Sophus A Reinert
Biographic Data
| ID | 311970 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Sophus A Reinert |
| GIVEN NAMES | Sophus A |
| FAMILY NAME | Reinert |
| SIGNATURE | REINERT S A |
| AFFILIATIONS | Harvard University |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 25 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 24 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 23 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 2 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2004 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 3 |
In the Land of Marvels: Science, Fabricated Realities, and Industrial Espionage in the Age of the Grand Tour
In the Zone: On Quinn Slobodian’s Crack-Up Capitalism and the Spaces of Political Economy
Quinn Slobodian has established himself as a leading historian of neoliberalism. Crack-Up Capitalism continues where his Globalists left off, but shifts focus from visions of global ordering to the fragmentation of the world into special economic zones (SEZs). In Slobodian’s provocative analysis, SEZs become a late neoliberal solution to the entrenched problem of democracy at the nation-state level. We follow Slobodian into the zone, thinking wit…
Forms of Capitalism
Reconsidering the Commercial Revolution
retirement and fellow of All Souls College, arrived on the academic scene with a splash in the early 1980s, but his scholarly output over the last two decades, especially the four important monographs (with a combined count of around 3,000 pages) beginning with the Wolfson Prize-winning Framing the Early Middle Ages (2005) and ending with the megahistory presently under review, has been nothing short of breathtaking.An unrepentant Marxist histori…
The historian, the shaman, and the werewolf
Disclosure statementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s)
The Origins of the Developmental State: The European Experience
This chapter interrogates the currently resurgent and frequently demonized concept of “state capitalism” from a deeper historical perspective. It argues that contrary to what often is maintained, the concept can be fruitfully traced back to the strategies and policies of the city-states of Medieval and Renaissance Italy, if not before, and that pertinent aspects of it can be used to explain practically all successful trajectories of development s…
Political Economy and the Medici
Using materials from the important collection of Medici manuscripts donated to Harvard Business School by Harry Gordon Selfridge, this paper explores the geopolitics of the transformation of raw wool into finished cloth, and the role played in that process by Medici entrepreneurs, their guild, and their government. It aims to show that the history of political economy cannot truly be understood without business history. Successful business practi…
Italy and the Origins of Capitalism
Capitalism does not seem like a concept in danger of disappearing.At
Leviathan and Kraken: States, Corporations, and Political Economy
In our politico-philosophical bestiary, no monster has historically been more prominent than the Leviathan, the whale of the Book of Job, transformed by Hobbes, which has long been ubiquitous as a metaphor or as a signifier in all intellectual traditions touching upon the political. Like the state itself, we argue, the Leviathan has played an outsized role in the way we theorize and imagine relations of sovereignty in the world. This essay seeks …
Northern Lights: Political Economy and theTerroirof the Norwegian Enlightenment
Breaking Even: Political Economy and Private Enterprise in the Norwegian Glass Industry, 1739–1803
Using internal debates and surviving account books, this article traces the eighteenth-century history of the Norwegian glass industry, created to exploit Norway's immense natural resource wealth, and of the chartered company that would later become Norway's iconic Christiania Glasmagasin. The investors in the company, many of them among Norway's “founding fathers,” were individually responsible for its losses and it operated, remarkably, at an a…
New Perspectives on the History of Political Economy
Markets, Morals, Politics: Jealousy of Trade and the History of Political Thought
When Istvan Hont died in 2013, the world lost a giant of intellectual history. A leader of the Cambridge School of Political Thought, Hont argued passionately for a global-historical approach to political ideas. To better understand the development of liberalism, he looked not only to the works of great thinkers but also to their reception and use amid revolution and interstate competition. His innovative program of study culminated in the landma…
Introduction to the Symposium on the Contributions of Business to Economics
This essay introduces the symposium and records some reflections from symposium participants on the role of businesses in the formation of economic ideas. What are some specific challenges in researching the contributions of businesspersons to economics? Which topics or events involving the role of businesspersons in economics are most in need of scholarly analysis? What are some of the key historical trends that can be discerned in how businessp…
The Harvard Research Center in Entrepreneurial History and the Daimonic Entrepreneur
