István Hont

19 Jul

István Hont was born in Budapest in 1947 into a privileged family committed to the socialist cause and well-connected with the communist regime. His mother, Klára Kemény (1923-1973), was an agricultural engineer and later a professor of engineering in Hungary. His father, János Hont (1914-1982), was deputy president of the National Planning Office and subsequently deputy in the Ministry of Agriculture. In this latter capacity, he worked to reverse the trend of collectivisation by implementing reforms that allowed peasant proprietors to keep possession of their smallholdings. By the standards of the time, he was remarkably un-corrupt and even refused to exempt his son from the dreaded mandatory enlistment in the People’s Army, from which Sgt István Hont was officially discharged with honour on 3 August 1966 after a year’s service in the Air Defence Corps.

Hont’s intellectual formation was naturally dominated by the heavy hand of Marxist officialdom, permeating the nation’s political and educational institutions. After completing his studies at the Eötvös Loránd University (ELTE) in Budapest, gaining a Master’s degree in 1973 and defending his PhD in June 1974 (summa cum laude), he was promoted to Research Officer at the Institute of History at the Hungarian Academy of Sciences (MTA), a purely research-oriented institution, which had given him a junior fellowship during his studies, and which required his membership of the Hungarian Socialist Worker’s Party (MSZMP).

Within the Institute of History, Hont quickly grew dissatisfied with the Marxist academic milieu and acquired a reputation for being intellectually rebellious. Although the Academy of Sciences set strict boundaries to research topics, he was fortunate to have access to the British Embassy library, which provided an indispensable sanctuary for his studies, allowing him to indulge in various academic ‘heresies’. In his doctoral thesis entitled Hume and Scotland, completed under the supervision of the economic historian Professor Éva Balázs (1915-2006), Hont examined the theoretical significance of the fact that the provenance of ‘classical’ political economy was predominantly Scottish, being convinced that this had been more than a historical contingency. The specific historical vantagepoint of Scotland, which in contrast to England was a poor country, had profoundly shaped the philosophical perspective of Hume and his contemporaries in ways that had positively enabled them to theorise a generalisable model of historical and economic development.

While he was still working on his PhD, Hont had – with the help of his father – acquired a set of visas for himself and his wife Anna Hont (née Lovas) to visit England where he met Duncan Forbes, of Claire College, Cambridge, who at the time was the leading authority on Hume’s political thought. On a second visit to England in 1975, as their new visas were about to expire, the couple made the difficult decision to defect, which they were able to do with the assistance of the economic historian Michael M. Postan (1899-1981). Through Postan’s guidance and connections it was arranged that Hont would be enrolled for a second PhD at Oxford under the supervision of Hugh Trevor-Roper, then Regius Professor of History. Naturally, this meant that he was now ideally placed to continue his work on Scottish political economy, having also gained access to the archival material of the Bodleian Library and with various Scottish archives within reach. And with the help of an Austrian relative, Hont even managed to smuggle out of Hungary his own 1802 edition of Hume’s History of England.

At Oxford, Hont was appointed to a Research Fellowship in Intellectual History at Wolfson College. There he attended the classes of Sir John Hicks, whose lectures gave him a firmer grasp of the history of political economy, supplementing the extensive knowledge that he had already acquired in Budapest. At Wolfson College, Hont produced his first paper in English, the manuscript of which is dated March 1977 and entitled ‘David Hume and the Paradox of Scottish Improvement – The Hume-Tucker Debate’. This paper, which is an early version of his article on the ‘rich country-poor country debate’, was then submitted as part of his application to a fellowship at the King’s College Research Centre in Cambridge. Following a successful interview, Hont received the position in 1978, acquiring also a leading organisational role alongside Michael Ignatieff in the advertised project on ‘Political Economy and Society, 1750-1850’, which lasted from 1978 to 1984 and established Hont’s as a leading intellectual historian of political economy. One important result of the project was the 1983 publication of Wealth and Virtue - The Shaping of Political Economy in the Scottish Enlightenment, co-edited by István Hont and Michael Ignatieff. The culmination of Hont’s career was the publication of Jealousy of Trade in 2005, which gathered together papers from more than thirty years of scholarship to form one coherent argument about the modern intersection of political and economic thought.

The Institute of Intellectual History organises the István Hont Book Prize for the best new work in intellectual history published in any calendar year and regularly holds István Hont Memorial Lectures.

The István Hont Collection

Thousand Manuscripts Blog

The Political Theory of Adam Smith

A lecture given at Barnard College (NY) in 2006.

The Cambridge Moment

A talk given in 2005 at Chiba University in Japan.

István Hont's papers have kindly been donated to the University of St Andrews, where the István Hont Collection is now part of the larger Intellectual History Archive, hosted by the Institute of Intellectual History. It features research notes and teaching materials, texts of lectures and presentations, and previously unpublished essays. Parts of his vast personal library have also been made available to users of the University Library.

Tributes and Memorials

István Hont died on March 29, 2013. In August of that year, a memorial event was held in Cambridge at which memorial addresses were given by John Dunn, Gareth Stedman Jones, Richard Tuck, Anna Stilz (in absentia), Keith Tribe, Béla Kapossy and Isaac Nakhimovsky.

