Culture, Needs and Property Rights: A History of Political Economy from Pufendorf to Marx

István Hont (1947–2013) defected from Communist Hungary in the 1970s and became renowned globally as a scholarly visionary in European political ideas. Following his death, a wealth of unpublished material from an early project rewriting the history of liberty, politics and political economy from Samuel Pufendorf to Karl Marx was discovered. This book brings together seven of Hont's previously unpublished papers, providing a revolutionary intellectual history of the Marxian notion of communism and revealing its origin in seventeenth-century natural jurisprudence. Hont aspired to integrate the history and theory of politics and economics, to infuse present-day concerns with a knowledge of past events and theoretical responses. The essays selected for this volume realise Hont's historical imagination, range and intellectual ambition, exploring his belief that Marxism ought to be abandoned and explaining how to do it.

István Hont (1947–2013) was born in Hungary, before defecting from the communist regime and moving to the United Kingdom in 1975. He became a Fellow at King's College, Cambridge in 1978 and a University Reader in the History of Political Thought. Hont was renowned globally as a leading intellectual historian of political economy, although much of his writing remained unpublished during his lifetime. His co-edited volume with Michael Ignatieff Wealth and Virtue: The Shaping of Political Economy in the Scottish Enlightenment (1983) and his collected essays Jealousy of Trade: International Competition and the Nation-state in Historical Perspective (2005) combine political theory with intellectual history and seek to illuminate contemporary debates.

Lasse S. Andersen is Associate Director of the Institute of Intellectual History at the University of St Andrews. He has published articles on the history of political thought and political economy in the Journal of the Philosophy of History and Intellectual History Review.

Béla Kapossy is a professor of Early Modern History at the University of Lausanne. He is the author of many works concerned with enlightenment politics and political economy including Iselin contra Rousseau: Sociable Patriotism and the History of Mankind (2006), and a number of edited works and editions including Commerce and Peace in the Enlightenment (2016) and Edward Gibbon et Lausanne (2022).

Richard Whatmore is Professor of Modern History at the University of St Andrews and co-director of the Institute of Intellectual History. His most recent books are The End of Enlightenment (2023) and The History of Political Thought: A Very Short Introduction (2021).