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Guest Articles on Adam Smith and his Works
An occasional column of articles worth reading by correspondents in the broad field of re-establishing Smith's Lost Legacy The first of which I hope will become a regular series, is from Nicholas Gruen in Australia, "Homo Dialecticus: notes on Adam Smith". It is a draft of a work in progress and not a finished article, therefore, please do not make comments on it in a published format without first contacting Nicholas Gruen: nicholas – AT – gruen.com.au and seeking his permission Nicholas regularly publishes in Australia and among his interests are philosophy in general and Adam Smith in particular. Article received for publication on “Lost Legacy” 14 September 2005.
All articles in this series strictly are the copyright of their authors, who reserve all rights. Publication here does not imply that their contents are agreed to by Lost Legacy and they are made available for a wider distribution for like-minded people in the field of the history of economics.
Homo Dialecticus: notes on Adam SmithBy Nicholas Gruen© Nicholas Gruen, 2005. All Rights Reserved.In a recent ABC Radio National Program a psychologist said this: Looking Out for No.1, that they keep an idea sort of for the invisible hand of the market place that will somehow take your own self interest and turn it into good. That is you know from Adam Smith’s famous theory of moral sentiments. So there’s this notion that if I’m just looking out for myself, for my own individual self interest, that everything will work out well in the end for all concerned. And of course we know that that market, free market ideology has proven to be incorrect, false, completely mistaken.
Here I want to outline what I think is a beautiful symmetry about his two great books, and in a subsequent post (as promised earlier) I’ll go on to try to show how Smith argued that capitalism tended towards civic virtue.
In a way Smith was an apostle of 'self love' but it was a particular kind of self love. If you want to say something simple and yet at the same time profound – go for dialectic. Jesus did this with ‘do unto others what you would have them to unto you’. Not ‘do unto others what they want. Nor 'do unto others what you want’. His simple formula introduces a dialectical richness into the discussion. It’s hard to read Smith’s first major published work, The Theory of Moral Sentiments (TMS) which was more successful in his own time than the Wealth of Nations (WN), without appreciating its dialectical foundations.
The dialectical foundations of The Wealth of Nations however, are routinely overlooked. The dialectical structure of TMS poses a very simple description of humanity.
It is simple in its formulation, but complex in its implications – just like Jesus's little formulation. Smith wanted to build a description of humanity that disposed of the dualism in Christianity between human depravity in this world and divine virtue in the next world. It offered little to help us formulate 'police' (ie policy) and it was in Smith's view psychologically and socially inaccurate.
Smith wanted to resurrect the status of self interest - or as he put
it self love - in human affairs. He didn't think there was much
point in building a theory of human society that simply condemned
the exercise of self-interest. At the same time he sought to build
psychological and sociological richness and subtlety into this
picture. What are the pangs of a mother, when she hears the moanings of her infant that during the agony of disease cannot express what it feels? In her idea of what it suffers, she joins, to its real helplessness, her own consciousness of that helplessness, and her own terrors for the unknown consequences of its disorder and out of all these, forms, for her own sorrow, the most complete image of misery and distress. The infant, however, feels only the uneasiness of the present instant, which can never be great. With regard to the future, it is perfectly secure, and in its thoughtlessness and want of foresight, possesses an antidote against fear and anxiety, the great tormentors of the human breast, from which reason and philosophy will, in vain, attempt to defend it, when it grows up to a man.
· an immature and asocial self which seeks the love - or approbation - of others like the baby does in its mother's arms (not unlike Freud's ego) and · a more mature and social self like Freud's 'id or one's 'conscience''. Smith calls this part of the human personality (the impartial spectator). Human psychology emerges from the actions of the asocial self as it is gradually conditioned by the impartial spectator. Ultimately then, a mature person might continue to want approbation like the child. But as the process of social interaction and internal reflection take their course a mature person understands that that what we really want is deserved approbation.
