Shannon Stimson

• Harvard University, PhD
• Professor and Leavey Chair at Georgetown University

[R]ivalship and emulation render excellency, Adam Smith When one thinks of the general will after Rousseau, the philosophers who most readily come to mind might be Kant or perhaps Hegel, rather than his near contemporary Adam Smith. In the view of some of Smith’s earlier and more economistic interpreters, there appears little in the way of philosop...

Few issues are more central to our present predicaments than the relationship between economics and politics. In the century after Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations the British economy was transformed. After Adam Smith looks at how politics and political economy were articulated and altered. It considers how grand ideas about the connections between i...

Few issues are more central to our present predicaments than the relationship between economics and politics. In the century after Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations the British economy was transformed. After Adam Smith looks at how politics and political economy were articulated and altered. It considers how grand ideas about the connections between i...

This paper explores the manner in which differing languages and conceptualisations of civil society figured in the early development of economic thought. It begins with a consideration of the understanding of civil society in the mercantilist literature and proceeds to examine the rise and transformation of the idea in the hands of the physiocrats...

This paper considers the relationship between economic life and political life as it has been articulated in four contexts in the history of economics: the ancient, the mercantilist, the classical and the neoclassical. It examines the changing ways in which these aspects of behaviour have been seen to be related, and how that relationship has taken...

This article examines the relation between the rule of law and constitutionalism. It attempts to provide a better understanding of the ambiguous construct of the rule of law which still remains in the public imagination as a formative part of political discourse. It analyses the role of the rule of law within the constitutional structure of a progr...

Dean of St Patrick’s Dublin, the austere Rabelais, the party pamphleteer from whom Rousseau learnt to detest politics and society, the high churchman from whom Voltaire and Lessing learnt their religion, the author of Gulliver’s Travels, Swift is a writer to whose economic views critics are often unjust. The Humble Petition of the Colliers, Cooks,...

Since emerging in the late nineteenth century, political science has undergone a radical shift--from constructing grand narratives of national political development to producing empirical studies of individual political phenomena. What caused this change? Modern Political Science--the first authoritative history of Anglophone political science--arg...

This paper examines John Stuart Mill's discussion of economic liberty and individual liberty, and his view of the relationship between the two. It explores how, and how effectively, Mill developed his arguments about the two liberties; reveals the lineages of thought from which they derived; and considers how his arguments were altered by political...

Despite the persistence of interpretive differences over the substance of Adam Smith's economic and political writings, in the last two decades historians of economic and political thought have done much to establish distinctions between the figure of Smith and the original subject. This paper examines a subset of issues surrounding what we call th...

On the philosophical plane, James Mill's political thinking began from a model of man quintessentially utilitarian in constitution. Starting with individual agents, it was to his account of the science of human nature that he turned in the quest for a science of politics suitable for the modern world. If James Mill's science of politics was individ...

It has been said that in the absence of legal training, past historians have failed sufficiently to appreciate the relevance of law as a conceptual template, shaping the character of the American revolutionary project. One legal historian, John Reid, has even suggested that non-legal historians have indeed ‘misunderstood the legal and constitutiona...

To examine John Adams’ jurisprudence provides a convenient entrée to one strand of legal thought which occupied colonials both during and immediately after the Revolution. His legal thinking contains many of the apparent disparities and inconsistencies in argument that one might expect from any lawyer struggling to legitimate a radical departure fr...

The aim of this essay is to challenge the assumption of a basic unity of vision and purpose at the roots of Anglo-American jurisprudence through a study of the role of juries and judgment in revolutions. Through a comparative look at the relationship between English and American conceptions of law and judgment in the seventeenth and eighteenth cent...

The colonial judiciary and particularly the jury system have been neglected subjects of early American law. Yet, it is common knowledge that the American colonies won their independence at a time when the jury system was being acclaimed as a fundamental guarantor of individual liberty. When colonial intractability was first displayed over the Sugar...

From Alexander Hamilton’s perspective, no mechanical structure ‘checking and balancing’ orders of men, such as Adams proposed, could alone save a ‘factious’ people from destroying itself. Nor could men rely, as Jefferson seemed to suggest, on the improvement of human nature through technological progress and education. Although their individual vis...

In sharp contrast to Adams’ fears of American declension, Thomas Jefferson’s political and legal thought is buttressed by psychological optimism and inner certitude. Altogether missing from Jefferson’s thought is any note of the tragic, or of the doubt, anguish, or uncertainty which come from the consciousness of the chasm separating ideals from ha...

In the task of searching for ways to ‘interpret’ the American Constitution and to understand (so as to delimit) the function of the Supreme Court, constitutional and jurisprudential theorists have almost invariably begun with Marshall’s principal opinions. He remains ‘The Source’, even as widespread uncertainty and disagreement persist about the ac...

This comment takes issue with the applicability and usefulness of the terms « dominant orthodoxy » and « dissidence » to describe contemporary American debate over the Constitution. It challenges the suggestion that the influence of Charles Beard still gives direction to academic study of the American Revolution and the Constitutional Founding. It...

Social democracy is a concept with multiple meanings – since its coinage in the latter half of the nineteenth century it has been applied to an array of theoretical and actual political and economic arrangements. It is noteworthy that the first edition of this Dictionary did not contain a separate reference to this concept.

Political philosopher, moral reformer, citizen of Geneva. Rousseau’s economic thought cannot readily be placed within the mainstream of the schools of 18th-century economic discourse. The entire thrust of his work, comprising a sustained argument against the luxury and conspicuous consumption of the rising European bourgeosie of new commerce, impli...

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Harvard University, 1984. Includes bibliographical references (p. 206-274). Photocopy. s