(The Muir portrait, circa 1800, unknown author. Wikimedia Commons)
(Above is an audio recording of the blog post)
Adam Smith recognized the need for education to play a role in counteracting the degeneration of the worker that would be brought about by the division of labour. But for Smith, modern commercial society also tends to increase that second great blessing that humanity can possess; namely, freedom. It is instructive that Smith’s testimony to opulence and freedom occur in a sentence following his statement that ‘The greater [the] freedom of the free, the more intolerable is the slavery of the slaves’ (LJ iii.112, p. 185). Smith’s sympathy here would surely extend to poor workers held in place by outdated Poor Laws, prevented as they were from finding work to improve their situation. Free workers in commercial societies might become ‘in some measure a merchant’ (WN I.iv.1, p. 37), but they do so in such a way that even the ‘lowest and poorest order, if … frugal and industrious, may enjoy a greater share of the necessaries and conveniences of life than it is possible for any savage to acquire’ (WN I.4, p. 10). In essence, the development of commercial society, for Smith, relieved us from past cruel necessities experienced by ‘miserably poor’ ‘savage nations of hunters and fishers’ (WN I.4, p. 10): cruel necessities such as the abandoning of the young, sick, and old. The development of commercial society created a situation where human life is better. Not perfect, but better, and education played an important part in this improvement.
This remark of Smith’s about free workers in commercial societies becoming ‘in some measure a merchant’ was, of course, taken up by the young Karl Marx in 1844 in his Excerpts from James Mill’s Elements of Political Economy, where he suggests that, as a result of this identification, ‘economics establishes the estranged form of social commerce as the essential and fundamental form appropriate to the vocation of man’ (Marx, 1975, p. 266). While having claimed to have appropriated the following theses from Smith – that under capitalism workers’ wages are minimal, work is punishing, labour is one-sided and degraded, and has become a commodity wherein workers lives are subject to alien forces (see Wolff, 2002, p. 30) – the Marxian critique of Smith developed against him the charge that he and his work were, far from being impartial and scientific, a product of the kind of society that he analysed: that is, what Smith regarded as ‘natural’ features of society were, in fact, superstructural; generated by the economic base of developing commercial society.
Blindness to this was not simply a matter of Smith’s fault, but it did mean that he could not see commercial society for what it was, something that, despite bringing progress from previous historical stages, would be surpassed by something better in the final resolution of history. As Craig Smith puts the point, on the Marxian critique: ‘Smith’s analysis of commerce was grounded in the point of view of a member of the revolutionary bourgeoisie. As a result, his ideas, though ostensibly scientific, were in fact an ideological servant of the interests of the dominant class in the new commercial society’ (Smith, 2020, p. 166). Adam Smith’s analysis, then, remains ultimately naïve and presumptuous from this perspective. Smith’s aspiration to a scientific philosophy disclosive of the connecting principles of nature, that would approach political economy as ‘a branch of the ‘science of a legislator’’ (Smith, 2020, p. 128) was blindsided by ideology.
In support of this general line of critique, Alasdair MacIntyre reminds us of Walter Bagehot’s joke about Smith; that he had in fact undertaken ‘the immense design … of saying how, from being a savage, man rose to be a Scotchman’ (Bagehot, as cited in MacIntyre, 1988, p. 252). Indeed, MacIntyre’s view is that ‘the sentiments that Smith and Hume catalogue and describe … are in part not sentiments shared by all humankind, but sentiments praised and cultivated by eighteenth-century commercial and mercantile humankind and often enough by their present-day heirs’ (MacIntyre, 2016, p. 92).
Having said that, Smith did, as argued in these blogs, recognize the ‘misery inducing’ dimensions of commercial society; he was not simply an apologist for nascent capitalism and a purely utilitarian education for the poor. It was to ameliorate the consequences of the division of labour that education came to have such an important role in his thinking. Smith recognized the existentially problematic dimensions of the division of labour in commercial society and he proposed a corrective to it in education. The Marxian line of critique sees Smith’s ‘proposed solution in education’ as a ‘panacea that did not address the real problem’ (Smith, 2020, p. 167). The more serious problem is, I think, the difference over the conception of the good put forward by Smith and by a critic like MacIntyre, and this turns upon the role of a free market. For MacIntyre (2016), ‘What is missing from Smith’s account is any conception of economic activity as capable of being cooperatively and intentionally directed towards the achievement of common goods, understood as Aristotle and Aquinas understood them, let alone any thought that it is only in and through the achievement of such goods that individuals are able to achieve their individual goods’ (p. 92). The point of contention turns upon Smith’s ethos of freedom, for he would surely hear in the Marxian-MacIntyrean line of critique an echo of the threat to freedom of the kind posed by the economic shackles of the Poor Laws, apprenticeships (which he was against), and mercantilism; economic factors that he regarded as preventative of achieving peaceable coexistence. This coexistence is, somewhat optimistically, underscored by universal opulence, freedom, and is ultimately brought about by free trade. Smith would surely argue that the pursuit of economic ‘common goods’ would degenerate in the direction of mercantilism to the detriment of liberty.
References
Marx, K. (1975). Early Writings, trans R. Livingstone and G. Benton, London: Penguin.
MacIntyre, A. (1988). Whose Justice? Which Rationality? London: Duckworth.
MacIntyre, A. (2016). Ethics in the Conflicts of Modernity: An Essay of Desire, Practical Reasoning, and Narrative, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Smith, A. (1976). An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, (eds) R.H. Campbell and A.S. Skinner, Oxford: Oxford University Press; Glasgow edition.
Smith, C. (2020). Adam Smith, Cambridge: Polity.
Wolff, J. (2002). Why Read Marx Today? Oxford: Oxford University Press.
