EQUITY, BESIDES: ADAM SMITH AND THE UTILITY OF POVERTY

Generations of readers have nodded in agreement with Adam Smith’s argument, in Book One of the Wealth of Nations, that a nation cannot be happy if the workers who constitute the majority of its population are miserable. Smith notes that equity, besides, demands that workers receive a generous recompense for their labor. I contend that this famous statement is best interpreted in light of contemporary arguments that it was socially useful for workers to be poor. Smith’s engagement with these arguments is usually interpreted with reference to the labor supply function, but I argue that it also involved deeper suppositions about the place of workers in the social order. Smith’s reaction to these suppositions enriches our understanding of his contribution to liberal economics.

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The Rhetoric of the Market: Adam Smith on Recognition, Speech, and Exchange

The Review of Politics ◽

10.1017/s0034670500030953 ◽

2001 ◽

Vol 63 (3) ◽

pp. 549-580 ◽

Cited By ~ 14

Author(s):

Andreas Kalyvas ◽

Ira Katznelson

Keyword(s):

Social Order ◽

Adam Smith ◽

Division Of Labour ◽

Modern Theory ◽

Modern Analogue ◽

Self Interest ◽

Social Esteem ◽

Wealth Of Nations ◽

Institutional Foundations ◽

Normative Role

We probe the connections linking the market, speech, and sympathy in the work of Adam Smith, stressing how individuals strive for social esteem and ethical credit while competing in markets. We demonstrate how Smith approached speech and rhetoric as constituting attributes of markets, the modern analogue of previous institutional foundations for social order. Thus, markets are not simply, or exclusively, arenas for the instrumental quest by competitive and strategic individuals to secure their material preferences. They are a central mechanism for social integration derived not from strategic self-interest but from the inexorable struggle by human agents for moral approbation. Part One retranslates the master concept ofMoral Sentimentsinto a modern theory of recognition. Part Two considers how Smith, in hisRhetoric, established the mutual constitution of recognition and speech. Part Three carries this understanding to hisJurisprudence, the most integrative of his texts, which relocates these impulses inside the market itself.The pivotal second chapter of Adam Smith'sWealth of Nations, “Of the Principle which gives occasion to the Division of Labour, ” opens with the oft-cited claim that the foundation of modern political economy is the human “propensity to truck, barter, and exchange one thing for another.” This formulation plays both an analytical and normative role. It offers an anthropological microfoundation for Smith's understanding of how modern commercial societies function as social organizations, which, in turn, provide a venue for the expression and operation of these human proclivities.

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The Social Philosophy of Smith's “wealth of Nations”

Philosophy ◽

10.1017/s0031819100014972 ◽

1927 ◽

Vol 2 (5) ◽

pp. 39-51

Author(s):

John Laird

Keyword(s):

Moral Philosophy ◽

Adam Smith ◽

Social Philosophy ◽

Short Discussion ◽

Philosophical Inquiry ◽

Scientific Analysis ◽

The Social ◽

General Principles Of Law ◽

Wealth Of Nations ◽

Historical Treatment

When Adam Smith, at the age of forty, resigned his professorship in Glasgow and devoted himself, after three years of travel, to the composition of his Wealth of Nations, he set himself to elaborate the sociological portion of his course on Moral Philosophy. Indeed, at the conclusion of his Moral Sentiments, written during the tenure of his professorship, he had promised “ another discourse ” on the “ general principles of law and government,” including a historical treatment and an account of “ police, revenue and arms.” To be sure, when the work appeared, it was not, in essentials, a continuation of the researches of Montesquieu, and had no authentic connection with Smith’s earlier treatise on morals, Instead, the bulk of it was a strict, and as we should say, a scientific (not a philosophical), inquiry into the origin and conditions of opulence in human communities. Nevertheless, it expounds and is even dominated by a certain social philosophy which is not too convincing when nakedly put. Smith's abiding fame, accordingly, rests more upon the strict scientific analysis of his book than upon its implicit philosophy. Still, the philosophy was there. It had, and it still has, influence. A short discussion of it, therefore, is likely to have something more than historical interest.