This paper sketches the intellectual history of the Research Center in Entrepreneurial History, founded at Harvard in 1948, which helped established the contours of business history as a discipline. This history was shaped by the rivalry between N. S. B. Gras, the "father of business history," and Arthur H. Cole, which defined still extant polarities in the field of business history. It provides context for the emergence of the figure of the "ent…
Paschalis M. Kitromilides. Enlightenment and Revolution: The Making of Modern Greece
Few cases in recent history speak more eloquently to the vexing relationship between economic decline and extremism than the ongoing Greek debt crisis and the ascendance of political parties like Golden Dawn. Greece's runaway public spending and institutionalized corruption have repeatedly rocked the Eurozone and, periodically, even the world economy, galvanizing chthonic passions and prejudices there and abroad. Paschalis M. Kitromilides is undo…
The Way to Wealth around the World: Benjamin Franklin and the Globalization of American Capitalism
The Political Economy of Empire in the Early Modern World
Translating Empire: Emulation and the Origins of Political Economy
Historians have traditionally used the discourses of free trade and laissez-faire to explain the development of political economy during the Enlightenment. But from Sophus Reinert’s perspective, eighteenth-century political economy can be understood only in the context of the often brutal imperial rivalries then unfolding in Europe and its former colonies and the positive consequences of active economic policy. The idea of economic emulation was …
Lessons on the Rise and Fall of Great Powers: Conquest, Commerce, and Decline in Enlightenment Italy
THOUGH THE THEME OF HIS Sidgwick Memorial Lecture at Cambridge was “Decadence,” and though he knew that “somewhere in the dim future” decline lay inevitably ahead, former British prime minister Arthur Balfour saw in 1908 “no symptoms either of pause or of regression in the onward movement which for more than a thousand years has been characteristic of Western civilisation.” 1 Just over a century later, his “dim future” has become our grim present…
The information master: Jean-Baptiste Colbert's secret state intelligence system - By Jacob Soll
Impossible engineering: Technology and territoriality on the Canal du Midi - By Chandra Mukerji
“One will make of political economy… what the scholastics have done with philosophy”: Henry Lloyd and the Mathematization of Economics
Research Article| November 01 2007 “One will make of political economy... what the scholastics have done with philosophy”: Henry Lloyd and the Mathematization of Economics Sophus A. Reinert Sophus A. Reinert Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google History of Political Economy (2007) 39 (4): 643–677. https://doi.org/10.1215/00182702-2007-035 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation Sophus A. Reine…
Blaming the Medici: Footnotes, falsification, and the fate of the ‘English Model’ in eighteenth-century Italy
Franco Venturi famously emphasised the importance of the 'English Model' for Italian reformist culture in his Settecento riformatore. This essay contributes to the history of the development and evolution of the 'English Model' beginning with its influential appearance in Antonio Genovesi's 1757–1758 translation of John Cary's 1695 Essay on the State of England. The 'English Model' was not a stable concept and, in fact, one tradition inverted the…
Iconoclastic eugenics: Thorstein Veblen on Racial Diversity and Cultural Nomadism 1
The Harvard Research Center in Entrepreneurial History and the Daimonic Entrepreneur
This paper sketches the intellectual history of the Research Center in Entrepreneurial History, founded at Harvard in 1948, which helped established the contours of business history as a discipline. This history was shaped by the rivalry between N. S. B. Gras, the "father of business history," and Arthur H. Cole, which defined still extant polarities in the field of business history. It provides context for the emergence of the figure of the "ent…
In the Zone: On Quinn Slobodian’s Crack-Up Capitalism and the Spaces of Political Economy
Quinn Slobodian has established himself as a leading historian of neoliberalism. Crack-Up Capitalism continues where his Globalists left off, but shifts focus from visions of global ordering to the fragmentation of the world into special economic zones (SEZs). In Slobodian’s provocative analysis, SEZs become a late neoliberal solution to the entrenched problem of democracy at the nation-state level. We follow Slobodian into the zone, thinking wit…
Political Economy and the Medici
Using materials from the important collection of Medici manuscripts donated to Harvard Business School by Harry Gordon Selfridge, this paper explores the geopolitics of the transformation of raw wool into finished cloth, and the role played in that process by Medici entrepreneurs, their guild, and their government. It aims to show that the history of political economy cannot truly be understood without business history. Successful business practi…
Italy and the Origins of Capitalism
Capitalism does not seem like a concept in danger of disappearing.At
Introduction to the Symposium on the Contributions of Business to Economics
