John Maynard Keynes famously observed, with no small hint of irony, that one of the characteristics of the relation between modern politics and modern economics is that: ‘Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influences, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist.’1 I do not mean to suggest that any of the major figures of classical liberal political economy that we have examined in this book are ‘defunct’ or somehow only of antiquarian interest. Rather, the object of my recovery project has been to challenge a narrow and reductive interpretation of the legacy of classical liberal political economy that remains influential among a key segment of the political and economic elites in contemporary liberal democracies (Keynes’ ‘practical men’). This distorted view of classical liberal political economy continues to hover over our economic debates as the purported intellectual forbear of the laissez faire doctrine that provides academic pedigree and philosophical heft for the policies of austerity and unrestrained capitalism in our times. In contrast, what we have seen in our careful reading of figures ranging from Hobbes to John Stuart Mill is a complex narrative that interweaves distinct forms of economic reasoning based upon the morally and politically infused discourses of both natural rights and the harmony of interests.

This study arraigned an influential philosophical anthropology claiming to expose the origins of liberalism, which tends to reduce the state and political life primarily into an instrument designed to secure the conditions required for free market economics. I have tried to demonstrate that this account of classical liberalism depends upon an historical appropriation of this complex intellectual tradition that proves inadequate upon serious re-engagement with the economic, political and philosophical writings of the most important liberal thinkers of the seventeenth century to the midnineteenth century. But this misreading of what classical liberal political economy means, even by sophisticated commentators, is in itself both instructive and consequential as it speaks to the general problem of delimiting intellectual traditions that necessarily draw upon multiple, diverse influences. On the one hand, despite the enormous social and technological changes in the past four centuries, there remain clear aspects of continuity in the way we talk about the relation between the individual and government in liberal societies.