Modernism, economics, and the ancient economy

Modernism, as a phenomenon in the study of the ancient world, has shown miraculous powers of recuperation from repeated and apparently fatal blows, and the appearance in 1992 of Edward Cohen's book Athenian economy and society: a banking perspective is a reminder of the fact. Modernism's apparent capacity to postpone terminal decline obviously has something to do with the subject of economics, but the connections are unclear. It might be imagined that modernism began with the first appearance of economics as an independent science in the eighteenth century. But in fact the classical political economists did not seek to universalize political economy backwards in time to cover the whole of human history in the way that today's modernists try to universalize economics. Adam Smith distinguished four stages in the development of mankind from the ‘rude’ to the ‘civilized’ state. He was perfectly aware that what he called ‘the stage of commerce’ was historically recent, that earlier forms of society had been quite different in character, and that the new science of political economy described only the operations of the last stage, that of commerce

Cover story · Modernism · Economic Theory and Institutions

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