Rounded Globe is an online publishing venture, which publishes “[e]books … free from jargon, written for the intelligent layperson, and released under a legal license that allows them to be freely shared with others” (http://roundedglobe.com/about). Donald Winch’s Secret Concatentations fits this description perfectly. The book is composed of the six Carlyle Lectures he delivered at Oxford University in 1995. In keeping with Rounded Globe’s intentions, it maintains the informal style of a lecture, and the scholarly apparatus is kept to a minimum. While the lectures cover much of the same ground as the author’s Riches and Poverty (Cambridge University Press, 1996), Rounded Globe has made Winch’s contributions to our understanding of the period from 1750 to 1834 (and beyond) in the history of economic thought much more accessible to the non-specialist.

The theme of both books on one level is debates over luxury and inequality: hence Riches and Poverty. At another level we are invited to eavesdrop “on the conversations of the past” (locations 35–36), in the words of John Burrow, Winch’s one-time collaborator in writing the intellectual history of political economy of this period. As such, Winch weaves a complex narrative of what Arnold Toynbee characterized as the debate between “economists and human beings,” or more broadly the interplay among economic, social-scientific, and ethical discourses. It will come as no surprise that Winch has no sympathy for stereotypical versions of the key figures he discusses, showing repeatedly how conventional histories of economics and politics suffer from reading current viewpoints back into earlier writers, a practice that is tone deaf to the conversations actually taking place and to what is being said. Thus, such modern-day dichotomies as liberal/conservative or classical/neoclassical or positive/normative are shown to not be a helpful way of understanding these conversations.

The title Winch chose for the book comes from Samuel Johnson, who referred to the interdependence of economic life in London in the eighteenth century as a “secret concatenation” binding the rich to the poor through a Smithian perspective on the division of labor (locations 58–60). In these lectures the metaphor is used to picture the interwoven and ongoing “conversations” primarily among Bernard Mandeville, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Adam Smith, Edmund Burke, and Thomas Robert Malthus, with some of their other interlocutors on the “left” and “right” of the political spectrum included, as they discuss the economics and morality of luxury and inequality in what we now call a capitalist society. The economists, Smith and Malthus, come out looking pretty well when we actually listen to them. Those familiar with Winch’s work on Smith as well as with his remarkable intellectual histories, Riches and Poverty and Wealth and Life (Cambridge University Press, 2009), will find nothing new here. However, that’s not the point. Secret Concatenations is a highly readable, intellectually stimulating, and above all broadly accessible work. As such it deserves a wide readership among historians of economic thought and among the educated public.

The book’s chapters are the six lectures. The first lecture, “Overhearing Conversations, Political and Social Scientific,” is essentially an introduction to some of the main themes of the book. The metaphor of interlinked conversations is introduced, and the central theme of the contrast between social-scientific conversations, which tend to be deterministic in nature, and moral discourses, which tend to be voluntarist and open to positive political action, is introduced in the context of an ongoing eighteenth-century discussion of luxury and inequality, and the nature of interdependence, in Smith’s commercial society. Lecture 2, “Mandeville, Rousseau, and the Paradox in Favour of Luxury,” using Smith’s first published work, the 1755 letter to the Edinburgh Review, as its epigraph, essentially argues a point that Smith had already noticed, that Rousseau is simply Mandeville with a minus sign attached. Smith himself will be treated as starting a new conversation based on elements of the mid-eighteenth-century consensus on luxury and inequality in Lecture 3, “Adam Smith and the Œconomy of Greatness.” Here, Winch shows how Smith transformed the debate through his focus on capital accumulation. The title of the lecture comes from the invisible hand passage of the Theory of Moral Sentiments, which shows the Mandevillian theme of unintended consequences against the Rousseau/Mandeville theme of deception, leading to the highly beneficial transformation of nature, contra Rousseau’s “smiling fields.”

The fourth lecture, “Burke, Smith and Factious Citizens,” the latter being Smith’s description of Richard Price, a revolution sympathizer, is set against the backdrop of the American and French revolutions. This lecture places Smith between the conservatism of Burke and the radicalism of Price and Thomas Paine. Smith is seen to have elements in common with both. It further introduces the problematic of the next generation of establishing the identity of the new republic in America and coming to grips with industrialization and urbanization in Britain in the context of population growth, land scarcity, and increasing cost of the Poor Laws, and becoming a net importer of food in a state of continual war.

Lecture 5, “Malthus, Godwin, and Condorcet: Inequality and Post-Economic Society,” pits Malthus’s economics and ethics of scarcity against the “post-economic” dreams of William Godwin and the romanticism of the literary critics of political economy. Malthus is the main interlocutor here. His relation to the Lake poets is shown to be ironic in that they shared many of the same moral perspectives on the rise of manufacturing and cities. Malthus’s debates with Godwin are examined, as is Malthus’s critique of the Marquis de Condorcet’s social insurance scheme. Malthus’s central message may be succinctly put as “embourgeoisment”: the idea that the working poor might become like bourgeois rational agents substituting luxuries for children. Moreover, Winch shows how Malthus viewed the issue of luxury and inequality within an overarching commitment to personal liberty and Christian virtue.

Lecture 6, “Economists versus Human Beings,” completes the series. Here, Winch jumps ahead to the last third of the nineteenth century to

This is a history of willful misunderstanding, which Winch ultimately feels unable to explain. Economists are not without blame, as the tendency to write the history of the discipline with the analytical apparatus of economic theory being the central preoccupation adds to the misunderstanding by reinforcing the impression that economics is divorced from moral and/or theological commitments.

The last lecture surveys the whole field, using Arnold Toynbee as the focal point. Misunderstandings on the right and left have dogged the debate between economists and human beings throughout, with Malthus’s and John Stuart Mill’s treatment by the Romantics and Marxists a case in point. The debate has many facets, but it is essentially between moral and scientific discourses or mindsets. However, as Winch successfully argues, the amoral view of political economy is a myth, which any honest reading of Smith, Malthus, and Mill would dispel. It is reading Smith without the moral sentiments, or Malthus without Christianity. And it is reading Mill as no better than a Ricardian economist. It is reinforced by the ideological histories of the enemies of economics and by the narrowly theoretical histories written by and for economists.

This is a most welcome call for rewriting the history of economic thought as what Kenneth Boulding and I would call “economics as a moral science.” Winch’s book is a beautifully written and well-argued move in that direction. I highly recommend it.