On Adam Smith's Wealth of nations: A philosophical companion

On Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations: A Philosophical Companion

Volumn , Issue , 2009, Pages

  Fleischacker, Samuel ^a  

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References (277)

1. Griswold, Adam Smith and the Virtues of Enlightenment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999);
2. Haakonssen, The Science of the Legislator (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981) and Natural Law and Moral Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996).
3. For instance, David Raphael, Adam Smith (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985) and Jack Weinstein, On Adam Smith (Belmont: Wadsworth, 2001).
4. Vivienne Brown, however, takes up many philosophical issues in her Adam Smith's Discourse (London: Routledge, 1994), as does Jeffrey Young, in Economics as a Moral Science (Cheltenham: Edward Elgar, 1997).
5. For abbreviations, see pp. xiii-xiv.
6. Søren Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript, trans. D. Swenson and W. Lowrie (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1941), pp. 447-8, 464-5, 491. Haakonssen speaks of a "Socratic element" in Smith in SL 56, 66. See also AVE 201, 207.
7. As the editors of TMS say, Smith probably has Hume in mind here.
8. Again, he has Hume in mind (T 316-17).
9. Joseph Cropsey, for instance: "The man who observes the joy of another will himself experience joy, and the spectator of grief or of fear will himself feel some measure of grief or fear" (PE 14; see also 17-19).
10. By, for instance, W. R. Taylor in Francis Hutcheson and David Hume as Predecessors of Adam Smith (Durham: Duke University Press, 1965), pp. 109, 113, 116.
11. Smith complained in a 1780 letter that when a critic of his on defense "Wrote his book, he had not read mine to the end"-noting, rightly, that WN does not "disapprove of Militias altogether" (Corr 251). Stephen Macedo describes the advantages Smith saw in churches, while overlooking the disadvantages Smith also notes, in "Community, Diversity, and Civic Education: Toward a Liberal Political Science of Group Life," Social Philosophy and Policy 13, no. 1 (1996), 242-52.
12. Franklin Court, "Adam Smith and the Teaching of English Literature," History of Education Quarterly, Fall 1985, p. 326.
13. Jerry Muller, Adam Smith in His Time and Ours (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), 55, 147, 150.
14. Marshall, The Figure of Theater: Shaftesbury, Defoe, Adam Smith, and George Eliot (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), chap. 7, and Griswold, AVE, 48-58, 63-70.
15. Marshall, pp. 169, 174. The whole of 171-77, especially, offers a wonderful account of the degree to which Smith understands the notion of the self as growing out of a movement between "actor" and "spectator" positions.
16. Rothschild, ES 55, and Thompson, Customs in Common (London: Merlin, 1991), 201 n5, citing Anon, Thoughts of an Old Man of Independent Mind though Dependent Fortune on the Present High Prices of Corn (1800), p. 4.
17. Simmons, The Lockean Theory of Rights (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), p. 9 and n 4 on that page.
18. The internal quotation is from Andrei Rapaczynski, Nature and Politics (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1987), p. 15.
19. Fleischacker, A Third Concept of Liberty: Judgment and Freedom in Kant and Adam Smith (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999), pp. 210-12, 191-203.
20. See ASP 146-7.
21. If anything, Smith says (WN 193), the real price of precious metals should rise slightly over time, since they have a small use value in addition to their exchange value (for jewelry, cutlery, and the like) and these uses will increase, along with the increase in the use of all sorts of luxury goods, as a nation gets wealthier.
22. For Gibbon, see Frances Hirst, Adam Smith (New York: Macmillan, 1904), p. 165. For Blair, see his letter to Smith of April 3, 1776 (Corr 187-8).
23. Lord Shelburne, quoted in Kirk Willis, "Ideas of Smith in Parliament," History of Political Economy 11 (1979), 529.
24. Joseph Schumpeter, History of Economic Analysis, ed. E. B. Schumpeter (New York: Oxford University Press, 1954), pp. 184-5.
25. Muller, Adam Smith, 27.
26. Thus the increased "dexterity" that the division of labor brings to workers is made to look, in its initial appearance, almost machine-like; on each of the two subsequent occasions, later in the book, on which he explicitly compares industrial workers to machines, the word "dexterity" is again used to designate the machine-like quality about them (see WN 18-19 and 118-19). Similarly, "toil and trouble" are given an almost technical sense distinguishing them from such more positive aspects of labor as "skill," "dexterity" or "industry" (47).
27. Quoted in Stewart R. Sutherland, "The Presbyterian Inheritance of Hume and Reid," in R. H. Campbell and Andrew Skinner, The Origins and Nature of the Scottish Enlightenment (Edinburgh: John Donald, 1982), p. 132.
28. "Philosophy . . . has no other root but the principles of Common Sense; it grows out of them, and draws its nourishment from them" (Thomas Reid's Inquiry and Essays, R. Beanblossom and K. Lehrer, eds., Indianapolis: Hackett, 1983, p. 6)
29. The most thorough and forceful case for reading Smith as a sceptic is to be found in Griswold, AVE 155-78. Griswold admits, however, that "Smith nowhere denominates his position 'skeptical' " (170; see also 160 n 18), and I find his case for Smith's scepticism-in any sense, at least, that would conflict with a full-throated endorsement of common-life beliefs-very strained. I criticize this aspect of Griswold's account in "The Philosopher of Common Life," Mind, 109, no. 436 (October 2000), 916-23.
30. If philosophy cannot dispel the doubts it raises, says Reid, then "I despise Philosophy, and renounce its guidance-let my soul dwell with Common Sense" (ibid., p. 6). There is one place where Smith expresses similar sentiments: "Gross sophistry has scarce ever had any influence upon the opinions of mankind, except in matters of philosophy and speculation; and in these it has frequently had the greatest" (WN 769).
31. I am indebted to ASD 195-6 for the last three citations. Brown makes a similar point to mine, but sees the appeal to common sense as a matter of rhetorical strategy rather than epistemological commitment.
32. See also WN 109, 286, 290, 316, 347.
33. See, in addition to the citations below, 361, 396, 440, 488, 523, 555, 563, 631, 637, 640, 755, 865, 902.
34. Smith described WN as his "very violent attack . . . upon the whole commercial system of Great Britain" (Corr 251).
35. Stanley Cavell, The Claim of Reason (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979), p. 125.
36. A similar explanation is supposed to dispel prejudices against apothecaries: 128-9.
37. AVE 168-9. See also footnote 27 to chapter 1 above, and text thereto.
38. TMS 9, ¶3. Hume announces the novelty of his use of the term "impressions" at T 2n and E 18.
39. T 183. Smith says that "to approve of another man's opinions is to adopt those opinions, and to adopt them is to approve of them" (TMS 17), which not only makes believing a matter of "approval" but, in context, makes shared belief exactly like shared sentiments.
