Barry R. Weingast and Philip Petrov - Political-Economic Development and Early Modern Political Theory (Zoom)

Early modern political theorists lived in the relatively harsh conditions of what we now call “developing countries” (developed countries did not exist until the nineteenth century). These theorists faced significant risk of political instability, state repression, and large-scale violence in states that struggled to do things such as protect property rights, implement rule of law, and distribute material resources using impartial criteria. Using Hobbes, Hume, and James Madison as examples, we argue that the early modern political theorists’ circumstances heavily influenced several of their normative prescriptions. Because most contemporary interpreters of these theorists live in the developed West, they often miss that the earlier theorists could not assume the relatively high levels of political-economic development that many contemporary normative ideas about justice presuppose. Reading early modern political theorists without regard to their location in developing countries risks neglecting that many of their normative prescriptions were not direct statements of their political preferences but rather responses to situational constraints. Writers such as Hobbes, Hume, and Madison focused on questions of how to establish—as opposed to distribute—what John Rawls called the “basic liberties.”