, he explains current Dutch power by citing “their Political Wisdom in postponing every thing to Merchandize and Navigation [and] the unlimited Liberty of Conscience that is enjoy’d among them.”^{Footnote 25} For Mandeville shared with Hobbes a bemusement, perhaps bordering on disgust, at the English obsession with the language of political liberty. On more than one occasion, he ridicules those he calls the “asserters of liberty”—those who admire Cato, for example, whose patriotic virtue turns out on inspection to be little more than envy at great leaders like Caesar or even a kind of crude anticlericalism.^{Footnote 26}

At times, in fact, Mandeville seems to flirt with a certain relativism in his treatment of the regime requirements for prosperity. Contrasting the Ottoman Turks on the one hand and the Greeks and Romans on the other, he writes, “Perhaps the one does better where absolute Power is lodg’d in one Person, and the other where there is some Shew of Liberty. Both are proper Tools to flatter the Pride of Man, when they are understood and made use of as such.”^{Footnote 27} But he does not pursue this suggestion, and generally Mandeville accepts that the best method of managing self-love so as to bring forth the “opulence” of modern commercial society is through the “liberty and property” enjoyed by Englishmen, even if he sometimes goads his readers by highlighting the strictly pragmatic basis of his endorsement of liberty.^{Footnote 28}

In the eighteenth-century debate that ensued from the moral challenge of Mandeville’s poem, many people reversed his priorities, seeing virtuous liberty as more important than prosperity and worrying that too much prosperity, or the wrong kind of it, might corrupt England’s cherished liberty. Drawing on their reading of Tacitus and other ancient historians, these theorists of virtue and corruption sometimes fretted that “the dissipations of luxury, by promoting trade, will gild over private vices with the plausible appearance of publick benefits.”^{Footnote 29} But it was also a common view of patriots like William Hazeland that “Trade and Civil Liberty Support Each Other.”^{Footnote 30}

Into this flowing stream stepped Montesquieu (1689–1755), perhaps the leading theorist of political liberty in his time. Before making his name as a constitutional theorist, however, the Baron of La Brède was also an attentive and sympathetic reader of Mandeville, defending him against his scandalized detractors.^{Footnote 31} He agreed with the Dutchman that trade and prosperity were now broadly to be encouraged rather than feared. To understand the modern world, he thought it essential to draw the sharpest contrast between conquest and commerce as alternative methods of wealth acquisition. The constant wars of the French King Louis XIV (1660–1715) were not only objectionable but out of kilter with the times. The “spirit of commerce” was, he thought, as fitting a description for his own era as the “spirit of conquest” might have been for an earlier one.^{Footnote 32} This commercial spirit produced a pervasive mutual interdependence conducive to peace between nations. Mandeville had opposed an English ban on the wearing of Persian silk because this would make it harder for the Persians to afford English cloth,^{Footnote 33} and Montesquieu observed more generally that in the modern trading world “Europe is no longer anything other than one nation composed of many.”^{Footnote 34} Both thinkers, then, may fairly be regarded as prophets of globalization.

Is political liberty necessary for this trade-based, interdependent economic prosperity? Early in his career, the Frenchman seemed to offer a pretty unambiguous answer: “Nothing attracts foreigners more than liberty and the wealth which always follows it.”^{Footnote 35} But it was not long before the concept of “liberty” itself became problematic for him. For at one level, Montesquieu seems to have shared Mandeville’s bemusement (and that of Hobbes) at a certain English obsession with liberty. In an early notebook entry, he almost defiantly denied that there was any significant difference between France and England on the one liberty standard that really mattered: security of life and property against the whims of a despot. “As for the rest of it,” he concluded, “I count for very little the happiness of arguing furiously over affairs of state and never uttering a hundred words without pronouncing the word liberty, or the privilege of hating half the citizenry.”^{Footnote 36}

But by the time he wrote Spirit of the Laws a quarter century or so later, his bemusement was supplemented by nuanced engagement. Still accusing his contemporaries of using the word “liberty” as an overly inclusive term by which to mark their approval of their own way of life, Montesquieu now made some sustained distinctions. First, he distinguished between constitutional and individual liberty. The former he defined mainly as the careful separation of powers, since everyone tends to expand his power if left unchecked.^{Footnote 37} The latter he defined as a feeling of personal security each individual possesses relative to his fellows. He dedicated a full book to each of these types of political liberty.

