This chapter explores how political economy was understood in Joseph Johnson’s periodical, the Analytical Review, by investigating which publications were listed under the heading of ‘political economy’, and how they were reviewed. It thereby illuminates how political economy was understood in Wollstonecraft’s intellectual milieu. Political economy emerges as a heterogeneous discourse where political and moral ideas mixed with the economic, and where discussions of human nature, and human motivation, as well as of civil society, were often prominent. Writings reviewed as ‘political economy’ in the Analytical Review reveal how the term was used by radical and progressive thinkers as a means for collecting a range of critical perspectives on contemporary society, as well as setting out possible means of improvement. In the eyes of the Analytical Review, political economy offered the prospect of enacting reforms which might increase the happiness of ordinary people, and a means of critiquing existing injustices.

When Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) was first published, it was categorised in Joseph Johnson’s Analytical Review as a work of political economy. The introduction asks what this term meant for Wollstonecraft and her contemporaries, and argues that it was used to understand the nature and operation of modern commercial society, as well as the potential for its reformation. Wollstonecraft’s relation to this project is explored, both through a survey of her engagement with Adam Smith and through her lived experience as an unmarried, often indebted woman in a society organised around possession of property. Wollstonecraft is presented as a writer engaging throughout her career as a critic of the connected material, economic, moral, psychological, and social conditions of modern commercial contemporaneity, and as anticipating the opposition to political economy of later Romantic writers.

This chapter challenges the view that The Theory of Moral Sentiments (TMS) is concerned with analyzing modern commercial society – a view that is especially prominent amongst those who turn to Adam Smith to help identify the malaises of capitalist societies today and their potential remedies. The chapter proceeds by, first, examining what both Adam Smith and Smith scholars mean by commercial society, and whether this concept has any place in TMS; second, assessing whether TMS should be read as response to other theorists of modern commercial society (Bernard Mandeville and Jean-Jacques Rousseau); and, third, analyzing whether Smith’s reflections on moral corruption, inequality, and prudence in TMS should be associated with commercial society. The chapter concludes with some brief reflections on why many Smith commentators superimpose the concept of commercial society onto TMS, speculating that this can be partially explained by the broader tendency in much recent scholarship to read TMS and the Wealth of Nations as forming a coherent whole, rather than as independent works that mostly address distinct questions.

This chapter examines eighteenth-century moral debates about wealth, poverty and corruption in the emerging commercial state. In particular, it discusses four important moments in these debates: Bernard Mandeville’s celebration of avarice and vice, the fustigations of writers like Bolingbroke, Trenchard and Gordon about the corruption they attributed to financial and commercial innovations, Adam Ferguson’s worries about the corruptions of commercial modernity, and, finally, Adam Smith’s indignation at the spirit of monopoly that threatened to undermine the moral and material gains of commercial society.

This chapter shows that in the British intellectual tradition, the Scottish moralists, followed by Hume and Smith, saw reliance upon the opinion of others (“recognition”) in a completely different way than the French tradition. Instead of being viewed as something intrinsically negative and self-destructive, such reliance is described – sometimes with the same words – as something positive, contributing to epistemic and moral self-control. The central notions used in the British tradition to describe these positive effects of being dependent on others are “sympathy”, “inner spectator” and “impartial observer”. The chapter also shows that John Stuart Mill adopted the same line of thought by reserving a very positive role for the judgment of others. The chapter also attempts to identify sociopolitical reasons that may explain why such a positive understanding might have prevailed in British culture.

Friendship across a society includes the mild manners of doux commerce. Aristotle ranks economic exchanges according to increasing levels of friendliness: from cash on the barrel, to giving the partner extra time to repay, to a loan, to a gift with strings attached. Instead of reducing each to self-interest (like modern economists do), he finds commodity exchange has a tincture of the goodness of the next level up (interest-free loans), just as loans retain some of the goodness of outright gifts. Across a chasm of differences, we can still observe similar passions today: affection for customers, pride in one’s economic contribution (“gift”), wanting societal recognition (honor) for it. Adam Smith thought this vanity was the root of morality. Full morality is not required for civic friendship but only middle-class “virtues” (Politics, Books 3-4). Fair markets help maintain liberal civic friendship. When free markets are replaced by rent-seeking (crony capitalism, regulatory capture, lobbying), the game becomes rigged and we leave behind win-win assumptions for zero-sum assumptions, in which anyone else’s gain must be my loss. Our mild manners degenerate into resentment and discord.