How Sweet Is It?

George Scialabba

I suppose you’re not entirely responsible for your obituary notices. When Albert Hirschman died in December 2012, the time-servers leaped in to claim his legacy, from Malcolm Gladwell in The New Yorker to Cass Sunstein in the New York Review of Books to the anonymous Economist.

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One of Hirschman’s most popular essays, “Rival Views of Market Society,” revived the eighteenth-century idea of doux commerce, or the civilizing effects of nascent capitalism. “It is almost a general rule,” Montesquieu wrote in L’Esprit des Lois (1748), “that wherever manners are gentle, there is commerce; and wherever there is commerce, manners are gentle. . . . Commerce polishes and softens barbaric ways.” Condorcet agreed; even the radical Thomas Paine argued that commerce “is the greatest approach towards universal civilization that has yet been made.”