István Hont (1947 – 2013)
First published in by The Point magazine, Chicago. Reproduced here by kind permission. Adapted from an address given at the memorial service for István Hont at Kings College, Cambridge in August 2013.
István Hont was born in Budapest in 1947, emigrated to the UK in 1974, and was from 1978 to his death in 2013 a Fellow at Kings College, Cambridge (with the exception of a very brief stint at Columbia University in the 1980s). Hont was one of the leading intellectual historians of his generation, with a special interest in Adam Smith as an intellectual figure who contributed to forming one of the dominant ideologies of incipient capitalism. His combination of overwhelming erudition, extreme intellectual fertility, originality, sharpness of perception and argumentative rigor had to be experienced in the flesh to be appreciated. His book Jealousy of Trade (Harvard, 2005) is a recognized masterpiece but gives only a pale reflection of the monumental intelligence that lay behind it. And so in a way the “real” István was the one encountered in supervisions and seminars at Cambridge, especially in the so-called “Monday Seminar” on intellectual history and political thought. In an ideal world any discussion of his intellectual significance would be centered on his interpretation of the period he made his own, the Scottish Enlightenment. Since I don’t have the competence to do this, my remarks will focus, even at the risk of a certain eccentricity of treatment, on some more general features of his approach that are visible even to those of us who are not trained historians.
In an early remark, Nietzsche describes his own project as that of trying to look at the world with the eyes of a “cold angel” who “sees through the whole miserable spectacle,” yet neither bears reality any ill-will, nor finds the world in the least bit “cozy”. [1] This, of course, is a modern variant of Tacitus’ famous declaration of non-partisanship when he asserts that he decided to write the history of the recent past sine ira et studio—“without anger or favoritism”. It would have been perfectly understandable if a member of the Senatorial aristocracy like Tacitus had written a history that was motivated by hatred or resentment of those Emperors who took over prestigious functions previously exercised by the Senate. Or he might have been keen to glorify the achievements of his particular faction, to present their motives in the best possible light, to promote their cause. Ira and studium therefore stand for negative and positive forms of bias, actively favoring or discriminating against one side or the other in the struggle for dominance. Tacitus clearly saw both of these as pitfalls to be avoided.[2]
Nietzsche’s view is an existential and metaphysical intensification of this basic Tacitean tack. If members of the Roman Senate tended to resent the Emperor because he thwarted their plans and reduced their dignity, and they allowed this to bleed into their account of politics, this was as nothing, Nietzsche thought, compared to the deep-seated general human resentment against reality itself, which continually frustrates us and imposes limits on our action, and against the course of human history, which can disrupt even an Emperor. If an individual Senator sought a sense of security and moral comfort in an exaggerated view of the power, accomplishments and virtue of his own faction, how much stronger is the temptation for humans in general to believe that the world is basically a benign place, or, at any rate, that history is on one’s side? This impulse can take a variety of forms covering a broad spectrum of attitudes. At one end of this spectrum lies a grudging participation in what is recognized as being the only game on offer and at the other end active triumphalism, the “warm” embracing of the status quo as a place in which one can feel completely at home. Finally, if history gives one a nasty surprise, what would be stronger than the temptation to become bitter and go sour on reality itself?
Nietzsche’s image of the “cold angel” is, I wish to suggest, a good foil to use in thinking about István´s work. István was impervious to the siren-songs of coziness, to the studium of explicit or tacit theodicies, to naive belief in progress, and to the self-congratulatory forms of wishful thinking that are particularly characteristic of modern liberal democracies. Equally, and perhaps more surprisingly, in his work he seemed remarkably resistant to the ira that can be one of the effects of the disappointment of deeply rooted hopes—even if, given his background and the events of the historical period in which he lived, he might have had more cause than most.
Although this discussion has been couched in the vocabulary of individual psychology— Tacitus’ ira, Nietzsche’s ill-will, my own use of “resentment” and “going sour on reality”— what is actually at issue are structural features of the interaction between concepts, theories, forms of action and human agents. If we fall back on what look like simple psychological terms, it is because we lack an appropriate and distinctive idiom for speaking about this whole domain. To look at the world through the lens of a theory that has the structure of a theodicy is not necessarily to be of a cheerful disposition, but rather to be theoretically committed to a number of assumptions about the world that will affect what else one will be likely to notice, how one will likely process what one perceives, and what courses of action one finds it easy or difficult to envisage.
This reflection might help to dispel the air of paradox that surrounds the application of the image of a “cold angel” to István. “Cold” is certainly not the adjective one would think of using about István as a person, about his attitude toward his subject-matter or about his treatment of it. He was as personally enthusiastic about his interests as anyone could be, and as capable as anyone of being vexed by those who proposed or perpetuated what he took to be untenable views. Personal passion, though, just to repeat, is not the same as structural affirmation of—or metaphysical resentment against—the course of history itself. Nor is resistance to the temptation of coziness a form of “skepticism”, if one construes “skepticism” as a strictly epistemological category. A healthy tendency toward suspension of belief, argumentative counter-suggestability and bloody-minded insistence of seeing “evidence” is of course part of the scholarly ethos, but István didn’t really think he was justified in claiming to know (for certain) fewer things than most people did (as would be the case for a classic skeptic). If anything, the reverse. To return to the quotation from Nietzsche, István wanted to “see through” things. Seeing through comforting or resentment-based illusions doesn’t mean limiting knowledge claims. To use an example that is mine rather than István’s, I don’t think I know less about the contemporary liberal ideology of rights and democracy than its confused and naive advocates do, but more.
A second difficulty one might have with the idea of István as a cold angel is that angels are primarily observers in the messy human process of acting, not participants.[3] Yet one of the most characteristic features of István’s thought was the view that human praxis had its own dignity, its own standpoint on the world and its own logic, and was not a mere weak sister of “theory”. The world confronting a political actor is really not much like that confronting an engineer trying to use a pre-given theory to build a bridge, a judge attempting to apply the law in judging a defendant, or a scientist testing a hypothesis. One salient difference is surely that engineering, law and science are limited and rule-governed activities directed at well-defined situations in a way in which politics need not be. I can argue with the engineer about which is the best way to calculate stress, and that can be a question within the competence of engineering. If, however, I begin to ask whether we should build the bridge over this river at all—maybe we don’t have the money or don’t actually wish to encourage fraternization with our obnoxious neighbors—we may quickly exit from the realm of engineering altogether. Politics isn’t internally bounded in this way or so strictly rulebound. There is the phenomenon of “routine politics”—electoral strategy in times of peace and stability—but it is also clear that this routine politics can at any time turn into something else. At some point the Cossacks may turn their weapons not on the peasants in the square but on their own officers. The political actor must always take this possibility into account in a way in which the engineer qua engineer need not take account of the possibility that people might decide they don’t want a bridge at all. From this idea that there is a distinctive
standpoint of practical agents, it is but a small step to the further claim that the study of political thought ought to take seriously the standpoint of agents who are facing uncertain and antecedently ill-defined situations which call for action, and thus are not like lawyers or engineers. And if this is right, the study of the history of political thought must somehow take account of this specific viewpoint of the political actor, the viewpoint of ‘praxis’. The ‘angel’ as archetypical non-agent therefore seems out of place in this picture.
István’s view was praxis-centered, but the argument given in the previous paragraph can and must be run the other way around as well. Although to understand political thinkers of the past, we must understand their politics, it is also the case that our relation to past politics cannot be the deeply practical relation we have to contemporary politics. My relation to the expansion of the Roman Republic in the second century BC cannot be the same kind of thing as my opposition to the creeping—and not so creeping—privatization of the NHS which is currently being implemented by the UK government. We have no alternative but to have something more like an “angelic” relation to the Roman Republic than we do to the Coalition Government. This doesn’t mean we can’t in some sense change the past by what we do now. What we do now does affect, no matter how infinitesimally, how relevant certain features of the past will be and in what way they will be effectively available to us. Appeals to “relevance” are potentially subject to serious misuse, most often because they can foster highly disagreeable and often ideologically motivated forms of myopia, but the possibility of such misuse should not blind us to the fact that “relevance” is not a mere epiphenomenon but is rather a constitutive characteristic of history. Past thought can be close to us to a greater or lesser degree.
Of course, István thought, one studied the history of political thought in order to understand, and thus presumably improve, our own politics. “Why else would you do it?” he once remarked to me. He didn’t have a theoretically elaborated view on the relation of present and past praxis in general—no one does, and it is possible that it is even a mistake to think that one should or could have a theory of this. Perhaps contemporary political action, contemporary theories and historical reflection form something like a singular and shifting force field within which we must move. If so, István moved in it with great skill.
To write about a recently deceased friend is to put oneself into an uncomfortable and artificial situation because one must act as if one were the recording angel of the life of someone one loved, summing him up. There is perhaps nothing to be done about this except perhaps to point out that this is an artifact of the situation of grievous loss in which those who knew István find ourselves. It is customary in such cases to reflect that we at least have the man’s works. That is true. But it gives no consolation, because those works are no replacement for the presence of his living voice.
Notes:
1. „Ich möchte die Frage nach dem Werthe der Erkenntniß behandeln wie ein kalter Engel, der die ganze Lumperei durchschaut. Ohne böse zu sein, aber ohne Gemüth“ (19 [234]). This is a fragment from 1872-3 [Friedrich Nietzsche: Sämtliche Werke. Kritische Studienausgabe ed. Colli and Montinari (de Gruyter, 1980), vol. 7, p. 493]. Although this is a remark specifically about the “value of cognition”, it seems reasonable to adopt it for the purposes described.
2. Whether or not he actually succeeded in avoiding them in his history is, of course, another matter. Similarly, it is an open question whether this aspiration could in principle be realized (even if it is not by Tacitus), whether it is a dangerous or an innocent illusion, or whether, even if it is unrealizable, it might retain value as an ideal to be approached asymptotically.
3. In this they differ from Homeric gods, who are invulnerable but have both the capacity for complete detachment and for active engagement. Walter Benjamin’s “angel of history” is presented as essentially a passive spectator of what has happened: he stares in open-mouthed horror at the past as its catastrophes pile up in front of him, a single mountainous mass of ruins that reaches to the skies, and he is propelled backward into the future by a wind that blows from a utopian past. An ‘angel’ (from Greek word for ‘announce’ [ἀγγέλλειν]), is essentially a messenger. If angels do intervene, it is as mere ministers of Divine Will, so without fully human forms of independent decision-making.
