THE WEALTH SYSTEM. POLITICAL ECONOMY

Transcription

1 THE WEALTH SYSTEM. POLITICAL ECONOMY AND METHOD IN ADAM SMITH Sergio Cremaschi ITALIAN: Il sistema della ricchezza. Economia politica e problema del metodo in Adam Smith. Milano: Angeli, pp. ISBN

2 Prospectus Preface Introduction The book is a study in Adam Smith's system of ideas; its aim is to reconstruct the peculiar framework that Adam Smith s work provided for the shaping of a semiautonomous new discipline, political economy; the approach adopted lies somewhere in-between the history of ideas and the history of analytic tools; my two `theses' are: i) The Wealth of Nations has a twofold structure, including a `natural history' of opulence and an `imaginary machine' of wealth. The imaginary machine is a kind of Newtonian theory, whose connecting links are "principles" provided either by `partial' characteristics of human nature or by analoga of physical mechanisms transferred to the social world; ii) a domain of the economic, understood as a self-standing social sub-system, was discovered first by Adam Smith. His `discovery' of the new continent of the economic was an `unintended result' of a deviation in his voyage to the never-found archipelago of natural jurisprudence. I Imaginary machines and invisible chains: natural philosophy and method 1. The background: Descartes or Newton 2. The `Essays on Philosophical Subjects' and their background: from Descartes to Newton

3 3. Natural philosophy and method 3.1 The `Essays on Philosophical Subjects' 3.2 Pleasure, passions, and theories 3.3 Languages, machines, and systems 3.4 Theories and the world 4. Concluding remarks: the vanishing of Galileo s dream The first chapter reconstructs Smith's views on method in natural philosophy, presented primarily in the History of Astronomy (HA). The peculiar kind of semiskeptical Newtonianism which permeates the essay is highlighted. Its reconstruction of the history of one natural science is shown to be based on the assumptions of Hume s epistemology, and to lead to a self-aware deadlock. Smith's dilemma is between an essentialist realism and a skeptical instrumentalism; the Cartesian presuppositions he shares with Hume and with the 18th century as a whole make it impossible for him to overcome his dilemma. The following chapters will show how, on the one hand, Smith's skeptical methodology encourages him in the enterprise of `carving off' a new self-contained discipline and how, on the other hand, his epistemological dilemma is reflected in the inner tensions of his moral and political theory as well as in a number of basic oscillations concerning the status of the new discipline. II Chessboards and clocks: moral philosophy and method 1. The background of Adam Smith s ethical and political writings: Grotius, Hume, and Montesquieu

4 2. The published moral work and the unpublished jurisprudential work 3. Moral philosophy and method 3.1 The building and its foundations 3.2 Principles, phenomena, and unintended results 3.3 Teleology 3.4 Motion 4. The order of reason and the order of nature 5. Concluding remarks: the vanishing of Grotius dream The second chapter reconstructs Smith's views on method in the parallel field of moral philosophy, including the theory of moral sentiments and natural jurisprudence. I argue that, when read along with the Lectures on Jurisprudence, where Smith's peculiar version of a `weaker' form of natural law is presented, The Theory of Moral Sentiments wins special interest, not only for the history of ethics, but even more for the history of political theory and the social sciences. The two most striking features of Smith's work in this area are highlighted. First, his effort at reformulating the `practical science' is a methodologically self-aware attempt at applying the Newtonian method to moral subjects. Secondly, this attempt ends in a stalemate as two distinguished kinds of normative order are introduced: one ultimate order of Reason, ultimately justifiable but inaccessible, and one weaker order of our `natural sentiments', to which we have empirical access, but which is so variable as to lack any ultimate value as a basis for grounding our normative claims. These two parallel conundrums may arguably account for the author's inability to publish during his life-time both The History of Astronomy and the projected history and theory of law and government.

5 III Wheels, dams, and gravitation: the structure of scientific argument in The Wealth of Nations 1. Interpretations of Adam Smith's economic work 2. The Wealth of Nations discourse 2.1 The genre 2.2 Natural history 2.3 The system 3. The presuppositions of The Wealth of Nations discourse 3.1 The function of the science of human nature 3.2 Final and efficient causes 3.3. Mathematical and physical accounts 3.4 The deduction of phenomena 4. Concluding remarks: explanation, justification and the vagaries of nature. The third chapter provides the core of the book, dealing with the structure of the argument in WN. I argue that the main presupposition that makes the shift possible from a `natural history' to a `system' approach is the Newtonian contrast of `mathematical' with `physical' explanation; that is, Smith drops any discussion of the "original qualities" of human nature that could account for economic behavior, while introducing, as `principles' for the system, a set of `hypothetical' statements of `observed' regularities in human behavior and of `observed' super-individual selfregulating mechanisms. In bringing this presupposition to light, the coexistence of a teleological with a mechanistic approach is clarified; fresh light is shed on the notion of the invisible hand by a comparison of its occurrence in Smith with the occurrence of the same expression (until now overlooked) in the correspondence between Newton and Cotes. Finally, the peculiar semi-prescriptive and semi-descriptive

6 character of political economy is highlighted, and the consistency of Smith's `impure' semi-prescriptive social science, when understood in his own terms, is defended against familiar charges with inconsistency and against even more familiar strained modernizations. IV Apples, deer, and frivolous trinkets: the construction of the economic 1. The issue at stake: words and things 2. The preliminary description of economic phenomena 3. The system and the idealization of economic phenomena 3.1 From natural history to the system: the Galilean break 3.2 Pre-analytical visions and layers of meaning 3.3 Analogy and metaphor 3.4 Wealth as a substance and as a process. 4.Concluding remarks: the autonomy of the economic and the Cartesian legacy The fourth chapter draws consequences from the third, examining how Smith's achievement in political economy, marking its transition to a scientific status, carried a re-description of the phenomena, creating the comparatively independent and unified field of the economic. Smith's achievement is interpreted not as the `discovery' of an autonomous character already possessed by the economy out there, so much as a Gestalt-switch by which our perception of social phenomena is modified making us `see' the partial order of the economy as an isolated system. To sum up, the autonomy of the economic in social reality and the autonomy of the economic in social consciousness are shown to be two sides of one process.

7 V General Concluding Remarks: Political economy and the Enlightenment halved A few suggestions on the status of economic theory two centuries after The Wealth of Nations in its relationship to practical philosophy are illustrated Reviews: S. Natoli, Rivista di Filosofia neoscolastica, 77\4 (1985), pp D. Parisi, Studi economici e sociali, ott-dic 1985, pp M.E.L. Guidi, L Indice, 1985, n.5, p. 46