40. Smith's account of language is permeated by this assumption: see especially LRBL 204-5, 214, 215-16, 218, 224. It is in this respect that I think Lindgren was right to point to Smith's theory of language as a model for his entire account of inquiry (see note 1 above).
41. See also Terence Irwin, Aristotle's First Principles (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), pp. 118-20, 261-3. For further examples of the linkage between interest and attention to detail in Smith, see WN 833, 836, 838-9, 844, 885.
42. See chapter 6 of my Third Concept of Liberty.
43. I am indebted to David Hilbert for pointing out to me that the fact that Smith accepted Hume's psychology does not by itself show that he accepted Hume's metaphysics. Once one accepts associationism as a full account of the psychology of causation, it becomes a bit difficult to find grounds for believing in causal realism as a metaphysical view. But certainly the psychological and the metaphysical claims are not identical.
44. See also WN 313 where, in words that echo the book's title, Smith claims that the Scottish bankers who were led into disaster by the practice of "drawing and re-drawing" were confused because they failed to grasp the underlying source ("nature and causes") of their troubles. The echo of the title suggests that when Smith set out to explain the "nature and causes of the wealth of nations," he meant to clear up confusions that depended precisely on the difference between accidentally linked phenomena and true causal regularities.
45. E 92-3. It is perhaps not irrelevant, if this chapter influenced Smith, as I think it did, that Hume illustrates his point by way of an example of causal regularities in economic exchanges: E 89.
46. Hume gives a wonderfully nuanced account of these levels of regularity in his chapter on miracles in the Enquiry, which immediately follows the one on causality in human affairs.
47. See Anthony Waterman, "Economics as Theology: Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations," Southern Economic Journal 68, no. 4.
48. Skinner, A System of Social Science, second edition (Oxford: Clarendon Press), p. 41n.
49. See, for instance, Charles Taylor, "Rationality," Philosophy and the Human Sciences (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985).
50. EPS 75 adds "novelty and unexpectedness," but not predictive ability, to beauty and simplicity. See also Deborah Redman, The Rise of Political Economy as a Science (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1997), p. 85: "A failure to appreciate prediction as a goal of science is one of [Dugald Stewart's] criticisms of Smith." But Eric Schliesser sees prediction as very important to Smith and cites EPS 103 in support: Indispensable Hume: From Isaac Newton's Natural Philosophy to Adam Smith's "Science of Man" (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Chicago, 2002), chap. 3.
51. Compare McCloskey's discussion of prediction as a scientific criterion, and argument that it is not a good criterion for the scientific status of economics (Rhetoric, 150-51). Here and elsewhere, I find McCloskey's account of what economics should be-a humanistic, historical, and rhetorically self-aware science-very close to what Smith hoped it would be.
52. Nothing I say in this section is intended to suggest that Smith's version of empiricism is unique. We can find similar ways of using classical texts in Hume, and a similar concern to give the credentials of authoritative sources in many other earlier writers. There are, however, ways in which Smith differs from his peers, at least in what he emphasizes and what he plays down. He is, for instance, considerably more skeptical of the uses of statistical evidence than other writers on political economy in his day, and he relies more on his own observations than Hutcheson or Hume did in their writings on society.
53. Similarly, a Mr. Meggens gets called "judicious" on 226, another unnamed author is called "eloquent and, sometimes, well-informed" on the same page, and M. Messance is complimented, again, for his "great diligence and fidelity" on 257. Certain manuscript accounts are described as "well authenticated" on 227. Smith constantly evaluates his sources even while using them: for other examples, see 169, 317, 320, 426, 506, 739, 755, 899, 905, 918, 922.
54. The practice of describing the reliability of one's sources was widespread among prior empiricists, going back at least as far as Bacon: see Steven Shapin, A Social History of Truth (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), chap. five.
55. For instance: 89, 173, 186-8, 191, 205, 240, 247, 568, 571, 574, 576, 680, 730.
56. This last remark brings to mind Hume's warning, in "On Miracles," that travelers are inclined to pack their tales with "miraculous" events: E 117.
57. Other citations from classical sources: 235-6, 241, 587, 685-6. The last of these draws an economic inference from classical statuary.
58. See editors' comment on WN 152, n50.
59. Nathan Rosenberg, "Some Institutional Aspects of the Wealth of Nations," Journal of Political Economy 68 (1960).
60. Unsurprisingly, much of what Smith tells us on the basis of his own experience and conversations has to do with Scotland: see, for example, 69, 92-3, 97, 99, 107, 121, 133.
61. Of course, he had few written sources he could turn to for information on this subject. Frederick Eden's 1797 The State of the Poor is often considered the first serious attempt to survey the condition of the poor. Arguably that honor belongs to the Wealth of Nations itself.
62. Shapin traces this list of criteria back to the seventeenth century, pointing out anticipations of Hume in Locke, especially: Social History, pp. 228-38.
63. Elsewhere, he treats his oral informants much as he does written texts, expressing doubts about the truth of some of what he has heard on the basis either of his own observations or of the disputability inherent to the subject on which his informant was testifying (177, 261).
64. I discuss the relationship between these two in Third Concept, chap. two. The importance of judgment in WN is the subject of Third Concept, chap. six.
65. Athol Fitzgibbons, Adam Smith's System of Liberty, Wealth and Virtue (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), p. 194. A helpful corrective to Fitzgibbons' view can be found in Emma Rothschild, ES 131-6. See also below, §37.
66. See also TMS 87, 128, 165, 166, 185. Smith also often seems to personify nature, describing it as if it had conscious intentions and as if those intentions were wise and benevolent: "Nature . . . exhorts mankind to acts of beneficence" (86). "Nature, when she formed man for society, endowed him with an original desire to please" (116)
67. Note the wonderful use of "savage," here, to describe the Europeans in America! Compare 636, where a Dutch policy in Indonesia is described as "savage" ("barbarous," in the first edition).
68. Editors' introduction, p. 40, my emphasis.
69. As, once again, Kierkegaard was to say: Concluding Unscientific Postscript, 68-74, 246-7, 320-22. Haakonssen makes an intriguing comparison between Smith and Kierkegaard on SL 77.
