The Contested 'Main Points' of Adam Smith's 'Wealth of Nations': A Scholarly Perspective, Assignments of Economics

Download The Contested 'Main Points' of Adam Smith's 'Wealth of Nations': A Scholarly Perspective and more Assignments Economics in PDF only on Docsity! 1 June 30, 2015 Rev:September 21, 2018 The Many, Diverse “Main Points” Of Adam Smith’s the Wealth of Nations Barry R. Weingast1 Stanford University Abstract The purpose of this short paper is to demonstrate that in the modern era Adam Smith scholars make a surprising variety of claims about the “main point” of the Wealth of Nations. I collect a range of statements asserting the main point and arrange them by categories. Most statements focus on economic topics (60%), though some entries clearly fall under politics (40%). Nearly half of the statements in the literature argue that Wealth of Nations’s main purpose was to provide a theory of economic development. Other categories include the idea that self-interested individuals can support gains from cooperation; ideas about justice, morals, and liberty; and finally, contributions to economic theory. The diversity of points is striking, indicating not only the work’s richness, but the many different topics to which it made substantive contributions. An obvious interpretation of these results is that no single, over-arching theme can be said to be the purpose or main point of the Wealth of Nations. This work made so many fundamental or foundational contributions to economics, government, history, law, politics, sociology, and normative political theory that it is difficult to say that any one contribution dominates. 1. Introduction Adam Smith scholars demonstrate that the popular and academic understanding of Smith's work has changed dramatically over time (Liu, 2018, Milgate and Stimson 2009, Tribe 1995). A great many different groups have taken Adam Smith as their own, often creating a caricature of a complex man 1 Senior Fellow, Hoover Institution, and Ward C. Krebs Family Professor, Department of Political Science, Stanford University. The author gratefully acknowledges Glory Liu for helpful comments. 2 whose thoughts, theories, and histories covered much of what we today call the social sciences and parts of the humanities. Indeed, Smith has been known as a free-trader, a laissez-faire advocate of small government, and a moral philosopher, and an egalitarian. The purpose of this note is to complement that literature by demonstrating that, in the modern era at least, Smith scholars make a surprising variety of claims about the “main point” of the Wealth of Nations. I collect a range of statements asserting the main point and then I arrange them by categories. Most focus on economic topics (60%), though many entries clearly fall under politics (40%). Dugald Stewart, Smith's first biographer and both a student and friend of Smith's provides the following insight in Smith's main point of the Wealth of Nations: “In his Wealth of Nations, various disquisitions are introduced which have a like object in view, particularly the theoretical delineation he has given of the natural progress of opulence in a country; and his investigation of the causes which have inverted this order in the different countries of modern Europe. His lectures on jurisprudence seem, from the account of them formerly given, to have abounded in such inquiries” (Stewart 1793: II.52:295). In this vein, nearly half of the statements in the literature argue that WN’s main purpose was to provide a theory of economic development. Other categories include the idea that self- interested individuals can support gains from cooperation; ideas about justice, morals, and liberty; and finally, contributions to economic theory. 5 contributions. A long, complex, and multifaceted work, the Wealth of Nations offers diverse interpretations. This paper proceeds as follows. Section 2 discusses the system of classification, including a summary table classifying the statements. Section 3 presents the statements by category; while section 4 discusses imputing main points to four additional works. Some modest conclusions follow. 2. The Classification System I begin with a word about methodology. I have collected these statements while reading widely in the Adam Smith literature. I have not attempted to collect a random sample. The sample includes 100s of works discussing the Wealth of Nations (most fail to state a particular main point), including the works that are among the most widely cited today. As to identifying the statements, I have included a quote in the sample whenever a scholar mentions the “main point,” “leading theme,” Smith's “intent in” the Wealth of Nations; or if an author uses a phrase such as, “The central focus of Smith’s analysis was stated clearly in the full title of his work – An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations. Put in more modern terms, he was concerned with developing a theory of economic growth”; or “The main purpose of the Wealth of Nations was … to define the necessary conditions for rapid economic development.” To be included in the sample, a statement must be explicit about the main point. 