Istvan Hont as Teacher
In order to explain what Istvan Hont meant to me I am forced to go back to my education as an intellectual historian. Burdening the reader with such particular recollections is never to be encouraged, but the reason is to explain Istvan’s impact upon his students. When I was younger I was very fortunate in being taught by some of the most renowned intellectual historians in the Anglophone world. As an undergraduate at the University of Cambridge I attended the final lectures of Duncan Forbes on the Scottish Enlightenment and the altogether inspirational lectures of Quentin Skinner on ideas about the state between Locke and Machiavelli. At the same time, I was supervised by Brendan Bradshaw who taught that the Reformation was a movement within a long history of Catholic reform, rather than being anything essentially Protestant. It was he who told me that I had to read John Pocock’s The Machiavellian Moment, and who clearly considered it to be for intellectual historians what E. P. Thomson’s The Making of the English Working Class was for social historians. He was right. In my final year, I was taught by Richard Tuck on modern political philosophy, by Peter Clarke on Keynes and the role of the state, and by Gareth Stedman Jones on socialism. I can’t imagine better tutors or a better environment in which to learn the rudiments of intellectual history and the history of modern political and economic ideas. On graduation I went to Harvard for a year and was taught by the incomparable Judith Shklar and by John Rawls, then revising his Theory of Justice through detailed engagement with Rousseau and with Kant. In addition I was able to attend the lectures and seminars of Robert Nozick, Michael Sandel, Amartya Sen and Bernard Bailyn, only to mention the more prominent among a host of luminaries with interests in history, intellectual history and political and economic thought. My plan, at the time, was to go to Oxford to study Condorcet’s economic ideas with Iain McLean. To this end I secured funding from the Economic and Social Research Council. Well-laid plans were scuppered by news that Iain was taking a sabbatical in North America. I received a phone call very early one morning from Gerry Cohen, then head of department, who gave me the bad news that there was no expertise on my proposed topic, and that therefore Oxford were going to revoke my place and therefore my funding. In retrospect this sounds harsh, but he was very nice about it and I fully understood the situation. At a loss, I decided to try to return to Cambridge, and put in a proposal to study the reception of Adam Smith’s ideas in the early nineteenth century. I was accepted, although the funding from the ESRC could not be transferred to Cambridge because the institution was blacklisted, having failed to meet the quota of successful PhDs being awarded within a set timeframe in previous years. I presumed that Gareth Stedman Jones would teach me, but I was informed that my application had been passed on to someone who had been appointed from Columbia called Istvan Hont. The first letter I received from Istvan identified “lacunae in my learning”; in other words, Istvan considered my proposal of study to be hopeless, and he told me that we would talk about what I might do when I arrived in Cambridge. I had no idea who he was, but I did have an idea of his impact upon the great. Asking the opinion of Judith Shklar, she told me that I should seek to be supervised by Quentin Skinner, Richard Tuck or Gareth Stedman Jones, but not Istvan. I’m still not sure why she held this opinion and never got the chance to talk further about it. It did not matter who anyone was, Istvan would always identify problems in their work. Fearlessness was one of the key facets of his character. When I met Istvan some months later I was speedily convinced that Shklar had been altogether mistaken. Istvan told me that rather than doing anything on Adam Smith, new work needed to be done on Jean-Baptiste Say. Being a dutiful soul, I went away for a couple of months and then thought that I should start to write essays on the existing Say literature and methods more generally; I had been informed in ‘how to do a PhD’ classes that the first step might usefully be a chapter on method. When I submitted essays to Istvan he informed me that they were so bad that I ought not to attempt to write anything that would ultimately contribute to the PhD for two years. Rather, I should get on with understanding the subject by working through primary sources on the period of the French Revolution, and Say’s work more generally, and gradually begin to formulate an argument. I met Istvan every couple of months and he would demolish existing literature on the French Revolution, economic thought in the eighteenth century and political thought in the long eighteenth century, and reconstruct the questions asked and answers given to problems faced by philosophers and commentators from Hume to Sieyes. The meetings normally went like this. I would make an interpretative suggestion. Istvan would explain where I’d got it from in terms of the secondary literature and would explain the assumptions that lay behind such work. He would then say why it was mistaken and what might be put in its place, while I crammed down Istvan’s ideas into a notebook. Metaphors drawn from the construction industry are apt when describing what Istvan was like as a teacher. He was a brutal demolisher of the argumentative buildings of historical thought. Many I have known who argued with him have likened the experience to being driven over by a tank; for British victims at least, it had to be a Panzer. But Istvan was never merely a leveller. Rather, he took you to the top of the tallest building to see a new landscape, which he described in long and sometimes rambling descriptions of what the eighteenth century, after Hontian town planning had been put into practice, would look like. The effect was thrilling because you came out of meetings feeling that you had not experienced a supervision but rather a super-vision or super-visionary at work. Istvan was an arch critic and I will always have his words ringing in my ears (“Richard, your work is shit [pronounced ‘sheet’]”). Many students fell by the wayside. I was undoubtedly one of the weakest, but after a couple of years he finally stated that a chapter might be taken further, if entirely remodelled. Readers might think that Istvan’s approach was too rough. But he was willing to devote as much time as any student demanded and he inspired. The central lesson he imparted was that intellectual progress was a myth, and that those who believed in the superiority of the moderns, meaning twentieth-century authors, were not just mistaken but stupid. But while those who listened were led to a healthy scepticism, they were also certain that they had experienced enlightenment in their own understanding of the past and had made a personal intellectual journey that was defined by progress. Istvan was as critical of his own work as he was that of others; more so in fact. That meant that while he could describe a landscape verbally, he found it difficult to put it down on paper, because everything had to be tested and proven. Again, an archaeological metaphor will explain what I mean. Istvan, when he wrote, erected structures that had to be tested by collapsing them, then reerected from the foundations a second time. The result was always the deep understanding of a subject, revealing the truth behind the veil, and of hidden meanings and connections that had been ignored by the less dedicated explorers of the past. Sometimes when reading the work of those associated with what is often called The Cambridge School of intellectual history there is agreement that there was a lot of continuity in thinking about transitions between ancient and early modern or modern times, and that much could be revealed about the past by looking at ideas about liberty or the state that were articulated by Stoic, Epicurean, Platonist or Aristotelian philosophers. Istvan exploded such claims in two ways. First of all, he emphasised discontinuity. There was not much that Cicero could tell those living in a world of reason of state where reason of state was directed towards taking the markets and commerce of foreign communities. Sometimes things changed and the thing to do was to look at the responses to the change, rather than how earlier authors had or had not examined related ideas. Secondly, there was no point studying concepts, because concepts meant such different things at different times and in different places. And in any case, none of them could be understood separately from any other. An idea about liberty had consequences not just for the domestic sphere but for international relations and for the economy. Those who were not schooled in political economy could only with difficulty see what really mattered to people from the seventeenth century onwards, when the economic relationship with politics both expanded and contracted. Istvan was always sceptical about methodological discussion because he felt that what mattered was the substance rather than the form of an argument. He felt happy in Cambridge because the issue of what happened in the eighteenth century brought scholars together from a variety of backgrounds, who could see the direct link between the debate about commercial society and politics then and now. It might be said that Istvan did not provide a sufficiently clear vision of the past as he saw it. Then again, who has? What he did was to justify intellectual history as a subject, provided a model of how to be an intellectual historian, and wrote articles that persuaded others to join the tribe. Noone who listened to Istvan went away thinking that his work was irrelevant or flippant; many were convinced that there was no more important work across the entire humanities. Istvan articulated the questions that shaped politics between early modern and modern times with a profundity and passion rarely found in historical enquiry. Everyone who knew him will forever miss him.
Richard Whatmore, January 2014, St Andrews
István Hont (1947 – 2013)
First published in the Cambridge Humanities Review.
Outside of Cambridge, it is widely believed that there is a ‘Cambridge School’ in the history of political thought. Within Cambridge, the existence of such a ‘school’ is much less obvious. Agreement on the scholars who should be associated with it, or on its distinctive intellectual characteristics, would be hard to come by. Among recent practitioners of the subject, István Hont, Reader in the History of Political Thought in the Faculty of History and Fellow of King’s, embodied this disjunction more sharply than anyone. To colleagues (including this writer) who work in the field he cultivated – one which extended over the whole of European political thought from the mid-seventeenth to the mid-nineteenth centuries – he is the reason why Cambridge has been the reference point for original and creative enquiry. Yet few of them would have regarded Hont as representative of a ‘Cambridge’ school, and any who ventured so to think of him would have been brusquely disabused of the notion by Hont himself. He was not ‘of’ Cambridge by background and intellectual formation, and he never allowed his long tenure of a University post here to domesticate him, institutionally or intellectually. At the same time, he believed passionately in the importance of his subject, and in the responsibility of Cambridge historians to uphold this, and to take the lead in the subject’s pursuit and propagation. The combination of denial and affirmation was often infuriating, to colleagues within as well as outwith the history of political thought, in Cambridge and beyond; but it was, as I shall try to show, the key to his quite remarkable contribution to the subject, and to the study of history more generally.
István Hont was born in Hungary in April 1947, of secular Jewish parents, and educated in Budapest at the King Stephen I Gymnasium. Russian was compulsory, and István learned it; but he never afterwards used it, although he was a good linguist, who read German, French and Italian. On leaving school he did a year of national service in the Hungarian army (1964-65), and then began to study Electronic Engineering at the Budapest Institute of Technology, completing Part I of the degree in 1968. Even if engineering was not to be his future, these were far from wasted years. Amidst all his scholarship, István was a lifelong car enthusiast, devouring auto magazines and freely advising colleagues on what they should be driving. But in 1968 he changed course, switching to History and Philosophy at the University of Budapest. Winning a Prize Studentship in 1970, he completed his MA in 1973, and proceeded immediately to the Dr Ph., which he gained in 1974. His doctoral thesis, supervised by Professor Éva Balázs, was on ‘David Hume and Scotland’. He was appointed a Research Officer in the Institute of History in the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, a post which required membership of the Communist Party. There his duties included making summaries of the Economic History Review, which then occupied the place in historical studies now held by Past and Present; he thus acquired his encyclopaedic knowledge of modern economic and social history.
