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Can society have a common interest? With Professor Jacob Sider Jost
Description
Can society have a common interest when everyone has interests of their own? Samuel Woodall and Jack Thomson welcome Professor Jacob Sider Jost, Professor and Chair of English at Dickinson College, for an audio-only conversation about the many meanings of interest in eighteenth-century life.
Beginning with Robinson Crusoe, we explore how a single word connected money, storytelling, political allegiance, friendship and patronage. Lord Hervey's memoirs reveal a world of personal networks, while Olaudah Equiano's Interesting Narrative brings emotional involvement, financial independence and the abolitionist cause into conversation.
We ask when connections become exclusion, whose interests count as the common good, and whether self-interest must be selfish. The discussion closes with Adam Smith, sociability and the desire to be worthy of other people's approval.
Hosted by Samuel Woodall and Jack Thomson. Guest: Professor Jacob Sider Jost.
JACOB'S BOOK
Jacob Sider Jost, Interest and Connection in the Eighteenth Century: Hervey, Johnson, Smith, Equiano (University of Virginia Press, 2020).
https://www.upress.virginia.edu/title/5566/
FURTHER READING DISCUSSED
Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe (1719).
Olaudah Equiano, The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano (1789).
J. A. W. Gunn, Politics and the Public Interest in the Seventeenth Century (1969).
Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759) and The Wealth of Nations (1776).
Explore Beyond the Text: https://beyondthetext.co.uk
The Intellectual Historian: https://theintellectualhistorian.com
CHAPTERS
00:00 Welcome and the question of common interest
01:21 Robinson Crusoe and two kinds of interest
05:21 Interest across eighteenth-century life
10:14 Method, selfishness and self-interest
17:33 Lord Hervey, patronage and networks
23:29 Human scale, merit and life writing
29:04 Equiano's Interesting Narrative
34:26 Groups, loyalty and nationalism
39:41 Whose interests count as the common good?
47:49 Adam Smith, sociability and recognition
49:53 Closing thanks