July 28, 2018 Dear Reader

Part 2

The Bourgeois Virtues

Were Philosophized
I want to give at these Part divisions a summary of the argument each Part to follow. I am determined to obviate the charge made against The Bourgeois Virtues that the reader could not keep the thread of the argument in mind (and in a second edition of The Bourgeois Virtues will insert passages like the following);
The sad history of prudence only:
The admiration for prudence in the new bourgeois society got out of hand: a rhetoric of prudence only.

The separation of spheres was prudence-only expressed in gender relations. Implicit in Kant.

It was explicit in Bentham and philosophical radicalism.

Prudence only is not a good theory of humans, or of human society.

It was silly in Hobbes, whatever his merits in bringing it forward. Spinoza, too, denk ik.

But regardless of how Hobbes is to be understood, the use of prudence-only in political theory, as in Rawls and Gauthier and Buchanan, was a mistake. It can't be fixed by adding Love, as in Nussbaum.

We need a humanistic science of economics, to apply elsewhere, as in political theory.

This is evident in the least humanistic parts of economics nowadays. Economists have reluctantly concluded that Max U is false. Experiments show it. The philosophical emptiness of the pot theory of humans shows it.

Adam Smith provided it in his ethical thinking. So did the Anglican economists of the early 19^th century.

Chapter 10:

Adam Smith Shows Bourgeois Theory at Its Amiable Best

Smith serves as an emblem of a peculiarly 18^th-century project, the making of an ethic for a commercial society. The seen-to-be protected actual bourgeois behavior from the usual attacks by aristocracy and populism, and by government influenced by grandees and the mob, at least until socialism ruled in 29^th century.

Smith’s life was nearly as quiet as Immanuel Kant’s, though he did travel as Kant did not at all. Dugald Stewart, his student and first biographer, was hard pressed to give much beyond an account of the works themselves (though because Stewart was writing in the politically troubled 1790s in Britain probably had to trim his sails). Smith’s father died a few months before Smith was born, June 5, 1723. Smith was never married. He was an only son, and much devoted to his mother, with whom he lived frequently (aetat. 24-26; and aetat. 43-52 [the years 1766-75, writing The Wealth of Nations] at Kirkaldy; and 1778-1784 with her at Edinburgh until her death). Stewart notes that Smith “enjoyed the rare satisfaction of being able to repay her affection, by every attention that filial gratitude could dictate, during the long period of sixty years.”¹⁹⁶

Smith and his friends exhibited a bourgeois character in the plain style of calling each other Mr. rather than Dr. Smith.¹⁹⁷ (Smith’s LL.D. was honorary, conferred by Glasgow during his professorship there). Smith was inclined to “offices of secret charity,” a most bourgeois inclination.¹⁹⁸ The Duke of Buccleuch, in whose entourage Smith traveled the Continent 1764-66, admired him for “every private virtue,” the sort of virtue that an aristocrat would think suited to a bourgeois.¹⁹⁹ On the 18^th-century supposition, the public---that is, political---men were aristocrats. Buccleuch was responsible for getting Smith a sinecure as Commissioner of HM Customs in Scotland in 1778 (with his mother, in Edinburgh, where he moved from two years in London), a paradoxical position for a man opposed to protection. And yet Stewart is emphatic that Smith “was certainly not fitted to the general commerce of the world, or for the business of life.”²⁰⁰ He was not bourgeois is that businesslike sense. Smith was a bookish man, and absent-minded in company.

In other words, Smith was a member, of course, of the Bildungsbürgertum, the education-middle-class. He was a professor, a writer, an official of the state, the son of an official of the state. He was no working bourgeois. His suspicions of businessmen have been made much of. But he in the end he admired them more than the alternatives. Smith was a student at Glasgow 13-17—note the early Scottish age for university, nothing unusual: a Scottish university professor ran a prep school. He studied mathematics and philosophy until age 24 at Balliol College. Smith contributed to the tradition of Hobbes in mimicking mathematics. Steward: “His early taste for the Greek geometry may be remarked in the elementary clearness and fullness, bordering sometimes upon prolixity, with which he frequently states his political reasonings.”²⁰¹ Smith 1748, aetat. 25, delivered lectures on rhetoric, his patron Lord Kames paying for him to give them. About this time he met David Hume, and was by 1752 his fast friend.