In this position, he was also asked to act as driver and guide to Michael Postan, Professor of Economic History at Cambridge, during a visit by Postan to Budapest. It was a crucial connection. Postan detected the young Hont’s frustration, and subsequently encouraged and helped him to come to England. In 1975, István and his wife Anna visited England, and just as their Hungarian ‘exit’ visas were due to run out, took the brave decision to seek leave to remain in the United Kingdom. Re-starting his academic career here was not easy; Anna, a sociologist, was unable to continue hers, and instead learned computing in order to provide them with an income. István went first to Oxford, where he resumed his study of the Scottish Enlightenment and Hume’s political economy under the supervision of Hugh Trevor-Roper. He also attended Sir John Hicks’s classes in the history of economic thought, laying the foundations for his interest in the history of political economy. He clearly appreciated Hicks’s free-wheeling style of teaching, expounding the ideas of the great economists, but also setting them in context. In 1977 he was appointed to the Research Fellowship in Intellectual History at Wolfson College, Oxford. A year later, however, he moved across to King’s College, Cambridge, to direct the newly-established Research Centre project on ‘Political Economy and Society 1750-1850’, along with Michael Ignatieff.
The six years of the project established Hont’s reputation as a scholar of uncompromising intellectual purpose. He and Ignatieff organised a series of ground-breaking conferences, which not only recast the history of political economy but transformed understanding of its wider intellectual context in moral, social and political thought. The first conference, in 1979, brought together Duncan Forbes (Reader in the History of Political Thought and Fellow of Clare, who claimed not to have set foot in King’s for over a decade), Nicholas Phillipson, John Pocock, Franco Venturi and Donald Winch, along with younger scholars; the second, in 1984 assembled a much larger cast, including John Dunn, James Moore, Judith Shklar, Quentin Skinner, and Richard Tuck, as well as the leading German intellectual historians, Hans Erich Bödeker and Reinhardt Koselleck, the latter the principal exponent of Begriffsgeschichte. But it was Hont who set the agenda, in the first with his paper on the ‘Rich country – poor country problem’, and in the second with early versions of his papers on Natural Law, Pufendorf, and Adam Smith.
What Hont christened the ‘rich country – poor country problem’ in eighteenth-century Scottish political economy concerned the development prospects of countries which lagged behind richer neighbours, as Scotland then lagged behind England. The issue was whether the poor country would be able to take advantage of its poverty, in particular its lower wage costs, to achieve a competitive advantage over its neighbour, and in due course catch it up. The question engaged all the major economic thinkers of the Scottish Enlightenment, David Hume, James Steuart, Adam Smith and several others; their foil was the sceptical English economist, Josiah Tucker, who argued that England would retain its advantage. But Hont’s point was that the Scots were neither of one voice nor simple economic nationalists: both Hume and Smith recognised that the rich countries would indeed retain their advantages, through their capacity for manufacturing innovation and an intensifying division of labour. Nevertheless, poor countries should keep their nerve: only through entry into the international market place could they improve their absolute position, even if they might never catch up altogether. Already, Hont had pinpointed what would be a leitmotif of his analysis of eighteenth-century political economy: securing the benefits of commerce and of commercial society was not for the faint-hearted. An essay on this theme was Hont’s own contribution to the volume which eventually resulted from the first conference, Wealth and Virtue. The Shaping of Political Economy in the Scottish Enlightenment, published by the Cambridge University Press in 1983. But by that time he had added a second strand to his interrogation of Scottish thought, which he brought to the fore in the volume’s introductory essay, co-written with Michael Ignatieff, on ‘Needs and justice in the Wealth of Nations’. The essay argued that Smith’s great work should be read as the culmination of an intensifying critique of Scholastic Natural Law’s concept of distributive justice. It was a critique from within natural jurisprudence: Smith was the heir of Grotius, Pufendorf and Locke. But his was the definitive answer to Aquinas: only a system of competitive markets in food and labour, not charity informed by the principles of distributive justice, would guarantee adequate subsistence to the labouring poor. The importance of the Natural Law tradition for the political thought of the Scottish Enlightenment had previously been signalled by Duncan Forbes; Hont demonstrated just how Smith had responded to it, over-turning one of its central tenets.
As his papers to the second conference revealed, however, Hont conceived of the natural law tradition as the key not only to explaining the Wealth of Nations; it would also provide the historical connection with the political economy of Marx. Briefly there surfaced in these conference contributions, which were never published, a constant but usually submerged dimension of Hont’s intellectual agenda: the need to settle accounts with Marx and his followers. There was nothing simplistic or crudely political in this: Hont never identified with right-wing critiques of Marx and Marxism. His register was that of intellectual-historical scholarship: only at this depth would Marxism’s theoretical limitations be exposed and understood. In these papers, Smith was set between Pufendorf and Marx; Marx’s failing was to have missed the extent to which classical political economy was a response to the larger moral and political issues explored in the Natural Law tradition. In particular, Marx had failed to grasp why modern commercial society was so successful a response to the Hobbesian problem of man’s natural aversion to society: it was precisely self-interest, the willingness to labour and the propensity to exchange, which had drawn man into, and now kept him within, an ordered, economically viable society. The first part of this argument would be published, three years later, as ‘The language of sociability and commerce: Samuel Pufendorf and the theoretical foundations of the “Four Stages Theory”’, in a volume on The Languages of Political Theory in Early Modern Europe, edited by Anthony Pagden (Cambridge, 1987). But the missing second part, taking the argument up to Marx, would never appear in print.
The King’s Political Economy Project ended in 1984, and Hont spent the following academic year as a Simon Fellow at the University of Manchester. In 1986 he was appointed to an Assistant Professorship in Political Science at Columbia. He spent the next three years in the United States, one of them (1987-88) as a Visiting Member of the Institute of Advanced Study at Princeton. He was always attracted to the direct, vigorous style of academic exchange he found there, which was so suited to his own seriousness of purpose; he also appreciated the theoretical edge given to the historical study of political thought at these and other US institutions. Although his return to Cambridge in 1989 would prove to be definitive, there was no guarantee of this at the time. He would hold visiting appointments at Harvard in 1999 and 2000, and was appointed to a tenured position there, only for the offer to be withdrawn at the insistence of a President determined that new appointees must be under fifty.
He returned to Cambridge to succeed Duncan Forbes as the lecturer in the History Faculty primarily responsible for eighteenth-century political thought, for the first three years as a University Assistant Lecturer, then as University Lecturer, and belatedly, from 2008, as Reader in the History of Political Thought. It was an appointment with major implications for the development of the history of political thought at Cambridge. Duncan Forbes had played a key role in the revival of this subject at the University, through his Special Subject on ‘Hume, Smith and the Scottish Enlightenment’, whose takers had included Quentin Skinner and John Dunn (as well as many others later to practice intellectual history – a prosopography of Forbes’s classes would tell us a great deal about the development of the field in the second half of the twentieth century). But for reasons yet to be properly explained, Skinner and Dunn had chosen to make the seventeenth century the focus of their initial, transformative scholarship; and from there Skinner would go further back still, identifying the ‘foundations’ of modern political thought in the Renaissance. Forbes had continued to lecture, defiantly and idiosyncratically, on the Scots and on Hegel, but never associated himself with the methodological or historical claims of those former students, now his colleagues. Hont certainly did not return to Cambridge in 1989 to join a ‘school’; rather he would exploit the freedom which Forbes had preserved for himself. But he did renew the agenda which he had mapped out in the course of the King’s College Project on Political Economy, and had since deepened and extended by study and teaching in America: he now asserted, as Forbes had never wished to do, that eighteenth-century political philosophers and economists had laid many of the intellectual foundations of the modern commercial world.
He did so first of all by his teaching. When Hont returned to Cambridge, the status of the history of political thought was asserted principally through lecturing – a great deal of it: he would later speak wistfully of the years when a single paper, covering political thought from 1700 to 1890, was the subject of over a hundred lectures. He was no less demanding a lecturer than a scholar, expecting undergraduates to reach above their heads, sometimes high above them, to grasp his arguments. He spoke best without notes, but with extensive handouts of textual quotations; he conveyed utter conviction, but at a level of complexity which pre-empted dogmatism. No-one could hear a lecture by Hont without realising that she or he was being told something important, something which it was important to try to understand. As an undergraduate supervisor, first impressions were similarly uncompromising; but if the student responded, and made the effort to engage, so would he. He was endlessly generous in reading essays, even those written simply as exam practice, a task most supervisors find less than rewarding.
Increasingly, a second strand of his teaching was devoted to graduates. With Quentin Skinner, Richard Tuck, Anthony Pagden, Gareth Stedman Jones and later Annabel Brett, he played a major part in the establishment of the M.Phil. in Political Thought and Intellectual History. This immediately commanded an international reputation, and became the History Faculty’s most successful M.Phil., while also involving colleagues in Politics and International Relations. The classes in which Hont introduced the new graduates to the study of a selected text, most recently Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments, were famous for taking no prisoners. Students who imagined that an internship in a management consultancy had given them a fair grasp of Adam Smith needed to be summarily disabused of their misapprehension: they were now at Cambridge, where the bar for beginning the study of Smith (or Hobbes, or Hume, or Kant) was set higher than anywhere else. Such rigour ensured, however, that those who responded to the demands of the M.Phil. would be wellprepared for the PhD.
At this level too, Hont was a famously demanding supervisor. But this was not dirigisme: intellectual independence had the highest value in his estimation of a doctoral student, and those who possessed it flourished. Initially he talked a student through the bibliography and the crucial questions at stake in a topic, often for hours at a time; later he would read and re-read drafts of the thesis, with the same patience and attention he gave to undergraduate essays, but necessarily taking even more time. Some of his students extended and deepened his own studies of Scottish thinkers; but many took Hont’s insights elsewhere, into French, German and Italian thought. Increasingly also they took their investigations forwards in time, into the early nineteenth century. Among the earliest of these doctoral students were Béla Kapossy and Richard Whatmore; more recently Isaac Nakhimovsky, Iain McDaniel and Sophus Reinert (among many others) have joined them in an enquiry in which Hont was always a close and supportive collaborator, but never sought to be the director.
