Gains from trade
David Foster Wallace imagines an old fish asking, “How’s the water?” and young fish replying, “What’s water?” The parable gently illustrates what we can fail to notice precisely because it is everywhere we look.Footnote 1
A generation ago, Adam Smith was water—ubiquitous yet unknown. Today, however, hundreds of scholars are crediting Smith for illuminating propensities to truck, barter, and exchange that sustain our social world. Today, hundreds of syllabi assign Smith. An International Adam Smith Society formed in 1995. Maria Paganelli is (as I write) its President.
Paganelli wonders how Smith could be so subversive, regularly needling powerful people and institutions, seemingly without getting into trouble. Why was there no backlash? Compare Smith’s reception to that of his friend, David Hume. Which author would take more heat? Comparing their writings would not have made the answer obvious, but as it happened, it was Hume who made enemies. Today, ironically, the more broadly influential and correspondingly more provocative legacy is Smith’s.
The human condition
Paul Sagar sees Smith drawing sweeping conclusions about the human condition from ancient Romans, medieval Mongols, early modern conquistadors, and contemporary Chinese. Sagar wonders, “Was this simply an unreflective assumption on Smith’s behalf—perhaps a product of his age that later periods would call into severe question—or did his approach in the Wealth of Nations rest upon an independent philosophical foundation?” Sagar describes Part V of The Theory of Moral Sentiments as
one of the few aspects of The Theory of Moral Sentiments that Smith subjected to almost no revisions (and none of any significance) between the first (1759) and sixth editions (1790). He clearly considered this aspect of his philosophical corpus in good shape, both before and after he published the Wealth of Nations in 1776, indicating that he thought his second masterpiece, at least in this regard, continuous with the first. In turn, the supposition that Smith radically changed his mind between the two books—a central contention of the so-called “Das Adam Smith Problem”—receives yet another, albeit subsidiary, nail in its coffin.Footnote 2
“Das Adam Smith” problem
The problem to which Sagar alludes is this: Smith’s two great works, the Wealth of Nations and The Theory of Moral Sentiments, seem to presuppose incongruent psychological models. The Wealth of Nations’s model seems rooted in egoistic self-love, while The Theory of Moral Sentiments supposes that we are essentially social animals wired to empathize. Did Smith change his mind? Did he elect to ignore the evident inconsistency? Did he fail to notice it?Footnote 3
To Karen Horn, there is no inconsistency. Smith has one model, although he models people as having more than one drive: “The first is self-love, whereas the second is an outward-looking, communicative trait, directed at and involving other people.”Footnote 4 This is not inconsistent. Rather, to model us as having potentially conflicting drives is simply telling it like it is.
Smith was not Marshall
Yet “Das Adam Smith problem” remains a focal topic. Why? In 1890, a century after Smith, Alfred Marshall led political economy’s neoclassical turn. Marshallian neoclassical economics proved that profit-maximizing behavior under specified conditions exhausts all possible gains from trade and converges on an optimal equilibrium of supply and demand.Footnote 5 This model—and its premise that economic agents aim to maximize profit—captured imaginations not because it was so realistic but because it was so fertile.Footnote 6 It set the stage for the first articulation of “Das Adam Smith Problem” in 1897.
Smith, however, was not that kind of economist. He did not crank out theorems. He did not simplify for tractability’s sake.Footnote 7 Smith was observing a process: that is, what was driving progress, not what was mathematically guaranteeing its convergence on an optimal outcome. He never anticipated our interpreting the Wealth of Nations as unpacking the logic of homo economicus. For Smith, the framework for interpreting the Wealth of Nations was The Theory of Moral Sentiments, not neoclassical economics.
