Like other concepts, ‘self-interest’ is also deemed to have a history. In the course of the seventeenth century, argues Albert O. Hirschman, there emerged the belief that countervailing passions or ‘interests’ – greed, avarice, love of money – might be invoked for the restraining of uncivil passions, ambition, glory-seeking or the lust for power. This influential thesis has been used to explain the rise of manners and the social and commercial sphere in the eighteenth century. Yet it remains problematic in terms of understanding historical development. One of the problems is that, on this view, the debate about social duty and self-interest is split across two hundred years, when in fact the dynamic relationship between them is the subject of humanist dialogue from at least the mid-sixteenth century.

This chapter revises our conception of the social thought of sixteenth century humanism. It questions the deep-rooted association of humanism with social exclusivity, aristocratic service and self-serving careerism. I do not dispute that these are often the effects of humanist debate, or that they represent the explicit motivation of some of the contributors, but I want to accommodate an agenda that had more complex and conflicted qualities. My aim is to communicate the varied nature of debate among those Cambridge humanists associated with John Cheke, who were committed to linguistic, social and religious reform, and who had a far-reaching and formative influence on the development of Elizabethan literary culture (an influence which is rarely recognised today in critical readings).