The final dimension of Hont’s higher pedagogy was the weekly Seminar in Political Thought and Intellectual History. In its most recent incarnation, this was very much his model of a research seminar, at which graduate attendance, both M.Phil. and Ph.D., was expected. Recognising the possibilities of new technology, Hont instituted a website where papers would be made available in advance, creating the opportunity for a formal Comment as well as for extended discussion of the paper during the seminar itself. His standard was that of the best American schools, below which Cambridge should by no means fall: here too, he saw no need to take prisoners when a speaker failed to address critical questions.
Meanwhile, during the 1990s, Hont had steadily advanced his own scholarly agenda, with articles on neo-Machiavellian political economy and the ‘economic limits to national politics’ at the turn of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, on the intellectually-vexed issue of public credit, and David Hume’s apparently alarmist response to its growth in Britain in particular, and on conceptions of the nation-state and nationalism in the later eighteenth century and during the French Revolution. Long articles in form, each of these was worth a book, treating its subject with an originality which transformed understanding of its significance. Not all his projects reached publication: this was particularly, and regrettably, true of an extended collaborative enquiry, conceived with Hans Erich Bödeker and Keith Tribe, and soon involving scholars from across Europe, into the early definition and teaching of political economy in the universities.
Eventually, the major articles of the 1980s and 1990s were collected in a single volume, Jealousy of Trade. International Competition and the Nation State in Historical Perspective, published by Harvard University Press in 2005. In effect, however, this was two books in one: an invaluable collection of previously-published articles, but also a new book, framed by a long introduction on the theme of ‘jealousy of trade’. The phrase was adapted from the title of one of David Hume’s economic essays, and pointed to the way in which commercial competition had exacerbated the rivalry hitherto fostered by political ‘reason of state’: between modern commercial nations, wars of empire and conquest in pursuit of markets and resources were almost inevitable. The interest of eighteenth-century political economy lay in the sophistication of its attempts to make sense of this development. Some, such as Montesquieu, had seen commerce itself as the cure: doux commerce would temper national rivalry. But this reading of political economy, endorsed by Albert Hirschman in his brilliant, influential The Passions and the Interests. Political Arguments for Capitalism before its Triumph (1977), was found wanting by Hont. To him Hume and Smith had gone deeper, demonstrating not just that poor countries might never overhaul rich ones, but that national emulation in commerce was ineradicable. The challenge was not to eliminate it, but to check misguided ‘jealousy’ in trade, and ensure that rivalry was conducted without malice, avoiding the premature resort to war. To Hont this was just as much a challenge for the modern, post-1989 global economic order as it had been for the eighteenth century: Jealousy of Trade was an intervention in contemporary politics as well as in historical scholarship.
By the time the book was published in 2005, new projects were already in hand. One, begun in the late 1990s, was a complete re-thinking of the standard narrative of the eighteenth-century ‘luxury debate’. Hitherto it had been assumed that Mandeville and Hume had successfully legitimated luxury, leaving only Rousseau and his followers unconvinced. Hont argued that the crucial text in reviving the issue had in fact been Fénelon’s Telemachus (1699), which had projected a ‘balanced’ economy of country and town as an antidote to luxury; a further critical intervention was Montesquieu’s Spirit of the Laws (1748), which ensured that the arguments of Mandeville and Hume would fail to persuade Continental European readers living in large, agriculture-based monarchies. Regrettably, this was another of Hont’s projects of which only the first half reached publication, in a long chapter in The Cambridge History of Eighteenth-Century Political Thought (2006); this stops abruptly short of Montesquieu. But seminar papers and conversation, not least with his close colleague in King’s, the French historian Michael Sonenscher, have made it possible to grasp the main findings of the project’s missing second half.
A second project picked up the threads of Hont’s earlier work on sociability, and explored the theme anew in the thinking of Rousseau and Adam Smith, two thinkers often thought antithetical, but whom Hont believed should be seen as closely related, arguing differently over common ground. This project was the subject of the Carlyle Lectures in Oxford in 2009 and of the Schiller and Benedict Lectures delivered respectively in Jena and Boston a year later; since a text exists of the Carlyle Lectures, it is possible, though far from certain, that with editing the lectures can be published.
By the summer of 2011 it was clear that István’s health, already uncertain as a result of diabetes and a heart operation, was deteriorating. Over a period of months he was diagnosed with a rare blood condition, which dramatically reduced his immunity. Determination and persistence on the part of Anna secured treatments from University College Hospital in London as well as from Addenbrooke’s, but István’s ability to work was increasingly disrupted.
Nevertheless in the Michaelmas Term of 2011 he pressed ahead with what was to be his final project, a seminar for Ph.D. students, co-directed with Duncan Kelly, on ‘The cultural history of the history of political thought’. The suggestion of a ‘cultural’ history was little more than ironic; Hont was dismissive of the reductive tendency of much recent cultural history. Instead, the seminar set out to explore the construction of the history of political thought by its major exponents since the late nineteenth century, when it had been established as central to both the Cambridge History Tripos and the Oxford School of Modern History. The seminar’s ‘canon’ of historians of political thought was unexpected, running from J.C. Bluntschli through Friedrich Meinecke, Carl Schmitt, Michael Oakeshott, Leo Strauss, John Rawls and Michel Foucault, before ending with ‘the Cambridge School’, identified for this purpose with Quentin Skinner, John Dunn and John Pocock. As Hont and Kelly proceeded to explain, the modern history of political thought was by no means born in Cambridge, of purely English or even Anglo-American parentage. Oakeshott, Strauss, Rawls and Foucault were particularly commended as historians of political thought (and sharply distinguished from their followers, the Oakshottians, Straussians, Rawlsians etc.) But the conclusion to the series was no less unexpectedly eirenic.
There was no coherent ‘Cambridge School’, Hont confirmed, for the simple and obvious reason that its supposed members agreed on very little, while the early forays into methodology had been polemical, ways of asserting the presence of a new generation of young scholars. What there was, nevertheless, was a profound disagreement over the history of the idea of the state in Europe since antiquity. In very different ways, the same question had been at the heart of the enquiries of Dunn, Skinner and Pocock, as it had been of those of their Swiss, German, French and Anglo-American predecessors. The need to answer the question was the reason why the history of political thought came into existence, and why it had stood, and should remain, at the heart of all historical study, above all in Cambridge. Defiantly ignoring his illness, Hont never suggested that the seminar should be taken as his legacy. But there can be little doubt that he intended it to be so. It was his injunction to his colleagues and to the current generation of graduate students in the History of Political Thought to maintain their predecessors’ focus on the state, and to continue to insist on its central importance to historical understanding.
Hont’s perspective on the history of political thought was not without its limits: like almost all Cambridge exponents of the subject until very recently, he ignored religion, assuming that modern political thought was secular, beginning with Hobbes, and omitting the ‘irredeemably Christian’ Locke. The lack of interest in theology marked his treatment of Natural Law in particular, prompting Jim Moore’s genial remark that his account of Pufendorf was ‘the Istvánian heresy’. But Hont was ready to learn: in his final years, even theology was absorbed – sometimes with unexpected results, as when he asked a baffled seminar speaker to address the matter of James Mill’s soteriology. But this was characteristic. Hont always possessed the curiosity of a good historian, combining it with seriousness of philosophical purpose. Together, these were what it meant to study the history of political thought at Cambridge. If he always remembered and insisted that he was not ‘of’ Cambridge, being formed elsewhere, he was nonetheless fiercely committed ‘to’ Cambridge, and to the indispensable role of the history of political thought – of thinking about the state – to the study of history in this University.
István Hont died on 29 March 2013, after months of ever-increasing difficulty, whose implications he persisted in denying, even as he depended on the devoted attention of Anna. A memorial meeting will be held in King’s College early in September; a colloquium in his honour and memory will be organised under the aegis of the History Faculty’s Political Thought and Intellectual History Subject Group some time in 2014.
István Hont (1947 – 2013)
First published in Economies et sociétés, série PE (Histoire de la pensée économique).
Many of the things that historians of political and economic thought now think about these two subjects were first thought of by Istvan Hont.[1] Although the point applies particularly to the period bounded by the works of Thomas Hobbes on the one side and by Karl Marx on the other, it also applies simply to thinking about politics as such. This is not only because Hont was a powerful and imaginative thinker but also because he was an unusually gifted historian. He found things – a text, a concept, a turn of phrase - that had long been forgotten (like, for example, the idea of a negative community of goods) or whose meaning had become garbled or ossified (like the concept of nationalism) and had the ability to explain what he had found with a depth and precision that could transform huge swathes of the history and historiography of political and economic thought.[2] In this sense, his choice of David Hume’s phrase “jealousy of trade” as the title of his own book was an apt illustration of both the ability and the subject matter to which it had been applied. It was a phrase that indicated that something more than doux commerce, power politics or the birth of a consumer society were at stake when, as Hume also put it, trade became a reason of state.[3] And, since it referred to both the normal and the pathological, it also helped to suggest that the interesting historical and analytical questions had to begin with both – meaning, in this case, with both the reciprocal and competitive sides of trade. In addition, since Hume’s retrospective assessment was written in the middle of the eighteenth century, the choice of title also pointed towards a range of further questions about established characterisations of historical periods and historical turning points. A generation ago, the idea that the thought of Adam Smith was best approached through the works of Hugo Grotius, Thomas Hobbes and Samuel Pufendorf was more likely to be seen as a form of refined antiquarianism than as a real indication of the provenance and content of the range of moral and political questions underlying the Wealth of Nations, despite the fact that the line of intellectual descent from Grotius to Smith had been traced quite clearly over two hundred years ago by Smith’s first biographers, John Millar and Dugald Stewart. A generation ago too, the idea that the differences between the political economy of Physiocracy and the political economy of Adam Smith involved anything more than different evaluations of the relationship between agriculture and industry – rather than different visions of world peace – would have looked like eccentric speculation, not considered historical reconstruction.[4] Both ideas now look self-evident, but it was Istvan Hont’s scholarship that made them look that way.
