Economic Sentiments

Adam Smith, Condorcet, and the Enlightenment

Emma Rothschild

• Editorial: Harvard University Press
• Año: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780674725621
• Categoría: Économie
• Categoría: Histoire économique

In a brilliant recreation of the epoch between the 1770s and the 1820s, Emma Rothschild reinterprets the ideas of the great revolutionary political economists to show us the true landscape of economic and political thought in their day, with important consequences for our own. Her work alters the readings of Adam Smith and Condorcet--and of ideas of Enlightenment--that underlie much contemporary political thought. Economic Sentiments takes up late-eighteenth-century disputes over the political economy of an enlightened, commercial society to show us how the "political" and the "economic" were intricately related to each other and to philosophical reflection. Rothschild examines theories of economic and political sentiments, and the reflection of these theories in the politics of enlightenment. A landmark in the history of economics and of political ideas, her book shows us the origins of laissez-faire economic thought and its relation to political conservatism in an unquiet world. In doing so, it casts a new light on our own times.

1

Economic Dispositions

THE HISTORY OF SENTIMENTS

The “beauty of writing history,” Adam Smith said in his lectures on rhetoric, in January 1763, consisted for Tacitus in a political theory of sentiments. Events, in Smith’s description, have both external and internal causes, or causes to do with circumstances and causes to do with sentiments. It is the neglect of these internal causes, Smith says, which makes the writings of modern historians “for the most part so dull and lifeless.” The ancient historians were preoccupied, by contrast, with “the feelings and agitation of mind” of individuals, or with “the motions of the human mind.” Tacitus’ plan, in Smith’s conjecture, is to relate the history of public events by leading the reader “into the sentiments and the mind of the actors.” Such a history, Smith says, “perhaps will not tend so much to instruct us in the knowledge of the causes of events; yet it will be more interesting and lead us into a science no less useful, to wit, the knowledge of the motives by which men act.”¹

The motions of the human mind were Smith’s own preoccupation as well. Smith’s lifelong study, his first biographer, Dugald Stewart, wrote in 1793, was of “human nature in all its branches, more particularly of the political history of mankind.” He was concerned with the “principles of the human mind,” the “principles of the human constitution,” the “natural progress of the mind.” His style, as in the Theory of Moral Sentiments, or “his copious and seducing composition,” was at its best in his “delineations of characters and manners,” or when “the subject of his work leads him to address the imagination and the heart.”²

The Wealth of Nations is in Smith’s description a “very violent attack . . . upon the whole commercial system of Great Britain.”³ But it is also a history of the “general disposition to truck, barter, and exchange,” which is a “necessary consequence of the faculties of reason and speech.”⁴ It is a contribution to the history of the human mind. It is a description of the sentiments and agitation of mind of individuals in the ordinary events of life. Smith’s epic begins, as in William Robertson’s History of Charles V, with “the human mind neglected, uncultivated, and depressed,” in the “thick and heavy” darkness of early feudal Europe.⁵ It ends in a new, enlightened society of independent individuals, reasoning and disputing, trucking and exchanging, being fair and deliberate, seeing through their own prejudices, having conversations about vexation and oppression, reflecting on their own sentiments.

Economic life, in the disputes with which this book will be concerned, is described to a striking extent in terms of thought and speech. It is itself a sort of discussion. In Turgot’s description, free commerce is a “debate between every buyer and every seller,” in which individuals make contracts, listen to rumors, discuss the values of one another’s promises, and reflect on “the opinion and the reality of risk.”⁶ Condorcet, in an essay of 1775 on monopoly and monopolists, evoked the scene at the outset of Laurence Sterne’s Sentimental Journey in which Yorick, the sentimental traveler, and M. Dessein, the innkeeper, go forth into the street in Calais to converse about the purchase of a “sorry post-chaise.” “He felt a secret hatred rising in his heart, against M. Dessein,” Condorcet wrote; the traveler reflected on the hostility of the world; he chaffered about the price; he concluded with a twelve guinea bargain and an advantage, even, in the “balance of sentimental commerce.”⁷

