1st Edition
Historicizing Self-Interest in the Modern Atlantic World A Plea for Ego?
Introduction: The Search for Self-Interest and the Problems with its Historicization
Christine Zabel
Part 1: Creating, Inspiring and Calculating Self-Interest
1. Improvement, Projecting, and Self-Interest in the Hartlib Circle, c. 1640–1660
Ted McCormick
2. Reckoning Self-Interest at the French Revolutionary Comité des Finances
Christine Zabel
Part 2: Understanding, Teaching, and Learning about Self-Interest
3. Commercial Sociability and the Management of Self-Interest in Isaac de Pinto’s Letter on Card-Playing
Koen Stapelbroek
4. The Concept of Self-interest in Eighteenth Century Anthropology and Economic Theory. From Richard Cumberland to Adam Smith
Simone de Angelis
5. The Problem of Embeddedness Revisited. Self-Interest as a Challenge in Ethnographic and Historical Research
Christof Dejung
Part 3: Embodying, Feeling and Practicing Self-Interest
6. Commercial Desires in a Web of Interest. Dutch Discourses on (Self-)interest, 1600-1830
Inger Leemans
7. Practical Knowledge of Self-Interest: The Disembedding of Agency in Rural Areas, Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries
Ulrich Pfister and Friederike Scholten-Buschhoff
8. Pursuing Self-Interest: Stock Market Speculation in the Early Twentieth-Century United States
Daniel Menning
Part 4: Taming Self-Interest, Self-Interest as Limitation
9. Interest as an Enduring Political Problem in Early Modern France
Rafe Blaufarb
10. Self-Interest, Speculation, and Gambling in Nineteenth-Century America
Cornelius Torp
11. Against Self-interest: The Codification of “Disinterestedness” as an Axiological Operator, in Religion, Aesthetics, and the Ethics of Intellectual Professions
Gisèle Sapiro
Biography
Christine Zabel is Director of the Early Modern Department at the German Historical Institute in Paris, France. She is currently completing a book on the economic and financial history of speculation, especially in early modern France. She is particularly interested in the history of political economy, financial mathematics, the history of knowledge and early modern republicanism(s). She is the author of the book Polis und Politesse. Der Diskurs über das antike Athen in England und Frankreich, 1630–1760 (2016).
