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Notes

¹ In a sense, these societies can be viewed as profoundly hypocritical. The Greek ideal could not abide trade or commerce, yet the Greeks could not even feed themselves without importing vast amounts of grain. See Paul Rahe, Republics Ancient and Modern: Classical Republicanism and the American Revolution (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992), especially Chapter 3, “The Political Economy of Hellas.” In the quote from the Republic, Socrates was speaking to and thinking of that tiny fraction of the Greek population who were free citizens, ignoring the fact that those citizens could avoid participating in commerce only because all their material needs were provided by slaves.

² St. Augustine (354–430): essentially, “If no one loses, then no one gains.”

³ It was not only the Jews who practiced moneylending, however. Famous figures like Voltaire himself found ways to lend large sums of money, especially to the royal houses, through the ruse of “donations” made in return for a lifetime stream of payments.

⁴ Much of my argument in this section of the book follows the fascinating account of Jerry Z. Muller in The Mind and the Markets (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2002).

⁵ The notion of economists as a separate profession did not exist in the eighteenth century. Adam Smith was a professor of moral philosophy.

⁶ Voltaire, Philosophical Letters (1734), quoted in Muller, The Mind and the Markets, 35.

⁷ From Pascal's Pensées, quoted in Muller, The Mind and the Markets ...