Montesquieu thought that commerce improves manners and cures “the most destructive prejudices” (1748)
About this Quotation:
Henry Clark selected this passage in his anthology Commerce, Culture and Liberty: Readings on Capitalism Before Adam Smith (published by Liberty Fund, 2003). He rightly points to the somewhat neglected but important contribution made by French authors such as Montesquieu, Turgot, Voltaire, Gournay, and Condillac. A common perception, especially among contemporary Europeans, is that free market ideas are a pernicious “Anglo-Saxon” phenomenon, when in fact, they have deep roots in Francophone culture.
Other quotes from this week:
- 2010: Herbert Spencer worries that the violence and brutalities of football will make it that much harder to create a society in which individual rights will be mutually respected (1879)
- 2008: William Findlay wants to maintain the separation of church and state and therefore sees no role for the “ecclesiastical branch” in government (1812)
- 2007: John Adams argues that the British Empire is not a “true” empire but a form of a “republic” where the rule of law operates (1763)
- 2006: Benjamin Constant argued that mediocre men, when they acquired power, became “more envious, more obstinate, more immoderate, and more convulsive” than men with talent (1815)
- 2005: Thomas Jefferson boasts about having reduced the size of government and eliminated a number of “vexatious” taxes (1805)
Other quotes about Economics & Free Trade:
- 2010: Richard Cobden outlines his strategy of encouraging more people to acquire land and thus the right to vote in order to defeat the “landed oligarchy” who ruled England and imposed the “iniquity” of the Corn Laws (1845)
- 2009: Ludwig von Mises on the impossibility of rational economic planning under Socialism (1922)
- 2009: Frank Taussig argues for the reverse of a common misconception about the relationship between high wages and the use of machinery (1915)
- 2009: Condy Raguet lays out a set of basic principles of free trade among which is the idea that governments cannot create wealth by means of legislation and that individuals are better judges of the best way to use their capital and labor than governments (1835)
- 2009: John Ramsay McCulloch argues that smuggling is “wholly the result of vicious commercial and financial legislation” and that it could be ended immediately by abolishing this legislation (1899)
- 2009: Adam Smith argues that retaliation in a trade war can sometimes force the offending country to lower its tariffs, but more often than not the reverse happens (1776)
- 2008: Jean-Baptiste Say argues that there is a world of difference between private consumption and public consumption; an increase in the latter does nothing to increase public wealth (1803)
- 2008: Nassau Senior objected to any government regulation of factories which meant that a horde of inspectors would interfere with the organization of production (1837)
- 2007: Ludwig von Mises argues that monopolies are the direct result of government intervention and not the product of any inherent tendency within the capitalist system (1949)
- 2007: Harriet Martineau condemns tariffs as a “vicious aristocratic principle” designed to harm the ordinary working man and woman (1861)
- 2007: Ludwig von Mises argues that the division of labor and human cooperation are the two sides of the same coin and are not antagonistic to each other (1949)
- 2007: Lord Macaulay writes a devastating review of Southey’s Colloquies in which the Poet Laureate’s ignorance of the real condition of the working class in England is exposed (1830)
- 2006: Jane Haldimand Marcet, in a popular tale written for ordinary readers, shows the benefits to workers of foreign trade, especially at Christmas time (1833)
- 2006: Adam Ferguson observed that social structures of all kinds were not “the result of human action, but not the execution of any human design” (1782)
- 2006: Forrest McDonald argues that the Founding Fathers envisaged a new economic order based upon Lockean notions of private property and the creation of the largest contiguous area of free trade in the world (2006)
- 2005: Bernard Mandeville concludes his fable of the bees with a moral homily on the virtues of peace, hard work, and diligence (1705)
- 2005: Bernard Mandeville uses a fable about bees to show how prosperity and good order comes about through spontaneous order (1705)
- 2005: Adam Smith argued that the “propensity to truck, barter, and exchange” was inherent in human nature and gave rise to things such as the division of labour (1776)
- 2004: Voltaire on the Benefits which Trade and Economic Abundance bring to People living in the Present Age (1736)
- 2004: Adam Smith on the natural ordering Tendency of Free Markets, or what he called the “Invisible Hand” (1776)
27 January, 2006
 | Montesquieu thought that commerce improves manners and cures “the most destructive prejudices” (1748) |
Montesquieu, like many writers in the 18th century, thought that commerce would have more than just economic benefits for societies. It would also improve morals.
Commerce is a cure for the most destructive prejudices; for it is almost a general rule, that whereever we find agreeable manners, there commerce flourishes; and that wherever there is commerce, there we meet with agreeable manners.
Let us not be astonished, then, if our manners are now less savage than formerly. Commerce has every where diffused a knowledge of the manners of all nations; these are compared one with another, and from this comparison arise the greatest advantages.
Commercial laws, it may be said, improve manners, for the same reason as they destroy them. They corrupt the purest morals; this was the subject of Plato’s complaints: and we every day see, that they polish and refine the most barbarous.
The full passage from which this quotation was taken can be be viewed below (front page quote in bold):
Commerce is a cure for the most destructive prejudices; for it is almost a general rule, that whereever we find agreeable manners, there commerce flourishes; and that wherever there is commerce, there we meet with agreeable manners.
Let us not be astonished, then, if our manners are now less savage than formerly. Commerce has every where diffused a knowledge of the manners of all nations; these are compared one with another, and from this comparison arise the greatest advantages.
Commercial laws, it may be said, improve manners, for the same reason as they destroy them. They corrupt the purest morals; this was the subject of Plato’s complaints: and we every day see, that they polish and refine the most barbarous.