Here's a nice quote from TMS illustrating how dialectical all this is for Smith: Their approbation necessarily confirms our own self-approbation. Their praise necessarily strengthens our own sense of our own praiseworthiness. In this case, so far is the love of praise-worthiness from being derived altogether from that of praise; that the love of praise seems, at least in a great measure, to be derived from that of praise-worthiness. Of course Smith is not arguing that all adults behave in complete fidelity to this insight, or that there are not adults who retain the infantile fixation on asocial self-love and the asocial desire for others love. There are immature people and what we might call psychopaths whose impartial spectators never emerge. But they are a tiny few. Other people care what other people think of them, and, though they will sometimes stray from the truly prudent conduct (which would involve the pursuit of deserved approbation) they understand that don't get real satisfaction from trying to fool others into having the wrong view of them. Society is thus built on the endless dialectic of interaction between such people of differing degrees of familiarity - and so sympathy with one another - and within each of these people is a dialectic between their rude self-love and their impartial spectator. Smith was the very opposite of a methodological individualist. For it is these interactions that constitute both society and those who inhabit it. Were it possible that a human creature could grow up to manhood in some solitary place, without any communication with his own species, he could no more think of his own character, of the propriety or demerit of his own sentiments and conduct, of the beauty or deformity of his own mind, than of the beauty or deformity of his own face. All these are objects which he cannot easily see, which naturally he does not look at, and with regard to which he is provided with no mirror which can present them to his view. Bring him into society, and he is immediately provided with the mirror which he wanted before. It is placed in the countenance and behaviour of those he lives with, which always mark when they enter into, and when they disapprove of his sentiments and it is here that he first views the propriety and impropriety of his own passions, the beauty and deformity of his own mind. To a man who from his birth was a stranger to society, the objects of his passions, the external bodies which either pleased or hurt him, would occupy his whole attention. The passions themselves, the desires or aversions, the joys or sorrows, which those objects excited, though of all things the most immediately present to him, could scarce ever be the objects of his thoughts. . . .Bring him into society, and all his own passions will immediately become the causes of new passions. He will observe that mankind approve of some of them, and are disgusted by others. He will be elevated in the one case, and cast down in the other his desires and aversions, his joys and sorrows, will now often become the causes of new desires and new aversions, new joys and new sorrows: they will now, therefore, interest him deeply, and often call upon his most attentive consideration. Some readers who don't know Smith might have a bit of an idea from this as what dialectic Smith sees existing in a market, and how that might contribute to civic virtue. But I'll leave that to the next exciting post.
Posted by Nicholas Gruen at September 14, 2005 01:09 AM
Homo Dialecticus: part two - Adam Smith and the dialectic of marketsThe story so far. . . Smith’s 1759 The Theory of Moral Sentiments (TMS) builds a picture of people as inherently dialectical beings. As Montes (2004: 55) puts it “The TMS presupposes sympathy as a principle in human nature that fosters a continuous relationship between spectators and agents, a natural interdependence among social beings.” The dialectic goes on between that part of the personality that represents raw and immature ‘self-love’ (like Freud’s ego) and another aspect of humanity’s social or psychological makeup. Internally within the psyche that aspect is the ‘impartial spectator’, the conscience, the ‘man within the breast’. But this construct is dialectical in itself. It is itself constructed from – as it constructs – social reality. It is the psycho-social bridge between raw self-love and society – the way natural sympathies between people both weak and strong build themselves into social mores and internal expectations of self. Smith’s grand plan was to publish a trilogy of large works. The TMS complete, his next work was on police (ie policy) The Wealth of Nations (WN). There was to be a final one on jurisprudence – but it was never published.
Notes from Smith’s lectures from 1763 make it clear that as was the case with Darwin, who took many of Smith’s ideas into biology, much of what appeared in the great book was in the authors mind for many years before it was finally published.
And as is often the way with such things, certain building blocks of Smith’s thought were more evident in the earlier work, though traces remain to confirm the continuity of thought in WN. There is a chasm in economics between those who focus on the process that occurs within markets and those for whom the market is a ‘black box’ which produces a specified economic outcome given certain inputs. As his later disciple Friedrich Hayek insisted, Smith valued markets as a unique and beneficial process. While most focus has been on Smith’s analysis of the outcomes of this process, careful attention to Smith’s description of the process illustrates important aspects of the way in which Smith conceived of markets as social processes which were – apart from their benign economic outcomes – socially beneficial. TMS preached the virtue of people’s relations with each other being appropriate to the circumstances of their interaction – to being ‘fit and proper’ to the nature of the relationship. As Smith puts it so beautifully, in civilised society man “stands at all times in need of the co-operation and assistance of great multitudes, while his whole life is scarce sufficient to gain the friendship of a few persons.” Markets allow all manner of co-operation to take place between strangers to their immense benefit.