Smith was briefly professor of logic (1751) and for a long time (13 years) of moral philosophy (1752-1765) at Glasgow. Smith believed in the usefulness of rhetoric more than of strict logic. Smith’s lectures as Professor of Moral Philosophy covered four subjects: theology, ethics (thus the Theory of Moral Sentiments), justice (thus the never-finished Treatise on Jurisprudence), and expediency (The Wealth of Nations).

* * * *

So Smith’s life was his work, and the work was the merely two books he published in his lifetime. (Smith would not have faired very well before a modern Promotion and Tenure Committee.)

In an early essay, which he did not carry into editions of his Essays beyond 1741-42, Smith’s great friend David Hume proposed a project for the age:

I shall take occasion . . . to compare the different stations in life, and to persuade such of my readers as are placed in the middle station to be satisfied with it, as the most eligible of all others. These form the most numerous rank of men that can be supposed susceptible of philosophy; and therefore all discourses of morality ought principally to be addressed to them.

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Hume does not in fact go on to make such an address. After observing that the virtue of friendship is natural for the bourgeoisie, which is true enough, he turns to praising artists and scholars, losing sight of his numerous audience of the middle station. His aporia (as the professors of rhetoric would say) anticipates the divide that opened in Europe a century later between the bourgeoisie and their children of la vie bohème, and especially their sons. What is mainly striking in the essay is the unfulfilled proposal to fashion a discourse of morality for the bourgeoisie.

Smith fulfilled what his friend Hume proposed. No aporia there. It was Smith’s intention in all his writings published and unpublished to develop an ethic for a commercial society, a society of the middle station. Authorial intention, true, is not the same thing as authorial accomplishment. You can intend with all energy and earnestness to write The Great American novel but the intention may, alas, be irrelevant to reading it as it actually, sadly is. Yet Smith did accomplish his intention, though the accomplishment has often been misunderstood by his children and grandchildren among economists, sociologists, and ethical philosophers. His temperate bourgeois rhetoric—too bourgeois when playing against the hot rhetoric of clerks like Rousseau or Marx—did not make his intention or accomplishment unmistakably clear.

Saying that Smith intended an ethic for a commercial age is not the same thing as saying that he was an enthusiast for every ethical or political excess of the bourgeoisie. Economists have often Thatcherized Smith in this way, reading into the throw-away line about the invisible hand an entire economistic, Benthamite philosophy: “Markets are always efficient,” say the economists, “so they provide a model for all of social life.” Always. Sell children.

Against such vulgarity Smith wrote The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759). In TMS, as The Theory of Moral Sentiments is affectionately known, Smith rebuked Hobbes and Bernard Mandeville explicitly and at length for their dependence on prudence only. Still, prudential arguments were much in favor in mid-eighteenth-century Europe. Therefore in The Wealth of Nations seventeen years later Smith made the argument against the excess of bourgeois self-interest as much as he could manage in cool, self-interested instruction, as matters of “police,” that is, policy, that is, prudence. He warned for example that the interests of merchants and manufacturers are "always in some respects different from, and even opposite to, that of the public."²⁰² He therefore did not recommend an unfettered rule of the bourgeoisie, and in fact supported the traditional politics of the landed classes.

