Gregory Collins, lecturer in Political Science, as an article on the Law and Liberty website entitled “Understanding the Commercial Republic.”
Abstract:
The glittering sheen of commerce masks a Janus-faced enigma, that parent of both war and peace, glory and ruin, freedom and despotism, progress and regress, virtue and hedonism. Accused by thinkers throughout the ages of inducing these wide-ranging and contradictory effects, commerce—and its role in conditioning the character of peoples and nations—is the subject of a delightful new Festschrift, Commerce and Character: The Political Economy of the Enlightenment and the American Founding, in honor of Ralph Lerner, the Benjamin Franklin Professor Emeritus of Social Thought at the University of Chicago and a distinguished scholar of political theory and American political thought for over sixty years. Edited by Steven Frankel and John Ray, the volume of essays offers keen interventions in scholarly debates over Enlightenment thinkers’ views on the intersection of commerce and statecraft. Its chapters, however, are also written with a level of clarity and concision that makes their arguments accessible to readers who may be unfamiliar with some of the books cited throughout the volume.