A second distinction he made was that even in a democracy, political liberty is not necessarily the freedom to do whatever one likes, because that could jeopardize the personal security of others, but rather whatever one ought to want to do. And finally, Montesquieu left it ambiguous how far he meant to recommend as a universal norm what he called the “extreme political liberty” of its contemporary standard-bearer, namely England. That was because the political liberty of the individual, if not of the constitution, is found in all “moderate” governments, including monarchies ruled by law, such as contemporary France, even if to a lesser degree than in England.^{Footnote 38} In principle, then, any regime—whether republic or monarchy—that provided a sense of personal security, including security of property, could foster economic prosperity.

But there is a further complication in Montesquieu’s new theory. Constitutionally, he saw each type of regime as grounded in a distinct psychological disposition: fear for despotisms, honor for monarchies, and virtue for republics or free polities. Political liberty in a republic, therefore, which is the only constitutional type that highlights its commitment to liberty, requires virtue. This in turn he defines as a love of the public good, which in a democratic republic means a love of equality.^{Footnote 39}

But now a problem arises: If the growth of prosperity produces inequality, as many contemporaries including Montesquieu believed it usually did, and if as he had postulated that inequality endangers the public-spirited virtue necessary for political liberty in that regime, then how if at all can this political liberty be confidently reconciled with economic prosperity?

Montesquieu’s answer seems to be somewhat as follows: in a commercial republic such as Athens (as opposed to a military republic like Sparta), the activity of commerce itself contains its own spirit, a spirit that includes “that of frugality, economy, moderation, work, prudence, tranquility, order and regularity.” For this reason, commercial republican liberty can accommodate great wealth and great inequality at the same time, without corruption. Only when the source of that wealth is disconnected from the commercial work ethic does the inequality begin to become dangerous to social stability.^{Footnote 40}

Englishmen of the time were anxious about this very problem. After the publication of Spirit of the Laws met with such resounding success there, he was asked by his English friend William Domville whether England should worry that its embrace of national wealth might cause the corruption and decline of English liberty as it had seemed to do in antiquity.^{Footnote 41} Montesquieu’s cautiously optimistic reply was that, since England’s method of wealth-getting was mainly through commerce and industriousness, which are positive-sum activities, rather than through the zero-sum enterprises of fiscality and conquest as with the ancient Romans, England had less to worry about than that ancient republic did.^{Footnote 42}

On the other hand, if political liberty was conducive to and compatible with sustained economic prosperity in England, it is also true that for Montesquieu there was more than one route to prosperity. France and other contemporary European monarchies may be “unfree” in constitutional terms because of their practice of combining the legislative and executive powers in the same hands. But they are still “moderate” governments, which provide a great deal of civil liberty, by virtue of their relatively independent legal systems and consequent protection of property rights, making their constitutional lack of freedom relative rather than absolute.^{Footnote 43}

Most Frenchmen, therefore, felt a tolerable portion of the “tranquility of mind” that defines individual political liberty. While perhaps short of “virtue,” they at least had “honor” instead, which, as the animating spirit of monarchy, brings in its train a number of incentives quite conducive to economic growth. To take one Mandevillian-sounding example: Montesquieu sees the French monarchy as wealthier than the Spanish precisely because it stimulated a brisk traffic in titles by tapping into the subjects’ vanity, “which is more inexhaustible than any mine.” Vanity is inexhaustible, in turn, because “self-interest is the greatest monarch on earth.”^{Footnote 44} For reasons such as these, Montesquieu opposed current proposals to spur economic activity by allowing the French nobility to engage in trade without losing their noble status. His view instead was that the French economy was prosperous enough, and that offering the prospect of nobility to ambitious merchants had served the country adequately over time, since “for two or three centuries [France] has been incessantly growing in power” with the help of these laws on trade and nobility.^{Footnote 45}

In short, although he greatly admired English political liberty, and although he accepted the verdict of some modernizing commentators that national wealth is a legitimate political priority, Montesquieu seems to have seen a conditional but not a mechanistic or universal connection between political liberty—however defined—and economic prosperity.

