The early Enlightenment debate on commerce and luxury
The early Enlightenment debate on commerce and luxury
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早期启蒙运动关于商业和奢侈品的辩论
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发表时间：
2006
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通讯作者：
Istvan Hont
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作者：
Istvan Hont
1751年，那不勒斯人费迪南多·加利亚尼写道，现代世界笼罩着一个幽灵——“奢侈”的幽灵。它“徘徊在我们中间，从未见过它的真面目，也从未认识到它的功效，也许，它从未出现在善良的人身上”。这类似于“尘世幸福”的概念，但“没有人知道或敢说”，加利亚尼抱怨道，“什么才是真正的奢侈”（加利亚尼1977年，第214页）。丹尼斯·狄德罗（Denis Diderot）也陷入了类似的困境。他在《百科全书》中定义了这个术语，他呼吁“在那些对奢侈品一词使用最具辨别力的人之间进行讨论：这种讨论尚未发生，甚至他们也无法得出令人满意的结论”（Diderot 1755, v, p. 635）。这篇关于“奢侈品”的文章发表于1762年，作者是圣兰伯特侯爵，它既是对18世纪上半叶奢侈品争论的总结，也是对解决这些争论的尝试。这一章的目的是介绍1748年之前法国和英国对这些争论的八位重要贡献者的工作，这一年孟德斯鸠的《法律精神》出版了，这为圣兰伯特提供了他所需要的资源来试图说明什么是奢侈品。正如圣兰伯特所言，奢侈不仅是一种经济现象，而且是现代性的核心道德和政治问题。“奢侈”的标准定义是过度的个人消费（Butel- Dumont, 1771），但圣兰伯特遵循了V ' eron de Forbonnais（《商业》和《农业》这两篇文章的作者，也是“奢侈”的最初代称人）的定义：“（奢侈）是人们利用财富和工业来确保自己愉快的生活”（Forbonnais, 1754, p. 221; Saint Lambert, 1965, p. 202）。
The spectre of luxury A spectre was haunting the modern world, wrote the Neapolitan Ferdinando Galiani in 1751, the spectre of ‘luxury’. It ‘wanders among us never seen in its true light, or recognised for its efficacy and it, perhaps, never occurs to the virtuous‘. It was akin to the idea of ‘terrestrial happiness’, but ‘no-one knows or dares to say’, Galiani grumbled, ‘what luxury might properly be’ (Galiani 1977, p. 214). Denis Diderot was in a similar quandary. Defining the term in the Encyclopedie , he called for a ‘discussion among those who show the most discrimination in their use of the term luxury: a discussion which has yet to take place, and which even they cannot bring to a satisfactory conclusion’ (Diderot 1755, v , p. 635). The article on ‘Luxury’, published in 1762, and written by the marquis de Saint Lambert, was asmuch a summary of the luxury debates of the first half of the eighteenth century as an attempt to resolve them. The purpose of this chapter is to present the work of eight important contributors to these debates in France and Britain before 1748, the year of publication of Montesquieu’s Spirit of the Laws , that supplied Saint Lambert with the resources he needed to try to say what luxury actually was. As Saint Lambert presented it, luxury was not merely an economic phenomenon, but the central moral and political issue of modernity. The standard definition of luxury’ was excessive individual consumption (Butel- Dumont 1771), but Saint Lambert followed the definition of V´eron de Forbonnais (the author of the articles Commerce’ and Agriculture’ and the original assignee for Luxury’): [Luxury] is the use men make of wealth and industry to assure themselves of a pleasant existence’ (Forbonnais 1754, p. 221; Saint Lambert 1965, p. 202).