Though Smith is speaking about economic outcomes in the passage just quoted the process by which that outcome is achieved is also significant from the perspective of moral and social betterment. For a start the market relation of strangers to one another is fit and proper, allowing a society to “subsist among different men, as among different merchants, from a sense of its utility, without any mutual love and affection”. Again the process between society and economy is dialectical or mutually reinforcing. Civilisation requires that strangers co-operate and the culture that it develops also facilitates it.
And, though Smith is commonly taken to be the apostle of self-interest, something like the opposite is the case. Smith’s focus is on the dialectic of self-interest in a market and thus on the way in which, in a market, self-interest is constantly conditioned and mediated by the self-interest of others.
Smith builds his theory of the market on a simple dialectic between buyer and seller. (Keep in mind that in the eighteenth century ‘the market’ is represented by the village market as well as anything else. It is an institution which is much more social and on a more personal scale than it has become in our own day where brand names and large private collective entities (firms) and their bureaucracies mediate a great deal of the market’s work.)
In WN human society evolves from the innate tendency of humans to ‘truck, barter and exchange’. But intriguingly, Smith traces this tendency back to something more fundamental – people’s natural sociability and indeed their desire to persuade and communicate. “If we should enquire into the principle in the human mind on which this disposition to trucking is founded, it is clearly the natural inclination every one has to persuade.”
Here’s Smith’s resulting ‘oratorical’ theory of negotiation: The offering of a shilling, which to us appears to have so plain and simple a meaning, is in reality offering an argument to persuade someone to do so and so as it is for his interest....And in this manner every one is practicing oratory on others thro the whole of his life." In this context the market is not just an economic mechanism producing an efficient outcome. It transforms self-interest – the seller’s self-love being conditioned by the buyer’s self-love and visa versa. Many continually standing in need of the assistance of others, must fall upon some means to procure their help. This he does not merely by coaxing and courting; he does not expect it unless he can turn it to your advantage or make it appear to be so. Mere self-love is not sufficient for it, till he applies it in some way to your self-love. A bargain does this in the easiest manner. When you apply to a brewer or butcher for beer of for beef you do not explain to him how much you stand in need of these, but how much it would be in [his] interest to allow you to have them for a certain price. And so it is that, driven by regard to their own interests, participants in a market will passionately attend to each others’ interest. Whole divisions of large companies attend to the task of researching what their customers want and how it can be better delivered to them. Customer service becomes a buzz-word, though of course businesses are more interested in what customers really want as demonstrated by their choices in the market place. And the little discount mortgage broker I run strains at the bit to see how it can do that little bit more to serve customers, and build associations with like minded businesses.
Smith is at some pains to insist on how this is both essentially human, and essentially civilised. It is not the indignity “merely coaxing and courting”. It is not the dog begging his master – or indeed for that matter the beggar. (Still in a typical touch Smith observes that, once the beggar has been given something, he’s off to market where he’ll attend to his needs in a way which is at once more direct and more dignified. With the money which one man gives him he purchases food. The old clothes which another bestows upon him he exchanges for other clothes which suit him better, or for lodging, or for food, or for money, with which he can buy either food, clothes, or lodging, as he has occasion. When I think of Smith’s picture of markets I think of E.M. Forster’s great injunction about life – “only connect!”. The participants in a market are connecting. They’re connecting with one another in a way which is not as close but, to use Smith’s expression, is every bit as “fit and proper” to its circumstance as the passionate love of a mother for her child. Here is Smith on how the impartial spectator moderates our self-love in a social context. Nature . . has not . . . abandoned us entirely to the delusions of self–love. Our continual observations upon the conduct of others, insensibly lead us to form to ourselves certain general rules concerning what is fit and proper either to be done or to be avoided. If that’s Smith’s psychology and sociology, his economics is founded on the same idea of a dialectic which tames, guides and ultimately transforms rude self-love. Within our minds and in social situations our self-love is conditioned by the impartial spectator. Within a market the self-love of its participants is conditioned by immediate (and not so immediate) engagement with the self-love of others.
Engagement between people who are free but who otherwise owe each other nothing is thus the social and moral foundation of markets. And this explains Smith’s hostility to Monopoly the ‘corporation spirit’ and the general tendency of merchants to conspire against the public interest. For just as those who fail to psychologically mature sufficiently to properly develop their ‘impartial spectator’ in opposition to their raw self-love, so the striving for monopoly is not just an economic conspiracy against the public. Socially it is inappropriate – not fitting and proper. Psychologically or morally it is an act of rebellion and pride against the great conditioner of self-love – the self-love of the other in a free bargain.