70. Sometimes Smith drops proto-Kantian hints that a concern for the equal worth of each and every human being lies at the basis of all moral sentiments (TMS 90, 107, 137. See Stephen Darwall, "Sympathetic Liberalism: Recent Work on Adam Smith," Philosophy and Public Affairs, 1999, pp. 153-4). This point, if it could be justified, might point the way toward an account of how the impartial spectator can correct for local biases and maintain universalist aspirations. But Smith says very little to justify the point.
71. A standard solution to the "Adam Smith Problem": see the editors' introduction to TMS, 20-21.
72. See §22 below and Third Concept, 154-6, 170.
73. In his Religion Within the Limits of Reason Alone especially, but also in Book I, Part I, chap. 3 of the Critique of Practical Reason.
74. Taylor, "Interpretation and the Sciences of Man," Philosophy and the Human Sciences (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985).
75. Ronald Meek, Smith, Marx, and After (London: Chapman & Hall, 1977), chap. 2.
76. Donald Davidson, Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984).
77. Pufendorf comments wrily on More's and Campanella's utopias: "I suppose . . . perfect men are more easily imagined than found" (LNN IV.iv.7; 541).
78. Ryan Hanley has carried out a deep investigation of these different kinds of self-love in Smith in "Magnanimity and Modernity: Self-Love in the Scottish Enlightenment," Ph.D. dissertation, University of Chicago, June 2002.
79. The most important recent discussion of this topic is For Love of Country, eds. M. Nussbaum and J. Cohen (Boston: Beacon Press, 1996).
80. See also Nussbaum, The Cosmopolitan Tradition (New Haven: Yale University Press, forthcoming).
81. TMS 335-6. Nicholas Phillipson discusses the importance of conversation to Smith's moral theory in "Adam Smith as civic moralist," Wealth and Virtue, I. Hont and M. Ignatieff (eds.) (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), pp. 188-9.
82. TMS 19. On theater, see TMS 107, 123, 143, 176-7; on poetry, see LRBL, passim, TMS 123-5, 143, and EPS 194, 243; on music, see EPS 187-207, esp. 194 and 204-5.
83. This "conduciveness to utility without actual utility" is I think a direct ancestor of Immanuel Kant's "purposiveness without purpose" in his writings on aesthetics (Fleischacker, Third Concept, 147, 190-91). TMS was employed in aesthetic theory by several Germans before Kant: the editors' introduction mentions its influence, in this regard, on Lessing and Herder (30-31).
84. Hutcheson had located beauty in a balance between uniformity and variety (OB, chapter II).
85. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Discourse on the Moral Effects of the Arts and Sciences (the so-called "First Discourse"), translated in The First and Second Discourses, R. Masters and J. Masters (ed. and trans.), (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1964).
86. By Peter Minowitz, in Profits, Priests and Princes (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993).
87. Indeed, he famously said that he considered David Hume, an avowed agnostic (and possibly an atheist), to "approach [ . . . ] as nearly to the idea of a perfectly wise and virtuous man as perhaps the nature of human frailty will permit" (Corr 221).
88. The more standard reading of this verse sees the image of God in our intellect, not our emotions, but since Smith has shifted the emphasis in morality from intellect to sentiment, it makes sense for him, correspondingly, to see God's image in our sentiments.
89. Similarly, he uses the phrase "demigod within the breast" to describe the impartial spectator within us, saying that it is "partly of immortal, . . . partly . . . of mortal extraction" (131). Insofar as we judge of one another impartially, we take up something of a "God's-eye view" of the universe, a view beyond both our own interests and the interests of the people we are judging.
90. Note that all the citations in the last two sentences come from the final, 1790 edition of TMS. I agree with the TMS editors' judgment that Smith retained a commitment to natural religion throughout his life, even if he increasingly dropped any commitment to Christianity (19-20, 383-401). The editors note, in this context, Smith's contemptuous sneer at "whining Christian[s]" in a letter to Alexander Wedderburn shortly before Hume's death. Anthony Waterman ("Economics as Theology") argues for a more Christian Smith.
91. Throughout that chapter, he is concerned about the ability of churches and clerics to foster moral virtues, by example and by creating communities that provide the mechanisms of social approval and disapproval he had emphasized in TMS.
92. WN 944-5: he here also uses the phrase "impartial spectator."
93. Vivienne Brown's intriguing reading of justice as a lesser virtue therefore goes too far, in my opinion, in that she fails to see the degree to which it expresses the impartial stance that Smith takes to be basic to all virtue; this suggests some questions about her reading of WN as an "amoral" book.
94. See Darwall, "Sympathetic Liberalism."
95. This is but one of many connections between Smith and Kant: see Darwall, "Sympathetic Liberalism" and my essays, "Philosophy and Moral Practice: Kant and Adam Smith," Kant-Studien 1991 and "Values Behind the Market: Kant's Response to the Wealth of Nations," History of Political Thought, Autumn 1996.
96. The distinction between these two sets of issues is not a sharp one, since one important way in which human rewards differ is that some people receive, from childhood onward, better means for developing intelligence and virtue than others do. Smith was neither unaware of nor unworried about this fact, but I think we can stick with the distinction in types of issues for the purpose of organizing his arguments.
97. Polanyi, The Great Transformation (Boston: Beacon, 1944), p. 44.
98. See also 104 ("[the owner of stock] endeavours to supply [his workers] with the best machinery which either he or they can think of "-my emphasis) and LJ 346, 351.
99. The word he uses is "musick," which for the Greeks included all the arts: "music" is that over which the Muses watch.
100. Justice is not, however, the only virtue that expresses equality: TMS 137 makes proper generosity also follow from seeing "the real littleness of ourselves."
101. Much of Smith's opposition to policies that help one sort of trade over another is based on the notion that such policies violate the sovereign's duty to show "equality of treatment" to every order of citizen (see, for instance, 825, 877, 905).
102. Quoted in Muller, Adam Smith, 163.
103. See Fleischacker, The Ethics of Culture (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994), chap. 5.
104. Ross, Life, 166.
105. Bentham, Works (Edinburgh: Tait, 1843), vol. 2, pp. 253-4.
106. George Stigler, "Smith's Travels on the Ship of State," in Essays on Adam Smith, eds. Andrew Skinner and Thomas Wilson (Oxford: Clarendon, 1975), p. 237.