The Wealth of Nations was read at the time as an attack more on bourgeois monopoly than on an intrusive government, as in Hugh Blair’s letter to Smith 3 April 1776: “You have done great service to the world by overturning all the interested sophistry of merchants, with which they have confounded the whole subject of commerce”²⁰³ The “clamor and sophistry of merchants and manufacturers," declared Smith, "easily persuaded [the rest of society] that the private interest of a part, and a subordinate part of the society, is the greatest interest of the whole.”²⁰⁴ People in pre-Benthamite Britain saw the State as merely an instrument of the Interests, nothing like a disinterested body, and so the more modern notion of monopoly versus the state (a notion devised in the late 19^th century by what Herbert Hovencamp has called the first law-and-economics movement) was in 1776 a distinction without a difference.²⁰⁵ The idea that the Hanoverian state could be a “countervailing force” to monopoly would have struck an eighteenth-century Scot as hilarious. After all, as Smith emphasized in his book repeatedly, the very state had created the monopolies in the first place. The bourgeois mercantilism of which Smith complained lives still in appeals to Buy American or to protect gigantic farms in North Dakota raising beet sugar. Wise up, said Smith in The Wealth of Nations: get prudent. By the late eighteenth century the rhetorical ground in Europe had recently shifted. Two centuries before the first publication of The Wealth of Nations, and still less two centuries before The Theory of Moral Sentiments, no one in England, and still less in the very unbourgeois Scotland of Mary Stuart or James VI, would have thought to write two long books treating a nation as though it were a prudent project for the self-improvement of a bourgeois society.

And yet even the more prudence-oriented of Smith’s two books is not a book only about prudence. The Wealth of Nations waxes sympathetic for the natural right to dispose of ones labor, for example, regardless of the prudence of such a policy, and waxes wroth against the corruptions of the commercial system. Prudence and justice, policy and indignation, together, fuel Smith’s attack on prohibiting manufacturers from selling at retail and farmers from selling to remote middlemen in the grain trade. "Both laws were evident violations of natural liberty, and therefore unjust; and they were both, too, as impolitic as they were unjust.”²⁰⁶

Smith was particularly indignant about restrictions on the workers’ right to use their labor as they saw fit. The English (not Scottish) Settlement Laws, which attempted to prevent poor people from overwhelming local relief systems, forced the poor back to the parishes of their birth—literally, resettling them, a sort of ethnic cleansing. “To remove a man who has committed no misdemeanor from the parish where he chooses to reside is an evident violation of natural liberty and justice. . . . There is scarce a poor man in England of forty years of age, I will venture to say, who has not in some part of his life felt himself most cruelly oppressed by this ill-contrived law.”²⁰⁷ Or again: “The property which every man has in his own labor, as it is the original foundation of all other property, so it is the most sacred and inviolable. The patrimony of a poor man lies in the strength and dexterity of his hands; and to hinder him from employing this strength and dexterity in what manner he thinks proper without injury to his neighbor, is a plain violation of this most sacred property.”²⁰⁸ The word “sacred” is used by this near deist twice in successive sentences. In view of such egalitarianism Smith has been claimed often by the left. No wonder, in view of such passages as:

The property which every man has in his own labor, as it is the original foundation of all other property, so it is the most sacred and inviolable. The patrimony of a poor man lies in the strength and dexterity of his hands; and to hinder him from employing this strength and dexterity in what manner he thinks proper without injury to his neighbor, is a plain violation of this most sacred property.²⁰⁹

Even his book on prudence, in other words, as Samuel Fleischacker has recently argued, exhibits ethical engagement in a commercial society beyond prudence only. Justice and temperance, with a bit of love and courage, must figure, too.

But the virtues are not heroic or saintly. Christopher Berry argues that

Whereas the premodern view sees a threat to virtue and liberty in the boundless uncontrollability of human bodily desires, modern, Smithian liberalism accommodates those desires. Virtue is largely domesticated or privatized. . . . Understood in this manner neither virtue nor liberty calls for superhuman qualities but are tasks which every human partakes and for which every human is qualified. . . . [T]hey are less exclusive than the classical versions, which are, in comparison, elitist and sexist.

Berry 1992, p. 84.

This is how social teleology is brought into the virtues. The virtues are those of Hume’s middling sort, not titanic heroisms. An economy and polity of middling people with middling virtues will suffice.

