Global Justice and Social Conflict: The Foundations of Liberal Order and International Law by Tarik Kochi

Author:Tarik Kochi [Kochi, Tarik]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780367406813
Google: 3B3DxgEACAAJ
Goodreads: 51226794
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2019-10-08T00:00:00+00:00

Laws and government may be considered in this and indeed in every case as a combination of the rich to oppress the poor, and preserve to themselves the inequality of 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. The government and laws hinder the poor from ever acquiring the wealth by violence which they would otherwise exert on the rich; they tell them they must either continue poor or acquire wealth in the same manner as they have done.97

For Smith the different forms of inequality historically emerge within herding, under agriculture, within slave-owning societies, and then via the operation of wage labour within commercial societies. All of these cases stand in sharp contrast to the relative degree of equality portrayed in hunter-gather societies at a point where private property was non-existent or minimal, and in contrast also to the degree of equality projected onto the idea of citizenship within ancient republics (both cases animating Rousseau’s moral objections to inequality). In a sense, Smith’s historical reconstruction of property relations frames law, government and private property as both a ‘wrong’ and as ‘right’. Property and government emerge historically through the wrong of force, violence and seizure, but then are reconceived in each historical moment by the holders of property as the legitimate form of juridical and political relations.

97 Ibid., p. 208. See also: Smith, The Wealth of Nations, Books IV–V, p. 302.

98 Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, ed. Knud Haakonssen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007). At p. 309, Smith argues:

Concern for our happiness recommends to us the virtue of prudence: concern for that of other people, the virtues of justice and beneficence; of which, the one restrains us from hurting, the other prompts us to promote happiness. Independent of any regard either to what are, or to what ought to be, or to what upon a certain condition would be, the sentiments of other people, the first of those three virtues is originally recommended to us by our selfish, the other two by our benevolent actions. Regard to the sentiments of other people, however, comes afterwards to enforce and to direct the practice of all those virtues; and no man during, either the whole course of his life, or that of any considerable part of it, ever trod steadily and uniformly in the paths of prudence, of justice, or of proper beneficence, whose conduct was not directed by a regard to the sentiments of the supposed impartial spectator, of the great inmate of the breast, the great judge and arbiter of conduct.

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