Truck and barter
Notably, the Wealth of Nations’s opening analysis of the division of labor is the exact place where a book premised on profit maximizers would introduce said premise. But that is not what Smith does. Instead, he states:
This division of labour, from which so many advantages are derived, is not originally the effect of any human wisdom, which foresees and intends that general opulence to which it gives occasion. It is the necessary, though very slow and gradual consequence of a certain propensity in human nature which has in view no such extensive utility; the propensity to truck, barter, and exchange one thing for another. (WN I.ii.1)
To read these words as continuous with The Theory of Moral Sentiments is to see the author conceiving the propensity not as expressing an underlying profit motive but as expressing our social nature. So, what if Horn is right to see in Smith’s moral psychology not only self-love but also sociality? Is our propensity to truck and barter one of these two features? Which one? Inward-looking self-love or outward-looking sociality?
What’s the difference? In passing, I note a parallel: moral philosophy treats self-interest as an impulse that must be held in check by an altruistic impulse so we can grow up to be fit for membership in society. Moral philosophy thus also steers us toward seeing tension between the moral psychologies of the Wealth of Nations and The Theory of Moral Sentiments. But here again, it is our theories, not Smith’s, that treat other-regard as something external that needs to discipline self-regard from the outside.
What if, instead of starting with theory, Smith started by observing the self-love of a social animal? He would say our social attitudes do not correct a more fundamental self-interest but instead provide it with content. Growing up involves constructing a self that can be at home in a particular social world.
Butchers, bakers, self-love
In summary, we have no reason to see the Wealth of Nations as premised on the homo economicus model that would emerge a century later to launch neoclassical economics. Even so, we should pause here because barely a page after positing a drive to truck, barter, and exchange, we find Smith stressing that when dealing with bakers and butchers, we address ourselves not to their humanity but their self-love. What is Smith doing here if not taking psychological egoism for granted?
It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest. We address ourselves, not to their humanity but to their self-love, and never talk to them of our own necessities but of their advantages. (WN I.ii.2)
What exactly is Smith saying? Does he say bakers are motivated not by humanity but by self-love? No.
Instead, he says we address ourselves not to their humanity but to their self-love. Smith is observing our psychology, not theirs; he is observing how we do business, not how bakers do business. As benevolent persons, of course we address ourselves to their self-love! Why? For one thing, we want them to be better off knowing us. We want to make deals for our own good, to be sure, but “our own good” is inherently social and prominently a concern to merit admiration rather than pity. A merchant learns to show up with a service that makes a community a better place for everyone with whom that merchant deals. Although the result may be no part of a merchant’s intention, neither does a successful merchant’s intention reduce to self-absorbed acquisitiveness. People of true public spirit put themselves in a customer’s shoes not only for profit’s sake but so they also can anticipate ways to be lovely. If all goes well, a merchant goes home after working long hours to be of service, looks in the mirror, and likes what she sees, having affirmed that she is good at what she does, affirming that her community needed her to be good, and affirming that when she dies, she will leave this world knowing it is good she was here.Footnote 8
This is not what cartoon clichés of Smith as an apostle of profit lead us to expect. But it is exactly what readers coming to the Wealth of Nations from The Theory of Moral Sentiments should expect. It makes perfect sense for an author whose first book treats benevolence as primary to launch his second by asking how to respond benevolently to trading partners. We address ourselves to our partners’ self-love as a way of making them feel visible. That’s what it’s like to succeed in our quest to be sympathetic.
Inventing feminism
Mary Wollstonecraft admired Smith but (as Roos Slegers engagingly documents) had a dim view of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, particularly what Rousseau says about women. It is a mark of sanity, not vanity, to want to look in the mirror and ask ourselves how we appear and what we really are. If we like what we see, that will give us strength to shrug off what others think. We learn that we are not the hero of their novel, but we can find that amusing even as we find it humbling. Thus, Rousseau theorizes about virtue, self-esteem, and opinions of others, but it was in Smith that Wollstonecraft found real insight.
To her, Smith’s conception of adult impartiality, especially for a woman, implies learning a discipline of self-mastery. Rousseau agrees with Smith that a man should ignore settled consensus when he knows he is right. But then Rousseau explicitly (and to Wollstonecraft, unforgivably) insists that women are in a different situation.