6 I have classified each statement into one of the following seven categories.  Economic development  Economic reform  Economic theory  Self-interest and its Implications: Leads to Social Cooperation; and the Invisible Hand  International Political Economy and War  Justice, Morals, Virtues and Liberty  Other. The categories involve a degree of arbitrariness. Some statements can be classified in multiple ways; and other categorization schemes are undoubtedly possible. Altogether different sampling techniques are also possible; for example, investigating the type of points that participants in other literatures cite Smith. In section 4 I have imputed a general point to particular authors, all of whom fall under the “other” category. Category Number Percent Economics development 15 37 Economic reform 5 12 Economic theory 4 10 Self-interest and cooperation 6 15 International political economy and war 1 2 Justice, morals, Virtues, and Liberty 6 15 Other 4 10 Total 41 100 7 I now consider the distribution of statements (41 in total) by category.4 As the table reveals, fifteen of the forty-one statements – more than a third of the literature, as sampled – categorizes the main point of Wealth of Nations as the economics of development. Four of these authors take the literal approach noted above, arguing that the Smith's full title summarizes his main point. The twenty-six statements are scattered across the remaining five categories. Two categories have six statements; the category, “Justice, morals, virtues, and liberty” and “self-interest and social cooperation.” The other four categories – Economic reform, Economic theory, International political economy and war, and other – total fourteen entries. An alternative way to divide the statements is by modern discipline – economics (the first three categories) and politics (the second three categories). This yields economics with twenty-four; political science with thirteen (excluding the category, other). I also note that two statements not classified under economic development could easily have been (Heilbroner 1953 and Hollander (1979). All of these comments reflect the complexity of Smith's thought. The Wealth of Nations can be thought of as an early version of a modern day “principles of economics” text only by ignoring all the material that does not comfortably fit under this label; although such a version can be constructed by beginning with Books I and II in combination with an active effort to pick through Smith's points in Books III-V that fall under the domain of modern economics 4 The classification system: (i) includes Stewart (1793), mentioned above and therefore not included in the list in section 3; and (ii) C.Smith (2017:44) argues that “When Adam Smith published the Wealth of Nations in 1776 it seems that he had two distinct, but related, objects in mind,” and I have counted these as separate “main points.” 10 Smith’s fundamental concern in the Wealth of Nations was with economic development defined in terms of (real) national income per head. His objective was to demonstrate that reliance upon the free operation of the competitive mechanism of resource allocation would assure the maximization at any time of the national income generated by the community’s given resources. [307-08] (7) Blaug, Economic Theory in Retrospect (1978) In his Introduction to the book, Adam Smith makes it clear that his leading theme is economic development: the long-term forces that govern the growth of the wealth of nations. [37] (8) Letwin, “Was Adam Smith a Liberal?” (1988) According to Letwin: Within the Wealth of Nations at least, Smith advocated only economic liberty among the whole range of individual liberties, and advocated it only as the most efficient means to achieve economic growth. That Smith should have posited “politics” as a final end of human activity was entirely in keeping with the rhetorical purpose of the Wealth of Nations. The book explains first, how and why some nations have become wealthy, and second, what governments have done and should do to foster enrichment. The first subject, which occupies Books I and II, is subservient to the second subject, which occupies Books III and IV. The latter pair aim to demonstrate that “natural liberty” is the | best way to achieve a purpose, which he assigns to the statesman considered as a practitioner of “political economy,” namely, “to provide a plentiful revenue or subsistence for the people, or more properly to enable them to provide such a revenue or subsistence for themselves …” (1976a:IV.Intro.1:428] In other words, the essential objective of the Wealth of Nations was to establish a normative precept. [66-67] (9) Pack, Capitalism as a Moral System (1991) The “Wealth of Nations is largely about particular modern capitalist society (and how best to achieve economic growth in modern societies).” [119] (10) Winch, “Adam Smith” (2004) Though often