The Political Economy of Sentiment Book contents
- Frontmatter
- CONTENTS
- Acknowledgments
- List of Charts
- Introduction: Prometheus Unbound
- 1 ‘Things without him’: Locke and the Logic of Metallism
- 2 Shaftesbury and Scottish Moral Sense Commercial Humanism: Inclinations Implanted in the Subject
- 3 American Money and Political Economy, 1780–1828
- 4 Banking and Money in Boston
- 5 Likeness to God
- 6 The Luxury of Pity
- 7 The Political Economy of Beauty and the Imagination
- Conclusion: Sense Subordinated to the Mind
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Appendix: Tables for Charts 1–9
- Index
Conclusion: Sense Subordinated to the Mind
- Frontmatter
- CONTENTS
- Acknowledgments
- List of Charts
- Introduction: Prometheus Unbound
- 1 ‘Things without him’: Locke and the Logic of Metallism
- 2 Shaftesbury and Scottish Moral Sense Commercial Humanism: Inclinations Implanted in the Subject
- 3 American Money and Political Economy, 1780–1828
- 4 Banking and Money in Boston
- 5 Likeness to God
- 6 The Luxury of Pity
- 7 The Political Economy of Beauty and the Imagination
- Conclusion: Sense Subordinated to the Mind
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Appendix: Tables for Charts 1–9
- Index
Summary
Perhaps it may be wondered that I should treat at the same time the question of property of all our riches, and that of all our sentiments, and thus mingle economy and morality; but, when we penetrate to their fundamental basis, it does not appear to me possible to separate either these two order of things or their study. In proportion as we advance, the objects separate and subdivide themselves, and it becomes necessary to examine them separately; but in their principles they are intimately united. We should not have the property of any of our goods whatsoever if we had not that of our wants, which is nothing but that of our sentiments; and all these properties are inevitably derived, from the sentiment of personality, from the consciousness of our self.
Count Destutt Tracy, A Treatise of Political Economy, trans. by Thomas Jefferson (Georgetown, 1817), p. 52.This book began with a discussion of Locke's insistence on the intrinsic value of silver-as-money. I interpreted Locke's notion of intrinsic value through his epistemology, and thus his theology. This emphasis highlighted Locke's strong theocratic message and his single-minded rejection of ‘any conception of the causal processes of human belief as a self-subsistent locus of value’. In Locke's mind, human values usurped theocratic systems yet failed to establish social consensus, cohesion and order – even individual purpose. Thus for Locke a social order founded on anthropocentric values and institutions was ‘a castle in the air’, or, to paraphrase Ware's objection to Allston's painting, a mere whim, or capriccio.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Political Economy of SentimentPaper Credit and the Scottish Enlightenment in Early Republic Boston, 1780–1820, pp. 159 - 162Publisher: Pickering & ChattoFirst published in: 2014