István Hont (1947–2013) is relatively unknown in the United States, but in the United Kingdom, he is considered one of the great intellectual historians of his generation. Defecting from Communist Hungary in the 1970s, Hont rose to fame at the University of Cambridge in the 1980s and 1990s as the leader of a series of pathbreaking research projects on the history of political economy and reason of state. Writing in the context of the fall of Soviet communism, he insisted on the need to return to the intellectual world of the Scottish Enlightenment. “Marx will not be truly buried,” he wrote in 1994, “until we understand better the politics of ‘classical’ political economy.”

Though Hont is considered a leading scholar by his contemporaries and later generations of historians in Cambridge and in the UK more broadly, he published relatively little in his lifetime. Many of his key essays were collected in Jealousy of Trade (2005), and in 2015, his Carlyle lectures were posthumously published as Politics in Commercial Society.

His lack of publications appears to have been due to a notorious combination of ambition and perfectionism. It was certainly not due to idleness, as his papers in the Intellectual History Archive hosted by the University of St Andrews demonstrate. Seven of his unpublished essays have now been collected as Political Economy from Pufendorf to Marx: Culture, Needs, and Property Rights, edited by Lasse S. Andersen together with two of Hont’s students, Béla Kapossy and Richard Whatmore. Most of the papers in the new volume originate from the 1980s, when Hont was planning to write a longue durée history of political economy, connecting the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries.

...read more at lawliberty.org