Of the seven virtues of classical and Christian theory, Adam Smith paid particular attention to three. His three books—well, two published and one intended—match the three: prudence is the chief if nothing like the only virtue considered in The Wealth of Nations; temperance is the chief if again certainly not the only virtue considered in The Theory of Moral Sentiments; and justice was to be considered in a projected Treatise on Jurisprudence, which we can read from elaborate notes by Smith's students in a course given from his chair of Moral Philosophy in 1762-63 and 1766. Smith was using a compendious model of social behavior something like this:

The Platonic/Smithian Social Model
Animal passions, pleasures, Characteristically human

utilities, impulses, desires faculties of reason and of speech

eros, bia peitho, mythos, logos
may be regulated by one of three alternative channels:

balance of power, precedent, habit, law, viz. personal virtues, governed by

Prudence Justice Temperance

Wealth of Nations Treatise on Jurisprudence Theory of Moral Sentiments

Exit Voice Loyalty
which lead to
good behavior of people or of governments
As also in Aristotle and Kant, the Smithian is distinguished from the early-Hume /late-Bentham/modern-economist model by the presence, of a second motivating force, beyond animal passions. As within a single person, so within a polis, as Plato had argued at length. There are no other ways than the three virtues of prudence, justice, and temperance, it is claimed, that passions may be translated satisfactorily into behavior.

Albert Hirschman has famously characterized a similar choice as "exit, voice, and loyalty." If you dislike the latest proposal for an optional war for oil you can take three routes. You can exit the political community, washing your hands of the matter, moving to Canada. Or you can exercise your voice before the courthouse and in the newspaper and at the polls to change the policy. Or you can retreat to the quietism of personal virtue, tempering your dislike, seeing the point in the policy, staying loyal to the polis. The fit with Hirschman's categories is not exact, but the Platonic-Smithian model here is of the same genre at least, and makes the same point. It is: that exit, or prudence, is not the only option that social science should consider in controlling passions.

And indeed, passions are not the only motivators of humans— unlike dogs, humans are open to reason and rhetoric.²¹⁰ If not, it would have been pointless for Smith to write at length about the idiocies of mercantilism or empire, or Hirschman in his youth to write on policy for Latin America. The balance of power is not the only constraint on human passions. "Realism" in foreign policy asks that we think only of passions and only in prudential terms. Be tough, it recommends, and "realistic." But it ignores the habits and laws of nations, a civic republicanism which can justify good behavior. And it treats with contempt the ethical channel, and, worse, the rhetorical channel, calling it "preaching." Thus George Stigler, the Chicago economist, an enthusiastic advocate of so-called “rational” models of politics, opposed always the premise of his friend and colleague Milton Friedman, that people are open to reason, and that reasons therefore are worth giving.

Vivienne Brown notes in her book of 1994, Adam Smith’s Discourse, that the talk of ethics in The Wealth of Nations is directed at the butcher and the baker and the politician in the ordinary business of their lives. Smith’s talk there is of a “lower-order” ethics, she says, a matter of prudence rather than of great-souled practice of balanced virtues recommended in The Theory of Moral Sentiments.

But is Smith’s discourse of morality ever really about lower order, prudence-only? His standard for the middle station is better shown than told, as in his first appearance in print, an unsigned memorial to a bourgeois friend, in 1758, while (age 35) he was completing The Theory of Moral Sentiments:

To the Memory of Mr. William Crauford,

Merchant of Glasgow

Who to that exact frugality, that downright probity and plainness of manners so suitable to his profession, joined a love of learning, . . an openness of hand and a generosity of heart, . .. and a magnanimity that could support . . . the most torturing pains of body with an unalterable cheerfulness of temper, and without once interrupting, even to his last hour, the most manly and the most vigorous activity in a vast variety of business. . . . candid and penetrating, circumspect and sincere.

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This is not an encomium to Profit Regardless, or I’ve Got Mine, Jack. It praises the bourgeois virtues. And “bourgeois virtues,” it suggests, is no oxymoron.