This essay introduces the symposium and records some reflections from symposium participants on the role of businesses in the formation of economic ideas. What are some specific challenges in researching the contributions of businesspersons to economics? Which topics or events involving the role of businesspersons in economics are most in need of scholarly analysis? What are some of the key historical trends that can be discerned in how businessp…
Leviathan and Kraken: States, Corporations, and Political Economy
In our politico-philosophical bestiary, no monster has historically been more prominent than the Leviathan, the whale of the Book of Job, transformed by Hobbes, which has long been ubiquitous as a metaphor or as a signifier in all intellectual traditions touching upon the political. Like the state itself, we argue, the Leviathan has played an outsized role in the way we theorize and imagine relations of sovereignty in the world. This essay seeks …
Northern Lights: Political Economy and theTerroirof the Norwegian Enlightenment
Breaking Even: Political Economy and Private Enterprise in the Norwegian Glass Industry, 1739–1803
Using internal debates and surviving account books, this article traces the eighteenth-century history of the Norwegian glass industry, created to exploit Norway's immense natural resource wealth, and of the chartered company that would later become Norway's iconic Christiania Glasmagasin. The investors in the company, many of them among Norway's “founding fathers,” were individually responsible for its losses and it operated, remarkably, at an a…
Blaming the Medici: Footnotes, falsification, and the fate of the ‘English Model’ in eighteenth-century Italy
Franco Venturi famously emphasised the importance of the 'English Model' for Italian reformist culture in his Settecento riformatore. This essay contributes to the history of the development and evolution of the 'English Model' beginning with its influential appearance in Antonio Genovesi's 1757–1758 translation of John Cary's 1695 Essay on the State of England. The 'English Model' was not a stable concept and, in fact, one tradition inverted the…
Iconoclastic eugenics: Thorstein Veblen on Racial Diversity and Cultural Nomadism 1
Blaming the Medici: Footnotes, falsification, and the fate of the ‘English Model’ in eighteenth-century Italy
Franco Venturi famously emphasised the importance of the 'English Model' for Italian reformist culture in his Settecento riformatore. This essay contributes to the history of the development and evolution of the 'English Model' beginning with its influential appearance in Antonio Genovesi's 1757–1758 translation of John Cary's 1695 Essay on the State of England. The 'English Model' was not a stable concept and, in fact, one tradition inverted the…
“One will make of political economy… what the scholastics have done with philosophy”: Henry Lloyd and the Mathematization of Economics
Research Article| November 01 2007 “One will make of political economy... what the scholastics have done with philosophy”: Henry Lloyd and the Mathematization of Economics Sophus A. Reinert Sophus A. Reinert Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google History of Political Economy (2007) 39 (4): 643–677. https://doi.org/10.1215/00182702-2007-035 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation Sophus A. Reine…
Lessons on the Rise and Fall of Great Powers: Conquest, Commerce, and Decline in Enlightenment Italy
THOUGH THE THEME OF HIS Sidgwick Memorial Lecture at Cambridge was “Decadence,” and though he knew that “somewhere in the dim future” decline lay inevitably ahead, former British prime minister Arthur Balfour saw in 1908 “no symptoms either of pause or of regression in the onward movement which for more than a thousand years has been characteristic of Western civilisation.” 1 Just over a century later, his “dim future” has become our grim present…
The information master: Jean-Baptiste Colbert's secret state intelligence system - By Jacob Soll
Impossible engineering: Technology and territoriality on the Canal du Midi - By Chandra Mukerji
Translating Empire: Emulation and the Origins of Political Economy
Historians have traditionally used the discourses of free trade and laissez-faire to explain the development of political economy during the Enlightenment. But from Sophus Reinert’s perspective, eighteenth-century political economy can be understood only in the context of the often brutal imperial rivalries then unfolding in Europe and its former colonies and the positive consequences of active economic policy. The idea of economic emulation was …
The Political Economy of Empire in the Early Modern World
Paschalis M. Kitromilides. Enlightenment and Revolution: The Making of Modern Greece
Few cases in recent history speak more eloquently to the vexing relationship between economic decline and extremism than the ongoing Greek debt crisis and the ascendance of political parties like Golden Dawn. Greece's runaway public spending and institutionalized corruption have repeatedly rocked the Eurozone and, periodically, even the world economy, galvanizing chthonic passions and prejudices there and abroad. Paschalis M. Kitromilides is undo…
The Way to Wealth around the World: Benjamin Franklin and the Globalization of American Capitalism
Introduction to the Symposium on the Contributions of Business to Economics