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Business Ethics in Adam Smith’s works

Annales Etyka w życiu gospodarczym ◽

10.18778/1899-2226.20.6.02 ◽

2017 ◽

Vol 20 (6) ◽

pp. 21-32

Author(s):

Stefan Zabieglik

Keyword(s):

Business Ethics ◽

Common Good ◽

Adam Smith ◽

Point Of View ◽

Moral Sentiments ◽

Ethical Problems ◽

The Social ◽

Property Owners ◽

Wealth Of Nations ◽

Theory Of Moral Sentiments

This paper presents some views of Adam Smith based on some selected problems of business ethics. These can be found in his famous works—The Theory of Moral Sentiments and The Wealth of Nations—and in his lectures at the Glasgow University, where he was a professor of moral philosophy in 1752–1764. The main argument of the paper is that ethical problems (presented mainly in The Theory of Moral Sentiments) are also present in his political economy, which contradicts some neoliberal interpretations of his works as ones of the “intellectual father of capitalism”. In The Wealth of Nations, Smith criticizes each social class because of the fact that its interests are incompatible with the good of the whole society. He condemned the monopolist efforts of the traders and entrepreneurs, described some property owners as “vain egoists” and advanced the interests of the poor. He maintained that the interests of the traders should be supported when these were compatible with the interest of the consumers. The desire for possession and wealth should be analyzed from the social point of view: It is good when it contributes to the common good and the reproduction of humankind.

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Taming Egoism: Adam Smith on Empathy, Imagination and Justice

Krakowskie Studia z Historii Państwa i Prawa ◽

10.4467/20844131ks.16.033.6971 ◽

2017 ◽

Vol 9 (Special Issue) ◽

pp. 29-37

Author(s):

Agnieszka Czarnecka

Keyword(s):

Social Order ◽

Life Experiences ◽

Adam Smith ◽

Role Playing ◽

Human Being ◽

Impartial Spectator ◽

Social Morality ◽

Psychological Mechanisms ◽

The Social ◽

Self Interest

I argue that the construction of the social order, as shown by Adam Smith in The Theory of Moral Sentiments, depends on people’s ability to tame their inborn egoism. According to the philosopher’s anthropological assumptions a human being learns through life experiences how to control his self- interest so that it does not threaten societal existence. During socialization, a human being – still an egoist to some extent – continues role-playing by the use of the psychological mechanisms of empathy and imagination. As a result he develops sympathy, at first, as a reaction to real people’s emotions experienced in a particular context. Finally, he naturally and more and more unconsciously takes under consideration the perspective of an impartial spectator. The gradually developing process brings about consequences that improve social morality, such as control over the expression of intense emotions, which is a condition for experiencing emotional harmony, or a refrain from pursuing one’s self-interest at the expense of someone else, so as not to become a subject of social contempt. One should also bear in mind that none of these consequences was carefully planned in advance nor purposefully executed.

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Blackstone's Science of Legislation

Journal of British Studies ◽

10.1086/385908 ◽

1988 ◽

Vol 27 (2) ◽

pp. 117-149 ◽

Cited By ~ 4

Author(s):

David Lieberman

Keyword(s):

Eighteenth Century ◽

Moral Philosophy ◽

Adam Smith ◽

The North ◽

Recent Scholarship ◽

The Social ◽

University Of Edinburgh ◽

Wealth Of Nations ◽

Law And Legislation ◽

The University

In 1795, Dugald Stewart, the professor of moral philosophy at the University of Edinburgh and reigning Athenian of the North, observed in a famous estimate of the career of Adam Smith that “the most celebrated works produced in the different countries of Europe during the last thirty years” had “aimed at the improvement of society” by “enlightening the policy of actual legislators.” Among such celebrated productions Stewart included the publications of François Quesnay, Anne-Robert Jacques Turgot, Pedro Campomanes, and Cesare Beccaria and, above all, the writings of Smith himself, whose Wealth of Nations “unquestionably” represented “the most comprehensive and perfect work that has yet appeared on the general principles of any branch of legislation.” One of the more striking achievements of recent scholarship on eighteenth-century social thought has been to make sense of this description of Smith's Inquiry and to enable us better to appreciate why Smith chose to describe his system of political economy as a contribution to the “science of a legislator.” In a cultural setting in which, as J. G. A. Pocock has put it, “jurisprudence” was “the social science of the eighteenth century,” law and legislation further featured, in J. H. Burns's formula, as “the great applied science among the sciences of man.” Moralists and jurists of the period, echoing earlier political conventions, may readily have acknowledged with Rousseau that “it would take gods to give men laws.” Nevertheless, even in Rousseau's program for perfecting “the conditions of civil association”—“men being taken as they are and laws as they might be”—a mortal “legislator” appeared plainly “necessary.”

