Passions and Interests

Taken from the book by Albert Hirschman, professor of political economy at Harvard in 1974
"(T)he idea of engineering social progress by cleverly setting up one passion to fight another became a fairly common intellectual pastime in the course of the eighteenth century. (p. 26)
"So much is clear now: when the interests of men came to be contrasted iwth their passions, this opposition could have quite different meanings depending on whether interests were understood in the wider or in the narrower sense. A maxim such as "Interest Will Not Lie" was originally an exhortation to pursue ll of one's aspirations in an orderly and reasonable manner; it advocated the injection of an element of calculating efficiency, as well as of prudence, into human behavior whatever might be the passion by which it is basically motivated. But because of the (...) semantic drift of the term "interests," the opposition between interests and passions could also mean or convey a different thought, much more startling in view of traditional values: namely, that one set of passions, hitherto known variously as greed, avarice, or love of lucre, could be usefully employed to oppose and bridle such other pssions as ambition, lust for power, or sexual lust." (pp. 40-41 - bold and underlining mine - italics theirs).

"In the numerous treatises on the passions that appeared in the seventeenth century, no change whatever can be found in the assessment of avarice as the "foulest of them all" or in its position as the deadliest Deadly Sin that it had come to occupy toward the end fo the Middle Ages. But once money-making wore the label of "interests" and reentered in this disguise the competition with the other passions, it was suddenly acclaimed and even given the task of holding back those passions that had long been thought to be much less reprensible. To account for this reversal it does not seem enough to point out that a new, comparatively neutral, and colorless term permitted lifting or attenuating the stigma attached to the old labels. A stronger explanation is provided by our demonstration that the term "interests' actually carried - and therefore bestowed on money-making - a positive and curative connotation deriving from its recent close association with the idea of a more enlightened way of conducting human affairs, private as well as public."
p. 40-41