We can use Smith’s language and his ideas to make a more contemporary point about regulation. We can use our oratory on a government official or on the Parliament. We don’t need to be enemies of government or even in favour of small government to appreciate that there is no organic balancing and weighing of relative interests within hierarchical decision making bodies. There is an imbalance of power. In a market, even if their bargaining power is not entirely equal, two parties to a deal must both seek each other’s satisfaction to some extent. With monopoly and within government one side is reduced to the indignity of supplication, to the coaxing and cajoling of the beggar and the animal to its master.
Here endeth this post, but you might be getting a picture of how the masses of people connecting in a market might not just lead to economic efficiency but also in our fallen world to some small improvement in the condition of humanity. But that will be revealed in the next exciting episode. . .
Homo Dialecticus: part three: Why Adam Smith thinks markets are conducive to virtue
The story so far – in which some foreshadowing of what’s to come is snuck in.
Smith’s great work in sociology and psychology, “The Theory of Moral Sentiments” (TMS) shares a deep logical symmetry with his (now) more famous work, “The Wealth of Nations” (WN). That symmetry can be explained in varying degrees of detail, but at it’s simplest, Smith’s bottom line in both works is this:
For humanity to prosper – whether socially, psychologically or economically – the power of self-love must be constrained by equally powerful forces.
In TMS the force that tames self-love is ‘sympathy’. Note however that in Smith’s hands sympathy is not ‘benevolence’. It is the need to see ourselves not just as a solitary psychological atom with feelings completely internal to ourselves but rather as a being within a social context. ‘Sympathy’ can act as a civilising counterweight to the power of self-love because, unlike benevolence, which is typically weak, sympathy is an elemental and existential craving in our makeup. It is the ‘I’ that must feel part of a ‘we’ – and indeed the ‘I’ that cannot exist except as part of a ‘we’.
It is only within society – for instance amongst family, friends, acquaintances or strangers – that the thirst for the sympathy of others (not to mention their thirst for our sympathy) can be assuaged. This in turn guides people’s psychological development and socialisation as they internalise what others might think of them. The more fully they develop the stronger becomes their conscience – an ‘impartial spectator’ which passes judgement on them. Thus people and societies grow together. The filaments of culture that stretches out through a society grow from our cravings for each other’s sympathy just as a cattle or sheep path grows from the accumulating effect of each animal’s footfalls.
The same communicative urges underlie the ubiquitous tendency for humans to truck, barter and exchange and it is this which dominates in the economic sphere. Again Smith is more interested in the way in which self interest is ‘constrained’ – in this case by others’ self interest – than he is in there being any merit – utilitarian or otherwise – in self-interest in itself. And not surprisingly this is the foundation of Smith’s case for his system of ‘natural liberty’ and his argument that commerce leads to human betterment both materially and morally.
Why does Smith think that markets are conducive to moral improvement or virtue – or rather that they each grow together?
Realise first that Smith is not a Pollyanna. He does not expect his ‘system of natural liberty’ to remake human nature. Instead, he understands human progress to happen slowly as indeed his policy views are shot throughout with gradualism. And his ultimate aspirations are modest and avowedly anti-utopian. Further, the coming of commerce and ‘opulence’ is not ‘all good’ as we say these days.
Nevertheless commerce requires and also rewards probity and good reputation and the sociability of commerce brings these about. Further commerce both benefits from as it rewards parsimony and frugality for, in Smith’s world investment – which cannot go ahead without these virtues – is the precondition of economic growth. Thus commerce and the ‘impartial spectator’ coalesce to nurture these virtues (which are some of the virtues of self-command) within commercial society.
Smith’s picture is not a ‘white wash’. In ‘softening’ social manners commerce does great good, but it can also undermine the martial spirit which can render a society vulnerable and effete. Commerce builds the arts and human inventiveness but the deployment of these skills is often at the behest of the greed and vanity of the wealthy and powerful. And Smith’s portrait of the dehumanising conditions within a factory was later much admired by Marx and Engels. Smith hoped that public education would improve things.
Also, Smith gives the strong impression of being dismayed by the lot of the poor and is almost invariably highly sympathetic to them. His policy preferences are favourable to them – most importantly the liberation of ‘apprentices’, opposing the ‘corporation spirit’ of monopoly amongst merchants, public education and taxation which is progressive (modestly by our standards).
