Introduction

This is the Japanese scholars’ first English-language monograph on Bishop Joseph Butler (1692–1752). It is a controversial message coming from Japan, a well-developed secular economyEconomy in which less than 1% of the population are Christians. It disputes the recent tendency to curtail the political economyEconomy of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to religiosity and theology. This interdisciplinary edited volume presents a new perspective. It differs from the recent works by Paul Oslington (2011, 2018), which attempted to reduce the political economyEconomy of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Britain to religion and theology, as prompted about three decades ago by[aut]Waterman, A. M. C. Boyd Hilton (1988) and A. M. C. Waterman (1991). Unlike these works, this collection of papers re-examines the largely forgotten Butler from the following two lenses, first, as a proto-political economist before Adam Smith[aut]Smith, Adam, second, as an empirical theologian.