Criticizes pure economic or political approaches to social problems, and argues for the establishment of civil responsibilities

Whose Keeper? Social Science and Moral Obligation

By Alan Wolfe

University of California Press

Copyright 1991 Alan Wolfe
All right reserved.
ISBN: 0520074262
One
The Dubious Triumph of Economic Man

Can Bourgeois Society Survive Bourgeois Man?

For all that has been said and done in its name, "the market" was rarely discussed by those presumed to have praised it. Adam Smith in The Wealth of Nations , which is generally considered a hymn to the efficiencies of the market, rarely uses the term, preferring instead the more general word exchange . (When Smith does use the term, he seems to mean it in a physical sense, as in his claim that the division of labor "is limited by the extent of the market," that is, by the size of the economic unit within which production or exchange is taking place.)1 Smith was not alone in his failure to discuss how markets actually behave. Joseph Schumpeter's massive History of Economic Analysis , as Bernard Barber has pointed out, contains no index entry for "the market," and Karl Marx, like Smith, generally assumed that circulation and exchange took place somewhere but never actually specified where.2

The tendency of eighteenth-century political economistsand even of those who came laterto ignore the workings of markets may well be because the societies in which they wrote did not have very many of them. Adam Smith witnessed the rise of the factory but was a stranger to a system in which markets were expected to constitute the sole method of exchange. Custom, trust, price regulation, personal contacts, and production for use were far more common in 1776 than was the exotic notion that people should maximize their self-interest through economic interaction with total strangers.3 As a consequence of the factory system national markets did develop, but only after a revolution in production filtered down

through society. A recent exploration of the capitalist transformation of the West notes that the development of markets took place gradually over a very long period, but picks 1880 as a date when "markets were taken for granted as a basic feature of modern economies"nearly 120 years after The Wealth of Nations. 4

If the classical political economists rarely talked about markets as concrete entities, they talked even less about "the market," an abstract process of calculating the economic gains and losses associated with individual decision-making. Their image of the individual was not as a solitary atom acting from rational choice, but as a person embedded in the kinds of social relations we associate with civil society. Adam Smith believed that a society could break through the restrictions imposed first by absolutism and then by mercantilism, thereby advancing human progress by liberating individuals to develop their own capacities. But this did not mean to Smith, any more than it did to his philosophical contemporaries, that all human action should from this point forward be based on the instrumental quest for self-interest. As Irving Kristol has pointed out, economic man was "never thought to be a whole man, only a man-in-the-marketplace. Smith never celebrated self-interest per se as a human motive, he merely pointed to its utility in a population that wished to improve its condition."5

The thinkers of the Scottish Enlightenment, Adam Smith among them, were sociologists as well as economists.6 As a protosociologist, Smith assumed that a traditional morality and a well-defined social structure would so curb human passions as to permit a realm in which people could be free to pursue their own self-interest; and this pursuit of self-interest was possible only because individuals could be sure that there was a social fabric responsible for all. "Man has almost constant occasion for the help of his brethren," Smith wrote, before adding, in the more often quoted second half of that sentence: "it is in vain for him to expect it from their benevolence only." It was not from any unalterable "original principles in human nature" that man got his famous tendency to "truck, barter, and exchange," but rather from "the . . . faculties of reason and speech"faculties that, requiring other people for their realization, are at least partly sociological.7

The "other" Adam Smiththe sociologist, not the economistis more easily perceived in The Theory of Moral Sentiments than in The Wealth of Nations , even though Smith saw both books as part of a unified system of thought. The very opening of Smith's work in moral philosophy establishes a sociological approach: "How 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." To establish a moral framework while simultaneously respecting individualism, Smith developed the concept of the impartial spectator, who must "endeavor, as much as he can, to put himself in the situation of the other, and to bring home to himself every little circumstance of distress which can possibly occur to the sufferer." (Far from radical individualism, Smith's moral philosophy resembles the philosophies of the American social psychologists Charles Horton Cooley and George Herbert Mead.) We must, says Smith, learn sympathy through empathy. This great founder of capitalist economics even went so far as to suggest that a "disposition to admire, and almost to worship, the rich and the powerful, and to despise, or, at least, to neglect persons of poor and mean condition, though necessary both to establish and to maintain the distinction of ranks and order in society, is, at the same time, the great and most universal cause of the corruption of our moral sentiments."8 Commercial society, from this point of view, was always on the brink of moral bankruptcy.

The political economists of the eighteenth century were not justifying a capitalist society; their aim was to provide the rationale for a capitalist economy within a society held together by a nonbourgeois (or, more precisely, early-bourgeois) morality. The difference between a realm of morality organized by economic principles and one organized by the principles of civil society becomes clear in Smith's treatment of friendship. In societies characterized by feudal or absolutist social relations, friendships were formed out of what Smith called necessitudo they were "imposed by the necessity of the situation." In more modern "commercial countries," however, people could join together based on "a natural sympathy" that would enrich and deepen their moral obligations to one another. As Allan Silver, on whose analysis of Smith's treatment of friendship I have relied, concludes, "Smith's model of friendship rests not on calculative and utilitarian exchanges between parties to interpersonal contractswhich, in the context of friendship, are redolent more of patron-client relations than of market exchangebut on generalized mechanisms of 'sympathy.'" Because sympathy "generates a kind of social lubrication throughout civil society," commercial societies are organized by a paradox: only by preserving a realm of morality against all forms of instrumentalism, including the instrumentalism of economic calculation itself, could a society be free to allow economic calculation to...