Wollstonecraft reacts. What is it like to be a genius soul born into a female body? Answer: it is torture. With every moment, she observes that who she truly is has no home. She cannot be comfortable in her own skin. If she were to voice a hope of being esteemed for who she is, she would be revealing herself to be unfit for polite company. What can she hope for? At best, she may enjoy a measure of success in the manner of a spy with a secret identity. If she aspires to self-mastery, it must be a stoic self-mastery indeed, along the lines of a turned-inward Nietzschean ascetic. She must discipline herself to give up all hope of her true self ever being esteemed or even visible.
Who is the impartial spectator?
Imagine meeting a friend after work. You feel tempted to whine about little injustices, but you hesitate. Because you are a self-conscious social animal, you step outside yourself and ask what impression you will make. You realize other people’s worlds do not revolve around you; your friend may well find your whining tediously self-absorbed. So, you tone it down. Anxious to be a true friend and good company, you mention that you had a setback, because a friend would want to know, then follow up by saying, “Thanks for listening, but how was your day? You said you had a doctor’s appointment. How did it go?” The two of you proceed from there, each having made the other feel visible.
I described Wollstonecraft as anticipating a Nietzschean theme. On the other hand, Sheila Dow notes, impartiality has a tight link to sympathy on Smith’s view, so the Smithian impartiality that Wollstonecraft sees at the core of adult self-mastery is an impartiality-sympathy complex. In fact, rereading these essays, I see now that the Smithian complex has three parts at least because, as Horn notes, impartiality also links to long-term prudence. Our inherently social self-interest drives us to rise (even when it hurts) to the challenge of accurate self-perception.Footnote 9
Fundamental to Smith’s kind of stoicism, then, is a not-so-Nietzschean discipline of being habitually alert to opportunities to make others feel visible, acutely aware (at least in our best moments) that everyone we meet yearns for it just as we do.Footnote 10
You navigate your social world, fashioning personae as you go. Your compass is your skill in seeing the impression you are making. When Smith asks us to imagine an impartial spectator, he is coaching us in the art of seeing ourselves through other people’s eyes and gauging how we are doing as social animals.
Horn conjectures that the Wealth of Nations’s impartial spectator has become an economic construct, not only the moral construct of The Theory of Moral Sentiments. In either case, we manifest self-love, but the change of context foregrounds different aspects and implications. With The Theory of Moral Sentiments having covered how we navigate relationships that give us mirrors for reflecting on our self-worth, the Wealth of Nations goes on to observe conditions under which carving out an estimable place for ourselves ends up building the wealth of a nation.
Incentive compatibility
The Theory of Moral Sentiments exhorts Smith’s audience (including students aspiring to careers in public service) to avoid the hubris of men of system. Having set that stage, the Wealth of Nations asks what fosters a nation’s wealth. To Smith, would-be public servants need to know that what works is respecting what has a history of inspiring butchers and bakers to pour themselves into learning to make themselves useful. In a commercial world, benevolent people see that benevolence is precious but also that benevolent people do not take benevolence for granted. Whatever else benevolent people want from an institutional framework, they want incentive compatibility. Whatever we aim to promote, we must respect the fact that we live among people who choose for themselves, who respond to incentives, and who are sensitive to any hint that we do not respect them as equal partners.Footnote 11
Before exchange, there is barter. Our superpower as social animals consists in our propensity to cooperate even with strangers, combined with our skill as political animals at negotiating mutual expectations. We start by establishing how much we have to offer, and again, it is not simply profit but a quest for estimable visibility that informs our truck and barter. Strangers, however, pose new layers of difficulty. How do we engage a larger and less transparent world where we must talk, listen, interpret, agree, document, and ultimately decide whether to trust? Commercial frameworks function by making it safer even for strangers to trust each other. A department store may offer a “money-back guarantee” so as to represent itself as a safe place to shop. In the aftermath, business booms. Where “No means No” even when dealing with members of a higher class, traders feel secure enough to risk showing up. Traders can afford to advertise that they possess valuables with which they are willing to part—if the price is right.
