nomics has played an important part in the current heaviness of heart, the widening gap between blacks and whites, the rarity of beauty in the culture, and the fading passion for justice" (147). He notes that the sudden expansion of capitalism "in the seventeenth century . . . took everyone by surprise. Adam Smith, John Locke, Thomas Hobbes, all tried to think their way through it." But did all these people (and others he lists later) really live at the same time?--a few simple reference books provide some answers. Adam Smith's surprise about anything that happened in the seventeenth century was probably much less than that of Locke or Hobbes since Smith (ca. 1723-1790) was not born until well into the eighteenth century. This might seem trivial but the next paragraph begins, "In the seventeenth century, Adam Smith, Thomas Hobbes, Bernard Mandeville, and David Hume, speaking for English property owners, gave to the strong "the right to pursue their own self-interest" (149). Smith, as we know (a favorite phrase of Bly's), was born in the eighteenth century, but Bly has now added Mandeville (1670-1733) a Dutch physician who moved to England in the mid-1690s to learn English and only first published in 1705 and did not publish the influential version of his main work, The Fable of the Bees, until 1726--once again, well into the eighteenth century (Harth 8). As for David Hume, he was born in 1711 and died in 1776. This leaves Hobbes as the only one of Bly's four seventeenth-century thinkers who actually had anything to do with the seventeenth century.
In the next paragraph Bly continues by quoting Locke (a genuine seventeenth-century man) saying that men form governments for the preservation of property. The next paragraph is as follows:
As we know, English business began to proceed on its path, and the State helped. The English enclosed, that is, abolished, the "commons"--the free pasturage at the center of English village...