Passions and interests

Passions and Interests is a classic of economic thought that deals with the history of ideas in capitalist society and its ideological foundations in an original and transdisciplinary way.

For Albert O. Hirschman, the history of economic thought is based on the belief that capitalism awakens certain benign tendencies in humankind at the expense of some malignant ones. Inspired by Montesquieu's argument, which associated passions with people's evil, while at the same time having an "interest in not being so," Hirschman presents in *The Passions and Interests * an original and transdisciplinary analysis that transcends economics.

When dealing with the history of ideas in capitalist society, the author shows us the ideological foundations of capitalism in an innovative way, despite the fact that its basic concepts date back more than two hundred years. To illustrate his complex array of ideas, Hirschman visits classical images, such as that of Mephisto in Goethe's Faust, when he defines himself as "a portion of that force which always determines evil and always produces good."

Hirschman offers a new interpretation of the rise of capitalism, emphasizing the continuities between the old and the new, in contrast to the hypothesis of abrupt rupture, characteristic of both Marxist and Weberian thought. To portray this slow ideological shift as an endogenous process, Hirschman draws on the works of several thinkers, notably Sir James Steuart and Adam Smith.

Unlike important works such as *The Strategy of Economic Development*, which Hirschman used to challenge various theories of economic equilibrium, this essay, according to the author himself, does not intend to contradict any particular intellectual thesis. Passions and interests have the quality of not opposing any set of thought, but of developing freely and, above all, independently.