Note that Smith gives himself a virtually impossible political assignment. Observing a game of commerce from the outside, he sees that the game will grow a nation’s wealth only insofar as it is incentive compatible. Smith never doubts that the game needs impartial referees; what he doubts is whether we can get them. After all, referees are players too and respond to incentives like everyone else. So, who referees the referees? Who makes the refereeing game incentive compatible? Smith finds an answer in Montesquieu regarding separation of powers.
But that answer mitigates rather than solves the problem, so Smith also sees a need for stoic moral education to train future public servants to resist being corrupted by power. Suppose The Theory of Moral Sentiments is Smith providing that as best he can—taking to heart his own counsel about salesmanship and addressing himself to his students’ self-love. How would he do that? By inspiring them to internalize a sense of honor. Convey that having nothing to hide is a person’s ultimate interest. When all is done, you will want your family’s esteem for you to not be a case of mistaken identity. You will want them to know who you were.
Men of system
Wollstonecraft might have said that in commerce and beyond, a right to say no is a liberal equality of status worth cherishing.Footnote 12 A community that respects a right to say no makes it safer to show up in hope of finding what merits a whole-hearted yes. Maria Carrasco sees securing and democratizing rights to say no as conducive to progress. But even while recognizing that treating everyone, regardless of social class, as having a right to say no steers trade toward mutual benefit, Carrasco worries that this very right also becomes what men of system hate.Footnote 13 Ryan Hanley reconstructs the Wealth of Nations’s picture of the American crisis and there too sees the moral psychology of The Theory of Moral Sentiments rather than the simple egoism that our neoclassical perspective tempts us to read into the Wealth of Nations. Hanley interprets Smith and Alexis de Tocqueville as seeing in America a paradigm of commercial society. But the Boston Tea Party happened in 1773 just as Smith was moving to London and becoming a “well-connected political operative.” To Hanley, finishing the Wealth of Nations (while revising The Theory of Moral Sentiments) against this background would have colored Smith’s writing. His opinion of “men of system” would be rounding into focus as he was observing follies of colonial mismanagement.
Hanley notes Smith’s sensitivity to how capitalists become threats to capitalism as they learn to twist the rules with a view to securing monopoly privileges and promoting “the little interest of one little order of men in one country” (WN IV.vii.60).Footnote 14 To Smith, American colonists viewed themselves as coming to the table for reasons of their own with a right to decline unattractive offers. Treating them like rubes to be patronized rather than like esteemed equal partners was bound to lead to revolt.
Hanley observes that “almost all Smith scholars accept as given that Smith’s arguments on behalf of the market economy had their origin in a deep concern to alleviate poverty.”Footnote 15 Hanley remarks, as does Yoshie Kawade in comparing Smith and Montesquieu, on how Smith returns to this theme even as (ever the dissenter, as per Paganelli) he rails against meddlesome men of system.
Facts and values
As economics is still catching up to Smith, so is philosophy. On Smith’s view, we are wired from birth to care about being loved, but we also have a latent capacity for adulthood, which is the threshold where our drive to be loved matures into a fully adult aim of being lovely.
Observing other drivers stop when the light turns red is not a premise from which we can deduce that we too should stop. Yet a slightly more complex story connects “is” to “ought” all the same. Namely, if others expect us to stop, then we should. Why? Because other drivers being able to trust us to stop is part of what it takes to be driving safely. So, if custom establishes that others expect us to observe this rule, that can make it true that we should.
Smith does not claim to be proving this. He simply observes that this is our “water.” As we mature and learn what others have good reason to appreciate, we are at the same time learning what a social being can do to be lovely.
What is moral science?
When Hume notoriously observes that we cannot deduce values from facts, Hume is voicing skepticism—not about values but about deduction. Facts have everything to do with what we truly should do and should want, but not because of what we can deduce.
