Montesquieu held that commerce pacifies society by checking passionate violence through self-interest

Evidence

In extolling the pacifying virtues of the market, I argue that the neoliberals revived an older political argument for capitalism first identified by Albert Hirschman in his classic 1977 book The Passions and the Interests. There, Hirschman uncovered what he called the ‘doux-commerce’ (‘sweetness of commerce’) thesis, which, he argued, was conventional wisdom in the mid eighteenth century. Hirschman’s account of the moral virtues of the market began with a sentence in Baron de Montesquieu’s The Spirit of the Laws, which he ultimately chose for his own book’s epigraph: ‘It is fortunate for men to be in a situation where, though their passions may prompt them to be wicked [méchants], they have nevertheless an interest in not being so.’ The view that the interests could check the passions, Hirschman argued, was a message of salvation for a world trapped between the violence of the passions and the seeming ineffectiveness of reason. Far from viewing commerce as corrupting, as republican thinkers tended to do, Montesquieu praised it for its ‘spirit of frugality, economy, moderation, work, wisdom, tranquility, order and rule’. Commerce, he contended, is a source of gentleness, softness and polish, which ‘cures destructive prejudices’ and leads to more gentle mores. For Montesquieu, those who pursued their interests through the market stood in a relation of mutual need, and thus the ‘natural effect of commerce is to lead to peace’. — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market, 32

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines the doux-commerce thesis as the belief that market self-interest checks violent passions.
• XREF: The doux-commerce thesis connects to Hirschman’s The Passions and the Interests, and resonates with the reader’s interest in whether markets have intrinsic moral or pacifying effects.