But beyond these he is wary of disrupting England’s hybrid constitution which in contemporary opinion balanced democracy, monarchy and aristocracy and suspects that inequality and the awe of the poor for the rich and powerful, though corrupting to their sentiments, may be conducive to the public peace. More generally where he is dismayed by what he sees before him he frequently argues that it was worse in other societies. Thus, he argues, “[t]he authority of riches, however, though great in every age of society, is, perhaps, greatest in the rudest ages of society, which admits of any considerable inequality of fortune.”
But ‘natural liberty’ in a commercial society makes its contribution to human happiness and civic virtue in a more powerful and ‘structural’ way. It diffuses economic power and in so doing creates the circumstances for greater ‘fair dealing’ between people. For, echoing the ideas presented in the previous part of this essay, their greater security sets the stage for each to deal with each other as is fit and proper.
As he puts it when discussing abuse of power, “I am afraid, the nature of human affairs can scarce admit of a remedy.” Yet, Smith goes on “but the mean rapacity, the monopolizing spirit, of merchants and manufacturers, who neither are, nor ought to be, the rulers of mankind, though it cannot, perhaps, be corrected, may very easily be prevented from disturbing the tranquillity of anybody but themselves.”
Thus the evolution of what we now call capitalism is conjoint with a process of diffusion of power. Smith describes the transition from earlier social and economic structures in Europe with his typical irony, power, insight and feeling when he describes how the Lords of Europe “sold their birthright, not like Esau for a mess of pottage”. How?
I reproduce the (edited) text below because it’s a terrific read, but in short, the great proprietors of Europe of days gone by spent their surplus wealth on payments and ‘hospitality’ to their inferiors who, because they were entirely beholden to them, were completely subservient to the proprietors.
Along comes manufactures and the proprietors have a new vent for their avarice and status seeking – baubles. Their purchase of these baubles now supports many artisans (and does so to the ends of wherever trade routes reach). And for each of these artisans the great proprietor is but one of many customers. They are thus far more secure and less subservient. The Great proprietors get greedier and demand higher rents from their tenants who can only pay them if the Landlords surrender them sufficient tenure to invest and improve the land – which is not something the landlords have been minded to do in the past.
And so:
“A revolution of the greatest importance to the public happiness, was in this manner brought about by two different orders of people, who had not the least intention to serve the public. To gratify the most childish vanity was the sole motive of the great proprietors. The merchants and artificers, much less ridiculous, acted merely from a view to their own interest, and in pursuit of their own pedlar principle of turning a penny wherever a penny was to be got. Neither of them had either knowledge or foresight of that great revolution which the folly of the one, and the industry of the other, was gradually bringing about.
It was thus, that, through the greater part of Europe, the commerce and manufactures of cities, instead of being the effect, have been the cause and occasion of the improvement and cultivation of the country.”
The parties are not brought directly to stark other worldly virtues of benevolence but rather engaged in a process in which certain virtues were nurtured and inequalities of wealth and power are gradually undermined. Thus we get a story in which human freedom and autonomy grow together with sociability and economic productivity. The tenant becomes more productive by acquiring greater autonomy and using it with intelligence and virtue. Smith likewise argued that when slaves or other workers were given better pay and greater freedom to better themselves, they would be more productive and that both master and worker would benefit – but that is a (slightly) different story.
Here follows the promised extract: ____________________________________________________________”C]ommerce and manufactures gradually introduced order and good government, and with them the liberty and security of individuals, among the inhabitants of the country, who had before lived almost in a continual state of war with their neighbours, and of servile dependency upon their superiors. This, though it has been the least observed, is by far the most important of all their effects. . . .
If [the] surplus produce [of a great proprietor] is sufficient to maintain a hundred or a thousand men, he can make use of it in no other way than by maintaining a hundred or a thousand men. He is at all times, therefore, surrounded with a multitude of retainers and dependants, who, having no equivalent to give in return for their maintenance, but being fed entirely by his bounty, must obey him, for the same reason that soldiers must obey the prince who pays them.
