UC Berkeley

This dissertation reconstructs an intellectual tradition centered around the idea that political institutions must harness negative passions for the common good. That is what I call ‘the politics of vice.’ I argue that its emergence can be traced to a synthesis of Machiavellian constitutionalism and Augustinian moralism, prompted by the pervasive concern with immorality that characterized British political discourse during the six decades following the Glorious Revolution (1688). Best exemplified by Mandeville’s scandalous assertion that politics can turn vices into benefits, this synthesis received its most sophisticated philosophical formulations in the 1740s by Hume and Montesquieu. They transformed the politics of vice from a polemical tool into one of the theoretical foundations of late-eighteenth-century constitutionalism and of the modern social sciences. Challenging conventional narratives that interpret early modern political thought as a confrontation between a virtue-centric republican constitutionalism and an interest-centric commercial society, I demonstrate that the constitutional version of the politics of vice has an independent history, which overlaps with but largely predates the birth of political economy and the application of economic tools to politics. Appreciating its distinctiveness can help us rethink both the intellectual origins and the conceptual features of modern constitutionalism.