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June 3 - October 26, 2025
the purpose of enclosures and other forms of primitive accumulation was not technical. Primitive accumulation appealed to the ruling classes because it was so effective in subordinating the working classes.
According to the Economists the function of the state was not merely one of ruling the nation, but also that of recasting it in a given mold, of shaping the mentality of the population as a whole in accordance with a predetermined model and instilling the ideas and sentiments they thought desirable into the minds of all.
the English political economists preferred to write as if all hardship were due to the silent compulsion of the market, rather than the intended result of extraeconomic actions.
the connection between the creation of a new social division of labor and the rise of capitalism—a connection that is generally expressed in terms of hostility toward the self-sufficient household.
To satisfy their newfound lust for luxuries, the lairds cast aside their traditional obligations to the community. Even though originally they only held their land as leader of a clan, they laid claim to clan land as their personal property. Based on questionable property rights, they threw large numbers of people off the land in the name of agricultural improvements.
“to hinder insurrection, by driving away the people, and to govern peaceably, by having no subjects, is an expedient that argues no profundity of politicks.”
These forced migrations following the first Jacobite rebellion, as well as the Battle of Culloden, resulted in concentrations of propertyless people available for employment.
Higher rents would also serve to drive those remaining on the land to intensify agricultural production. As a result of such “silent compulsion,” market forces would compel them to specialize in the production of commodities for the market, rather than continuing to produce so many goods as pure use values.
When the crops had grown on the land, the people who grew them consumed a significant proportion of the harvest. Pastures require a minimum of labor, thereby leaving almost all the proceeds of the land to its owner.
As far as Steuart (1767, 1:111) was concerned, the mode of existence of the traditional agriculturalist was appropriate only for “rude and uncivilized societies.” So long as they had been free to live off the spontaneous fruits of the earth, they could content themselves with a few wants and much idleness
“Any person who could calculate his labours in agriculture purely for subsistence, would find abundance of idle hours. But the question is, whether in good economy such a person would not be better employed in providing nourishment for others, than in providing for other wants”
masses of people detached from the land could pose a serious political threat, given that capitalism threatened to unleash the dread forces of democracy. The danger was all the more troubling because the majority of people considered the property of the lairds to be illegitimate.
The frequent admiration of Sparta owed much to Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who emphasized Sparta’s collectivism and antipathy to trade (see Therborn 1976, 119–24). Praise of Sparta became a common characteristic of the tradition of civic humanism, which held that property was important because it allowed the possessor the independence to exercise civic virtue
While Steuart (1767, 1:51) taught that slavery was a “violent method (for) making men laborous in raising food,” he understood that the market, properly arranged, could accomplish the same objectives that Spartan slavery promised. In the past, he argued, “men were … forced to labour because they were slaves to others; men are now forced to labour because they are slaves to their own wants”
Thus although wage earners, unlike slaves, are formally free, Steuart understood that workers would be subject to an increasingly strict discipline. In this sense, capitalism seemed to be the next best alternative to a slave society.
“The whole magic of [a] well-ordered society is that each man works for others, while believing that he is working for himself”
Steuart looked to a statesman to guide the system. This perspective led him to focus his attention on one overriding question: How were wants to be structured so that they would effectively enslave people?
According to Smith, the first institutions were not large factories, but the works of small artisans who gradually increased the scale of their operations. Unfortunately, Smith’s approach does not shed any light on the process by which the artisans became wage laborers—a central concern of Steuart and the rest of the classical political economists.
Whereas most of his contemporaries described historical evolution in terms of the romance of natural law, Steuart (ibid., 1:237) was willing to investigate the real forces that caused “men… to submit to labour.” His sophisticated application of the classical theory of primitive accumulation made his work an embarrassment to the mainstream political economists who pretended that capitalist development was a voluntary affair. In this respect, he was far more truthful than the rest of the classical political economists combined.
Hume had the ability to write like both Steuart and Smith within the same paragraph, suggesting that the gulf between these supposedly polar opposites was not nearly as wide as it might seem. After all, in many ways, Steuart merely expressed truths that Smith preferred to shroud in silence.
Hume, in contrast, was concerned about putting the superfluous hands to work producing luxuries, rather than letting them fall into inactivity: “Luxury, when excessive, is the source of many ills; but is in general preferable to sloth and idleness”
Like both Steuart and Smith, Hume (1752f, 32–33) was distrustful of the masses, yet he understood that the state depended on their acquiescence: “Nothing appears more surprizing to those, who consider human affairs with a philosophical eye, than the easiness with which the many are governed by the few …. [A]s FORCE is always on the side of the governed, the governors have nothing to support them but [the] opinion [of the masses].”
Government is instituted in order to restrain the fury and injustice of the people, and is being always founded on opinion, not on force, it is dangerous to weaken, by these speculations, the reverence which the multitude owe to authority, and to instruct them beforehand that the case can ever happen when they may be freed from their duty of allegiance.
Steuart never suggested that his statesman determine how people should deploy their capital. His statesman was more concerned about how people without capital should be deployed.