107. Internal quotation from Bernard Bailyn, The Origins of American Politics (New York: Vintage, 1968), p. 41.
108. See Locke, Essay Concerning Human Understanding, II.xxi38, 43-4, 62, II.xxviii.5-8; Jerome Schneewind, The Invention of Autonomy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 142-55;
109. Stephen Darwall, The British Moralists and the Internal 'Ought' (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. 149-71.
110. On Shaftesbury and his relation to Locke, see Darwall, British Moralists, pp. 176-8.
111. The desire for self-approval may lead one, after all, to sacrifice everything one has, including one's life.
112. See TMS 63-4 and WN 794 on the likelihood that the poor will be more ascetic than the rich.
113. "When a Man acts in behalf of Nephews or Neices, and says they are my Brother's Children, I do it out of Charity; he deceives you: for if he is capable, it is expected from him, and he does it partly for his own Sake: If he values the Esteem of the world, and is nice as to Honour and Reputation, he is obliged to have a greater Regard to them than for Strangers. . . ." Mandeville, "An Essay on Charity, and Charity Schools," in The Fable of the Bees, ed. F. B. Kaye (Oxford: Clarendon, 1924), p. 253. (See also the whole of this chapter.)
114. Nor would a self-respecting butcher give away his meat to customers with the means to pay for it. Gloria Vivenza is right to "doubt whether the impartial spectator would . . . sympathize with a butcher who gave away his meat, or even sold it at a lower price than he should." Vivenza, Adam Smith and the Classics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), p. 63.
115. Aristotle, Politics I.2, 1253a7-18, as translated in Jonathan Barnes (ed.), The Complete Works of Aristotle (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984).
116. Continental philosophy of language, from Saussure onward, stresses the first of these conditions; Anglo-American philosophy of language, especially as developed by Donald Davidson, emphasizes the second.
117. But even here the word "only" in the second sentence qualifies the extent to which benevolence is being written out of the picture. No such qualification appears in a similar argument in Mandeville, cited by the editors at the bottom of the page: and Smith will similarly, toward the end of the paragraph, say that beggars do not depend upon charity "entirely," where Mandeville had reduced "charity" itself to the self-interest of the donors.
118. James Steuart, Inquiry into Political Economy (London: Cadell & Davies, 1805), p. 212, my emphasis.
119. Translated as "Nature's Domain," in French Utopias, ed. and trans. Frank E. Manuel and Fritzie P. Manuel (New York: The Free Press, 1966), pp. 93-4.
120. Tommasso Campanella, "City of the Sun" (1623), trans. Thomas W. Halliday, in Henry Morley (ed.), Ideal Commonwealths (New York: The Co-operative Publication Society, 1901), p. 148.
121. The lawyer Guy-Jean Target, at the beginning of the French Revolution, quoted in Simon Schama, Citizens (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1989), p. 291.
122. Gordon Wood, Creation of the American Republic (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press), p. 69. As Rothschild says, for Smith politics "requires very little in the way of civic virtue" (ES 233).
123. TMS 317: the language here echoes his dismissal of Mandeville, on 313.
124. >The same slip between "polity" and "society" occurs several times on PE 110-11 and 113.
125. See above §12, Muller, Adam Smith, 133, and AVE 294, 296-300.
126. See my "Insignificant Communities," in Amy Gutmann (ed.), Freedom of Association (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998), pp. 275-8.
127. See, for instance, AVE 225, 263, 326.
128. ASP 91-2 very much presents WN as "painted within the framework" of TMS IV.i.10, as do Fitzgibbons (168-9), Cropsey (PE 133-4), and Muller (134).
129. Griswold himself stresses, against more Stoic interpretations, that Smith does not entirely disapprove of the pursuit of wealth: see, especially, AVE 226-7 (including note 56 on 226) and 265. Nevertheless, the degree to which, on Griswold's view, Smith regards the pursuit of wealth as a corruption is sufficient to warrant an expectation that he would have engaged in far more moral criticism of commercial society than he did.
130. "The Market and the Republic," in Ignatieff, The Needs of Strangers (New York: Viking, 1984).
131. See also Ryan Hanley's brilliant comparison of Smith to Rousseau, in TMS IV.i and elsewhere: "Rousseau's Diagnosis and Adam Smith's Cure," presented at APSA, Boston, 2002.
132. Howard Caygill rightly understands this last phrase to refer to "the political direction of wealth in the interest of the common welfare," and maintains that Smith moved gradually from this position to the free trade doctrine of WN: Caygill, Art of Judgment (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989), p. 91.
133. See also Brown (ASD 155 n35): the celebration of "police" in this passage, she says, "is at odds with the argument of WN," and the passage "could not have occurred in WN."
134. See W. L. Taylor, Francis Hutcheson and David Hume as Predecessors of Adam Smith (Durham: Duke University Press, 1965), chapter IV.
135. WN 337, 342-3, 345, 405, 513, 540, 674, 925, 929. See also Taylor, Hutcheson and Hume, pp. 109-17.
136. See note k on TMS 275 and pp. 292-3.
137. On the subject of "preferred indifferents" in Stoic thought, see Glenn Lesses, "Virtue and Fortune in Stoic Moral Theory," Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy, ed. Julia Annas (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989). I am indebted to Rachana Kamtekar for clarification of this point.
138. "Virtue is open to everyone, admits everyone, invites everyone-freeborn, freedman and slave, king and exile" (Seneca, De Beneficiis III.18, translated by J. Cooper and J. F. Procopé in Seneca, Moral and Political Essays (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), p. 256. Similarly, Epictetus, who was himself born a slave, makes light of the difference between freedom and slavery in Discourses IV.i.
139. See the part of TMS IV.i.10 quoted above and TMS 50-51.
140. See Fred Hirsch, Social Limits to Growth (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1976).
141. Vivenza uses, as proof of Smith's distance from the Stoics, the fact that he was interested in "guarantee[ing] a minimum of well-being, education and consideration even to the less fortunate classes: something the Stoics would not have been concerned with" (212, n 91).
142. The former is "taste" proper, for him, while the latter is our "empirical interest in the beautiful" (Critique of Judgment, §41).
143. Cavell, Claim of Reason, p. 120.
144. For this terminology, see Christine Korsgaard, Sources of Normativity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 19, 49-89.
145. We are competing here for positional goods: see Hirsch, Social Limits of Growth.
146. TMS 50, 186; LJ 334-5, 337, 377-9, 487; WN 96, 178, 338, 340.
147. For a contemporary economist's defense of this point, see Deirdre McCloskey, "Christian Economics?" Eastern Economic Journal 25 (4, Fall 1999): 477-80.