As Hume notes, we cannot even deduce causation from observed facts. But we have been taught to misread Hume’s point. Hume never doubts that facts can warrant expectations. The target of his withering skepticism is not causation but the idea, again, that deduction is a scientist’s gold standard of reasoning. Facts legitimately warrant jumping to conclusions about causal connections even while leaving us prone to error. A good scientist says, “Here is what I see, and here is a plausible causal story consistent with observation. My hypothesis can be tested, and I could be wrong.” Smith understands that when observation disconfirms what our theory predicted, life is inviting us to learn something new.Footnote 16
Smith and Hume strive to introduce experimental methods of reasoning into moral subjects (to borrow the subtitle of Hume’s Treatise). Smith was not a twentieth-century analytic philosopher. In neither The Theory of Moral Sentiments nor the Wealth of Nations does he aim to define objectivity, justification, or truth, or to specify necessary and sufficient conditions for x being right or good. We might see him as a moral theorist in a broadly consequentialist tradition, yet he apparently had no interest in articulating a recipe for deciding what to do. If he had a moral question about tariffs, it would have been: Are the effects of introducing them useful and agreeable?Footnote 17
One way to understand Smith’s place in history is to see him as, arguably, the greatest practitioner of a philosophical approach that Hume was preaching. Smith was a taste of what philosophy could have been. Hume and Smith were practicing the art of being observant, but Hume wanted philosophy to become something more: a moral science guided by controlled experiment. It would neither yield theorems nor culminate in certainty. It would not lay bare the universe’s causal structure. At best, it would identify robust correlation and thus feel its way toward a more informed view of the human condition. Smith evaluates trade barriers by observing correlations. I imagine Smith saying, “Given how trade barriers and monopoly licenses correlate to rising prices and rising unemployment, I would not want the world to remember me as defending trade barriers. Observable correlations do not disprove the claim that trade barriers are just, but they sure do embarrass it.” Smith was as cynical as anyone regarding power’s tendency to corrupt, but that did not blind him to evidence that commercial societies of his time were becoming famine-proof.
Today, we classify empiricism as rationalism’s epistemological rival. We interpret it as a view that the axiomatic foundation of indubitable truth is experience rather than pure reason; all knowledge ultimately derives from sense experience. Smith and Hume, however, were reaching as much for a philosophy of science as for an epistemology.Footnote 18 They were articulating a view of science as starting with observation and culminating in conjecture about underlying causal structure—a hypothesis that future experimentation was invited to disconfirm.
Dennis Rasmussen notes that the term “science” lacked connotations of precision and certainty that it tends to have today.Footnote 19 To Smith, science is a permanently open-ended study of contingencies, prompted by passions, and forged by imagination. Smith was systematic, but as Rasmussen says, a philosopher’s role for Smith is not to design comprehensive systems, but to observe (WN I.i.9, I.i.21). Smith sees men of system making a systematic mistake: neglecting to be resolutely accountable to observation, failing to be scientific, and gradually becoming more eager to cover up failures than to learn from them.Footnote 20
Guiding principles for legislators must be loose and indeterminate, more akin to advice on how to write well than to rules of grammar.Footnote 21 Rasmussen holds: “Smith’s aversion to the ‘spirit of system’ in politics led him to be wary of implementing even his own preferred policies immediately or in their entirety.”Footnote 22 He observes the human condition without assuming that systematic observation would yield a “universally applicable science of political economy.”
Rasmussen sees Smith prioritizing “facts over general theories, stressing repeatedly that human knowledge is most reliable when it is highly contextual. Smith is, for this reason, perhaps the most empirical of all the empiricists, pursuing his version of ‘the science of man’ in a particularly messy, fact-laden rather than theory-laden way.”Footnote 23 When scholars like Smith discuss messy phenomena, it is not because they aren’t clever enough to crank out theorems. It’s because they aspire to get past a game of clever technicality and say something worthwhile about the human condition. Smith was reveling in his powers of observation, cataloguing complexities and irregularities, and building a richly suggestive explanatory framework. As Dow says and as Rasmussen would agree, Smith was a methodological pluralist.
What is methodological individualism?
