A community of advantage or mutual respect?

Abstract

This paper reviews the points of continuity and change between Sugden’s new book and his classic from the 1980s, The Political Economy of Welfare, Rights and Cooperation. It argues that while his new responses to the ‘nudging’ revolution and rising inequality have sharpened his argument for, respectively, the economist as ‘contractarian’ adviser to citizenry model and his defence of the market as an institution of mutual benefit, the introduction of Adam Smith’s concept of ‘mutual sympathy’ is double-edged. It fills a psychological gap in Hume that is important for ‘contractarian’ proposals to citizenry, but it also suggests we might plausibly be interested in something more than mutual benefit when deciding what rules to be regulated by.