~ Political Economy from Pufendorf to Marx: Culture, Needs and Property Rights (Cambridge University Press, 2026) by István Hont, edited by Lasse S. Andersen, Béla Kapossy, and Richard Whatmore.

István Hont’s Political Economy from Pufendorf to Marx: Culture, Needs and Property Rights arrives thirteen years after his death and more than four decades after much of it was written. Edited by Lasse S. Andersen with Béla Kapossy and Richard Whatmore, the volume collects seven previously unpublished papers dating largely from Hont’s work during the 1980s and 1990s. It is consequently an unusual book: Hont never assembled these materials into a manuscript for publication, and some remain much closer to conference papers than to finished chapters. Yet together they recover an intellectual project that had remained largely invisible behind his published work: an attempt to understand Marxism by reconstructing the older European tradition of natural jurisprudence from which, Hont believed, Marx had inherited some of his deepest assumptions about human needs, property, and society.

Hont left communist Hungary for Britain in 1975 having already lost confidence in Marxism, but he did not respond by becoming an uncomplicated liberal or conservative. Convinced that Marx had failed politically and historically, Hont remained impressed by the scale of his intellectual ambition: Marx had tried to explain economic life, political institutions, historical change, and the development of human needs within a single account of commercial society. Hont eventually found a more convincing way of doing this in Hume and Smith, but his route to the Scottish Enlightenment ran backwards through Marx. As Andersen explains in the introduction, Hont wanted to retain Marx’s ambition to comprehend commercial society as a whole while abandoning the historical theory with which Marx had attempted it.

The most original feature of the resulting argument is the place occupied by Samuel Pufendorf. Marx conventionally appears at the end of a genealogy running through Hegel, Ricardo, and the socialist tradition. Hont pushed the problem much further back, into seventeenth-century natural jurisprudence. The second and third chapters reconstruct arguments developed by Grotius and Pufendorf about why human beings form societies at all. Pufendorf began from human insufficiency. Unlike animals equipped to survive largely through instinct and bodily adaptation, human beings possessed needs they could not satisfy alone. Food, shelter, security, cultivation, and eventually the more elaborate wants produced by civilised life required cooperation with others. Sociability therefore did not have to rest upon affection or moral harmony. It arose from dependence: individuals needed one another because no individual could provide the conditions of a developed human life for himself.

Property enters the argument as an historical solution rather than an eternal fact. Hont was particularly interested in the natural-law idea of “negative community”: the proposition that the world had originally belonged exclusively to nobody rather than positively to everybody. Private ownership could therefore arise as an institutional response to scarcity, conflict, and changing needs. Property rights were necessary because goods were scarce, and competing individuals required stable rules governing possession. They were not necessarily required under every conceivable material condition. That apparently technical distinction allowed Hont to connect seventeenth-century jurisprudence with nineteenth-century communism.

The fourth chapter, “Negative Community and Communism,” is consequently the centre of the book. Hont interpreted Marxian communism not simply as collective ownership or state direction of production but as an attempt eventually to escape the historical circumstances that had made property itself necessary. Capitalism would develop productive power until scarcity ceased to govern social relations. Once material abundance made direct satisfaction of human needs possible, private property could disappear together with the coercive political structures required to protect it. Marx’s communism thus recovered, in radically transformed form, a problem already contained within natural jurisprudence: if property had arisen historically because scarcity made it necessary, sufficiently transformed material circumstances might render it historically unnecessary.

Hont’s criticism of Marx follows directly from that reconstruction. Human need does not remain fixed while productive capacity increases, and civilisation continuously creates new wants, expectations, and dependencies. The supposedly approaching condition of abundance recedes as societies become richer. Capitalism might increase productive power spectacularly without ever creating the satiated humanity required by Marx’s post-property society. Andersen summarises Hont’s argument neatly: human beings combine “indefinite and socially flexible needs” with an inability to satisfy most of those needs without cooperation. Material development intensifies this dependence rather than abolishing it. Marx had consequently mistaken increasing productive capacity for an approaching liberation from scarcity.

Chapter five presses the difficulty into Marx’s treatment of use-value. A post-market economy must somehow determine which needs deserve satisfaction, in what quantities, and at what cost. Exchange-value can be abolished conceptually, but the practical problem formerly handled through prices does not disappear with it. Resources remain finite, preferences conflict, production requires coordination, and newly satisfied wants generate further wants. Hont was not interested in rehearsing the familiar Cold War objection that central planning was inefficient. Rather, he probed something prior to institutional design: Marx needed a theory explaining how a society organised around use-values could establish socially recognised need without recreating some mechanism performing the allocative work of the market. The chapter therefore asks whether communism has genuinely escaped political economy or merely removed the vocabulary through which political economy had described its problems.

