Seki Hirono, Unearthing the Forgotten History of Ideas, 1985

original：Seki Hirono, Yaban to shiteno Ie-Shakai,1987, March, Ochanomizu Shobo、pp.378-80
First Publication：朝日ジャーナル、1985年11月1日、朝日新聞社

This is a review of the following book by the historian of ideas, Seki Hirono. It is an excellent review that is simple and to the point, so we are republishing it on our blog.

Albert O. Hirschman, The passions and the interests : political arguments for capitalism before its triumph, 1977, Princeton University Press
(Princeton University Press, 2013, 1st Princeton classics ed,pbk, foreword by Amartya Sen ; with a new afterword by Jeremy Adelman)

Albert O. Hirschman, The passions and the interests : political arguments for capitalism before its triumph, 1977, Princeton University Press(Princeton University Press, 2013, 1st Princeton classics ed,pbk, foreword by Amartya Sen ; with a new afterword by Jeremy Adelman)

Seki Hirono, Unearthing the Forgotten History of Ideas, March, 1985
original：Seki Hirono, Yaban to shiteno Ie-Shakai,1987, March, Ochanomizu Shobo、pp.378-80
First Publication：朝日ジャーナル、1985年11月1日、朝日新聞社

　There is a popular belief that capitalism is immortal because all human beings are egoists anyway. However, the calculative egoism inherent in modern man is in fact an artificial discipline that capitalist civilization has developed over many years and instilled in us. Max Weber, for example, showed how strange and perverse the egoism of modern man is in the paradoxical transformation of Protestantism's asceticism into the modern commercial spirit.

　In this book, Hirschman counters Weber's theory by tracing another genealogy of capitalist thought, namely, that a wise and peaceful commercial spirit, manipulated by passion, can overcome arbitrariness and tyranny and create a trustworthy public order, from Machiavelli to Spinoza, Montesquieu, the agrarianists, James Stuart, and Adam Smith. The book traces the ideas of Machiavelli, Spinoza, Montesquieu, the agrarianists, James Stuart, and even Adam Smith. Although small in size, this is an ambitious attempt to rediscover a forgotten tradition in the history of thought.

　According to the author, the condemnations and warnings against the heroic ideal and the destructive character of the passions found in early modern Western thinkers such as Pascal were not directly related to the class struggle between the aristocracy and the bourgeoisie. The question, then, is what social catastrophe was involved in the attack on the passions, but unfortunately this point is not made clear in this book. At any rate, Westerners had three options to deal with the threat of the destructive presence of emotion. In other words, they could either suppress it by force, use it to their advantage, or counterbalance it by opposing it to emotion. The third strategy, which originated with Machiavelli, led to Hobbes' social contract theory, Montesquieu's theory that commerce and economic activity would bring about an order of peace and interdependence that would restrain tyranny, and Stuart's argument that a complex modern economic system would make it impossible for a tyrannical government to intervene. Smith, however, at the end of this trend of historical thought on the "political effects of economics," effectively reduces all passions to the urge to increase wealth and improve living standards, and liquidates the profit-versus-passion dualism by proposing the paradigm that non-economic desires can be satisfied by economic means. This is an important point to be made when washing away the true nature of the discipline of economics.

　On the other hand, a strong counterargument to this theory of Montesquieu et al. comes from Adam Ferguson and Tocqueville, who both point to the possibility of the emergence of a new tyranny, one based on commerce and driven by the need to maintain a disciplined market order in addition to the depoliticization of citizens devoted to commercial pursuits.

　According to the author, the vision of the "rule of profit" was defended on the basis of the constancy and measurability of the profit-oriented social order and the relative harmlessness of the desire for money. In that sense, the author's argument, although intended as a complementary refutation of Weber's theory, is not without overlap with another of Weber's arguments, that predictable law and administration are essential to capitalism.

　But Hirschman's contribution is that "Weber claims that capitalistic behavior and activities were the indirect (and originally unintended) result of a desperate search for individual salvation. My claim is that the diffusion of capitalist forms owed much to an equally desperate search for a way of avoiding society's ruin, permanently threatening at the time because of precarious arrangements for internal and external order." (p. 130). I fully agree with the assertion that capitalist "organization through greed and money" was adopted by early modern Western Europeans as the next best alternative to total social catastrophe, and this fact is also a decisive point in considering the question of what kind of society is beyond capitalism. This fact seems to me to be a decisive point in considering the question of what kind of society transcends capitalism. As the translator says, this book should be regarded as a concise introductory book rather than a unique work, but in terms of the importance of the subject matter covered, it should be ranked with Tawney's "The Acquisitive Society "*1 and C. B. MacPherson's "The political theory of possesive individualism"*2.

*1  R.H. Tawney, The acquisitive society, 1920, NY, Harcourt

*2  C.B. Macpherson, The political theory of possesive individualism, 1962, Oxford