As Horn notes, though, Smith is also a methodological individualist. Methodological individualism in social science treats individual choice as a unit of analysis. It is not—and Adam Smith’s work was not, as Dow notes—atomistic.Footnote 24 It does not model us as Robinson Crusoe.Footnote 25 Neither does it ignore institutions. Rather, it analyzes institutions as choice architectures that, by making particular choices possible and rewarding, help to explain and predict the course of events.Footnote 26
The rise of commercial society
On Barry Weingast’s analysis, feudalism was an arms race. Indeed, Weingast suggests, the feudal arms race was a Nash Equilibrium (meaning no player could afford to move first along a risky road to disarmament). Thus, feudal European society could not tip into an age of commerce without some exogenous shock. On Weingast’s reading of Smith, the shock was not a vast tsunami but something more local, not a current but a ripple. Some lords lived closer to towns, making them more apt to fall under a nearby town’s security umbrella. Shared security offered economies of scale and a gradual and sequential fall in the cost of individual security, which meant more disposable income for luxuries.
In passing, Smithian logic has a second dimension here, insofar as resources freed up by economies of scale in the provision of security predictably would translate into rising effective demand not only for luxuries but for staples as well. The history Weingast describes was a scene not only of burgeoning luxury, but also of quietly famine-proofing a continent.Footnote 27
We imagine an Age of Agriculture preceding an Age of Urbanization. We imagine nomadic hunter-gatherer tribes gradually settling down to develop crops, then coalescing into villages and finally cities. But no. There could not have been separate “Ages” with agriculture coming first.Footnote 28 If, as Smith taught us, division of labor depends on the size of the market, then there was agriculture at scale only as there emerged cities and ports like Athens to express large-scale demand for grapes, olives, and so on. For farmers, producing large harvests came to have a point: emerging along with rising opportunities to market large surpluses in large markets, under the umbrella of town-sized militia increasingly capable of defending an increasingly vital supply chain.
Neither would a farmer, without tools, have capacity to grow and ship a large harvest, yet serious tools require centers for smelting metal. This means that agriculture at scale presupposes concentrations of specialized industrial labor, provisioned by fleets of merchants delivering agricultural outputs at scale. So, there was no prior “Age.” Urbanization and agriculture could scale up only by scaling up together. Agriculture, industry, and commerce are not stages of anthropological development but intertwined dimensions of expanding economic organization.
Mauricio Coutinho traces Smith’s nuance and abstraction on value and prices. As Smith realizes, intertemporal comparisons are crucial. Was food becoming more affordable to consumers or less? How would we know? How would we measure that? In terms of coinage that would purchase a standard quantity? In terms of silver? Coinage that has not been debased? In terms of hours of average wage labor it takes to support an average family?
Aaron James wonders whether Adam Smith has a theory of money per se. James thinks not. What Smith has is a functionalist allegory about pairs of traders learning to trust each other enough to extend credit. A system of IOUs evolves into a unit of exchange, illustrating Smith’s “big idea: a free commercial society and largely self-regulating banking practice could be trusted, despite certain exceptions, to steadily augment the wealth of nations.”Footnote 29
Kawade finds passages where Montesquieu’s influence is clear, as when Smith says, “to make every individual feel himself perfectly secure in the possession of every right which belongs to him, it is not only necessary that the judicial should be separated from the executive power, but that it should be rendered as much as possible independent of that power” (WN V.i.b.25). Like Montesquieu, Smith sees how branches of government could be each other’s system of checks and balances. Beyond that, Smith also, Kawade explains, sees potential for judicial self-regulation. For example, common law tradition with its respect for precedent can be part of the discipline by which a judiciary keeps itself in line. Second, judges are accountable to juries through which a community’s citizenry participates in maintaining the courts’ impartiality. Third, appellate courts impose layers of discipline likewise internal to the judiciary.
Fabrizio Simon notes that Mediterranean liberals regard Smith as having discovered fundamental laws of political economy. Texts of Smith and Edmund Burke informed Mediterranean efforts to expand markets in general, to rebuild agriculture on modern property conventions, and to replace Jacobin and Napoleonic political order with British liberal constitutionalism. This history is too important not to be more widely known.
