One thing the historical record makes abundantly clear is that Adam Smith and his laissez-faire buddies were a bunch of closet-case statists who needed brutal government policies to whip the English peasantry into a good capitalistic workforce willing to accept wage slavery.Yasha Levine's detailed review of historian Michael Perelman's The Invention of Capitalism.
One thing the historical record makes abundantly clear is that Adam Smith and his laissez-faire buddies were a bunch of closet-case statists who needed brutal government policies to whip the English peasantry into a good capitalistic workforce willing to accept wage slavery.Actually, from what heard I've Adam smith wasn't a laissez-faire capitalist at all. He thought government regulation was a good idea. On the other hand, I heard that in an interview on The Daily Show with a conservative pundit who said he assumed Adam Smith was a big fan of Ayn Rand style laissez-fare capitalism, then he read his actual books and realized he totally wasn't. Of course, it's possible he was totally wrong, I don't know.
Adam Smith was a terrible person. As evidence, here are some quotes by people who are not Adam SmithNot that compelling. The quote from Rev. Joseph Townsend seems legit though.
In other words, poverty is good for the individual because it motivates the individual to become wealthy. Calquhoun is flatly not saying 'poverty is awesome because poor people exist to make us rich bastards wealthy!' He is deluded, but he is not evil; at least not in that way. His peculiar delusion is that the individual will not work to become wealthy unless that individual starts out poor.I disagree. To me, it seems like he's saying that poverty allows for the creation of wealth through labor. It looks to me that he is saying exactly what you claim he's not.
“Poverty is that state and condition in society where the individual has no surplus labour in store, or, in other words, no property or means of subsistence but what is derived from the constant exercise of industry in the various occupations of life. Poverty is therefore a most necessary and indispensable ingredient in society, without which nations and communities could not exist in a state of civilization. It is the lot of man. It is the source of wealth, since without poverty, there could be no labour; there could be no riches, no refinement, no comfort, and no benefit to those who may be possessed of wealth.”I he's using the following logical premises:
Drawing upon personal diaries, letters written to colleagues and newspapers, and lectures delivered to college classes, i.e., texts that are usually ignored by contemporary political economists, Perelman shows that all of the classical political economists -- yes, even Adam Smith -- believed in, lobbied for and directly benefited from English or French primitive accumulation. Drawing upon these same texts, Perelman is also able to suggest why Adam Smith worked so hard to avoid the subject in The Wealth of Nations. The history of primitive accumulation, especially in Ireland and Scotland in the 17th and 18th centuries, proved that Smith was right when he told his students: "Laws and government may be considered in every case as a combination of the rich to oppress the poor, and preserve to themselves the inequality of the goods which would otherwise be soon destroyed by the attacks of the poor, who if not hindered by the government would soon reduce the others to an equality with themselves by open violence" (emphasis added). It just wouldn't do to discuss or even openly acknowledge the reality of primitive accumulation and the oppression of the poor by the rich, especially in a book such as The Wealth of Nations, which was written as much to curry favor amongst politicians, potential benefactors and Smith's peers, as it was to set forth a theory or methodology of modern economics. And so, Smith carefully followed the advice he himself had given his students ten years before The Wealth of Nations was published: if we desire to sway the opinion of sensitive or unsympathetic readers, "we are not to shock them by affirming what we are satisfied is [in fact] disagreeable, but are to conceal our design and beginning at a distance, bring them on to the main point and having gained the more remote ones we get the nearer ones of consequence."posted by titus-g at 2:16 AM on April 8, 2012 [7 favorites]
