Jealousy of Trade

Download or read book Jealousy of Trade written by Istvan Hont and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2005 with total page 568 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "The author focuses on Adam Smith and his contemporaries, who pondered these issues, particularly the nature and development of commercial society. They attempted to come to terms with the claim that, on the one hand, the market was a decisive element in economic progress, and, on the other, that its workings depended upon the release of the immoral desires of fallen men and that its consequences were socially and politically destabilizing. Hont reconstructs the salient features of this controversy between the proponents of market sociability and its most trenchant critics. In doing so, he has helped to locate historically the most important arguments at the heart of the emergence of modernity."--Jacket.