Private Government by Anderson Elizabeth;

Author:Anderson, Elizabeth;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2017-07-03T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter 4

Market Rationalization

David Bromwich

Elizabeth Anderson’s provocative discussion of the relationship between theories of political liberalism and market society asks a large question and has the probity to leave the answer open. The question concerns the party of equality that Europeans call the left and Americans think of roughly as the liberal side. How could this party have had so optimistic a start around 1640—when it identified the market with individual initiative, the energy of personal enterprise, a version of the career open to talents—yet by the end of the nineteenth century have come to view the market as an arrangement that suppresses equality and widens the distance between the poorest and the richest members of society?

Throughout her lectures, Anderson argues (in effect) that political theory should not stop at the door of the workplace. Supposing we share that belief, we still have to ask what prevented the new economic doctrine of the eighteenth century and the liberal political theory of the nineteenth from leading finally to acceptance of a democratic doctrine of self-government among men and women at work. Some reasons for the failure of the transition from the free market to full democracy may be found in the ideally abridged “freedom” that was first applied as a predicate to the marketplace alone. It is not clear how far it was ever conceived for adaptation to modern politics.

“What happened,” Anderson asks, “between Smith and Marx to reverse the egalitarian assessment of market society?” She thinks it natural to be puzzled by the reversal, because “Smith, no less than Marx, reviled selfishness.” That is true, but it tells us very little. One may denounce selfishness without embracing equality. Anyone who is not an apologist for sheer privilege and inherited wealth must deplore selfishness in order to gain a hearing. The parallel between Smith and Marx seems a lot weaker if we put aside “selfishness” and ask instead what Smith meant by “self-interest”: an idea he made central to the economic morale and the moralized economics of several generations following his own. Even allowing for the correctives The Wealth of Nations prescribes against useless wealth and massive disparities of power, a reader of Smith can hardly avoid the conclusion that his idea of self-interest gives a pretext and an agreeable complexion to selfishness. Self-interest, as he interprets it, operates for the long-term good of society, and does so almost independent of the will of the interested party. It thereby circumvents less mechanistic and more volitionally exacting ideas of the common good. Under a system pervaded by self-interest, society is improved without anyone having to think about it. The progress will continue so long as we shun the wasteful deployment of middlemen and reckless ventures to engross private fortunes through monopoly.

Why does the machine work so well? Because, says Smith, we inhabit a world of goods—a world whose natural emanation and expression is an infinity of possible exchanges. We live in a world of goods that wants to be explored. It is as

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