Political Economy of Sentiment

The Political Economy of Sentiment situates changes in the nature of money and the rise of sophisticated financial structures at the centre of the Enlightenment. It argues that paper credit instruments were causal – critical to the larger epistemological and psychological changes associated with the Enlightenment's reconstruction of value. The rise of an economy based almost entirely on paper credit instruments undermined the empiricist worldview and precipitated a fundamental shift in human psychology. The proliferation of credit-based financial instruments led human beings to accept the idea that natural economic money value did not reside in commodities such as silver and or gold; signs could contain value and act as money in all of its functions. More importantly, paper credit instruments cracked the juggernaut of received values and accustomed human beings to nominal value: value as a function of the imagination – be it economic, moral or aesthetic. In the United Kingdom and on the Continent, this was a change largely expressed by the Scottish Moral Sense philosophers and political economists over the long eighteenth century. In the United States, these changes also derived in part from the Scots, widely read and praised during the Early Republic. As in Scotland, however, it was not simply ideas that precipitated change. Political economy shaped and was shaped by economic practice; both in turn had a dramatic impact on culture and personality. Thus as Americans created a nation and the political and financial structures and institutions necessary to society, they were also involved in the Enlightenment's profound reshaping of humanity.