‘Oeconomy' and 'Political Oeconomy' in the Theory of Moral Sentiments and in the Wealth of Nations’

Abstract

It has been authoritatively supposed that probably Adam Smith did not make use for his book of the term ‘political economy’, because of the Editor’s choice of not repeating the title of James Steuart book. In fact, if we examine attentively the use of the term ‘political oeconomy’ made by Adam Smith, we reach different conclusions; in order to better understand this use, it is necessary taking into account the use of the term made by others authors, writing in the third quarter of the Eighteenth century, when the ‘political oeconomy’ begun a new life. Until then the term had been only rarely used, especially in a tradition linked to the writings of Xenophon and Aristotle. To make more clear this literary context, and the disciplinary process occurring at that time, we will focus not only on the use of the term ‘political economy’ in the Wealth of Nations, but also on the significance of the term ‘oeconomy’ in the Theory of Moral Sentiments. The entry ‘Oeconomy’ published in 1755 by Rousseau on behalf of Diderot and D’Alambert, represents a good example of the tensions that followed in those years the word ‘oeconomy’ in its relation to the term ‘political oeconomy’. The entry published in the fifth volume of the Éncyclopedie, under the exact title “Économie ou Oeconomy (Morale et Politique)”, was reissued three years later by the editor Duvillard of Geneve choosing as title Discours sur l’économie politique, with the consent of the same Jean Jacques Rousseau; in the meanwhile the philosopher of Geneva had broken with the Encyclopedists, which, for the eleventh volume of the Éncyclopedie, published in 1765, reproduced under the title “political oeconomy” the work of N. A. Boulanger, Recherches sur l’origine du despotisme oriental (1761). Furthermore, when Adam Smith sojourned in Paris during the 1766, the group of Physiocrats had begun to speak of the new “Science de l’économie politique”, a term used above all by Samuel Dupont de Nemours and the marquis of Mirabeau some year later. Anyway, the most important reference of Adam Smith relating to the term in question when he wrote the Wealth of Nations, was the work of James Steuart, Inquiry into the Principle of Political Oeconomy; but the founder of the modern political economy did not like the term ‘political oeconomy’ in order to define his inquiry. In fact, the meaning of the noun ‘economy’ was still ‘order/structure’, so that the term ‘political economy’ was essentially used to indicate the science of politics. It was only during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries that the discipline of Economics was progressively identified as a field independent, and thus separate, from the science of Politics, conferring to the term ‘political economy’ a new semantic identity; but it was a difficult and not linear process, on which historians and scholars are still debating.