Doubtful Knowledge: Skepticism and the Birth of Political Economy

The origins of political economy are often told as a story of increasing certainty, rationality, and scientific progress. But what if its earliest thinkers were instead preoccupied with uncertainty? In Doubtful Knowledge, Richard Adelman offers a striking new interpretation of eighteenth-century political economy by tracing its roots to the skeptical philosophy of the European Enlightenment.

Moving between Scotland and France, Adelman reveals how figures including David Hume, Adam Smith, Denis Diderot, Jean Le Rond d'Alembert, François Quesnay, and the Physiocrats developed a shared understanding of the limits of human knowledge. Rather than presenting markets or societies as systems that could be fully understood or controlled, they emphasized the complexity of the social world, the fallibility of human judgment, and the need for intellectual humility. Through close readings of major philosophical and political-economic texts, Adelman demonstrates that skepticism was not peripheral to early political economy but fundamental to its emergence. Challenging long-held assumptions about the history of economics and Enlightenment thought, Doubtful Knowledge reframes debates about commerce, governance, progress, and human nature.

By bringing together intellectual history, literary studies, philosophy, and the history of political economy, Adelman offers a compelling account of how eighteenth-century thinkers understood knowledge itself—and why their questions remain relevant to contemporary discussions about economics, politics, and the limits of expertise.