Given the moral novelty of accepting the pursuit of private wealth as a public good, especially in the whimsically paradoxical vein in which both Mandeville and Montesquieu sometimes embraced it, it was perhaps inevitable that opposition would arise. Hume recognized that topics such as “commerce, money, [and] interest” were likely to be regarded by some of his readers as “vulgar subject[s].”^{Footnote 46} And so they were. In addition to those who burned Mandeville’s work in effigy, there was a steady stream of polemicists and preachers who railed against him and his paradox through much of the eighteenth century. Generally speaking, their complaint was not so much about the pursuit of national prosperity as an end, as about the means of achieving it. George Blewhitt was merely the first of countless authors who rebutted the scandalous fabulist by arguing that virtue, not vice, is and has been the true road to riches.^{Footnote 47}

The criticism of Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–78), though, was more radical, embracing as it did both ends and means.^{Footnote 48} He described as a “poisonous doctrine” the Mandevillian argument that luxury is historically relative, ultimately indefinable, and thus mostly harmless.^{Footnote 49} He famously preferred Spartan virtue to modern materialism. But although it was easy to caricature Rousseau’s aversion to the amenities of civilized society,^{Footnote 50} the liberty-prosperity relationship that emerges from his writings is in fact quite modern in at least two ways: first, despite a genuine loathing for the supposed contemporary obsession with material wealth, he also expressed a real commitment both to private property and to general prosperity. Not for him was the typical ancient class division between a largely slave-based workforce and a privileged citizenry; his ideal rather was that of a widely diffused, property-owning population of free citizens, a quite imaginable extension of what already existed in northwestern Europe.

On occasion, Rousseau could sound positively Lockean in his subordination of public power to private wealth. “The wealth of the public treasury,” he writes in his 1755 Discourse on political economy, “is only a means, often poorly understood, of maintaining private individuals in peace and prosperity.” The purpose of the social contract, he adds, is “insuring the property, life, and liberty of each member through the protection of all.”^{Footnote 51} Property is in fact “the most sacred of all the citizens’ rights.”^{Footnote 52} “What is the end of political association?” he asks again in his 1762 Social Contract. “The preservation and prosperity of its members.”^{Footnote 53}

How, then, does he differ from his Lockean or Mandevillian predecessors? The key is that Rousseau drew an increasingly sharp distinction between prosperity on the one hand and mere wealth on the other. In his Plan for a Constitution for Corsica, probably drafted in 1765,^{Footnote 54} he wrote: “Everyone must live and no one get rich. That is the fundamental principle of the nation’s prosperity.” That this “prosperity” is independent of, indeed antagonistic to, monetary wealth, he makes very clear: “since [money] is useful only as a token of inequality, the less it circulates within the island, the greater its real abundance will be.”^{Footnote 55}

A few year later, in his Considerations on the Government of Poland, he made the contrast even more explicit, complaining that some of the proposals brought to his attention were “more favourable to wealth than to prosperity.” Though never exactly defining his terms, he makes clear the primacy of virtue over money when he writes that “heads, hearts and arms are . . . what make up the force of a state and the prosperity of a people,”^{Footnote 56} and again, “it is never anything but good Citizens who make up the force and the prosperity of the State.”^{Footnote 57}

It would be a mistake to regard Rousseau’s discussion of prosperity as semantic sophistry; like most other contemporaries, his notion contained a specific material dimension. And this leads us to the second modern element in his treatment of the issue: true prosperity, in Rousseau’s view, was measured not in individual wealth or standard of living, and not only in the manly republican virtues that he so frequently extols, but in population.^{Footnote 58} After exploring the purpose of political association, as noted above, he had followed with a further question: “And what is the surest mark of [the citizens’] preservation and prosperity? Their numbers and population.”^{Footnote 59} In his Polish proposal, for example, he recommended national autarchy and discouragement of trade, while adding, “but multiply as far as possible your domestic production and consumption of foodstuffs. The infallible and natural effect of a free and just Government is [increased] population.”^{Footnote 60} Here, we have the two modern ideas in Rousseau’s political economy neatly combined: an expanding, vital, and prosperous economy, but one focused on agriculture and manifesting its growth not in a rising standard of living but in demographic flourishing.