148. For economic guides to WN, see Vincent Bladen, From Adam Smith to Maynard Keynes (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1974) Samuel Hollander's The Economics of Adam Smith (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1973), or Mark Blaug's chapter on Smith in Economic Theory in Retrospect, fifth edition (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997). A lively introduction can be found in Robbins, History of Economic Analysis. For a fascinating but controversial view, see ASD, chapters 6 and 7.
149. Jack Weinstein, On Adam Smith (Belmont: Wadsworth, 2001), p. 72. There is a reason for the many ellipses in this quotation: The medieval view can be attributed to Smith only if one ignores much of his actual language. I will restore the missing words shortly, and it will then become clear that the attribution is misguided.
150. See Richard Teichgraeber, 'Free Trade' and Moral Philosophy (Durham: Duke University Press, 1986), 182n12.
151. On the importance of sectoral analysis to the argument of WN, see ASD 164-82, 196-206.
152. "Or whatever else is the common and favourite vegetable food of the people": WN 95-6, 206, 258-9.
153. This is not entirely true: It might add to your value, and if you are off to a job interview, that might be of real significance. But Smith is presumably thinking of aristocrats who do not seek or take jobs, and for them it is probably true that the service of their valets has no economic value.
154. But see Bladen, From Adam Smith, pp. 65-7, who provides an interesting reinterpretation of the distinction between productive and unproductive labor that sheds light on why menial labor is so prevalent in underdeveloped economies, and why such labor is both rarer and better recompensed in better developed ones.
155. In connection with this section, see Emma Rothschild's chapter on the invisible hand in ES (116-56). Not only is Rothschild's own reading of the nature and role of the invisible hand metaphor an extremely intriguing one, but her footnotes contain the most complete survey of literature on this topic I have ever seen.
156. Passages that express the same view, but without the vivid phrase, include WN 374, 524-5, 530, 630.
157. "Nothing but exemplary morals can give dignity to a man of small fortune," he says (WN 810), so an institution that needs to be served by morally exemplary people will do well to discourage the profit-motive in its employees.
158. Waterman, "Economics as Theology," 16. See also Rosenberg, "Institutional Aspects," and Werhane, Adam Smith's Legacy, chap. 4. Werhane offers a partial critique of Rosenberg.
159. Fitzgibbons, Adam Smith's System: see note 13 above.
160. If this is news, it is news primarily to Hobbesians, to those who picture human beings as so inevitably in conflict with one another that the result of their unregulated individual activities should hardly ever yield good results for society as a whole. On such a picture, the idea that an invisible hand of society might often guide individual activities toward a good for all would seem absurd. Like Hutcheson and Hume, Smith rejects Hobbes's unsociable conception of human beings, and we may take his invisible hand accounts to be part of this anti-Hobbesian polemic.
161. Implicitly, this argument depends upon Smith's analysis of sympathy in TMS. We build trust and understanding of other people's "character[s] and situation[s]" through sympathy, but sympathy is a highly particularized mechanism, which works most effectively between people who see each other often. As a consequence, people will always tend to trust those they know more than those they don't know-their neighbors more than unfamiliar fellow countrymen and unfamiliar countrymen more than unfamiliar people from foreign countries.
162. The man of virtue "really adopts" the sentiments of the impartial spectator (TMS 147), which, as we have seen earlier, essentially reflect moral sentiments widespread in his society; the man of lesser virtue adopts less lofty sentiments that his society also, tacitly, approves of (62).
163. See, for instance SL 1, 83, 89, RP 97, Werhane, Adam Smith and His Legacy, 44 and 78; or Fitzgibbons, Adam Smith's System, 140.
164. John Rawls, relying on Sidgwick, places Smith in "the utilitarian tradition" in Theory of Justice (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1971), p. 22n, and again in Political Liberalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), p. xiv.
165. There are implicit references. The phrase "impartial spectators" appears on 945, the phrase "bettering one's condition" appears throughout II.iii (echoing TMS 50), WN 180-81 looks like a rewrite of TMS 184, the notion that there is an upper-class (loose) and a lower-class (strict) standard of morals appears both at TMS 63-4 and at WN 794, and the phrase "invisible hand" of course appears in both books. None of these echoes requires a reader of WN to look back at TMS, however.
166. The early fragment is printed in the back of the standard Glasgow edition of TMS: see pp. 389-90.
167. If we look closely at the opening passage, which seemed to proclaim the unequivocal immunity of beneficence from enforcement, we also find one line hinting at the more complicated view: where a beneficiary fails to show gratitude to a benefactor, Smith says, "it would be impertinent for any third person, who was not the superior of either, to intermeddle" (79).
168. Smith here follows Locke's description of the enforcement of the law of reason in the state of nature: see ST §§8-13 (esp. §10).
169. For the need to moderate resentment, see TMS 38, 40, 68-9, 73-4, 160-61, 172. The plethora of references reflects the great importance of this to Smith: "There is no passion, of which the human mind is capable, concerning whose justness we ought to be so doubtful," no passion more in need of being filtered through "the sentiments of the cool and impartial spectator" (38). Smith describes both the unjust person and the person too filled with resentment as like "wild beasts" that threaten the very possibility of society (40, 86).
170. Haakonssen notes this at SL 106.
171. The editors of TMS take this author to be Kames, but Haakonssen argues, plausibly I think, that it is probably Hume: SL 203n20.
172. See, however, D. D. Raphael, Concepts of Justice (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2001), p. 117.
173. Summa I-II, Q90, A4.
174. He regards it, however, as an enforceable failure of beneficence. For Pufendorf it was a straightforward injustice: "But it is our feeling that perfect obligation rests upon parents to maintain their children so long as they cannot maintain themselves . . . For surely they would do a great injury to their offspring, if they begot them only to die" LNN IV.xi.4 (627-8). So Smith and Pufendorf agree that parents should be punished for neglecting their children, but disagree about what justifies that punishment. Why they disagree about this is unclear.
175. TMS 331; but see the whole discussion on 330-34 and 339-40.
176. One can of course abolish a systematic injustice while grandfathering in the generation that grew up with expectations shaped by the system. But such grandfathering-in may be politically impossible in many cases. Reform is often time-sensitive-a moment arises in which normally powerful aristocrats, clerics, or businesspeople are suddenly politically weak, and can be stripped of an unjust privilege they have long enjoyed-and if the present generation of people who benefit from an injustice are allowed to keep their privileges, they may in future use the power they gain from those privileges to roll back the reform.
