Das ist der Doux Commerce!
The Passions and the Interests: Political Arguments for Capitalism Before Its Triumph, Albert O. Hirschman, 1977.
Artwork: The Alarm Clock, Diego Rivera, 1910.
In The Spirit of the Laws, Montesquieu wrote that “wherever the ways of man are gentle there is commerce; and wherever there is commerce, there the ways of men are gentle”. This belief - in what would be called doux commerce - was once the pre-eminent argument for ‘capitalism’. But no longer. Now, intellectually serious defenders of capitalism are more likely to point to the benefits of private property or extol sheer economic growth. World peace is fairly low down the list, and for good reason; after the imperialist and repressive nineteenth century and the explosively violent twentieth, doux commerce became rather hard to believe in. But why were there those - like Montesquieu - who once did? This is the question Albert Hirschman tries to answer in The Passions and the Interests. To understand the belief in doux commerce, he argues, one must grasp the genealogy of that most basic economic concept: self-interest.
Hirschman begins in the Renaissance, when no such concept as ‘self-interest’ - or simply ‘interest’ - existed. Political philosophers of the time were preoccupied with how to control the various passions of man - love of glory, money, lust, and so forth. Solutions varied: some suggested the encouragement of heroic pursuit, others the righteous exercise of raw state power. But that religion and morality could “restrain the destructive passions of men” was always assumed. After Machiavelli’s The Prince, however, this was no longer sufficient; the Italian statesman was taken seriously when he argued man should be studied “as he really is”. But as radical as The Prince was, Machiavelli produced no theory of human behaviour capable of fulfilling this ambition. But by the seventeenth century, Hirschman believes, philosophers found a realistic solution: the “principle of the countervailing passions”. This idea held that the passions should be set against each other, so that one desire could control another. It would have many expressions. Spinoza wrote “an effect cannot be restrained or removed except by an opposed and stronger effect”, and d’Holbach “the passions are the true counterweights of the passions”. Hirschman cites other versions from Hume, Vaucenargues, and Bacon. Taken together, a non-idealistic theory of behaviour had been found; one that could be used to reign in the worst excesses of princes and states whilst still studying them ‘as they really were’. From this principle of the countervailing passions, ‘interest’ enters our conceptual vocabulary. More often than not, it was observed, sexual or violent urges could be tamed by passion for wealth or power. Over time, these latter passions - more reasonable, more calculated, more ‘tame’ - coalesced into a single concept: interest. Initially, interest represented all the passions more inclined to ‘taming’ than to ‘being tamed’. But eventually, pure economic interest would become predominant. Why did this meaning narrow? Hirschman has many explanations. Perhaps it was because of conceptual similarities with the older, financial meaning of interest. Perhaps the association of commerce with calculation lent it towards ‘calculating’ interest; or even, Hirschman wonders, grandé siècle France was so politically exclusive that commercial pursuits became the only viable realm for ambition. Maybe no explanation is needed other than once modern economic growth had commenced, having an ‘interest’ in one’s fortune made more sense for many. More speculations than explanations, I found this the least convincing element of the book. It is also the least justified by textual evidence. Nonetheless, it does not so much matter why interest came to exclude the non-economic countervailing passions - we need only to acknowledge it eventually did. In the light of that inarguable fact, we can let Hirschman off the hook.
Finally, we arrive at the ‘modern’ notion of self-interest: the amoral, reasoned ambition to increase one’s material wealth. It would open a new world for political philosophy. Leaning on Kuhn, Hirschman writes how “once the idea of interest had appeared, it became a real fad as well as a paradigm”. Representing the best of both passion and reason, interest was “the passion of self-love upgraded and contained by reason, and reason given direction and force by that passion”. Further, interest was predictable and perpetual. Passions were fickle, often contradictory, and always temporary - satisfied, they would disappear, only to be replaced by another. Accumulation, however, seemed a universal, inexhaustible desire. This quality, which had once made it so sinful, now - under the guise of interest - was a virtue. Finally, interest was “innocuous”; commerce was a considerably less violent pursuit than pillaging. All combined, the new paradigm of interest presented the possibility of a freer, less violent society than the early-modern theorists knew.
Here we reach the crux of The Passions and the Interests; at least, the part of it that caught my focus. The emerging doctrine of interest had, by the eighteenth century, led it to be believed the emergence of commercial society could lead to political - as well as economic - progress. Hirschman considers Montesquieu and the Scottish Enlightenment figures James Steuart and John Millar to be the greatest exponents of this perspective. Commerce, they thought, encouraged peace between nations by rendering them interdependent; for, as Montesquieu wrote, “all unions are based on mutual needs”. The extension of commerce would align the mutual interest of nations in peaceful trade, overriding princely desires for conquest. As webs of mutually beneficial interconnections grew, the ability of a prince to make disruptive decisions was diminished; for the costs in doing so, both in terms of his own material interest and for those of his affected subjects, grew much greater.
