The Political Economies of Happiness

"Capitalism is often assumed to have been invented in the Anglosphere," writes Philipp Robinson Rössner in the editor's introduction to this special issue. "...however, present-day historians of political economy have tended to miss crucial bits of the story." In fact, Rössner argues, the tradition of thinking about commercial society had been manifest in Anglo-Saxon economics since the sixteenth century or earlier. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, he writes, it "extended to the entire European continent where it has become commonly known, in its manifold regional and national variants, under the general term Cameralism." The essays in this issue cover the contributions made by continental Cameralists to the shaping of the political economy of modern capitalism.

Contributors: Alexandre Mendes Cunha, Georg Eckert, Mária Hidvégi, Vera Keller, Adriana Luna-Fabritius, Lars Magnusson, Ere Nokkala, Philipp Robinson Rössner, Antal Szántay, Carl Wennerlind, Xuan Zhao