The Making of the Economy by Düppe Till

Author:Düppe, Till
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780739169544
Publisher: Lexington Books, a division of Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc.

Accordingly, there could be an Adam Smith only thanks to countless pamphlets that had prepared the ground for his economic abstractions. Notably, Smith distrusted the character of merchants, in particular those who, like Thomas Mun, pretended to act in favor of the common interest. “I have never known much good done by those who affected to trade for the public good,” Smith writes after his mention of the invisible hand (1976a: 456). What made Smith the first of the moderns (rather than an early modern) is that he neither had to defend himself against the suspicion of being guided by his self-interest (like all merchants), nor did he fall back into the clergy’s moral lament. Beyond the clergy and the merchants, there was the scholar. Modern times had moved on.

As a consequence, however, the character of merchants became stigmatized. Since Smith, one can allow for and presume merchants to be self-interested. This would constitute the central trope of the invisible hand in nineteenth-century political economy. Everybody who had presumed so before immediately had to face doubts about his own moral integrity. Political economists, however, did not have to feel personally addressed. Since the time of Smith, economists can see themselves as scholarly outside judges. “It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own self-interest. . . . Nobody but a beggar chuses to depend chiefly upon the benevolence of his fellow-citizens” (Smith 1976a: 26f.). Such statements only softly echo the intellectual milieu of the seventeenth century, in which those gentlemen appear respectable who argue subtly against the motives of their opponent. Merchants since Smith are admittedly self-interested. They no longer have to pretend to be of good will, because there is a level of reflection where such no longer counts: the economy.

Adam Smith, in order to anticipate the remaining intervention of economists in Western history, was, so to speak, the first John Stuart Mill, the first Alfred Marshall, the first Paul Samuelson, the first Mas-Colell. They all codified the body of economics to such an extent that the problematic context from which their work sprung vanished. Since Smith, economists can make claims without the threat of accusation of being guided by their own self-interest. Smith was the first step toward an economic science that forgets its history in an eloquent summary. He was the first who made it futile to read what preceded him—which later on, when his invisible hand was axiomatized during the 1950s, included Adam Smith too.

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