The source of opulence, Smith says at the beginning of the Wealth of Nations, is to be found in the trucking disposition which is common to the most dissimilar characters (a philosopher and a common street porter, for example), and which is itself a consequence of the faculties of reason and speech. The “fair and deliberate exchange” of civilized society is to be contrasted to the “servile and fawning attention” of relations between unequals (including between dogs and their masters).⁸ In his lectures on jurisprudence, Smith describes exchange as a sort of oratory. “It is clearly the natural inclination everyone has to persuade,” he says, which is “the principle in the human mind on which this disposition of trucking is founded”; “the offering of a shilling, which to us appears to have so plain and simple a meaning, is in reality offering an argument to persuade one to do so and so as it is for his interest . . . And in this manner every one is practising oratory on others through the whole of his life.”⁹

Economic life is at the same time a matter of sentiment. “It is chiefly from this regard to the sentiments of mankind, that we pursue riches and avoid poverty,” Smith wrote in the Theory of Moral Sentiments, of the desire to be attended to, and taken notice of, which is in his description the great object of worldly toil and bustle.¹⁰ Sentiments are the objective of economic striving, and they are also the adjunct of economic exchange. The judgments of individuals, in the relationships of commercial life, are judgments, often, about one’s own and other people’s sentiments. All individuals, in their economic relationships as in the rest of their lives, are interested in what Smith describes as “the characters, designs, and actions of one another.” They feel shame, and seek respect, and think about esteem. They have “anxious and desponding moments.”¹¹ Tax reform, Condorcet wrote in his Réflexions sur le commerce des blés of 1776, would relieve “the sentiment of oppression,” and freedom of commerce would reduce, for the poor, the horror of being ignored; “the idea of being counted for nothing, of being delivered up, without defense, to all vexations and all outrages.”¹²

Sentiments influence reasons in economic life, and reasons influence sentiments.¹³ Giacomo Leopardi said of the word “sentimental,” in 1821, that it was one of the common European words, the gallicismi or europeismi, of a “philosophy which is part of ordinary conversation.” The word “sentiment,” too, was something other than what Leopardi called a term. It was not “naked” and “isolated”; it was one of the words which evoke “clusters of ideas” and “multitudes of concepts,” vague, indefinite, and indeterminate.¹⁴ But the indefinite idea of a sentiment was at the heart of Smith’s and Condorcet’s political and moral theory. Sentiments were feelings of which one is conscious, and on which one reflects. They were also events that connected the individual to the larger relationships in which he or she lived (the society, or the family, or the state).¹⁵ The traffic or commerce of modern life was at the same time a traffic in opinions and sentiments. The “man of society,” in Smith’s translation of Rousseau’s Discours sur l’inégalité, is “always out of himself”; he “cannot live but in the opinion of others, and it is . . . from their judgment alone that he derives the sentiment of his own existence.”¹⁶

CIVILIZED AND COMMERCIAL SOCIETY

The discursive, reflective, self-conscious disposition, in the economic disputes with which this book will be concerned, is both a cause and a consequence of economic progress. The two most important conditions of commercial prosperity, for Smith and for Condorcet, are the improvement of political and legal institutions and the independence of individual dispositions. “Order and good government, and along with them the liberty and security of individuals,” the circumstance which is for Smith at the heart of the progress of opulence, has the effect of making possible the enfranchisement of opinions and sentiments. Individuals are free of “servile dependency”; they exert their industry “to better their condition”; they are no longer “continually afraid of the violence of their superiors”; they have a sense of their own security.¹⁷

Free government is taken to be a necessary but not a sufficient condition for universal prosperity. It must be accompanied by certain dispositions and opinions, in Hume’s description: “Liberty must be attended with particular accidents, and a certain turn of thinking, in order to produce that effect.”¹⁸ The only difficult question in relation to the abolition of all regulation of the commerce in subsistence food, Condorcet wrote in 1776, consists in “the prejudices of the people,” including prejudices against “capitalists”; the only truly important transformation is in “public opinion,” with respect to “freedom of commerce” and “respect for property.”¹⁹ The history of the rise of commerce, for Smith, is an epic of the emancipation of the mind. It is a story, as in the account of private credit and public debt in the Wealth of Nations, of “the operation of moral causes.”²⁰ Individuals become independent in their lives and their opinions. They are freed, in particular, from superstitions and prejudices. Smith says, of the progress of opulence which he describes in Books 3 and 4 of the Wealth of Nations, that it is “interests, prejudices, laws and customs” which he will “endeavour to explain as fully and distinctly” as he can.²¹