A countryman living on his own little property with his family industriously employed in manufacturing for all their own wants, without exchange, connection, or dependence on any one, offers, indeed, a spectacle of rural comfort, but a species absolutely inconsistent with the prosperity of a modern society.
Adam Smith became a highly abstract writer who used charming prose to disarm his readers. He himself commended this tactic to his students, telling them that if they wanted to sway an unsympathetic audience, “we are not to shock them by affirming what we are satisfied is disagreeable, but are to conceal our design and beginning at a distance, bring them slowly on to the main point and having gained the more remote ones we get the nearer ones of consequence”
Smith’s cheerful optimism, in contrast, was just what polite society wanted to read: Curb the government, unleash the forces of the market, and all will be well. Unfortunately, Smith could present this vision only by substantially violating the truth.
Smith’s basic thesis in his attempted refutation of Steuart was appealing: The interest of individuals might clash, but society as a whole, as well as the classes of which it is composed, have a common interest.
Today, the majority of academic economists believe that market forces suffice to develop an economy. In contrast, until the time of Smith, economists almost universally accepted the necessity of government intervention
The reluctance of the aspiring petty bourgeoisie to serve in the military would leave national defense in the hands of the two classes that represented the greatest threat, in Smith’s view, to commercial society: the aristocracy and the unreformed workers, who resented the new society.
“But when the army comes to be compos’d of the very meanest people, they must be forced into a standing army and a military discipline must be established.”
Given his fears about the discipline of both the military and the working class, Smith called for state intervention in the educational process. Hopefully, schooling could make the potentially unruly working class more accepting of both military discipline and property rights.
the continuing tradition of popular rural justice that displaced rural workers brought with them to the cities. For example, workers insisted that necessities should not sell above what they considered to be a just price.
He claimed that people’s fear of forestalling was no more warranted than anxiety about witchcraft
How does forestalling differ from retailing?
Smith (1976, V.i.b.2, 709) feared that the working classes were possessed by “passions which prompt [them] to invade property, passions much more steady in their operation, and much more universal in their influence.” Consequently, government is necessary to protect the property of the rich
Laws and government may be considered in … every case as a combination of the rich to oppress the poor, and preserve to themselves the inequality of the goods which would otherwise be soon destroyed by the attacks of the poor, who if not hindered by the government would soon reduce the others to an equality with themselves by open violence.
Many people are startled to learn that Adam Smith, the great defender of capitalism, had few good words for the capitalists.
Smith’s work represents a vigorous defense of the mores of one narrow segment of the population and an equally vigorous denunciation of all other values.
Smith greatly admired the mores of the hardworking, but relatively unsuccessful members of the petit bourgeoisie.
Smith accepted that in a market society, “every man is rich or poor according to the … labour of other people … which he can command, or which he can afford to purchase”
We hate people who, though very important to us, do not love us and refuse to become our cooperative partners despite our best efforts to win their affection. This stirs up in us all the bitter pains, sufferings, and anxieties of the past and we defend ourselves against their return by the barrier of hatred, by denying our need for those people and our dependence upon them.
Men always endeavour to persuade others to be of their opinion even when the matter is of no consequence to them. If one advances any thing concerning China or the more distant moon which contradicts what you imagine to be true, you immediately try to persuade him to alter his opinion. And in this manner every one is practicing oratory on others thro the whole of his life. You are uneasy whenever one differs from you.
In general, populism appeals to people who feel that they are neither capitalists nor wage earners. Like Smith, populists feel threatened both by those above and below them in social status and usually blame their problems on the machinations of powerful elite groups. Populists frequently reject complex analyses of the world in favor of more simplistic solutions. The most common populist nostrums are paper money schemes or the break up of monopolies. Although laissez-faire is not usually associated with populism, it probably should be.
to analyze the social division of labor as a natural history is to sacrifice all hope of understanding the mechanism that governs its evolution in human society.
According to Smith, the progressive social division of labor should be understood exclusively in terms of the anthropological principle of the natural disposition of human beings. He counseled that we should prohibit any attempts to affect the division of labor through political action since such efforts were “evident violations of natural liberty”
Smith (ibid.) concluded, “It is in the interest of every society that things such as this kind [i.e., the creation of a new social division of labor] should never be forced or obstructed.”
Smith proposed two principles regarding the social division of labor. In the first, occupational-based analysis, the social division of labor evolves because people voluntarily choose specialized occupations. The second, and contradictory principle regulating the social division of labor, divides society into classes, one of which is defined by the ownership of stock.
Smith gave no indication that he in any way comprehended the move from the “rude state” to one in which people who were once able to live without “stock” now found themselves “stand[ing] in need of those particular persons,” the capitalists, who are able to claim a reward for their “stock.”
Smith frequently fell into confusion because he consistently failed to distinguish between the creation of petty commodity production, in which individuals produced goods on their own account for sale on the market, and the introduction of capitalism, where capitalists hired workers to do wage labor.
Early commentators on political economy also generally overlooked the theoretical challenge posed by the transition to wage labor. Perhaps the closest to a recognition came from the question that von Thünen posed: “How has the worker been able to pass from being the master of capital—as its creator—to being its slave?”
