Rousseau of admired Sparta for its simplicity and lack of bourgeois decadence. Steuart was disinterested in the idea freedom.
Chris Brooke wrote:
> >This sounds very much like Sir James Steuart. Principles of Political
> >Oeconomy,
> >1767.
>
> It's not surprising if some of the themes sound similar. Rousseau's
> Discourse was completed in 1754, and Scottish political economists became
> interested in his argument quite quickly. Adam Smith, for example,
> translated three of the passages of Rousseau's French into English in an
> anonymous "Letter to the Edinburgh Review" of 1756, and all three -- one of
> which included one of the fragments I quoted in my earlier post -- were
> discussions of the problem of mutual dependence in human society. (Smith,
> of course, takes quite a different view of the merits of the division of
> labour in society, and presents a very different account of inequality in
> the 1759 "Theory of Moral Sentiments".)
>
> But Steuart's argument about dependence seems to me to be quite different
> from Rousseau's. He *sounds* like Rousseau, for example, when he asks (in
> Ch. II of the first book of the "Principles") "Can any change be greater
> among free men, than from a state of absolute liberty and independence to
> become subject to constraint in the most trivial actions?" -- but he makes
> it clear that the freedom and independence he is celebrating is the freedom
> to buy and sell and to enjoy the use of one's property free from the
> interference of the state, which is entirely alien to Rousseau's account of
> the end of natural freedom and independence. And in general he is keen on
> mutual dependence -- of the kind a division of labour promotes -- and calls
> it "the only bond of society" in a quite unRousseauian way. Here he is, for
> example, in Chapter XIV of Book One: "Hence I conclude, that the best way
> of binding a free society together is by multiplying reciprocal
> obligations, and creating a general dependence between all its members.
> This cannot be better effected, than by appropriating a certain number of
> inhabitants, for the production of the quantity of food required for all,
> and by distributing the remainder into proper classes for supplying every
> other want." From Rousseau's point of view, this is a recipe for a rather
> unpleasant form of modern slavery.
>
> Chris.
--
Michael Perelman Economics Department California State University Chico, CA 95929
Tel. 530-898-5321 E-Mail michael at ecst.csuchico.edu