This blend of lateral historical thinking and acute analytical sensitivity was one of the most consistent features of Hont’s work. He was, for example, immensely pleased to discover that François de Salignac de la Mothe Fénelon, the author of the eighteenth century’s great paean to a just society, The Adventures of Telemachus, Son of Ulysses, was also the author of a poem entitled The Bees, not only because it pointed to the likelihood that Bernard Mandeville’s better-known Fable of the Bees was a reply to Fénelon, but also because, independently of any putative Mandeville-Fénelon dialogue, juxtaposing the content of the two poems helped to capture a great deal more of the fiercely competitive context of global war and political survival underlying the questions about morality, wealth and power that Mandeville’s poem addressed. This, as Hont went on to show, not only explained why the subject of luxury had as much to do with eighteenth-century theories of international relations as with arguments in moral theory or speculation about political stability and social inequality, but also made it easier to see how Mandeville’s thought could be positioned within a broader analytical spectrum running from the strong endorsement of competitive trade made, for example, by the English admirer of Machiavelli, Charles Davenant, to the equally strong rejection of competitive trade by Fénelon and his followers.[5] Broadening the analytical context in this way also had the further effect of clarifying the intellectual relationship between Mandeville and David Hume and, at the same time, of supplying the conceptual background to the opposition between what the French political economist Jean-François Melon was the first to call the “the spirit of commerce” and “the spirit of conquest” some three generations before the antithesis was revived by the Swiss political theorist Benjamin Constant. Thanks to Hont, it is now clear that almost all the great moral and political questions that emerged in the aftermath of the Napoleonic Wars were already alive a hundred years earlier, in the aftermath of the wars of the age of Louis XIV.
The mixture of the historical and the analytical informing everything that Hont wrote meant that the focus of his work fell less immediately or directly on the normative side of political thought than has been usual, at least in Anglophone circles, since the appearance of the works of John Rawls in the USA or after the revival of scholarly interest in civic humanism, civic republicanism or neo-Roman concepts of liberty in the work of J. G. A. Pocock, Quentin Skinner, Phillip Pettit and James Tully in Britain, the USA, Australia and Canada.6 On Hont’s terms, beginning with the normative amounted to beginning in midstream. Even the most apparently straightforward of normative claims (about, for example, self-preservation) could house clusters of concepts and usages whose significance would become apparent only in the light of careful historical research. In this sense, Hont was a sceptic. This meant that none of the nouns or phrases used in teaching and text books found their way inadvertently into the things that he wrote. When they did - as for example with the concept of nationalism or the idea of the enlightenment - they were often deliberately presented in ways that were designed to counter the cumulative weight of received ideas. But, like the original subject of his doctoral research – a thesis on David Hume - Hont was also a mitigated sceptic. It was an intellectual disposition that fitted his early education as an engineer and, as his students and friends sometimes saw, piecing together an argument made up of a range of heterogeneous, but tightly integrated, historical components could be a cause of real aesthetic pleasure, just as reading the arguments of some of his less sceptical or talented peers could be a cause of real aesthetic dismay. One of his highest compliments was to say, when referring to a particular piece of writing, that its author was beginning to hear the music and, although his own musical tastes tended to provoke shock and awe rather than admiration, the tone of respect that accompanied the comment always made it clear that he was referring to work of an unusually high intellectual standard.
Hont’s reluctance to make normative assumptions was one of the reasons why, very early in his intellectual career, his historical attention was struck by the subject of sociability and, more specifically, by the vast body of largely religious and philosophical discussion to which that subject used to belong.[7] The word itself, like its Latin forebear, socialitas, has now lost most of its earlier moral and theological connotations and has come to be used mainly descriptively to refer to different types of social interaction, as in the various types of sociability involved in public or private life, or in salons, masonic lodges, religious confraternities and workers’ associations, or among men and women in different locations, occupations, social settings or economic circumstances. In this sense, the modern concept of sociability has something in common with the old, unflattering, description of social history as history with the politics left out. In its earlier, seventeenth and eighteenth-century sense, however, the concept had rather more to do with the question of when - or why - the politics came in. This was the sense in which both the concept and the subject came to interest Hont. As he saw, sociability began to matter more when the idea of original sin began to matter less (he sometimes liked to say that the idea of original sin supplies a very robust foundation for politics). It did so too, however, because it also helped to open up an almost entirely unexplored historiographical terrain lying outside, or alongside, the strong conceptual polarities left over from the great philosophies of history of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Here, instead of Gemeinschaft versus Gesellschaft, nature versus culture, feudalism versus capitalism, Enlightenment versus counter-Enlightenment, secularisation versus sacralisation, markets versus states – and all the other well-known ways of identifying the putative direction and content of historical change – was a richer and more highly differentiated array of approaches to what, in the last analysis, was still the same subject matter, namely human lives and what they are for. Here too, as Hont repeatedly showed, the space between philosophies of history on the one side and scripture on the other could be filled by recovering more of the huge and largely unexplored array of accounts of human needs, intelligence, emotions, sexuality, imagination, language, industry, capabilities or creativity that had been shoe-horned into twentieth-century historiography with little benefit to either the historiography or to its earlier seventeenth- and eighteenth-century subject matter. Adding this heterogeneous subject matter to the history and historiography of political and economic thought not only opened up new ways to think about the normative and causal dimensions of the two subjects, but also made it possible to inject more awareness of historical contingency, historical reflection and historical self-consciousness into the received accounts of the origins and nature of modern political thought.[8] In this sense, Hont’s historical practice echoed the practice of the subjects of his research, from Hobbes and Pufendorf to Rousseau, Smith, Kant and Marx.
This emphasis on historical contingency and unintended outcomes was a consistent feature of Hont’s work, starting with his first publication on Adam Smith in 1981 as his part of the introduction to the collection of essays that he published with Michael Ignatieff under the title of Wealth and Virtue: The Shaping of Political Economy in the Scottish Enlightenment. The same emphasis was still apparent in his last major historical work, a study of the thought of Smith and Rousseau that began as the Carlyle lectures that Hont gave in Oxford in 2009 and is due to be published posthumously. In the first publication, the focus fell mainly on the subject of justice. In the last lectures, the range of subjects was broader, but the earlier focus on justice was still central. Initially, and in keeping with the Humean claim that justice is an artificial virtue, Hont began to show how the argument of the Wealth of Nations was best situated within the broader framework of modern, Grotian, natural jurisprudence, with its strong distinction between what Grotius had called perfect and imperfect rights along with their corresponding duties and obligations. Much of the point of this contextual claim, as Hont went on to show, was to emphasise its compatibility with contemporary accounts, particularly those by Dugald Stewart and John Millar, of the nature and internal architecture of Smith’s whole theoretical system. As they described it, part of that system had been concerned with expediency, which was the part catered for by the Wealth of Nations. The other part, however, had been concerned with justice. But this part, according to Millar and Stewart, had not been fully catered for by the Theory of Moral Sentiments because that work did not say as much about sovereignty, government and law as Smith himself had envisaged. Hont’s aim, right from the start, was to try to fill in the missing parts of the system. It is not clear how far he finally got, but it is clear both from his Carlyle lectures and, more particularly, from his last published essay, on “Adam Smith’s history of law and government as political theory”, which also appeared in 2009, that he had identified most of the missing pieces of the whole jigsaw.[9]
The initial procedure, in the introduction to Wealth and Virtue, was to show how some of the effects of expediency, particularly economic growth and rising prosperity, were compatible with some of the properties of justice. This procedure seemed to indicate that careful analysis of the component parts of what Smith took to be a dual system, or one that could satisfy the demands of both justice and expediency, would lead towards a fuller picture of how the two had come to be articulated. The starting point of this analysis was the Grotian distinction between perfect and imperfect rights. This distinction had an analytical and historical connection to the related distinction between property rights and entitlements to welfare, but, as Hont went on to show, the connection itself was more equivocal than it might seem. Needs and welfare appear to fall under the rubric of expediency, while property and rights belong more firmly, at least in Grotian terms, to the subject of justice. Paradoxically, however, giving priority to property makes it easier to recognise the claims of distributive justice both because the types of inequality associated with property can be measured more readily than those associated with, for example, desert, talent or merit and because taxes on different types of property usually supply the resources required for welfare. Giving priority to welfare, however, not only has the effect of raising a question mark against strict definitions of property, but, by doing so, it also makes it more difficult to keep questions of desert, talent or merit out of the subject of distributive justice. This was the somewhat counter-intuitive argument that Hont wanted to highlight in the introduction to Wealth and Virtue.[10] Putting the emphasis on property helped, paradoxically, to bring the distributive issues into sharper focus. And, as he also began to show, working out the relationship between justice and expediency was complicated further by Smith’s engagement with the thought of several of his contemporaries, notably the English Anglican divine, Josiah Tucker, his Scots interlocutor, David Hume, the Genevan republican, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and the French advocates of the system of reform that came to be called Physiocracy. His first major article, on the “Rich Country-Poor Country Debate”, that was also published in Wealth and Virtue, focussed on the Tucker-Hume debate because, independently of its intrinsic interest, it presented two radically different approaches to the bearing of the subject of expediency and justice –and the related subject of markets and morality - on modern politics. As Hont went on to show in a sequel to the essay published some three decades later in 2008, the debate between Tucker and Hume was probably the most sophisticated version of a Europe-wide debate that has still to be fully described.[11] Although both endorsed what appeared to be the same system of free trade or natural liberty, implying therefore positive support for an Anglo-Scottish or Anglo- Irish common market, they still diverged on what they thought that its outcome would be.
For Tucker, free trade was the means to correct the unequal distribution of wealth and power between rich and poor countries because the lower input costs of the latter were likely to favour a gradual rebalancing of economic activity in their favour. In one sense, Hume’s case for free trade was less morally compelling, although, from another point of view, it was also less morally demanding. The input costs of poor countries were, he acknowledged, likely to be lower, but the goods supplied by rich countries would still remain competitive, either because of higher levels of productivity, or because of a continuing capacity to innovate in both products and processes, or because the quantity and variety of different types of capital and skill in rich countries favoured more mobility of resources between different sectors of the economy as market conditions changed. On Hume’s terms, free trade was not likely to change the relative distribution of resources between rich and poor countries, but it still meant that the absolute wealth of both would grow. In this sense, Hume’s argument complemented his broader, utility based, moral theory, with its emphasis on justice as an artificial virtue and on the interplay between property, the emotions and specialised institutions as the cause of its historical emergence.