criticized for its rambling structure, historical digressions, and over-abundance of ‘curious facts’, the work has a single unifying theme which takes on further ramifications as it is unfolded. As the full title 11 makes clear, it is an enquiry into the nature of wealth, how its benefits should be measured or judged. This is combined with a causal account of the growth of opulence designed to show why the process had been retarded during the feudal period of European history, why some nations were stationary or in decline, and why those that have made a start have frequently failed to reap the full advantages. The theme is launched by posing a simple though artificially heightened enigma that survives from the earliest drafts. While there is no difficulty in explaining how the rich and powerful come to enjoy the fruits of others' labour, how is it that in civilized societies even the poorest members enjoy more of the necessaries and conveniences of life than an African king? Smith had two superficial pieces of conventional wisdom in his sights: the belief that the luxuries of the few were conditional upon the poverty of the mass; and the impossibility of combining high wages with better and cheaper goods for consumers. (11) Evensky, Adam Smith’s Moral Philosophy (2005) “As the name of the work implies, Smith turns his focus to an analysis of the progress of opulence in his Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations.” [111] (12) Kennedy, Adam Smith. (2010) Wealth of Nations is not a textbook on economics. It represents the application of Adam Smith’s world-view to the larger historical problem of what caused the British economy to show signs of sustained improvements through slow but steady growth, what inhibited it from performing much better compared to how well it could perform if certain changes were made in its political stance towards international trade with neighbours and with its colonies in North America. His book was entitled An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations ... using Britain as his case study. [2] (13) Phillipson. Adam Smith: An Enlightened Life. (2010) The main question in WN is “how to explain the slow progress of opulence in Europe.” [222-23] 12 (14) Sandmo, Economics Evolving (2011) “The title of Adam Smith’s economic treatise suggests that the main question that it poses is what determines a nation’s level of economic development.” [55] Further, “A central concern for Adam Smith is to argue against the mercantilist view of economic policy and in favor of free trade and free markets.” [34] See also his comment under social cooperation. (15) Hont, Politics in Commercial Society. (2015) Hont provides two different possible “main points” of WN: The sun rising in the east and down in the West was the ordinary course of things. The sun rising in the West would have created a retrograde movement, and this, to say the least, called for a special explanation. Well, the economic sun of Europe did rise in the West, Smith claimed, and a very special explanation was indeed badly needed. This is what the Wealth of Nations was designed to deliver. In this respect, Smith was not a natural jurist and hence not an economist. [107] Rousseau’s famous “fatal accident,” the discovery of metallurgy. A new species of property, yes. But the key is that metallurgy “gave rise to industry, a species of economic endeavor divorced from the land. A metallurgist did not produce food but exchanged products for it. This was a huge leap forward in the division of labor.” [99] Terms of trade favored the artisans over those producing food. “This gave rise to a world where industry and cities ... increasingly dominated agriculture and the rural population.” [99] R argued that this would cause a huge demographic crisis.” “A” if not “the” major problem of the era. [99] Smith concerned too, and the “simplest definition of the content of the Wealth of Nations is that it gave a counterintuitive answer to this issue.” Hence, Smith on the “retrograde” development of Western Europe. [99] 15 3.3. Economic Theory (1) McLean, Adam Smith, Radical and Egalitarian (2006) Smith's major theoretical idea occurs in his first sentence of the WN: “The greatest improvement in the productive powers of labour, and the greater part of skill, dexterity, and judgment which is any where direct, or applied, seem to have been the effects of the division of labor.” Further, the division of labor is limited by the extent of the market” [WN I.i.1,13] (2) Benton “Adam Smith and the Limits to Growth” (1995). “The central thesis of the book … is the ‘annual labor of every nation’ which is the source of ‘all the necessaries and conveniencies of life which it annually consumes.” [144, quote WN I.1.