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Smith’s ‘intentions’

According to Fitzgibbons (1995: 193), rather than present an interest-based account of liberalism, the primary aim of Smith’s work appears to revolve around offering a new moral insight into early liberalism and the notion ‘that a liberal society need not be undermined by its own lack of values’. As such, many have pointed to the ways in

which Smith seems to have had the intention of providing liberalism with a ‘workable moral foundation’ and not just in his TMS, but in WN as well (Fitzgibbons 1995: v). Yet, as mentioned above, the suggestion is often made that Smith must have in some sense ‘compartmentalised’ his ‘ethics’ and his ‘economics’ (e.g. Otteson 2002: 193). On this argument, his thoughts on self-love in commercial society and his virtue ethics appear to apply to two separate spheres: ‘the sphere of what actually happens and the sphere of what should be’ (Fitzgibbons 1995: 3).

However, in response to these accounts, Fitzgibbons (1995: 4 emphasis in original) convincingly suggests that ‘the more intriguing possibility is that Smith wanted to integrate economics and morals, by developing a philosophy that would harness the force of self-love without being dominated by it’. This line of interpretation would seem more historically accurate given the intellectual context in which he was writing as outlined above. As Smith built on the thought of Hutcheson and Hume, he saw himself as working within the framework of their ‘highest ambitions’, which were to contribute to moral philosophy as broadly conceived in both its classical humanist and natural law senses (Teichgraeber 1986: 122).

Crucially, though, it is necessary to proceed with caution when attempting to give a complete account of Smith’s overall intentions in writing his work. Jerry Evensky is particularly illuminating on this issue. In essence, Evensky (1987: 175-176) suggests that there are ‘two voices’ in which Smith writes: Smith as moral philosopher on the one hand and Smith as historian, contemporary observer, and social critic on the other. In the former, ‘Smith sees the world as the Design of the Deity, a perfectly harmonious system reflecting the perfection of its designer’ (Evensky 1987: 176). In the latter, by

contrast, Smith sees the world not in the Design of an ideal vision because ‘human frailty leads to distortions in the Deity’s Design’ (Evensky 1987: 176). For Evensky (1987: 184), then, Smith intentionally makes a clear distinction between an ‘ideal world’ of the Design and the ‘real world’ for which he offers a ‘practical-prescriptive perspective’. What is particularly worthy of note is that there may be an alteration in Smith’s approach concerning this distinction as his thought developed over time. Indeed Evensky (1989: 378) suggests that ‘in Smith’s early work his moral philosophical voice represented humankind as evolving in spite of its flaws toward an approximation of an ideal society’. By contrast, in his later work, Smith ‘took on the new role of social critic’ as he realised that the power of factions and monopolies were not just historical artefacts, but actually continuously detrimental to the progress of commerce (Evensky 1989: 379).

I do not wish to impose on Smith a level of consistency that is unwarranted, nor do I want to suggest that he ought to be criticised if his thoughts altered due to the adoption of a different ‘voice’ over time. Of course to do so would be to fall foul of Skinner’s mythology of coherence (Chapter 2) and might involve discounting parts of Smith’s work for no good reason. What is more interesting from the perspective of recovering Smith’s understanding of the individual is that if it is possible to identify a shift in his thought, or simply the presence of two voices in his work, his conception of the individual moral agent might not be completely unified and constant either. If Smith was operating as both a moral philosopher and as a social critic as Evensky suggests, he may have included a level of malleability into his conception of the individual which depended on historical circumstance, or, in other words, on the particular social rules and values of the society to which he referred. In fact, Smith (TMS III.4.11) writes:

When these general rules [formed through attempting to impress upon the opinion of others], indeed, have been formed, when they are universally acknowledged and established, by the concurring sentiments of mankind, we frequently appeal to them as to the standards of judgment, in debating concerning the degree of praise or blame that is due to certain actions of a complicated and dubious nature. They are upon these occasions commonly cited as the ultimate foundations of what is just and unjust in human conduct; and this circumstance seems to have misled several very eminent authors, to draw up their systems in such a manner, as if they had supposed that the original judgments of mankind with regard to right and wrong, were formed like the decisions of a court of judicatory, by considering first the general rule, and then, secondly, whether the particular action under consideration fell properly within its comprehension.