Hume’s account of justice as an artificial virtue, was paralleled by Rousseau’s. Here, the link between justice and politics was even more pronounced. Where Hume was publicly sceptical towards social contract theory, Rousseau made it the basis of political legitimacy and, at the same time, also emphasised the large number of additional conditions, particularly with respect to the distribution of property and taxation, required to keep the contractual basis of political society alive. In this respect, Rousseau’s political thought seemed to foreshadow the more comprehensive indictment of modern political societies made by the advocates of Physiocracy or, as they also described it, the new science of political economy. As the title of their 1767 manifesto - L’Ordre naturel et essentiel des sociétés politiques or “the natural and essential order of political societies” - was designed to indicate, modern political societies were the outcome of what the French physiocrats described as an unnatural and retrograde process of development, in which manufacturing industry, foreign trade and urban society had grown up ahead of agriculture, population and domestic trade, leaving the modern world to face a choice between barbarism and civilisation or, more broadly, between continuing along the same, ultimately fatal course or adopting the Physiocratic reform programme of free trade, a single tax and a legal despot. In important respects, Smith’s thought overlapped with all three of these positions. He shared Hume’s view of justice; he endorsed Rousseau’s claim that a free state was also a fiscal state; and he subscribed to the Physiocratic programme of free trade. Yet, as Hont went to great lengths to show, first in his comparison between Smith and the Physiocrats in 1989, then in his examination of Smith’s history of law and government, and finally in his Carlyle lectures of 2009, Smith’s final position differed from all three. It did so, as Hont also showed, mainly on the basis of the comprehensive historical vision that came to inform Smith’s treatment of both justice and expediency.
Hont’s description of this historical vision launched the final part of the work that he had begun some three decades earlier. Its centrepiece was the idea that the apparently longestablished division of Europe’s history into, for example, the ancient and the modern or the medieval, the renaissance and the modern had, largely in the twentieth century, come to obscure a different, less linear, way of thinking about the relationship between the past and the present. In this vision of the past, Europe had a double history, made up of two historical cycles, the first southern and Roman and the second northern and German. This double history, Hont argued, was the basis of Smith’s politics because, he went on to show, it supplied the reasons for Smith’s willingness to claim that the “unnatural and retrograde order” underlying the history of modern European political societies contained enough of a mixture of both the ancient and the modern to forestall or obstruct a rerun of the cycle of decline and fall that had brought Europe’s first, Roman-driven, history to an end. The history of this way of thinking about Europe’s history began with Montesquieu and the unusual historical vision that informed all of Montesquieu’s works. It was taken considerably further not only by Smith (and Gibbon) in Britain, but by the host of Montesquieu’s other European admirers or critics from Rousseau to Hegel.[12] As Hont went on to show, Smith’s version of this history, with its emphasis, firstly, on the moral and political afterlife of the structures of authority and power prevailing in the pastoral societies that overran the Roman empire and, secondly, on the concentrations of industry and trade located in the fortified towns that survived after Rome’s decline and fall, supplied the basis of what, in the early nineteenth century, became the Whig interpretation of history. In other guises, however, it was also one of the key sources of political romanticism and, more broadly, of the many philosophies of history of the nineteenth century, stretching from Hegel to Comte and from Tocqueville to Marx and Weber.
A generation ago, it was usual to say that the rise of political economy marked the separation of politics from economics. Much recent scholarship, particularly that centred on Machiavelli and republicanism, has focussed on traditions of thought or types of discourse in which the two could once more be integrated. After Hont, it is now more likely that the next generation will say that the rise of political economy actually established the foundations of modern politics. Much future scholarship, particularly that centred on the nineteenth century, is likely to focus on what the components of those foundations can be taken to be.
Notes:
1. Thanks to Béla Kapossy, John Robertson and, particularly, Isaac Nakhimovsky for helpful comments on earlier drafts.
2. The idea of a “negative community of goods” appeared in a paper entitled “Negative Community: The Natural Law Heritage from Pufendorf to Marx”, which was one of a series that Hont presented under the auspices of John M. Olin Program in the History of Political Culture at the University of Chicago in 1989. It was preceded by an earlier paper, written in 1984, on “The Concept of ‘Negative Community’ and the Origins of Historical Materialism.” Plans exist to publish several of Hont’s many unpublished papers, together with the text of his 2009 Carlyle lectures on Smith and Rousseau at Oxford University. His examination of nationalism was published originally as “The Permanent Crisis of a Divided Mankind: ‘Contemporary Crisis of the Nation State in Historical Perspective” in John Dunn (ed.), The Contemporary Crisis of the Nation State (Oxford, Blackwell, 1994) and then in Istvan Hont, Jealousy of Trade. International Competition and the Nation-State in Historical Perspective (Cambridge, Mass. Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2005): 447-528. Future references to Jealousy of Trade will appear as JT, followed by page numbers.
3. JT, 1-156 (especially pp. 1-11). On the three phrases, see Albert O. Hirschman, The Passions and the Interests. Political Arguments for Capitalism before its Triumph (Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1977); Jacob Viner, Essays on the Intellectual History of Economics (Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1991); Neil McKendrick, John Brewer and John Harold Plumb, The Birth of a Consumer Society: The Commercialization of Eighteenth-Century England (London, Europa, 1982); and Laurence Dickey, “Doux-commerce and humanitarian values”, Grotiana, new series, 22/23 (2001-2002): 271-317.
4. On Smith and natural jurisprudence, JT, 389-443; on Smith and Physiocracy, JT, 354-88. For a later, related essay, see Istvan Hont, “Correcting Europe’s political economy: The virtuous eclecticism of Georg Ludwig Schmid”, History of European Ideas, 33 (2007): 390-410.
5. On Fénelon and Mandeville, see Istvan Hont, “The Early Enlightenment Debate on Commerce and Luxury”, in Mark Goldie and Robert Wokler (eds.), The Cambridge History of Eighteenth-Century Political Thought (Cambridge, UK. Cambridge University Press, 2006): 379-418. On Davenant, see JT, 185-266 and, for a related essay, Istvan Hont, “Irishmen, Scots, Jews and the Interest of England’s Commerce: The Politics of Minorities in a Modern Composite State”, in Simonetta Cavaciocchi (ed.), Il Roulo Economico delle Minoranze in Europa seccoli XIII-XVIII (Florence and Prato, Le Monnier, 2000): 81-112.
6. An indication of Hont’s approach to the historiography of political thought can be found in an unpublished paper, given in Tokyo in 2005, on “The Cambridge Moment : Virtue, History and Public Philosophy”. It prefigured a series of seminars given with Duncan Kelly at the Cambridge University Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities (CRASSH) in the Michaelmas Term of 2010 on the history and historiography of political thought.
7. On sociability, see JT, 159-84.
8. Some of these methodological suggestions appeared in Istvan Hont, “Commercial Society and Political Theory in the Eighteenth Century: The Problem of Authority in David Hume and Adam Smith”, in W. Melching and W. Velema (eds.), Main Trends in Cultural History (Amsterdam and Atlanta: GA Rodolfi, 1994): 54-94.
9. See Istvan Hont, “Adam Smith’s history of law and government as political theory”, in Richard Bourke and Raymond Geuss (eds.), Political Judgement. Essays for John Dunn (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2009): 131-171.
10. See, for critical comment, Samuel Fleischacker, A Short History of Distributive Justice (Cambridge, Mass. Harvard University Press, 2004): 17-18, 27-28, 32-37.
11. Istvan Hont, “The ‘Rich Country-Poor Country’ Debate Revisited: The Irish origins and French reception of the Hume Paradox”, in Carl Wennerlind and Margaret Schabas (eds.), David Hume’s Political Economy (London and New York, Routledge, 2008): 243-323.
12. Further examples of this approach to eighteenth-century discussions of Europe’s history and politics can be found in Béla Kapossy, Iselin contra Rousseau: Sociable Patriotism and the History of Mankind (Basel, Schwabe, 2006); Ulrich Adam, The Political Economy of J. H. G. Justi (Bern, Peter Lang, 2006); Koen Stapelbroek, Love, Self-Deceit and Money: Commerce and Morality in the Early Neapolitan Enlightenment (Toronto, University of Toronto Press, 2008); Isaac Nakhimovsky, The Closed Commercial State: Perpetual Peace and Commercial Society from Rousseau to Fichte (Princeton, Princeton University Press, 2011); Sophus A. Reinert, Translating Empire: Emulation and the Origins of Political Economy (Cambridge, Mass. Harvard University Press, 2011); Richard Whatmore, Against War and Empire: Geneva, Britain and France in the Eighteenth Century (New Haven, Yale University Press, 2012); Iain McDaniel, Adam Ferguson in the Scottish Enlightenment: The Roman Past and Europe’s Future (Cambridge, Mass. Harvard University Press, 2013).
István Hont. A Personal Memoir
I first met István in 1978 when we were being interviewed to head a five-year project on “Political Economy and Society, 1750-1850” at the King’s College Research Centre. I was very ambivalent about the project; I was about to publish my own account of political economy before Malthus and Ricardo, and at the time was working on Russian and Soviet agrarian policy. The following year I went to Heidelberg as a Humboldt postdoctoral fellow, intending to study the development of German and Austrian economics in the later nineteenth century, so that I might better understand the common background shared by Soviet agrarian economists. As it happened, in Germany I found myself increasingly forced back to eighteenth-century material. When István contacted me in the autumn of 1980 and asked me to present a seminar on Cameralism at King’s, this at long last focussed my ideas, and in January 1981 I presented a paper which marked the beginning of my long engagement with German economics, and at the same time was the real beginning of my friendship with István. Joan Robinson came along to the seminar, presumably because István had asked her to. Some years later I found myself with István on what passes for High Table at King’s, seated opposite Nicky Kaldor. István explained that I was working on Cameralism, and Kaldor proceeded to tell me about it.
I cannot remember ever asking István how he put the 1979 conference on Smith and the Scottish Enlightenment together; I think he would have said that it was the obvious thing to do. Those who were close to him in Cambridge at the time – Bianca Fontana, Greg Claeys – would have a better idea. But it was this conference that led to the path-breaking work that Wealth and Virtue represented, and it was his drive and ingenuity that turned a successful conference into a collective work which laid the foundations for all subsequent work on commercial society and sociability in the eighteenth century. During the summer of 1981, and encouraged by Pasquale Pasquino, I moved from Heidelberg to Göttingen, finding in Rudolf Vierhaus at the Max Planck Institut für Geschichte a congenial Director interested in furthering my work. Back in England in the early autumn I bought a Yamaha 350LC and commenced regular trips between Keele and Cambridge. István was chiefly interested in cars – a largely theoretical interest, but one which was very well-informed. (Later, in 1988, when he was still in New York, I organised subscriptions to Autocar and Car magazines for him, the cost of a foreign subscription coming to £91.50). I was back in Göttingen during Easter 1982, part of a five-week sweep through West Germany covering 3000 miles that convinced me that I needed a better motorcycle – I bought a Ducati in July 1982, which made commuting between Cambridge and Keele a much more interesting experience, using a Yamaha XT 600 in the winters.
