Adam Smith's identity crisis
Scholarly tug-of-war: Left wing lays claim to founding father of the free
market
Jeet Heer
National Post
Although Adam Smith is usually considered to be the founding
father of right-wing free market economics, a rising chorus of
left-wing academics are claiming him for their own. The scholars,
who argue Smith was a radical critic of the establishment of his
day, would place the famed Scottish economist next to Jean
Jacques Rousseau and Karl Marx and the pantheon of left-wing
thinkers.
Smith is usually associated with conservative politics. In England,
the Adam Smith Institute is a bulwark of Thatcherism. In the
United States, The Leadership Institute markets an Adam Smith
necktie that is proudly worn by such conservative luminaries as
House Majority Leader Dick Armey, former U.S. attorney-general
Edwin Meese, Nobel laureate Milton Friedman and National Right to Work
Committee
president Reed Larson.
But in the recent book Chomsky on Miseducation, the well-known linguist
and political radical
Noam Chomsky describes his own world view as belonging to "the Left libertarian
tradition"
which he traces back to Adam Smith.
Chomsky, who has long criticized capitalism, sharply distinguishes between
Smith and his
conservative followers, writing that: "It's quite remarkable to trace the
evolution of values
from a pre-capitalist thinker like Adam Smith, with his stress on sympathy
and the goal of
perfect equality and the basic human right to creative work, to contrast
that and move on to
the present to those who laud the new spirit of the age, sometimes rather
shamelessly
invoking Adam Smith's name."
Chomsky's own invocation of Smith is part of a larger trend where scholars
writing from a
variety of left-wing perspectives argue that Adam Smith's ideas have been
wrongly
appropriated by free marketers. For example, the May/June issue of the
New Left Review
includes an article by Michael Watts, a University of California, Berkeley
geographer, who
notes that "in his own day Adam Smith was considered a friend of the poor,
a free-thinker ... a
voice for liberty -- not just of trade -- in the widest sense."
Adam Smith, born in Scotland in 1723, is widely regarded as the founder
of modern
economics. Prior to Smith, the dominant school of economics was mercantilism,
which
promoted the use imperialism and protective trade barriers to enrich wealthy
imperial capitals
such as London and Paris. In his landmark work The Wealth of Nations (1776),
Smith made
the case that free trade, rather than centralized imperial control of the
economy, was the
road to enrichment.
However, left-wing scholars note that advocating free trade was merely
one small part of
Smith's larger agenda, which was aimed at promoting economic and political
equality.
David McNally, a professor of political thought at York University in Toronto
and an active
member of Canada's New Socialist Party, agrees there is "a more progressive
dimension to
Smith's work, which really has been systematically neglected in the mainstream
liberal and
neo-liberal tradition." McNally points out that, for Smith, prosperity
was measured by a rise in
living standards for the working class. This sets Smith apart from other
free market advocates
who believed a low-wage economy was the key to economic development. Smith
believed
that economic policy should be secondary to moral and ethical concerns
such as equality.
"Smith had a through-going mistrust of capitalists," notes McNally. "He
says over and over
again in The Wealth of Nations that whenever possible they will collude
to corner the market,
to raise prices, and to deceive the public."
The argument that Adam Smith had a progressive dimension has been bolstered
by the
recent publication of Emma Rothschild's Economic Sentiments: Adam Smith,
Condorcet, and
the Enlightenment (Harvard 2001) a widely praised book that links Smith
to the radical French
intellectuals of his day, who were instrumental in creating the French
Revolution. According to
Rothschild, Smith was considered a radical because he was "critical of
religious
establishments, of war, of poverty, and of the privileges of the rich."
In the years immediately
following his death, Smith was regarded with such fear that four of his
Scottish followers were
found guilty of treason and transported to penal colonies.
But by the end of the 18th century, Smith had been appropriated by conservatives
who
focused on his advocacy of free trade but ignored his criticism of established
institutions. More
recently, the conservative interpretation of Smith has been advanced by
the late Nobel prize
winning economist Friedrich Hayek in his influential account of the history
of economic thought,
written in the early decades of the last century.
According to both Rothschild and McNally, Hayek was guilty of conflating
Smith's moral defence
of the market with the amoral celebration of self-interest found in other
economic theories.
Hayek, who was a product of Freud's Vienna, defended capitalism because
it encompassed
human irrationality. As an enlightenment thinker, Smith would have found
such an argument
alien to his sensibility. "Smith definitely does not have the sort of Hayekian
contempt for
human reason," says McNally.
The revisionist view of Adam Smith advocated by McNally and Rothschild
is being echoed from
a surprising corner: Some free market economists are willing to concede
that Smith was not
an advocate of pure capitalism. "Adam Smith was an advocate of free enterprise,
but he
qualified it very severely," says Walter Block, a libertarian professor
of economics at Loyola
University, in New Orleans, La. "Adam Smith should be seen as a moderate
free enterpriser
who appreciated markets but made many, many exceptions. He allowed government
all over
the place."
If they agree in their overall view of Smith, the left-wing admirers of
the Scottish economist
often disagree about how Smith fits into contemporary left-wing politics
and economics.
McNally and Rothschild are more careful than Chomsky to stress the ways
in which Smith is
different from the contemporary left. For McNally, Smith is the intellectual
forefather of a futile
attempt to make capitalism more humane.
Rothschild, a self-described "liberal in the American sense," is more ambivalent.
As a historian,
she resists attempts to categorize Smith in contemporary terms. "In England
[my] book has
been thought to have connections with New Labour, which is very strange
for me since I
haven't read any of the manifestoes about the third way or New Labour."
Yet Rothschild does believe Smith can teach us to have a more expansive
view of economic
life. Smith and his contemporaries believed discussion and debate were
part of economic life,
a concept Rothschild believes has a renewed relevance at a time when bartering
on the
Internet is replacing a world of fixed prices. For McNally, it is more
a matter of placing Smith in
his historical context.
"We need to read Smith historically and recognize that he is neither an
apologist for
capitalism nor is he an anti-capitalist critic," McNally argues. "He is
ultimately in the tradition of
those who aspire towards a humane, decent, polite version of capitalism.
I have no problem
when people like Chomsky want to point that out, but I don't think we do
ourselves or our
historical understanding a service if we repackage Smith in contemporary
guise."