István Hont (15 April 1947 – 29 March 2013[1]) was a Hungarian-born British historian of economics and political thought, University Reader in the History of Political Thought at the University of Cambridge.[2]
Hont was supervised as a doctoral student at OxfordbyHugh Trevor Roper. He was elected a Fellow of King's College, Cambridge in 1978.[3] From 1978 to 1984 he directed a King's College Research Centre project 'Political Economy and Society 1750–1850' with Michael Ignatieff, out of which grew their co-edited volume Wealth and Virtue. Hont was invited to be a professor in political thought at Columbia University,[4] and was a visiting fellow at the Collegium Budapest in 1993–4.,[5] but remained at Cambridge until his death. He and Raymond Geuss organized the Cambridge Seminars in Political Thought and Intellectual History for 2007/8, attracting a range of international scholars to participate in the seminar series.[6]
Though Hont's scholarly articles – on such figures as David Hume and Adam Smith, and on such themes as the Scottish Enlightenment, commerce, nationalism, national debt, luxury and political economy – have won awards for breaking new ground, the scope and nature of his overall ambition were difficult to gauge until the articles were collected together in Jealousy of Trade. An extended introduction to Jealousy of Trade emphasized the absence of economic questions in the seventeenth-century thought of Thomas Hobbes, traced (via Samuel Pufendorf) the eighteenth-century emergence of commerce as a problem for political theory, and used eighteenth-century debates about the interaction of politics and commerce to suggest a new perspective for thinking about economic nationalism in the nineteenth century and beyond.
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