Glasgow in the 1750s and 1760s was a suitable place to launch a free-trade theory, says Stewart, and Smith was much acquainted with businessmen there.²¹¹ Smith recognized the prudent and just desirability of developing an ethic for a commercial age beyond the Me-First ethic of mercantilism or of the country club; and beyond traditional Christianity (though Smith, as a virtue ethicist, has a lot of Aquinas in him); and beyond classical stoicism. His writings are hard to imagine outside of the eighteenth century in the commercial quarter of Northwestern Europe---though there are eerie parallels in Japanese thought at the time. Smith shared with Kant a deism that raised the question of how to live a good life without God actively present. Both men answered, By Reason. But Kant’s reason was a Platonic, absolute one, a closed aristocracy of proof. Vivienne Brown has noted that Smith’s reasoning about ethics was on the contrary dialogic and open. And I would add that his ethics were empirical, depending on a philosophical anthropology or psychology that Kant scorned. Smith’s, you could say, was Aristotelian and Aquinian rather than Platonic, interested in how sacred and profane interact among actual denizens of this world as against Ideal Rational beings.

Smith for example was obsessed as Kant was not with how language and its limits fits a society of merchants as against the older absolutes of saint or hero. Smith was a rhetorical theorist, explicitly and self-consciously. The notion that ethical behavior should come out of an internal dialogue with a better self, named by Smith the Impartial Spectator, is natural to someone who believed that language was foundational. Smith’s first job was teaching rhetoric to Scottish boys. He was we would say a high-school teacher of English. By contrast Kant (though like Smith a famously good university lecturer) believed that a priestly and individual Reason was foundational. Manfred Kuehn’s recent biography argues that Kant modeled himself on an English merchant very like the Scottish one Smith memorialized. But Immanuel was no theorist of the chattering bourgeoisie. Adam was. Walk with me, talk with me; what news on the Rialto?

Smith and the rest of the economists and calculators 1700 to 1848 were of course busy providing a theory of innocent contributions to the well-being of the world arising from the genius of the natural merchant. They explained how the cooperation and competition of people getting money leads to the division of labor and the wealth of nations. Smith was not appalled that in places like Holland or Scotland or England or Pennsylvania people got money. A quarter century before Napoleon’s sneer at the nation of shopkeepers Smith noted that “England, though in the present times it breeds men of great professional abilities in all different ways, great lawyers, great watch makers and clockmakers, etc., etc., seems to breed neither statesmen nor generals.” Smith was not criticizing the bourgeoisie in saying so (though he was criticizing Lord North and his American policy), any more than Hume was when he wrote that “There are more natural parts, and a stronger genius requisite to make a good lawyer or physician, than to make a great monarch.”

Yet Smith is concerned to avoid an ethics of what the market can bear, the worst of bourgeois other-directedness. Smith encompasses the paradox that a conscience, his Impartial Spectator, has a social origin yet can stand against society. “When we first come into the world,” he writes, “we are accustomed to consider what behavior is likely to be agreeable to every person we converse with, to our parents, to our masters, to our companions.” So an adolescent. Yet a mature person abandons “the impossible and absurd project of rendering ourselves universally agreeable.” “The weak, the vain and the frivolous, indeed, may be mortified by the most groundless censure or elated by the most absurd applause. Such persons are not accustomed to consult the judge within.” The man o’ independent mind,/ He looks and laughs at a’ that.

Likewise St. Thomas spoke of a faculty of “synteresis” (Greek “watching closely”; the scholastics for some reason spelled it “synderesis”), the conscience, a third thing beyond nurture or nature, beyond upbringing or original sin—we call original sin nowadays “genes,” and congratulate ourselves for our lack of theology. Synteresis or the germ of an Impartial Spectator resolves the nature/nurture paradox with free will. An ignorant woman can by her good will be more virtuous than many a proud doctor. A virtuous pagan, in some theologies emphasizing free will, can enter Paradise. It is similar to the way the brain is supposed to work in modern theories, begun by biology but then self-healing, self-directing, self-educating. Thus blind people train their visual cortexes for substitute uses. Smith and St. Thomas take the sunny view that we can bend our will to virtue and can self-heal—this in contrast to the pessimistic line of St. Paul, St. Augustine, and John Calvin, in which we are sinners lacking grace in the hands of an angry God. “Grace,” says Aquinas to the contrary, “does not dispense with nature; it perfects it.”