The moral roots of this move on Rousseau’s part bear attention as well: for another concession he makes to modern thought appears in this same chapter in the Considerations. “One cannot make men act except by their self-interest,” he notes, “I know it.” The Genevan, in short, envisions a political community in which the self-interest of men is engaged rather by increasing population than by the accumulation of monetary riches.^{Footnote 61}

This demographic growth is best seen not as the direct and conscious goal of government, but instead as the indirect result of wise policies. Indeed, there is a kind of “invisible hand” mechanism at work in Rousseau’s view of the process of population increase. “The more you perfect your Government,” he writes, referring to his advocacy of agriculture over trade, “the more you will increase your people without even thinking about it.”^{Footnote 62} So a policy of civic virtue, inculcated by education and by institutions such as corvée labor,^{Footnote 63} buttressed by agrarian economics and its carefully calibrated appeal to healthy self-interest, will naturally restore the true “prosperity” of a people, as measured in its fecundity. In all these ways, Rousseau is best regarded as a certain kind of selectively modern thinker rather than as a pure reactionary.

Given his deliberately revisionist definition of prosperity, the question now arises: Is political liberty necessary for its achievement? In the passage cited three paragraphs ago, it would seem so, since it is only a “free and just government” that reliably leads to population growth. Despite never once using the phrase “political liberty” in any of his writings,^{Footnote 64} it seems generally clear that what Rousseau has in mind is a government that is national, patriotic, reflective of the democratic “general will,” and independent of any outside interference or influence. Where Montesquieu had remarked on the interdependence of modern nations arising out of their thickening trade networks, Rousseau shows himself fiercely hostile to this kind of globalization avant la lettre: “Today,” he complains scornfully, “there are no longer any French, Germans, Spanish, even English, whatever might be said about it; there are only Europeans.” And what holds these sadly disparate and deracinated individuals together is nothing but a shared and unseemly pursuit of money.^{Footnote 65} The only hope in Rousseau’s mind is for a Lycurgus-like lawgiver, able to start from scratch and determine not only the constitutional laws undergirding the regime, but the mœurs or value system accompanying those laws.^{Footnote 66} “Favor[ing] agriculture,” making it “respectable in its simplicity,” and removing temptation by either banning or severely contracting the use of money,^{Footnote 67} are among the measures the Genevan contemplates for the salvation of corrupt modern polities.

Although Adam Smith greatly admired Rousseau and engaged his far-reaching critique of modernity in numerous ways,^{Footnote 68} his own enterprise mainly picked up the threads left by Locke, Mandeville, and Hume. Where Rousseau spurned “wealth” in favor of the moral purity of “prosperity,” Smith’s classic Wealth of Nations refers very much to our recognizable notion of standard of living. Indeed, his overarching purpose was to shift the emphasis not only from the mercantilist preoccupation with public treasure to private well-being, but also from the organized interests of producers to the unorganized and grossly neglected interests of consumers.^{Footnote 69}

Most early thinkers on political economy, it is useful to recall, were ultimately concerned to show how private wealth could contribute to public power. In the competitive state system of early modern Europe, money as the “sinews of war” was a pervasive concern. Certainly the seventeenth-century Dutch republicans, having seen their country emerge from a protracted fight for survival against Habsburg Spain, firmly yoked their argument for a Dutch commercial republic to a corresponding thesis that liberty would translate comfortably to political and military power. Mandeville on the one hand and the English Whigs on the other were equally impressed by the contributions English prosperity had made to the newfound political and naval power of the small island regime. Maritime trade and the navy were often regarded as two sides of the same inimitably English coin, each mutually reinforcing the other. Even David Hume, who probably did most to shape the contours of Adam Smith’s agenda, began his series of essays on political economy with the confident assumption that national power would be the principal concern of anyone wishing to address the sources of national wealth.^{Footnote 70}

By contrast, Smith was an important part of a growing tendency in the late eighteenth century to devote somewhat more attention to the happiness of the subjects relative to the power of the state. Hume himself had declared the ancient republican policy of preferring public power and the public good to be “violent” and “unnatural.” “Sovereigns must take mankind as they find them,” he asserted, insisting at length on the legitimacy of the private desires satisfied by trade and manufactures.^{Footnote 71} Doctor François Quesnay, the French physiocratic leader, developed in the early 1760s a schematic model, which he called the “tableau économique,” that attempted to represent visually the ideal method of maximizing such national wealth.^{Footnote 72}

