What to Do about “Doux Commerce”?

Hirschman's powerful and influential thesis about the origins of capitalism, The Passions and the Interests (1977 & 1997), still dominates university reading lists in the history of economics. At the time of its first edition, the work provided a provocative and alternative narrative about the intrinsic connections between political and economic thought. Yet its greatest impact was to propel an account of the eighteenth-century origins of economics focused on what Hirschman coined the “doux commerce thesis.” This paper proposes to read Hirschman's synthesis in the light of popular eighteenth-century authors—often considered external to the canon of economic thought—to assess the state of the field today and to suggest an additional perspective on the history of political and economic thought