Smith, then, is less a neo-stoic, as he has often been called, than he is a secular Aquinian. For stoicism is above all anti-bourgeois. Its founder Zeno is an early example of a character in bourgeois culture, the anti-bourgeois son—Zeno’s father appears to have been a Cypriot merchant. Zeno’s follower Epictetus advised: “Wish [events] to happen as they do happen; and you will go on well.” It is the opposite of bourgeois’ busyness. “Whoever then would be free, let him wish nothing,” Epictetus declares. “For this is your business, to act well the character assigned to you; to choose it, is another’s.” The Enchiridion begins, “Of things, some are in our power, and some are not. In our power are opinion, pursuit, desire, aversion, and in one word, whatever are our own actions. Not in our power, are body, property, reputation, command, and, in one word, whatever are not our own actions.”²¹² Epictetus recommends that we deal only with those things “in our power,” as he claims them to be. But his list of things not in our power is precisely the list of things the bourgeois reckons are in his power: body, property, reputation, command. Epictetus articulates the ethic of an emperor or a slave, aristocrat or Christian. You have a heroic character or an immortal soul, given to you by the grace of the gods, or of God. Do well with your gift, but don’t expect much. In aristocratic and peasant theory you do not make yourself and cannot advance in condition. Thus the so-called Law of Jante in Denmark, a peasant sensibility (it comes from a comic novel of the 1930s): do not think you are better than other people. No free will; grace alone (these were Lutheran bachelor farmers, after all). What matters is your moral luck, your genes, your original sin, your fate, fatō profugus.

Smith’s ethical theory, furthermore, is social. It does not recommend bowling alone. Again Vivienne Brown has it right. She discusses in detail the influence of an aristocratic-pagan or peasant-Christian stoicism in Smith’s thought but sees clearly that he is proposing something beyond stoicism. Stoicism is solipsistic. Smith’s dilemma was how to be inner-directed yet properly social, a good person though living in town. Metaphors of accounting were part of bourgeois education and had long been the metaphor of Protestant self-education, as in Robinson Crusoe’s thoughts on the island. Smith wrote in his letter to Gilbert Elliot some months after the first publication of The Theory of Moral Sentiments, “Man is considered as a moral, because he is regarded as an accountable being. But an accountable being, as the word expresses, is a being that must give an account of its actions to some other, and that, consequently, must regulate them according to the good liking of this other.” Though the accountable being “is, no doubt, principally accountable to God [says Smith with his mild faith so far from the quarrelsome Calvinism of Scotland a century before], in the order of time, he must necessarily conceive of himself as accountable to his fellow creatures.” The Impartial Spectator of the good person’s imagination is a “Substitute for the Deity.”

And then he makes a sweet argument why “the author of nature has made man the immediate judge of mankind”: “If those infinite rewards and punishments. . . were perceived as distinctly as we foresee the frivolous and temporary retaliations which we may expect from one another, the weakness of human nature, astonished at the immensity of objects too little fitted to its comprehension, could no longer attend to the little affairs of this world; and it is absolutely impossible that the business of society could have been carried on.” It is a deistic and bourgeois thought: that business should take precedence over salvation, lest we starve praying on a pillar in the desert, and that therefore God in His wisdom has arranged moral sentiments to make the little affairs of the world more convenient.

I have referred to Vivienne Brown’s book as though she would approve my theme here. She would not. She and I agree that Smith is first and last an ethical philosopher, a view which is becoming stronger as philosophers like Samuel Fleischacker pick up Smith. We agree that within bourgeois economics Smith has been read erroneously, as a confused precursor of later economic theorists of the self-governing character of markets, such as Émil Walras and F. Y. Edgeworth and Kenneth Arrow. We also agree that reading Smith is a rhetorical task not to be reduced solely to his intentions or his logic. Brown perhaps relies too exclusively on her claims about the monologic character of The Wealth of Nations as against the supposed dialogism à la Bakhtin of The Theory of Moral Sentiments (which therefore, she says, “bears the signs of the moral fragmentation of humanity”). But considering the over-free use of Smith’s Intentions in the existing literature on Smith, one can understand why she appeals to a New-Critical horror of the Intentional Fallacy as something like a shibboleth: all intentionally is to be banished, and The Text is to stand alone.