Adam Smith, for his part, nearly dedicated his great work to Quesnay,^{Footnote 73} as he pushed the analytical pendulum further toward individual well-being and away from state power.^{Footnote 74} Adopting a roughly Mandevillian historical framework while moralizing it, Smith positively celebrated the way ordinary English people, in the face of centuries of foolish and extravagant government, had through “private frugality and good conduct” managed to raise their standard of living. “This effort,” he writes, “protected by law and allowed by liberty” had “maintained the progress of England towards opulence and improvement in almost all former times.” “It is to be hoped,” he concludes, on a remarkably normative note, that it “will do so in all future times.”^{Footnote 75}

So powerful is this individual pursuit of happiness through wealth that it leads Smith to answer very differently a question that had vexed Montesquieu and Rousseau alike: namely, whether growing prosperity engenders an inequality that might erode the liberty that had made that prosperity possible. Montesquieu had thought the corruption that ancient wealth and inequality had seemed to produce could be avoided, as long as modern wealth continued to flow from the industrious virtues rather than from conquest or fiscality. Rousseau had disagreed, seeing modern inequality as already corrosive of any chance of true political liberty, necessitating the most heroic efforts at equalizing the distribution of property by a thoroughly reconstituted government.

But Adam Smith seems to have seen the market itself as the best protection against the corruption of liberty by wealth. “Without any intervention of law . . .,” he writes, “the private interests and passions of men naturally lead them to divide and distribute the stock of every society, among all the different employments carried on in it, as nearly as possible in the proportion which is most agreeable to the interest of the whole society.”^{Footnote 76} Thus, though the market does not equalize the wealth or income of individuals, it takes much of the sting out of any resulting inequality by channeling it toward the common good. Unlike Montesquieu, then, Smith offers an institutional rather than a virtue-based answer to the problem of inequality.

Is political liberty necessary for this sought-after prosperity? As we have seen, Montesquieu had distinguished between constitutional and individual political liberty, defining the latter as the tranquility that makes one feel secure.^{Footnote 77} This kind of liberty clearly matters for Smith. Already in a paper delivered to fellow club members in Glasgow in 1755, he had asserted that “little else is requisite to carry a state to the highest degree of opulence from the lowest barbarism, but peace, easy taxes, and a tolerable administration of justice; all the rest being brought about by the natural course of things.”^{Footnote 78}

In the Wealth of Nations, he elaborates upon this notion. He argues that the historical origins of European growth were eccentric. Whereas a “natural” process would see agriculture growing organically and eventually producing the surplus necessary to bring forth manufacturing and trade, medieval Europe shows us the reverse: there, it was the emergence of towns out of mercantile activity, and the accidental political support they received from feudal kings (in need of allies against restive nobles), that proved critical to growth.

Smith repeatedly uses the phrase “order and good government” to describe the resulting medieval developments. What he seems to mean is simply the absence of the constant fear of violence that had previously afflicted the European countryside. His phrase is pure Montesquieu: each time he uses it, he accompanies it with the equally formulaic expression “the liberty and security of individuals.”^{Footnote 79} The sequence that emerges from his historical account consists of four steps: order and good government bring liberty and security, which in turn leads individuals to seek not mere subsistence but “to better their condition,” a natural impulse that, just as Mandeville had posited, inexorably promotes the division of labor.^{Footnote 80} Thus, at least a certain quantum of Montesquieu’s “political liberty of the citizen” would seem necessary for Smithian wealth to arise.

What about constitutional political liberty? That question is harder to answer, for though Smith told a correspondent in 1785 that he had “a sort of theory and History of Law and Government” in preparation that might have addressed it in detail, that work was never finished. His political views have accordingly been regarded as simply “missing” from his published corpus.^{Footnote 81}

Not all contemporaries would have accepted this account. The Earl of Buchan was pretty sure that Smith was a virtual republican in his politics.^{Footnote 82} And Smith did in fact speak sympathetically of the relationship between republicanism, freedom, and prosperity in one very important place: namely, book three of Wealth of Nations, where he laid out the aforementioned account of the origins of growth. On that reckoning, it was only the medieval towns, which Smith suggestively calls “a sort of independent republicks,” that enabled merchants the freedom to jump-start the division of labor out of which European wealth began to appear.^{Footnote 83} The whole sequence seems deliciously ironic to Smith, because it was the decidedly unfree feudal monarchies that had made these free republican towns viable in the first place.

