István Hont
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István Hont (15 April 1947 – 29 March 2013) was a Hungarian-born British historian of economics and political thought, University Reader in the History of Political Thought at the
University of Cambridge , mottoeng = Literal: From here, light and sacred draughts. Non literal: From this place, we gain enlightenment and precious knowledge. , established = , other_name = The Chancellor, Masters and Schola ...
. Hont was supervised as a doctoral student at
Oxford Oxford () is a city in England. It is the county town and only city of Oxfordshire. In 2020, its population was estimated at 151,584. It is north-west of London, south-east of Birmingham and north-east of Bristol. The city is home to the ...
by
Hugh Trevor Roper Hugh Redwald Trevor-Roper, Baron Dacre of Glanton (15 January 1914 – 26 January 2003) was an English historian. He was Regius Professor of Modern History at the University of Oxford. Trevor-Roper was a polemicist and essayist on a range of ...
. He was elected a Fellow of
King's College, Cambridge King's College is a constituent college of the University of Cambridge. Formally The King's College of Our Lady and Saint Nicholas in Cambridge, the college lies beside the River Cam and faces out onto King's Parade in the centre of the city ...
in 1978. From 1978 to 1984 he directed a King's College Research Centre project 'Political Economy and Society 1750–1850' with Michael Ignatieff, out of which grew their co-edited volume ''Wealth and Virtue''. Hont was invited to be a professor in political thought at
Columbia University Columbia University (also known as Columbia, and officially as Columbia University in the City of New York) is a private research university in New York City. Established in 1754 as King's College on the grounds of Trinity Church in Manhatt ...
, and was a visiting fellow at the
Collegium Budapest A (plural ), or college, was any association in ancient Rome that acted as a legal entity. Following the passage of the ''Lex Julia'' during the reign of Julius Caesar as Consul and Dictator of the Roman Republic (49–44 BC), and their reaff ...
in 1993–4., but remained at Cambridge until his death. He and
Raymond Geuss Raymond Geuss, FBA (; born 1946) is a political philosopher and scholar of 19th and 20th century European philosophy. He is currently Emeritus Professor in the Faculty of Philosophy, University of Cambridge. Geuss is primarily known for three r ...
organized the Cambridge Seminars in Political Thought and Intellectual History for 2007/8, attracting a range of international scholars to participate in the seminar series.Cambridge Seminars in Political Thought and Intellectual History
Though Hont's scholarly articles – on such figures as
David Hume David Hume (; born David Home; 7 May 1711 NS (26 April 1711 OS) – 25 August 1776) Cranston, Maurice, and Thomas Edmund Jessop. 2020 999br>David Hume" ''Encyclopædia Britannica''. Retrieved 18 May 2020. was a Scottish Enlightenment philo ...
and
Adam Smith Adam Smith (baptized 1723 – 17 July 1790) was a Scottish economist and philosopher who was a pioneer in the thinking of political economy and key figure during the Scottish Enlightenment. Seen by some as "The Father of Economics"——— ...
, and on such themes as the
Scottish Enlightenment The Scottish Enlightenment ( sco, Scots Enlichtenment, gd, Soillseachadh na h-Alba) was the period in 18th- and early-19th-century Scotland characterised by an outpouring of intellectual and scientific accomplishments. By the eighteenth century ...
,
commerce Commerce is the large-scale organized system of activities, functions, procedures and institutions directly and indirectly related to the exchange (buying and selling) of goods and services among two or more parties within local, regional, nation ...
,
nationalism Nationalism is an idea and movement that holds that the nation should be congruent with the State (polity), state. As a movement, nationalism tends to promote the interests of a particular nation (as in a in-group and out-group, group of peo ...
,
national debt A country's gross government debt (also called public debt, or sovereign debt) is the financial liabilities of the government sector. Changes in government debt over time reflect primarily borrowing due to past government deficits. A deficit oc ...
,
luxury Luxury may refer to: *Luxury goods, an economic good or service for which demand increases more than proportionally as income rises *Luxury tax, tax on products not considered essential, such as expensive cars **Luxury tax (sports), surcharge put ...
and
political economy Political economy is the study of how Macroeconomics, economic systems (e.g. Marketplace, markets and Economy, national economies) and Politics, political systems (e.g. law, Institution, institutions, government) are linked. Widely studied ph ...
– have won awards for breaking new ground, the scope and nature of his overall ambition were difficult to gauge until the articles were collected together in ''Jealousy of Trade''. An extended introduction to ''Jealousy of Trade'' emphasized the absence of economic questions in the seventeenth-century thought of
Thomas Hobbes Thomas Hobbes ( ; 5/15 April 1588 – 4/14 December 1679) was an English philosopher, considered to be one of the founders of modern political philosophy. Hobbes is best known for his 1651 book ''Leviathan'', in which he expounds an influent ...
, traced (via Samuel Pufendorf) the eighteenth-century emergence of commerce as a problem for political theory, and used eighteenth-century debates about the interaction of politics and commerce to suggest a new perspective for thinking about
economic nationalism Economic nationalism, also called economic patriotism and economic populism, is an ideology that favors state interventionism over other market mechanisms, with policies such as domestic control of the economy, labor, and capital formation, incl ...
in the nineteenth century and beyond.


Works

* *'Free trade and the economic limits to national politics: neo-Machiavellian political economy reconsidered', in John Dunn (ed.), ''The Economic Limits to Modern Politics'', Cambridge University Press, 1990. *'Commercial Society and Political Theory in the Eighteenth Century: The Problem of Authority in David Hume and Adam Smith' in Willem Melching & Wyger Velema (eds.) ''Main Trends in Cultural History'', 1994. *'The Permanent Crisis of a Divided Mankind: 'Contemporary Crisis of the Nation State' in historical perspective', ''Political Studies'' 42 (1994). Reprinted in John Dunn (ed.) ''Crisis of the Nation State?'', 1995, and Hont, ''Jealousy of Trade'', 447-528. Winner in 1994 of the Political Studies Association's Harrison Prize for the best paper published in political studies *''Jealousy of Trade: International Competition and the Nation-State in Historical Perspective'', Harvard University Press, 2005. . Winner in 2007 of the J. David Greenstone Book Prize, awarded by the Politics and History section of the
American Political Science Association The American Political Science Association (APSA) is a professional association of political science students and scholars in the United States. Founded in 1903 in the Tilton Memorial Library (now Tilton Hall) of Tulane University in New Orleans, ...
, and of the
Joseph J. Spengler Joseph John Spengler (19 November 1902 – 2 January 1991) was an American economist, statistician, and historian of economic thought.Kelley (March 1992), p. 142 A recipient of the 1951 John Frederick Lewis Award of the American Philosophical Socie ...
Best Book Award, sponsored by the History of Economics Society. *'The Luxury Debate in the Early Enlightenment', in Mark Goldie & Robert Wokler (eds.) ''The Cambridge History of Eighteenth-Century Political Thought'', Cambridge University Press, 2006. *(eds. by Béla Kapossy and Michael Sonenscher) ''Politics in Commercial Society: Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Adam Smith'', Harvard University Press, 2015.


References


External links

* {{DEFAULTSORT:Hont, Istvan 1947 births 2013 deaths Historians of economic thought Hungarian political scientists Scottish Enlightenment Hungarian expatriates in the United Kingdom Fellows of King's College, Cambridge