Adam Smith, socialist?

The search for the Historical Adam

All around the internet, in response to the Republican campaign against 'spreading the wealth around', the tubes have been filling up with quotations from Adam Smith.

The scripture for fundamentalist capitalists, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, contains many neglected sayings that deserve to be studied and interpreted by a new Adam Smith Seminar wherein scholars who are steeped in the text and its cultural context would seek to shed new light on the Historical Adam.

Very possibly, some of the original text has been corrupted during its various editions . A preliminary selection of difficult passages makes clear how daunting the task will be, as doctrinal errors may well have crept in, unnoticed.

1. Did the Historical Adam really prefigure the class analysis that showed up later in Karl's Manifesto to the Exploited?

Most notably and possibly inserted much later, under the influence of Karl's Manifesto:

"Civil government, so far as it is instituted for the security of property, is in reality instituted for the defense of the rich against the poor, or of those who have some property against those who have none at all."

And

"All for ourselves, and nothing for other people, seems, in every age of the world, to have been the vile maxim of the masters of mankind."

And

"Every man is rich or poor according to the degree in which he can afford to enjoy the necessaries, conveniencies, and amusements of human life. But after the division of labour has once thoroughly taken place, it is but a very small part of these with which a man's own labour can supply him. The far greater part of them he must derive from the labour of other people, and he must be rich or poor according to the quantity of that labour which he can command, or which he can afford to purchase."

And, from Adam's less substantive work, The Theory of Moral Sentiments:

"This disposition to admire, and almost to worship, the rich and powerful, and to despise, or at least neglect persons of poor and mean conditions, though necessary both to establish and to maintain the distinction of ranks and the order of society, is, at the same time, the great and most universal cause of the corruption of our moral sentiments."

And, going back to the Wealth of Nations inquiry:

"It is not uncommon... in the Highlands of Scotland for a mother who has borne twenty children not to have two alive... In some places one half the children born die before they are four years of age; in many places before they are seven; and in almost all places before they are nine or ten. This great mortality, however, will every where be found chiefly among the children of the common people, who cannot afford to tend them with the same care as those of better station."

And, in what appears to be an anti-imperialist fling with what later would be incorporated into so-called "Liberation Theology":

"There is not a negro from the coast of Africa who does not, in this respect, possess a degree of magnanimity which the soul of his sordid master is too often scarce capable of conceiving. Fortune never exerted more cruelly her empire over mankind, than when she subjected those nations of heroes to the refuse of the jails of Europe, to wretches who possess the virtues neither of the countries which they come from, nor of those which they go to, and whose levity, brutality, and baseness, so justly expose them to the contempt of the vanquished."

2. Did the Historical Adam actually see a danger to the common good that comes from the exclusive and unfettered pursuit of individual self-interest?

"People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices. It is impossible indeed to prevent such meetings, by any law which either could be executed, or would be consistent with liberty and justice. But though the law cannot hinder people of the same trade from sometimes assembling together, it ought to do nothing to facilitate such assemblies; much less to render them necessary."

And

"A monopoly granted either to an individual or to a trading company has the same effect as a secret in trade or manufactures. The monopolists, by keeping the market constantly understocked, by never fully supplying the effectual demand, sell their commodities much above the natural price, and raise their emoluments, whether they consist in wages or profit, greatly above their natural rate."

3. Did the Historical Adam see a need for interfering with the natural order of creation by having governments intervene on behalf of those who lack the competitive entrepreneurial spirit?

"The man whose whole life is spent in performing a few simple operations, of which the effects are perhaps always the same, or very nearly the same, has no occasion to exert his understanding or to exercise his invention in finding out expedients for removing difficulties which never occur. He naturally loses, therefore, the habit of such exertion, and generally becomes as stupid and ignorant as it is possible for a human creature to become. The torpor of his mind renders him not only incapable of relishing or bearing a part in any rational conversation, but of conceiving any generous, noble, or tender sentiment, and consequently of forming any just judgment concerning many even of the ordinary duties of private life... But in every improved and civilized society this is the state into which the labouring poor, that is, the great body of the people, must necessarily fall, unless government takes some pains to prevent it."

And

"What improves the circumstances of the greater part can never be regarded as an inconvenience to the whole. No society can be flourishing and happy if the greater part of the members are poor and miserable."

4. Did the Historical Adam actually advocate the redistribution of wealth through a soak-the-rich tax scheme?

"The subjects of every state ought to contribute towards the support of the government, as nearly as possible, in proportion to their respective abilities; that is, in proportion to the revenue which they respectively enjoy under the protection of the state. The expense of government to the individuals of a great nation is like the expense of management to the joint tenants of a great estate, who are all obliged to contribute in proportion to their respective interests in the estate. In the observation or neglect of this maxim consists what is called the equality or inequality of taxation."

And -- in a possibly later accretion to the original text that attempts to point the interpretation of that passage in the direction of unequal taxation, making it more palatable by the sly use of the phrase "not very unreasonable":

"The necessaries of life occasion the great expense of the poor. They find it difficult to get food, and the greater part of their little revenue is spent in getting it. The luxuries and vanities of life occasion the principal expense of the rich, and a magnificent house embellishes and sets off to the best advantage all the other luxuries and vanities which they possess. A tax upon house-rents, therefore, would in general fall heaviest upon the rich; and in this sort of inequality there would not, perhaps, be anything very unreasonable. It is not very unreasonable that the rich should contribute to the public expense, not only in proportion to their revenue, but something more than in that proportion."

5. Did the Historical Adam accept the interference of irrational moral sentiments with the economic rationality of the mechanisms of the free market?

"How selfish soever man may be supposed, there are evidently some principles in his nature, which interest him in the fortune of others, and render their happiness necessary to him, though he derives nothing from it except the pleasure of seeing it."

And, in a passage that I have not as yet located:

The Historical Adam is said to have argued in favor of free trade by assuming that it would never harm domestic industry because of the natural inclination of the owners of capital to prefer their own domestic industries over foreign industries, even at the cost of earning lower profits. Such moral sentiments, it is claimed that he believed, are good. They help make markets work, in another manifestation of the Hidden Hand, perhaps.

If Greed is Good, this kind of soppy sentimentality is sadly out of place.

The next question suggests itself: Jesus - a socialistic redistributionist?