This reconsideration of Marx also alters the meaning of eighteenth-century political economy. Hont did not treat political economy as the discovery of a separate economic sphere. It emerged because European thinkers had encountered problems that older political thinking could no longer adequately handle. Increasing commerce made individuals more dependent upon strangers. Expanding markets crossed political frontiers, and states required prosperity to finance defence while commercial competition created new causes of international rivalry. Economic development could therefore pacify some relations while making others more dangerous. In one of the papers collected here, Hont captured the contradiction with characteristic compression: there was “enough commercial sociability … to make the politics of virtue impossible, but not enough to keep the peace.”

Readers of Jealousy of Trade will recognise where this eventually led. Hont’s mature work centred on the collision between an increasingly international economy and a political world divided into competing states. Commerce could make nations richer, but wealth increased military capacity and therefore intensified the requirement that rival states become richer too. Economic competition became inseparable from national security. Neither liberal expectations of a peacefully integrated commercial world nor Marxist expectations that capitalism would eventually transcend national politics could resolve the problem. Hont was interested in the eighteenth century because Hume, Smith, and their contemporaries were already trying to understand a problem that remains unresolved in modern capitalism: commercial expansion made societies richer and more dependent upon one another, but it did not remove political rivalry between states. Greater wealth could increase a state’s military power, while dependence on trade could make access to markets and resources more politically important. Commerce therefore bound states together economically even as it gave them new reasons to compete.

The new book reveals how much of that mature argument grew from Hont’s earlier confrontation with Marx. It also reveals paths that he did not continue to follow. The first three chapters attempt to explain eighteenth-century political economy through the interaction of natural jurisprudence and civic humanism. Hont was grappling here with two powerful Cambridge inheritances: Duncan Forbes’s emphasis upon Protestant natural law and J. G. A. Pocock’s republican account of “commercial humanism.”

One difficulty with the volume is that some of its interpretive framework appears less secure than Hont’s later work. The early papers place considerable weight on natural jurisprudence and civic humanism as the intellectual languages through which eighteenth-century political economy developed. That helps explain the route from Pufendorf to Smith, but it can also overstate the continuity. Hume and Smith were not simply extending natural-law arguments into a commercial setting, and Smith in particular cannot be understood adequately through political economy alone. His account of commercial society also rests upon a moral psychology of sympathy, judgement, self-command, and social recognition developed in The Theory of Moral Sentiments. Read too heavily through Pufendorf, that philosophical dimension recedes.

The problem is therefore one of emphasis rather than simple error. Hont’s work is exceptionally good at restoring political economy to the history of political thought, showing how commerce, property, state power, and international rivalry belong to the same field of argument. But the method can narrow what counts as politically significant. Hume’s philosophy, Smith’s moral psychology, and the direct intellectual relationship between the two sometimes receive less attention than the longer genealogy running back through natural law. The result is a powerful account of how commercial society became a political problem, but a less complete account of how eighteenth-century thinkers understood the moral agents who inhabited it.

These criticisms make the editorial status of the volume important. The seven papers were never assembled by Hont into a finished book, and they vary considerably in completeness. Chapters four and five come close to self-contained scholarly arguments, while chapters one and seven still show the compression and abrupt transitions of conference papers. Hont was also famously reluctant to publish work he considered unfinished, so the collection cannot simply be treated as a lost masterpiece recovered after his death.

That is also the level on which Political Economy from Pufendorf to Marx is most revealing. It should not be read as a substitute for Jealousy of Trade, or as though every argument in these papers represented Hont’s settled position. What it exposes instead is the problem from which much of the later work developed. Hont was trying to abandon Marxism without abandoning Marx’s ambition to explain commercial society as a historical system encompassing politics, economic life, property, and changing human needs. His turn to Pufendorf, Hume, and Smith therefore amounted to more than a change of intellectual allegiance. He was looking for a way to preserve the scale of Marx’s questions while rejecting the expectation that the contradictions of commercial society could finally be abolished.

Such a refusal of reconciliation now looks like the deepest continuity between the unfinished papers and Hont’s mature work. Marx expected economic development eventually to dissolve scarcity, property, and the political divisions sustained by them, while liberal commercial optimism could produce a parallel expectation that expanding exchange would progressively make national antagonism irrational. Hont rejected both. Needs continue to develop faster than any final condition of abundance can satisfy them, while commercial interdependence remains embedded within a world of states capable of fearing one another. The economy cannot abolish politics because economic development continually creates political problems of its own.

This somewhat awkward posthumous book deserves publication for precisely that reason. Its unfinished quality occasionally exposes interpretations that Hont himself may later have discarded, and anyone encountering him for the first time should still begin with Jealousy of Trade. But the roughness also lets us see something the polished essays conceal: Hont had not simply discovered eighteenth-century political economy and applied it to modern problems. Rather, he reached it through the wreckage of Marxism. Pufendorf, Hume, and Smith became important because they offered ways of thinking about dependence, property, commerce, and political conflict without promising that history would someday make those problems disappear. Hont wanted Marx buried, but he understood that Marx could not be disposed of by declaring him wrong. The questions had first to be recovered from the history Marx had misunderstood. This remarkable, uneven volume finally allows us to see how Hont attempted to do it.