Debt: The First 5000 Years - autonomous learning

AGE OF THE GREAT CAPITALIST EMPIRES 331
Davenant was an unusual merchant (his father was a poet). More
typical of his class were men like Thomas Hobbes, whose Leviathan,
published in r6sr, was in many ways an extended attack on the very idea
that society is built on any sort of prior ties of communal solidarity.
Hobbes might be considered the opening salvo of the new moral
perspective, and it was a devastating one. When Leviathan came out,
it's not clear what scandalized its readers more: its relentless materialism
(Hobbes insisted that humans were basically machines whose
actions could be understood by one single principle: that they tended
to move toward the prospect of pleasure and away from the prospect
of pain), or its resultant cynicism (if love, amity, and trust are such
powerful forces, Hobbes asked, why is it that even within our families,
we lock our most valuable possessions in strongboxes) Still, Hobbes'
ultimate argument-that humans, being driven by self-interest, cannot
be trusted to treat each other justly of their own accord, and therefore
that society only emerges when they come to realize that it is to their
long-term advantage to give up a portion of their liberties and accept
the absolute power of the King-differed little from arguments that
theologians like Martin Luther had been making a century earlier.
Hobbes simply substituted scientific language for biblical references.55
I want to draw particular attention to the underlying notion of
"self-interest. "56 It is in a real sense the key to the new philosophy.
The term first appears in English right around Hobbes' time, and it
is, indeed, directly borrowed from interesse, the Roman law term for
interest payments. When it was first introduced, most English authors
seemed to view the idea that all human life can be explained as the pursuit
of self-interest as a cynical, foreign, Machiavellian idea, one that
sat uncomfortably with traditional English mores. By the eighteenth
century, most in educated society accepted it as simple common sense.
But why "interest" Why make a general theory of human motivation
out of a word that originally meant "penalty for late payment on
a loan"
Part of the term's appeal was that it derived from bookkeeping. It
was mathematical. This made it seem objective, even scientific. Saying
we are all really pursuing our own self-interest provides a way to cut
past the welter of passions and emotions that seem to govern our daily
existence, and to motivate most of what we actually observe people
to do (not only out of love and amity, but also envy, spite, devotion,
pity, lust, embarrassment, torpor, indignation, and pride) and discover
that, despite all this, most really important decisions are based on the
rational calculation of material advantage-which means that they are
fairly predictable as well. "Just as the physical world is ruled by the