Mandeville, Rousseau and the Political Economy of Fantasy

Abstract

Denis Diderot, setting out to explain the purposes of the Enlightenment’s greatest monument, said that the Encyclopédie would expose the abuses to which words have commonly been put. 1 In offering ‘luxury’ as the term which best exemplified contemporary conceptual confusion, Diderot counted on his readers’ familiarity with a continuing controversy about the consequences of massively increased consumption in Europe’s Atlantic rim since the beginning of the seventeenth century. Voltaire, Montesquieu, Hutcheson and Hume had already contributed to this body of argument, which would further be enriched by many entries in the Encyclopédie itself and, most notably, by Adam Smith’s account in Book III of The Wealth of Nations of the role of ‘baubles and trinkets’ in the demise of feudalism. 2 These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 23 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.