The Economy of Esteem: An Essay on Civil and Political Society

However much people want esteem, it is an untradable commodity-- there is no way that you can buy the good opinion of another or sell to others your good opinion of them. And yet esteem is allocated in society according to systematic determinants: people's performance, publicity, and presentation relative to others will help to fix how much esteem they enjoy and how much disesteem they avoid. In turn, rational individuals are bound to compete with one another, however tacitly, in the attempt to increase their chances of winning esteem and avoiding disesteem. And this competition shapes the environments in which they each pursue esteem, setting relevant comparators and benchmarks, and determining the cost that a person must bear for obtaining a given level of esteem. Hidden in the multifarious interactions and exchanges of social life, then, there is a quiet force at work -- a force as silent and powerful as gravity -- which molds the basic form of people's relationships and associations. This force was more or less routinely invoked in the writings of classical theorists like Aristotle and Plato, Locke and Montesquieu, Mandeville and Hume and Madison. Although Adam Smith himself gave it great credence, however, the rise of economics proper coincided with a sudden decline in the attention devoted to the economy of esteem. What had been a topic of compelling interest for earlier authors fell into relative neglect throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This book is designed to reverse the trend. It begins by outlining the psychology of esteem and the way the working of that psychology can give rise to an economy. It then shows how a variety of social patterns that are otherwise anomalous come to make a lot of sense within an economics of esteem. And it looks, finally, at the ways in which the economy of esteem may be reshaped to improve overall social outcomes. While making connections with older patterns of social theorising, it offers a novel orientation for contemporary thought about how society works and how it may be made to work. It puts the economy of esteem firmly on the agenda of economics and social science and of moral and political theory.

Table of Contents:
Introduction: Rediscovering the Economy of Esteem Part I: Towards an Economics of Esteem 1: The Nature and Attraction of Esteem 2: The Demand for Esteem 3: The Supply of Esteem 4: The Economy of Esteem Part II: Within the Economics of Esteem 5: A Simple Equilibrium in Performance 6: A More Complex Equilibrium in Performance 7: Multiple Equilibria and Bootstrapping Performance 8: Publicity and Individual Responses 9: Publicity and Accepted Standards 10: Seeking and Shunning Publicity 11: Voluntary Association 12: Involuntary Association Part III: Exploiting the Economics of Esteem 13: The Intangible Hand in Profile 14: The Intangible Hand in Practice 15: Mobilising the Intangible Hand

About the Author :
Geoffrey Brennan trained originally as a public economist, but increasingly works in rational actor political theory. He was at the Australian National University for ten years, before he took up a Professorship in the Public Choice Center at Virgina Tech. In 1983, he returned to the ANU to become head of the Economics Department and in 1988 joined the Research School of Social Science, of which he was Director from 1991 to 1997. He is currently the Editor of Economics and Philosophy. Philip Pettit teaches political theory and philosophy at Princeton University, where is William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Politics. Prior to taking up this post in 2002, he had been at the Australia National University, Canberra for many years. Irish by background and training, he has previously held positions at University College, Dublin; Trinity Hall, Cambridge; and Bradford University. His interests include the philosophy of cognitive and social science as well as moral and political theory.

Review :
`In Esteem, Brennan, an economist by training, and Pettit, a philosopher and political theorist, attempt to redirect the attention of social scientists back to classical writings from Aristotle to Adam Smith, David Hume, and James Madison on one of humans' fundamental needs--our desire for prestige, recognition, approbation, status, or what these authors term esteem, a highly-valued "commodity" but one not so subject to the usual supply-demand forces and characteristics.... This is a well-researched, well-presented serious piece of scholarship that social scientists and other academics will appreciate and applaud.... Highly Recommended. ' Choice `An example of how economists are taking an interdisciplinary approach to their research and writing, which is helping make their work more accessible and relevant.... This is very far from the kind of economics so many of us suffered through in Econ 101.... The analytical rigor of conventional economists needs to be combined with a rich understanding of the human context. Fortunately, that is what more and more economists, including the authors ... are doing. ' Strategy + Business