This essay introduces the symposium and records some reflections from symposium participants on the role of businesses in the formation of economic ideas. What are some specific challenges in researching the contributions of businesspersons to economics? Which topics or events involving the role of businesspersons in economics are most in need of scholarly analysis? What are some of the key historical trends that can be discerned in how businessp…
The Harvard Research Center in Entrepreneurial History and the Daimonic Entrepreneur
This paper sketches the intellectual history of the Research Center in Entrepreneurial History, founded at Harvard in 1948, which helped established the contours of business history as a discipline. This history was shaped by the rivalry between N. S. B. Gras, the "father of business history," and Arthur H. Cole, which defined still extant polarities in the field of business history. It provides context for the emergence of the figure of the "ent…
New Perspectives on the History of Political Economy
Markets, Morals, Politics: Jealousy of Trade and the History of Political Thought
When Istvan Hont died in 2013, the world lost a giant of intellectual history. A leader of the Cambridge School of Political Thought, Hont argued passionately for a global-historical approach to political ideas. To better understand the development of liberalism, he looked not only to the works of great thinkers but also to their reception and use amid revolution and interstate competition. His innovative program of study culminated in the landma…
Breaking Even: Political Economy and Private Enterprise in the Norwegian Glass Industry, 1739–1803
Using internal debates and surviving account books, this article traces the eighteenth-century history of the Norwegian glass industry, created to exploit Norway's immense natural resource wealth, and of the chartered company that would later become Norway's iconic Christiania Glasmagasin. The investors in the company, many of them among Norway's “founding fathers,” were individually responsible for its losses and it operated, remarkably, at an a…
Political Economy and the Medici
Using materials from the important collection of Medici manuscripts donated to Harvard Business School by Harry Gordon Selfridge, this paper explores the geopolitics of the transformation of raw wool into finished cloth, and the role played in that process by Medici entrepreneurs, their guild, and their government. It aims to show that the history of political economy cannot truly be understood without business history. Successful business practi…
Italy and the Origins of Capitalism
Capitalism does not seem like a concept in danger of disappearing.At
Leviathan and Kraken: States, Corporations, and Political Economy
In our politico-philosophical bestiary, no monster has historically been more prominent than the Leviathan, the whale of the Book of Job, transformed by Hobbes, which has long been ubiquitous as a metaphor or as a signifier in all intellectual traditions touching upon the political. Like the state itself, we argue, the Leviathan has played an outsized role in the way we theorize and imagine relations of sovereignty in the world. This essay seeks …
Northern Lights: Political Economy and theTerroirof the Norwegian Enlightenment
The Origins of the Developmental State: The European Experience
This chapter interrogates the currently resurgent and frequently demonized concept of “state capitalism” from a deeper historical perspective. It argues that contrary to what often is maintained, the concept can be fruitfully traced back to the strategies and policies of the city-states of Medieval and Renaissance Italy, if not before, and that pertinent aspects of it can be used to explain practically all successful trajectories of development s…
The historian, the shaman, and the werewolf
Disclosure statementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s)
In the Zone: On Quinn Slobodian’s Crack-Up Capitalism and the Spaces of Political Economy
Quinn Slobodian has established himself as a leading historian of neoliberalism. Crack-Up Capitalism continues where his Globalists left off, but shifts focus from visions of global ordering to the fragmentation of the world into special economic zones (SEZs). In Slobodian’s provocative analysis, SEZs become a late neoliberal solution to the entrenched problem of democracy at the nation-state level. We follow Slobodian into the zone, thinking wit…
Forms of Capitalism
Reconsidering the Commercial Revolution
retirement and fellow of All Souls College, arrived on the academic scene with a splash in the early 1980s, but his scholarly output over the last two decades, especially the four important monographs (with a combined count of around 3,000 pages) beginning with the Wolfson Prize-winning Framing the Early Middle Ages (2005) and ending with the megahistory presently under review, has been nothing short of breathtaking.An unrepentant Marxist histori…
In the Land of Marvels: Science, Fabricated Realities, and Industrial Espionage in the Age of the Grand Tour
Political science (19 works) · Law (18 works) · Politics (16 works) · Sociology (13 works) · Economics (11 works) · History (11 works) · Political economy (11 works) · Historical Economic and Social Studies (9 works) · Political Economy and Marxism (8 works) · Law (7 works)