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Date: | Fri Mar 31 17:19:13 2006 |
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================ HES POSTING ======================
CALL FOR PROPOSALS
HES CONFERENCE June 25-28, 1999
Bruce Caldwell has invited me to try to put together a session for
the next conference. I would like to explore some underdeveloped
themes in 18th century economic thought. A couple of years ago I
sat down to answer the question: was Smith an opponent of
consumption? In the course of this I found myself in
unfamiliar and quite unexpected territory. (It may be familiar to
others, but was not for me.) This includes Smith's (brief)
treatment in the Lectures on Jurisprudence on the formation of
preferences. Preferences in turn he grounds in the sources of
pleasure. The sources of pleasure, at least in the way Smith
illustrates the subject, are tied very closely to visual
satisfaction. And in the course of discussing visual
satisfaction (more fully developed in his essay on the imitative
arts) Smith enters into a theory of ingenuity. Ingenuity happens
to be a topic of interest to historians of art and aesthetics, as
well as to some (few, recent) economic historians. Not only are
pleasure, preferences -- hence valuation -- visual satisfaction and
ingenuity all connected in Smith, but much of what he says about
visual satisfaction borrows from or at least parallels the thought of
contemporaries such as Hutcheson, Hartley, Gerard.
Contemporary notions of how satisfaction increases and then
descreases with increasing variety or novelty in turn seem quite
similar to the work of the 19th century German psychologist Wundt,
and the 20th century psycho-biologist D.E. Berlyne. Ingenuity too
ties in with novelty since, if, as Mandeville and others insisted,
we crave novelty, then ways of creating it become inseparable from
sustaining pleasure and thence demand. The study of ingenious
designs and products thus becomes highly pertinent from an
economic point of view.
I invite proposals which address one or more of these aspects of
18th century thought. I encourage particularly proposals which
integrate more than one of the themes I've touched on. Please submit
to me at [log in to unmask]
Neil De Marchi
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