177. I draw here on Rawls's useful distinction between "summary rules" and "practice rules" in "Two Concepts of Rules" (Rawls, Collected Papers, ed. S. Freeman, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999).
178. See also Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue, second edition (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1984), pp. 187-90.
179. Indeed, it might even be a boon for liberty if the rules of justice did vary across societies. Then individuals unwilling to "submit to the regulations" made in any one society might find regulations more to their liking elsewhere.
180. Martha Nussbaum traces the idea that the duties of justice alone are owed across national borders to Cicero, and criticizes that idea, in "Duties of Justice, Duties of Material Aid."
181. But, again, he does say that the laws required to support monopoly control over a sector of trade tend to be "cruel" and "oppressive" (WN 648-9).
182. They may have approved of the colonial enterprise nevertheless, but then they would be likely either (a) to deny that there had been as much injustice as Smith avows, (b) to say that a bit of injustice was a reasonable price to pay for the good that the colonies brought to the natives, or (c) to deny that any nation could or should worry about justice in the Hobbesian bellum omnium contra omnium that constitutes the international order.
183. I hope it is obvious that what I am saying does not give comfort to anyone who would like to return to the old misunderstanding of Smith as a utilitarian. If justice goes along with utility, throughout WN, then we have no basis on which to place utility over justice, any more than we do to place justice over utility.
184. Aristotle, Politics II.v and Aquinas, Summa Theologica, II-II, Q66, A2, as translated in The Political Ideas of St. Thomas Aquinas, ed. Dino Bigongiari (New York: Hafner Press, 1953).
185. See also WN 335: "Our ancestors were idle for want of a sufficient encouragement to industry." Smith tells us that a world of equality would be a world of poverty at LJ 195.
186. "[W]e find in Locke a variety of styles of argument for moral conclusions, sitting side by side and without any explanation of their differences" (Simmons, Lockean Theory of Rights, p. 45). See Simmons's rich account of Locke on property in chapter 5 of this book.
187. Note that this is a moral justification for the right to property-as much so as any other moral justification Hutcheson provides. It is not correct to say, as Richard Teichgraeber does ('Free Trade,' 52), that Hutcheson regards political matters as outside the realm of morality, as a realm in which utility matters instead of morality. Teichgraeber says that "Hutcheson does not show exactly how perfect rights derive from the moral sense" (51), but Hutcheson in fact does exactly that, in this passage.
188. Contrast Hutcheson, SMP II.4.ii, 283: "'Tis no fictitious state."
189. Hutcheson had already granted that "The accident of first occupation may be a trifling difference," but he said that "a trifle may determine the right to one side, when there is no consideration to weigh against it on the other" (SMP II.6.v, 318). So for Hutcheson "first occupation" is a trifle but it nevertheless determines "the right." For Hume, it seems to be just a trifle, useful for settling disputes where no other mark of ownership will do so, but something that can easily be overruled if we can find another basis on which to establish stable possession.
190. Consider especially Book III of TMS, where the entire argument is devoted to the importance of self-perception, self-judgment, and self-approbation, but where we also get an elaborate account of how we come to a notion of selfhood by way of the "lookingglass" of society (110-13).
191. The point in the passage is that the attribution of property rights is a matter of propriety rather than of utility, and that may be true. But it still is not obvious where propriety lies in this case. When, say, one man has tamed a sheep but his friend and two neighbors have also often taken care of it, how do we settle disputes among these people about who, in propriety, deserves the milk?
192. Pufendorf, whose work Smith knew well, had described objections of precisely this sort: "Imagine two men, one swift of foot and the other slow; it is obvious that in such a case the pair is ill-matched in the race to secure property. Therefore, the right whereby what is seized belongs to the first one to occupy it, is [not] founded . . . upon nature" (LNN IV.iv.5, p. 539).
193. Again, Pufendorf describes Velthuysen as having argued that "There is no natural reason for one receiving a right by first occupancy any more than by first laying eyes upon a thing" (ibid., p. 538).
194. LJ 17; note also the appeal to "expectations" in the hunting discussion on 19.
195. Compare Turgot: "[the] most sacred of all property [is] . . . the property of man in the fruit of his labor" ("Lettre sur le commerce des grains," cited in ES 85).
196. SL 107, my emphasis. Haakonssen does not spell out what the other circumstances might be, and, as I have indicated previously, I don't think this can be done in a precise and comprehensive way. Haakonssen also says that Smith gives "a very lucid exposition of the spectator theory of property" at LJ 17, and seems to think that Smith has shown how any impartial spectator, independent of conventions and social history, might come to see certain expectations of property as "reasonable" ones. I do not think Smith has shown this.
197. In particular, Haakonssen cites the famous "four maxims" on taxation in WN (825-7), but these principles in no way suggest that taxes pose a challenge to property rights.
198. The passage continues: "It is not very unreasonable that the rich should contribute to the publick expence, not only in proportion to their revenue, but something more than in that proportion." In terms of today's debates, these remarks put Smith firmly on the side of progressive taxation!
199. Dugald Stewart, "Life of Adam Smith," EPS 321-2.
200. The governmental activities Smith himself condemns as "wasteful" tend to be unnecessary wars, and the ceremonies of royal pomp and circumstance (see WN II.iii and §60 of this book). He never calls any expenditure designed to help the poor wasteful or unnecessary.
201. See D. W. Haslett, "Is Inheritance Justified?" Philosophy and Public Affairs Spring, 1986; and J. D. Trout and S. A. Buttar, "Resurrecting 'Death Taxes': Inheritance, Redistribution, and the Science of Happiness," Journal of Law & Politics 16.
202. The phrase "bourgeois radicalism" is Isaac Kramnick's: see his introduction to Tom Paine's Common Sense (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976), pp. 46-55.
203. Letter to Thomas Mann Randolph, 05/30/1790.
204. Letter to Madison, 09/06/89. The line about the earth belonging to the living could have come straight from Smith: Smith says it is absurd to deny "that every successive generation of men have . . . an equal right to the earth, and to all that it possesses" (WN 384; see also LJ 69 and especially LJ 468: "the earth and the fulness of it belongs to every generation").
205. Paine, Rights of Man, in The Writings of Thomas Paine, Moncure Daniel Conway (ed.) (New York: GP Putnam, 1894), vol. II, 496-7. The tax moved by steps of 3 pence per pound, such that estates of less than £5000 would be taxed at a rate below 10%, while everything above £23,000, in an estate, would go to the government. This proposal is preceded by a Smithian analysis of luxury taxes, and critique of duties on the necessary goods of the poor (495-6).