On balance, however, it seems best not to put too much emphasis on the idea of a republican Adam Smith. The preponderance of evidence presents the Scotsman as a skeptic concerning political action, whether by governments or by peoples. Conduct on behalf of the public interest, he believed, was easier to pronounce than to effect.^{Footnote 84} Though his teacher Francis Hutcheson had been sympathetic to a robust Lockean, rights-based approach to political liberty,^{Footnote 85} Smith’s general view seems more akin to that of his skeptical friend Hume.^{Footnote 86} The latter had postulated that the arts and sciences—including those that become the object of trade and manufacturing—always originate with “free government,” but once having done so, they can be transplanted elsewhere. In this way, the great kingdoms of modern Europe, such as France (which Hume knew well), could become nothing less than “civilized monarchies” that offer “tolerable security to the people” in the fashion imagined by Montesquieu, contrary to the “high political rant” of some liberty-loving English contemporaries.^{Footnote 87}

Likewise with Smith: it is surely a striking fact, in the context of the Wilkesite and other pro-liberty agitation during the time of composition, that nowhere in his 950-page opus does Smith ever hint that electoral accountability or representative government are necessary in principle to achieve his three conditions of peace, easy taxes, and tolerable justice. And whereas Smith’s student John Millar of Glasgow had the experience of being called to account for the republican drift of his university lectures, Smith’s own lectures were apparently never thought so dangerous.^{Footnote 88}

There are cases in Wealth of Nations, furthermore, where economic prosperity unambiguously occurs without the influence of political liberty, even of the indirect sort postulated by Hume. Ancient Egypt on the one hand, modern India and China on the other, all achieved “a very high degree of opulence,” though of course without a shred of what a modern Cato might call “political liberty.”^{Footnote 89}

It has sometimes been argued that Adam Smith was a more radical, or at least a more fervently progressive, figure than the conservative-leaning economics profession of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries has wanted to admit, a process traced to the frightening upheavals of the French Revolution. “The disjunction of economic and political freedom,” one historian claims, “was the necessary condition, in the 1790s, for the transformation in Smith’s own reputation.”^{Footnote 90} In fact, however, no disjunction seems to have been necessary, because Adam Smith, following in Hume’s footsteps, had already effected it himself.

The French Revolution did indeed have a significant impact on the way observers contemplated the liberty-prosperity relationship, but not in as monolithic a way as we might assume. To be sure, the broad Anglophile “liberalism” associated with the names of Locke, Mandeville, Montesquieu, Hume, and Adam Smith were ultimately defeated in the First Republic (1792–95) by a civic and democratic republicanism of more broadly Rousseauian inspiration. Virtue came to be pitted against “corruption,” and to the extent that corruption was associated in people’s minds with conspicuous consumption (of the kind, for example, that Robespierre famously suspected in Danton), a certain controlled or “dictated” economy gained favor, tending toward a sort of patriotic autarchy.^{Footnote 91}

But it is useful to make distinctions: the constitutional emphasis on limited government and the separation of powers—through a bicameral legislature, for example, and a strong executive veto—was defeated relatively early, perhaps by the end of 1789, even though it took a while for the tensions between the monarchy and the revolutionary assembly to play themselves out.^{Footnote 92} But the prosperity-enhancing liberty of the new political economy had a longer shelf life. The attack on corporate privilege that was central to the Revolution from its beginnings continued to be channeled through the idiom of free markets far into the Revolution. Even Robespierre, while targeting “monopolists” in subsistence goods with regulatory and price-control policies that would have predictably ruinous results, nonetheless still acknowledged that “in general the unlimited freedom of the market works to the greater profit of both state and individuals.”^{Footnote 93}