Eric Schliesser traces the influence of Smith’s version of federalism on Immanuel Kant, Benjamin Constant, and Jeremy Bentham, in the process tracing the origin of liberalism itself. Schliesser unpacks how Kant and Bentham were inspired by Smith’s “new imperialism” to treat federalism “as a means to connect and pacify previously hostile states.”Footnote 30 Along the way, Schliesser reconstructs Kant’s views about how debt financing prolongs wars, finding the roots of some of Kant’s ideas in the Wealth of Nations.
To Aaron Garrett, the sweeping cross-cultural confidence that Sagar finds so striking also informs some of Smith’s views about slavery. For example, “It appears, accordingly, from the experience of all ages and nations, I believe, that the work done by freemen comes cheaper in the end than that performed by slaves” (WN I.viii.41). Garrett finds this incongruent with other positions taken by Smith. Smith had to wonder: “[S]lavery is imprudent according to the general rule, wholly immoral according to Smith’s account of natural rights, and historically anomalous in comparison with other institutions of unequal power. Yet it is also ubiquitous and persistent. How and why does it persist?”Footnote 31 Garrett’s puzzle seems analogous to Weingast’s. Both writers see a particular development flying in the face of a general logic, leading them to speculate about conditions under which that general logic would not hold. Garrett looks for a local “ripple” in the economic current where slavery’s inefficiency would be less clear. What Smith does not do, Garrett says, is consider how slavery was systematically reinforced (in effect demanded) by distant consumers in expanding markets. Smith saw slavery as immoral, but it is a further step (as Garrett describes Ottobah Cugoano’s view) to see wealth production itself as immoral, “making everyone complicit in immoral actions. To take this step one must think of the act of wealth production through slavery as itself immoral theft.”Footnote 32
Smith presumably also saw American Framers in a horrible crunch, tossed by currents of a political rather than economic nature. Was a thoroughgoing system of natural liberty economically viable? It was a moot point because it wasn’t politically viable. Framers, staring at an existential crisis, muddled through—at hideous cost—but the vision that Smith and Tocqueville wanted to see America realizing (if Hanley’s interpretation is right) was not to be.
Smith looking forward
Masazumi Wakatabe’s essay is accurately subtitled “What Adam Smith Could Teach Us about the Future of Capitalism.” Wakatabe reflects on capitalism’s future and on what a realistically inclusive capitalism can offer, starting from here. Wakatabe’s essay has a scope around which an entire course on the topic could be designed.
Finally, Caroline Breashears offers offbeat insight into a history of printing, reprinting, and choosing cover designs for the Wealth of Nations. She sees cover designers as not as only marketing the Wealth of Nations but, in effect, interpreting and even debating its themes. What is wealth? What is money? What does it symbolize? What is commerce? Does industry entail industrialization? What is profit? Did Smith dignify profit? Did Smith dignify greed? Is it moral to seek the best possible price? Is trying to get the best price somehow more defensible for a buyer than for a seller? When is it honorable to buy and sell? Are investors inherently corrupt? Is it only the labor of workers that creates value?
Breashears sees the covers of the Wealth of Nations as, over generations, reflecting controversial intellectual currents. Ultimately, though, Breashears embraces the adage about not judging a book by its cover, closing by advising that “the only way really to understand Smith’s Wealth of Nations is to release it from its paratextual trappings and just read it.”
Acknowledgments
For helpful feedback, I thank the various contributors to this volume and everyone involved in putting this issue together, but especially Billy Christmas, Chris Freiman, Ryan Hanley, Dennis Rasmussen, Roos Slegers, and, more generally, Geoff Brennan and Doug Den Uyl. For decades, Doug ran week-long summer seminars on Adam Smith. I thank Doug for appointing me as discussion leader in one of his early workshops. For me as for so many scholars today, the road to Adam Smith (and what I now call moral science) went through Doug’s seminar.
Competing interests
The author declares none.
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