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THE PROTECTION OF THE RICH AGAINST THE POOR: THE POLITICS OF ADAM SMITH’S POLITICAL ECONOMY

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 January 2021

James A. Harris
James A. Harris*
Affiliation:
Philosophy, University of St. Andrews, United Kingdom
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Abstract

My point of departure in this essay is Smith’s definition of government. “Civil government,” he writes, “so far as it is instituted for the security of property, is in reality instituted for the defence of the rich against the poor, or of those who have some property against those who have none at all.” First I unpack Smith’s definition of government as the protection of the rich against the poor. I argue that, on Smith’s view, this is always part of what government is for. I then turn to the question of what, according to Smith, our governors can do to protect the wealth of the rich from the resentment of the poor. I consider, and reject, the idea that Smith might conceive of education as a means of alleviating the resentment of the poor at their poverty. I then describe how, in his lectures on jurisprudence, Smith refines and develops Hume’s taxonomy of the opinions upon which all government rests. The sense of allegiance to government, according to Smith, is shaped by instinctive deference to natural forms of authority as well as by rational, Whiggish considerations of utility. I argue that it is the principle of authority that provides the feelings of loyalty upon which government chiefly rests. It follows, I suggest, that to the extent that Smith looked to government to protect the property of the rich against the poor, and thereby to maintain the peace and stability of society at large, he cannot have sought to lessen the hold on ordinary people of natural sentiments of deference. In addition, I consider the implications of Smith’s theory of government for the question of his general attitude toward poverty. I argue against the view that Smith has recognizably “liberal,” progressive views of how the poor should be treated. Instead, I locate Smith in the political culture of the Whiggism of his day.

Keywords

SmithHumeWhiggismpovertygovernmentallegianceutilityauthority
Type
Research Article
Information
Social Philosophy and Policy , Volume 37 , Issue 1 , Summer 2020 , pp. 138 - 158
Copyright
© Social Philosophy & Policy Foundation 2020

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Footnotes

I am grateful for comments and advice to Ryan Hanley, Margaret Schabas, Max Skjönsberg, Craig Smith, and an anonymous referee. I would also like to thank the other contributors to this volume for a very helpful, and detailed, discussion of the first draft of this essay. Nick Phillipson died before I started work on this essay. It would certainly have been improved by conversation with him, and I should like to dedicate it to the memory of a supremely enlightened, humane, and sociable Smith scholar.

References

1 Adam, Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, ed. Campbell, R. H. and Skinner, A. S. (Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund, 1981), 708Google Scholar.

2 Sheldon, Wolin, Politics and Vision (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1960), 292Google Scholar.

3 Cropsey situates Smith in a Lockean political tradition in “Adam Smith and Political Philosophy,” in Skinner, Andrew S. and Wilson, Thomas, eds., Essays on Adam Smith (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), 132–53Google Scholar. In Polity and Economy, by contrast, Cropsey’s claim is that Smith’s teaching “falls into the tradition of modern thought permeated by the spirits of Spinoza and Hobbes” (The Hague: International Scholars Forum, 1957), viii.

4 John, Robertson, “Scottish Political Economy Beyond the Civic Tradition,” History of Political Thought 4 (1983): 451–82Google Scholar, at 469. For a nuanced account of Smith’s relation to the republican, or civic humanist, tradition, see Leonidas, Montes, “Adam Smith on the Standing Army Versus Militia Issue: Virtue over Wealth?” in Young, Jeffrey T., ed., Elgar Companion to Adam Smith (Cheltenham: Edward Elgar, 2009), 315–34.Google Scholar

5 Smith, Wealth of Nations, 715.

6 For a more general assessment of Smith’s view of the role of government, especially in economic matters, see Medema, Steven G. and Samuels, Warren J., “‘Only Three Duties’: Adam Smith on the Economic Role of Government,” in Young, , ed., Elgar Companion to Adam Smith, 300–314Google Scholar.

7 See especially Knud, Haakonssen, The Science of a Legislator: The Natural Jurisprudence of David Hume and Adam Smith (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981)Google Scholar.

