{"id":1447,"date":"2019-04-15T04:46:01","date_gmt":"2019-04-15T09:46:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/cthorne\/?p=1447"},"modified":"2019-04-15T04:46:40","modified_gmt":"2019-04-15T09:46:40","slug":"the-old-adam-after-all","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/cthorne\/articles\/the-old-adam-after-all\/","title":{"rendered":"The Old Adam, After All"},"content":{"rendered":"

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A review of The Other Adam Smith <\/em>by Mike Hill and Warren Montag (Stanford University Press 2014)<\/strong><\/p>\n

This review first appeared in Historical Materialism <\/em>26. 3 (2018)<\/p>\n

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A book promises The Other Adam Smith<\/em>, and the title is already something of a puzzle. Scholars writing about much read philosophers have, after all, a few established ways of declaring their revisionism. If the line you are taking is programmatically modernist and decontextualizing and perhaps even contraindicated, you can signal this by saying you have made your philosopher \u201cnew\u201d: the new Nietzsche, the new Hume, Montag\u2019s own New Spinoza<\/em>, published in 1997. If, conversely, you are resolved to scrape away decades worth of interpretive accretions and polemical anachronisms\u2014if you have just about had it, I mean, with the neo-Kantians and not-really-quite Marxists\u2014you can choose from a few different options: X in Context<\/em>, What X Really Said<\/em>, The Authentic X<\/em>, as in The Authentic Adam Smith<\/em>, published by James Buchan in 2006. By these standards, a book calling itself The Other X<\/em> can seem hard to parse, lackadaisical and itemizing. The adjective announces a lateral move, a secret life, maybe another person altogether. A Harley Davidson dealer in Texas? A cryptographer at Penn State?\u00a0 An ecologist with the Missouri Botanical Garden? You know\u2014the other <\/em>Adam Smith.<\/p>\n

So who exactly do Hill and Montag mean to put before us? Have they written a New Perspectives on Adam Smith<\/em>? An Adam Smith Reloaded<\/em>? Or have they given us Adam Smith in the Eighteenth Century<\/em>? Other to what?, in other words. Part of the problem is that it is no longer clear what counts as Smith\u2019s received image. I announce the other Adam Smith, but no-one can be sure with what settled perceptions this double is being asked to share the room. Outside the academy, Smith is still widely regarded as the preeminent theorist of an austere and deregulated capitalism, the house philosopher of the IMF, Ayn Rand\u2019s Scottish uncle. But this is precisely the view that the last forty years of Smith scholarship have been out to defeat. A person gains entry into contemporary Smith studies by offering to identify one more way in which he disagreed with Friedrich Hayek. You can begin by pointing out that Smith propounded a moral psychology of considerable scope and complexity, discerning in social actors a wide variety of motivations, ethically charged feelings, and modes of judgment. Rational utility-maximizers barely feature. You might go on to point out that when Smith defends deregulated markets, he typically does so on the grounds that they will help the poor, generating plenty and higher wages and the equitable allotment of scarce goods. The anti-capitalists might scoff that Smith has been wrong about this, but the modest point remains that his framework of justification for that error is more or less Rawlsian\u2014that Smith is not the Malthusian or social Darwinist we have been led to expect. Next, a person goes on to read The Wealth of Nations <\/em>and is surprised to discover how hostile it is to merchants and manufacturers; far from modeling the bourgeois takeover of the state, Smith\u2019s most famous work issues an unmistakable call to roll back the power of the commercial classes. That there were identifiable Left Smithians by the time of the philosopher\u2019s death in 1790 is now well established\u2014proven critics of the eighteenth-century state who greeted Smith as a brother radical, an anatomist of corruption and aristocratic privilege and colonial misrule. Nor were these last some negligible eddy in the crosscurrents of Georgian politics. There were Smithians in the French revolutionary assembly for one, deregulators who considered free markets wholly compatible with famine relief and social insurance schemes, best understood in this context as innovative proposals for protecting artisans, farmers, and workers without falling back on late-feudal modes of market manipulation. One occasionally still runs into radical Smithians of this vintage. As recently as 2007, Giovanni Arrighi\u2019s Adam Smith in Beijing <\/em>was making the case that it was wrong to think of Smith as the theorist of \u201ccapitalism,\u201d which a Scot who died before 1800 could not have had access to (either as concept or mature social formation). Nonsense, you think, except if you\u2019re the kind of person who insists that Marx was not a Stalinist, nor even much of a Bolshevik, you might want to grant the point. Reading Smith alongside Marx should teach us, indeed, to tell the difference between \u201ccapitalism\u201d and \u201ccommercial society,\u201d on the understanding that the latter is not the utopian misdescription of the former, but a historical rival in its own right, no less than the socialism whose vacated place it might now assume. Adam Smith should help us discern the underconsidered possibility of a market society without colonization or rule-by-investment-bankers or the de-skilling and devaluation of labor. Such, at least, was Arrighi\u2019s pitch. Among intellectual historians, regular reminders that Marx had a lot to say in defense of capitalism are now matched by explanations that Smith had a lot to say against it.<\/p>\n