206. Haakonssen, NL 172. Haakonssen says on 169 that Millar took over Smith's natural jurisprudence "in all its essentials," and the quotations he brings from Millar on 161-4 bear this out.
207. The only commentator who recognizes that "distributive justice" in the jurisprudential tradition Smith inherited is very different from the notion that goes by that name today is Vivenza (Smith and the Classics, 198-202). The account of Smith on distributive justice in Young, Economics as a Moral Science, chapter 6, is also quite good, although Young shares the misconception that reads modern distributive justice into what he calls "the Aristotelian-Scholastic" version of the natural law tradition (p. 131).
208. RP 219. See also 168 and 228 on Condorcet's commitment to the translation and popularization of WN. Winch nevertheless sees the redistributivism of Paine and Condorcet as differentiating them from Smith (218-19); as I shall argue in the next chapter, I think this is based on a misunderstanding of Smith's attitude toward distributive justice. ES carries out a full-scale comparison between Smith and Condorcet, with which I am very sympathetic.
209. Gertrude Himmelfarb, The Idea of Poverty (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1984), 78-83.
210. The material in this chapter is elaborated in Fleischacker, A Short History of Distributive Justice (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004).
211. As Vivenza writes, "Classical distributive justice aimed to maintain inequality, while . . . distributive justice [in modern economics] aims to correct it" (Smith and the Classics, 202).
212. Idea, 61. Himmelfarb notes that commentators often confuse Smith's attack on the laws of settlement with an attack on the Poor Law. I made that mistake myself in my previous book (Third Concept, 167).
213. For instance by Joseph Townsend in his 1786 Dissertation on the Poor Laws.
214. Idea, 62, 46. See also Daniel A. Baugh, "Poverty, Protestantism and Political Economy: English Attitudes Toward the Poor, 1660-1800," in England's Rise to Greatness, ed. Stephen Baxter (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983), p. 86). Knud Haakonssen has called WN "the greatest working-man's tract ever written" (cited in AVE 261).
215. Walter Trattner, From Poor Law to Welfare State, fifth edition (New York: Free Press, 1994), p. 18.
216. Bronislaw Geremek, Poverty: A History, trans. Agnieszka Kolakowska (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994), p. 20.
217. Baugh, "Poverty, Protestantism . . . ," p. 80.
218. Baugh, p. 83.
219. Note that Smith here identifies himself with a person widely regarded as the lowest of the low. See §16, above.
220. At LJ 540 he suggests that good education can reduce drunkenness by giving poor children "ideas with which [they] can amuse [themselves]."
221. Strictly speaking, he identifies it with "all the social virtues" (270), but he treats beneficence as prominent among those virtues.
222. Politics III.9-11 and VI.2-3.
223. There is also a tradition, in the Christian as in the Hindu and Buddhist worlds, of people voluntarily taking on poverty, and of course these poor monks were held to be especially virtuous, not vicious. But it was essential to their virtue that they had renounced material goods, so there was no suggestion that they ought to be given the means to live comfortably.
224. George Clarke (ed.), John Bellers: His Life, Times and Writings (London: Routlege and Kegan Paul, 1987), 55. See also 52.
225. Schneewind, Invention, 79-80.
226. Grotius gives the bestowing of legacies as an example of an act expressing attributive justice (LWP I.I.viii.3; 37), and giving full information to prospective business partners (II.XII.ix.2; 347-8), sacrificing your life for your country (II.XXV.iii.3; 579), troubling innocent civilians as little as possible in times of war (III.XIII.iv.2-3; 759), and being merciful to needy debtors (III.XIII.iv.1; 759) as examples of acts demanded of us by "the law of love." Only the last of these examples has anything to do with helping the needy.
227. Schneewind (Invention, 78-80) and Haakonssen (NL 26-30) both claim that Grotius introduced the distinction between "perfect" and "imperfect" rights. Grotius does lay out the basis for this distinction (LWP 35-6), but without ever quite using the terms "perfect right" and "imperfect right." See further discussion in Fleischacker, Short History.
228. There has been much speculation that TMS 232-4 is a comment on the French Revolution. Given that we have no letters by Smith mentioning the Revolution, nor so much as a comment reported in his name, and given also that the revisions to TMS were completed by November 18, 1789-a month before the Jacobin Club was formed, and only two weeks after the sermon by Richard Price that so enraged Edmund Burke-I see little reason to believe this. Rothschild (ES 54-5, and notes thereto) suggests several alternative political events as background to TMS 232-4.
229. David Thomson, The Babeuf Plot (London: K. Paul, Trench, Trubner, 1947), p. 33. The summary was not written by Babeuf, although he endorsed it at his trial.
230. See Aquinas, Summa, II-II Q61 A1, A3, Q62A1, as translated in Summa Theologiae, Latin text and English translation (New York: McGraw Hill, 1964-81). Hont and Ignatieff wrongly associate the right of necessity with distributive justice at the bottom of NJ 29.
231. MacIntyre, Whose Justice? Which Rationality? (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1988), p. 307.
232. Summa II-II, Q66, A2.
233. Hont and Ignatieff say, several times, that for post-Grotian thinkers the right of necessity was an exception to the rules of property rather than an ongoing, structural feature of those rules (NJ 25-6, 29), while it constituted a permanent, structural feature of justice for Aquinas. This is simply not true. Necessity constituted an exception to property rules for Aquinas as well.
234. Richard Tuck, Natural Rights Theories (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), p. 20.
235. This reverses the implicit claim, at NJ 37, that concern for the poor was integral to the justification of property until Locke, and only became "a side-constraint, rather than a structuring condition" on property from Locke onward.
236. In general, Smith says, those in the top echelons in society-whether they get there by birth, by money, or by political power-are prone to be less virtuous than those lower down: Smith argues that people in "the middling and inferior stations of life" are more likely to achieve virtue than their social superiors at TMS 54-6 and 63-4, and that poor workers are drawn to particularly strict moral systems at WN 794-6.
237. Compare ASD 137: "given the cynicism evident in TMS concerning the standards of probity in public life, there is a presumption that it is unlikely that a sage would ever become a national hero."
238. See, for instance, the paragraph just preceding the one from which my quotation comes: 687, ¶50.
239. Himmelfarb, Idea, 59.
240. In Third Concept, I develop the notion that Smith's view of freedom should be seen as lying between the standard "negative" and "positive" concepts of liberty, rather than as simply a version of the "negative" one. Freedom has conditions, for Smith, and the government needs to provide those conditions where the market does not.
