In this volume, Albert Hirschman reconstructs the intellectual climate of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to illuminate the intricate ideological transformation that occurred, wherein the pursuit of material interests - so long condemned as the deadly sin of avarice - was assigned the role of containing the unruly and destructive passions of man. Hirschman here offers a new interpretation for the rise of capitalism, one that emphasizes the continuities between old and new, in contrast to the assumption of a sharp break that is a common feature of both Marxian and Weberian thinking. Among the insights presented here is the ironical finding that capitalism was originally supposed to accomplish exactly what was soon denounced as its worst feature: the repression of the passions in favor of the 'harmless,' if one-dimensional, interests of commercial life. To portray this lengthy ideological change as an endogenous process, Hirschman draws on the writings of a large number of thinkers, including Montesquieu, Sir James Steuart, and Adam Smith.

阿爾伯特•赫希曼（Albert Otto Hirschman，1915—2012），1915年生於德國柏林。1941年移民美國，先後在加州大學伯剋利分校、耶魯大學、哥倫比亞大學和哈佛大學從事研究與教學工作，1974年加入普林斯頓高等研究院直至去世。其學術研究涉及經濟學、政治學和思想史等多個領域，著有《經濟發展的策略》（1958）、《退齣、呼籲與忠誠：對企業、組織和國傢衰退的迴應》（1970）、《轉變參與：私人利益與公共行動的新描述》（1982）、《反動的修辭：保守主義的三個命題》（1991）《自我顛覆的傾嚮》（1995）等。