Cambridge is not easy to get to from Keele by rail. When I first went to Keele for interview from Cambridge in October 1975 it took me five hours each way in a day. It still does. The best time I did on the Ducati, keeping off the motorways, was slightly less than 2.5 hours, so it was perfectly feasible to ride down to see István for an afternoon. And this was how my own connection to Cambridge was re-established: through István. After I left Cambridge at the end of 1975 most of my personal links had quickly dissolved: Jim Tully went back to Canada, Terry Counihan went back to Australia, eventually Stuart Macintyre went back there too and Geoff Eley went to Michigan. The friendship that I formed with István in the early 1980s re-established a personal connection to Cambridge that went back to 1968, when I had first visited schoolfriends at Christ’s, which in turn had brought me into contact with Roy Porter and David Blackbourn. But by my early 30s that was all long gone.
From 1979 to 1985 I spent more time in Germany, chiefly in Göttingen, than in Britain. I began translating Reinhart Koselleck and Wilhelm Hennis, visiting them in Bielelfeld and Freiburg, but it was István who brought them together for the first time at a Research Centre Workshop on Political Theory in 1984. During the winter of 1981-82 he got me to write a paper on Friedrich List for a planned collection of essays “After Adam Smith”; I gave another seminar at the Centre on Otto Neurath. Years later these were revised and put together with my initial essay on Cameralism in my Strategies of Economic Order. Without my really being aware of it, he showed an interest in the work I was doing and helped me develop it, at a time when my chief intellectual points of contact were all in Germany. When I wanted to talk to someone about my work, I talked to István.
The Centre’s project continued until 1984, but its most lasting achievement came about largely by accident. In July 1982 Piero Barucci visited with a proposal to create a database of the founding chairs of political economy in European universities. By this time I was already researching German university history, and so István asked me down for the day to join in discussion with the Italians. That afternoon he proposed that we extend the limited idea of a database into a full-fledged study of the institutionalisation of political economy, which as it developed became the first international project of its kind, covering Europe, North America and Japan. The Centre served as the essential co-ordinating switchboard, and István quickly put together a number of national collaborators who would be able to organise research in their own countries, extending the coverage to Japan because of the very great interest among Japanese scholars in the history of economic thought. Planning meetings were held at King’s in July 1983, and in Paris in 1984 and 1985, with the British group meeting up at Keele in March 1985. National groups were created, there was lengthy discussion of the approach to be taken, and for the first of the Paris meetings István got me to draft a paper on Malthus and East India College to serve as a model for the kind of mixture of intellectual and institutional history we had in mind. Besides his constant engagement in driving the project forward, as a contributor to the British section he drafted three long papers: one on the Townshend Prize, one on Dugald Stewart’s Edinburgh lectures, and one on Pryme and the foundation of the Cambridge chair. In April 1986 the final conference convened at San Miniato, without the presence of István, who had recently moved to Columbia University and who was not able to spare the time for the trip – although when it became clear that he also had no funding, Hiroshi Mizuta immediately offered to pay for his trip back to Europe. There had been an initial aspiration to publish the work of the project in a consolidated way, but this also proved too difficult to manage without the King’s College Research Centre, and instead several national volumes were published – French, German, Italian, American and Japanese.
István and I planned to edit a single British volume under the title Trade, Politics and Letters, and in July 1988 I spent two weeks with him at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton vainly trying to draft an introduction. As already suggested, while István did not publish a great deal, this did not mean that he did not write a great deal. He could and did read and write very quickly. The Pryme draft is a case in point. We had a rather weak contribution on Cambridge in the early nineteenth century, with which István was dissatisfied. When I arrived in New York in late June 1988 he told me that he had spent a few days in the Seligman Collection in the Columbia Library and had roughed out a much better story. The draft never got developed beyond that, but twenty-five years later it is still the most acute and detailed account of the intellectual and academic politics associated with the foundation of the Cambridge chair in political economy.
Much of the time in Princeton he was wrestling with his new Toshiba laptop. This was his third computer; he had begun in the early 1980s with an enormous “portable” IBM machine, then in 1987 acquired a very nice Toshiba laptop with a 20MB hard disk and a wonderfully clear gas plasma screen. The new one had a 40 MB hard disk, and I took the older one off him, which started me on the long and winding road of ever-changing and always unreliable Microsoft software. Many of us were taking the plunge at this time, and everyone had trouble making the software work without crashing. István was the man who knew the fixes; you would phone him up and he would patiently explain how you could get around the latest problem. In those days you could easily spend half a day just trying to get your machine to function, never mind losing all that you had done in the weeks before. Thanks to his advice, everything that I have committed to my hard drive since the summer of 1988 is sitting on my machine here – including the three draft papers for Trade, Politics and Letters. We never did resolve the problems with that project; instead, in the early 1990s Alon Kadish and I put together some of the papers as The Market for Political Economy, which includes a short description of the institutionalisation project.
By the later 1980s István was developing his interest in Natural Law, and the connection to Göttingen and Hans-Erich Bödeker led to the staging of a major conference on Kant and Natural Law – and yet another unsuccessful attempt to synthesise material into a collection that would emulate the coherence of Wealth and Virtue. István had returned to Cambridge in 1989, by which time I was developing work started by the British side of the institutionalisation project, diverting my attention to the later nineteenth century. Apart from a later conference at Bad Homburg in 1993, which István organised with Hans- Erich, and a workshop meeting in Uppsala in 1989, our main areas of interest drifted apart: he remained committed to work on Hume, Smith and Kant, and I became more involved with the development of the discipline of economics in Britain. All the same, it was István who in 1999 pushed the project of compiling a bibliography of Adam Smith editions my way, having been initially approached by Hiroshi Mizuta. As with the Institutionalisation project, the task of simply recording all published versions of Smith’s writings quickly turned into an extensive international network, making use of many of the contacts that had been largely built by István in the 1980s. This also took me back to Smith and, apart from the book published in 2002, prompted two essays which I have included in The Economy of the Word.
I conceived this book in March 2010, trying to find some coherence for my various writings and activities. In the following October I was to spend two weeks in Canada giving lectures and seminars, and I was searching for some connecting theme in what I could offer. As it happened, in Canada I ended up talking exclusively about Max Weber, but the idea of a book that would focus upon the historiography and methodology of economic discourse seemed a good one. I had a long telephone conversation with István about it; he too seemed to think that it was a good idea. In July 2012, thinking of how to best use my time in Uppsala during September and October, I drove over to Cambridge to talk to him about it – by now in my 1997 Defender 90 hardtop, so not such a rapid journey any more. As it turned out, we never did have that conversation, and instead I had to think things out by myself. Or rather, in the light of what I thought István might have said about it.
During the last few years I have been mainly concerned with translation, and have also developed a deepening interest in the writings of Max Weber. Here again though, it was István who invited me in 2008 to present a paper on Weber to the Cambridge seminar series
he organised with Raymond Geuss. István got me to write a treatment and potted biography; he rewrote this, attached a list of my publications and links to key articles, put it up on the seminar’s web page, representing a level of preparation that was in stark contrast to the facilities on hand in the King’s College seminar room - everyone did have a chair, but that was as far as it went.
On the other hand, such minimalism does focus the mind. This was apparent in the two workshops that István organised around the theme of “Commerce and Perpetual Peace”, the first in December 2008 where a group of around twenty convened in King’s for a two day conversation, leading to a more structured meeting in July 2009 at which presentations were made. No effort was made to secure funding for these meetings, apart from a small amount to cover overnight accommodation and some refreshment. All participants covered their own travel costs and meals, and there was no fixed plan for publication. I remember them as the most stimulating meetings I had been to in a very long time. Without funding, István, Isaac Nakhimovsky and Mike Sonenscher could invite whoever they wished, there was no need to promise that there would be some specific payoff from the meeting, no contributors would be pursued for their paper, no editor would try to shape the resulting collection of papers into some simulacrum of coherency. In the present academic climate, this would immediately suggest a lack of seriousness, a failure to engage with contemporary academic priorities, even career death for those participating. As István well knew, precisely the opposite was true: only under such conditions can real scholarship survive. The development of knowledge of ourselves and our circumstances requires not ever-extending research grants and funding, but a commitment to learning. Money cannot buy that, although it can also certainly destroy any prospect of its realisation.
In March 2001 I received a request from Harvard University to comment on a number of candidates for a “fully tenured Professor of Political Theory with a special interest in the Enlightenment”. As we know, the following year the Faculty voted unanimously to appoint István, only to be vetoed by Larry Summers, then President, on the grounds that István was too old, and that in any case what relevance did the Enlightenment have for modern political theory? In commenting on István’s candidacy I wrote that “The energy with which István works is tempered by a strong self-critical sense, a reluctance to publish anything that is not a genuine contribution to our knowledge. He has some notoriety in this respect, but exasperation is always tempered by a genuine recognition of his unlimited intellectual honesty and good will. I have witnessed several times at conferences and seminars the manner in which he is able to give renewed direction and focus to discussion and thus provide a fresh and productive basis for debate.” That is one of the many things we have lost with István’s death. But in any case, Summers was wrong about political theory too. István was a voracious reader with informed views on very many things. His day job was to teach eighteenth century political thought at the University of Cambridge. For my money, he was the world’s pre-eminent social and political theorist, informed by his encyclopaedic knowledge of eighteenth century thought. Having encountered in one way or another many of the world’s contemporary “thinkers”, I know that whatever István had to say far outran their imagination. I was very fortunate to have been his friend, and many of the friends I now have I owe to István’s skill as a selfless networker, whose main interest was to bring together people who would have things to learn from each other.

Books

Criticism

Special Edition:

*István Hont and Political Theory*

Lasse Andersen

István Hont

The István Hont Collection

Tributes and Memorials

Books

Criticism

Patricia James