It is this<\/em> Adam Smith that Hill and Montag\u2019s book is out to sideline\u2014the Left-libertarian Smith, the social-democratic Smith, the anti-capitalist Smith. It will be hard for readers to appreciate what the authors are up to, then, unless they are willing to correct what is most misleading in the volume\u2019s prefatory material\u2014that word \u201cother,\u201d for a start, since the book\u2019s chief aim is in fact to vindicate the textbook image of Smith as the ideologue of market society. The Other Adam Smith<\/em> summons the philosopher back from Beijing and relocates him instead in the accustomed precincts of Vienna and Chicago. This Smith is the pensioned intellectual willing to let the poor starve, a philosopher at one with von Mises, himself discussed at length in Hill and Montag\u2019s Chapter 4 (312 \u2013 41); an ontological individualist who thinks the most pressing purpose of government is to protect the market from the intemperate demands of the starving; the originator, therefore, of a now dominant politics of abandonment. Hill and Montag\u2019s alterna-Smith is the old Adam, after all.<\/p>\n

But then the words \u201cAdam Smith\u201d are hardly less misleading than the word \u201cother\u201d and will need correcting in their own right, since Hill and Montag are interested in Smith only intermittently and mostly as the member of a movement or a scene. The authors boast early on that they have consulted all of Smith, and not just the two big books on which his reputation rests, and indeed, one important part of their case is that nothing you can read of Smith will adjust your accustomed sense of him as the arch-bourgeois philosopher: not the lectures on rhetoric and jurisprudence, not the early essay on Newtonianism, certainly not The Theory of Moral Sentiments<\/em>. Hill and Montag might return the reader to an orthodox understanding of Smith, but their trick is to reach that point by less familiar routes. There\u2019s no reason to believe them, then, when they promise not<\/em> to impose an artificial coherence on Smith\u2019s corpus, offering contrariwise to identify those passages where his writing is most multiple and unsettled. They pay tribute, it\u2019s true, to the philosopher\u2019s \u201ccomplexity and contradiction\u201d (3), and yet their Smith is fully of a piece, as witness this typical sentence: \u201cThe virtues of self-command so important in The Theory of Moral Sentiments<\/em> ground Smith\u2019s condemnation of prodigality in The Wealth of Nations<\/em>\u201d (235). And that underlying boast (to have read the complete Smith) is in its own way rather timid, since Hill and Montag have read much else besides: Henry Home, David Hume, University of Edinburgh principal William Robertson, Samuel Johnson, Henry Fielding. The book contains extensive commentary on each, its implicit claim being that the continuity that runs across Smith\u2019s un-varied writings extends to these several figures, as well. Smith, Hume, and the others all speak in one voice or are engaged in the same project, albeit a many-sided one\u2014the project of \u201cmoderate Enlightenment,\u201d premised on the love of harmony, order, and consensus, backed by repression, discipline, and \u201cliberal indifference,\u201d content to \u201cpacify particularity\u201d and build safeguards against \u201cdisruption\u201d (75, 54, 63).<\/p>\n