This has important implications for considering individual behaviour as the outcome of a (sympathetic) procedure that takes place in society, which I later discuss, as opposed to a transcendental standard of moral judgement. As Smith (TMS VII.iv.6) himself writes, ethics is ‘a science which … does not admit of the most accurate precision’. This leads Vivienne Brown (1994: 75 emphasis added) to make the interesting point that in TMS Smith’s ‘ideal moral agent … is not the unified, integral moral agent such as we see in the case of the ideal Stoic man, the “fully furnished and completed being” of the monologic hero, but in some respects is a more fractured and struggling moral being’. This is a point to which I return for it hints at how Smith’s individual might be understood as a site at which judgement and standards of ethics come to be interactively formed and contested.

Smith’s ‘politics’

An attempt to get a firmer grasp of Smith’s intentions does not become that much more straightforward by considering his ‘politics’ in the narrow sense of the term. Yet, as Donald Winch’s (1978) Adam Smith’s Politics shows, a consideration of his thought along these lines can be very revealing in terms of locating it in its linguistic and historical context. Winch (1978: 141) claims that Smith’s many criticisms of all ‘interest groups’ in society make it extremely difficult to categorise his politics: he could be construed as anything from a ‘nostalgic Tory’ to ‘a pioneer theorist of labour exploitation along Marxian lines’. Indeed, as Fitzgibbons (1995: 70) points out, it is possible to identify Smith as a ‘revolutionary’, but the issue with this is that at his time ‘collectivism was a right-wing doctrine that favoured the social and religious power structure, whereas liberalism meant subverting that structure and introducing radical social change’. In any case, for Winch (1978: 142), one must not, as many economists and historians of economic thought tend to do, place meanings developed in the nineteenth-century and after to the less familiar eighteenth-century concepts that make up Smith’s system.

Striking examples of this kind can be discerned in Michael Fry’s (1992) edited collection Adam Smith’s Legacy: His Place in the Development of Modern Economics, which contains a significant number of Nobel Laureates in Economics reflecting on the ‘relevance’ of Smith to modern economics to mark the bicentenary of his death. For instance, Paul Samuelson attempts to ‘test’ the ‘findings’ of the classical political economists ‘with the aid of modern techniques’ and discovers that Smith emerges with ‘flying colours’; Richard Stone writes about Smith’s ideas on ‘public economic policy and its limits’, claimed to be a ‘subject of self-evident interest even two hundred years

later’; and James Tobin sets out ‘to trace the presence or otherwise of the invisible hand in modern macroeconomics’ (Fry 1992: xi-xiii). In light of a Skinnerian perspective (Chapter 1), the general tone of this whole collection as a celebration of Smith as the founder of modern economics appears to submit to a mythology of prolepsis. More problematically, picking up on Winch’s critique, these contributions tend to fall foul of a mythology of parochialism in the sense that they engage in a process of historical foreshortening whereby ideas and concepts are deemed applicable to the contemporary world at the expense of historicised meaning.

Winch (1978: 23) further identifies the problem that there is apparent ‘underlying agreement’ about situating Smith’s politics into arguments about an emerging ‘liberal capitalist context’. This interpretation of Smith’s politics locates him as part of ‘a much larger story in which the strength and autonomy of a socio-economic realm variously threatens, limits, or deflects the realm of the political’ (Winch 1978: 23). However, in response to this line of thinking, Winch’s (1978: 26) central argument is that Smith’s style of political analysis cannot be located within the language and categories of the liberal capitalist perspective. Indeed, on his reading, Smith’s politics is far more ‘problematic that it has been made to appear’ (Winch 1978: 26). Most firmly, Winch (1978: 180-181) suggests that:

Smith did not advocate the establishment of a particular economic order called capitalism; nor did he prize what he set out to analyse, namely commercial society, for the sake of its benefits in the form of democratic freedoms.

In many ways, perhaps the value of Winch’s work comes from the way in which he demonstrates exactly who and what Adam Smith was not. At the very least, he shows that it is possible to read into Smith’s politics elements of a number of political positions (Winch 1978: 182). Yet, in doing so, Winch also serves to distance Smith from those interpretations of him which suggest that he was essentially arguing for a capitalist system as part of a larger liberal capitalist or bourgeois ‘tradition’ of thought.

On Winch’s (1978: 184) reading, there is a significant gulf between Smith’s intellectual enterprise and those who are commonly regarded as his successors: put simply, there is not an unbroken tradition of liberalism, or bourgeois ideology, stretching from Locke through Smith and Hume to John Stuart Mill and on to present-day economic science. What is important for my consideration of Smith’s understanding of the individual in this regard is that this distances him from any form of Benthamite utilitarianism. Such a position would ignore Smith’s understanding of the individual and his conception of sympathy, which do not divorce the economic from the ethico-political. This helps to indicate what Smith clearly does not stand for, while the final section of this chapter presents a more constructive image of his concept of ‘sympathy’.