**] (3) Cairncross, “The Market and the State” (1976) The Wealth of Nations “provided us with the first coherent model of an economic system and analysed the role of the market within that system.” [113] (4) C. Smith, “Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations” (2017) When Adam Smith published the Wealth of Nations in 1776 it seems that he had two distinct, but related, objects in mind. The first of these was to provide a systematic survey of the political economy of commercial societies that would place the study of the economy on a secure and scientific basis. The second purpose was to use this systematic enquiry and its conclusions to contribute to the debates about British economic policy. Smith famously described this as “a very violent attack…upon the whole commercial system of Great Britain” (Smith, 1987, p. 251). 3.4. Self-Interest Leads to Social Cooperation; and the Invisible Hand (1) Heilbroner Worldly Philosophers (1953 [5e, 1980]) Heilbroner argues that two big questions animate Smith: 16  First, Smith sought to understand “the mechanisms by which society hangs together.” How do self-interest people nonetheless cooperate?  Second, Smith sought to understanding the dynamic path of society. “Indeed, in its entirety the Wealth of Nations is a great treatise on history, explaining how ‘the system of perfect liberty” (which is what Smith called commercial capitalism) came into being, as well as how it worked.” [52] (2) Teichgraeber, ‘Free Trade’ and Moral Philosophy (1986) “Most ‘modern readers’ would … come to see the Wealth of Nations as a giant machine assembled to drive home one very easily understood point – namely, the view that self-interest pursuit of gain, unregulated by legislation or popular prejudice, ensured the greatest benefit to society.” [xii] Teichgraeber also quotes: “Walter Bagehot observed that the doctrine of ‘free trade’ had become in the popular mind almost as much Smith's subject ‘as the war of troy was Homer’s.” [xii] (3) Muller, Adam Smith in his Time and Ours (1993) Smith “devoted the Wealth of Nations primarily to showing that self-interest, when properly channeled by social institutions, can produce socially beneficent effects and behavior.”7 [98] (4) Gallagher, Rule of the Rich (1998) The ... assumption offered here is that, rather than defending any particular social or political system, Smith’s overarching purpose was to show that society is held together not by any moral code, not by any political scheme, but by the very defects that prevent us from behaving in a morally correct and politically competent manner. More specifically, by identifying the natural pursuit of self-interest as both the ruling principle of individual conduct and the foundation of social development, Smith was 7 Muller further says, “Error! Main Document Only.The Wealth of Nations, which focuses on the analysis of market processes motivated by self-interest, was written by a Scottish professor of moral philosophy to arouse politicians to pursue the common good. It celebrates the virtues of the “commercial society” while vilifying the merchant – who gave his name to “the mercantile system” which Smith endeavors to demolish.” [7] 17 trying to show that judgments about what is morally acceptable or what is politically desirable are irrelevant to the natural course of progress and the inevitable spread of prosperity. Smith was, in other words, not attempting to resolve any moral or political dilemma. On the contrary, his plainly painful thesis was that moral corruption and political incompetence are unavoidable aspects of social development. The Theory of Moral Sentiments and the Wealth of Nations can consequently be accurately described ... as answers to critique of commerce contained in classical republican philosophy, but rather than furnishing philosophical weapons against moral decay and political incapacity, both works offer full and complete surrender... Smith’s response to the classical republican attack on commerce as a threat to political virtue was not to find some strategy to rescue politics from corruption, but to advise all combatants to withdraw from the field. [70-71] (5) Rothschild, Economic Sentiments (2001) The Wealth of Nations is “a history of the ‘general disposition to truck, barter, and exchange,’ which is a ‘necessary consequence of the faculties of reason and speech.’” [7-8] (6) Sandmo, Economics Evolving (2011) “If one were to carry out an opinion poll among economists concerning the most important single contribution of the Wealth of Nations, the probability is high that most of them would say that it is the idea of the invisible hand.” Although Sandmo qualifies this. [43] See also his comment under economic development and reform. 