241. Jeff Weintraub makes clear that there are actually several different "public/private" distinctions, on some but not all of which a business or church would count as "private": see "The Theory and Politics of the Public/Private Distinction," in Weintraub and Kumar (eds.), Public and Private in Thought and Practice (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997).
242. Chaudhuri, The Trading World of Asia and the English East India Company, 1660-1760 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978), p. 21.
243. Nicholas Phillipson characterizes the whole of Smith's moral and political writings as "a discourse on the social and ethical significance of face-to-face relationships between independently-minded individuals" (Phillipson, "Adam Smith as civic moralist," in I. Hont and M. Ignatieff (eds.), Wealth and Virtue, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983, p. 198).
244. Moreover, since the sovereign collects taxes from all the produce of the nation, his material interest is directly tied to that produce being as great as possible (637-8, 730). The sovereign is also the only agent whose "pride and dignity" is connected to the power of the nation (739-40), and "the permanent grandeur" of whose family is tied to the prosperity of the people (903).
245. On the importance of good institutional design to Smith, see also Rosenberg, "Institutional Aspects" and Muller, Adam Smith, passim, but especially chapters 9, 11, and 12.
246. See also the alternative proposal he made for resolving this conflict to Alexander Wedderburn in 1778 (Corr 377-85).
247. Millar, Origin and Distinction of Ranks, 1771 [from a 1960 edition, pp. 177-8; cited in ASD 125]. The phrase "projecting spirit," and the negative accent on "projecting," have direct parallels in Smith: see WN II, chapters ii-iv.
248. The First Amendment may have been influenced by Smith's case for religious disestablishment: see Fleischacker, "Adam's Smith Reception Among the American Founders, 1776-1790" William and Mary Quarterly, October 2002.
249. Winch describes Smith as expressing "a mild and ambivalent hint of a preference for the Whigs" (ASP 52), on the basis of the passage from LJ 320, quoted below. He says nothing about the passage at LJ 319, or the material in WN I discuss below.
250. Frances Hirst has suggested this: "As a politician Smith was doubtless attracted by the prospect of introducing a strong democratic and republican strain into Parliament." Hirst, Adam Smith (New York: Macmillan, 1904), 177-8. Joseph Cropsey argues brilliantly that Smith's pervasive praise for Holland in WN may also express a preference for republicanism (PE 75-6).
251. Constant, "The liberty of the ancients compared with that of the moderns," in Biancamaria Fontana (ed.), Benjamin Constant: Political Writings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), p. 16.
252. Teichgraeber, 'Free Trade,' 10.
253. Rousseau, "Discourse on Political Economy," in The Social Contract and Discourses, trans. G.D.H. Cole (London: JM Dent, 1973), 139.
254. See discussion in ASP 106-12.
255. Smith treats court "pageantry" in a similarly dismissive fashion at WN 908-9.
256. "The great Montesquieu pointed out the road. He was the Lord Bacon in this branch of philosophy. Dr Smith is the Newton" (quoted in EPS 275n, from Millar, Historical View of English Government, 1812 edition, vol II, 429-30n).
257. Smith warns that war is often carried out "contrary to every principle of justice, and . . . without any regard to humanity" (TMS 239).
258. Winch, puzzlingly, entirely overlooks the tone of this passage (ASP 135-6), reading it as though it were a straight-faced comment on the advantages of funding wars by debt rather than by taxes.
259. The Parliamentary History of England, From the Earliest Period to the Year 1803 (London: TC Hansard, 1817), vol. XXX (1792-4), pp. 659-60.
260. WN 947: Smith here is talking about the British Empire in the Americas, not about British India-which was not formally an empire yet-but his point generalizes, I think, to the empire that was beginning to develop under the auspices of the East India Company.
261. Kirk Willis writes: "Neither Pitt nor Dundas, despite their obvious respect for Smith and familiarity with his doctrines, could escape traditionalist thinking on how to deal with the abuses of the East India Company." ("Ideas of Smith in Parliament," 535. Willis goes on to say that they never even "mentioned Smith or his principles" in Parliamentary debates on this issue. I think the quotation I have given shows that that is not true.)
262. Willis, 533-4, esp. note 106.
263. On Hume and Place, see E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1980), pp. 563-7. Thompson notes that Hume and Place had earlier voted against certain protections for workers "on Dr. A. Smith's grounds of letting Trade alone." He also notes that Place believed that trade unions would naturally disappear once they were legal.
264. Himmelfarb, Idea, 75.
265. See RP chap. 5; Himmelfarb, Idea, chap. 3; and ES chap. 2, esp. 53.
266. C. K. Kindleberger, "The Historical Background: Adam Smith and the Industrial Revolution," in T. Wilson and A.S. Skinner (eds.), The Market and the State (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976).
267. "In a free trade an effectual combination cannot be established but by the unanimous consent of every single trader, and it cannot last longer than every single trader continues of the same mind" (WN 145).
268. On the navy and its expenses see John Brewer, The Sinews of Power (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988).
269. It is an important, and disturbing, fact about the modern world that many products can only be serviced by those who make them. This gives firms a control over the market for their products that they never would have had in Smith's day.
270. It was said of the Roman Empire that it was a tyranny tempered by assassination; we might say, of the contemporary United States, that it is a corporate despotism tempered by lawsuits. And where the left praises these lawsuits as putting a check on corporate abuse, and the right complains that they are often frivolous and excessively costly, a true follower of Smith would recognize that the explosion of huge lawsuits represents an unintended, inefficient, but natural outgrowth of our society's technological and political history.
271. See Sarah Wildman, "City Limits," in The New Republic, 03/06/00.
272. Quoted in Trattner, op. cit., p. 363.
273. Barry Supple, "Working-class Self-help and the State," in McKendrick (ed.), Historical Perspectives, 216-17.
274. And in fact "When the EPA proposed designating Pittsfield a 'Super Fund' cleanup site, the company threatened to close its one remaining local office" (Wildman, "City Limits").
275. Among the other advantages of such a change would be that the state's bureaucracy would shrink somewhat, and that those who administer unemployment compensation would be more likely to know their clients.
276. The FTC does look out for potential monopsonies over products (e.g., a film distributor can in many circumstances be practically the only buyer for other firms' films), but not, as far as I know, for monopsony over labor.
277. The first of these proposals appears in "Insignificant Communities," and the second in Third Concept, 274 (see also 236-40).