One suggestive measure of how hardy this side of the Enlightenment liberty-prosperity equation could be is found in the actual references to Adam Smith by French Revolutionary orators.^{Footnote 94} It turns out that the Scotsman was quoted favorably by assembly deputies across the full spectrum of political opinion, and throughout the most radical periods.^{Footnote 95} Until the depths of the Terror, and even beyond, most representatives believed strongly that the political and constitutional liberty that they had been elected to promote could be combined harmoniously with a dramatic liberalization of the hitherto blocked potential of their economy. Abbé Siéyès, for example, who lays claim to being perhaps the leading political theorist of the French Revolution in addition to being one of its most resourceful constitution-builders, was an attentive reader of Adam Smith. He believed that abolishing the regime of noble privilege would have the dual effect of achieving a broadly representative form of government with full electoral participation, alongside policies guaranteed to favor agriculture, trade, and industry. Contrary to Rousseau’s more participatory democracy, Siéyès saw government itself as a specialization that would be performed better in a society committed to advancing the division of labor. Whether this amounts to believing that political liberty is necessary for economic prosperity is unclear; it would at least be safe to say that a modern society organized around specialization of skill and function would naturally include both representative government and economic prosperity.

The upheavals of the revolutionary and Napoleonic periods did much damage, in both the short and medium terms, to the Rousseauian philosophy of democratic political rights that many thought had triggered them.^{Footnote 96} The great question for commentators after Waterloo was how much of the Enlightenment project could or should be salvaged—including how to rethink the relationship between political liberty and economic prosperity.

For the Swiss liberal Benjamin Constant (1767–1830), who came of age when the Revolution broke out and was an active participant during its various twists and turns, the answer was clear; as he argued in his 1819 speech on ancient vs. modern liberty, the Revolutionary leaders had erred grievously in choosing Rousseau over Montesquieu. He began that speech by appealing directly to public opinion itself. “First ask yourselves, Gentlemen,” he pleaded, “what an Englishman, a Frenchman, and a citizen of the United States understand today by the word ‘liberty.’” It is true that he expressly included “political liberty” in his answer, writing: “it is everyone’s right to exercise some influence on the administration of the government,” either through representation or lobbying.^{Footnote 97} But his main response was to catalogue a standard Lockean-Montesquieuan inventory of individual liberties, and the need for limited government in order to secure them. Thus, of Rousseau and his idolization during the First Republic (1792–95), he wrote, “This sublime genius, animated by the purest love of liberty, has nevertheless furnished deadly pretexts for more than one kind of tyranny.”

What Constant added to this eighteenth-century debate was a more intense focus on the psychology of individual liberty. He criticized Montesquieu, for example, for not fully understanding the underlying reasons for the stark differences between ancient and modern liberty: “He attributes this difference to the republic and the monarchy,” Constant complains, alluding to Montesquieu’s famous constitutional analysis. “It ought instead to be attributed to the opposed spirit of ancient and modern times.”^{Footnote 98} As we saw above, the Baron of La Brède did indeed distinguish between the “spirit” of conquest and of commerce, but without systematically mapping that distinction onto a contrast between ancient and modern liberty.

For Constant, the liberty-prosperity nexus is itself a crucial element in this difference in “spirit.” “In the past,” he argues, “where there was liberty, people could bear hardship.” That is because liberty was a sacred possession. In the modern world, on the other hand, liberty is regarded more as a means to individual independence and private comfort than as an end in itself. He notes that the modern, pre-Revolutionary nation most attached to its liberty, namely England, is also most attached to the personal gratifications made possible by it.^{Footnote 99} “Individual liberty,” he concludes, “is the true modern liberty.”

Granted, “political liberty is its guarantee, consequently political liberty is indispensable.” But that political liberty is and must always be merely representative in nature, rather than directly democratic as the Jacobin revolutionaries had mistakenly thought. As such, Constant proposes a politics subject to principles of economics—especially the sovereignty of the consumer, and the division of labor as articulated by Smith and echoed by Siéyès—that he regards as psychologically authoritative for modernity.^{Footnote 100} His original appeal to public opinion, cited above, ends up being an appeal to the private reflections and conscience of each listener, which he is confident will confirm the subordinate relationship of political liberty to economic prosperity for modern people.