Before the extension of commerce and manufactures in Europe, the hospitality of the rich and the great, from the sovereign down to the smallest baron, exceeded every thing which, in the present times, we can easily form a notion of. . . . But what all the violence of the feudal institutions could never have effected, the silent and insensible operation of foreign commerce and manufactures gradually brought about. These gradually furnished the great proprietors with something for which they could exchange the whole surplus produce of their lands, and which they could consume themselves. without sharing it either with tenants or retainers. All for ourselves, and nothing for other people, seems, in every age of the world, to have been the vile maxim of the masters of mankind. As soon, therefore, as they could find a method of consuming the whole value of their rents themselves, they had no disposition to share them with any other persons. For a pair of diamond buckles, perhaps, or for something as frivolous and useless, they exchanged the maintenance, or, what is the same thing, the price of the maintenance of 1000 men for a year, and with it the whole weight and authority which it could give them. The buckles, however, were to be all their own, and no other human creature was to have any share of them; whereas, in the more ancient method of expense, they must have shared with at least 1000 people. With the judges that were to determine the preference, this difference was perfectly decisive; and thus, for the gratification of the most childish, the meanest, and the most sordid of all vanities they gradually bartered their whole power and authority. . . .
When the great proprietors of land spend their rents in maintaining their tenants and retainers, each of them maintains entirely all his own tenants and all his own retainers. But when they spend them in maintaining tradesmen and artificers, they may, all of them taken together, perhaps maintain as great, or, on account of the waste which attends rustic hospitality, a greater number of people than before. Each of them, however, taken singly, contributes often but a very small share to the maintenance of any individual of this greater number. Each tradesman or artificer derives his subsistence from the employment, not of one, but of a hundred or a thousand different customers. Though in some measure obliged to them all, therefore, he is not absolutely dependent upon any one of them.
The personal expense of the great proprietors having in this manner gradually increased, it was impossible that the number of their retainers should not as gradually diminish, till they were at last dismissed altogether. The same cause gradually led them to dismiss the unnecessary part of their tenants. Farms were enlarged, and the occupiers of land, notwithstanding the complaints of depopulation, reduced to the number necessary for cultivating it, according to the imperfect state of cultivation and improvement in those times. By the removal of the unnecessary mouths, and by exacting from the farmer the full value of the farm, a greater surplus, or, what is the same thing, the price of a greater surplus, was obtained for the proprietor, which the merchants and manufacturers soon furnished him with a method of spending upon his own person, in the same manner as he had done the rest. The cause continuing to operate, he was desirous to raise his rents above what his lands, in the actual state of their improvement, could afford. His tenants could agree to this upon one condition only, that they should be secured in their possession for such a term of years as might give them time to recover, with profit, whatever they should lay not in the further improvement of the land. The expensive vanity of the landlord made him willing to accept of this condition; and hence the origin of long leases.
Even a tenant at will, who pays the full value of the land, is not altogether dependent upon the landlord. The pecuniary advantages which they receive from one another are mutual and equal, and such a tenant will expose neither his life nor his fortune in the service of the proprietor. But if he has a lease for along term of years, he is altogether independent; and his landlord must not expect from him even the most trifling service, beyond what is either expressly stipulated in the lease, or imposed upon him by the common and known law of the country.
The tenants having in this manner become independent, and the retainers being dismissed, the great proprietors were no longer capable of interrupting the regular execution of justice, or of disturbing the peace of the country. Having sold their birth-right, not like Esau, for a mess of pottage in time of hunger and necessity, but, in the wantonness of plenty, for trinkets and baubles, fitter to be the playthings of children than the serious pursuits of men, they became as insignificant as any substantial burgher or tradesmen in a city. A regular government was established in the country as well as in the city, nobody having sufficient power to disturb its operations in the one, any more than in the other. . .
A revolution of the greatest importance to the public happiness, was in this manner brought about by two different orders of people, who had not the least intention to serve the public. To gratify the most childish vanity was the sole motive of the great proprietors. The merchants and artificers, much less ridiculous, acted merely from a view to their own interest, and in pursuit of their own pedlar principle of turning a penny wherever a penny was to be got. Neither of them had either knowledge or foresight of that great revolution which the folly of the one, and the industry of the other, was gradually bringing about.
It was thus, that, through the greater part of Europe, the commerce and manufactures of cities, instead of being the effect, have been the cause and occasion of the improvement and cultivation of the country.
This order, however, being contrary to the natural course of things [ie not easy as it was proving in America], is necessarily both slow and uncertain.” (“The Theory of Moral Sentiments”, 1759)
© Nicholas Gruen, 2005
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