[lbo-talk] Adam Smith on Too Big to Fail

Carrol Cox cbcox at ilstu.edu
Wed Dec 2 07:36:45 PST 2009


Eubulides wrote:
>
> What is natural liberty?
>
> What are private people?

An immanent critique of Smith (reading history backwards) would necessarily raise such questions, as Marx did in _Capital_, but for construing Smith's text in its own terms they are misleading. "Privaste peole" and "natural liberty" were among the udefined terms, as it were, with which 18th-c thought _began_. The century confrotns us with a wild heap of quasi-feudal (heirachcal) notions and embryonic premises of civil society. Dryden's Religio Laici is a good place to str in seeing this mixture. The novels of Samuel Richardson & Jane Austen are explicitly concerned with the unacceptable rigidity of the one, the threatening chaos of the other. Dryden's sympathies were increasingly 'feudal,' and that shows in the argument of the poem: But the poem as a whole shows us the islolated individual (layman) confronting a world in which there existed no fixed point from which one could cold find one's place. He is battling with the unfreedom of a world in which every choice is a forced free choice: i.e., in which motive is not visible in act. Johnson, Richardson, and Austen found what still seems the default position (as shown by the debates over ethics asnd Progress on this list): *A code of ethics with no place to stand but affirmed as though it were self-evident. It is against this self-evident (!) ethic (notoriously affrmed by Rousseau) that Marx directs his critique in the Povberty of Philosophy. Socialists who try to ground their politics on a ethical critique of capitalism are revolving in the same dizzying world that Dryden tried to escape from.

So natural liberty and private people don't exist, but they did for Dryden, Pope, Richaerdson, Smith, Johnson, and Austen (and the wild differences among these writers is a manifestation of the utter confusion generated by capitalist individualism with an ethic (e.g., "my personal sense of justice") pasted on to the chaos below.

You can't demand that Smith answer your questions, because then he can't write his books.

Carrol



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