SMOKE ON THE WATER: HES AT 50 AND THE NON-NEUTRALITY OF HISTORY

Abstract

Recently, I participated in the thesis defense on an eminently local subject, political economic writing in the eighteenth century in the cantons of Vaud (where I live and teach) and Berne (which at the time had occupied the Canton of Vaud) in Switzerland. I will spare you the details of this 700-pages-thick thesis, with an appendix of another 200 pages, which was not even about political economic writing in all of the Swiss Federation, but only in these two small regions in one of the most beautiful spots of Europe. But I became mesmerized by the profoundness of the political economic thinking of a group of now largely forgotten administrators and members of the Swiss socio-economic elite that grappled with questions of how to position their economic doings against a Europe that was plagued by the early eighteenth-century War of Succession, questions about the economic consequences not of population growth but of population decline, and the consequences of what David Hume has characterized so well as the “Jealousy of Trade” between the emerging European colonial empires. More in particular, these local men of politics and power were concerned with if and how they could preserve the agricultural system of common pastures—that were to figure prominently in Elinor Ostrom’s early studies of the “commons”—or whether they should copy the English model of enclosures that seemed to promise agricultural innovation and economic growth. How would this pan out for the means of existence of the local population? And, of course, what would this mean for their own economic and political interests and standing? All these concerns brought them in conversation with the work of such writers as François Forbonnais, Richard Cantillon, the Physiocrats, and Scottish philosophers such as Hume, James Steuart, and Adam Smith, with some of whom they were also in correspondence. The measures the local elites implemented on the basis of these discussions were consequential for such important issues as land use, manufacture and commerce, and poor relief. Unsurprisingly perhaps, the thesis was supervised by one of Istvan Hont’s students, Béla Kapossy, a professor in the history department of the University of Lausanne.