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11 For the claim that Smith went further than Fleischacker allows, and actually argues for a right of subsistence that stood to be enforced by government action, see Witztum, Amos and Young, Jeffrey E., “The Neglected Agent: Justice, Power, and Distribution in Adam Smith,” History of Political Economy 38 (2006): 437–71CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For effective criticism of Witztum and Young, and also of Fleischacker, see Salter, John, “Adam Smith on Justice and the Needs of the Poor,” Journal of the History of Economic Thought 34 (2012): 559–75CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

12 I owe this formulation to conversation with Craig Smith.

13 Donald, Winch, Adam Smith’s Politics: An Essay in Historiographical Revision (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978), 101Google Scholar. For an analysis that reaches similar conclusions to Winch, see Gloria, Vivenza, Adam Smith and the Classics: The Classical Heritage in Adam Smith’s Thought (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2001)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Vivenza argues that, according to Smith, “the aim of laws and government is to manage things so that the poor man either stays poor or, if he wishes to become rich, must do as the rich have done: work” (101).

14 Wolin, and Cropsey, , Winch argues in a later paper, “fail to recognize Smith’s consistent concern to demonstrate how actual practices or outcomes in modern commercial societies require the attention of the legislator” (“Adam Smith’s ‘Enduring Particular Result’,” in Hont, and Ignatieff, , eds., Wealth and Virtue, 258–59)Google Scholar.

15 See Ryan, Patrick Hanley, “On the Place of Politics in Commercial Society,” in Paganelli, Maria Pia, Rasmussen, Dennis C., and Smith, Craig, eds., Adam Smith and Rousseau: Ethics, Politics, Economics (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2018), 26–27Google Scholar.

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17 Francis, Hutcheson, A System of Moral Philosophy (London: A. Millar and T. Longman, 1755), vol. ii, pp. 214–15Google Scholar.

18 Smith, Wealth of Nations, 709.

19 All quotations in this paragraph are from Smith, Wealth of Nations, 715.

20 Smith, Wealth of Nations, 716.

21 Ibid., 710.

22 Adam, Smith, Lectures on Jurisprudence, ed. Meek, R. L., Raphael, D. D., and Stein, P. G. (Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund, 1982), 208.Google Scholar

23 Smith, Lectures on Jurisprudence, 338.

24 Smith, Wealth of Nations, 91.

25 Ibid., 96.

26 For an argument that Smith envisages an end to “steep” inequality, see Deborah, Boucoyannis, “The Equalising Hand: Why Adam Smith Thought the Market Should Produce Wealth Without Steep Inequality,” Perspectives on Politics 11 (2013): 1051–70Google Scholar. Boucoyannis frames her argument in purely economic terms, without appeal to the principles of Smith’s moral philosophy. But the argument relies on the full realization of Smith’s system of natural liberty, and I think it most unlikely that Smith himself imagined that that was possible in the world as it actually is. For Smithian reasons in favor of pessimism about the real-world capacity of commerce to produce liberty for all, see Jean, Dellemotte and Benoît, Walraevens, “Adam Smith and the Subordination of Wage-Earners in Commercial Society,” European Journal of the History of Economic Thought 22 (2015): 692–727Google Scholar.

27 Smith, Wealth of Nations, 784.

28 Ibid., 785.

29 Ibid., 266.

30 Ibid., 788.

31 Winch, Adam Smith’s Politics, 120.

32 Dugald, Stewart, “Account of the Life and Writings of Adam Smith, LL.D.”, in Adam, Smith, Essays on Philosophical Subjects, ed. Wightman, W. P. D. (Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund, 1982), 313Google Scholar.

33 Himmelfarb, The Idea of Poverty, 60.

34 Robertson, “Scottish Political Economy beyond the Civic Tradition,” 464–65.

35 Smith, Lectures on Jurisprudence, 319, 322.

36 Duncan, Forbes, “‘Scientific’ Whiggism: Adam Smith and John Millar,” Cambridge Journal 7 (1954): 643–70Google Scholar; “Sceptical Whiggism, Commerce, and Liberty,” in Skinner and Forbes, ed., Essays on Adam Smith, 179–201.

37 Smith, Lectures on Jurisprudence, 402.

38 David, Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, ed. Selby-Bigge, L. A., rev. Nidditch, P. H. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978), 553.Google Scholar

39 David, Hume, Essays Moral, Political, and Literary, ed. Millar, Eugene F. rev. ed. (Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund, 1987), 33Google Scholar.

40 Hume, Essays, 34.

41 Smith, Lectures on Jurisprudence, 318.

42 Ibid.

43 Ibid., 320.

44 Smith, Wealth of Nations, 710.

45 Ibid., 714.

46 Ibid., 712.

47 Smith, Lectures on Jurisprudence, 322.

48 Ibid., 401.

49 Here Smith draws heavily on Hume: see A Treatise of Human Nature, II.ii.v (“Of Our Esteem for the Rich and Powerful”).

50 Adam, Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, ed. Raphael, D. D. and Macfie, A. L. (Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund, 1984), 51–52Google Scholar.