Smith thus managed to avoid the fate of his fellow Scot, Sir James Steuart, who was imprudent enough to be completely honest. Ten years before Smith's book came out, Steuart published An Inquiry into the Principles of Political Economy, which was not, as Perelman says, based "on the airy fiction of a [voluntary] social contract." It was instead based upon the frank recognition that ancient slave societies such as Sparta offered, in Steuart's own words, "the perfect plan of [modern] political economy." Because they forced people (the poor and the conquered) to produce for others as well as for themselves, slave societies suppressed what Steuart called "idleness" and "the laziness of the people," and thereby allowed the masters and rulers to eat and live luxuriously without doing any work of their own. Thus, Steuart argued, slave societies were able to become much wealthier, stronger and longer-lasting than free societies, in which the poor and the conquered are allowed to produce only as much food as they themselves need. But Steuart thought Sparta to be a "violent" and barbaric republic because it wasn't Christian: e.g., it allowed people to enslave other people. And so Steuart championed capitalism, a putatively enlightened form of slavery in which "men are [instead] forced to labor because they are slaves to their own wants," in particular, to their need for food. But Steuart wasn't willing to wait for plagues, famines or wars to make the British masses hungry enough to submit to capitalist slavery. It was in fact possible that these catastrophes wouldn't come or wouldn't be severe enough to do the job and in precisely the way desired. And so Sir James advocated that the state should forcibly evict the masses of rural peasants from the land, turn their farms into pastures, and thereby create the hunger, poverty and misery necessary to provide capitalism with sufficient numbers of people willing to submit themselves to wage labor. Though he wasn't the only writer of the time to be completely honest about the brutality of the invention of capitalism, Steuart's book was objected to, taken to task and then completely forgotten about. It struck a nerve, the very one Adam Smith tried to soothe.
This is a great story, this "secret history," but Perelman doesn't tell it very well, or, rather, he doesn't tell it nearly as well as it could have been told. It takes him six chapters (almost 140 pages) to set it up. When he finally gets around to telling the story, he puts Steuart first and Smith second. While this ordering is chronologically accurate, it's weak dramatically, especially since Perelman devotes a single chapter to Steuart and spends three chapters on Smith. If Smith is such a willful idiot, why dwell on him? Why not spend three chapters on Sir James, the one who is unjustly obscure and underappreciated? Furthermore, going from Steuart to Smith points the reader in the wrong direction, i.e., away from reality and towards propaganda. But going from Smith to Steuart points the reader in the right direction, i.e., away from the contemplation of the past and towards activism in the present.
Actually, having now read the other review mentioned, it's worth a link:Interesting. It's still not too damming about Smith, but it certainly makes his peers look bad. It sounds like smith knew what was going on, but didn't want to offend the people who mattered. Interesting.
Possessed of a fortune worth £5000 per year, as Trollope would have said.Pretty sure £5000 was a hell of a lot of money in 1829. £5k in 1806 would be worth $609k today on the basis of the retail price index, $5m on the basis of average earnings and $9.2m on the basis of per capita GDP. (On the basis of this)
The chapters of Part I lay down the theoretical underpinnings of the investigation. I begin by surveying the recent discovery of the significance of Adam Smith's theory of economic development for an understanding of Pomeranz's "Great Divergence." I then reconstruct Smith's theory and compare it with Marx's and Schumpeter's theoriesHis second chapter, 'The Historical Sociology of Adam Smith', sets out inter alia Arrighi's contentions that
of capitalist development. My main contentions in Part I are, first, that Smith was neither an advocate nor a theorist of capitalist development and, second, that his theory of markets as instruments of rule is especially relevant to an understanding of non-capitalist market economies, such as China was prior to its subordinate incorporation in the globalizing European system of states, and might well become again in the twenty-first century under totally different domestic and world-historical conditions.
Three myths in particular surround his legacy: that he was a theorist and advocate of "self-regulating" markets; that he was a theorist and advocate of capitalism as an engine of "endless" economic expansion; and that he was a theorist and advocate of the kind of division of labor that occurred in the pin factory described in the first chapter of The Wealth of Nations. In reality, he was none of the above.I'll not do a disservice to the arguments by giving my half-baked version here, but would heartily recommend it.
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This is not a review, it is simply a bunch of quotes trying to shock the squares (or preach to the choir).
Remember, mention Adam Smith a lot in your diatribe! People know who he is, so it sounds like you know your shit. Don't bother quoting him though. Don't read any Wealth of Nations easier, everyone knows it's just a fairy tale told to justify capitalism, maaaaan.
posted by Snyder at 4:43 PM on April 7, 2012 [7 favorites]