The Economy of Esteem

An Essay on Civil and Political Society

Geoffrey Brennan and Philip Pettit

A Strategy + Business Best Business Book of 2004
This highly original book opens up a new, or perhaps forgotten, area of social thinking and study.
The treatment is at once historical and theoretical, and combines the best intellectual and empirical rigour of psychology, philosophy and economics.
The book is deeply interdisciplinary, being of interest to all social scientists but also to philosophers and lawyers

The Economy of Esteem

An Essay on Civil and Political Society

Geoffrey Brennan and Philip Pettit

Description

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.

The Economy of Esteem

An Essay on Civil and Political Society

Geoffrey Brennan and Philip Pettit

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

The Economy of Esteem

An Essay on Civil and Political Society

Geoffrey Brennan and Philip Pettit

Author Information

Geoffrey Brennan, Professor of Social and Political Theory, Australian National University, and Philip Pettit, William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Politics, Princeton University

The Economy of Esteem

An Essay on Civil and Political Society

Geoffrey Brennan and Philip Pettit

Reviews and Awards

"Brennan and Pettit's book raises a great number of questions of both theoretical and empirical importance. Innovative and illuminating, this book is an interesting contribution to philosophically inspired social sciences." - Diego Rios, Economics and Philosophy, Volume 22, 2006

"'...The Economy of Esteem illuminates a serious inadequacy in the way that the economic approach has been used conventionally; its own creative use of that approach makes its claims all the more credible.'" - Zev M. Trachtenberg, Ethics

"'...Brennan and his co-author Pettit are laying out some of the most important arguments in social science today...Read this book carefully. It could, should, and probably will give rise to many subsequent studies.'" - Tyler Cowen, Politics, Philosophy & Economics