================ 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 ============ FOOTER TO HES POSTING ============ For information, send the message "info HES" to [log in to unmask]