3.5. Justice, Morals, Virtues and Liberty (1) Buchanan, “Smith on Justice as Natural Liberty” (1976) “His intent in The Wealth of Nations was to offer a readily generalizable criticism of what he labeled the "policy of Europe." [2] 20 opposing views have been thoroughly dismantled, does Smith say that “the obvious and simple system of natural liberty establishes itself of its own accord.” (WN 687 ea). [11] 3.6. International Political Economy and War (1) Hont, “Introduction” to Jealousy of Trade (2005); According to Hont, Hume and Smith wanted to explain “how the conflation of the logics of war and trade arose in the seventeenth century and why it was so difficult to exorcise them afterward…The Wealth of Nations is a book not about perpetual peace but about competitive economic strategy. In this book Smith weighed the odds for national survival in global markets.” [8] Hont (1988) raises a similar idea: Smith thus clearly saw that the system of the économistes took the shape of an agriculturalist political economy in order to answer the problems presented by the cutthroat international competition inaugurated in Europe by the rise of mercantilism… The Wealth of Nations was written to give a different solution to the same problem of international competitiveness.8 4. Works with Imputed Main Points In this section, I discuss another portion of the sample, works in which we may impute a possible main point, but not with certainty. (1) Herzog, Inventing the Market (2013) 8 Hont here cites Hont (1983) on the “rich country – poor country” debate. 21 The Wealth of Nations “is substantially more than an economics textbook. It is also a political programme: how to best govern a society in which some mechanisms are provided by nature, but in which institutions and regulations must be added by human action.” [39] (2) Cropsey, Polity and Economy (1957) Since history is not the rational expression of nature but in principle may conflict with nature, there arises the need for a statement of the strictly natural, which of course is the substance of the Wealth of Nations, a book that delivers the truth about nature.9 [73] (3) Grampp, Economic Liberalism vol. II (1965) In the Wealth of Nations Smith developed in detail the idea of a natural order. There the natural order is offered as the ideal organization of society... It is not ideal in being the handiwork of nature. [23] From these considerations of the role of natural law and natural characteristics in the Lectures, one can infer that the natural order is the competitive market. [23] (4) Kalyvas and Katznelson, Liberal Beginnings (2008) Smith’s WN transcends a positive theory of market and social organization. It is also “A powerful normative theory about the emancipatory character of market systems lies at the heart of Wealth. These markets constitute ‘the system of natural liberty’ because they shatter traditional hierarchies, authorities, exclusions, and privileges. Unlike mercantilism and other alternative mechanisms of economic coordination, markets are based on the spontaneous and free expression of individual preferences.” [20-21 citing Smith on the latter quote: WN pp 687, 678, 670, 419-20] 9 Cropsey continues, “If we were obliged to reduce Smith’s historical teaching to a single, simple proposition, we might recur to the following formula: The arrangement of the social forms that rule men’s common existence is a direct outgrowth of the facts of an historical background; and those facts exert their influence through their power to excite the passions of groups of men who bring forth the net arrangement of society (and even polity) by their maneuverings on behalf of their interest... Thus we observe that the highest form of social organization which is mentioned by Smith is “civilization,” or commercial society founded upon the elaborate division of labor. This social form is highest (not in the sense of “noblest”) precisely because it best suits the end of nature, namely the preservation of man’s existence.” [73] 22 Additionally, with his emphasis on spontaneous coordination, Smith pointed to the possibility of a social order in which people could live in harmony with only minimal coercive apparatus and limited political power. Notwithstanding its conflicts, capitalism produces stability and enjoys the advantage of a mechanism, the market, which maintains equilibria by continually adjusting competing interests, thus limiting the necessity of the state. Over time, these powerful theoretical propositions combined to produce a legitimating cornerstone for the robust defense of market capitalism, a particular ensemble of political institutions, and a specific line of justification for liberal ideas and values. [21] 5. Conclusions This short paper collects a sample of statements by Smith scholars as to their reports of the main point of his magnum opus, the Wealth of Nations. As I showed above, Smith himself was not of one mind as to the main object of this complex work, emphasizing different aspects of his work as the main point in different contexts. The literature proves no different. The stated objectives range from economic development (nearly half) to economic reform, various normative issues, and social cooperation based on self-interest. I myself would classify the main point as a theory of development, both economic and political. In this sense, I think the title accurately names Smith's purpose. An obvious interpretation of these results is that no single, over-arching theme can be said to be the purpose or main point of the Wealth of Nations. 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