The Invention of Capitalism: Classical Political Economy and the Secret History of Primitive Accumulation by Perelman Michael & Perelman Classical political economy Michael

Author:Perelman, Michael & Perelman, Classical political economy, Michael [Perelman, Michael]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: ebook, book
Publisher: Duke University Press
Published: 2000-04-12T04:00:00+00:00

If I wanted to shake this tree with my hands I should not be able to do it. But the wind, which we do not see, tortures and bends it in whatever direction it pleases. It is by invisible hands that we are bent and tortured worst…. It is with man as it is with the tree. The more he aspires to height and light, the more strongly do his roots strive earthward, downward, into the dark, the deep—into evil.

Adam Smith’s Socio-Psychological Theories of Harmony

ADAM SMITH’S DISCOVERY OF THE DIVISION OF LABOR

John Maynard Keynes (1938, 330) once remarked: “It is chiefly in the description of Adam Smith’s intellectual progress and in the analysis of influences which went to make the Wealth of Nations that there may be room for something further.” I suspect that Keynes was unaware of how much of an understatement he was making.

The section of Adam Smith’s Lectures on Jurisprudence dealing with the subject of police gives us a most remarkable insight into his struggle to obscure the harsh reality of primitive accumulation, within the context of the theoretical structure of The Wealth of Nations. Smith (1978, 333) began this section by commenting that the state had an obligation to maintain the cheapness of commodities. He then went on to note that in spite of the rarity of some materials, advances in technology could make things much more affordable (ibid., 337). Such progress requires the enforcement of the law, which is necessary for the preservation of “that useful inequality in the fortunes of mankind” (ibid., 338). This unexceptional discussion seems to somehow have aroused Smith’s curiosity about the equity of the law.

Are the poor merely victims of the law? Smith, as a social scientist, observed that laws were required to protect the rich from the poor (ibid., 208). This idea sat poorly with Smith, the ideologue.

Although Smith admitted to his Glasgow students of 1762–1763 that “the labour and time of the poor is in civilized countries sacrificed to the maintaining of the rich in ease and luxury,” he apologized for this situation with the modest claim that the most disadvantaged members of society enjoy a far greater degree of “plenty and opulence” than they would in a “savage state” (ibid., 340, 338). In fact, he asserted, “An ordinary day labourer … has more of the conveniences and luxuries than an Indian [presumably Native American] prince at the head of 1,000 naked savages” (ibid., 339).

Smith here went further than Locke (1698, 314–15), who had merely asserted that the English worker “feeds, lodges and is clad” better than an Indian prince. Smith may well have come to this thought by way of Bernard Mandeville (1723, 26), who wrote that “the very poor Liv’d better than the Rich before.” He then turned to another thought of Mandeville, who had observed that the production of a fine crimson or scarlet cloth requires a multiplicity of trades working together in its manufacture (Mandeville 1723, 356–57). The democratic Smith used the example of a blue coat of a worker rather than a scarlet cloth, but the thought remained unchanged nonetheless.

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