A Structured Approach to the Adam Smith Problem

by Hodder, Christopher

http://etheses.whiterose.ac.uk/15712/

Unknown Binding

Published October 1, 2016

Reviews

[Gavin · Rating 3 out of 5]

The third PhD I have ever read, the first to which I've contributed, and certainly the best-written. ”The "Adam Smith Problem" is just that Smith's two big books seem to dramatically contradict each other: WoN is methodologically and normatively individualist and abstracts out the economy from the rest of human life, but ToMS is a holistic and altruistic picture, one which subsumes economic behaviour as a special case of all virtuous or vicious actions. Hodder's job, which, remarkably, went undone over 200 years of scholarly debate, is to consider the possible explanations (e.g. "Smith divides society into disjoint private and public spheres"; "one of the two books is ironic"; "he changed his mind"; "he was a idjit") through close exegesis and logical reconstruction, and somehow weigh them.

The conclusion is satisfying enough: What is the Adam Smith Problem?: A debate on a problem; the debate was the problem. Basically, a series of bad readers (from the German Historicists to Paul Samuelson) misread certain key terms and passages, imputed an anachronistic atheism and efficient-causation empiricism to him, and then propagated a straw-man ("a shadow history") throughout the secondary literature and the tertiary sewer we call the media. (They also missed the timing and the explicit initial audience of WoN: the book is avowedly a polemic to affect British trade policy, and a highly successful one at that.)

Hodder writes with absolutely minimal jargon; this is as easily grasped as C18th political economy can be. One of my notes was that an institutionalised marker might penalise it for omitting jargon to the degree it does; after all, what's the point if just anyone can waltz in to constructive thought without using the gaudy tools made in desperation by knowledge pieceworkers?:

Sympathy plays a far more foundational role in WN than has previously been noted by any scholar which I have encountered. If we return to the butcher, brewer and baker, example, where we address ourselves not to their benevolence but to their self-interest, all commentators seem to have overlooked the question of how we are to go about addressing ourselves to another's self-interest. The obvious and simple answer to this is Sympathy. We put ourselves in their place, we realise that they expect to be paid for their labour as we would expect to be paid for our own, and as a result we understand that the appropriate behaviour expected of us is to pay for their service. In the primitive society, where the hunter begins to trade his bows for food and starts down the long road towards commercial society, it must be Sympathy which alerts his fellow hunters that he wants something in return for the bows he produces. “Give me that which I want, and you shall have this which you want” requires that I can escape my own self-interest and understand what you want, and have at least a basic level of Sympathy for you otherwise I would not know what to offer you.

Sympathy must therefore apply to trade at a very foundational level, and that intimate Sympathy which fosters benevolence can take hold even in business relationships. All it requires is repeated dealings with the same person, and a character which is “well-disposed”. It is not said to be central to society - but this is entirely consistent with TMS, where Smith describes benevolence as “the ornament that embellishes” society, that which makes it happier rather than merely efficient.

I do wonder at the fact that someone with no historiographical background and only half an economics degree could make substantive corrections and suggestions at the very frontier of the field's knowledge of a canonical figure. In one way this is nice: reason is a universal solvent, and specific facts make up relatively little of total intellectual work! But in another way sad: the pompousness and boundary-work of the non-formal academic fields is again shown to be needless, and narrowing.