Clean, Humane, and Long
11 May 2009How selfish soever man may be supposed, there are evidently some principles in his nature, which interest him in the fortune of others, and render their happiness necessary to him, though he derives nothing from it except the pleasure of seeing it.
The Theory of Moral Sentiments
Pt I § I Ch I ¶ 1
Thus begins Adam Smith's first book, in its editions of 1759, 1761, 1767, 1774, 1781, and 1790. In other words, he was saying this both before and after his more famous work, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776, 1778, 1784, 1786, & 1789). At some point, I may write a lengthier entry on what Smith was doing with the Wealth of Nations, but I wanted to make the point that Smith didn't make his case for a free market based upon a personal belief that one only cared for others based upon their effects on one's own material well-being. Rather, he made his case (in the Wealth of Nations) for the optimality of a free market without availing himself of the proposition that people otherwise gave a d_mn about each other. Then, as now, many opponents of a free society held that an economy without extensive state control could work
only if people had more fellow-feeling than they actually do.
Tags: Adam Smith
It's a wonderfully ironic difference between liberalism and conservatism then, and now. Smith was a classic liberal, arguing for a free market, and 250 years later, liberals are arguing against it while conservatives seek to make the markets even more free.
I presume that you follow Russ Robert's site, econtalk.org due to the timeliness of this post. If not, you will really enjoy the last few podcasts.
Starting in the late Nineteenth Century, a group of thinkers (such as Leonard Trelawny Hobhouse) persuaded themselves and others that liberalism was not about means but about objectives, and that sometimes the objectives in question could be accomplished by means that liberals had traditionally rejected. From the very start, more genuine liberals have been predicting where this would lead those ostensible liberals.
I remember one of the history texts that I read in college pitifully insisting that one should not equate a programmes of the mercantilists with those effected by present-day because the intentions behind them were different — the author couldn't point to a fundamental difference in structure or in practical effect, but he didn't want to acknowledge that the liberalism of had been quite lost. (As to intentions, well, the mercantilists included humanitarian arguments for their programmes, and the include pragmatic arguments for theirs.)
I do think that the word should be used with restraint. It has been applied to so many different ideologies as to be nearly useless except to cause insult or confusion. And, with its root sense, it doesn't fit classical liberalism, as the over-all programme of classical liberalism was far from ever being fully effected and therefore its reälization could never be preserved.
I haven't followed Roberts, nor much commentary by anyone else (except in-so-far as journalists refuse to present news without inserting commentary). My entries on economics are variously responses to news reports, accounts of what has been happening with my own work (which is presently fairly abstract microëconomic theorizing), and stuff that gets posted mostly as an artefact of more circumstance — such as the recent acquisition of a third copy of The Theory of Moral Sentiments, upon which copy I happened in a used-book store.