In essence, increased commerce gave a prince greater interest not to indulge in his passions - for war, opulence or arbitrariness - and in so doing, aligned his interest closer to that of his subjects. Steuart, likening the economy to a delicate clock, states as such categorically: “modern oeconomy… the most effectual bridle ever was invented against the folly of despotism”. This was the promise of doux commerce: that a society geared towards the pursuit of interest would be less inclined to indulge the harmful passions that had hitherto caused such suffering.
That capitalism might promise an end to war between - and to tyranny within - nations is hard to believe, Hirschman acknowledges. But he asks us to grant that Montesquieu and Steuart “earnestly and fully expected [capitalism] to have certain effects that then wholly fail to materialise”. But why were they wrong? Hirschman presents a few potential “counterforces”. For starters, the delicacy of the economic watch is not just a barrier to “princely caprice”. Business-as-usual politics lends itself to ‘law and order’ tyranny, the tyranny of the status quo. In other words, the arbitrary exercise of power is replaced by the calcification of arbitrary power itself.
Further, the pursuit of interest by the many leaves wide political room for the few who focus on less innocuous pursuits. Now, these are not the only reasons doux commerce did not transpire. They are not even the most convincing. But Hirschman attributes them to Tocqueville and Ferguson, both of whom wrote shortly after Montesquieu and Steuart. It did not take long until doux commerce fell out of alignment with emerging reality.
Of course, the argument for capitalism most familiar to us is not found in Montesquieu-Steuart, but in Adam Smith, who proposed in The Wealth of Nations that “ambition, lust for power, and the desire for respect can all be satisfied by economic improvement”. At the same time, Smith made no promises on behalf commerce’s emancipatory power. Having established a powerful economic justification for capitalism in the division of labour, Smith is less concerned by political consequences, about which he is relatively pessimistic; for “the violence and injustice of the rulers of mankind is an ancient evil, for which, I am afraid, the nature of human affairs can scare admit of a remedy”. This modest vision is more easily reconciled to actual history than the Montesquieu-Steuart promise is. It is thus no surprise, Hirschman thinks, that the former was quietly forgotten.
The Passions and the Interest could have stopped here. But for Hirschman, the most important element behind the story “lies still elsewhere”. In making wealth the satisfier of all passions, Smith eliminated the need for the pursuit of the former to offset the latter. Compromise between passions and interests was needed no longer; henceforth, economic progress could henceforth be understood in apolitical terms. The conceptual evolution traced in The Passions and the Interests is cleanly rounded off. A trajectory that began with Machiavelli reaches conclusion in Adam Smith. That said, I could not help but find an ambiguity here: did the Smithian narrative endure because it shed the pretensions of doux commerce, or because it cut through the ‘passions against interests’ knot? Upon reflection, the former is more convincing. I feel the latter perhaps represents Hirschman getting taken in by the trappings of his own framing more than any causally significant historical force. It depends on a rather stretched reading of Smith, founded on little more than his use of “passions and interests” as plausible synonyms on but one occasion. I cannot deny the elegance, however. In fact, there is probably more about The Passions and the Interests that prioritises elegance over truth. It is an old, short book, after all. I have heard it suggested the very premise of the book - that Montesquieu believed in doux commerce - is questionable. In short, many grains of salt should be taken. Despite this, however, The Passions and the Interests is essential. It is one of those rare books that makes you reappraise everything in its light. I do not think Hirschman will vacate the back of my mind for a long time.
Towards the end of Capital, Marx - after waxing lyrical about the violence of mercantile expansion - exclaims: “das ist der doux commerce!”. Marx’s sarcasm was fair - the promise of doux commerce had always been tenuous. This became obvious to most fairly quickly; there are few today preaching it (with notable exceptions, of course). But the idea has a long shadow. Recently, I read Nicholas Mulder’s history of economic sanctions, The Economic Weapon (next!). It made me realise that the temptation to think self-interest and economic interdependence naturally encourages a ‘liberal’ political order, both within and between states, has never gone away - even if it has been couched in different language since Montesquieu’s time. More contemporaneously, doux commerce style arguments abounded after the fall of the Soviet Union, when it seems economic connection alone could bring Russia or China into peaceful co-existence with the Western orbit. We can thank Hirschman for reminding us that such ideas have a history.