Would the resulting prosperity endanger political liberty by way of a corruption-inducing inequality, as many eighteenth-century observers had feared? Constant doesn’t seem to think so. The conquests of Napoleon, far from leading to a Roman-style corruption through unequally distributed spoils, had in his view evoked the opposite reaction: “Those peaceful virtues that our civilization nourishes and develops still struggle victoriously against the corruption and the vices which the fury of conquest summons up and which are necessary to it.” With the spread of enlightenment, it seems, “comparative reflection discerns among individuals an equality opposed to any exclusive supremacy.” Indeed, “political liberty . . . establishes among [all the citizens] a kind of intellectual equality.” Thus, against those radical contemporaries who would impose a statutory equality of possessions, Constant sees commercial society as potentially leading to “the gradual establishment of true equality, that of happiness and enlightenment.”^{Footnote 101}

Alexis de Tocqueville (1805–59)—arguably the last important thinker of the Long Eighteenth Century before the Industrial Revolution turns the historical page—restored politics to the center of the liberty–equality equation, but in a subtler way than his predecessors had done. He states as categorically as anyone we have encountered that “liberty is useful for the production of well-being among all peoples.” But since his conceptual framework hinges on a systemic distinction between “aristocratic” societies based on tradition and hierarchy, and “democratic” societies grounded in an aspiration to equality, he immediately adds that his equation is “principally [true] among democratic peoples.”^{Footnote 102}

For Tocqueville, the reason liberty is necessary for prosperity is clear and original. It is not so much the centrality of property rights (as with Locke) or even the fear of personal harm or insecurity (as with Montesquieu). Instead, it is the need for freedom of association. Business in his view is not an isolated or individualist undertaking but a collaborative one. As such, it is best seen as one of the many forms of cooperation evoked in his famous claim that “in democratic countries, the science of association is the mother science.”^{Footnote 103} Moreover, he believes that the “imagination,” “boldness,” and spirit of enterprise that arise naturally from political liberty form a uniquely important vector along which individuals conceive similar passions for economic enterprise.^{Footnote 104}

Tocqueville sees a telling contrast, for example, between the economic vitality of the early Renaissance Florentine republic and its stagnation under the Medici dictatorship. There is a time lag in the causation, however: he postulates that when political liberty is at first lost, one often finds a temporary continuation of prosperity, as the momentum of civil association carries over for a while longer. It is only after that residual momentum is exhausted that people stop associating vigorously with each other, and that prosperity withers along with it.

Similarly, the possibility of corruption through inequality is also powerfully affected by this “science of association.” Though much has been made of the “soft despotism” that Tocqueville fears among a democratic people grown so attached to their material comforts that they abandon the public arena to an increasingly manipulative state,^{Footnote 105} it is possible to see his glass as half full rather than half empty. For Tocqueville views the Americans as having advanced a practical doctrine of “self-interest rightly understood” that combines a materialist individualism with a lively commitment to public affairs. While he offers no institutional reason (like Adam Smith’s market) or virtue-based reason (like Montesquieu’s “spirit of commerce”) to think the Americans’ solution is necessarily permanent or durable, neither does he see the advent of “soft despotism” to be a foregone conclusion, as a true cyclical theory would. All one can say for sure is that political liberty is woven into the fabric of social and economic prosperity in a more inextricable way for Tocqueville than for his predecessors.

In short, virtually all of the leading thinkers of the Long Eighteenth Century who addressed the liberty-prosperity question were agreed that Europe had entered a time in which generalized opulence was already a reality, and was likely to become more so. Recent research confirms the picture of a “consumer revolution” or an “industrious revolution” long antedating the transformative upheavals of the 1830s and 1840s.^{Footnote 106} Whether political liberty had anything significant to do with this growing prosperity was a remarkably controversial question, and depended partly on definitions. The Dutch republicans of the seventeenth century and the English Whigs of the eighteenth were concerned to yoke the two together quite closely. More skeptical authors such as Montesquieu or those “skeptical Whigs” Hume and Adam Smith took a more ironic and eclectic view of the role of regimes in engendering wealth. Rousseau sought political solutions to the social and psychological crisis of modernity, but after the French Revolution, liberals such as Constant and Tocqueville embraced the “prosperity” agenda of the eighteenth century while looking for more cautiously defined ways of affirming the role of political liberty. Despite the vaunted End of History, it is not clear that we have solved their essential problem even now.