Independence of mind is in turn a consequence, as well as a condition, of commercial prosperity. Commerce and manufactures gradually introduced order and good government, in Smith’s description of late medieval European towns, and “this, though it has been the least observed, is by far the most important of all their effects.”²² Individuals become less dependent on their landlords and superiors, and are less subject to the fear of sudden destitution. These effects are even more pronounced when the benefits of opulence are extended to the greater part of the people, to “servants, labourers, and workmen of different kinds.”²³ The great advantage of eighteenth-century England, for Hume, consists in the circumstance that “riches are dispersed among multitudes,” and that the “high price of labour” is the source of “the happiness of so many millions.”²⁴ The high price of labor, for Smith, increases the industriousness and the “good spirits” of the laborer; it inspires “the comfortable hope of bettering his condition, and of ending his days perhaps in ease and plenty.”²⁵

The history of the human spirit, for Condorcet, was to be a history of the interior and private sentiments of millions of individuals; of the influence of the progress of the mind on “the opinions, the well-being of the general mass” of people in different countries. Until the late eighteenth century, Condorcet wrote, political history, like the history of philosophy and of the sciences, had been no more than the history of a few men. The history of the ideas and opinions of the mass of families—“the most obscure, the most neglected, and for which monuments offer us so little material”—was more difficult to write. Its neglect could not be ascribed only to the shortcomings of historians (the “bassesse des historiens”). It required quantitative information or observations. But it was the true object of philosophy.

This history of sentiments and thoughts was to be a history of “the law as it is written and the law as it is enforced; the principles of those who govern and the way in which they are modified by the spirit of those who are governed; institutions as they emanate from the men who shape them, and institutions as they are realised; the religion of books and the religion of the people; the apparent universality of a particular prejudice, and the real adherence it receives.” It would end, as in the ultimate epoch of the Esquisse des progrès, in a society in which the “different causes of equality” reinforced one another. There would be greater equality of instruction, which would lead in turn to greater equality of industry and of wealth. There would be enough equality, at least, to exclude “all dependence,” and to ensure that no one was obliged to depend blindly on others, in the ordinary business of life or in the exercise of individual rights.²⁶

The rise of civilized and commercial society was by no means only beneficial, in Smith’s and Condorcet’s depictions. It can indeed be full of danger, under certain conditions, for the dispositions of ordinary people. The division of labor, in Smith’s description, can “benumb the understanding” and lead the mind into a “drowsy stupidity.” The individual “whose whole life is spent in performing a few simple operations” is “mutilated and deformed” in the “character of human nature,” including in his capacity to enjoy “rational conversation” and to make judgments about private and public life. The progress of commerce and the mechanical arts can be an obstacle to human improvement, Condorcet wrote, citing Smith, and even a source of “eternal stupidity.” But universal public instruction was for both Smith and Condorcet an efficient remedy, and the only remedy, for this evil. The eventual objective of a commercial society is not “equal enlightenment.” It is the prevention, at least, of “that inequality which brings with it a real dependence, and which compels a blind confidence.”²⁷

THE UNFRIGHTENED MIND

The most heroic outcome, in this history of the human spirit, was to be the slow vanquishing of fear. The condition of uncivilized society, in Smith’s description as in Hume’s, is of the “lowest and most pusillanimous superstition.”²⁸ Fear is the source of superstition for Hume, and superstition “steals in gradually and insensibly; renders men tame and submissive.” The rise of commercial and civilized society is associated with the replacement of superstition by philosophy; in Smith’s description, “when law has established order and security, and subsistence ceases to be precarious, the curiosity of mankind is increased, and their fears are diminished.”²⁹ The highest calling of philosophy is to liberate the minds of individuals from terrors and apparitions and portents.³⁰

Fear was for Smith and for Condorcet a natural condition of human life. It is “a passion derived altogether from the imagination, which represents, with an uncertainty and fluctuation that increases our anxiety, not what we really feel, but what we may hereafter possibly suffer,” Smith wrote in the Theory of Moral Sentiments. For Hume, it is a passion associated with probability, or with a “wavering and unconstant method” of surveying the world.³¹ It influences the way individuals think, for Condorcet: “We believe what we hope or what we fear, more forcefully than something which is indifferent.”³² It is even enticing, or at least interesting. We are interested in hope ...