Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Georgic Political Economy: Emergent Forms Of Order And Liberal Statecraft In Eighteenth-Century British Poetry, Jonathan Stillman

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Eighteenth-century, British, georgic poems participate in the work of the new discipline of political economy of naturalizing economic and political liberalism. Georgics indirectly communicate a moral philosophy amenable to the system of natural laws and rights in John Locke’s Two Treatises of Government (1689). In light of the groundbreaking economic science of François Quesnay which Adam Smith revised in his more historically-informed, open-ended analysis, states were increasingly regarded as serving rather than served by their subjects, who now best fulfilled their natural law-based obligation to thrive by freely pursuing their rational self-interests. Georgic poems primarily undermine a conception of state …