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Evolutionary Theorising in Economics

The Evolution of Cultural Entities ◽

10.5871/bacad/9780197262627.003.0009 ◽

2002 ◽

Author(s):

Richard R. Nelson

Keyword(s):

Evolutionary Theory ◽

Cultural Change ◽

Evolutionary Economics ◽

Adam Smith ◽

Neoclassical Economics ◽

Economic Discourse ◽

Evolutionary Theories ◽

Evolutionary Thought ◽

The Social ◽

Wealth Of Nations

This chapter deals with evolutionary theorising in economics, first by considering two quite different ways in which evolutionary arguments have entered economic discourse. In particular, it discusses the link between economic dynamics and evolutionary theory in biology, citing the views espoused by Adam Smith in his book The Wealth of Nations. It then examines the argument put forward by a number of economists that modern neoclassical economics and evolutionary theory in biology are basically the same thing. It also outlines the similarities and differences between several contemporary strands of evolutionary economic theorising. The chapter proposes an alternative kind of economic evolutionary theorising and how it fits with other bodies of evolutionary thought in the social sciences, and especially in terms of evolutionary epistemology. Finally, it outlines the way scholars outside of economics are embracing evolutionary economics by developing evolutionary theories of processes of economic, social, and cultural change in their own fields.

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Looking for (Economic) Growth in the Eighteenth Century

Systems of Life ◽

10.5422/fordham/9780823281725.003.0002 ◽

2018 ◽

pp. 35-55

Author(s):

Christian Marouby

Keyword(s):

Economic Growth ◽

Eighteenth Century ◽

Historical Development ◽

Adam Smith ◽

Fundamental Principle ◽

Stage Theory ◽

Economic Systems ◽

The Social ◽

Biological Analogy ◽

Wealth Of Nations

In the context of the book’s emphasis on “Systems of Life” in the social sciences in the eighteenth century, this chapter seeks to interrogate the conception of growth, an evidently biological analogy, in the work of two major founders of the discipline of economics, François Quesnay and Adam Smith. Taking its cue from a famous passage in the Wealth of Nations, the first part investigates the surprisingly discreet physiological conceptions in the non-medical writings of the theorist of physiocracy. While recognizing significant parallels between the biological and economic systems developed by Quesnay, particularly with regards to circulation, this first investigation fails to produce a model of economic growth based on physiological principles. The second part turns to the thought of Adam Smith himself, in which can be found not only an explicit analogy between physical health and that of the economy, but a clear conception of economic growth. But if it is tempting to find in Smith’s economics a system akin to that of life, a close examination of his theory of growth makes it even clearer than with Quesnay that its fundamental principle is not physiological, but sociological, grounded as it is in a stage theory of historical development.

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Adam’s Smith’s Concept of a Great Society and its Timeliness

Studies in Logic, Grammar and Rhetoric ◽

10.2478/slgr-2019-0011 ◽

2019 ◽

Vol 57 (1) ◽

pp. 175-190

Author(s):

Janina Godłów-Legiędź

Keyword(s):

Social Order ◽

Political System ◽

Adam Smith ◽

Division Of Labour ◽

The Political ◽

Great Society ◽

Small Communities ◽

Face To Face ◽

The Social ◽

Economic Philosophy

Abstract The article aims to present the concepts of Adam Smith which are important considering the current disputes over liberalism, as well as the challenge that is the maintenance of the world’s economic order. Firstly, the article analyses the significance of the division of labour which is perceived as a fundamental premise for transitioning from small communities and face-to-face exchanges to the impersonal exchange and the expanded social order in which relations with strangers become meaningful. Secondly, the present work indicates that Smith did not neglect the matter of justice when proclaiming the need for freedom. He believed that efficient functioning of the market depends on the political system and a man’s ethical system, and his criticism of interventionism was not directed against the state as an institution co-creating the social order, but against the act of granting special privileges to certain interest groups. Thirdly, the article refers to the concept of coordination described by Scottish moral philosophers and the so-called Smith Problem. In this context, the article presents arguments against the assumption that John Nash’s theory provided proof of the erroneous nature of Adam Smith’s concepts. Arguments in favour of the timelessness of the economic philosophy of the father of economics are also drawn from Vernon Smith’s experimental economy and the research of evolutionary psychologists.

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