The article examines Sparta’s influence on the treatment of luxury and wealth in early-modern republican thought, analyzing three key thinkers: Francesco Guicciardini, Montesquieu and Abbé de Mably. In this view, unnecessary wealth and, particularly, consumption over a certain limited level, is a pernicious extravagance that harms virtue and leads to corruption of the commonwealth that allows it. Both the direct influence of the Spartan example and the correlative Platonic ideal, inspired by the Lacedaemonians, are analyzed; the influence of Plutarch is emphasized. Special attention is given to the distinction between the Platonic account, with the twin dangers of both wealth and poverty, and a simpler, binary opposition of virtuous poverty vs. corrupting wealth. Guicciardini’s and Mably’s views are closely examined; for Montesquieu, the article traces the decisive role Plato plays in Montesquieu’s account of luxury, and analyzes his almost unknown work, Dialogue de Xantippe, showing the importance of Sparta for Montesquieu’s idea of republic.

Through his philosophical treatises, John Locke is perceived as the founder of political liberalism. However, from a different perspective, he can also be seen as a mercantilist. To show that there is no complete incompatibility between Locke’s philosophical treatises and his economic essay, I stress the central role of money. Money leads to a conflict, which is usually described as a conflict between “haves” and “have nots” (Macpherson 1962; Vaughn 1980; Caffentzis 1989). I complete this analysis showing that the introduction of money in the state of nature also leads to an uncommon conflict within the owners’ class between “landed men” and “moneyed men.” I also argue that this transition from a state of peace to a state of unrest leads to the establishment of a government whose role is to avoid the escalation of the conflict into a state of war.

In his widely read and cited History of Economic Analysis (Schumpeter 1954), Joseph Alois Schumpeter dismissed Adam Smith’s Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (Smith 1976a) in a blunt and often ad hominem manner. In fact, he even questioned Smith’s intellectual mettle. We argue that Schumpeter’s assessment might have resulted from his failure to appreciate the rhetorical structure of Smith’s masterpiece (and the highly political character of its Book V), a failure possibly due to Schumpeter’s not having access to student notes of Smith’s lectures on rhetoric that surfaced only after Schumpeter’s death. We argue that Schumpeter’s failure to appreciate the rhetorical structure of Smith’s masterpiece is a prominent example of the consequences of not taking into account Smith’s rhetorical strategies and principles when trying to understand the man and his oeuvre.

The purpose of this essay is to analyze Léon Walras’s theory of public interest goods. For him, “services and products of public interest are theoretically those that interest men as members of the community or of the State emanating from the authority to establish social conditions, that is, from the satisfaction of needs that are the same and equal to all” ([1875, 1897a] 1992, EEPA, p. 187). In Walras’s mind, this definition meant that public interest goods could not be factored into the utility function, in sharp contrast with the standard approach in public goods theory. Walras did not imply that public interest goods were not useful, but he maintained instead that their utility was felt only by the community as a whole and not by the individual. Walras developed an anti-individualistic view of the State in which the collective interest was not reducible to the sum of private interests.

Although Jacques Rueff (1896–1978) is known as a liberal thinker, what he means by the term “economic liberalism” should be specified. Indeed, for Rueff, the notion of economic liberalism leads to the notion of the liberal social order: i.e., a situation where the freedom of the individual is maintained and State intervention is justified in order to ensure a harmony of interests. This paper aims to bring out the particularism of the Rueffian liberal social order and to explore the connections between Rueff’s vision of this concept and his specific approach to liberalism, where private property (the pillar of freedom in liberal thinking) may be called into question under certain circumstances.