Adam Smith stands accused, in other words, of loving system too much, which is the charge automatically leveled by critical theory against any eighteenth-century philosopher. Such, indeed, might be the small innovation of Hill and Montag\u2019s book\u2014that rather than making Smith the apologist of liberal capitalism, they cast him instead as just another enlightener and thus trade in the perhaps overfamiliar Marxist positions on The Wealth of Nations <\/em>for the stances of a barely less familiar Enlightenment critique. Sometimes the shift from one theoretical vantage to the other is rhetorical, an ornamental swapping of idioms, as when Hill and Montag propose that Smith\u2019s economic writings, like those of his twentieth-century followers, are haunted by a certain human type, a new, quasi-legal category of person they name le malheureux<\/em>, and whom they define as \u201cthe one, the many, who may, with impunity and without consequences, be exposed to starvation and allowed to die, slowly or quickly, in the name of the rationality and equilibrium of the market\u201d (307). This Unfortunate Man is plainly a cousin to Giorgio Agamben\u2019s homo sacer <\/em>and is to that extent the translation of some old Marxist claims into the language of biopolitics. One can credit the elegance of the repackaging and still note that the substance of the underlying argument hasn\u2019t much changed. The point remains that laisser faire<\/em> mostly means \u201clet \u2018em die\u201d and that Smith was the sort of philosopher who dismissed persistent malnutrition as an \u201cinconvenience\u201d to the hungry (302).<\/p>\n

And yet Hill and Montag do have a case to make, as their low-key reliance on the dialectic of Enlightenment manages to flush out some under-remarked aspects of Smith\u2019s output. Most readers, for instance, wouldn\u2019t think to consult Smith on the topic of aesthetics, even though he had a lot to say on the subject, or at least on the subject of sublimity, whose escalations and upsurges were central to eighteenth-century conceptions of the field. As surprising as Smith\u2019s aestheticism is, though, even more surprising is its popping up in an essay called the \u201cHistory of Astronomy.\u201d A philosophy of art intrudes itself upon the domain of science\u2014is that what anyone associates with Adam Smith? But it\u2019s true: When you read his reflections on Newtonianism, you will find that Smith was not interested in physics qua physics. He was interested, rather, in how the mind responds to \u201csurprise\u201d and \u201cwonder\u201d\u2014and, indeed, in the defense mechanisms the mind possesses to cope with these latter, which Smith urges the reader to treat as threats. Smith is emphatic that we confront astonishment as a menace. Granted, this argument won\u2019t make much of sense until one realizes that Smith\u2019s philosophical skepticism goes much deeper than casual readers ever suspect. In the astronomy essay, he says openly that \u201call philosophical systems\u201d are \u201cmere inventions of the imagination to connect together the otherwise disjointed and discordant phenomena of nature.\u201d It is when philosophy fails us that we briefly encounter the authentically disorganized world. Sometimes we perceive a traumatic gap in the cosmos or are made to contemplate a glitch in our experiential timelines. \u201cSurprise\u201d and \u201cwonder\u201d are the anodyne names we give to these small shocks, and philosophical explanation, some more or less contrived argument to order, is how we cope. Wonder unmitigated, by contrast, can easily kill us or drive us mad. This last is perhaps the most remarkable feature of Smith\u2019s essay\u2014that it is making the case against<\/em> sublimity. Prolonged exposure to novelty and the unexplained will destroy us, and it is the task of thought\u2014in this case, of astronomy\u2014to \u201cinvent connections\u201d where none are evident. Philosophical system is the shock-absorbing fiction of balance and pattern.<\/p>\n

It is this argument that Hill and Smith have seized upon as the key to decoding Smith in toto<\/em>. Their book\u2019s most ingenious stroke is simply to take Smith\u2019s word on this front and so to read The Theory of Moral Sentiments <\/em>and The Wealth of Nations <\/em>as producing not systems, but fantasy systems\u2014make-believe non-structures whose unreality has been conceded to the attentive reader in advance. Three arguments follow on from here, and together these make for a nifty refinement of Enlightenment critique in its Adornian and Foucauldian modes:<\/p>\n