51 Ibid., 52.

52 Ibid., 52, 53.

53 Smith, Wealth of Nations, 330–31.

54 Smith, Theory of Moral Sentiments, 53.

55 Ibid.

56 See, Smith, Lectures on Jurisprudence, 325, 327–30Google Scholar, 436—where Smith draws on Gilbert Burnet’s History of His Own Time, not Hume’s History of England.

57 Smith, Theory of Moral Sentiments, 89.

58 Smith, Lectures on Jurisprudence, 322.

59 Istvan, Hont, “Adam Smith’s History of Law and Government,” in Political Judgement: Essays for John Dunn, ed. Bourke, Richard and Geuss, Raymond (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 151Google Scholar.

60 Smith, Theory of Moral Sentiments, 61–62.

61 Ibid., 62.

62 Ibid., 58.

63 Ibid., 60.

64 Which is not, say, pace Hont, that it is a work in the Epicurean tradition. See Istvan, Hont, Politics in Commercial Society: Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Adam Smith, ed. Kapossy, Béla and Sonenscher, Michael (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015)Google Scholar, chap. 2 (see e.g. 32: “The Theory of Moral Sentiments . . . was a treatise in enhanced Hobbism and Epicureanism”). For criticism of Hont, see Hanley, “On the Place of Politics in Commercial Society”; and also James A. Harris, “Review of Hont, Politics in Commercial Society,” Journal of Scottish Philosophy 14 (2016): 151–63.

65 Lisa, Hill, “Adam Smith and Political Theory,” in Hanley, Ryan Patrick, ed., Adam Smith: His Life, Thought, and Legacy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2016), 324Google Scholar. For a very different view, see Ryan, Patrick Hanley, Adam Smith and the Character of Virtue (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009)Google Scholar. I offer some reasons to be skeptical of Hanley’s reading of Smith in a review of his book in The Adam Smith Review 7 (2014): 293–98.

66 Smith, Theory of Moral Sentiments, 61.

67 Hont, Politics in Commercial Society, 39.

68 Smith, Theory of Moral Sentiments, 179.

69 Ibid., 181.

70 Ibid., 183.

71 Though it may well have costs for individuals who do not, in the end, find happiness in the pursuit of wealth and greatness.

72 Smith, Theory of Moral Sentiments, 183.

73 Smith’s only surviving comment on Wilkes dates from early on in the saga, just after the publication of number 45 of The North Briton and its burning by the public hangman. “The ridiculous affair of Wilkes,” he wrote to Hume in December 1763, “seems at present to be the principal object that occupies the attention of the King, the Parliament, and the People”: The Correspondence of Adam Smith, ed. E. C. Mossner and I. S. Ross (Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund, 1987), 414.

74 See Harris, James A., Hume: An Intellectual Biography (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 426–28CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

75 Quoted in Skjönsberg, Max, “Adam Ferguson on Partisanship, Party Conflict, and Popular Participation,” Modern Intellectual History 16 (2019): 1–28CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 20. For the larger case for seeing Ferguson not as a nostalgic republican but rather as an essentially Smithian political philosopher, see Craig, Smith, Adam Ferguson and the Idea of Civil Society: Moral Science in the Scottish Enlightenment (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2019)Google Scholar.

76 According to Winch (Adam Smith’s Politics, 102), Smith shared Hume’s highly critical attitude toward extra-parliamentary pressure on the legislature. It needs to be acknowledged, however, that after his death in 1790, and in the wake of the French Revolution, Smith acquired the reputation of a dangerous radical: see Emma, Rothschild, Economic Sentiments: Adam Smith, Condorcet, and the Enlightenment (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), 52–64Google Scholar. I think this tells us more about the political atmosphere of the early 1790s than about Smith himself.

77 See Forbes, “Scientific Whiggism.”

78 John, Millar, An Historical View of the English Government, ed. Smith, Mark Salber Phillips and Dale R. (Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund, 2006), 796Google Scholar.

79 Ibid., 804–5.

80 Ibid., 807.

81 Stewart, “Account of the Life and Writings of Adam Smith,” 311.

82 Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, 232.

83 Adam, Smith, Correspondence, ed. Mossner, E. C. and Ross, I. S. (Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund, 1987), 251Google Scholar.

84 As Nicholas Phillipson puts it, Smith’s message was that “[i]n a country whose politics and governance was in the hands of the landed and mercantile classes, it was the job of philosophers, who understood the principles of political economy, to safeguard the public interest by educating their masters”: Phillipson, Adam Smith: An Enlightened Life (London: Allen Lane, 2010), 220–21.