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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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