And yet Smith’s life was a text, to be interpreted, and a life as methodical as Smith’s often has illuminating intentions.

Brown has persuaded me that Smith’s affection for agriculture, though an analytic error, is not something that can be ignored in reading his ethics. Smith and his followers up to John Stuart Mill did not grasp the scale of modern economic growth, the factor of 15 or 20 or so by which our material lives exceed that of our eighteenth-century ancestors. That Smith could view manufacturing as something of a luxury is part of the misapprehension. And yet in praising agriculture he is praising what he regarded as prudent investment, not the traditional social relations of the countryside. His agriculture was Lowland commerce in grain, not Highland cattle herding. He is again busy in a bourgeois project.

Where Brown and I most sharply disagree is precisely in my claim that Smith expressed a commercial morality. On the contrary, she writes, “the texts of TMS and WN contain instances. . . where concern is expressed over the impoverishing effects of commercial society in eroding standards of public decency as well as private morality.”²¹³ True. But I would claim that such concern is what one would expect in a serious project of bourgeois ethics. Smith after all devotes more space to the enriching effects of commercial society---and not in bread alone, but in converse and address, the doux commerce of French pro-bourgeois theorists at the time. As Tom Paine wrote, commerce operates to “cordialize mankind.” Brown says flatly that The Wealth of Nations “cannot be read as an endorsement of ‘liberal capitalism’.” I believe it can, at least when read against the illiberal texts in opposition—the pamphlets and begging letters of the mercantilists, for example.

True, true: Smith is not simply Milton Friedman in knee britches or Margaret Thatcher in drag. But as Brown herself puts it, Smith and other Scots were showing how “a society may cohere and its people may live decently, in spite of the moral failure [by the highest, and utterly asocial, stoic standards] of mankind at large.” The idea was characteristic of the Scottish Enlightenment—not utopian, those mad attempts to refashion human nature, but a program of living decently together within the constraints of anthropological and psychological facts. Brown does not acknowledge how very bourgeois such an ethical project was. She concludes, “It is a mistake, therefore, to think that in commending prudence as a lower-order virtue [I would again dispute the `lower order’], is praising either economic activity in general or the economic activities associated with what later became known as the middle class.” Scrutiny of the argument surrounding her assertion does not justify her word “therefore.” She does not tell why the inventor of economics cannot be read in all his works as praising economic activity---with reservations, as a moralist for the age, but nonetheless praising in a way that would have been possible at only a few other times and places outside Scotland in its Enlightenment.


Chapter 11:

Franklin Was Bourgeois, But Not Prudence-Only

Footnotes to be added to this from another version:

For various reasons, anyway, such an ethic was a natural project in the 18^th century for a Scottish Enlightenment, or indeed for an even more marginal American Enlightenment, as can be seen in a figure like Benjamin Franklin. Both locales, like Holland earlier, were laird-light, and were commercial without being wholly ignorant of philosophy. The theory of the bourgeoisie came from the margins, away from courts and princes. It is emblematic of the mechanism involved that Voltaire, that friend of kings and their mistresses, was driven in 1726 to reflect on British commercial virtue precisely by his banishment from Paris and its courtly environs, a banishment occasioned by an insult to a well-connected aristocrat. His estate in far Verney, nearly in Switzerland, purchased with his profits as a grasping speculator early and late, not the central places of Versailles or Paris, would be where he preached the bourgeois virtue of cultivating ones own garden.

Franklin shows the ethic flourishing on the furthest margins. W. H. Auden said in 1940,

Out of the noise and horror, the